Abstract
The theme of scientific utopianism is often extracted from Francis Bacon’s dream in New Atlantis of a national college whose ends were “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things” and “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire.”1 Meanwhile, scholarly discussion has been all but silent on what seems to be the lesser implications of a historically charged trade route that grounded the same narrative. This “Work Unfinished,” which Bacon’s secretary and publisher William Rawley described as a “fable,” made its first print appearance in 1627 at the end of a posthumous volume of Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural Historie in Ten Centuries.2 No one, to be sure, disputes the fact of its author’s familiarity with both the geographical explorations and the mercantile opportunities to the left of newer European world maps of his time. Except for the fateful push of Hernando de Grijalva’s ship toward the Moluccas in 1537, all Western expeditions into the so-called la otra mar, or “the other sea,” had left from the ports of Mexico and not Peru before 1568.3 The famous nao de China (ships of China), which traveled between Acapulco and Manila once or twice a year from 1565 to as late as the 1810s, fed the lucrative trade in “Chinese damasks, satins, silks, chinaware, porcelain, perfumes, and jewelry.”4 Bacon simply set his vision of institutional science on a more logical enterprising form of an updated route: “We sailed from Peru, (where we had continued by the space of one whole year,) for China and Japan, by the South Sea; taking with us victuals for twelve months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months’ space and more.”5
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 15 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1900), 5:398.
Celsius Kelly, “The Terra Australis—A Franciscan Quest,” The Americas 4, no. 4 (1948): 436.
O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 96–97.
John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburg, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964-69), 2:225
L. A. Clayton, “Trade and Navigation in the Seventeenth-Century Viceroyalty of Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies 7, no. 1 (1975): 5–13.
Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1.
Robert R. Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 42
Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 40–44.
Harry Kelsey, “Finding the Way Home: Spanish Exploration of the Round-Trip Route across the Pacific Ocean,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1986): 145–49
Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus: Being His Own Log-Book, Letters and Dispatches with Connecting Narrative Drawn from the Life of the Admiral by His Son Hernando Colon and Other Contemporary Historians, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 220–22, 300.
Balboa may be known as the first European to behold the Pacific Ocean, but Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes (Cosmography of the world according to the tradition of Ptolemy, Amerigo Vespucci, and other surveyors) already mapped it six years earlier, in 1507. See Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World: Twenty Centuries of World Maps (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art-books, 1994), 54–55.
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Baltasar de Ocampo, History of the Incas and The Execution of the Inca Tupac Amaru, ed. and trans. Clements Markham (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1907), 135–37.
Alvaro de Mendana de Neyra et al., The Discovery of the Solomon Islands by Alvaro de Mendana in 1568, ed. and trans. William A. Amherst and Basil Thomson, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1901), 1:5, 1:83.
Marcel van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide (Utrecht: HES Publishers, 1996), 3:1, 11:1.
Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quires, 1595 to 1606, ed. and trans. Clements Markham, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1904), 1:251.
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trafiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Made by Sea or Over-Land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compass of these 1600 Yeeres, 12 vols., 2nd ed. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903–5), 9:392.
Albanese, New Science, New World, 97; Jerry Weinberger, “Science and Rule in Bacon’s Utopia: An Introduction to the Reading of the New Atlantis,” American Political Science Review 70, no. 3 (1976): 865–85
Charles C. Whitney, “Merchants of Light: Science as Colonization in the New Atlantis,’ in Francis Bacons Legacy of Texts: “The Art of Discovery Grows with Discovery,’ ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 255–68
Simon Wortham, “Censorship and the Institution of Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 180–98
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–5.
John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 167.
Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, trans. Nicola Trigault and Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), 505–14.
The Incan writing system conveyed information via a complex system of cords and knots with varying numbers, sizes, shapes, and colors in different arrangements: see Tarmo Kulmar, “On the Writing Systems of Ancient Peru: The Possibility of the Quellqa and the Quipu as an Instrument of Power of the Incas,” Folklore 38 (2008): 135–44.
Bacon, The Works, 5:381; Robert Temple, China: Land of Discovery (Welling-borough: Patrick Stephens, 1986), 81–84, 110-16
Charles D. Benn, China s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 58.
Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. Henri Cordier, trans. Henry Yule, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1929), 1:441, 2:202.
Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof, ed. George T. Staunton, trans. Robert Parke, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1853–54), 1:14, 2:60–61.
Jonathan Swift, The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), 152–64.
Sung Ying-Hsing, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966)
Joseph Needham, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).
Bacon, The Works, 5:372–73. By having “all the canonical books of the Old and the New Testament,” Bensalem’s Bible actually predated both the fixing of the Christian canon by the Third Council of Carthage and the earliest known complete New Testament manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, by some three centuries. See Larry W. Hurtado, “How the New Testament Has Come Down to Us,” The History of Christianity, ed. Tim Dowley (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1997), 130–36.
Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11–18.
Spate, The Spanish Lake, 145; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 186–91. Gavin Menzies’s recent claim that Cheng Ho had also visited West Africa, the Americas, Greenland, Iceland, the North Pole, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica is widely dismissed by scholars. He has since gone on to assert that a Ming fleet reaching Italy in 1434 helped to pave the way for the European Renaissance: see Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Press, 2002)
Menzies, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (New York: William Morrow, 2008).
Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 69–70.
Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 171
Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Ahistoricism of the New Historicism: Knowledge as Power versus Power as Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 36.
Bacon, The Works, 8:160-63; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 110-16, 148-57, 224-48; Nathan Sivin, “Science and Medicine in Chinese History,” in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, ed. Paul S. Ropp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 164–66.
Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32–39
Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 15.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2009 Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sui, G.L. (2009). Westward to the Orient. In: Johanyak, D., Lim, W.S.H. (eds) The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106222_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106222_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37963-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10622-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)