The diverse peoples of the early modern Atlantic basin had long believed the world a frightening place. A century after Columbus' travels to the New World, Europeans still talked about monsters, witches, “blemmyes”, “monopods”, and other “entities” as a matter of course (15). Across the Atlantic, Indigenous Americans populated wide-ranging landscapes they saw comprised of animals, spirits, and demons that had the power to create, destroy, and change forms at will. As voyagers relentlessly crisscrossed the ocean space in between those worlds, news of their travels spawned an outpouring of travel literature, maps, and imagery. As Peter C. Mancall argues, this vast body of knowledge shifted contemporary notions about humanity and the environment beyond the fantastical toward more modern, secular sensibilities.
In Chapter 1, the author dates the belief in monsters and other such entities “to at least the fourth century BCE” (1). Ancient works by Lucretius and Pliny the Elder provided authoritative accounts of the otherworldly that endured in premodern thought for centuries. For example, paintings of nonhuman creatures adorned the fourteenth century ceilings of the Fréjus Cathedral in France alongside biblical images and portraits of the saints. More commonly, these creatures appeared in stories, bestiaries, maps, and books that circulated throughout Europe. Meanwhile, Native peoples in North America found the likes of beasts and spirits to be powerful forces in their own daily lives and rituals. Tobacco, for instance, was critically important as a way “to please the nonhuman agents that controlled elements of the natural world” (40).
Following the pioneering work of Alfred Crosby in The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–19000, Mancall explains in Chapters 2 and 3 how sustained contact between Europeans and Native Americans created considerable ecological changes for the New World. Starting with Columbus, Europeans sought fame, fortune, and conquest of indigenous peoples in the name of Christianity. Native Americans realized that death seemed to follow the invaders. Europeans, however, appeared virtually unaffected by smallpox and other pathogens. God saw fit to punish the Natives as “unbelievers”, and their lands offered abundant riches for those Christians bold enough to take them.
Mancall excels at explaining just how much the business of conquest rested on persuading Englishmen to go abroad. A burgeoning European print culture at the time instructed Englishmen how to conquer the New World environment and its peoples. Noted cartographers like those of the Dieppe School in France created bold maps meant to help explorers find routes to the Americas and avoid dangers along the way. Authors like Richard Hakluyt the Younger provided philosophical and religious arguments for colonisation. It was his 1584 Discourse on Western Planting that urged Protestants everywhere to check the Catholic presence in the Americas. Once wrested from Papal control, Hakluyt reasoned that Natives populations then under Spanish control would ally with the English as liberators.
A fascinating portion of Mancall's text is devoted to unravelling just how images and texts impacted European knowledge of the New World. Here he explains the origins of Thomas Harriot's influential work A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. First published in London in 1588, Harriot's work contained his observations from an earlier expedition to Roanoke Island on the coast of Carolina and featured richly detailed accompanying illustrations by English artist John White.
Mancall notes that other writers like Hakluyt the Younger wasted little time in using Harriot's Briefe and True Report in their works. Two years later it appeared in four different languages, though very altered from its original form, by engraver Theodor de Bry. The author painstakingly traces how de Bry significantly altered John White's images of Algonquin life and, in turn, offered a persuasive visual argument for colonising the New World. The new engravings demonstrated the extent to which Natives failed to take proper possession of the lush environment, thus paving the way for European conquest based on Christian principles. The supposedly primitive Natives, at least in de Bry's version, posed no threat to Europeans.
In a lengthy Postscript, Mancall illustrates how the “knowledge of nature was the product of collective long-term observation, which could be recorded and disseminated through the circulation of manuscript treatises or in printed books” (123). One such work, Thomas Moffet's The Theatre of Insects, represents an early effort to make scientific discoveries available to the general reading public. Regarding the study of insects, Moffet agreed with the likes of Aristotle and Pliny the Elder that these tiny creatures could give crucial insights to everything from politics and human behaviour to the workings of nature. “Insects revealed the wondrous powers and infinite potential of God”, writes Mancall, “a point Moffet made obvious to his readers” (128). While this process was overwhelmingly by and for Europeans, the author rightly points to Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of the Things of New Spain as a Native example based on “the same careful observations about nature that Moffet also relied on” (124). He notes that while the core of Sahagún's text comes from Aztec sources, the Spaniard's need to make the content intelligible to a European audience (then grappling with a seismic shift in thinking about nature, culture, and the world) also coloured it.
The bulk of Mancall's text derives from lectures given at the University of Pennsylvania, which is clear in the structure of the work. At times the narrative is unnecessarily repetitive, and the chapters read more like standalone pieces rather than parts of a single tome. These caveats aside, the width and breadth of Mancall's history is clear throughout Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic. Additionally, there are over 50 black and white illustrations, plus a dozen richly-detailed colour plates, that greatly enhance the rich history offered here. Sure to be an essential volume, Mancall's work is a most welcome addition to studies of the Early Modern Atlantic World and beyond.
