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Explorers Amazing Tales of the World s Greatest Adventures First American Edition Nellie Huang
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chaves, Kelly K., author. | Walton, Oliver, author. | Buckley, Jay H., contributor. | Nokes, Jeffery D., contributor.
Title: Explorers of the American east : mapping the world through primary documents / Kelly K. Chaves and Oliver C. Walton, with Jay H. Buckley and Jeffery D. Nokes.
Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, [2019] | Series: Mapping the world through primar y documents | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028836 (print) | LCCN 2018046065 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440839313 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440839306 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: America—Discovery and exploration—European—Sources. | America—History— To 1810—Sources.
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 www.abc-clio.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
1. King Henry VII of England Grants John Cabot a Letters Patent to Explore
2. Initial Reports of John Cabot’s Discovery of Land to the West
3. Raimondo di Soncino Reports on Cabot’s Discoveries in Detail to His Master, the Duke of Milan, December 18, 1497
4. Soncino Reports of John Cabot’s Plans for His 1498 Voyage, December 18, 1497
5. Grant for and Petition to Pay John Cabot’s Pension
6. Second Letters Patent to John Cabot, February 3, 1498
7. Spanish Reactions
8. Bristol Custom Rolls
9. Sebastian Cabot’s Account of His Father and His Subsequent Voyages
10. Uses and Abuses of Cabot’s Legacy, September 11, 1718
Jay H. Buckley and Jeffery D. Nokes
11. Island of Birds, May 1534
12. The Geography of Newfoundland, June 1534
13. Trade with Beothuk People, July 1534
14. The Mi’kmaq, July 1534
15. Discovery of the St. Lawrence River, August–September 1535
16. Beluga Whales and Other Marine Life, August 1535
17. Lord of Canada, September 1535
18. Hochelaga, October 1535
19. St. Lawrence Iroquoian Culture in Stadacona, October 1535
20. Sassafras, March 1536
Chapter 3: Hernando de Soto’s Expedition, 1539–1543
Biography of Hernando de Soto
21. An Official Report on de Soto’s Preparations in Cuba
22. De Soto Reports from Florida
23. Garcilaso de la Vega: The Battle of Vitachuco (or Napituca)
24. Encountering the Mississippian Culture of the Southern Appalachian Region
25. The Wealth of Cofitachequi
26. Encountering the Peoples of the Tennessee Valley
27. Different Perspectives on the Spanish Capture of Slaves
28. The Battle of Mabila
29. Elvas: The Aftermath of the Battle at Mabila
30. Ranjel: Chicasa and Onward
Chapter 4: Sir Walter Ralegh’s Roanoke Expeditions, 1584–1590 91
Biography of Sir Walter Ralegh
31. Ralegh’s Letters Patent for Exploring and Founding a Colony
32. Arthur Barlowe: Landfall in Virginia and First Contact
33. Arthur Barlowe: Exploring and Meeting Natives
34. Account from the Tiger: The Voyage to Plant the Colony
35. Ralph Lane: Exploration from Roanoke
36. Ralph Lane: Relations with Native Tribes
37. Thomas Hariot: Commodities and Crops
38. Thomas Hariot: Description of the Native Peoples Near Roanoke
39. John White: Founding the Second Colony at Roanoke
40. John White: The Relief Voyage of 1590
Chapter 5: Samuel de Champlain Explores Acadia, New France, and Northern New England, 1603–1635
44. Describing Indigenous Life in Acadia
45. The Ordre de Bon Temps
46. Founding of Quebec
47. Preparing for the First Battle with the Iroquois
48. The First Battle with the Iroquois
49. Champlain’s Moral View of His Indigenous Allies
50. Religious Conversion Practices in New France
Chapter 6: George Waymouth Explores the Northwest Passage, 1602, and New England, 1605
Biography of George Waymouth
51. The East India Company Determines to Search for the Northwest Passage, November 1601
52. Conditions and Protests in the American Arctic, July 1602 160
53. Waymouth Discovers a Route West and Turns Back, July 1602 162
54. Committee of the East India Company Reviews the Expedition, October 1602 164
55. Establishing a Base for Exploration Off the New England Coast, May 1605 166
56. Meeting the Almouchiquois, June 1605 169
57. Observing Almouchiquois Society, June 1605 171
58. Trade and Betrayal, June 1605 174
59. The Virtues of North Virginia, June 1605 176
60. Cataloging the New World, 1605 178
Chapter 7: John Smith Explores Virginia and New England and Champions English Colonies, 1606–1631 185
Biography of John Smith 185
61. First Charter of Virginia, 1606 189
62. Description of Virginia, 1608 191
63. The Capture of the Captain 193
64. Edward Maria Wingfield: John Smith’s Capture 195
65. The Question of Pocahontas 197
66. A Description of Virginia, 1624 201
67. A Description of New England, 1614 202
68. The Description of New England, 1621 Revision 204
69. Smith Reminisces on His Career 207
70. Smith’s Justification for English Colonialism 209
Chapter 8: Henry Hudson’s Expeditions to New Netherland, 1609, and the Northwest Passage, 1610 215
Biography of Henry Hudson 215
71. Robert Juet: Hudson’s Third Voyage Reaches Maine, July 1609 219
72. Robert Juet: Exploring Lower New York Bay 222
73. Robert Juet: Exploring the Hudson River 224
74. Van Meteren’s Historie der Nederlanden (1614): Hudson’s View of the Expedition 226
75. Johannes de Laet’s Nieuwe Werelt (1625): Hudson’s View of the New World 228
76. An Abstract of Hudson’s Logbook: Navigating the Hudson Strait 230
77. Abacuk Prickett’s Discourse: Navigating the Hudson Strait 232
78. Abacuk Prickett’s Discourse: Winter in Hudson Bay 234
79. Abacuk Prickett’s Discourse: The Mutiny 237
80. Samuel Purchas: A Note by Thomas Wydowse, and Addendum by Purchas 240
Chapter 9: John Lawson in the Carolinas, 1700–1711 245 by Jay H. Buckley and Jeffery D. Nokes
Biography of John Lawson 245
81. A Feast with the Waxsaw Nation 250
82. Sapona Town: A “Delicious Country” 252
83. Hatteras Inlet and the Outer Banks
84. Cape Fear River
85. The Present State of Carolina
86. The Carolina Climate
87. Of the Vegetables of Carolina: The Red Cedar and Cypress
88. The Beasts of Carolina
89. The Alligator 264
90. Native American Sociality 266
Chapter 10: Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres and the Atlantic Neptune, 1763–1784
Biography of Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres
91. Spry Persuades the Admiralty of the Idea of a Survey of Nova Scotia, 1762–1763 275
92. The Survey Commences: Commodore Colvill’s Journal, May–June 1764 278
93. Survey Techniques: Letter from Des Barres to Colvill, May 27, 1765 280
94. The Isle of Sable: Letter by Des Barres to Lord Colvill, July 23, 1766 283
95. Practical Challenges: Commodore Hood Reports to the Secretary of the Admiralty, September 5, 1767 286
96. Knowledge and Resources: Des Barres Writes to the Secretary of the Admiralty, November 13, 1769 288
97. Soundings Offshore: Extract from Knight’s Log of the Diligent, July 11–14, 1770. 290
98. Cross-Fertilization with Holland’s General Survey: Des Barres to Hood, August 13, 1770 295
99. Fears for the Last Phase of the Survey: Des Barres to Hood, August 13, 1770 298
100. The Atlantic Neptune: Chart of Egmont Harbor 301
Preface
In the years following Christopher Columbus’s 1492 discovery of a “new world” far to the west of Europe, Europeans explored eastern North America in two ways. First, a small number did so in person. They traveled there by ship and continued their exploration by either remaining at sea and following the coast or venturing inland on foot. These explorations were the focus of many generations of historical writing about the enterprise and achievements of great men, for they were mainly male and represented European states as they rose to global power. This kind of history writing, giving preeminence to dead white men, is still prominent in some school teaching, popular history, and fiction, but professional historians have increasingly adopted other perspectives. Some have used social historical and ethnographic approaches to examine the histories of those with less power, whether lower-ranked Europeans or Native peoples. Others have sought to examine the cultural, social, political, and military structures and systems that underpinned European expansion into North America.
More recently, however, scholars have focused on a second process of exploration. The majority of Europeans encountered eastern North America not in person but instead through the texts created by those who had traveled there. Armchair travel was both made possible and profoundly shaped by documents written by those who had actually been there. Scholarship has thus increasingly focused on the texts themselves, borrowing approaches from literary studies. This has allowed new questions to be addressed: How could Europeans adequately explain the American unknown when limited by anachronistic or wholly inadequate European frames of reference? In what ways did Europeans describe and define Native Americans as primitive, different from, or subordinate to Europeans, and how did this shape both ethnography and Europeans’ own identities? To what extent might discussion of eastern North America have revealed more about Europe than it did about America? This brings into sharper focus questions of representation and rhetoric as well as propaganda.
This book focuses on the stories of 10 particular explorers from the late 15th century until the late 18th century, a 300-year period in which European knowledge about the continent was transformed, as were the places and the people themselves—both Europeans and Native Americans. These are presented chronologically, reaching from the earliest European encounters with the North American landmass through to detailed and systematic surveys of the expanding colonial state. Each chapter has an introductory essay, and the explorations are each illuminated by 10 extracts from original documents that provide evidence of their journeys, organization, and observations. Most extracts are taken from sources that were
published in the early modern period by colonialist publicists or in more recent centuries by historians. However, a number are taken from unpublished manuscripts, and these include some that have never been published before.
These 10 explorers were selected from a possible cast of hundreds to span both the chronological and geographical ranges of European exploration of the American East. They illuminate key exploratory and colonial endeavors and show how European exploration of and encounter with the New World changed from the earliest voyages to the late 18th century. The explorers used different methods: some ranged inland, while others hugged the shore in ships. Some established a base, while others took their supplies with them. The explorers engaged in contrasting ways with the natural history and the peoples they met. They explored a range of places: the book covers European encounters with North America east of the Mississippi River from the Arctic expanses of modern Canada to the tropical lowlands of modern Florida. The explorers featured here represented different European states, which contributed their own strands to the fabric of the history of eastern North America.
The book provides biographical studies of these explorers but does not aim to celebrate their achievements or resourcefulness, significant though these often were. Rather, they are placed in their historical contexts. They and their expeditions offer insights into the motivations for and experiences, processes, and impact of exploring eastern North America. These microhistories are also windows onto the wider landscape of European colonization and expansion in the Atlantic world in this period.
This is a book of stories—an anthology of extracts from contemporary accounts of exploration and discovery. It is also a book about storytelling and story reading: it offers training in the historian’s craft of reading documents. The selections have been made not only to tell the narrative of exploration and provide evidence of wider issues of European engagement with North America but also to pick out particular problems and issues of handling evidence on these topics. The sources that have survived as evidence of these expeditions are themselves stories, as participants tried to convey their observations, experiences, and decisions to their readers. The sources are therefore essentially not straightforward but instead are complex and challenging. There are layers of political and cultural meaning, intellectual assumptions, and personal agenda that need to be deciphered. This book is thus a source reader in the true sense by providing passages for instruction in reading critically. Indeed, it is a workshop in the reading and writing of history.
A Note on Editorial Practices
For the convenience of the reader, we have taken the calendar year to have started on January 1 throughout this book, although this reform was implemented at different times in different countries. Otherwise, we have followed the dating in the documents themselves rather than providing dual dating in both New Style and Old Style.
Early modern spellings and capitalization can be idiosyncratic but have been retained, as they are integral to the historic character of the text. Reading them is both a pleasure and a challenge for the historian. Some words may be spelled phonetically, and meaning can often become clear from reading difficult words out loud and trying alternative pronunciations. Where meaning is genuinely unclear, an explanation is provided in brackets or within the analyses.
Acknowledgments
Various people have helped bring this book to completion. Kaitlin Ciarmiello, Erin Ryan, and the team at ABC-CLIO have been patient and supportive as our day jobs, house moves, and growing families impinged on the process of writing. Paul Wells selected the images for us and Jon Dertien has been very helpful in transforming the manuscript into a finished book. Jay H. Buckley and Jeffery D. Nokes wrote the chapters on Jacques Cartier and John Lawson. We owe thanks to several other people who have contributed in various ways. Kelly would like to thank Joshua Smith, Lincoln Paine, Heather Dalton, and Sara Marie Bodenstein and her students at the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics for their keen questions about the project and their excitement for learning. Oliver would like to thank Todd Gray, Vin Caretta, Glyn Redworth, Arthur Burns, Judy Lucas, Hannah Keene, and especially Louise Walton, who read and commented on the text. This book is all the better for their input and inspiration. Most documents presented in this book are drawn from published works which are out of copyright. The few exceptions are Crown Copyright and are used by permission of The Stationery Office. Document 100 is reproduced thanks to the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library. Above all, we are grateful to our families for their support and tolerance; this book is dedicated to our respective sons, Thomas and Nathaniel, who arrived while we were writing it.
Introduction
The Significance of Exploration
The eastern coast of North America surprised European explorers when they reached it in 1497. John Cabot and those who followed him in the 16th century had hoped to find Marco Polo’s Cipango (modern Japan) or his treasure-laden city of Cathay. Instead, Europeans found strange and wonderful people and wild land that stretched on as far as the dense forest would allow the eye to see. Before Europeans visited and reported back on their discoveries, eastern North America was not widely known or even imagined by Europeans. The Indigenous people who lived in North America, of course, shared the same bewilderment when meeting Europeans for the first time. They too could not conceive of a continent beyond their own or of people so pale and hairy as Europeans. This all changed in the years following the discovery by Christopher Columbus that land lay far to the west of Europe, land that was not China but something else entirely. There followed a long period of conquest, commerce, and colonization, which was based on the findings of explorers who reconnoitered the lay of the land, its inhabitants, and its flora, fauna, and other natural resources.
The exploration of eastern North America was thus the foundation of the Atlantic world that was created as flows of people, goods, and information grew across the ocean. Exploration was intimately linked with the story of conquest, commerce, and colonization. This explains in large part why different European nations settled where they did and, conversely, did not push into other areas. Explorers were also at the vanguard of the Columbian exchange—that
E XPLOR i NG U NPUBL i SHED M ANUSCR i PTS
This book includes a number of documents that only exist as unpublished manuscripts stored in archives. Access to these unique handwritten documents is only possible in person unless they have been microfilmed or digitized. References to archival material are different from book citations, as archive collections are themselves different. References express a set of hierarchical relationships that identify specific documents uniquely within the context of the file and the collection in which they are stored. Thus, the reference for Document 93 in the chapter on Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres is ADM 1/482/452–5, which refers to, in increasing degrees of specificity, the papers of the Admiralty and naval forces of the United Kingdom and its predecessors, the incoming correspondence of the Admiralty itself, a particular file of correspondence from commanding officers in North America in the 1750s and 1760s, and a particular letter that comprises folios 452 to 455.
is, the spread of different species between the Americas and other continents, including species of plants, animals, and diseases, such as the introduction of pigs and smallpox, for instance, to North America.
Furthermore, the explorers’ records of the first contacts between Native American peoples and Europeans offer key insights into both. These accounts often provide the only glimpses of human life in North America before the influence of European invasion transformed it through settlement, trade, and disease. These texts also hold a mirror up to early modern Europe, revealing shifting ideas about politics, society, and the natural world.
Exploration also marked European expansion beyond the bounds of the small area of Christendom at the northwest corner of the Eurasian landmass. This was in contrast to the previous centuries when Europe had been backward, poor, and hemmed in by the more dynamic non-Christian civilizations to the south and east that had been ascendant since the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 CE. Yet the exploration of North America did not necessarily signify European strength and superiority. Europe still felt under siege. The previous major effort at overseas conquest, the Crusades, had been beaten back comprehensively. In 1453 the Islamic Ottoman Empire had conquered the Christian Byzantine Empire, Europe’s eastern bastion. The Ottomans’ westward expansion was only held off by desperate sieges at Malta in 1565 and Vienna in both 1529 and 1683. European states did not even control their own waters: the Barbary corsairs from Muslim North Africa continued to attack shipping and even settlements as far away as Britain until the 18th century. Europe also seemed vulnerable internally. A plethora of rulers from imperial knights, prince bishops, dukes, and kings right up to the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor all completed for influence and territory. Consequently, there were many wars over dynastic and inheritance rights, territorial claims, economic rights and conditions, and above all religious difference. Sectarianism fueled unrest and bloody civil wars as well as wars between countries. The biggest conflagration was the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, which killed an estimated 8 million Europeans. In contrast to these preoccupations, the resources devoted to North American exploration were tiny. Only a handful of countries sent explorers to North America, not so much because they were strong but despite their weaknesses. They sought easier opportunities than could be found nearer home, and they now had the means and the know-how.
The Origins of Exploration
There are many reasons why Europeans began venturing westward into the Atlantic and exploring eastern North America. Above all, they hoped to reach the Spice Islands to trade in the most valuable spice commodities there. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 disrupted the existing European trade with the Levant for Asian luxuries such as spices, making these commodities drastically more expensive. However, there were no alternative trade routes, and Venice continued to monopolize this trade. During the 15th century the Portuguese explored southward down the Atlantic coast of Africa seeking slaves, gold, and contact with the mythical Christian king Prester John. These aims were partially fulfilled with a growing number of feitorias (trading factories) along the African coast. From the 1480s the Portuguese were increasingly purposeful about trying to sail around Africa to reach the source of the spices in India, and they succeeded in 1499. European rivals hoped to find an alternative route by sailing the other way around the globe: westward.
L AT i TUDE W i THOUT LONG i TUDE
Until the late 18th century there was no convenient way for mariners to ascertain their longitude. However, latitude could easily be taken by measuring the elevation of the sun at noon or the pole star at night. Mariners often tried to either follow their target line of latitude or sail north or south until they reached it before turning toward land. Knowing the latitude of key landfalls was thus crucial to oceanic travel and valuable information for composing charts and sailing directions. Charts could thus be inaccurate in the outline and even position of the shoreline, but if the important landfalls were plotted on the correct latitudes, a chart could still be useful.
This oceanic voyaging was made possible by developments in ship construction during the 15th century. North European cogs were seaworthy and required relatively small crews but were heavy and slow; Mediterranean craft tended to be faster and more maneuverable but were not suited to the big waves of the open ocean. Elements of both were combined to produce designs that opened up the ocean. The carrack was a large vessel of often up to 600 tons and sometimes much more. It typically had three masts, with square sails and topsails on the foremast and mainmast along with a lateen mizzen sail that gave improved maneuverability. They could carry large cargoes across rough seas. Much smaller was the Portuguese caravel. These modest ships of up to 70 feet in length typically had two or three masts, carrying large triangular lateen sails that made the ship maneuverable and capable of making ground to windward. The hull was carvel-built on fine lines, with a strong frame to which the hull planks were fixed edge to edge with each other. This made the ship both strong and light and gave it a relatively large cargo capacity for its modest size. The result was a fast and seaworthy craft that could handle well in most conditions—in short, an ideal vessel for sailing into the unknown. The significance of these designs for exploration in America is clear from Columbus’s decision to take one carrack and two caravels for his first voyage westward from Spain, while Cabot took a single caravel for his successful voyage. Columbus’s discovery of land was the decisive stimulus of westward exploration by the Europeans. The Spanish needed to follow up and find the extent of these new lands, hoping to find the Spice Islands. This included exploring northward, where they found North America. Once it was clear that the newly discovered land was not Asia, a new priority was to find a route beyond the Americas. This entailed further exploration to both the south and the north. North America itself became a focus of interest after the discovery and conquest of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, as Europeans hoped to emulate these conquests and find comparable sources of gold and silver. While Portugal had signed the Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain and so mainly kept away from North America, other European states did not consider themselves bound by the treaty. The prospect of riches, whether from trade or conquest in North America or from trade through a putative Northwest Passage to China, was a powerful incentive.
The Exploration of Eastern North America
Christopher Columbus receives credit for finding the Americas in 1492, but he was not the first European to encounter those lands, nor did he ever see North America. The Vikings
settled a Norse village on the northern tip of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows in 1000 CE. Archaeologists believe that the Viking settlement may have been a boat-repair colony because no artifacts, such as burials, exist that would represent a sustained presence in the area. Hundreds of years passed between the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows and the next appearance of Europeans in the Americas. Alwyn Ruddock and David Beers Quinn, historians who popularized the field of discovery history in the 20th century, suggested that Bristol sailors reached the Americas prior to Columbus. Ruddock and Quinn based their speculations on an account written by Lope Garcia de Salazar prior to 1476 that discussed Bristol sailors discovering the mythical island of Hy-Brasil and returning to England with a cargo of brazilwood that fetched a good profit. While historians agree that Bristol mariners traveled across the Atlantic at earlier dates than many previously believed, most do not find Salazar’s account compelling enough to believe without other as yet unfound corroborating evidence. The Basques too claim chronological precedence over Columbus, although historians have not been able to substantiate these assertions with either archaeological or documentary evidence.
The first recorded voyages to North America proceeded with the approval and support of European monarchs who hired explorers, often foreign, to lay claim to new supposedly Asian lands for their realms. This was done to establish their sovereignty in the region and profit from the lucrative spice trade. Spices were not found, but land and commodities abounded. In 1492, Columbus made his discoveries in the Caribbean for the Spanish Crown. He trumpeted his successes loudly back in Europe and inspired other men, such as Cabot and Giovanni da Verrazano, to take to the ocean in search of fortune and royal favor. Cabot, who thought of himself as a great admiral like Columbus, probably discovered Newfoundland in 1497. Cabot sailed with the support of King Henry VII of England and laid the claim for England’s North American empire. Gaspar and João Vaz Corte-Real also tried to lay claim to Newfoundland for Portugal’s King Manuel I in 1500. In 1508 Verrazano, a Florentine citizen, explored the North American coast from the Carolinas to Newfoundland at the behest of the French King, Francis I.
Following the initial claiming of territories at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, monarchs began to authorize colonists to settle permanently in their new territorial possessions. The Spanish again served as the forerunners for the rest of Europe. Columbus established his government on the island of Hispaniola in 1493 but ruled cruelly and was replaced as governor in 1499. In 1534 the French decided to send Jacques Cartier to explore their claims up the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence before deciding on a place to settle their first colony. Cartier identified two Indigenous towns, Stadacona and Hochelaga. In 1603 Samuel de Champlain desired to settle at either of Cartier’s suggested locations, but Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, chose to establish a colony on the Eastern Seaboard the following year. This was on St. Croix Island, which sits astride the international border of Canada and the United States in Passamaquoddy Bay and was settled in 1604. English explorers tried multiple times to found permanent settlements in America. Sir Walter Ralegh organized expeditions to modern North Carolina, settling colonists on Roanoke Island in 1585–1586 and again in 1587, but this was a failure that cast a long shadow over English colonial projects. Following Roanoke, the English settled their first permanent colony in 1607 at Jamestown. In 1608 another English colony was established farther north in Sagadahoc (Maine). Sagadahoc succumbed to infighting between the colonists and violence against the settlement by the Etechemin. The year 1608 also proved momentous for the French when Samuel de Champlain, who had returned to France in 1607, established his own colony of Quebec on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
The establishment of permanent European colonies in eastern North America did not stop further exploration of the East Coast and in the interior of the country. Hernando de Soto undertook a gargantuan inland journey in 1538–1541 that covered a wide portion of the American South and the southern plains. He led a small army in search of another Tenochtitlan before dying by the Mississippi River. In 1605, George Waymouth sailed from Massachusetts’s cape to Maine’s midcoast. James Rosier, a supernumerary on board, described the flora and fauna they saw and gave detailed accounts of the Indigenous people they met while at sea and onshore. Both John Smith and Samuel de Champlain left their settlements frequently to explore the rivers and lands around them.
Europeans, especially the English, maintained Columbus’s and Cabot’s hopes of reaching the Indies and tried to find a seaway past or through America to Asia: the Northwest Passage. George Waymouth also reconnoitered this route, and Henry Hudson pressed on farther in 1607–1608. He did not reach China but instead sailed up the strait and reached the bay, which were both later named for him. The search for the Northwest Passage continued after Hudson’s death and did not end until the 19th century.
Some explorers in the early 17th century wanted to found permanent settlements in North America or continue to make geographic discoveries, but the majority had more modest economic ambitions. Fur trading voyages to North America began in 1583 when Étienne Bélanger traded “trinkets” to the Indigenous people in exchange for beaver pelts and sold those in France for record profits. Fishing voyages also had the potential to enrich merchants. Multiple temporary fishing settlements dotted northern New England and Acadia’s coastline in the summer and then disappeared at the end of the fishing season. Explorers’ narratives, like those produced from Waymouth’s voyage, did much to inspire these temporary settlements. These texts described the riches of the northern fishing grounds and enticed fishermen of all nationalities to exploit North America’s rich and profitable fishing banks.
Even after the major push for settlement in the 17th century ended and permanent colonies dotted the North American landscape, the need to map those discoveries for political, economic, and intellectual reasons still inspired explorers. John Lawson, a self-styled naturalist, ventured into the Carolina backcountry to expand his knowledge of the natural world but also to map the region in order to auction lots off to potential European settlers. After the Seven Years’ War, in which Britain gained significant new territories from France, the British Board of Trade and the Admiralty decided to have the whole coast of British North America mapped, and Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres was commissioned to chart the coast of Nova Scotia. These maps, published in the Atlantic Neptune, defined the boundaries of England’s colonial possessions and effectively ended the exploration of America’s eastern coastline.
Where Did the Explorers Come From?
The European social and cultural world in which the explorers originated was radically different from Western society of the 21st century. Famines and epidemic diseases were frequent, including outbreaks of bubonic plague and smallpox. Monarchs, aristocrats, and established churches (especially the Roman Catholic Church) held political sway. Most economic activity and wealth depended on agriculture. The significance of commerce,
trades, and towns was starting to rise but was only genuinely influential in the Low Countries as well as parts of England and Italy. Society itself was increasingly mobile as serfdom ended in most places, crafts flourished, and merchants built up a dense web of trade routes across the continent, distributing among many other things North Sea herring, Russian tar, French wines, Polish wheat, English wool, Italian fashions, Spanish steel, and Asian spices as well as new ideas and publications.
From the late 15th century to the 18th century, the adventurers who explored North America on behalf of the rulers of Spain, France, England (from 1707 Great Britain), Denmark, and the Dutch Republic brought this cultural inheritance with them. These countries were all on the western fringes of Europe, with significant maritime economies and direct access to the Atlantic Ocean. Explorers came as agents of these European countries, but these nation-states were still only developing in the early modern period. Service and belonging were more personal and flexible than the later ideology of nationalism dictated in the 19th century. There was therefore considerable scope for people born subject to one monarch to serve another. Explorers were for hire. John Cabot was a Genoan-born Venetian who served the English. The English Henry Hudson served both the Dutch and English Crowns. Des Barres was born in a French-speaking part of the Holy Roman Empire before becoming a British Army officer. The expedition parties could also be diverse. De Soto’s Spanish expedition through La Florida included Moors and people from Italy and France as well as Portuguese nobles and adventurers, while Des Barres employed French Acadian settlers to assist his survey of Nova Scotia.
The identification of those nation-states was itself complex. It is important to grasp how different they were from their modern successors. Indeed, it might be better to speak of monarchies rather than countries in the late 15th century: political units were determined not by ethnicity or culture but instead by the reach of those who ruled them. The West European monarchies, whose agents explored North America, were composite: their kings and queens ruled multiple territories, each with their own legal frameworks and traditions. Moreover, the actual territories they ruled over changed, sometimes significantly, during the early modern period. Thus, at different times the Spanish monarchs ruled over not only the confederacy of kingdoms and principalities that made up Spain but also significant territories in the Low Countries, Italy, Burgundy, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe as well as Spain’s growing empire in the Americas and the Philippines. France became a nationstate as successive monarchs attempted to establish centralized control over the patchwork of duchies, counties, and provinces of which the French kings were feudal overlords. The English monarchs ruled over England and Wales as one political and legal unit. From 1603 the Stuart dynasty ruled Scotland as well as England and Wales, and in 1707 Scotland formally joined to form Great Britain. The Dutch Republic was a new invention altogether, comprising the northern Protestant part of the Netherlands that had successfully rebelled against rule by Catholic Spain in 1568.
Religion mattered intensely. It was integral to the warp and weft of daily life for all levels of society, shaping everything from cultural activity and social relationships to high diplomacy. The Protestant Reformation thus upended relations within families, within states, and between states. Europe was swept by a succession of wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries; papal authority was much reduced. Rulers sought to renew, adapt, or invent anew political and cultural structures to hold together their peoples. Novelty also extended beyond these spheres: the printing press underpinned the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment in this period. Yet these years also saw Europe swept by witchcraft, superstition, and persecution.
North America and its inhabitants
Not only did the explorers leave a Europe unrecognizable to modern eyes, but they also sailed to an America whose geography was both little known to them and very different from its modern form. This poses several challenges for the historian to understand what was actually explored. The first of these is linguistic. The naming of places and things creates an authoritative framework but one that can be misleading, illusory, or anachronistic. For example, how does one identify the river that Hudson explored in 1609 other than by calling it the Hudson River? Yet he did not call it that. He did not set out with the intention of exploring it; indeed, he did not even know it existed before September 1609. Moreover, he hoped that it was not a river but a channel leading to the west, and he did not know it was a river until he had progressed some distance upstream. The Spanish term “Florida” or the English “Virginia” referred in the 16th and 17th centuries to much larger—and less precise—regions than the modern American states of those names. Nor can we always be sure of an explorer’s location: without GPS, their movements could not be recorded to modern standards of accuracy, and they relied on other forms of geographical reference. It is important to hold in parallel both the contemporary systems of reference and modern geographical designations and tolerate the ambiguities, without which understanding of the explorers’ world will be anachronistic and inaccurate.
The second issue is that the geography of eastern North America has changed— sometimes dramatically—since the explorations outlined in this book. North Americans today would not recognize the North America of Cartier or Smith. The flora and fauna creating the landscape, the birds singing in the trees, and even the waterways themselves looked and sounded differently than they do today. European explorers marveled at the density of the “primordial” forest, but many species have all but disappeared. For instance, loggers cleared the eastern white pine forests for settlements and for the naval commodity markets, where the trees often became masts on tall ships. Whereas over half of Florida was forested wetland, drainage and clearance has reduced this to less than one-tenth of the land area. Not only were the trees in the precontact forest different, but the birdsong would now sound strange. The chirrup of the house sparrow would not have been heard, because it, along with the starling, was introduced to North America from Europe in the 19th century.
N AM i NG N AT i VE N AT i ONS
The terminology used to refer to Indigenous people has changed with time. Until the 1960s, “Indian” had been an acceptable term to refer to people native to North America. Scholarly literature morphed this term into “Amerindian” to distinguish these people from those of the Asian subcontinent. With the rise of the American Indian rights movement in the late 1960s the term “Native American” became popularized, followed in the 1980s by the term “Indigenous.” While “Indian” and “Amerindian” have fallen out of fashion, the terms “Native American,” “Native,” and “Indigenous” are interchangeably used in this work to describe groups of peoples who lived in North America prior to European contact. Wherever possible, the authors of this work have tried to use each group’s regional or political name, such as Mi’kmaq and Powhatan, to give a more accurate picture of the diversity of Native culture in North America before and during the European era of contact and to represent the continuity of that culture today.
Other native North American birds are now foreign to us. John Josselyn, a 17th-century English traveler, remarked on the “millions and millions” of passenger pigeons that filled the North American sky and even blocked out the sun. Explorers and early colonists hunted them to extinction, so today passenger pigeons exist only as taxidermic models in museums. Perhaps the most striking difference lay in the coastline, the inlets, and the bays themselves. Whereas once John Smith mapped the islands in Chesapeake Bay, now those same islands are sinking into the ocean, victims of rising sea levels, while the waterways flow in new directions. Farther north, Arctic Canada is changing as a warming climate shrinks the tundra and ice; the long-fabled Northwest Passage has become a reality and is now used by commercial ships.
The changed landscape presents a glaring difference between today’s North America and the land seen by Hudson, Champlain, and the other explorers, but the biggest dissimilarity between then and now lay in the thousands of Indigenous communities that hugged the coastlines, extended past the forests, and filled the interior of the continent. Native peoples were ravaged by infectious diseases brought by Europeans and were displaced by successive waves of immigrants. Native Americans lived in towns, villages, and dense patches of hamlets and also used countless temporary fishing and hunting camps. They formed extensive political groupings and trading networks that reached both inland and along the coast. These did not rival in size or complexity the political and economic organization of Aztec Mexico or Incan Peru or even those European states that dispatched men to seek out new opportunities, but the eastern region of North America was no blank slate or terra nullius, inviting European occupation. Like Europe, North America was populated by many different peoples, characterized by complex social rules governing every Indigenous community, political networks connecting related groups of people into confederations, and constant attempts by multiple groups to preserve territory, regional power, and prestige.
The popular image of the Indigenous peoples of precontact North America—if we think of them at all—has been heavily shaped by caricatured images of Squanto (Tisquantum) and Pocahontas (Matoaka) seared into our minds by cartoons and coloring books. They have been ill-served by romantic traditions that have portrayed them as peace-loving and living in harmony with nature. Surely, we reason, Pocahontas’s and Squanto’s sole desire was to become like “us”—or rather to become Europeanized versions of themselves. What other motive would Squanto have for helping the Pilgrims learn to plant their gardens or would Pocahontas have for saving John Smith from the wrath of her father, Powhatan? This line of thinking betrays us—and them. We should reject this anachronistic fiction and have the courage to look critically at the evidence that these explorers offer, which for all its challenges is the best documentary evidence for Indigenous life in North America. The sources in this volume show how rare it was—and difficult too—for explorers to listen to and observe Native societies attentively with the intention of understanding them on their own terms. Despite this, they reveal a good deal about political, social, and economic relationships. They also show that native people were not mere passive recipients or objects of exploration. They reacted to, resisted, and negotiated with the Europeans. Native North Americans also learned about the Europeans; information did not flow only in one direction. Furthermore, Native Americans also traveled to Europe. It is true that most of the early North Americans to visit Europe did so as captives, but a number returned across the Atlantic and acted as intermediaries. Later, some Indigenous people traveled there of their own volition. Thus, on a much smaller scale Europe was explored by North Americans.
European ideas about the World
In traveling to North America, Europeans also explored their ideas about the world. Medieval thinkers knew that Earth was a sphere; this fact had been known since at least Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170 CE). The principle of latitude was well understood. Europeans had adopted astrolabes from the Arab world to measure latitudes by the 14th century and adapted these instruments for use at sea in the 15th century. The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought that the world was flat was established by 19th-century historians who wished to emphasize the supposed progressiveness and modernity of science by constructing a straw man of irrational backwardness. Columbus did not have to persuade anyone that the Earth was round—he had to persuade backers that the distance to traverse the ocean was manageable. The key gap in medieval knowledge was that of the enormity of the globe. Europeans’ understandings of the world were grounded in thinking inherited from the ancient Greeks. According to this, the world was divided into the three known continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe). They were separated by major watercourses (the Nile, the Mediterranean, and the chain comprising the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, and the Tanais or Don River) and were surrounded by Oceanus, the great river. This had been revised as JudeoChristian elements were overlaid, with Jerusalem typically considered the center of the known world. Further layers of often conflicting information were added from rediscovered ancient writers such as Strabo and Ptolemy and travel reports by Marco Polo, Arab mariners, and others, with their tales of Cathay (China), Cipango (Japan), and the Indies.
Practical maps were produced for the Mediterranean with increasing accuracy from the 13th century onward. These portolan charts were based on close observation of the coastline. However, longitude could not be measured, so positions could not be positively located, and mapmakers lacked the geometrical knowledge to project a spherical world onto a flat map mathematically. Although portolans included compass roses and rhumblines, these could only indicate approximate directions and did not represent geometrical relationships between places. Only in the 15th century, when Ptolemy’s Geography was reintroduced to West Europeans, could his spherical projection be adopted. This development transformed European mapmaking and allowed men such as Columbus to make estimates about how far west they would need to sail before reaching Asia’s eastern shore.
The discovery by Columbus and Cabot that there was land—presumably China—far to the west of Europe forced revisions to the estimated size of the globe. The discovery that the Americas were not Asia but instead an extensive continent separated from Asia by a further vast ocean forced another revision to Europeans’ understanding of the world. These were the greatest but not the last revisions. Jerusalem could no longer be seen as the center of the world, as it had been represented in medieval mappae mundi. Successive explorers and cartographers tried to reconcile their findings with inherited ancient geographical knowledge, medieval travelers’ tales, and legends that might have some grounding in reality.
Exploring eastern North America also challenged Europeans’ understandings of ethnography. The novelty and strangeness of Native peoples did not fit easily with preexisting notions of the human race. First, the relative lack of substantial buildings in the areas explored and the use of hunting and fishing camps by some peoples confounded European ideas of a “civilized” culture. Europeans’ idea of “civilization” was settled society, in contrast to the nomadic Visigoths and Vandals who had defeated Rome or the Mongols who had threatened Europe in the 13th century.
Second, they found in North America people with no wheeled transport, no draft animals, no written culture, and very limited use of metals, while agricultural tools and weapons were made primarily from wood and stone in contrast to European steel. This was a surprise to Europeans, who were accustomed to the rich diversity of artisans, craftsmen, and merchants who underpinned the material culture of early modern Europe. Since Greek and Roman times, Europeans had thought that “civilization” required the use of science and art to master, mold, or mitigate nature, and the Judeo-Christian idea that the world belonged to mankind added a further imperative to this. They therefore wondered if Native North Americans were actually “civilized.”
Furthermore, Europeans could not place Native American peoples in the context of world history. They were beyond the pale of the known world. The Christian church had taught that all of humanity was descended from Noah, as the survivor of the Great Flood, and also that Christianity had reached the whole world—even if many people had chosen to follow other faiths. Yet here were unknown people who could never have heard God’s message. Was it even possible that they were not descended from Noah? Various alternative anthropologies were proposed. These included theories that the Great Flood cut them off from the rest of the human race, that they might have been descended from a different Adam, or even that they spontaneously generated, independent from other peoples. Did human history—and religion—have to be rewritten? How was this religious and perhaps moral naïveté to be understood? By the time of the Enlightenment, the “noble savage” had become a major focus of philosophical inquiry.
The explorers themselves did not always engage in the more intellectual debates about the Native inhabitants of eastern North America, though honorable exceptions included Garcilaso de la Vega, Thomas Hariot, and John Lawson. They were, however, at the forefront of ethnography: they met the Native Americans first. They carried this intellectual heritage with them and had to test their concepts against the reality of the New World they encountered. American exploration was a huge laboratory for the exploration of European ideas about geography and ethnography.
The Aims of Exploration
Exploration of eastern North America took many forms. The most obvious reason for this variety was that the aims of exploration could be radically different. Aspirations to develop trade, conquer Native peoples, discover gold, spread the Christian message, or establish European settlements entailed very different kinds of enterprise. For those seeking a route to the Indies, such as Hudson, North America was an obstacle rather than an opportunity. Lawson’s reconnaissance for agricultural settlement, which needed secure and fertile land, was different from Champlain’s desire to establish trading posts to tap existing Native commercial networks. De Soto’s search for wealthy cities inland was a fundamentally different undertaking from Cartier’s effort to delineate the coastline. As colonies became established by the 18th century, the focus shifted to more systematic and detailed exploration of smaller regions so as to optimize the use of those territories, such as Des Barres’s survey of Nova Scotia.
The diplomatic relations between European countries determined where and how exploration took place. Mostly they were careful to keep to their own spheres of influence as these
became more established. Until the mid-18th century, English endeavors focused on the far north and the regions lying between the Spanish in Florida and the French-dominated St. Lawrence area. There was also competition to challenge rival states’ colonial ambitions. Ralegh hoped that Roanoke would provide a base from which to attack Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. Hence, both Champlain and Waymouth explored New England within months of each other, and French explorers approached the Caribbean not via the Spanishcontrolled maritime route but instead down the Mississippi River from their own colonial bases near the Great Lakes.
These different aims reflected a range of concepts of empire that shifted over time and were also rooted in European rivalries and concerns. The very first voyages had little hope of territorial acquisition, as the ambition was to reach and trade with the Indies. This shifted, however, with the realization that the newly found land was not the extremity of Asia but rather a separate landmass and above all with the discovery in Latin America of large civilizations wealthy with gold and silver. Ruling a wealthy but weak Native province now became a model to which others aspired. The failures of Cartier to find the mythical kingdom of Saguenay and of the Spaniards to locate the fabulous cities of Cibola dashed such hopes for North America. More modest concepts gained ground instead. Mercantilist concepts based on extending national trade in fish and furs could be realized with specific colonies such as those envisaged by Champlain. Aristocrats such as Sir Walter Ralegh might become proprietors of a major province held under seigniorial right from the Crown. The Earl of Arundel sponsored Waymouth in hopes of establishing a colony as a refuge for members of the English Catholic religious minority so they could escape tension and persecution at home but remain under the sovereignty and protection of their monarch. Cabot had support from the Milanese priest Augustinian Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, who hoped to establish a missionary post. Very often, explorers and their backers did not share a single vision of what colonial concept their exploration was to serve. The legal framework in which exploration took place mattered: what rights did the explorers and their sponsors have to govern and exploit what they found? In this context it is notable that while monarchs sometimes contributed financially, more often they found a way to ensure that others bore the speculative risk. This was partly a matter of time frame: monarchs could play a longer game than merchants or bankers, who needed a swift return on their investment.
The individual character and expertise of the explorers themselves mattered too. They were almost all men. They came from a Europe where men dominated, and on their expeditions they undertook in some cases extreme feats of physical endurance. It is thus not surprising that women were only direct participants in those expeditions that had some prospect of establishing a colonial settlement, such as de Soto’s enterprise and the colonial effort at Roanoke. Some explorers came from the merchant classes with an eye for profit, even if as with Cabot navigational experience might be limited. Others such as Waymouth were mariners with extensive experience of sailing more familiar waters who tried to make their name—and some serious money—with a more ambitious undertaking. Aristocrats saw different personal opportunities for glory and conquest in national service. For some, this was wrapped in a religious zeal to confound the enemies of the true faith: Ralegh was passionate about attacking the Catholic Spanish, while de Soto was at least somewhat diligent in proclaiming the Gospel to the Native peoples he met. The backgrounds and motivations of those who made up the expeditions may be guessed: soldiers and mariners such as Robert Juet in search of adventure and booty, missionaries such as Carbonariis in search of heathens to convert, scholars such as Hariot seeking new information, and settlers in hope of better prospects than those back in Europe. Exploration changed as colonies became established
and the geography of North America was better understood: the risks became somewhat lower, and so too did the potential rewards. Lawson and Des Barres had no hope of a jackpot like Hernán Cortés hit in Mexico. However, Lawson and Des Barres both acquired life-changing wealth, as their explorations allowed them to become extensive colonial landowners. Des Barres eventually governed a colony, and Lawson was killed by the Tuscarora; exploration remained a high-stakes game.
Logistics for Exploration
Exploration was also shaped by the equipment available. Land-based explorers generally took fewer navigational instruments, but mariners were accustomed to using instruments to estimate their position. Oceanic voyaging stimulated innovation. For example, John Davis’s quadrant improved both the ease and accuracy of reading the elevation of the sun at noon to fix latitudes. Martin Frobisher took a blank globe with him so he could plot his route and findings. Marine charts improved steadily, even if the Mercator projection was not widely used for navigation until the second half of the 17th century. In the 18th century Lawson and Des Barres had the increasingly precise tools used by surveyors to measure and plot areas of land and sea.
Maritime explorers were considerably more mobile than those venturing inland on foot. Ships and boats could move faster and transport more supplies, though they were conversely at the mercy of the weather, and the terrain of the shoreline could limit accessibility. On land, supplies had to be carried by hand or on some of the few draft animals brought by Europeans, though the Spanish preferred to use their horses for cavalry rather than for cargo. This tended to make expeditions small, and the exception proves the rule: de Soto’s campaign could only be on a grand scale because of the large number of Native porters forced to manhandle the army’s supplies and booty.
Many expeditions, especially those mounted by North European countries, involved relatively modest numbers of people, for the risk of disaster was high, and the cost of feeding and employing larger numbers for long periods was considerable. Only 18 people accompanied Cabot across the ocean. Conversely, de Soto was able to procure the services of hundreds of volunteers tempted by the prospect of land and gold. However, some enterprises suffered from shortages of particular skills or tensions between members of the team. The
M AR i T i ME N AV i GAT i ON AND D EAD R EC kON i NG
Without being able to measure longitude, mariners were not able to fix their position accurately—though for much of the period the charts available would not have allowed them to do so anyway. Sailors thus had to rely on dead reckoning. More than mere guesswork, dead reckoning relied on measurement of the ship’s speed through the water, the compass bearing of the ship’s heading, knowledge or estimates of the speed and direction of the prevailing currents, and allowance for the ship’s leeway (lateral movement downwind). Sailors also took cues from the world they observed—seabirds, fish, and changes in the color of the water—and used the lead and line to measure the depth of the water and composition of the seafloor to check for sandbanks or proximity to land.
cost could be high indeed. Jamestown suffered due to a lack of coordinated agricultural activity, and internal rivalry almost cost John Smith his life on two occasions. Mutiny did lead to Hudson’s death.
Supplies were important factors too. Some explorations were intended to span more than a single season, so resupply was planned either from the home country or, as de Soto intended, from a nearer colonial base. Sometimes this worked, and in other instances delays, miscommunications, or conflicting priorities disrupted the process. John White was not able to return to reinforce Roanoke for three years because of the emergency measures to defend England against Spain in 1588–1590. Champlain and Dugua abandoned Acadia in 1607 due to lack of supplies from France and the revocation of Dugua’s royal monopoly over the region’s fur trade. Dugua lost that perk because he had no political agents at the court working on behalf of him and his colony. As the nation-state developed and as existing colonies became more established, the logistical challenge of keeping expeditions adequately supplied became easier, though as Des Barres found, resources remained a key focus for those leading exploration.
Exploration as a Cultural Activity
Explorers were not merely people who traveled somewhere new. They reported back. They created and shared new geographical knowledge. That novelty reflected cultural context: the inhabitants of North America knew their territories in their own ways, but European explorers created their own new representations of physical and political geography and of the peoples, plants, and animals inhabiting these lands. Exploration was thus a cultural activity as much as a physical undertaking.
Geographical knowledge was valuable. At times, states made efforts to keep as much as possible secret to protect their valuable discoveries and vulnerable colonies from raids or encroachment by their European rivals. The Spanish Council of the Indies was the prime example of this, maintaining both secret archives and a master map, the Padrón Real. However, all states indulged in such secrecy, especially in the first half of the period, with published accounts by Waymouth and Hudson, for instance, apparently redacted to conceal key navigational details.
Geographical information could be used to promote the colonial enterprise. The development and rapid spread of the printing press following the invention of movable type in Mainz in the 15th century allowed knowledge to be disseminated with unprecedented speed. Thus, the diametrical opposite of the Council of the Indies emerged: centers for commercial cartography and printing of travel literature. Antwerp and Louvain became the focus of the new industry, while in the 17th century Amsterdam became dominant. These cities were connected to an intelligence network, spreading information to and from the major ports of Europe. In Britain and France, colonial propagandists tapped this network to publish travel accounts that bolstered their projects, Richard Hakluyt’s and Samuel Purchas’s compendia being the preeminent examples. By the 18th century Des Barres was able to profit from the sale of his hydrographic atlas, the Atlantic Neptune.
Explorers’ writings about their discoveries were embedded in European culture and reflected both European concerns and European frames of reference. Some scholars have even gone so far as to argue that European observers were so imprisoned by the vocabulary and
mental architecture they brought with them that their writings are fundamentally flawed as actual evidence of American realities. Stephen Greenblatt argued that “we can only be certain that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation” (Greenblatt 1991, 7–8). Even if this extreme conclusion is not accepted, his major point still stands as a warning: these sources can be challenging to read because it was clearly hard for explorers to comprehend the strangeness of what they had seen and to explain it to others back home. They resorted to comparison with more familiar things from the Old World: John Lawson’s assertion that an alligator was the same as a crocodile may be zoologically inaccurate but entirely satisfactory for most practical purposes. However, when the Gentleman of Elvas described the women in Toalli as dressed “after the manner of the Gypsies,” the reader could form a vivid impression but would not know what was left out. This highlights a key issue: that some things could simply fall through the “conceptual grid” of European observers because they had neither the learned sensitivity to observe nor the vocabulary to express those observations. De Soto and the Spaniards seem never to have grasped the matrilineal descent of inheritance among the Mississippian peoples they met, and few explorers’ accounts show any significant understanding of the nature of Native religious beliefs.
Conclusion
It is easy to criticize the failures of early modern exploration: logistical planning was often weak, there was often a stark mismatch between the expectations and reality encountered, and there was sometimes a grievous lack of practical skills among the colonists. Some expeditions were a triumph of naive optimism over reality, such as Martin Frobisher’s three voyages of exploration in search of the Northwest Passage, in which his men mined successively larger amounts of a shiny yellow metallic mineral, totaling some 1,400 tons over three expeditions, before anyone assayed it to find that it was only iron pyrite, or fool’s gold. Yet it should be borne in mind that these were genuinely cutting-edge expeditions. They were operating at the limits of the capabilities of the early modern state, with its constrained financial muscles, slim bureaucratic and management capacity, and modest control over human and other resources. The ships used may be small by modern standards—the modern full-size replica of John Cabot’s Matthew is only 78 feet long—but they were the height of early modern technology. Ships were the most complex machines made by men until the advent of the steam engine. Exploration required resourcefulness, leadership, and extreme courage in the face of physical and mental adversity. Explorers also had to make sense of the new places and peoples and explain their discoveries to those back home. We need to remember that the world was truly a different place. These explorers were setting off into the unknown. What they found challenged them physically and intellectually. They were the equivalent of the astronauts of the 20th century. This comparison should encourage us to accord appropriate respect for their achievements and take seriously both the challenges they faced and those presented by the sources that document their expeditions.
Further Reading
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1991.
Chronology
1000 Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.
ca. 1300 Marco Polo’s Book of the Marvels of the World begins to circulate in manuscript form.
1390 Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras moves to Italy, where he introduces works from ancient Greek literature to Western Europe, including Ptolemy’s Cosmographia
ca. 1445 Johannes Gutenberg begins printing with movable metal type.
1450 Birth of John Cabot.
1453 Ottoman Turks conquer Byzantium, making Asian luxuries much more expensive in Europe.
1489 The Treaty of Medina del Campo guarantees an alliance between England and Spain.
1491 Birth of Jacques Cartier.
1492 Christopher Columbus reaches Hispaniola.
1493 John Cabot moves to Seville.
1494 The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the non-European world between Spain and Portugal.
1494–1559 The Italian Wars—a series of conflicts involving many European countries including Scotland, England, France, Spain, various Italian states, the Holy Roman Empire, Saxony, Switzerland, and the Ottoman Empire—take place.
1496 News of Columbus’s expeditions reach England.
King Henry VII of England grants John Cabot a letters patent to explore to the west.
1497 John Cabot reaches North America.
Vasco da Gama reaches India for Portugal.
1498 John Cabot’s voyage to settle a colony in North America.
1500 Birth of Hernando de Soto.
Pedro Álvares Cabral discovers Brazil.
1506, 1508 Jean Denys and Thomas Aubert survey the Newfoundland coast for France.
1513 Juan Ponce de León claims La Florida for Spain.
1514 De Soto travels to participate in the conquest of Castilla del Oro.
1516 Publication of the third decade of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s De orbe novo decades
1517 Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” initiates the Reformation.
1518–1521 Hernán Cortés conquers Aztec Mexico.
1519 Álvarez de Pineda finds the Mississippi River.
1520 De Soto participates in Gaspar de Espinosa’s expedition to conquer Veragua. 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano explores the North American East Coast for France.
De Soto goes on campaign to conquer Nicaragua.
1526 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón leads 600 colonists to what is now Georgia, but the colony is a failure.
Marriage of Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Queen Isabella.
1528 Pánfilo de Narváez leads a disastrous expedition to Florida.
1529 The Ottomans lay siege to Vienna.
1531–1533 De Soto is part of Francisco Pizarro’s expedition to conquer the Inca Empire in Peru.
1534 Jacques Cartier’s first voyage to Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
1535–1536 Jacques Cartier’s second voyage explores the St. Lawrence River.
1536 De Soto returns to Spain.
1538 De Soto’s expedition leaves Spain for the Americas.
1539 De Soto’s expedition leaves Cuba and lands in Florida. Cartier dies.
Birth of Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, in Peru.
1540 Foundation of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
1540–1542 Francisco Coronado leads a Spanish expedition through southwestern North America.
1541–1542 Jacques Cartier’s third voyage to seek the Kingdom of Saguenay and establish a permanent settlement on the St. Lawrence River.
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Et primum faciunt ignem se vortere in auras Aëris; hinc imbrem gigni terramque creari
Ex imbri; retroque a terrâ cuncta revorti, Humorem primum, post aëra deinde calorem; Nec cessare hæc inter se mutare, meare, De cœlo ad terram de terrâ ad sidera mundi
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Water, and Air, and Fire, alternate run Their endless circle, multiform, yet one. For, moulded by the fervor’s latent beams, Solids flow loose, and fluids flash to steams, And elemental flame, with secret force, Pursues through earth, air, sky, its stated course
INTRODUCTION.
Of Thermotics and Atmology
IEMPLOY the term Thermotics to include all the doctrines respecting Heat, which have hitherto been established on proper scientific grounds. Our survey of the history of this branch of science must be more rapid and less detailed than it has been in those subjects of which we have hitherto treated: for our knowledge is, in this case, more vague and uncertain than in the others, and has made less progress towards a general and certain theory. Still, the narrative is too important and too instructive to be passed over.
The distinction of Formal Thermotics and Physical Thermotics, of the discovery of the mere Laws of Phenomena, and the discovery of their causes, is applicable here, as in other departments of our knowledge. But we cannot exhibit, in any prominent manner, the latter division of the science now before us; since no general theory of heat has yet been propounded, which affords the means of calculating the circumstances of the phenomena of conduction, radiation, expansion, and change of solid, liquid, and gaseous form. Still, on each of these subjects there have been proposed, and extensively assented to, certain general views, each of which explains its appropriate class of phenomena; and, in some cases, these principles have been clothed in precise and mathematical conditions, and thus made bases of calculation.
These principles, thus possessing a generality of a limited kind, connecting several observed laws of phenomena, but yet not connecting all the observed classes of facts which relate to heat, will
require our separate attention. They may be described as the Doctrine of Conduction, the Doctrine of Radiation, the Doctrine of Specific Heat, and the Doctrine of Latent Heat; and these, and similar doctrines respecting heat, make up the science which we may call Thermotics proper.
But besides these collections of principles which regard heat by itself, the relations of heat and moisture give rise to another and important collection of laws and principles, which I shall treat of in connexion with Thermotics, and shall term Atmology, borrowing 138 the term from the Greek word (ἄτμος,) which signifies vapor. The Atmosphere was so named by the Greeks, as being a sphere of vapor; and, undoubtedly, the most general and important of the phenomena which take place in the air, by which the earth is surrounded, are those in which water, of one consistence or other (ice, water, or steam,) is concerned. The knowledge which relates to what takes place in the atmosphere has been called Meteorology, in its collective form: but such knowledge is, in fact, composed of parts of many different sciences. And it is useful for our purpose to consider separately those portions of Meteorology which have reference to the laws of aqueous vapor, and these we may include under the term Atmology.
The instruments which have been invented for the purpose of measuring the moisture of the air, that is, the quantity of vapor which exists in it, have been termed Hygrometers; and the doctrines on which these instruments depend, and to which they lead, have been called Hygrometry; but this term has not been used in quite so extensive a sense as that which we intend to affix to Atmology.
In treating of Thermotics, we shall first describe the earlier progress of men’s views concerning Conduction, Radiation, and the like, and shall then speak of the more recent corrections and extensions, by which they have been brought nearer to theoretical generality.
THERMOTICS PROPER.
CHAPTER I.
T
D
C R
Section 1. Introduction of the Doctrine of Conduction.
BY conduction is meant the propagation of heat from one part to another of a continuous body; or from one body to another in contact with it; as when one end of a poker stuck in the fire heats the other end, or when this end heats the hand which takes hold of it. By radiation is meant the diffusion of heat from the surface of a body to points not in contact It is clear in both these cases, that, in proportion as the hot portion is hotter, it produces a greater effect in warming the cooler portion; that is, it communicates more Heat to it, if Heat be the abstract conception of which this effect is the measure. The simplest rule which can be proposed is, that the heat thus communicated in a given instant is proportional to the excess of the heat of the hot body over that of the contiguous bodies; there are no obvious phenomena which contradict the supposition that this is the true law; and it was thence assumed by Newton as the true law for radiation and by other writers for conduction. This assumption was confirmed approximately, and afterwards corrected, for the case of Radiation; in its application to Conduction, it has been made the basis of calculation up to the present time. We may observe that this statement takes for granted that we have attained to a measure of heat (or of temperature, as heat thus measured is termed), corresponding to the law thus assumed; and, in fact, as we shall have occasion to explain in speaking of the measures of sensible qualities, 140 the thermometrical scale of heat according to the
expansion of liquids (which is the measure of temperature here adopted), was constructed with a reference to Newton’s law of radiation of heat; and thus the law is necessarily consistent with the scale.
In any case in which the parts of a body are unequally hot, the temperature will vary continuously in passing from one part of the body to another; thus, a long bar of iron, of which one end is kept red hot, will exhibit a gradual diminution of temperature at successive points, proceeding to the other end. The law of temperature of the parts of such a bar might be expressed by the ordinates of a curve which should run alongside the bar And, in order to trace mathematically the consequences of the assumed law, some of those processes would be necessary, by which mathematicians are enabled to deal with the properties of curves; as the method of infinitesimals, or the differential calculus; and the truth or falsehood of the law would be determined, according to the usual rules of inductive science, by a comparison of results so deduced from the principle, with the observed phenomena.
It was easily perceived that this comparison was the task which physical inquirers had to perform; but the execution of it was delayed for some time; partly, perhaps, because the mathematical process presented some difficulties. Even in a case so simple as that above mentioned, of a linear bar with a stationary temperature at one end, partial differentials entered; for there were three variable quantities, the time, as well as the place of each point and its temperature. And at first, another scruple occurred to M. Biot when, about 1804, he undertook this problem. 1 “A difficulty,” says Laplace, 2 in 1809, “presents itself, which has not yet been solved. The quantities of heat received and communicated in an instant (by any point of the
bar) must be infinitely small quantities of the same order as the excess of the heat of a slice of the body over that of the contiguous slice; therefore the excess of the heat received by any slice over the heat communicated, is an infinitely small quantity of the second order; and the accumulation in a finite time (which depends on this excess) cannot be finite.” I conceive that this difficulty arises entirely from an arbitrary and unnecessary assumption concerning the relation of the infinitesimal parts of the body. Laplace resolved the difficulty by further reasoning founded upon the same assumption which occasioned 141 it; but Fourier, who was the most distinguished of the cultivators of this mathematical doctrine of conduction, follows a course of reasoning in which the difficulty does not present itself. Indeed it is stated by Laplace, in the Memoir above quoted, 3 that Fourier had already obtained the true fundamental equations by views of his own.
1 Biot, Traité de Phys iv p 669
2 Laplace, Mém Inst for 1809, p 332
3 Laplace, Mém. Inst. for 1809, p. 538.
The remaining part of the history of the doctrine of conduction is principally the history of Fourier’s labors. Attention having been drawn to the subject, as we have mentioned, the French Institute, in January, 1810, proposed, as their prize question, “To give the mathematical theory of the laws of the propagation of heat, and to compare this theory with exact observations.” Fourier’s Memoir (the sequel of one delivered in 1807,) was sent in September, 1811; and the prize (3000 francs) adjudged to it in 1812. In consequence of the political confusion which prevailed in France, or of other causes, these important Memoirs were not published by the Academy till
1824; but extracts had been printed in the Bulletin des Sciences in 1808, and in the Annales de Chimie in 1816; and Poisson and M. Cauchy had consulted the manuscript itself.
It is not my purpose to give, in this place, 4 an account of the analytical processes by which Fourier obtained his results. The skill displayed in these Memoirs is such as to make them an object of just admiration to mathematicians; but they consist entirely of deductions from the fundamental principle which I have noticed,—that the quantity of heat conducted from a hotter to a colder point is proportional to the excess of heat, modified by the conductivity, or conducting power of each substance The equations which flow from this principle assume nearly the same forms as those which occur in the most general problems of hydrodynamics Besides Fourier’s solution, Laplace, Poisson, and M. Cauchy have also exercised their great analytical skill in the management of these formulæ. We shall briefly speak of the comparison of the results of these reasonings with experiment, and notice some other consequences to which they lead. But before we can do this, we must pay some attention to the subject of radiation.
4 I have given an account of Fourier’s mathematical results in the Reports of the British Association for 1835 142
Sect. 2.—Introduction of the Doctrine of Radiation.
A body, as a mass of incandescent iron, emits heat, as we perceive by our senses when we approach it; and by this emission of heat the hot body cools down. The first step in our systematic knowledge of the subject was made in the Principia. “It was in the destiny of that great work,” says Fourier, “to exhibit, or at least to
indicate, the causes of the principal phenomena of the universe.” Newton assumed, as we have already said, that the rate at which a body cools, that is, parts with its heat to surrounding bodies, is proportional to its heat; and on this assumption he rested the verification of his scale of temperatures. It is an easy deduction from this law, that if times of cooling be taken in arithmetical progression, the heat will decrease in geometrical progression Kraft, and after him Richman, tried to verify this law by direct experiments on the cooling of vessels of warm water; and from these experiments, which have since been repeated by others, it appears that for differences of temperature which do not exceed 50 degrees (boiling water being 100), this geometrical progression represents, with tolerable (but not with complete) accuracy, the process of cooling.
This principle of radiation, like that of conduction, required to be followed out by mathematical reasoning. But it required also to be corrected in the first place, for it was easily seen that the rate of cooling depended, not on the absolute temperature of the body, but on the excess of its temperature above the surrounding objects to which it communicated its heat in cooling. And philosophers were naturally led to endeavor to explain or illustrate this process by some physical notions. Lambert in 1765 published 5 an Essay on the Force of Heat, in which he assimilates the communication of heat to the flow of a fluid out of one vessel into another by an excess of pressure; and mathematically deduces the laws of the process on this ground. But some additional facts suggested a different view of the subject. It was found that heat is propagated by radiation according to straight lines, like light; and that it is, as light is, capable of being reflected by mirrors, and thus brought to a focus of intenser action. In this manner the radiative effect of a body could be more precisely traced. A fact, however, came under notice, which, at first
sight, appeared to 143 offer some difficulty. It appeared that cold was reflected no less than heat. A mass of ice, when its effect was concentrated on a thermometer by a system of mirrors, made the thermometer fall, just as a vessel of hot water placed in a similar situation made it rise. Was cold, then, to be supposed a real substance, no less than heat?
5 Act. Helvet. tom. ii. p. 172.
The solution of this and similar difficulties was given by Pierre Prevost, professor at Geneva, whose theory of radiant heat was proposed about 1790. According to this theory, heat, or caloric, is constantly radiating from every point of the surface of all bodies in straight lines; and it radiates the more copiously, the greater is the quantity of heat which the body contains. Hence a constant exchange of heat is going on among neighboring bodies; and a body grows hotter or colder, according as it receives more caloric than it emits, or the contrary. And thus a body is cooled by rectilinear rays from a cold body, because along these paths it sends rays of heat in greater abundance than those which return the same way. This theory of exchanges is simple and satisfactory, and was soon generally adopted; but we must consider it rather as the simplest mode of expressing the dependence of the communication of heat on the excess of temperature, than as a proposition of which the physical truth is clearly established.
A number of curious researches on the effect of the different kinds of surface of the heating and of the heated body, were made by Leslie and others On these I shall not dwell; only observing that the relative amount of this radiative and receptive energy may be expressed by numbers, for each kind of surface; and that we shall
have occasion to speak of it under the term exterior conductivity; it is thus distinguished from interior conductivity, which is the relative rate at which heat is conducted in the interior of bodies. 6
6 The term employed by Fourier, conductibility or conducibility, suggests expressions altogether absurd, as if the bodies could be called conductible, or conducible, with respect to heat: I have therefore ventured upon a slight alteration of the word, and have used the abstract term which analogy would suggest, if we suppose bodies to be conductive in this respect.
Sect. 3. Verifications of the Doctrines of Conduction and Radiation.
T interior and exterior conductivity of bodies are numbers, which enter as elements, or coefficients, into the mathematical calculations founded on the doctrines of conduction and radiation. These 144 coefficients are to be determined for each case by appropriate experiments: when the experimenters had obtained these data, as well as the mathematical solutions of the problems, they could test the truth of their fundamental principles by a comparison of the theoretical and actual results in properly-selected cases. This was done for the law of conduction in the simple cases of metallic bars heated at one end, by M Biot, 7 and the accordance with experiment was sufficiently close. In the more complex cases of conduction which Fourier considered, it was less easy to devise a satisfactory mode of comparison. But some rather curious relations which he demonstrated to exist among the temperatures at different points of an armille, or ring, afforded a good criterion of the value of the calculations, and confirmed their correctness. 8
7 Tr de Phys iv 671
8 Mém Inst 1819, p 192, published 1824
We may therefore presume these doctrines of radiation and conduction to be sufficiently established; and we may consider their application to any remarkable case to be a portion of the history of science. We proceed to some such applications.
Sect. 4. The Geological and Cosmological Application of Thermotics.
B far the most important case to which conclusions from these doctrines have been applied, is that of the globe of the earth, and of those laws of climate to which the modifications of temperature give rise; and in this way we are led to inferences concerning other parts of the universe. If we had any means of observing these terrestrial and cosmical phenomena to a sufficient extent, they would be valuable facts on which we might erect our theories; and they would thus form part, not of the corollaries, but of the foundations of our doctrine of heat. In such a case, the laws of the propagation of heat, as discovered from experiments on smaller bodies, would serve to explain these phenomena of the universe, just as the laws of motion explain the celestial movements. But since we are almost entirely without any definite indications of the condition of the other bodies in the solar system as to heat; and since, even with regard to the earth, we know only the temperature of the parts at or very near the surface, our knowledge of the part which heat plays in the earth and the heavens must be in a great measure, not a generalization of observed facts, but a deduction from theoretical principles. Still, such knowledge, whether obtained 145 from observation or from theory, must possess great interest and importance. The doctrines of this kind which we have to notice refer principally to the effect of the sun’s heat on the earth, the laws of climate,—the thermotical
condition of the interior of the earth, and that of the planetary spaces.
1. Effect of Solar Heat on the Earth. That the sun’s heat passes into the interior of the earth in a variable manner, depending upon the succession of days and nights, summers and winters, is an obvious consequence of our first notions on this subject. The mode in which it proceeds into the interior, after descending below the surface, remained to be gathered, either from the phenomena, or from reasoning. Both methods were employed. 9 Saussure endeavored to trace its course by digging, in 1785, and thus found that at the depth of about thirty-one feet, the annual variation of temperature is about 1⁄12th what it is at the surface. Leslie adopted a better method, sinking the bulbs of thermometers deep in the earth, while their stems appeared above the surface. In 1813, ’16, and ’17, he observed thus the temperatures at the depths of one, two, four, and eight feet, at Abbotshall, in Fifeshire. The results showed that the extreme annual oscillations of the temperature diminish as we descend. At the depth of one foot, the yearly range of oscillation was twenty-five degrees (Fahrenheit); at two feet it was twenty degrees; at four feet it was fifteen degrees; at eight feet it was only nine degrees and a half. And the time at which the heat was greatest was later and later in proceeding to the lower points. At one foot, the maximum and minimum were three weeks after the solstice of summer and of winter; at two feet, they were four or five weeks; at four feet, they were two months; and at eight feet, three months. The mean temperature of all the thermometers was nearly the same. Similar results were obtained by Ott at Zurich in 1762, and by Herrenschneider at Strasburg in 1821, ’2, ’3. 10
9 Leslie, art. Climate, Supp. Enc. Brit. 179.
10 Pouillet, Météorol t ii p 643
These results had already been explained by Fourier’s theory of conduction. He had shown 11 that when the surface of a sphere is affected by a periodical heat, certain alternations of heat travel uniformly into the interior, but that the extent of the alternation diminishes in geometrical progression in this descent. This conclusion applies to the effect of days and years on the temperature of the earth, and shows that such facts as those observed by Leslie are both exemplifications of 146 the general circumstances of the earth, and are perfectly in accordance with the principles on which Fourier’s theory rests.
11 Mém Inst for 1821 (published 1826), p 162
2. Climate.—The term climate, which means inclination, was applied by the ancients to denote that inclination of the axis of the terrestrial sphere from which result the inequalities of days in different latitudes This inequality is obviously connected also with a difference of thermotical condition. Places near the poles are colder, on the whole, than places near the equator. It was a natural object of curiosity to determine the law of this variation.
Such a determination, however, involves many difficulties, and the settlement of several preliminary points. How is the temperature of any place to be estimated? and if we reply, by its mean temperature, how are we to learn this mean? The answers to such questions require very multiplied observations, exact instruments, and judicious generalizations; and cannot be given here. But certain first approximations may be obtained without much difficulty; for instance, the mean temperature of any place may be taken to be the temperature of deep springs, which is probably identical with the
temperature of the soil below the reach of the annual oscillations. Proceeding on such facts, Mayer found that the mean temperature of any place was nearly proportional to the square of the cosine of the latitude. This, as a law of phenomena, has since been found to require considerable correction; and it appears that the mean temperature does not depend on the latitude alone, but on the distribution of land and water, and on other causes M de Humboldt has expressed these deviations 12 by his map of isothermal lines, and Sir D Brewster has endeavored to reduce them to a law by assuming two poles of maximum cold.
12 British Assoc. 1833. Prof. Forbes’s Report on Meteorology, p. 215
The expression which Fourier finds 13 for the distribution of heat in a homogeneous sphere, is not immediately comparable with Mayer’s empirical formula, being obtained on a certain hypothesis, namely, that the equator is kept constantly at a fixed temperature. But there is still a general agreement; for, according to the theory, there is a diminution of heat in proceeding from the equator to the poles in such a case; the heat is propagated from the equator and the neighboring parts, and radiates out from the poles into the surrounding space. And thus, in the case of the earth, the solar heat enters in the tropical 147 parts, and constantly flows towards the polar regions, by which it is emitted into the planetary spaces.
13 Fourier. Mém. Inst. tom. v. p. 173.
Climate is affected by many thermotic influences, besides the conduction and radiation of the solid mass of the earth. The atmosphere, for example, produces upon terrestrial temperatures effects which it is easy to see are very great; but these it is not yet in
the power of calculation to appreciate; 14 and it is clear that they depend upon other properties of air besides its power to transmit heat. We must therefore dismiss them, at least for the present.
14 Mém Inst tom vii p 584
3. Temperature of the Interior of the Earth. The question of the temperature of the interior of the earth has excited great interest, in consequence of its bearing on other branches of knowledge. The various facts which have been supposed to indicate the fluidity of the central parts of the terrestrial globe, belong, in general, to geological science; but so far as they require the light of thermotical calculations in order to be rightly reasoned upon, they properly come under our notice here.
The principal problem of this kind which has been treated of is this: If in the globe of the earth there be a certain original heat, resulting from its earlier condition, and independent of the action of the sun, to what results will this give rise? and how far do the observed temperatures of points below the surface lead us to such a supposition? It has, for instance, been asserted, that in many parts of the world the temperature, as observed in mines and other excavations, increases in descending, at the rate of one degree (centesimal) in about forty yards. What inference does this justify?
The answer to this question was given by Fourier and by Laplace. The former mathematician had already considered the problem of the cooling of a large sphere, in his Memoirs of 1807, 1809, and 1811. These, however, lay unpublished in the archives of the Institute for many years. But in 1820, when the accumulation of observations which indicated an increase of the temperature of the earth as we descend, had drawn observation to the subject, Fourier gave, in the
Bulletin of the Philomathic Society, 15 a summary of his results, as far as they bore on this point. His conclusion was, that such an increase of temperature in proceeding towards the centre of the earth, can arise from nothing but the remains of a primitive heat;—that the heat which the sun’s action would communicate, would, in its final and 148 permanent state, be uniform in the same vertical line, as soon as we get beyond the influence of the superficial oscillations of which we have spoken;—and that, before the distribution of temperature reaches this limit, it will decrease, not increase, in descending It appeared also, by the calculation, that this remaining existence of the primitive heat in the interior of the earth’s mass, was quite consistent with the absence of all perceptible traces of it at the surface; and that the same state of things which produces an increase of one degree of heat in descending forty yards, does not make the surface a quarter of a degree hotter than it would otherwise be. Fourier was led also to some conclusions, though necessarily very vague ones, respecting the time which the earth must have taken to cool from a supposed original state of incandescence to its present condition, which time it appeared must have been very great; and respecting the extent of the future cooling of the surface, which it was shown must be insensible. Everything tended to prove that, within the period which the history of the human race embraces, no discoverable change of temperature had taken place from the progress of this central cooling. Laplace further calculated the effect 16 which any contraction of the globe of the earth by cooling would produce on the length of the day. He had already shown, by astronomical reasoning, that the day had not become shorter by 1⁄200th of a second, since the time of Hipparchus; and thus his inferences agreed with those of Fourier. As far as regards the smallness of the perceptible effect due to the past
changes of the earth’s temperature, there can be no doubt that all the curious conclusions just stated are deduced in a manner quite satisfactory, from the fact of a general increase of heat in descending below the surface of the earth; and thus our principles of speculative science have a bearing upon the history of the past changes of the universe, and give us information concerning the state of things in portions of time otherwise quite out of our reach
15 Bullet des Sc 1820, p 58
16 Conn. des Tems, 1823.
4. Heat of the Planetary Spaces. In the same manner, this portion of science is appealed to for information concerning parts of space which are utterly inaccessible to observation. The doctrine of heat leads to conclusions concerning the temperatures of the spaces which surround the earth, and in which the planets of the solar system revolve. In his Memoir, published in 1827, 17 Fourier states that he conceives it to follow from his principles, that these planetary spaces 149 are not absolutely cold, but have a “proper heat” independent of the sun and of the planets. If there were not such a heat, the cold of the polar regions would be much more intense than it is, and the alternations of cold and warmth, arising from the influence of the sun, would be far more extreme and sudden than we find them. As the cause of this heat in the planetary spaces, he assigns the radiation of the innumerable stars which are scattered through the universe.
17 Mém. Inst. tom. vii. p. 580.
Fourier says, 18 “We conclude from these various remarks, and principally from the mathematical examination of the question,” that this is so. I am not aware that the mathematical calculation which
bears peculiarly upon this point has anywhere been published. But it is worth notice, that Svanberg has been led 19 to the opinion of the same temperature in these spaces which Fourier had adopted (50 centigrade below zero), by an entirely different course of reasoning, founded on the relation of the atmosphere to heat.
18 Mém Inst tom vii p 581
19 Berzel. Jahres Bericht, xi. p. 50.
In speaking of this subject, I have been led to notice incomplete and perhaps doubtful applications of the mathematical doctrine of conduction and radiation. But this may at least serve to show that Thermotics is a science, which, like Mechanics, is to be established by experiments on masses capable of manipulation, but which, like that, has for its most important office the solution of geological and cosmological problems. I now return to the further progress of our thermotical knowledge.
Sect. 5.—Correction of Newton’s Law of Cooling.
I speaking of the establishment of Newton’s assumption, that the temperature communicated is proportional to the excess of temperature, we stated that it was approximately verified, and afterwards corrected (chap i , sect 1 ) This correction was the result of the researches of MM. Dulong and Petit in 1817, and the researches by which they were led to the true law, are an admirable example both of laborious experiment and sagacious induction. They experimented through a very great range of temperature (as high as two hundred and forty degrees centigrade), which was necessary because the inaccuracy of Newton’s law becomes considerable only at high temperatures. They removed the effect of the surrounding
