Chasing the Cinnamologus_ Luis Teixeira’s World Map of 1604.mp4

The State Library on Tuesday night on mythical maps, so talk to me and I'll pick you. All right, so Daniel Crouch has worked as a bookseller since the age of 16, first at Sands of Oxford while at school and university, then Bonham's and the Shapiro Rare Books, branching out on his own with his business partner Nick Trimming to form Daniel Crouch Rare Books in 2010. During 34 years in the trade, Daniel has given numerous talks and lectures on maps and atlases and has been responsible for the sale of both the most expensive map and the most expensive atlas, which is a title that needs to be told next week. He serves as treasurer of both the Imag and Mundi, the journal for the study of the history of cartography, and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association. In his spare time, apparently, Daniel is chairman of and a rollerball player of the Wolverhampton Cricket Club in Oxford since 2008, and as you can see, he's a voracious collector of maps, books, prints relating to Oxford and Oxfordshire, where he lives with his wife. And roll on, Daniel. Thank you. Hi, good morning, I think, or good afternoon for you. This is somewhat of a surprise, I've just discovered in the last 45 seconds I'm speaking now. Thank you for your immense tolerance and patience that you're demonstrating and sitting for a talk about maps from someone who couldn't even get to the venue on time. Not only could I not get to the venue, I couldn't get to the right city, state, country, continent, or even hemisphere on time. So I'm very grateful that you're prepared to listen to a topographical idiot, and really, I'm a truly terrible map seller for my very poor ability to turn up to the conference. Also, thanks to Australian Immigration for not letting me in. But I'm also a terrible map seller because, like a bad drug dealer, I get high on my own supply. And so today, I'm going to start my presentation, which should work if I press the share screen now. Oh dear, hang on, right. Can you see that? Excellent news. Okay, so I'm going to be talking about the Louise Teixeira's world map of 1604. But as I say, I'm a very bad drug dealer and get high on my own supply. And so I'm going to start with a story of one of my most recent purchases for my own collection. I bought this at the New York Book Fair in April this year. And it's a recipe book by Radolf Ayers, done in 1722 for New College, Oxford. And you'll see on the right hand side, on the right hand page, the recipe for the most quintessential of English things, the Oxford sausage. And you'll see on the third from bottom line, the ingredients include pepper, salt, and nutmeg. And I'm going to maintain that it is not too big a stretch to say that the history of the world as we know it, the modern world of capitalism, global finance, the joint stock company, and maritime insurance, can all be traced from the ingredients of this humble Oxford sausage. And so this is the crouch sausage theory of world history. But before we talk about sausage, I'm going to talk about a mythical bird. And the mythical bird is the Sinomalogus. And in bringing the ingredients for the Oxford sausage, for many, many years, people brought spices from the Far East to Northern Europe. And I know it's difficult to believe, but before the UK had reached the culinary pedestal that it now sits, British food was pretty dull. And we needed to spice things up with things from the exotic East. And Herodotus had an explanation for the origin of some of these things, including the great bird of the Sinomalogus, which, as he says in his history in book three, great birds, they say, that bring their sticks, which we Greeks, taking the word from the Phoenicians, call cinnamon, and carry them up into the air to make their nests. And the Sinomalogus was a ferocious beast, a vast bird of enormous proportions, and a long beak and ferocious talons. And it flew so high, and it was so tall. The only way to obtain these precious twigs from its nest was to hurl lead balls at it using a sling and scare off the bird and get the twigs. How the twigs were imbued with the flavor of cinnamon from the bird remains a mystery. I'll leave that up to your imagination. But it was myths such as these, stories such as these, that inspired the great prices of spices in the East. And so here is our map. This is a map that I acquired an example of in 2011, which we sold. And then, remarkably, in 2015, another one came along. These are the only two complete versions of the map. So it appears that Teixeira world maps of 1604 are a bit like London buses. You wait for 407 years, then two come along at once. There are two incomplete examples, one in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, and one in an obscure Spanish monastery that is quite secretive and won't send photographs of it. The map is noteworthy, and I hope you all had a chance to have a look at it downstairs, for its vast southern continent and its depiction of the South Pacific at the dawn of Dutch exploration of Southeast Asia and Australia. And so our story is going to take a deep dive into this map, the motivation behind its production, the sources used, its physical structure, its publication, its marketing, and its impact. And it's a story that, as you've already seen, encompasses the works of Herodotus, and will meet Shakespeare and two very naughty Dutch brothers later on. It's a story of scientific truth, of cutting-edge technologies, and of blatant propaganda. And it's a story, as I've said, of stock market, maritime insurance, and globalization. In looking at any map, there are four good questions that I try and answer, and these are the who, what, why, and when. And so we're going to start with the who. Is the slideshow moving on? Because it's not on my... Sorry, it's not on the YouTube feed, that's all. The who of the map is very clearly stated at the top here. Luís Ludovico Teixeira, Portuguese navigator extraordinaire. Except I would maintain that I'm not entirely convinced Luís Teixeira had anything to do with this map, and in fact may have known nothing of its production. But he was something of a brand name. And if mapmakers have gone down in people's estimations, there was a time when they were once well-known among the cultural elites of different countries, and the mapmaker's name could carry great authority. And the reason Luís Teixeira's map name is attached to this map is twofold. One, for his depiction of Japan, which looks a little bit like a prawn, so the squillageponicus I've called it. And the other, for his depiction of the Spice Islands and the Moluccas. And it's interesting that the who for the map leads on to the what for the map. And here we're looking at what sort of format the map is. And you can see it's a sort of cylindrical projection, not unlike a Mercator projection, but not quite. Now the Mercator projection first appeared in 1569, so it was available to the makers of this map. And indeed, the depiction of the Spice Islands taken across from Teixeira appeared on Edward Wright's famous map on Mercator's projection in 1599, a copy of which would have been downstairs had I made it along with the maps myself. If you'd like to see an example, there will be one at the Sydney Book Fair next week. And this is a map that was mentioned in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, when Maria says of Malvolio, he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies. Now that's a fascinating thing to say, because the map they're talking about is this one, Edward Wright's map. And the Indies on here, and if you can see it close up, are engraved slightly later than the rest of the map. You see a slightly darker inking on them. And those are taken very much from the same source as here on the Teixeira. And so it's interesting that the map is making a great effort to be up to date with the most recent sources, but not so much as to bring across Mercator's projection from the right map, but it's on a more straightforward projection of the world. And then we look for what else is on this map. Well, in the top left and right hand corners, there are two celestial hemispheres, a northern and a southern, north on the west of the map and southern on the east. And these are bang up to date with the latest discoveries. And they come directly from Jacob Flores van Langeren and Petrus Planckius's Celestial Globe of 1589, an example of which I would have brought with me, but we sold it recently. And it's a very rare globe. And it's particularly interesting because it includes 12 new constellations in the southern hemisphere. And these are the 12 new constellations of Frederik Houtman, one of the two naughty Dutch brothers we'll be talking about. Frederik and his brother Cornelis, I'm sure you all know about the Houtman voyages, sailed with the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies. And so this is a map that is including the most up to date knowledge of the Spice Islands, most up to date knowledge of the celestial hemispheres. Also, along the bottom, not at all ironically, within this great mythical southern continent of Magellanica, there are a series of eight inset maps. And again, these are giving enormous authority to the map because they're carrying the most up to date voyages. You've got Magellan's Strait according to Drake and Norton de Weert from 1599. You've got Rio de la Plata. And in northern Europe, you've got the Scandinavian from Barents Voyages. So this map is not only giving you authority from the most up to date voyages, it's telling you there is access around the globe from a northeast, northwest, a Cape Horn, and a Cape of Good Hope passage. It is a map that is extraordinarily optimistic in its outlook, and it's extremely up to date in its geography. When was the map made? Again, apparently from the title block, it should be very clear. There is a date of 160 blank. Now, is this a missing piece of text? Or is it in fact, a deliberate attempt by the mapmaker to leave the final digit year blank to be updated to make sure that this is the most up to date available cartographic document to the viewer. A further clue appears in the date of 1602. That is the year of the establishment of the Renga Oost-Indische Compagnie, or the Dutch East India Company, the second of the English East India Company, joint stock company. And here is its foundation documents and its first shares. It is tempting to conclude that the map starting in 160 something or other was, if not commissioned, then at least made in time to coincide with the foundation of Dutch East India Company. And a further clue is given in the bottom left hand corner, there is a cartouche. And this is where things get really interesting. In the cartouche, there is a very clear date at the bottom, 1604. And a dedication to Isabella Clara Eugenia Hispania. She is, of course, the queen of the Dutch Netherlands in 1604. And in charge of the southern part of the Netherlands, the Netherlands were divided between the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic in the north. And the Spanish Netherlands in 1604, and there's this dedication to her and above it, I haven't highlighted it, there is a Spanish coat of arms. If you look very closely at the map, however, you will see that that is a paston. The coat of arms above is a paston. And the two other known examples of the map that were known prior to the two that we found, didn't have the title of the cartouche mentioning Teixeira. And so they were written about by Marcel de Thun, and they assumed that they were engraved by Joshua van der Ende, and perhaps described as being done by Blaeu. In fact, as this cartouche makes quite clear, it's published in Antwerp by Johan Baptiste Vrins. And so this would appear to be Habsburg southern Netherlands map with this paste over. However, things get more interesting, because they're indeed in the Plantae Moratus archives of 1604. And there's a note from Vrins with a bill for the map. And if you look about four lines on the bottom, you'll see two large maps by Teixeira, for six real, and a receipt. So again, the cartouche on this example, plus the receipt from Vrins would suggest it was a map published by Vrins in Antwerp. However, simultaneous to this, there is a 1609 Cornelius Claes catalogue, also advertising a very large 12-sheet map by Teixeira. And in this instance, it's being sold in Amsterdam by Claes. Now, I maintain that it is entirely possible that Claes and Vrins were actually in concert, and an alternative version of this map could have been purchased with the Dutch Republic's coat of arms, as they're based on, and with a dedication to the Dutch Republic on the map, and an updated date, should you choose. Thereby suggesting something about the potential marketing for this map. So why was the map produced? Well, the clue is then in its surrounds. The bottom left, we can see pepper. The bottom right, clothes. A little bit above that, nutmeg. Below that, cinnamon. And in case you think those are the only products of East Indies, we also have a rhinoceros and a unicorn. Interestingly, the rhinoceros is taken directly from Albrecht Durer's 1515 print of the subject. And for those that want to disappear down rabbit holes for the longevity of Albrecht Durer's rhinoceros, it's interesting to know that it continues in print in various forms, right the way through into the Third Reich's publications in the 1930s. But where do these images come from? And there is the source. So here we have Jan-Jürgen van Linschoten's The Spice Island Map, The Spice Map. And you can see it on the bottom there, the very familiar, almost identical depictions of nutmeg, cinnamon, clothes, and pepper. There's no pepper on that one, but nutmeg, cinnamon, clothes on this. Now, that's very interesting because that gives us as the sources for this map, the English van Linschoten and going back, as you might remember the, well, we're going all the way back to it, the right map, the two most important and most up-to-date travel and navigational books of Tudor England in the 1590s, suggesting that these are, again, very up-to-date and very, very current technologies and cartographies. We now get to the why for the production. So we've obviously got The Spice Island as the origin, and then you start looking at the map in detail, and you'll see depicted in the seas, Chinese junks, Arabian dows, Dutch galleons. Along the bottom, depictions of personifications of the four continents. So you've got America on the left. You're open with the bull, Africa, and Asia. And indeed, the geographers gathered around a globe in the cartoon. Interestingly, check it, look into the geographers earlier. One of them, this one here on the left, you'll remember from Chip Van Duzer's talk earlier, a very blue depiction of Ptolemy, and this is absolutely taken from the same image as that. Above him, a European scholar. To the right of him, a Jewish geographer. And in red on the right-hand side, an Arab geographer, and to the right of him, a Dutch merchant. Again, all pointing to the internationalism of the map. This is a map with immense global reach and optimism for the future. Why? Well, in the words of the great Indiana Jones, fortune and glory. And this type of map, the Tejera, is often presented as a war map. Ours has been varnished at some point and presumably would have been put on poles. And if you look in the background of many of the beast, you will see in the background, hanging on the wall, unframed, these large monumental war maps. These things would have been used as symbols by Dutch merchants, geographers, nobility, as symbols for their great knowledge and power. All good so far for the map. Unfortunately, something went very wrong for Mrs. Clace and Vrins in 1606. Dirk Hartog, meeting the western coast of the Cape of York, renders this entire depiction of Southern Continent on the map redundant instantly. And so the map's great claims to be the most up-to-date cartographic document, its optimism of its 160 blank date at the top, are foiled. And indeed, in 1607, 1608, Hondius produces a map that supersedes this one and knocks it out of the market. Hence, one of the reasons why, in addition to the normal mortality of very large war maps often varnished and hung, actually just becoming plain out of date was one of the problems with the welcome discoveries that were happening at the time. And so what I hope I'm able to demonstrate with this is that the map is an advertisement for globalization, one of the things that was caused by the Dutch East India Company and was part of the push towards spreading risk in terms of joint stock companies and maritime insurance, leading us for our humble sausage and the need for cinnamon and clothes to the effect of global capitalism that leads us to stock market bubbles and tariffs today. I hope that's the end of my story. Thank you, Daniel. Can you hear us still? I can just about hear you. It sounds very strange to me. Can you hear me okay? Yes, that was excellent. Thank you very much. You know what? I know that we're doing this wrong way round, but I'm just going to ask if anyone's got one question, because once Daniel goes, we may never get him back. Does anyone have one question for Daniel? Now, you know what, Daniel? I think the thing is that they all want to go down and have a look at the map again at the end of the day, because now you've talked about all of those things, they actually want to go and see it in the flesh. I think they're all nodding curiously. Excellent. Well, I hope any of you who can make it to Sydney next week, I will try and get to the right continent this time. Okay, thank you very much. Bye.