Thevet Revisits Guanabara

lI nous faudroit des topographes qui fissent narration particuliere des endroits où ils ont esté" [We need topographers who can provide detailed accounts of the places where they have been]. ¹ In his essay on "Cannibals," the early version of his celebrated plea for objective accounts of the fauna, flora, local cultures, and singular features of the New World, Montaigne admonished a tradition of reports made by cosmographers who bore false witness to the Americas. Those observers, he implied, filled Europe with ill-formed and fanciful fiction and had little to do with any first-hand contact with spaces unfamiliar to Europeans. He impugned a line of writers, from Boemus and Sebastian Münster to François de Belleforest and André Thevet, who used the overarching network of a new but compendious genre to capture in its descriptive webbing customs at once primitive and refined, facts archaic and modern, and material both classical in aura and uncanny in shape. Montaigne's praise of the topographer shared affinities for the person who later became Pierre Bayle's ideal historian and, no less, the modern ethnographer: one who belonged to no land, was uprooted, déraciné, and capable of casting a candid gaze on any cultural foible that met the eye; one who refused to jump to any moral judgment about cultural practices or the outcome of historical events in past or present; one who was aware of the allure of allegory and rhetoric, on whose seductive delight the effusive and amplified style of the cosmographia was constructed; and one who could report in simple language--of a clarity and measure precise as a toise and discrete as a measured piece of prose--what constituted a singularity.

Montaigne's call for a scientific view of things also suggested that he and his readers wished to know what "really" happened when the French first sought to gain a foothold in the New World. Two failures were on the horizon. The first was Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon's 1555 expedition to the bay of Rio de Janeiro and the establishment of a settlement, which was obliterated by Portuguese warships in 1561. The second expedition, led by René de Laudonnière, settled on the coast of Florida in 1562 but succumbed to the Spanish two years later. In these pages of "Cannibals," it can be implied that the nascent anthropology of the Essais was born of mixed impressions about colonial endeavors whose memory was quickly swallowed in the oblivion of violence that reigned during the wars of religion from 1562 up to 1598. For the essayist the reminder of the ventures was revived through the appeal to be rid of cosmographers in favor of new, ingenious, and naïve observers of the pluralities of cultures. A politics subtended the chapter on "Cannibals" and in fact exceeded what is too often taken to be either its humanistic tenor or its anti-Iberian inflection. ²

The chapter built its observations on the grounds of a double bind. For if "chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n'est pas de son usage" [everyone calls barbarity whatever is not of their own custom], and if the only available measure of truth and reason is "l'exemple et idée des opinions et usances du païs où nous sommes" [the example and idea of opinions and ways of the country where we are], there exists no way to get out of ourselves and our solipsism. The essay proceeded to do so through its inquiry into Amerindian culture, but its most reliable sources were often the very cosmographers it called into question. The more Montaigne spurned the falsifying effects of a Sebastian Münster or a François de Belleforest, the greater the sense of an affiliation and a need, it appeared, to sort through their histories. Crucial for the reflections were the descriptions in André Thevet's Les Singularités de la France antarctique, a work that laid the foundation both for an anthropology and, to...