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© April 2004
revised 3 March 2008

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library catalog (continued)

LIB. CAT. NO. DC1980

Information packet on D-Charts
with 2 articles from the late-1970s by Kim Harris

D-charts — a style of flowchart using structured control symbols — are the little-known invention of Professor Edsger W. Dijkstra, a prominent Dutch computer scientist. They were a topic of interest in November 2003 on one of the discussion lists I belong to, at which time I promised to make available an old packet of materials I had on the subject (mostly poor copies of poor copies).

The original information packet was compiled by an electronics engineer, Steve White, and given to me in the early 1980s. In its original form, the photocopied information included 3 items:

• an unattributed (possibly by Steve) 6-page typescript, dated 26 March 1980, giving a simple overview of D-charts and D-charting
  
  
• an article, ca. 1978, titled “D-Charts,” by Kim Harris: this was a 3-page reprint of an article (pp. 30-32) published in the journal of the FORTH Interest Group from the San Carlos, California area (given address in 1978: P. O. Box 1105, San Carlos, CA 94070). The reprint I have is undated, but the last page included a letter to the editor dated 3 November 1978.
  
  
• a 15-page typescript, titled “D-Charts,” also by Kim Harris, dated September 1976.
  

To Steve’s original packet, I have appended a 4th item: five sample D-charts from the technical documentation for the command-and-control software of a remotely-operated deepsea vehicle system. While the working D-charts aren’t pretty to look at, they were so easy to produce and revise, that they quickly became indispensable design and development tools.

Because the photocopied materials of the original package are unreadable in places, I have transcribed the text for HTML publication, but I have retained the hand-drawn sketches and typed charts from the original, spot-cleaning and reformatting them for reproduction here, rather than redrawing them. I believe the cruder drawings better capture the processive nature and flexibility of the D-chart format, and may encourage viewers to similarly dash off their own D-charts, without having to worry about drawing more perfectly proportioned shapes and graphs.

Available as HTML text

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LIB. CAT. NO. DTB1985

Women as Audience and Author of Scientific Discourse: A Study of Early English Popularization Literature (Winter Quarter 1985)
by Deborah Taylor Bazeley

This previously unpublished paper (one of three qualifying papers for my C.Phil. examination) records my earliest research and thinking about the evolving ethos of the “she-philosopher.” Here, I first grappled with some of the issues that still concern me today.

The exam paper attempted a rhetorical analysis of early-modern popular science directed at women, beginning with John Wilkins’ Mathematicall Magick in 1648. From here I moved on to summary discussion of Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, the Athenian Society, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes as translated by Aphra Behn in 1688, John Harris, early 18th-century science periodicals, and Francesco Algarotti’s two-volume Il Newtonianismo per le Dame, as translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1739.

While some of the interpretations offered in the paper have proven inadequate (especially concerning the nature of women’s exclusion from scientific circles), there is still some useful data gathered here, which I continue to mull over (e.g., see the IN BRIEF topic on Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes).

89 pages in the original typescript
Available as HTML text

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LIB. CAT. NO. DTB1990

An Early Challenge to the Precepts and Practice of Modern Science: The Fusion of Fact, Fiction, and Feminism in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) (1990)
by Deborah Taylor Bazeley

My doctoral dissertation (University of California, San Diego, 1990) on Margaret Cavendish was primarily a rhetorical study, in which I argued that Cavendish championed:

... a new rhetorical model (“natural rational discourse”) that is at base heuristic rather than positivist. Her discourse is raw and unprocessed, exploratory, unfinished, with no clear beginning, middle, or end. It depicts a complex matrix of shifting perspectives and ways of knowing, employing a cumulative syntax, focused on plurality and juxtaposition, rather than the more conventional subordinate syntax, which pre-classifies information for the reader within circumscribed lines and hierarchies.

And I compared Cavendish’s “refusal to elide self, gender, sentiment, imagination, and wild speculation from technical discourse” to the alternate New Science rhetorics of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Joseph Glanvill, Henry More, Thomas Sprat, and Francis Bacon.

While my basic thinking concerning the epistemological dimension of Cavendish’s naturalist rhetoric as an art of reason and discovery hasn’t changed, I no longer hold with many of the positions taken in the dissertation. For instance, the dissertation makes frequent mention of institutionalized science’s androcentric and authoritarian methods and discourses, with Cavendish portrayed as an oppositional or alternative voice to that of Bacon and succeeding generations of Baconians. But my ongoing research shows this to have been an incomplete, and in many ways misleading, reading of what was a remarkably heterogeneous New Science movement. In particular, I’m sorry to say that I grossly misjudged Robert Hooke, about whom I knew very little at the time. Looking for gender bias in Hooke’s science, and for confirmation of Cavendish’s critique of his technologically-mediated nanogaze, I managed to locate both in Hooke’s Micrographia (a good example of the sort of reasoning Cavendish herself opposed as “vain in-bred imaginations, without the experience of the concurrence of outward things”). Having long since parted with received opinion concerning 17th-century mechanism and its dualisms, I have tried to remedy my earlier misjudgments of the man and his work with a recent series of monographs. One of these is already available in the she-philosopher.com Library, and the rest in the series will be posted to it as they are finished.

In addition to several such errors in judgment, the dissertation contains a few errors of fact. As far as I know, these are restricted to chapter 1, where I stated incorrectly that Sir Charles Cavendish was William Cavendish’s older brother. Sir Charles was, in fact, William’s younger brother, although William did have an older brother, also named Charles, who died in childhood (hence, scholars’ repeated confusion on this point). I also confused Constantijn Heer Van Zuilichem Huygens (1596–1687) with his son, Christiaan (1629–1695). It was, in fact, Christian Huygens who was “one of the most brilliant of seventeenth-century scientists,” and his father, Constantine, who “valued Cavendish’s opinion on scientific questions,” as indeed, he did the opinion of other learned women, including the very talented Anna Maria van Schurman.

312 pages in the original issue (not including front matter)
Available as HTML text

NOTE: I have reformatted the text of the dissertation for HTML publication, omitting page numbers, adding active links for the section numbers, and moving footnotes to a sidebar on the right of the page, with links to/from the text to which notes refer. No changes have been made to the content of the UMI-published dissertation. Even the HTML-friendly section numbers, and in-text section references, are as they were in the original.

View by individual chapter:

• Abstract (9KB)
• Table of contents (29KB)
• Preface (17KB)
• Chapter 1 — Introduction (107KB)
• Chapter 2 — The Feminist Problematic (225KB)
• Chapter 3 — The “Triangular Countenance” of Discourse (204KB)
• Chapter 4 — A (Re)Feminized New Science Project: Cavendish’s Philosophical and Physical Opinions (194KB)
• Chapter 5 — “Imaginations of Impossibilities” (78KB)
• Chapter 6 — Concluding Remarks (31KB)
• Appendix A — The Seventeenth-Century Context: Women and Science (137KB)
• Appendix B — The Seventeenth-Century Context: The Discourse of the New Science as the Ultimate Masculine Register (90KB)
• Works Consulted (118KB)

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LIB. CAT. NO. DTP2000

The Growth of Science (2000)
by Deborah Taylor-Pearce

I began writing this paper in 1998 for Brown University’s Renaissance Women Online project. RWO is a special subset of Brown’s online textbase, Women Writers Online, and was designed as a pedagogical tool for those working in Renaissance history and/or women’s studies. In its initial phase, the textbase includes 100 works by Renaissance Englishwomen — from the most well-known, such as Elizabeth I, to more obscure figures, such as Susan Du Verger — written during the years up to and including 1670. Each primary text is supplemented by a brief scholarly commentary and a series of topic essays introducing the larger cultural and historical context within which Renaissance women wrote. The Growth of Science is one of RWO’s context essays. As such, it had to conform to the RWO style guide, including a 2,000-word limit.

Intending to give beginning students a range of entry points into the burgeoning body of research on a complex and mostly unfamiliar subject, I wrote a short essay, with 27 notes, and an appendix on Margaret Cavendish’s scientific publications (3 of which — Poems and Fancies, 1653 edition; Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666 edition; and The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, 1668 edition — are included in the RWO textbase).

ERRATUM:  Given the 2,000-word limit and “Renaissance” time-frame of the original essay, I was unable to fully explain about the changing role of medical men in the Royal Society, and may have given the wrong impression with my statement:

Rather than courting its natural constituency in the middling classes, the Society’s earliest fellows were drawn mostly from the professional and landed classes, many of them men associated with government and the court. Merchants, tradesmen, and professional scholars were proportionately rare. Those “mechanical capricious persons” much maligned by F.R.S. John Evelyn (1620–1706) were excluded, as were surgeons, apothecaries, reformers (albeit past associates) such as Samuel Hartlib, and women.

From the beginning, medical men of highest social and professional standing, such as Walter Charleton (who I do mention elsewhere in the Growth of Science, because of his relationship with Margaret Cavendish) and William Croone (who I do not mention in my essay), were very active in the Royal Society, and in some cases, such as that of Croone, served as a liaison between the status-conscious Royal Society and the less prestigious Barber-Surgeons’ Company.

Altogether 20 Fellows of the Royal Society became anatomy readers to the Barber-Surgeons’ Company between 1663 and 1743 (two years before they parted company) — from Sir Charles Scarburgh (1649–1669) through William Croone (1670–1684) and Edward Tyson (1684–1699) to Robert Nesbitt (in 1743) — providing the Society with a potentially rich source of anatomical material and information.

(John Appleby, “Human Curiosities and
the Royal Society, 1699–1751,” p. 13)

The physician William Croone (1633–1684), also Gresham Professor of Rhetoric from 1659–70, was not only a Fellow of the Royal Society, but also served on its Council for the years 1664, 1666, 1668, 1670, 1672, 1675–6, 1678–81, and 1683. He collaborated often with Robert Hooke, and was among the “virtuoso vivisectionists” described by Lisa Jardine in her Ingenious Pursuits, pp. 113ff. As Appleby points out,

The second charter [in 1663] of the Royal Society made special provision for it “to demand and receive the bodies of executed criminals, and to anatomize them, as the College of Physicians and the Company of Surgeons of London use or enjoy”, but there is little direct evidence that this prerogative was exercised. The College of Physicians encountered practical difficulties in obtaining the bodies of the four executed criminals to which they were entitled, as seen by its president Sir Hans Sloane’s petitions to Parliament in 1721 and 1723 (when they became law). Entries in Sloane’s “Humana” Catalogue suggest that he made other arrangements for his own collections ....

(Appleby’s “Human Curiosities,” p. 13)

In the early years of the Society, medical experiments were done with animals, including a gruesome series of vivisectional “enquiries into the nature of respiration” using dogs. On 10 November 1664, a conscience-stricken Robert Hooke wrote to Robert Boyle about the Society’s experiments on living dogs,

... which I shall hardly, I confess, make again, because it was cruel ... I shall hardly be induced to make any further trials of this kind, because of the torture of the creature: but certainly the enquiry would be very noble, if we could any way find a way so to stupify the creature, as that it might not be sensible, which I fear there is hardly any opiate will perform....

(Hooke MS., transcribed and printed in vol. 6
of Gunther’s Early Science in Oxford, pp. 217–8)

But when skilled physicians were not available to perform the follow-on experiments, and “the next two attempts at the dog and bellows demonstration at the Royal Society were thoroughly botched by less skilled dissectionists ... Hooke once again took over the public performance of this experiment.” (Jardine 118)

Two branches of anatomical science — myology and osteology — preoccupied the Royal Society from its inception. Croone’s widow, Lady Sadleir, founded the celebrated lectures on the “Nature and Laws of Muscular Motion” in honor of her deceased husband (d. 1684), and scientific interest in the structure and functioning of the human body continued to grow, particularly during the 18th century.

Throughout the 1720s and 1730s, medical men figured prominently in the Royal Society membership and were frequent contributors of papers published in the Society’s journal, the Philosophical Transactions. By 1740, 63 physicians and surgeons formed 63% of the Society’s total membership, and from this point on, the medical profession constituted the largest group of scientific Fellows up to 1860.

Available as HTML text

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LIB. CAT. NO. DTP2003

Time, Soul, Memory (© May 2003; restructured January 2007 to allow access by external search engines)
by Deborah Taylor-Pearce

This is an electronic monograph (formatted as a PDF), which includes a complete transcription of Robert Hooke’s Lecture explicating the Memory, and how we come by the notion of Time (read at meetings of the Royal Society, May–June 1682).

Hooke’s early exploration of phylogenic memory includes the first scientific description of attention, and as such, deserves to be better known as a classic work in cognitive neuroscience.

Like our own 21st-century neuroscientists, Robert Hooke studied attention and memory as sub-fields of vision, analyzing both in terms of how the brain interprets and assigns meaning to what the eyes see. While there is a tendency among historians to indiscriminately categorize 17th-century researchers in optics, light, and vision as “Cartesian dualists,” this was not true of Hooke (nor, indeed, of many other scientists during the baroque period).

To better make this point, I have written a critical essay for Hooke’s text that contextualizes his lecture and introduces a broad range of historical actors and influences — Albertus Magnus, Aristotle, John Aubrey, Francis Bacon, Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, Giovanni Domenica Campanella, Hieronymous Cardanus, Margaret and William Cavendish, René Descartes, John Evelyn, Joseph Glanvill, Thomas Hobbes, Juan de Dios Huarte, Elizabeth Joceline, Henry More, Mary More, Katherine Philips, William Shakespeare, Bernardino Telesio, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard Waller, and John Wilkins. The PDF is one of a planned series of 10 documents of this sort (the other 9 of which are in various states of completion).

I have designed the PDF for multimedia reading, so that it can be easily printed and/or read onscreen (with Acrobat bookmarks added in January 2007). Because of my use of hyperlinks within the text, the Acrobat 5 (or later) reader is required.

64 pages
Available as PDF download (sized to fit on either US Letter or A4 paper)

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LIB. CAT. NO. FLECK1656

Letters XXIII and XXIV from A Relation of Ten Years Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America (1656)
by Richard Flecknoe

Letters XXIII and XXIV in Flecknoe’s A Relation of Ten Years Travells document his fascinating “Sea Voyage from Lisbon to the Brasils” in 1648–50. They are provided here in HTML format for their historical interest — not just as exotic traveler’s tales dating from Europe’s Golden Age of Discovery, but also as a record of the type of popular science (mostly natural history and cultural anthropology) promoted by the rapidly expanding specialist travel literature of the early-modern period. As Lisa Jardine has already summarized,

We are coming increasingly to understand how influential in the seventeenth century, in all kinds of areas of life and thought, were the detailed accounts — and images — of new cultures brought home by enthusiastic travelers.

(Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: The
Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren)

Flecknoe’s A Relation of Ten Years Travells was privately printed for the author in 1656, then reissued in 1665, right before Flecknoe retired to Welbeck (the Nottinghamshire seat of William and Margaret Cavendish) following the outbreak of the Great Plague in London. The Relation is a compilation of letters written to Flecknoe’s “noble friends” and patrons, many of whom were women, while traveling to Gant, Brussels, Paris, Marseilles, Monaco, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Constantinople, Lisbon, Provence, “the Brasils,” Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Antwerp. The letters date from 1640, with the first letter postmarked “Gant, Anno 40.” (and subtitled: “The Reasons of his Going over Seas”), and cover a ten-year period, ending in 1650.

Flecknoe’s text was strategically dedicated to “All those Noble Personages mentioned in the following Letters,” opening with a complimentary epistle “To the Lord Marquis of Newcastle,” and closing with a “consolatory epistle” to the queen mother of France, Mary of Medicis, “written about the year, [16]41.” Flecknoe’s letters are witty in a way which stresses the new urbanity associated with the coffee-house and its influence, the salon, and coterie publication in general. Like others in the Cavendish Circle, Flecknoe practiced and preached a Hobbesian aesthetic, arguing in his essay “Of Wit” (in A Farrago of Several Pieces, pub. 1666) that dialogue is its true source (wit is “not acquir’d by Art and Study, but Nature and Conversation,” he writes). Flecknoe’s increasingly urbane conception of natural and social inquiry was prophetic. The model of sociable science institutionalized in 17th-century London was very much in this mold, and reliant on traveler’s tales and observations for much of its data.

Indeed, early modern travelers were trained in the finer points of scientific observation by such books as Albertus Meierus’ Certaine briefe, and speciall Instructions for Gentlemen, merchants, students, souldiers, marriners, &c. Employed in services abrode, or anie way occasioned to converse in the kingdomes, and governementes of forren Princes (Englished by Richard Hakluyt’s brother minister, the Reverend Philip Jones of Cirencester, in 1589). Jones instructed travelers to study intelligently a wide range of phenomena having to do with geography, navigation, husbandry, politics, religion, literature, and learning. His traveler’s syllabus is broken into 12 divisions:

1.   Cosmographie, or, the description of the worlde.
2.   Astronomie, or, the art of skill, in the course of the starres and planets.
3.   Geographie, or, the drawing and proportioning of the earth.
4.   Chorographie, or, the demonstration of Cities and Regions.
5.   Topographie, or, the portraiture of particular places.
6.   Husbandrie.
7.   Nauigation.
8.   The Politicall State.
9.   Ecclesiasticall State.
10.  Literature.
11.  Histories.
12.  Chronicles.

Each section consists of queries and suggestions in tabular form, designed to remind the traveler just what to look for and to record. And the philosophical traveler’s habit of mind that Jones sought to popularize was not just intended for use in foreign lands. Early modern students of the natural and human worlds were to attend carefully to quotidian detail in whatever countryside they found themselves. John Aubrey (1626–1697), elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 7 January 1663, explained in an autobiographical fragment what it meant to travel mindfully through life:

My studies (geometry) were on horse back, and [in] the house of office: (my father discouraged me). My head was alwaies working; never idle, and even travelling (which from 1649 till 1670 I was never off my horsback) did gleane som observations, of which I have a collection in folio of 2 quiers of paper + a dust basket, some wherof are to be valued.

Throughout the early modern period, the travelogue (real or imaginary, and in the hands of Athanasius Kircher and Margaret Cavendish, it was both) was a form of writing long favored by philosophers and scientists. And the sociable “poetaster,” Richard Flecknoe, had a particular talent for it.

Flecknoe’s detailed account of his two-year excursion to Brazil is given in Letter XXIII of A Relation of Ten Years Travells, and addressed to Madamoiselle de Beauvais, princess of Aramberg, who lived south of Brussels (then the capital of the Spanish Netherlands) in Beersel. Judging by the number and tone of the letters written to her and later published by Flecknoe in A Relation, Madamoiselle de Beauvais actively supported Flecknoe in his travels (e.g., ensuring that he was fêted in great style — with “infinite ... Entertainments” — by the Marquis Philippo Palavicino while visiting Genoa, in 1645). Madamoiselle de Beauvais was also a central figure in the literary salons of “the Flandres Ladies,” as Flecknoe put it in one of his letters, and as such, an excellent conduit for Flecknoe’s communications with the “great” personages, in Old and New worlds, with whom he wished to associate.

Letter XXIV of the Relation briefly recounts Flecknoe’s maritime adventures on his return trip to Europe; it is dated 1650, and is addressed to Father John Pererio, a Jesuit in Brazil. In it, Flecknoe thanks Father Pererio for his hospitality, and for procuring him first-class passage home on a Portuguese carvel, captained by Don Roderigo d’Alancastro. Again, ever attentive to the ways in which his epistolary travelogue helped to maintain his status in the dominant socio-political networks of European high society, Flecknoe tells Pererio that he has informed “the King himself ... of the many favours I received from you in Brasil, chiefly for his sake, next to God” and that he has “written also to Rome, that I might repay your curtesies the sooner, the more I should call into contribution to the debt, of which Letter behold the Copy.” (The letter to Rome, written in Latin, is dated 1650, and addressed to “Ad Eminentissimum Card. Fra. Barba.” A copy is appended to Letter XXIV in Flecknoe’s Relation, but I have not reproduced it here.)

Flecknoe traveled to Brazil with the Portuguese, who had developed their ships and rigging empirically “during the long probing voyages of the fifteenth century down the coast of Africa.” (Cumming, Skelton, and Quinn, The Discovery of North America) By the time Flecknoe set sail with a flotilla “of 4 ships ... and more than 4 hundred men,” the Portuguese had become masters of the ocean passage.

Even in the later sixteenth century English explorers liked to have a Portuguese pilot with them — Drake rarely sailed without one — and a number of foreigners also appeared in the later French expeditions, even though the standard of French navigation was very high indeed by the later sixteenth century.

(Cumming, Skelton, and Quinn,
The Discovery of North America)

Flecknoe describes his life aboard the ocean-going Portuguese vessels as comfortable (replete with all the “commodities and delicacies you have on Land”) and congenial (“And thus sleeping, eating, drinking, and recreating our selves, we made our voyage secure from storms, secure from Pirats and Enemies ...”).

Of note, Flecknoe positions himself in Letter XXIII as a philosophical traveler, one who has embarked on his journey to Brazil out of “curiosity,” versus the usual 3Cs undergirding the Age of Discovery (converts, conquests, and commerce):

... all who frequent those parts being either Merchants, who lodge with their Correspondents, or Seafaring men, who lodge aboard, never any man like me before making that voyage merely on Curiosity.

Flecknoe’s letter to Madamoiselle de Beauvais is full of poetic descriptions of the ocean environment, with its dramatic seascapes (“like your seenes in Masques and playes”) and sea gardens (“with many Gridiline Flowers besides like our Crocus’s, rendring it a most delightfull spectacle”), and of Brazilian flora and fauna, such as the amusing account of his run-in with “animated dust,” and the charming tales of his beloved pet sagoins (“my Pocket Lyons”), a creature most likely known to his readers from earlier accounts in Topsell’s Four-Footed Beasts (1607) — which took its authoritative portrait of the sagoin from “a very learned Apothecary of Antwerpe” — and in the ever popular Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613). But Flecknoe adds vivid personal details to his account of the small South American monkey, always careful to frame the new and exotic in terms of the known (in this case, the most prized lapdogs of European ladies).

The limitations of such ethnocentric framing are clearest when Flecknoe tries to describe the taste of unfamiliar fruits in familiar terms. So, for instance, Flecknoe associates the banana with beans and apricots, telling his European audience that it grows

some 40 together in a bunch, in husks like Beans, all yellow when they are ripe, the fruit of colour and tast much like our Apricock, but much more firm and more delicious.

And the guava is subjectively described as

round and green, like to our Nectarins, but crusht, you finde a round red pulp within, about the bignesse of a Bilyard ball, eating like so many Strawberries moulded into a past.

But it is Brazil’s native peoples who are most disserved by Flecknoe’s imported schemes of comparison/contrast. While historians now believe that religion was more important than phenotype (e.g., skin color, facial features, hair texture) or nationalism in justifying and framing European colonialism in the Americas (see, e.g., Cumming, Skelton, and Quinn’s The Discovery of North America), it is also true that by the time Flecknoe was writing mid-century, colonialist ideologies were changing. Increasing numbers of American Indians had been converted to Christianity by then, so their non-Christian status could no longer be used to justify further land-grabs and acts of inhumanity.

Flecknoe’s own uneasiness with the quasi-Christian status of the Brasilian natives “who live among the Portugals” is apparent in his expressions of disgust over their non-European appearance and demeanor. Despite their having earned the same right to divine salvation as other men, “these Brasilians” are portrayed by Flecknoe as belonging to some strange category of “both Man and Beast”; they are, he thinks, “like Asses, dull and phlegmatick, in servitutem nati, and only fit for toil and druggery [drudgery].” Flecknoe is here searching for new human categories able to justify transplanted European hierarchies of birth and status and political order (to quote Flecknoe: god, king, and law) with the same force as the old contrast scheme of Christian vs. non-Christian.

Cultural associations of color with psychology and ethnicity surface in Flecknoe’s Letter XXIII, as they will once again in a passage of theater criticism prefaced to his play Love’s Dominion, pub. 1654 (for a separate discussion of this, see the GALLERY exhibit, Portraits of Melancholy — IV). It was a common enough theme — then, as now — within scientific and non-scientific circles alike. Flecknoe concludes Letter XXIII by introducing a New World spin on Old World verities:

I will conclude this Treatise of Brasil with a word or two of the Starrs of the other Hemisphere, garnisht with many constellations wholly unknown to us, of which the Cruciero or Crosse is the principalst, consisting of 5 or 6 Stars of the first magnitude, as bright as any in our Hemisphere; whose brightnesse, as with a foil, is set off the more by a great black cloud that’s continually under it, as is the whitnesse of the Milky Way tendred more perspicuous, by a streak of black in the midst of it, tending towards the same constellation; both which, as also another great black cloud on th’other side the Milkie way, I observ’d at my being there, for more than six months continually: whence I concluded, ’twas the natural complexion of that sky (as ours is blew) to have much part of it black, which perhaps renders the people of that Climat far more melancholy than ours, which black clouds I much wonder none (as I know of) has observ’d besides my self, especially since there are 2 white clouds not far from the Cruciero appearing always in the same posture and figure, so generally observ’d and known, as they are call’d Nubes Magellanicae, from Magellan, who first discovered them.

... being ta’n, strange it was to behold the curious colours of its seales, fading by degrees, as death won on life, (just as the skies colour does when night comes on) till quite dead it became all black, with good reason, it putting on mourning for its death, whose life had cloath’d it in such rich and glittering colour.

Such a profound change of color in death, so noticeable to the human eye, appealed to more than just Flecknoe’s poetic imagination. The ambiguously-colored dorado would figure in poetry through the 19th century (we find it mentioned, for example, in verses by Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

Natural changes in skin color — whether of fish or humans — took on added significance in a world where

The Inhabitants are of two sorts, viz. free People, and Slaves; the Slaves are African Negro’s, and the others, Netherlanders, Portugueses, or Brasilians ...

(from the description of northern Brazil
in John Ogilby’s America: Being the Latest,
and Most Accurate Description of the
New World [London, 1671], p. 602)

Flecknoe’s letter includes several mentions of the brutal conditions under which African servants and slaves labored in Brazil, one being a chilling account of work conditions in the Portuguese sugar mills:

And in these Mills (during the season of making Sugar) they work both day and night, the work of immediately applying the canes into the Mill being so perillous as if through drousinesse or heedlessnesse a fingers end be but engag’d betwixt the Posts, their whole body inevitably follows, to prevent which, the next Negro has alwayes a Hatchet readie to chop off his Arm, if any such Misfortune should arive.

Because native Brasilians were designated “free People”, having come in to the European-dominated settlement areas “of their own accords” (Ogilby’s America, p. 602), they had more options than African slaves and were far better treated, with policies in place to ensure

that the Owners of the Sugar-Mills do them no injury: They [native Brazilians] never suffer themselves to be Hir’d for above twenty days, at the end whereof they demand their Wages; they are commonly employ’d to chop Wood to boyl the Sugar with, but by reason of the scarcity of Negros, they are often made use of for other Business, which to avoid they hide themselves ....

(Ogilby’s America, p. 602)

In contrast, Dutch “Handicraftsmen” — “that went from the Netherlands to Brasile on their own Accounts” — were held in such esteem that they could earn “ten or twelve Shillings a day” for their work extending colonial jurisdictions, towns and villages ever further along the coast and into the interior.

Flecknoe is mildly critical of Brazilian colonial development, noting the political imperatives driving monocultural production for export. It is not environmental limitations or natural causes, he writes, but

some politique reason to keep them with that necessary dependency [for basic commodities such as corn, wine, and salt] on Portugal, to vent their commodities, and prevent revolt ....

The overdevelopment of the colony’s sugar trade inevitably resulted in an insatiable need for slave labor. Pernambuco, the heart of the West India Company’s plantation in northern Brazil, had

a hundred and twenty Sugar-Mills, of which a great number stand still for want of Negro’s.

(Ogilby’s America, p. 601)

In all, the West India Company owned 160 working sugar mills by the latter half of the 17th century, plus another 46 mills idled by repairs and/or lack of slave labor. Company accounts reprinted in Ogilby’s America report that 4,000 African slaves “work in the Sugar-Mills between the River Grande and Francisco” (Ogilby’s America, p. 600), but this was nowhere near enough.

Ogilby’s Dutch source states matter-of-factly that

The Labor which is requir’d in the Sugar-Mills, no Men are able to undergo but the Negro’s.

(Ogilby’s America, p. 602)

— a situation with devastating consequences for the Black Atlantic, especially Angola, whose peoples were in greatest demand by Portuguese and Dutch mill owners who believed that

The Angolan Slaves can undergo greater Labor than any other.

(Ogilby’s America, p. 603)

The attrition rate consequent to such forced labor was egregious, with an annual turnover involving three-quarters of the entire slave labor force in the West India Company’s Brazilian sugar mills:

The Cape Verde, Mina, Angola, Ardra, and Calabria, generally provide three thousand [slaves] in a year, to supply the number of the Sick, or those that run away.

(Ogilby’s America, p. 600)

Even Flecknoe’s philosophical tourism shies away from too close an encounter with this ugly underside of the Brazil he wittily called “the Paradise of Birds.”

Although Flecknoe’s variant spellings and diction can make his 17th-century prose difficult for modern readers, I have not modernized his text. Over the centuries, the print quality of his text has degraded somewhat, resulting in some obliterated letters (which I have marked with the _ character). Letter XXIII includes three indistinguishable words:

• Sho_ks
  
• _umenta
  
• R_ss
  

Letter XXIV includes one indistinguishable word:

• valer_
  

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