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Authenticating El Dorado: Frustrated Knowledge Production in Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2019
Abstract
This article takes a fresh approach to Walter Ralegh's published account of his voyage to Guiana, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), using it as a case study through which to explore the fragility of sixteenth-century processes of knowledge production about new lands. The article revisits this famous account in order to scrutinise in more detail the types of evidence Ralegh used to support his claims that a rich and powerful empire lay ready to be conquered by the English in the Amazon. This new analysis of Ralegh's narrative highlights the continued centrality of reputational models of authority in early modern travel literature and examines the types of evidence that could be employed by writers to support their suppositions when witness testimony was lacking. Ralegh's narrative illustrates that systems of knowledge production centred on the New World were, at the end of the sixteenth century, still in a state of flux. New ideas about what constituted credible knowledge, from firsthand experience to the collection of material artefacts, competed with older frameworks of authentication and authority. By examining knowledge production in frustration, and by dissecting Ralegh's failure to present a believable vision of El Dorado, this article throws into starker relief the many pitfalls and difficulties that beset those who attempted to present new and credible knowledge about the New World.
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- Copyright © 2019 Research Institute for History, Leiden University
Footnotes
*
Rachel Winchcombe is a lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester. Her PhD explored the many cultural influences that shaped English understandings of the New World in the sixteenth century, and her new project traces the interplay between diet and emotion in English accounts documenting dietary change in the early American colonies.
References
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Anon, . The Strange and Marveilous Newes Lately Come from the Great Kingdome of Chyna, translated by Nicholls, Thomas. London, 1577.Google Scholar
Cartier, Jacques. “Cartier's Second Voyage.” In The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, edited by Cook, Ramsay, 35–95. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Castellanos, Juan de, Elegías Para Varones Ilustres de las Indias, edited by Aribau, Buenaventura Carlos. Madrid, 1852.Google Scholar
Evesham, John. “A Voyage to the Azores with Two Pinases.” In The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 2nd ed., edited by Hakluyt, Richard, 2: 120–1. London, 1598–1600.Google Scholar
Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo. “Appendix C.” In Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World, edited by Myers, Kathleen and translated by Scott, Nina M., 143–79. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Hakluyt, Richard, ed. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. London, 1589.Google Scholar
Lok, Michael. “Michael Lok's Testimony.” In The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Isalnd, 1578, edited by McDermott, James, 71–102. London: Hakluyt Society, 2001.Google Scholar
Ralegh, Walter Sir. The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. London, 1596.Google Scholar
Ralegh, Walter Sir, to Sir Cecil, Robert. “Preparations for a Naval Expedition and Ralegh's Marriage, March 1592.” In The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh, edited by Latham, Agnes and Youings, Joyce, 63–4. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Smith, John. Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England. London, 1631.Google Scholar
Adorno, Rolena. “The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History.” William and Mary Quarterly 49:2 (1992): 210–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, Kenneth R.Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Barker, S. K., and Hosington, Brenda M., eds. Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640. Leiden: Brill, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Batho, G. R. “Jacob Whiddon.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (website). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29205.Google Scholar
Billings, Warren M.Jamestown and the Founding of the Nation. Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1990.Google Scholar
Bryson, Alan. “Elizabethan Verse Libel.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare, edited by Malcolm Smuts, R., 477–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Burke, Peter, and Po-chia Hsia, R., eds. Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byrd Simpson, Lesley. Introduction. In Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror and His Secretary Francisco López de Gómara, edited and translated by Simpson, Lesley Byrd, xv–xxvi. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Campbell, Mary B.The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo. Fabulas y Leyendas de El Dorado. Barcelona: Tusquets Circulo, 1987.Google Scholar
Cook, Alexandra Parma, and Cook, Noble David. Introduction. In The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter by Pedro Cieza de León, edited and translated by Cook, Alexandra Parma and Cook, Noble David, 5–35. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Frisch, Andrea. The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Fuller, Mary C.Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Harkness, Deborah E.The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Hodgen, Margaret. Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Second ed.Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.Google Scholar
Lamikiz, Xabier. Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks. Woodbridge, U.K.; Boydell Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Lewis, Bart L.The Miraculous Lie: Lope de Aguirré and the Search for El Dorado in the Latin American Novel. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Lorimer, Joyce. Introduction. In Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana, edited by Lorimer, Joyce, xvii–xcvi. London: Hakluyt Society, 2006.Google Scholar
Maczelka, Csaba. “Exile, Translation, and Authorial Self-Representation in Elizabethan Travel Literature: The Case of Thomas Nicholls.” In Displacing the Anxieties of Our World: Spaces of the Imagination, edited by Limpár, Ildikó, 44–62. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.Google Scholar
Magasich-Airola, Jorge, and de Beer, Jean-Marc. America Magica: When Renaissance Europe Thought It Had Conquered Paradise, edited and translated by Sandor, Monica. London: Anthem Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Mancall, Peter C.Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDermott, James. Martín Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
McGhee, Robert. The Arctic Voyages of Martín Frobisher: An Elizabethan Adventure. London: British Museum Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Miller, Shannon. Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Montrose, Louis. “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery.” In New World Encounters, edited by Greenblatt, Stephen, 177–217. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicholl, Charles. The Creature in the Map: Sir Walter Ralegh's Quest for El Dorado. New York: William Morrow, 1996.Google Scholar
Nicholls, Mark, and Williams, Penry. Sir Walter Raleigh in Life and Legend. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2011.Google Scholar
Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Perera, Miguel Angel. Oro y Hambre: Guayana Siglo XVI: Antropología Histórica y Ecología Cultural de un Malentendido, 1498–1597. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2000.Google Scholar
Popper, Nicholas. Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Quinn, David B.England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1974.Google Scholar
Quinn, David B.Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Sanchez, Mark G.Anti-Spanish Sentiment in English Literary and Political Writing, 1553–1603. PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2004.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Simon, and Shapin, Steven. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shelton, Anthony Alan. “Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by Elsner, John and Cardinal, Roger, 177–203. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Shepard, Alexandra. Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverberg, Robert. The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Small, Margaret. “A World Seen through Another's Eyes: Hakluyt, Ramusio, and the Narratives of the Navigationi et Viaggi.” In Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe, edited by Carey, Daniel and Jowitt, Claire, 45–55. Farnham, U.K.: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Smith, D. K.The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell. Aldershot, U.K.: Routledge, 2008.Google Scholar
von Hagen, Victor W.The Golden Man: A Quest for El Dorado. Farnborough, U.K.: Saxon House, 1974.Google Scholar
Wennerlind, Carl. Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, Neil. “The Discoverie as Ethnological Text.” In The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh, edited by Whitehead, Neil, 60–116. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Yenne, Bill. Cities of Gold: Legendary Kingdoms, Quixotic Quests, and the Search for Fantastic New World Wealth. Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing, 2013.Google Scholar