Abstract
Amerigo Vespucci famously recorded his wonder at both the variety of flora and fauna and the pleasurable environment he encountered on a voyage to the New World between 1500 and 1504. Ostensibly writing his ‘Letter on the Mundus Novis’ to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici, Vespucci informed European readers that he had ‘found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals that our Europe or Asia or Africa, and, in addition, a climate milder and more delightful that in any other region known to us’ (The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard Popkin, New York: Free Press, p. 24). If the natural world that Vespucci recorded was pleasant, it was not static. As William Cronon argued in Changes in the Land, Europeans began to permanently alter American environments from the moment of first contact. In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, Peter C. Mancall has synthesised much of the scholarship inspired by Cronon’s path breaking work. In this compact work of Atlantic environmental history, Mancall smoothly weaves in and out of the historiography, pausing to offer commentary and point out areas for future scholarship. His narrative is both compact and convincing, hardly an easy feat for such a rich field of study. Still, maritime historians will be frustrated to find that despite the richness of this narrative, the early modern Atlantic in Mancall’s history is a space to be bridged and not an area of study itself. The reader is introduced to coastal communities in North America and the occasional monstrous fish depicted on a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century map, but the heart of this narrative reflects cultures of settlement on either side of the Atlantic – not the sea in between.
The monograph is divided into three chapters with a postscript on sources that is of equal length and depth as the chapters. Notable is Mancall’s use of visual evidence, material culture, and anthropological evidence (folklore and oral history) to include indigenous culture in his narrative. Mancall laments the exclusion of such sources from environmental and early modern histories previously and explains his choice of sources by pointing out that the ‘natural world existed apart from humans’ understandings of it, but every effort to explain its workings drew on culture in the broadest sense’ (p. xi). Nature and culture anchor this monograph, but those concepts could just as easily be explained as historical accounts of human settlement and the landscapes that sustained settlement.
This project began as a series of distinguished lectures, which remains evident from the structure of the argument and the focus of each chapter. Fundamentally, Mancall moves the reader deftly from general questions concerning human settlement and the natural world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to specific inquiries regarding a single case study. The first chapter examines how indigenous culture and Europeans thought about nature at the moment of first contact. How did they belief that nature functioned, what did they believe to be their impact on the environment, and how did their culture include supernatural forces and specimens? In the second chapter, Mancall examines how the trans-oceanic encounters and their impact on the natural world in the Atlantic basis. Here Mancall relies heavily on visual evidence to demonstrate how early settlers’ bridged American and European natures. He examines ornamental elements of maps, illustrations in travel narratives, and decorative artwork fashioned out of American materials, such as brazilwood. The third chapter focuses on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, examining how English accounts of the Carolina Algonquians became representative of European/Amerindian relations more generally through the reprinting of travel accounts and reproduction of images. The postscript compares sixteenth century English and Iberian publications on insects to illustrate useful differences between natural writings of in the early modern Atlantic.
The early modern Atlantic that Peter Mancall describes is a curious approximation for the physical ocean that his historical actors crossed. Mancall includes sources that speak to the experiences of Amerindians and Iberian settlers in the southern Atlantic, but his focus remains in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Further, his attempts to connect the experiences of Anglo and Iberian colonisers are less convincing that his observations about English settlers independent of their Iberian counterparts. Maritime historians will also note the relative lack of focus on the Atlantic basin as compared to its shorelines. The reader is given exhaustive evidence – and this book is rich with both primary and secondary sources – on how indigenous and European cultures understood nature (broadly defined) before, during, and subsequent to the first century of colonisation. However, I was left with questions about how the cultures that Mancall so aptly describes conceived of the ocean space and their different methods of aquaculture. A brief indication of these questions is provided in a close reading of John White’s illustration of Carolinian Algonquians for the Brief and True Report (pp. 96–97), but a fuller exploration would have greatly enriched the narrative. Mancall does cite Molly Warsh’s recent scholarship on the global excavation and trade in pearls, which offers one possible model for how aquaculture could have been developed more fully for this comparative narrative. Despite Mancall’s attempts to fully integrate Amerindian voices into the early modern Atlantic, I also found myself thinking of recent works that could have supported this goal. One methodological approach is Joshua L. Reid’s The Sea is My Country (Yale University Press, 2015), which explores the culture of the Makahs in the northwestern Pacific. The Makahs’ culture, as Reid demonstrates, is built around maritime space, not territorial domains. Exploring how European and Amerindian conceptions of territorial possession differ in this instance would have enriched Mancall’s analysis of different cultural understandings of nature, especially as relate to territorial possession.
With this new monograph, Peter Mancall has again produced a thoroughly researched and compelling account of the early modern Atlantic world. Mancall offers astute analysis of the historiography and suggests innovative methodologies for incorporating indigenous voices in early modern history. Maritime historians may lament the focus on landscape at the expense of seascape in this monograph, but there is much to be appreciated here about coastal settlements and their culture.