Clare Jackson: Jaguars over the Seine

Clare Jackson

Stained-glass windowpanes salvaged from Gorhambury, Francis Bacon’s 17th-century Hertfordshire residence, feature a cornucopia of flora and fauna, including tobacco plants, parrots and Indigenous men from North America, alongside mythical reclining river gods – all in vividly translucent colours. Visiting Louis XIII’s château at St-Germain-en-Laye in 1625, Peter Heylyn, one of Bacon’s contemporaries, admitted that he would have been more impressed by the decorative stained glass had he not previously seen Bacon’s installation at Gorhambury, where ‘all the Fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are so naturally and lively dissembled’ that it had seemed as ‘if art went beyond itself’.

A generation earlier, Mary, Queen of Scots had relied on the pastime of needlework during nearly two decades of house arrest in Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Among the queen’s embroidered creations are silk panels in the Cavendish Hanging – now displayed at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk – featuring sewn images of a South American armadillo, known as a tatou, as well as a toucan sitting on a branch and another ‘byrde of America’, possibly a blond-crested woodpecker from Amazonia. In 1569, Henry VIII’s former barber-surgeon, Edmund Harman, erected a monument to his family in the parish church at Burford in Oxfordshire, with his sixteen children kneeling at the base beneath four naked figures, believed to be likenesses of Tupinambà Brazilians, sporting feather headdresses and carrying baskets of maize and gourds. Although no image of the Burford monument is included in Lauren Working’s A Golden World, a quick online search confirms the accuracy of the book’s description of the sculpted subjects, whose ‘angular features look jarringly modern, a kind of Renaissance art deco’.

Neither Bacon nor Harman – nor, indeed, Mary – ever crossed the Atlantic Ocean. But that is Working’s point. A Golden World is ‘a travel account in reverse’: it ‘traces the tangible imprints that Indigenous peoples across the Americas made on Tudor and Stuart society’. In an earlier book – The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis – Working explored ways in which nascent English imperialism influenced domestic discourses of civility, honour and national identity. A Golden World takes a ‘material turn’ to try to find ‘a way of relishing the gilded prose and exuberant drama of Renaissance culture without relegating the history of colonialism and the Indigenous presence to the shadows’. In chapters exploring, among other things, the transatlantic histories of sealskin parkas, Rakíock canoes, Aztec illuminated manuscripts, Colombian emeralds and beaver hats, Working insists that ‘these objects transmit stories of care, desire, capitalist extraction and endurance beyond anything even Ovid could have conjured up.’

Working is a literary scholar and appreciates, for example, the parallel pliability of poetry and metallurgy. Words and phrases, like precious metals, ‘could be melted, spun and twisted’, resisting obliteration. Surveying an era when between 60 and 80 per cent of the world’s silver supply was extracted from mines at Potosí (in modern-day Bolivia), she recounts the ‘procession of carts laden with wedges of silver and gold’ that boosted Treasury reserves when Mary Tudor married the future Philip II of Spain in 1554. Valued at £40,507, this Spanish treasure ‘caused a 7 per cent increase in England’s real wealth’. Working also explains skills of artisanal craftsmanship such as the centuries-old process of depletion gilding, whereby Indigenous metallurgists gave objects fashioned from a copper-and-gold alloy, known as tumbaga, the appearance of pure gold by using plant extracts or mineral salts to remove base metals from the alloy’s surface. As the 16th-century alchemist and translator Richard Eden noted, ‘the Indians can very excellently gylte such vesselles of copper and base gold … that all the masse which they gylte, appeareth as though it were of gold.’ Listed first in the inventory of items Walter Raleigh had with him when arrested for treason at Plymouth in 1618 was ‘a Guiana idoll of gold & copper’.

The ‘incredible iridescence’ of American feathered headdresses, artworks, shields and wall hangings attracted Jacobean collectors too. In early modern England, ‘people were surrounded by feathers all the time,’ as ‘the gentry flew their hawks, servants plucked birds for meals and secretaries sharpened quills to scribble letters.’ But among the Tupi-speaking people of Brazil, birds were revered as representing ‘a bridge between earthly knowledge and the heavenly realm’. South American parrots and macaws were also subjected to human intervention in a colour modification process known as tapirage: plumes of cooler colours were plucked from live birds whose skins were then rubbed with unguents made from plant dyes, animal secretions or animal fats, to suppress the birds’ natural melanin. Thereafter, as Working describes, ‘new feathers grew back in warmer shades of yellow and orange-red, shimmering conduits to the golden light of the sun.’ Modern ethnozoological research has explored the significance of tapirage in Indigenous artistic and ritualistic practices, with Tupi featherworking techniques potentially serving a mimetic function in ceremonies associated with avian identification.

Among 16th-century contemporaries, tapirage was also termed contrafeito: counterfeiting. Seeing wares for sale at Brazilian markets in 1576, the Portuguese historian Pero Magalhães de Gândavo objected that ‘the Indians deceive people’ by selling new, modified bird feathers ‘for the true species’. In a chapter on ‘Feathers and Fakes’, Working points out the image of a Tupi headdress placed alongside an American turkey in an anthology published by Henry Peacham in 1612 of pictorial emblems inspired by King James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron, his advice book to his son and heir. Peacham’s purpose was to counsel readers against fraudulently appropriating undeserved honours. As he warned, ‘We pick from others’ praises here and there,/So patch herewith an Indian Diadem/Of parrats’ feathers’, wearing ‘Plumes indeed, whereto we have no right’. Mindful of the ancient Greek fable about ‘the bird in borrowed feathers’, Robert Greene dismissed William Shakespeare in 1592 as that ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ who dared to mingle among London’s established writers. Meanwhile, in English markets, items misleadingly claiming to be made entirely from desirable North American beaver pelts might turn out to include lower-grade rabbit fur. Accordingly, ‘the anxiety over fake beavers, and the accompanying humiliation of being duped, was rife in early Stuart literature.’

As this shows, the American material ‘transformation’ of Renaissance England was not universally welcomed. In 1620, a royal chaplain, John Williams, preached ‘A Sermon of Apparel’ before the king, outraged that ‘the Indians (the remotest people of the world) must be continually busied to trick up and trim’ fashion-conscious Englishmen. A Jacobean gentleman’s sartorial demands kept inhabitants of the Americas engaged ‘in spinning of their trees for silk to apparel him, in diving to their seas for pearls to adorn him, in picking their rocks for diamonds to sparkle him, in digging to their centre for gold to lace him [and] in hunting their vermin for smells to fume him’. King James was unlikely to have been swayed. When his erstwhile court favourite Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, had been arrested in 1615 on suspicion of being an accessory to murder, an inventory of Somerset’s clothing listed 25 cloaks, and nearly 50 doublets and hose, embroidered with satin lace, silk grogram and ‘black taffeta, cut upon tinsel’, in flamboyant gold, silver, pink, crimson, ‘seagreen’ and ‘ashcoloured’ hues.

Alongside polychromatic silks, Working relates, ‘in the decades after 1498, millions of Atlantic pearls flooded into Europe’; they adorned ‘jewellery, purses, clothing, fans, book coverings, garden grottoes, devotional objects, even toothpicks’. As a marriage gift, Philip presented Mary I with a table-cut diamond set in a large pearl pendant. With the queen’s pearl still thought to be one of the largest ever discovered, ‘the memory of such megapearls from the Americas loomed large in the Elizabethan imagination.’ In 1586 alone, Elizabeth I spent £644 on pearls in various shapes and sizes: ‘a sum far surpassing what a wage labourer might make in a lifetime’.

While Williams fulminated about Jacobean women appearing at Sunday church services ‘chimera-like: half-male, and half-female’, he was out-harangued by the Puritan William Prynne, who, as Working puts it, ‘like many early Stuart moralists … had a problem with gender fluidity’. In a 63-page tract, The Unlovelinesse of Lovelocks (1628), Prynne excoriated Englishmen for becoming ‘Womanish, Sinful and Unmanly, Crisping, Curling, Frouncing, Powdring, and nourishing of their lockes and Hairie excrements’. Obsessed by hairstyle, the country’s gentry seemed ‘in dayly thraldom, and perpetual bondage to their curling Irons, which are as so many chaines and fetters to their Heads’. Prynne blamed American influence, insisting ‘that our sinister and unlovely Love-locks, had their generation, birth and pedigree [from] the Heathenish, and Idolatrous Virginians’ who imitated their devil-god, Ockeus, believed to appear to the Algonquin people in the form of a man with a long black hairlock on the left side of his head. Prynne’s source for this claim was the 1617 edition of Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all places discovered from the Creation unto this Present, published by the clergyman Samuel Purchas, who admitted that he had never travelled more than ‘two hundred miles from Thaxted in Essex where I was born’, but whose encyclopedic works were based on manuscripts inherited from the travel writer Richard Hakluyt. A mine of information for 17th-century armchair travellers, Purchas his Pilgrimage later inspired the fictional travel accounts of Defoe, Swift, Coleridge, Thoreau and Melville.

James VI and I’s own wrath was reserved for another American import: tobacco. Having succeeded to Elizabeth I’s throne the previous year, in 1604 his first publication as king of England was A Counterblaste to Tobacco, lambasting its recent arrival from Spanish America and asserting his royal duty – ‘as the proper physician of his politic body’ – to save his new subjects from toxic hellfire. Whereas Spanish colonists traditionally preferred to smoke cigar-like rolls of tobacco, copying the Carib, Arawak and Tupi peoples of the West Indies and South America, James was dismayed by the readiness of Englishmen to adopt Algonquin customs of pipe-smoking and without ‘blushing, abase ourselves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians’. Why not also ‘imitate them in walking naked as they doe’, prefer ‘glasses, feathers and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do’ and thus also ‘denie God and adore the Devill, as they do?’ But James’s jeremiad came too late. Another pamphleteer quoted by Working recognised simply that ‘Men like and love this smokie kind of life.’ Seeing the name of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, inscribed on a terracotta pipe crafted in the Powhatan lands of Tsenacommacah and dispatched to London, Working suggests that the pipe offers ‘a glimpse of what has always been there, but can be difficult to see – an entanglement between England and Indigenous America marked by some level of reciprocity’.

Tracing the transatlantic histories of artefacts ranging from Colombian emeralds to North American beaver pelts, each chapter of A Golden World ‘follows its own micronarrative’. A similar approach is adopted by Nandini Das in her recent This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England. While Working focuses on the influence of American material culture in early modern England, Das’s book comprises microhistories of Elizabethan and Jacobean migrants as they moved across the globe, juxtaposed with the lived experiences of new arrivals to England. The two books have sites of shared interest, including ‘The Ark’, a cabinet of curiosities created in South Lambeth by John Tradescant, whose collections later formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the first purpose-built museum in the world. In the 1630s, Tradescant’s son, also called John, travelled to Virginia and returned with specimens of the tulip tree, red maple, Jerusalem artichoke, aster and Virginia creeper. After they were successfully transplanted to English soil, Das notes, ‘the offsprings of the seeds and cuttings that John brought back to Lambeth would be Virginian, but also English.’ But as Working reminds her readers, ‘when visitors entered Tradescant’s Ark to witness its global curiosities, they were encountering a world in a room – but at a cost, having disrupted the equilibrium of the communities from which such flora and fauna had been taken.’

Both Working and Das are concerned to recover female contributions to their Renaissance worlds. As Working contends, ‘Tudor and Stuart women were involved in gathering and disseminating transatlantic knowledge to a far greater extent’ than hitherto appreciated. Another site of convergence is Harman’s family memorial at Burford, with its carvings of Indigenous Tupinambà men. Das writes that their ‘features are decidedly un-English, emerging from the Tudor stone like ghosts from a contact zone’. Das, however, is also interested in another monument in the same church: that of Lawrence Tanfield, his wife, Elizabeth Symondes, and ‘at the other end of the tomb, facing away from the rest of the family’ their disowned daughter, Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, viscountess Falkland. Elizabeth was married to the lord deputy of Ireland, and spent her time within the crumbling walls of Dublin Castle during the 1620s trying to learn Irish from an Irish-language Bible in what Das describes as a ‘symbolic reversal of colonial hierarchy: an Englishwoman learning the language of the colonised, rather than demanding its extinction’. Elizabeth’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism provoked the family estrangement. Das sees the Harman monument as ‘a revelation of global contact leaving its fingerprints in the hidden corners of everyday English life’ and the Tanfield memorial as epitomising ‘the familial structures that underpinned the nation’s imagined stability, a shrine to lineage and piety’.

Similarities in content and methodology between A Golden World and This Little World are not coincidental. Working teaches early modern English literature at the University of York, after a stint as public engagement lead for a European Research Council-funded project exploring ‘Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c.1550-1700’, which was directed by Das. To some extent, a public engagement ethos informs Working’s book in its attempt to counter ‘the near total erasure of Native peoples from English history’. The change of gear from her Making of an Imperial Polity to a trade book is clear. In A Golden World original italicisation and orthography are preserved but chapters are unnumbered and endnote referencing is light.

In asking whether we can ‘find ways to pursue luxurious self-expression without the suffering of others’, Working’s new book also carries a political message. In the Tudor and Stuart era, Working wonders, ‘did women connect the brutal extraction of silver or other luxury goods with the jewellery pinned to their gowns?’ before acknowledging that ‘it is difficult to know.’ Given that we all continue to buy new clothes while our most sustainable garments are already in our cupboards, one assumes not: fast fashion still flourishes. As Caroline Dodds Pennock argued several years ago in On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, ‘the stuff of the Americas is part of the fabric of our lives, of the stories we tell ourselves about how the world was made. And those stories are almost always about production, consumption and profit.’

To see what stories about American material culture might ‘look like when Indigenous voices are brought in’, Working invokes the notion of ‘survivance’ articulated by the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor. Endowing Indigenous accounts with ‘an active sense of presence’, ‘survivance’ seeks simultaneously to resist and counter traditionally marginalising narratives by pursuing oppositional forms of storytelling. To this end, Working relays the plot of Vizenor’s satirical novel The Heirs of Columbus (1991), in which Felipa Flowers, a ‘trickster-poacher’, visits Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at Whitehall – described by Working as ‘the crucible where ideas of Englishness and global power could be projected as benign, magnificent, harmonious’. In Vizenor’s novel, Flowers unsuccessfully tries to secure repatriation of the bones of the Algonquin woman Matoaka – often referred to by her childhood nickname Pocahontas – who, more than four centuries earlier, had attended a Jacobean court entertainment at Banqueting House, shortly before her death at Gravesend in 1617.

To imagine ‘how Matoaka felt in those months’ spent in London, Working quotes from a poem published in 2016 by the Moanacan poet Karenne Wood, ‘Amonute, 1617’. Mattaponi oral histories of Matoaka’s life confirm the existence of numerous other Indigenous women whose ‘names don’t survive’ and whose impressions of Elizabethan and Jacobean England remain unknown. Moreover, as Working observes, ‘even in the rare moments when such women are visible, they do not speak in their own words. Still, the work of recovery is vital.’ In describing the way early modern women ‘viewed and admired Indigenous-made weaves and embroideries’ and the increasing extent to which Indigenous-crafted products featured in Tudor and Stuart domestic interiors, Working emphasises the testimonial capacities of objects, as ‘the threads of baskets and garments allow the stories of those gathered women to whisper back.’

Working also probes the interiority of Elizabethan and Jacobean actors. Following Hakluyt’s acquisition in Paris of an early 16th-century illuminated codex of Aztec/Mexica history, beliefs and practices, she speculates as to the reactions it provoked. Did the codex’s ‘graphic impressions’ of baskets full of chillis and warriors wearing pelts linger in Hakluyt’s mind ‘as he walked through the streets of Paris? Jaguars hovering over the Seine. It is impossible to know.’ In a similar vein, she admits that ‘we can only imagine what the councillors thought’ of Raleigh’s impounded tumbaga idol, but if ‘its burnished surface flashed in the light,’ she imagines Raleigh himself recalling ‘the sun hitting the Orinoco Delta. Glimmering, diamond-bright, like some truth that lay ever beyond human understanding.’

Working wants her readers to engage immersively with American flora and fauna, to ‘scratch the bark of the flowering sassafras tree’ and learn that ‘it releases a warm, sugary scent of cinnamon-like spice, its leaves smelling like sweet lemons’. Or, through the holdings of the V&A, appreciate that ‘to feel the bristly felt under one’s fingertips is to touch the fragments of a beaver’ that lived four centuries ago. In the Jacobean era, since North American beaver hats formed ‘an important part of a citizen’s silhouette’, they were ‘subject to the whims of microtrends’ and continually ‘amended, reworked or traded in’. Today, however, Working notes that ‘the Beaver has become an important figure in Indigenous activism,’ promoting natural regeneration and new modes of co-existence ‘in which all members of the community, human or other-than-human, can benefit’.

Displayed today at Tate Britain, Nathaniel Bacon’s large oil painting Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit shows for Working ‘how the Americas sneak into what seems like an archetypally domestic’ artwork. The array of produce surrounding the ‘milky white cookmaid’ includes marrows, squashes and pumpkins as well as, possibly, runner beans and North American ‘fox-grapes’. The nephew of Francis, Nathaniel Bacon relied on Central American imports to render his painted cherries and poppies so brilliantly red. Cochineal insects, found on the pads of the opuntia prickly pear cactus, were collected, dried and ground into powder by Indigenous farmers. Only the female cochineal has sufficiently high levels of carminic acid that, when a mordant such as alum was added, it created the vibrant shade known as chilichiltic: ‘chilli red’. Imagining the way modern audiences might react when confronted with such global abundance, ‘Have we woken up, collapsed under a banqueting table after a raucous bout of intoxication?’ Working asks. ‘Or are we suspended in a dream, next to a lobster and a ribbon?’

A Golden World succeeds in demonstrating ‘that there is never just one way of telling a story’, but its subtitle – ‘How the Americas transformed Renaissance England’ – is more questionable. Working’s story charts a metamorphosis in elite culture rather than a transformation of everyday lives. What’s more, despite insisting that there has been ‘too much romance’ in historical storytelling about the Americas, where ‘intrepid knights and sea captains crossed oceans on quasi-mythical quests,’ Working risks presenting a counter-romance in which Native inhabitants across the Americas repeatedly rescue lost settlers and, in Wampanoag homes, hapless colonists are found ‘resting and recovering much more comfortably than if they had been in some old countryside inn’. Back in England, her ‘travel account in reverse’ ends by lingering on Anthony van Dyck’s Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (c.1630s) – now in the Duke of Westminster’s private collection – to ‘connect us to a time when an accomplished artist painted himself with a sunflower, and when hopes for another golden age, free of greed and cruel extraction, still lingered’.

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