to the sonne, as before al other to feale the heate.” Boemus also translated “Athiopes” in a way that emphasized the point, claiming that the word derived from the Greek “Atho which signifieth burne and Oph which signifieth take hede, and that because of the approchynge nyghe to the soone [the Sun]. The countreye is continually hote.” As a result, the inhabitants of Africa possessed characteristic features, most noticeably their skin color. As George Abbot observed in 1600, “All the people in general to the South, l[i]ving within the Zona torrida, are not onely blackish like the Moores, but are exceedingly blacke. And therefore in olde time, by an excellency, some of them were called Nigrita; so that to this day they are named Negros, and then whome, no men are blacker.”52
Figure 1. Detail from the lower-left quadrant of the title page of Historia mundi: or Mercator’s Atlas. Containing his cosmographical description of the fabricke and figure of the world (London, 1635). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Africa, numerous authorities reported, was also a land of monstrous races of men. The authoritative text on this subject was Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1601 (although an excerpted version had previously appeared in 1566). In the account of the “Æthyopians,” Pliny described the existence of peoples whose differences could be relatively subtle, like the “Troglodites” who lived in caves and fed “upon the flesh of serpents” and the “Garamants” who were intriguing because they “live[d] out of wedlocke, and converse with their women in common.” Some differences were quite stark: “The Blemmyi, by report, have no heads, but mouth and eies both in their breast. The Satyres besides their shape onely, have no properties nor fashions of men” and the “Himantopodes bee some of them limberlegged and tender, who naturally goe creeping by the ground.” Sir John Mandeville made even more of these characters, including a passing reference to a “monstrously shaped beast” who lived in Egypt that “had the shape of a man from the navel upward, and from there downward the form of a goat, with two horns standing up on its head.” South of Ethiopia, he added, was “a vast country, but it is uninhabitable because of the terrible heat of the sun.” Nonetheless, there you could find “some who have only one foot” that “is so big that it will cover and shade all the body from the sun.” Those who traveled farther, to India and Southeast Asia, might even come across “people whose ears are so big that they hang down to their knees,” “people who walk on their hands and their feet like four-footed beasts,” hermaphrodites, and people who “live just on the smell of a kind of apple.”53
If classical and medieval sources compelled the English to imagine a world to their south inhabited by strange and monstrous beings, Christianity played no less an important role in how Europeans wrote and thought about Africa (or any other place, for that matter). First, even if English and other European authors were disinclined to explain the physical appearance of African people with reference to the so-called Curse of Ham, a number of writers did associate African peoples with the biblical passage. Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores, which appeared in two separate English translations (in 1554 and 1555), is once again representative. Recounting the origin of the division of the world, Boemus reported that Cham, “by the reason of his naughty demeanour towarde his father” was “constrayned to departe with his wyfe and hys chyldren” and subsequently “lefte no trade or religion to his posteritie, because he none had learned of his father.” If Cham and his descendants were cursed with darkness, it was clearly a spiritual rather than a physical matter. Thus, over time “some fel into errours whereout they could never unsnarle themselves” and eventually “some lived so wildely … that it ware harde to discerne a difference betwixte them and the beastes of the felde.” John Pory noted that most of the inhabitants of Africa, excluding “some Arabians,” were “thought to be descended from Cham the cursed son of Noah,” but he did not elaborate on the subject any further.54 Although there were exceptions, few domestic English authors were willing to embrace the idea that the skin color of Africans was wholly attributable to a curse handed down by Noah.
Second, and more important, Christian Europeans dreamed of Africa because of the potential presence of Prester John. An anonymous fourteenth-century Spanish Franciscan traveler, whose observations survive today as the Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships that Are in the World, described Prester John as the Patriarch of Nubia and Abyssinia, which were “very great lands” with “many cities of Christians.”55 The origins of the Prester John myth date to the twelfth century when news reached Pope Eugenius III that a powerful Christian king in the East stood ready to assist European Christians in their ongoing struggles against Islam. It was unclear where this fabled king may have been located, but his rumored presence served as a rationale for voyages of discovery and other official missions to both Asia and Africa during subsequent centuries. Three hundred years after he first appeared, Prester John continued to be an enticing, if illusive, figure whose greatest legacy may have been the Portuguese effort to establish direct contact with Ethiopia.56 Other Europeans, however, were also intrigued by stories about “the kynge of Ethiope whiche we call pretian or prest John whom they cal Gian,” a man who, in Johann Boemus’s words, was “of so great a personage and blud, that under him he hath threscoore and two other kynges.”57
There were always serious doubts about the veracity of these legends, but even Henry IV of England had written to Prester John in 1400 asking him to lend his support to the reconquest of the Holy Land. Still, the small chance that there might be a powerful Christian kingdom to the south was too tantalizing to dismiss out of hand. Abraham Hartwell was moved to declare in his 1597 translation of Duarte Lopes’s A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, if “Papists and Protestants” and “all Sectaries and Presbyter-Johns men would joyne all together” they would be able “to convert the Turkes, the Jewes, the Heathens, the Pagans, and the Infidels that know not God but live still in darkenesse.”58 Yet, Prester John increasingly appeared in English sources more as a caricature designed to amuse readers than as the leader of a kingdom that might actually exist. In 1590, Edward Webbe claimed to have visited Prester John’s court, where he encountered “a king of great power” and “a very bountifull Court.” At the same time, he also claimed that at the court of Prester John there was “a wilde man” who was “allowed every day a quarter of mans flesh” whenever someone was executed for “some notorious offence.” In addition, he declared that there was “a beast in the court of Prester John, called Arians, having four heades” that were “in shape like a wilde Cat.”59 Like Webbe, George Abbot linked Prester John with the fantastic rather than the sacred. Drawing from Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, he noted at the end of his consideration of Prester John’s kingdom that Africa “bringeth forth store of all sortes of wilde beastes,” including “newe and strange shapes of beastes.” These new creatures, according to Abbot, were a result of “the country being hot and full of wildernesses which have in them little water.” Thus, “the beastes of all sortes are inforced to meete at those fewe watering places…; where, oftentimes contrary kindes have conjunction the one with the other: so that there ariseth newe kindes or species, which taketh part of both.”60
Before they went to Africa, Englishmen learned about the place and its peoples as best they could from an array of manuscript and printed sources. After the 1590s, it was increasingly likely that English readers could read accounts authored by Portuguese, Dutch, and even English merchants and sailors who had spent considerable time in the places about which they wrote. The Portuguese had been actively engaged in diplomacy, commercial exchange, and religious conversion with West Africans for more than a century before English readers and mariners began to demonstrate any serious interest in the region. Portuguese texts, even when they did not find contemporary English translators, were typically the only sources interested English readers could find before the 1550s and continued to be among the most detailed accounts available to them through the end of the century. Even when the works
