‘The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes’: Terra Australis Incognita Revisited

AUBREY ROSENBERG 'The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes': Terra Australis Incognita Revisited Of the many accounts of real and imaginary expeditions to Terra Australis Incognita, the Dutch imaginary voyage, Beschryvinge van het magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes ('A Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes'), writtenby HendrikSmeeksand first published inAmsterdam in 1708,' has attracted little notice from those interested in the history of utopias,2 mainly because the work as a whole has never been translated into languages more widely accessible. As we shall see, part of the novel has already been much discussed in the English-speaking world, but the rest of it has been neglected. The purpose of this article is to remedy that defect. In 1921, Lucius Hubbard caused something of a stir among students of Defoe when he published the text and an English translation of an extract of Smeeks's novel. Hubbard contended, although he was not the first to do so,3 that an episode in the book was the main source of Robinson Crusoe. Over the next few years there ensued a lively and sometimes acrimonious debate about the validity of Hubbard's thesis but, in the end, it was and still is generally felt that an excess of misguided enthusiasm had caused him to overstate the case.4 Nowadays, at least as far as the Englishspeaking world is concerned, the Dutch novel has returned to the obscurity from which Hubbard's bold assertions temporarily rescued it. In Holland, however, interest in Smeeks and his novel has continued. In 1954, for example, in her magisterial study of the influence of Descartes in Holland, the late c.L. Thijssen-Schoute devoted several pages to the thorny question of the identity of Smeeks and to an evaluation of his book.5 In 1958, the archivist of Zwolle, the city in the province of Overijssel where Smeeks was a surgeon, returned to the problem of the author's biography.6 In 1972, A. Rosenberg challenged Thijssen-Schoute's assertion that Smeeks was an associate of Simon Tyssot de Patot, a Huguenot writer of imaginary voyages who lived in the neighbouring city of Deventer.7 In 1975, P.]. Buijnsters demonstrated conclusively that all previous attempts to identify Smeeks were based on erroneous assumptions and lamentable methods of research. In the following year he incorporated these findings into his excellently annotated edition of Smeeks's novel, together with bibliographicalinformationand an analysis of the work.8 Buijnsters also suggested that too much attention had been UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1988 'THE MIGHTY KINGDOM OF KRINKE KESMES' 377 paid to the robinsonade episode, and too little to the others. He argued that the rest of the novel is worthy of study not only because it is an interesting variant of the imaginary voyage-cum-utopia genre but also because it provides an excellent illustration of the way in which obscure second- and third-rate writers made their contribution to the vast spread of ideas that came to be known as the Enlightenment. Buijnsters's analysis, written in Dutch, forms the basis of what follows. In a preface characteristic of the genre's attempt at authenticity, Smeeks, speaking of the adventure and profit to be gained from the discovery and colonization of distant lands, praises the Dutch for their superiority in this regard. One area still to be explored is the unknown Southland, to which several abortive expeditions have been sent. Mention is made of real ships and of real expeditions that have been mounted unsuccessfully.9 Mixing fantasy with fact, Smeeks goes on to speak of what the reader will discover in the new report he has acquired from a seaman who lived for a time among the Southlanders. He cautions the reader not to expect an elevated style since the writer, Mr de Posos, is a sailor and not a literary man. The book is divided into eight chapters of unequal length which I shall resume very briefly. Chapter 1 (11 pages) is an account by the first-person narrator of his childhood in Holland where he was brought up as a devout Catholic by poor but respectable parents. In 1674, aged sixteen, he...