Travelling Cosmographical Knowledge between Elizabethan England and Valois France

In 1562, the Huguenot pilot Jean Ribault (1520-1565) departed from France to Florida. He was ordered by the French admiral Gaspard de Coligny to explore the area. Shortly after mapping the region, Ribault laid a French claim to Florida by placing landmarks with the Valois coat-of-arms.

Later, when the explorer René de Laudonniére arrived, Ribault returned to France to purchase more reinforcements. Returning to his hometown, Dieppe, Ribault found it besieged. As a consequence, he fled to England, where he petitioned Elisabeth I for an expedition to the Americas.

In the meantime, since Anglo-French relations were complicated due to the English takeover of French Le Havre, Ribault was jailed under suspicion of being a French spy. As soon as admiral Coligny heard of Ribault’s entering English service, he immediately started negotiations to release him. Ribault’s first attempt at escaping failed, but a second one proved successful. Coligny then sent Ribault back to Florida in 1565. However, Ribault was caught and executed by the Spanish Pedro Menéndez de Aviléz. Aviléz even wrote to Philip II a self-praising letter mentioning that he had executed the “famous” Ribault. But what did really motivate Ribault’s death?

During his time in the tower of London, Ribault wrote a report on his 1562 expedition to Florida, which is today held at the British Museum. This account had an enormous impact on the English plans for colonizing North America from the 1560s onwards. But it also impacted Spain, as Ribault became known as a dangerous pilot that knew all the secrets of the Atlantic routes and could easily use his knowledge to attack Spanish interests. Aware of this and of Ribault’s Protestantism, Spain considered him a dangerous threat that needed to be eliminated, as it happened in 1565.

Still, Ribault's story is a good example of how it was impossible for cosmographical knowledge to be kept hidden or in secrecy, even between open maritime rivals. Despite Coligny’s, Elisabeth I’s and Philip II’s attempts, they were unable to prevent Ribault from circulating with his rutters, maps and accounts, and to influence directly English, French and Spanish plans for maritime expansion. Although Ribault’s story fades against a backdrop of similar 16th-century cases, it also suggests the historiographical importance of studying the circulation of cosmographical knowledge between open rivals. [Nuno Vila-Santa]

A Shipyard of Science and Empire

To think of Early Modern oceanic voyages is to think of astronomy, seamanship, instruments, cartography, rutters, and shipbuilding. It is to acknowledge that this nautical enterprise would not have been without intellectual concepts, technological artifacts, and scientific practices institutionally organized. It is also to perceive that these achievements are directly connected to the birth of European maritime empires.

While the connection between science and empire is a hot topic in nowadays History of Science, it is possible to trace back to the sixteenth-century some reflection on the scientific, technical and technological rule over nature as the foundation of an empire’s wealth and glory. An example of this perception can be found in the Portuguese tragicomedy Nau d’Amores (1527), by Gil Vicente, where a Prince of Normandy, in love with the idea of fame, arrives in Lisbon asking for a licence to build a ship in Ribeira das Naus, then the most notorious shipyard in Portugal and possibly Europe:

“As a remedy for my sorrow
Give me a full license
To build a Ship of Love
Here in your Ribeira
Where the best vessels are built.”

The Prince’s desire to build a ship to search for glory in the deep blue sea tells us of what must have been a pervasive notion of oceanic voyages as the carriers of fame and richness to the kingdom of Portugal, as well as the international prestige of Ribeira das Naus, which he characterizes as “worth more than all of Paris”, due to the technology and know-how contained there. Despite the hyperbolic tone, Gil Vicente uses this character to state quite modern ideas – that successfully sailing the world is related to having the best shipbuilding techniques, and that the act of gaining fame and wealth is a consequence of having control over the ocean. And, while doing so, this forefather of Portuguese theatre sets the scene for historians of science to look at Early Modern literary texts as documents where the connection between science and empire is already being built. [Joana Lima]

The First Reader

After an initial enthusiasm for the invention of printing, the diffusion of reading began to worry humanists, who were concerned about its negative effects. Among the various testimonies, in 1562, the Italian Lodovico Domenichi, author of the Dialoghi, discussed the advantages and disadvantages of typography, spotting as its main failure precisely the exponential growth of harmful and superfluous books. "The forest of books that appears before us like a garden full of many fruits, has in the end few trees to build out of it, of which one is crooked, one is dry, one stings, and the other stinks".

Expurgatory indexes, paradoxically, saved from destruction many medical, juridical, scientific and nautical texts, which were fundamental for countless scholars to stay up-to-date. The selection process involved not condemning to oblivion books which had great cultural value. In fact, among the first readers of significant nautical books there were Holy Office inquisitors.

At the turn of the 16th century, a Portuguese Dominican, Fr. Manuel Coelho, stood out as a reader of an impressive number of works on sea culture (from the famous rutter of the pilot Gaspar Ferreira Reimão to the Naufrágio of Afonso Luís). Coelho’s comments to the books went beyond the mere formalism. As an example, the license given to the book Chronographia repertorio dos tempos, published in 1603, underlined the following characteristics: "This book composed by the mathematician Manuel de Figueiredo (the future 3rd Chief Cosmographer), is very curious because it includes a treatise on the sphere, the art of navigation, rustic astrology, astrology of the times, the construction of astronomical clocks, and other curiosities, which are not contrary to the holy faith, on the contrary, very worthy to be known, and consequently worthy to be published". [Luana Giurgevich]