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Thevet Revisits Guanabara

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-4-753

1527-1900

Tom Conley,

Historical Geography and Geographical Thought

“Il nous faudroit des topographes qui fissent narration particuliere des endroits où ils ont esté” [We need topographers who can provide detailed accounts of the places where they have been].1 In his essay on “Cannibals,” the early version of his celebrated plea for objective accounts of the fauna, flora, local cultures, and singular features of the New World, Montaigne admonished a tradition of reports made by cosmographers who bore false witness to the Americas. Those observers, he implied, filled Europe with ill-formed and fanciful fiction and had little to do with any first-hand contact with spaces unfamiliar to Europeans. He impugned a line of writers, from Boemus and Sebastian Münster to François de Belleforest and André Thevet, who used the overarching network of a new but compendious genre to capture in its descriptive webbing customs at once primitive and refined, facts archaic and modern, and material both classical in aura and uncanny in shape. Montaigne’s praise of the topographer shared affinities for the person who later became Pierre Bayle’s ideal historian and, no less, the modern ethnographer: one who belonged to no land, was uprooted, déraciné, and capable of casting a candid gaze on any cultural foible that met the eye; one who refused to jump to any moral judgment about cultural practices or the outcome of historical events in past or present; one who was aware of the allure of allegory and rhetoric, on whose seductive delight the effusive and amplified style of the cosmographia was constructed; and one who could report in simple language—of a clarity and measure precise as a toise and discrete as a measured piece of prose—what constituted a singularity.Montaigne’s call for a scientific view of things also suggested that he and his readers wished to know what “really” happened when the French first sought to gain a foothold in the New World. Two failures were on the horizon. The first was Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon’s 1555 expedition to the bay of Rio de Janeiro and the establishment of a settlement, which was obliterated by Portuguese warships in 1561. The second expedition, led by René de Laudonnière, settled on the coast of Florida in 1562 but succumbed to the Spanish two years later. In these pages of “Cannibals,” it can be implied that the nascent anthropology of the Essais was born of mixed impressions about colonial endeavors whose memory was quickly swallowed in the oblivion of violence that reigned during the wars of religion from 1562 up to 1598. For the essayist the reminder of the ventures was revived through the appeal to be rid of cosmographers in favor of new, ingenious, and naïve observers of the pluralities of cultures. A politics subtended the chapter on “Cannibals” and in fact exceeded what is too often taken to be either its humanistic tenor or its anti-Iberian inflection.2The chapter built its observations on the grounds of a double bind. For if “chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage” [everyone calls barbarity whatever is not of their own custom], and if the only available measure of truth and reason is “l’exemple et idée des opinions et usances du païs où nous sommes” [the example and idea of opinions and ways of the country where we are], there exists no way to get out of ourselves and our solipsism. The essay proceeded to do so through its inquiry into Amerindian culture, but its most reliable sources were often the very cosmographers it called into question. The more Montaigne spurned the falsifying effects of a Sebastian Münster or a François de Belleforest, the greater the sense of an affiliation and a need, it appeared, to sort through their histories. Crucial for the reflections were the descriptions in André Thevet’s Les Singularités de la France antarctique, a work that laid the foundation both for an anthropology and, to a lesser degree, a reflection on the illusion of the New World seen as a golden age or an idyllic landscape. After meticulously describing Tupinamba culture from sources teased out of Thevet’s account, Montaigne told of two natives he met in the city of Rouen in 1562, a time synchronous with the outset of the wars of religion. Their observations about rampant social contradiction and the impotence of the French king amidst the mercenary troops who protected him inaugurated a counterdiscourse aimed at French readers. Its rhetoric of criticism stated in the voice of the native, literary historians have shown, became part of the arsenal of the philosophes two centuries later.3In this short essay I would like to argue that Montaigne’s watershed essay, a decisive chapter in the history of French colonial policy, in the tactics of counterdiscourse, in the philosophy of heterology, and in the origins of ethnography, also thresholds the impact of the failed expeditionary venture in the years prior to the outbreak of civil strife. The essay infers that it is in accord with the way the André Thevet had negotiated the history in the passage between the first—and seemingly ocular—impressions circulated in 1557 and the more shaded, confused, and even Baroque treatment of Villegagnon’s mission to Rio de Janeiro in the Cosmographie universelle of 1575.4 The confusions projected through the rewriting of the history of the colony show that Thevet did not belong to one ideology or another, but that the complexity of the chronicle he constructed highlighted a welter of issues pertaining to inner and civil conflict. Like Thevet, Montaigne looked at the French presence in the New World through the lens of religious strife and, as a result, he developed an ethnography and a political praxis on the basis of a memory revised and rewritten for the ends of the moment in which it was crafted.In the early part of his essay, Montaigne builds on the literature surrounding the establishment of Fort Coligny first described in Les Singularités, but at the end, where the political aims are resonant, the multiple inflections of his words echo the revised treatment in the same author’s Cosmographie universelle. Thevet’s shift in perspective grounds the ethnography of “Des cannibales.” For the cosmographer the new material of 1575 was also retained for inclusion in the unpublished Grand pilotage et insulaire (1584), especially because it had been the subject of fresh and violent polemic with Protestant Jean de Léry and his Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578 and 1580), a Protestant work written against the grain of Thevet’s accounts and published just prior to the first two volumes of the Essais.5Thus the history of Fort Coligny can be separated from the cosmographic genre that had inaugurated a style of inquiry and of writing that welcomed encounter with other cultures.6 The topographers Montaigne extolled had in fact already been familiar to writers of geography and cosmography. The distinction between a cosmographer and a topographer was heralded in the first and celebrated sentence of every printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia.7 It may be that the term “topographer” was a name fitting for anyone who observed and described whatever had not yet appeared in any history of the first French colony. The essay allusively begged its reader to look at earlier representations of the complex events to which it vaguely referred and on which its own history depended.Not long after Pedro Cabral’s discovery of Brazil in 1500 and the Portuguese claim to own the land, the coastal line was developed and exploited by trade in brazilwood. French voyagers made incursions along the coastline and developed trade with indigenous tribes. Less bent on commercial development than bartar and informal exchange, many Norman sailors (indeed avatars of coureurs de bois) developed adventitious connections along the eastern coastline and in riparian cultures from the Amazon southward.8 Pockets of French presence marked the coast of Brazil, as they have been amply shown on the maps of the Dieppe School.9 One site became formalized when Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, a member of the Order of Knights of Malta who had an envied record of military service, asked Protestant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and the cardinal of Lorraine to underwrite a colonial expedition to the mouth of the Guanabara River in southern Brazil. Coligny sustained interest in the New World by launching the idea of a new haven for dissidents, at the same time he led Henry II, the Catholic king of France, to believe that trade in brazilwood would be enhanced by a French foothold in rivalry with Spanish and Portuguese settlements. In the mid-1550s the Portuguese had only sparse holdings along the coastline, while Norman traders had by then deepened their ties with indigenous tribes.10 The French felt that an exotic colony in the west would dispel or defer religious turmoil through a national project aimed less at overwrought expansion and more toward respecting a parity of economic and theological interests.The ships left Dieppe on 15 August 1555 under Villegagnon and his pilot Nicolas Barré. They dropped anchor at Cabo Frio, on 10 December of the same year. Several days later they sailed to the bay of Rio de Janeiro (a. k. a. Guanabara). Villegagnon chose to settle on a small island in the bay that now borders the landfilled embankments of the Santos-Dumont airport. The prospect from the island allowed the colony to look seaward where Portuguese vessels entered the bay but remained at a safe distance from the Margageaz Indians who circulated in canoes in the bay on the other side of the island. Villegagnon’s Fort Coligny was built with earthen walls and palisades erected with the assistance of indigenous labor. In the paranoid frenzy about the fort being put under siege the leader soon broke off relations with the Tamoio Indians, who were traditional allies of the French. An epidemic came with reinforcement of new colonizers in 1557. The healthy were quickly impressed into service (or even forced labor) directed toward completing the defensive structure. Relations between the colonizers and friendly Indians were curtailed under Villegagnon’s orders. A revolt ensued. Norman truchements, or interpreters, who had acclimated to rustic life, fomented further rebellion by turning friendly tribes against the colonial leaders. Besieged and betrayed by men who preferred the exotic liberty of life on the mainland to the carceral regime on the island, Villegagnon sent messages to Jean Calvin in Geneva, begging the Protestant leader to send him a second wave of colonizers equipped with stronger moral backbone. A tiny population of convicts and unruly elements was about to be supplanted by militants of the reformed church. At this point Villegagnon’s project, “because of the failure of expansion into the mainland and the conversion of the Brazilians, moved toward the creation of a city of refuge cut off from the back country and reserved for the principal benefit of persecuted Protestants from Europe.”11Apparently the leader had until then harbored a desire to establish a Gallican colony based on respect for religious difference and compromise. In anticipation of an outburst of religious wars within the borders of France, lines of belief hardened and, under new strain, civil conduct gave way to conflict. On 7 March 1557, 14 Protestants from Geneva emigrated to the island and were welcomed by Villegagnon’s outstretched arms. But on the day of Pente-cost, in a debate on Presence and the nature of the Eucharist, the seeds of new violence were sown. Villegagnon argued along Catholic lines, attesting to the identity of the sacramental wine and wafer with the body and blood of Christ, while the new arrival, minister Chartier, conscientiously disputed the idea of Presence. Villegagnon later returned to Geneva for counsel. Minister Richer took part in the ideological collapse of the colony. Accusing Villegagnon of being a cannibal, the Protestants attacked Catholic ideology in the ambient distinction that was used to separate humans from savages. Several months later the reformers took refuge on the mainland with the Indians, the people whom they had assumed, contrary to Villegagnon’s symbolic anthropophagia, to be real cannibals. In January 1558, five surviving Calvinists returned to the island. Villegagnon put them in irons in a desperate attempt to furnish an example for others and to use force to correct miscreant behavior. He drowned three of the men before leaving the colony, en route to Paris, where he sought to obtain funding and wherewithal to rebuild the mission in accord with the principles of the Counter-Reform. The efforts failed on 15 March 1560, when, under the leadership of Villegagnon’s nephew, Bois-le-Comte, Fort Coligny fell under the attack of 26 Portuguese warships.12André Thevet played a very minor part in this history. His account of the passage along the coast of Brazil began upon his return from the colony after accompanying the members of the first expedition to Guanabara. The writing of the Singularités commenced upon his return to France in 1556. Having been ill for most of the journey, Thevet was bedridden for ten weeks, even though the text reported that he had encountered Chief Quniambec, smoked a “petun” cigar to the point of vomiting and fainting, and had been naked as an Indian after the natives had robbed him of his books, paper, and clothing.From these shards of experience a popular and profitable novel could be made. Fantasies were mixed with the notes and impressions. In the travel book that resulted little attention was paid either to the history of the French fort or any latency of religious dispute; nor did the author launch propaganda to encourage new settlers to uproot themselves from the old country and develop new lives in the land he named “Antarctic France.”13 Commentary was scattered in the thick of varia about nature, diet, preparation of fermented beverages, the aspect of Capo Frio, and exotic birds and fish.The first and only visit to Guanabara is the topic of chapter 25. A topographical description proceeds an incipit underscoring the movement of the eye that records the impressions of an idyllic landscape, itself in motion, because of the welcome brought by the natives thrilled by the sight of ships arriving from the high seas. Thevet remarked that the group spent two memorable months in the area before they baptized it.The description remains topographical in the best sense both for the attention it brings to the defensive virtue of the island that Villegagnon chose for settlement and for the bonus of the exchanges made with Indians for goods and foodstuffs. Any fear about scarcity or famine is dispelled by the aura of the site when the prose turns from an engineer’s view to that of a tourist or of a painter, depicting an exotic scene whose titillation owes much to the indigenous people eternally residing in a space from which the reader or spectator is forever excluded.The area recedes into the background of the account that follows. It is, literally, a point de repère, a place whence observations were made of the surrounding water and land. It was a camp, too, from which trips were taken to inquire of the fish in the river and to see how the land might have belonged to a continental mass. Ensuing chapters contain precocious accounts of Tupi religion, daily life, attire, diet, social organization, division of labor, bodily conduct, and the myths they told. The historical material blends into the texture of description of things unknown that are mirrored by parallels drawn from the classical past. The text confirms the effects made clear in the illustrations. The woodcuts are of varied proportion and topic. A rendition of a giant manioc root is juxtaposed to graphic scenes of long houses or rites of burial. The composite nature of the images and description obtains a balance of strange and familiar phenomena in mannerist turns of phrase and line. The effect approximates prevalent styles of Fontainebleau illustration in the tradition of the illustrated book, a new and valued object in France in the 1550s.15In this context, Les singularités appears to be designed as a work of art, indeed as a book designed to become a mnemonic architecture of travel. In this New World version of a Songe de Poliphile or a modern Odyssey the narrator André Thevet is Ullyses, cast in the first person, who leaves a homeland, reaches an improbable destination that bears the toponym of the title, and returns with reports of new and unique phenomena that are, like the insular spaces he visits, replete with unique impressions. Singularités, they are also pebbles and pieces of strangeness, isolated and scattered bits, insularités, peppering an oceanic surface. They betray an affinity for a new genre allied with the cosmography, recently revived from the fifteenth-century island-book by Benedetto Bordone, in the name of the isolario. However, the varia are not distinguished by the islands that hold them but to a new-found continent where they are mixed together. Prevailing is a tension of cohesion and of dispersion, of an itinerary with departure and destination, but also of errancy that wanders from the circularity of Thevet’s voyage.No invitation is tendered to the reader to emigrate to the Island of Villegagnon or to develop a new market similar to a Pacific rim of the Renaissance. A self-contained book of description, it has the aura, as Lévi-Strauss and other ethnographers have shown, of an ethnographer’s “breviary.”16 The pieces of history in Les Singularités that belonged to the colonial venture appear among so many others in a work intended to move to and from classical antiquity, current time, and a world without written chronicle.17 The French mission is seen in the glow of marvel and through the prismatic space of a new textual architecture. That it blended into the overarching project of a new and mixed genre, built in part on Thevet’s earlier and richly illustrated travel-book recounting a quasi-fictitious voyage to the Holy Land, the Cosmo-graphie de Levant, is not surprising. Crucial for the representation of Fort Coligny in the work of 1557 is the effect of the seamless and benign presence of the mission.Much of the same material was taken up again in the second volume of Thevet’s vast and grandiose Cosmographie universelle. Yet the new and amplified representation is entirely different from what was given in Les singularités. The wars of religion were inaugurated after the Conjuration of Amboise in 1560, a grisly event that made the river Loire carry blood spurting from the decapitated bodies of victims of a religious conspiracy and its reprisal. The massacre in the Touraine, synchronous with the collapse of Fort Coligny, began a concatenation of violence that ran unabated up to and past the end of the author’s own life. Thevet’s revised account of adventure at Guanabara in 1575 could not be divorced from the forces of history that the colony seemed to anticipate. In a strange and singular way they are crystallized in the Cosmographie.In comparable chapters of Les singularités, exotic fauna and flora had given way to mannered depictions of everyday indigenous life, war, and ritual cannibalism. The work invites and seduces the eye to see and read in the same motion material that dazzles in the synergy of the woodcuts and the surrounding textual mass. Likewise, in La cosmographie many of the same effects are enhanced by the quarto size of the two volumes. However, offered to the eye is a much greater oceanic mass of printed writing without the reassuring harbors or lagoons of chapter divisions that had marked the earlier account. The flow in the new work is punctuated by marginalia or manchettes in italic font in a point-size smaller than the Roman character of the descriptive text. Numerous woodcuts from Les singularités return to adorn and to organize the new material along with inclusion of some new and freshly drawn images that alter the account.The history of Fort Coligny is taken up in chapter two of book 21 of the second volume.18 In the Singularités the title had read “De la riviere de Ganabara, autrement de Janaire, & comme le pays où arrivasmes fut nommé France antarctique.” [Of the Ganabara River, in other words of Janaire, and how the country where we arrived was named Antarctic France.] But, a more pointed caption indicates that the site had literally fallen into the turmoil of history: “De l’isle posee en la riviere de Ganabara, & de l’heur et malheur qui s’en est ensuivy.” [Of the Island placed in the Ganabara River, and of the fate and ill fortunes that followed.] In the middle of the chapter is a woodcut illustrating the naval battle that a Portuguese fleet engaged when it laid siege to the island and soon sacked Fort Coligny. For a rare instant the end of the colonial enterprise is shown and given a title in the manchette in the left-hand margin (Isle & fort des français). A view drawn from a birds-eye perspective, it describes and names the places and players of the siege and defeat. The woodcut stages an event that takes place in a cartographic decor. A topography replete with place-names in the images suggests a continuity of a regime of forces distributed in space. The stable view of the bay and the vegetation of its surrounding shores is contrasted by the fireworks of a ring of ocean-going vessels pelting the island with cannon fire.19The text of the chapter is virtually written “about” or “around” the image it places at the visual center of the textual mass. The printed writing and the picture are organized in the manner of a rotative or a center-enhancing emblem that can be read from the periphery to the axis or else around and about a central event.20 The same configuration is reproduced in the picture itself, in which the island, seen from an elevated view, recedes while being contained in its watery frame. Like the figure of the ships that encircle the island on which they are firing their cannons, the text contains and places at a turning point, a literal trophy, the crucial episode that brought doom to the mission. In a psychoanalytical sense the misfortunes of Villegagnon’s colony were introjected in Thevet’s history. Put into language and drawn in the lines of an active image, the colony is seen floating in the mouth-like area of the bay behind what might have been stomata, a pair of lips, or even a sphincter that opens the area onto the sea at large. The open-ended form of the illustration betrays its own failure to “contain” the events that led to the demise.In the text of the chapter the artist or editor (who could have been Thevet himself) took care to put the image below a sentence that tells of the “treason” or “betrayal” of two Flemish conspirators who were killed and thrown to the bottom of the sea. That space is immediately “translated” into the vanishing perspective of the image set just below. To the left is the manchette in small italic font while at the lower edge, below La mer oceane in the image, textual reference is made to the fortress and the attack the Portuguese waged upon the island. The image is placed in the text to confirm the statements on both sides.The narrative of the chapter is aimed toward this focal point in at least two thematic ways. First, the apparently uninflected geographical description of the lands and rivers about the tropic of Capricorn and the natural history elide and blend into the tale of Thevet’s initial passage up the river and landing on the island. The history of the colony was begun with the account of the construction of the fort and mention of the first symptom of the collapse of the defensive structure. It was caused by enemy forces not outside of the fort but within, as if an illness or a virus were “inhabiting” those who set about to lay claim to a formerly “uninhabited” island. The collapse is recounted only 15 lines infra, just below the woodcut image, before the miseries of the mission are retold through a series of flashbacks signaled by reiterated formulas such as “au reste” [finally] and “j’avois oublié à vous dire” [I had forgotten to tell you]. As the story moves forward it also goes backward. Second, the sedition of Christians in the first narrative is contrasted in the second half by that of emigrating Calvinists and conflict among the natives synchronous with the outbreak of plague and destitution. Some ethnographic remarks on Tupi religion precede a retelling of the Portuguese attack near the end of the chapter. In this section some of the broad swipes that Thevet had taken at proponents of the theory of the New World shaped as an archipelago are repeated where the author shoots rhetorical cannon fire at his enemy brother, the cosmographer François de Belleforest (“ce pauvre philosophe Comingeois”) who was said to supply false information in his rival work published in the same year.21The content of Thevet’s relation appears divided into two equal and thus almost specular panels that belong to the order of allegory or what art historians call an allegorized landscape.22 The line of demarcation is marked by the historical image, the only illustration of the chapter, enclosed within or engulfed by a prose designed to mediate or negotiate the French defeat by reiterating and overlapping the principal episodes of the history. The cartographic latency of the woodcut makes clear the logistical reasons for the construction of the fort on the uninhabited island. It marks the places and the virtual movements of ships to and from different points on the mainland and the mer oceane that floats beyond the two mandibles of land that clasp the bay and the estuary.23 It is a geographical and a historical point of vanishment. The construction of the fort is recounted, the latter is illustrated and then, suddenly, in the same image, new events jostle the depiction that could—if the reader follows the gist of the descriptive prose—otherwise hold to the platitudes of descriptive ethnography.The chapter seems to teeter-totter between the remainders of the style given in Les Singularités in the first pages before, in what follows, taking a crucial turn with its report of religious strife. The beginning is idyllic. The chapter initially defers the history by moving from a general description, proper to the touristic style of the work of 1557, of an island given to be for the natives a somewhat exotic place frequented by mainlanders. They escaped to its shores for what seem to be vacations to “fish in leisure, stopping over for four or five days, and camping together, their wives and children included, provided that the fishing is good.” Uninhabited, the island was a zoologist’s treasure, abounding “only in beast and fowl, with a few fruits. Living there were several kinds of parrots, yellow pigs, rather large starlings. Also seen were wild boar, but they were different from “ours,” noted Thevet, because they lacked a tail and were half-black, very wild and cruel, with a hole on the top of their back. The Tibiguereans called these beasts rhitob and the Tupinambous called them Taiassoub, who were people inhabiting the shore of this river, “who I believe have put these beasts in the country to have the pleasure of hunting them.”There follows an extensive description of the South American Ostrich. Contrasted to its African counterpart the description of the volatile follows the line of division of the allegorical landscape. An older continent and its birds help to bring forward differences pertaining to the new species. In the comparison are sown some of the first seeds of the demise of the French mission. Thevet shows that the ostrich, contrary to belief, does not “digest iron.” His experience showed that the bird could not assimilate large pieces of metal. Rather, as if it were inoculating itself to the violence of the artillery that struck Fort Coligny, the ostrich swallowed pistol or harquebus shot to mix with its food. Yet the bird also laid eggs that were comparable to cannon balls. Implied was that the bird could handle small amounts of hardware the west brought to the New World, and that its attributes bore the memory of the apparatus that brought an end to the colony. As an emblem of the dynamics of intervention and exchange the bird forecasts the history that follows, and all the more in its frequent failure to note exactly where it puts its eggs or to care for them. Thevet concludes that the island, like the mainland, was not forested and less fertile than the neighboring countries populated by savages.On the opposing panel of the chapter, in the material that follows the woodcut, the description becomes increasingly chaotic and embroiled. History began with the misfortune of thoughtless or self-involved intervention. Even though the island was colonized and an escarpment was built for the fort, “[a]u surplus, la cause principale pour laquelle ceste Isle estoit sans habitation, estoit, pource qu’il y a tant de vermine que rien plus.” [Furthermore, the island was uninhabited for the principal reasons that there was so much vermin and nothing more.] The exotic island that inaugurated the chapter gives way to a site of desolation. In the accounts it was clear that the space was uninhabited but inhabited by the colonizers. Furthermore, the inhabitants were vermin “and nothing more.” Was there an evacuation, was the population decimated, or did the residents who decided not to go to the mainland live there as vermin? The exotic fauna of one panel are staged to contrast the rodents of the other. Yet, since the specular structure is mobile in the descriptive register of the text, nonetheless the island is “dressed” and pertains to a state of culture: it is “revestue d’une grande quantité de Palmiers, Cedres, arbres de Bresil, & arbris-seaus aromatiques, incognuez par-deça, qui verdoient toute l’annéev”