Abstract
Although seemingly insignificant due to its diminutive size and soft resonance, the jingle bell has a rich archival history evident in surviving physical specimens and in travel narratives, as Wood discusses in “Hell’s Bells: Transatlantic Jinglings.” Trunks of these so-called “trifles” were brought to the New World as cheap trading items exchanged with native peoples. This chapter traces the motion of these small bells as they jingle throughout early modern travel narratives and onto the stage; their sound became so closely aligned with the New World that bells accompany music performed by a New World Indian figure in The Maske of Flowers. Though touted as “trifles” improperly overvalued by native peoples, these bells were also immensely popular in England and on the continent.
They are greatly delighted with anything that is bright, or giueth a sound…
Dionise Settle , The Principal Navigations
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Notes
- 1.
Technically crotal bells are actually rattles themselves, rather than “true” bells, but since they are called “bells” in the travel accounts, I retain that usage here. There were two ways the cast bell could be manufactured: one method left the bottom of the bell open until the pellet was inserted, then the seam along the bottom was closed to keep the pellet inside; a later method used sand in a bell’s hollow center during the foundry process, which left a small pellet inside as the bell was cast. Consult Percival Price’s “Introduction” to Bells and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). In the process of making sheet metal bells, “The body of these is made in two halves, formed by hammering the sheet into shaped moulds, and joined together, after inserting the iron ‘pea’, with a lead/tin solder,” according to Rod Blunt, “Crotal Bells,” http://www.ukdfd.co.uk/pages/crotal-bells.html, accessed June 19, 2017. These were valued for their lightness, which probably made them easier to transport compared to the bells cast as a single piece.
- 2.
Quotations of Columbus’s writings are from Christopher Columbus : The Four Voyages, translated by J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1969) unless otherwise noted. Quotation above from page 72. The account of the first voyage is recorded as a “Digest” by Bartolomé de las Casas, which was a rewriting of Columbus’s logbook.
- 3.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963), 66.
- 4.
Morison renders this line “I placed on his ears” in Journals and Other Documents, 70. In either case, the proximity to the hearing organ is clear.
- 5.
Four Voyages, trans. Cohen, 61.
- 6.
Similarly in The Five Senses : A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (New York: Continuum, 2008), 34, Michel Serres describes a woman adorning the ears; she “underlines hearing with an earring” and in so doing “draws the map of her own receptivity.”
- 7.
Morison , Christopher Columbus Mariner (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1956), 78. Morison also discusses bringing bells to Africa in Journals and Other Documents (66).
- 8.
Morison , Journals and Other Documents, 241.
- 9.
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 23–45, 41. As Pietz argues, an echo of the “fetish” is linguistically tangible in the “trifle.” The concept of the fetish has been developed in both Marxian and psychoanalytic frameworks. Karl Marx outlines his theory of the commodity fetish in Das Kapital (1867), where the social relationships among people are truly objectified economic exchanges. In Freud’s account, the fetish is a substitute for the lost phallus, as he describes in his 1927 article, “Fetishism.”
- 10.
Cited in Charles Harding Firth, An American Garland: Being a Collection of Ballads Relating to America, 1563–1759 (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1915), 7.
- 11.
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 110.
- 12.
Thomas Vennum, Jr., The Ojibwa Dance Drum: Its History and Construction (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 161.
- 13.
The references to Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations , Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, Volume XIII, America Parts I and II in this chapter are from Edmund Goldsmid’s edition (Edinburgh, 1889), 2:7. A similar sentiment is recorded in Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr in The decades of the newe worlde (London, 1555), 89r, during the voyage of “Vaschus Nunnez” (Vasco Nunez de Balboa), in which “Vaschus to recompence one benefyte with an other, gaue hym certeyne of owre thynges, as counterfet rynges, Christal stones, copper cheynes & brase lettes, haukes belles, lokynge glasses, and suche other fyne stuffe. These thynges they set much by and greately esteeme. For suche thynges as are straunge, are euery where counted precious.”
- 14.
Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England , America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest ” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 145. At a later moment in the narrative of Columbus’s first voyage, the author recounts that Indians arrive at the Christian camp, Navidad, “bringing some sheets of gold to barter for bells which they value above everything else,” which reaffirms the point made by Knapp, as well as in the ballad “Have over the Water to Florida,” that gold could be gotten in exchange for trifles (93). Morison, Christopher Columbus Mariner, 189, writes that during his fourth and final voyage, Columbus found native peoples near the Boca del Dagon wearing gold disks around their necks and “for the standard price of three hawk’s bells, value about a penny, the Spaniards were able to buy a gold disc worth a double eagle, or four guineas.” As even Morison’s estimation of the monetary value of this exchange makes clear, the native peoples don’t know how to properly value objects.
- 15.
James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 185. This conflation also allowed the English to align the Catholic explorers with the natives, even though the English, ironically, engaged in the same patterns of trade relationships centered on trifles.
- 16.
Hakluyt , Principal Navigations , 2:525.
- 17.
In many, if not all, of the examples cited here, Peter Martyr seems to have expanded the role of gold in the narrative.
- 18.
Peter Martyr of Angleria, The Decades of the newe worlde or west India, trans. Richard Eden (London, 1555), 2r.
- 19.
11v–12r.
- 20.
140r.
- 21.
John Smith, A True Relation (London, 1608), A3v.
- 22.
Smith, A True Relation , D2v.
- 23.
Cited in Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, ed. Edward Wright Haile (Virginia: Roundhouse, 1998), 132–133.
- 24.
“Report of what Francisco Maguel, an Irishman, learned in the state of Virginia during the eight months that he was there, July 1, 1610” in Jamestown Narratives, ed. Haile, 450.
- 25.
Cited in the Jamestown Narratives, ed. Haile, 606.
- 26.
John Smith, Map of Virginia With a Description of the Countrey (Oxford, 1612), sig. *4r.
- 27.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 1:79–80.
- 28.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 1:88.
- 29.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 1:178.
- 30.
Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), viii. He notes the wide application of sensory studies, arguing “we will see that sensory history plays into all the realms of the past, political and military as well as social and cultural” (viii).
- 31.
Hoffer , Sensory Worlds, 55.
- 32.
Quotation from Jamestown Settlement Museum’s display case consulted in the summer of 2011. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela Daniel “Silver Star” write in The True Story of Pocahontas : The Other Side of History from the Sacred History of the Mattaponi Reservation People (Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010), 51, “It was well known that the Powhatan prized copper. The Powhatan attributed spiritual qualities to it. As such, only Powhatan royalty wore copper jewelry; thus it signified a high status in Powhatan society.”
- 33.
Morison , Journals and Other Documents, 222.
- 34.
Karlis Karklins, Trade Ornament Usage Among the Native Peoples of Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1992), 13, citing Father Chrestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia, trans. W. F. Ganong (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1910), 89–99, 28.
- 35.
Karklins , Trade Ornaments, 24.
- 36.
Karklins , Trade Ornaments, 48, 66, 78, 99, and 106.
- 37.
The Four Voyages, trans. Cohen, 72. Morison, Christopher Columbus Mariner, 78, appositely describes these bells as “little spherical bells about the diameter of a quarter dollar or shilling, which were attached to the birds used in falconry.” For a full discussion of the use of bells in falconry according to English practice, consult Tom Ingram, Bells in England (Exeter: David & Charles, 1987), 139–141.
- 38.
Sujata Iyengar, “Moorish Dancing in The Two Noble Kinsmen ,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 85–107, 92.
- 39.
The National Portrait Gallery holds a portrait of a young King James I and VI holding a hawk wearing bells on its ankles (NPG 63). Several images depict men with hawks wearing bells in the Mughal Empire, including a watercolor held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Prince With a Falcon,” M.83.1.4.
- 40.
Karklins , Trade Ornaments, 199, 223.
- 41.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 1:140. The “pretty lowbell” and the “louder bell” could have been the open-mouthed handbells that were different from the crotal bells discussed in this chapter; however, the cost of those bells would likely have been greater, and the loss of the bell to the sea more substantial than if he had been using different types of crotal bells, which came in a wide range of sizes. Of the moment when Best lured the man who bites his tongue off, William McFee, The Life of Sir Martin Frobisher (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928), 52–53, continued this tradition of disparaging native peoples for what they desire, writing “There was nothing on earth, probably, of less use to a Labrador native than a bell, but there was nothing for which he could conceive a more fatal infatuation. Bells were wrecking the whole social system of those parts. The natives who had secured bells were going up in the world, while those who had no bells were talking of revolution and setting up a new government which would give every man his bell.”
- 42.
Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 108.
- 43.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 2:93–94.
- 44.
Morison , Journals and Other Documents, 137.
- 45.
Morison , Christopher Columbus Mariner, 78.
- 46.
Cited in Jeffrey Brain, “Artifacts of the Adelantado,” The Conference on Historic Site Archaeology, Papers 8 (1975): 129–138, 129.
- 47.
As Jeffrey Brain explains in “Artifacts of the Adelantado,” 129, “the preference of the natives for the bells resulted in their being selected for the second voyage as the principal Spanish barter for gold and other valuables.”
- 48.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 2:208.
- 49.
Fernão Lopes de Castanheda’s narrative was translated into English by Nicholas Lichefield in 1582. He writes
…the Generall threw on lande little belles, which the Negroes tooke vp, and some of them came so neare vnto him, that he gaue them the bells into their owne hands, whereat he wonderfully meruailed, for that Bartholome Dyas had informed before, that when he was there, they did run away, and wold not be allured to come so neere view. The Generall therefore finding and perceiving contrary to his expectation, the gentlenesse of those blacke people, hee then leapt out on lande with his men, making exchaunge of certain red night caps with the Negroes for Bracelets of Iuory which they had, and so for that time departed.
The first booke of the historie of the discouerie and conquest of the East Indias, enterprised by the Portingales (London, 1582), 8–9. Castanheda’s account is discussed at further length in the chapter “‘Drums rumble within’: Embodied Experiences of Temples in the East and on the London Stage.”
- 50.
Iyengar , “Moorish Dancing,” 86. As Iyengar discusses, the white English morris dancers in the period usually blackened their faces to perform the dance (86–87). See also Jane Garry, “The Literary History of the English Morris Dance,” Folklore 94.2 (1983): 219–228.
- 51.
Percival Price, “Bell (i)”; “Sizes” in Grove Music Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.42837, (2001), accessed March 19, 2018.
- 52.
William Foster, Early Voyages and Travels in India : 1583–1619 (Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1968), 306.
- 53.
Percival Price, Bells and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 21, writes that “Ganusha shook a garland of crotals in order to terrify people; Krishna wore a waistband of them to inform of his presence.”
- 54.
Price , Bells and Man, 24. “The Sanskrit term ghaṇṭī, or the diminutive ghaṇṭikā, can also denote small metal pellet bells, worn cosmetically or on various parts of the body for dancing (female dancers traditionally wear 101 bells and male dancers 151 around the lower legs). The spheres, of bell-metal, with a slit on the one side and interior pellets of ṭikṣṇa (probably cast-iron), are threaded on to strings by an integral ring at the top. Bells of this type are common throughout South Asia, known in North India as ghuṅgrū,” according to Alastair Dick, “Ghaṇṭā,” Grove Music Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.51700 (2001), accessed June 15, 2018. Dancers who performed a Mughal version of the Kathak dance tradition wore “scores of ankle-bells,” which the female dancers used in rhythm to the tabla playing, according to Jonathan Gil Harris, First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans and Other Foreigners who Became Indian (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015), 155.
- 55.
As William Hawkins records, Indians who experience injustice “come to a certain place where a long rope is fastened unto two pillars, neere unto the place where the King sitteth in justice. This rope is hanged full of bels, plated with gold, so that the rope beeing shaken the bels are heard by the King; who sendeth to know the cause and doth his justice accordingly” (cited in Foster, Early Voyages and Travels, 113). William Finch also observed: “On the further side of this court of presence are hanged golden bels, that if any be oppressed and can get no justice by the Kings officers, by ringing these bels when the King sits, he is called, and the matter discussed before the King” (Foster , Early Voyages and Travels, 184).
- 56.
Cited in Foster, Early Voyages and Travels, 39–40.
- 57.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten writes in His discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies Deuided into foure bookes (London, 1598), 29,
also divers of the Peguans weare a bell upon their yarde, and some two, as bigge as an Acorne, which is made fast between the flesh and the skinne. Of the like Belles Paludanus can shew you one, which I brought out of India , and gaue it him; which bels have a very sweet sounde: This custome of wearing Belles was ordained by them, because the Peguans in time past were great Sodomites, and vsing this custome of belles, it would be a meane[s] to let them from the same.
Luis Vaz de Camões writes in his verse Os Lusiads (cited here is The Lusiads, trans. L. White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10.122.1–8):Verse
Verse See the Arakan kingdom and the throne Of Pegu, once peopled by monsters— Children of the horrible coupling Of a solitary woman and a dog Today, men wear on their genitals Tiny tinkling bells, a custom Invented very subtly by their queen To put pay to behaviour so obscene.
- 58.
Richard Hakluyt, The Discoveries of the World (London, 1601), 208.
- 59.
Consult Helen Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 69. Karl Schmitt records in his archaeological findings that “small copper ‘hawk’s bells’ between a half-inch and an inch in diameter were fairly common” trade items, “fifty-five being found” in Patawomeke; consult “Patawomeke: An Historic Algonkian Site” Quarterly Bulletin: Archeological Society of Virginia 20.1 (1965): 1–36, 20. In the Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), Josephine Paterek cites bells on the dress of the Creek, who used “Brass or silver bells from the traders” to adorn garments and boots (20); “tin tinklers” on the Fox and Ojibwa (53, 63); and for the Omaha, “Garters had brass bells attached, to add to the rhythm and sound of the dance,” similar to the Osage, who also wore “woven garters” that “often had brass bells attached to them to add to the sounds and rhythms of the dance” (125, 127). According to the Grove Dictionary of Music, “after the coming of Europeans and the introduction of metal, bells (sleigh bells) came to be used as container rattles among some Apache groups and have since spread to other tribes, where they are sometimes worn on ceremonial costumes, enhancing the dance with rhythmic jingles.” Bruno Nettl, et al., “Native American Music: Musical Instruments: (a) Idiophones”; Grove Music Online https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2251909 (2013) accessed March 19, 2018. Ian W. Brown, “Bells,” in Tunica Treasure, ed. Jeffrey Brain (Salem: The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, and the Peabody Museum of Salem, 1979), 197–205, 197, records that “the anonymous author of the Relation de la Louisianne wrote, ‘when dancing … they don their best clothes. They wear a belt made up of about forty potin hawk-type bells.’” At an Innu powwow, the dance rhythms, “accentuated by the bells or jingle cones which are part of the dance outfit, are an integral aspect of the experience,” according to Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen, Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of the First Nations Communities in Northeastern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 158–159.
- 60.
Brain , “Artifacts of the Adelantado,” 129–130. The practice of giving bells to the Native Americans continued into the nineteenth century: “Prior to departing St. Louis in 1804, on their expedition into the then unknown Far West, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark amassed thousands of items for trade with or as gifts for the Indians they would encounter: sewing needles, brass kettles, ivory combs, calico shirts, brass hawk bells, cheap rings with glass stone, knives, scissors, and yards of red flannel,” note Anita J. Ellis and Susan Labry Meyn in Rookwood and the American Indian: Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Garner Collection (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 132. By 1890, things had changed little; “Other objects, such as brass sleigh bells, were high fashion for dancers who wanted noise-making ornaments. Soon small tin cones, sometimes made from snuff can tops replaced the expensive and hard-to-find bells” (132).
- 61.
“In October 1541, Coronado prepared a report to the king, describing the highlights of his visit to Quivira, in which he says that a local Native leader gave him ‘some small copper bells’ that Coronado called cascabeles, and a piece of copper that the Indian leader wore hanging from his neck. As noted, cast copper bells or crotals (cascabeles) were distinct, easily recognized Native trade items that probably originated from Casas Grandes from the West coast of Mexico and moved through Casas Grandes in the late prehistoric period after ca. 1200. The presence of Casas Grandes cast copper bells East of the Great Plains in central Kansas in 1541 is evidence of some degree of interaction between the American Southwest and the Eastern Woodland peoples at the time,” according to William C. Foster, Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 146. In Andrew White’s Relation of Maryland (London, 1635), while he does not record that his company of English travelers brought bells with them to what became Maryland, the Yaocomico tribe with whom they interacted owned bells.
- 62.
Powhatan ’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska, 2006), 190–191.
- 63.
Stephen R. Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 213.
- 64.
Brain , “Artifacts of the Adelantado,” 132–133. Marvin T. Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Coosa, A.D. 1350–1700,” in Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands, A.D. 1400–1700, ed. David S. Brose, Robert C. Mainfort Jr., C. Wesley Cowan (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 143–156, 153–154, notes that cast brass bells were also found in the burial sites of the Coosa Indians in what is now Georgia.
- 65.
H. Trawick Ward and R.P. Stephen Davis, Jr., Indian Communities on the North Carolina Piedmont A.D. 1000 to 1700 (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Research Laboratories of Anthropology, 1993), 429.
- 66.
Ward and Davis, Indian Communities, 333.
- 67.
Brown , “Bells,” 199.
- 68.
Brown, “Bells,” 200.
- 69.
Brown , “Bells,” 201. Brown describes these bells as originating in northern France and their prolific appearance indicates that they were a “major trade item through the Colonial period” (201).
- 70.
Vennum , Ojibwa Dance Drum, 161.
- 71.
Anon, The Maske of Flowers (London, 1613) will be cited parenthetically.
- 72.
Olivia Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118.
- 73.
Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 168.
- 74.
The music that both parties sing is included in the 1614 printed version in four-part harmony, unlike the five songs sung in the actual masque, which were not printed. According to this text, James I enjoyed the antimasques so much that, “The Maske ended, it pleased his Maiestie to call for the Anticke-Maske of Song and Daunce, which was againe presented” (C4).
- 75.
Bloechl , Native American Song, 120.
- 76.
According to a “Mr. Prendergast,” cited in F. Cunningham Woods’s “A Brief Survey of the Dances Popular in England during the Eighteenth Century,” in Proceedings of the Musical Association (22nd Session) (1896): 89–109, 109, “In the Masque there is a novel instrument I could never make out, called the ‘Bobtail’; no answer is provided to his question in the “Discussion” included in Woods’s “Brief Survey.”
- 77.
An Interregnum play might also hint at a connection between bells and baubles: “in Thomas Jordan’s masque Fancy’s Festivals [1657], the character Fancy drops ‘a bundle of Masking toyes’…. A poet, finding the fallen objects, details what he picks up: first the props, ‘Ribons, Bells, bawbles, Masks, and dancing shooes.’” Cited in Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201. The third definition the OED gives for “bauble” is “A showy trinket or ornament such as would please a child, a piece of finery of little worth, a pretty trifle, a gewgaw.”
- 78.
George Withers’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern (London, 1635), depicts a fool wearing a hood with three bells on it: two on either of the points and one at the top of his head (Book 4, page 211). Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (Basel, 1552), cited in Peter Whitfield’s Mapping Shakespeare ’s World (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015), 131, shows four bells on the points of the hood and on the tips of the shoes.
- 79.
Satis Coleman, Bells: Their History, Legends, Making and Uses (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1928), 390.
- 80.
One is held by the Louvre (93-006353; OA389) and has at least seven crotal bells attached to the fabric collar of the “marotte”; two with a similar design and six crotal bells upon each are held by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (T1294 vor der Restaurierung Aufn. 1972 and T 1381). The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust held a child’s rattle similar to the Fool’s bauble and has “four copper alloy bells”: “Baby’s Rattle: Object 33.” Entry by Elizabeth Sharrett, Shakespeare in 100 Objects (6 February 2012), https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeare-100-objects-babys-rattle/, accessed June 15, 2018.
- 81.
The Four Voyages, trans. Cohen, 71.
- 82.
Greenblatt , Marvelous Possessions, 7.
- 83.
This argument echoes Alain Grosrichard’s discussion with regard to sexuality and the Orient in The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998).
- 84.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 1:95.
- 85.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1992), 140–141 and 150–152. Hulme writes, “Smith—though he was obviously unaware of it—had passed through an elaborate ritual of mock-execution whereby he allied himself with Powhatan” (150). Consult also Karen Robertson’s “Pocahontas at the Masque,” Signs 21.3 (1996): 551–583, esp. 564–565.
- 86.
As both Hulme and Robertson mention, it is noteworthy that Smith’s account of Pocahontas saving his life supposedly occurred in 1607, but was not included in his 1608 account, instead appearing in John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1624). For some, the question then becomes one of historical veracity.
- 87.
Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia , 101.
- 88.
Smith , Generall Historie of Virginia , 101.
- 89.
Robertson , “Pocahontas at the Masque,” 564.
- 90.
Please consult The True Story of Pocahontas , by Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star”; this account was written “from the Sacred History of the Mattaponi Reservation People,” orally transmitted through the quiakros or Powhatan priests. Of this incident, Custalow and Daniel write,
Children, male or female, were not allowed to attend [this sacred ceremony]. Children were not allowed into a religious ritual entailing priests. The quiakros were highly respected persons. They were regarded as being next to Ahone, the Good and Great Spirit. This must be understood in order to put these aspects into perspective. Pocahontas would not have been in the ceremony to throw herself on top of Smith to save him because the quiakros would not have allowed Pocahontas to be there. (19–20)
- 91.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 2:331.
- 92.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 2:331.
- 93.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations , 2:152.
- 94.
According to Eden’s Decades of the New World, during the 1513 voyage of Pedarias Dávila in “Paria,” what is now present-day Venezuela, besides gifting the Spanish “With the golde and frankensence,” the Kuna people also bestowed “Lykewyse certeyne carpettes, coouerlettes, table clothes and hanginges made of gossampine silke fynelye wrought after a straunge diuise with plesante & variable colours, hauing golden belles & suche other spangles and pendauntes as the Italians caule Sonaglios, and the Spanyardes Cascaueles, hanging at the purfles therof” (79r). A similar—though more extravagant—presentation of bells is described in The laste booke of Peter Martyr of Angleria. At Colluacana (Culiacán in present-day Mexico), the inhabitants presented two gold chains to the king of Spain:
At the edge of this cheine, there hange .xxvii golden belles, hauynge betwene euery of them, foure iewels of precious stones inclosed in golde, at euery of the which in lyke maner hange certeyne spangels of golde. The other cheyne consisteth onely of foure golden lynkes, beset rounde about with a hundreth and two redde stones, and a hundreth threescore and twelue greene stones, with .xxvi. golden belles curiously wrought and placed in comely order.” (163v–164r)
- 95.
John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 70.
- 96.
Forrest , History of Morris Dancing, 120.
- 97.
Ben Jonson, The Gypsies Metamorphosed , ed. George Watson Cole (New York: Century Co., for the Modern Language Association of America, 1931), Text C, 28, line 16. Ben Jonson mentions these bells in several of his writings: they are invoked in the 1617 Twelfth Night production of The Vision of Delight , which Pocahontas attended, and the character Gambol in Christmas, His Masque (1616) is dressed “like a tumbler, with a hoop and bells.”
- 98.
Forrest , History of Morris Dancing, 120.
- 99.
Forrest , History of Morris Dancing, 55. Forrest adds, “but Moorish characters often wore bells attached to their clothes to create a general jingling, rather than a rhythmical sound specifically associated with leg motion” (55).
- 100.
Cited in Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 363.
- 101.
William Kemp, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (London, 1600), 1.
- 102.
Forrest , History of Morris Dancing, 241.
- 103.
De Bry’s engravings here show chains of pearl (mentioned in the text), and bracelets of beads on a man’s wrist. Thomas Harriot, A breiefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590).
- 104.
Figure 2 from Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americae, 1609, in Kim Sloan, A New World: England ’s first view of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 226–227. Similar cone-shaped noisemakers on legs can be seen also in engravings of Tupinamba in Theodor de Bry’s Americae tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1605).
- 105.
Cited in Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs, 184.
- 106.
Paterek , Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume, 125, 127.
- 107.
Vennum , The Ojibwa Dance Drum, 37, 129.
- 108.
John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709), 38–39.
- 109.
Jeremy Montagu, Timpani and Percussion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 56. As Montagu also notes, the rattle numbered 10 is also identified with multiple Indians. The image “shows a feathered gourd rattle said to be Indian, but almost certainly American Indian, probably from Brazil” (56).
- 110.
Ian Spink, Music in Britain: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 3.
- 111.
Orazio Busino describes “jingling bells on harnesses that helped to clear a way for horses.” Cited in Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England : Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 58.
- 112.
Coleman , Bells, 390. Suzanne Lord, Music from the Age of Shakespeare : A Cultural History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), 123, describes the far-reaching appeal of bells: “Small bells were not only used to brighten dance music and singing, but were also applied to practically anything that moved in Elizabethan England. Tuned or untuned, small bells were applied to clothing, shoes, and horses’ harnesses.” Francis William Galpin, Old English Instruments of Music: Their History and Character (London: Methuen, 1911), 190, also notes that small bells were affixed to “personal dress” for centuries.
- 113.
Refer to Geoff Egan and Frances Pritchard’s Dress Accessories: c. 1150–c. 1450 (London: The Boydell Press, 2002), 336–341. Blunt writes “Examples dating from the later end of this period have been found suspended from necklaces and possibly bracelets. Prior to becoming fashionable, the wearing of bells as a dress accessory was limited to jesters, acrobats, pilgrims and priests.” Rod Blunt, “Crotal Bells,” http://www.ukdfd.co.uk/pages/crotal-bells.html. Bells also appear on the headgear of the Lancastrian kings portrayed on the Speed map of Lancashire (1611) (cited in Whitfield, Mapping Shakespeare ’s World, 170–171).
- 114.
James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 148.
- 115.
Forrest , History of Morris Dancing, 262.
- 116.
Blunt , “Crotal Bells.”
- 117.
The Portable Antiques Scheme is available at www.finds.org.uk, accessed June 15, 2018.
- 118.
Other artifacts on display at the museum include a trumpet mouthpiece, a shawm pirouette, several Jew’s harps, and a tambourine cymbal.
- 119.
Personal communication via email, August 24, 2011.
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Wood, J.L. (2019). Hell’s Bells: Delight in Transatlantic Jinglings. In: Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12224-9_4
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