Changing the image of the Southern Pacific

Journal of Pacific History

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 77-87

  Van Groesen, Michiel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 74049131061     PISSN: 00223344     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00223340902900845     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. For a modern edition of Van Noort's account, see J.W. IJzerman (ed.), De reis om de wereld door Olivier van Noort (1598-1601) [Werken uitgegeven door de Linschoten-Vereeniging, 27-8], 2 vols (The Hague 1926)
2. The most recent English edition of his narrative is included in R. Kerr (ed.), A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. X (Edinburgh 1820?), accessible at the digital Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/etext/13130 (last visited April 2008)
3. For another, condensed edition of the reports of Schouten and Le Maire: A. Dalrymple, An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (London 1771) II, 1-64
4. H. de la Fontaine Verwey, 'Willem Jansz. Blaeu and the voyage of Le Maire and Schouten', Quaerendo, 3 (1973), 87-105
5. See also: Th. Suárez, Early Mapping of the Pacific: the epic story of seafarers, adventurers and cartographers who mapped the earth's greatest ocean (2nd edn, Singapore 2004), 87-94
6. For this and the following paragraphs, see M. van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634) (Leiden and Boston 2008). See ch. 4 for the production process of the De Bry volumes and ch. 8 for the different (Latin and German) versions
7. Of the owners of some of the volumes mentioned here, John Locke was the only one to comment publicly on the De Bry collection. Locke found the mid-16th-century collection of voyages by the Venetian civil servant Giovanni Battista Ramusio 'much more full and complete than the Latin De Bry', as quoted in D.F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe: the century of discovery (Chicago and London 1965) I, 208
8. B. Smith, Imagining the Pacific: in the wake of Cook's voyages (New Haven and London 1992), 13-15
9. He does not discuss the consequences of the additions. The De Bry modifications to Schouten's iconography are not mentioned in W. Eisler, The Furthest Shore: images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge 1995), 68-73,
10. or in Smith, Imagining the Pacific, although both discuss De Bry's North American illustrations
11. Engelbrecht and Van Herwerden, De ontdekkingsreis van Jacob le Maire, II, 190-1, argue that it was probably Rangiroa, based on the (independent) computations of both Schouten and Le Maire
12. This claim is copied by Suá rez, Early mapping of the Pacific, 89
13. One of the anonymous reviewers of this article has suggested the Marquesas, with its local scourge of Simuliidae midges, rather than the Tuamotus. To me it appears impossible to establish the exact location of the island based on the two accounts, and since both sailors had reported seeing other atolls in the previous days, it is at least conceivable that it was one of the larger atolls in the western part of the Tuamotus. For a brief survey of the route followed by Schouten and Le Maire in the Pacific, see A. Sharp, The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman (Oxford 1968), 14-15
14. Van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World, 124
15. Both Schouten's report and Jacob Le Maire's log confirm that after their encounter with the flies (18 April), it took them three weeks to reach Cocos Island (9 May). Two days later, on 11 May, the ship reached another large island usually identified as Niuatoputapu. It was perhaps here that Jacob Le Maire famously tried to collect words from the natives and assembled a vocabulary. For an elaborate analysis of the linguistic data Le Maire gathered, see A.H. Bolyanatz, 'Where is Claes Pietersz Bay? An episode in the history of the Sursurunga of New Ireland', Ethnohistory, 45:2 (1998), 319-47
16. Estimated by Suá rez, Early Mapping of the Pacific, 89, to be the Takaroa and Takapoto atolls
17. See my analysis of the De Bry modifications to Barent Jansz Potgieter's travel account in Van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World, 271-5, or more extensively but only in Dutch: M. van Groesen, 'Barent Jansz. en de familie De Bry
18. Twee visies op de eerste Hollandse expeditie "om de West" rond 1600', De zeventiende eeuw, 21-1 (2005), 29-48
19. Engelbrecht and Van Herwerden, De ontdekkingsreis van Jacob le Maire, I, 175: 'De onse saghen oock eenighe vrouwen, die de mans om den hals vielen ende kreten, dat wy niet en wisten wat het beduyde, dan meenden dat het was om de selve te doen scheyden'
20. Historische Beschreibung, ill. vi/Americae pars undecima, ill. vi
21. See, for example, S. Burghartz, 'Aneignungen des Fremden: Staunen, Stereotype und Zirkulation um 1600', in E. Huwiler and N. Wachter (eds), Integrationen des Widerläufigen: ein Streifzug durch geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungsfelder (Mü nster 2004), 109-37
22. Historische Beschreibung, ill. viii/Americae pars undecima, ill. viii
23. See H.W. Roodenburg, 'On "swelling" the hips and crossing the legs: distinguishing public from private in paintings and prints from the Dutch Golden Age', in A.K. Wheelock jr. and A.F. Seeff (eds), The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Newark and London 2000), 64-84
24. or alternatively, Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: perspectives on gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle 2004), 131-2
25. Christopher B. Steiner, 'Travel engravings and the construction of the primitive', in E. Barkan and R. Bush, Prehistories of the Future: the primitivist project and the culture of modernism (Stanford 1995), 214-16, who argues that De Bry intended to visualise what he calls a 'childhood of mankind', characterised by wonder and magic
26. Roodenburg, 'On "swelling" the hips and crossing the legs', 64-84.
27. On a late-18th-century image where crossing the legs did not have a similar negative connotation, see B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd edn, New Haven and London 1985), 131
28. This estimate is based on archival records in the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, Arch. nos. 969-1047, where the account books of the Antwerp bookseller Jan Moretus and his son Balthasar show the number of copies the De Brys sold to their colleagues.
29. See for a more detailed discussion of these figures: Van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World, chs 4 and 10
30. See for example Steiner, 'Travel engravings and the construction of the primitive', 217-23
31. Tasman, who in the 1640s used Schouten's report, was confused about the location of the Tuamotu and Tonga archipelagoes in a manner reminiscent of the De Bry modifications. See Sharp, The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman, 82. It is nevertheless unlikely that he used one of the Oppenheim translations
32. Newe Welt und Americanische Historien (Frankfurt 1631), 493-515. The title is unchanged for the second edition of 1655. The same work is sometimes found with another title-page: Historia Antipodum oder Newe Welt