An Atlas for a French or an English King? Cosmographical Knowledge and Maritime Expansion

Following our previous post on Travelling Cosmographical Knowledge between Elizabethan England and Valois France, we could not resist mentioning an interesting previous case of Anglo-French cosmographical exchange: that of the Dieppe cartographer Jean Rotz.

Born to a Scottish father and a French mother, Jean Rotz became one of the most well-known French Renaissance cartographers at the Dieppe cartographical school. This school was created at the beginning of the sixteenth century to support French maritime expeditions. One of such expeditions was that of the Parmentier brothers to Asia in 1529. It is unclear whether Rotz participated in it. Still, he became acquainted, either by personal experience or by availing himself of important testimonies from crew members, with important knowledge of several parts of Asia, including the East African coasts, the Persian Gulf, the Indian sub-continent, the Indonesian archipelago and the China sea. Rotz’s knowledge was later enlarged when he made a trip to Brazil in 1539 that allowed him to collect information about South America, the Strait of Magellan, the Caribbean and Africa.

Adding this knowledge of the world to European cartography and general rules for Oceanic navigation, Rotz built up a work entitled Book of Hydrography that he intended to present to the French King Francis I. As the Valois monarch did not appreciate Rotz for his work, the celebrated cartographer crossed the border to England, where he ended up dedicating it to Henry VIII. Rotz’s book is still today preserved (and accessible online) in the British Library. Although Henry VIII did not use immediately the amount of knowledge that Rotz was offering him, he understood the importance of keeping such knowledge in his hands, and he protected Rotz until his death in 1547. Only after this date did Rotz return to France due to the French King Henry II’s patronage of the Dieppe cartographical school.

Rotz’s story is, thus, another episode of this Anglo-French exchange of information. If England did not take immediately Rotz’s knowledge to plan maritime expeditions, one should not forget the importance of such acquisitions to the creation of a scientific milieu favourable to maritime expansion. This was precisely what happened when Henry VIII’s successors supported a full-restart of English maritime plans from the 1550’s onwards. Rotz’s case also underscores the historiographical importance of linking history of science and knowledge approaches with imperial maritime histories, in order to have wider and clear perspectives of the different stages of European maritime expansion. After all, English maritime expansion, like the previous French, Spanish and Portuguese, would hardly have happened without these critical episodes of circulation and acquisition of cosmographical knowledge needed to support such a global endeavour. [Nuno Vila-Santa]