Tag Archives: The Singularities of France Antarctique

A photograph of the Parade of African Mammals in the Grand Gallery of Evolution at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris taken by the author from the 3rd floor.

On Systems of Knowing

On Systems of Knowing – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I argue that we must have some degree of artifice to organize our thoughts and recognize the things we see in our world.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D For my recent essays referring to this current historiographic project see “On Sources,” Wednesday Blog 6.22, “On Writing,” Ibid., 6.27, and “On Knowledge,” Ibid., 6.29.[2] Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, (University of Chicago Press, 2009).[3] Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnean Lens | Linnaeus’ Lapland Journey Diary (1732),“ moderated by Isabelle Charmantier, virtual lecture, 12 May 2025, by the Linnean Society of London, YouTube, 1:04:18, link here.[4] Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, (Random House, 2024), 45–49.[5] Roberts, 20.[6] Roberts, 115–125.[7] Roberts, 109.[8] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 16r–16v. The translation is my own.[9] Roberts, 109.[10] Damião de Góis, Chronica do Felicissimo Rei Dom Emanuel, 4 vols., (Lisbon, 1566–1567).[11] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 190.[12] Roberts, 110.[13] Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France, (Stanford University Press, 2006), 42.[14] Roberts, xii.[15] Roberts, 107.[16] Roberts, 96–98.[17] Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, (Delta, 1998).
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This week, I argue that we must have some degree of artifice to organize our thoughts and recognize the things we see in our world.

Near the end of June on a Sunday afternoon visit to the Barnes & Noble location on the Plaza here in Kansas City when we were picking out books to gift to family, I espied a copy of Jason Roberts’s new paperback Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life. In the Plutarchan model it is a twenty-first century Parallel Lives of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), two of the eighteenth century’s most prolific naturalists. I saved it as fun reading once I thought I’d done enough of my proper historical work. That moment came after I finished writing the first draft of the new introduction to my dissertation, a rather large addition to my doctoral study which is mostly historiographic in nature.[1] I’ve been reading Roberts’s book in my free time and delighting in the vibrant portraits he paints of the two men in question. I am a newer Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, elected in January 2025, and so I arrived to this particular book with a happy perspective on Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae is cited in my dissertation as the first identification of the three-toed sloth by the genus Bradypus. At the same time, I’ve referenced Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle far more frequently in those moments when I’m following the legacy threads of my own Renaissance naturalists into the Enlightenment. After all, Buffon cited Thevet on several occasions where the savant referred to the same animals which the earlier cosmographer described two centuries before.

In spite of my own Linnean affiliation, and my use of Buffon’s corpus in the earliest stages of my broader historiography, I am still largely unfamiliar with these two men. I first knew of Buffon for his famous comments on his presumption of the diminutive nature of American animals when compared with their Afro-Eurasian counterparts, to which Thomas Jefferson retorted by sending Buffon evidence of an American moose.[2] I also know very little about Linnaeus, most of what I know of the Swede comes from lectures presented at the Linnean Society online including a recent lecture given in May by Staffan Müller-Wille, Professor in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Cambridge about Linnaeus’s Lapland diary from his northern expedition in 1732.[3] There is a new biography of Linnaeus by Gunnar Broberg titled The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus which I have an eye on yet haven’t gotten a copy of quite yet. So, reading Roberts’s book is a quick introduction for me to this man who for me is most influential with his method of binominal taxonomy which has appeared time and again here in the Wednesday Blog. Yet this system followed after Linnaeus’s earlier alphabetical system for identifying plants by sexual characteristic. The basic premise here is that if there are 26 letters in the alphabet, we can then use that familiar framework to organize other complicated concepts for easy recognition. Linnaeus used this to categorize plants by their male and female sexual characteristics in his 1730 booklet Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, or Prelude to the Betrothal of Plants.[4] Therefore, Linnaeus could go around the botanical garden at the University of Uppsala in 1730 and quickly identify a plant as a J plant or a G plant. First reading this I thought of the way that letters are used by the Federal Reserve System to identify specific regional branches. Thus, J represents the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and G the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. 

I like the idea behind Linnaeus’s alphabetic system yet having only 26 categories to describe the entire plant kingdom seems doomed to be flawed as it relies on a belief that all the plants that are known to exist are the ones that exist, that there’s nothing new under the Sun to be discovered. Roberts frames this in a biblical context, describing how Olof Celsius (1670–1756), one of Linneaus’s first professors, met the young Linnaeus when he was working on a project called the Hierobotanicum or Priestly Plants which was intended to be a compendium of all 126 plants mentioned in the Old and New Testaments.[5] Why would Linnaeus need more than 26 categories to contain all the plants known to the Ancients and to the Bible? Naturally, the flaws were apparent in this from the start by using a system of knowing which originated in the more arid landscape of the Levant rather than in the cooler and damper climate of Sweden. I’ve noticed this in my own life, how many cultural elements which we practice in the United States, notably the seasons, better fit the natural climate of New England and England proper than they do here in the Midwest with its far more variable conditions depending on the time of year, or even the given hour. Roberts deconstructed Linnaeus’s early efforts near the end of Part I of his book when he described Linnaeus’s first scholarly collision with Buffon after the Frenchman’s appointment by Louis XV to the position of Intendant of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.[6] In a debate which Roberts calls “the Quarrel of the Universals” Linnaeus argued that species could be recognized from individual type specimens while Buffon countered that this ran the great risk of minimizing the diversity of life and eliminating potential variations in nature.

This got me thinking about systems of knowing, thus I decided to render the title of the original file for this blog post that you’re now reading (or listening to) De Systemarum Scientis in the full Latinate tradition of my own scholarship, or “On Systems of Knowing” in English. Why is it, for instance, that our Roman alphabet begins with A and ends with Z? The first half of that question is easier to answer: the Romans adapted our alphabet from the Greeks who started it off with α alpha, β beta, thus the noun alphabet itself. Yet the Greek alphabet ends with ω omega rather than ζ zeta, so why does ours end with Z? What I’ve heard about this is that the Greek letters that were adopted into the Roman alphabet were tacked onto the end of the line, or at least this is what I remember being taught when I learned to recite the alphabet in French in my undergraduate years. French calls the letter Y y-grec, or the Greek i. Likewise, everyone except for we Americans call the final letter of the Roman alphabet some variation of zed, which is a shortening of the Greek zeta. This better reflects that letter’s original sound in Greek, just as the cursive lowercase z is the lowercase Greek ζ just adopted straight into the Roman alphabet without any major changes.

So, when it comes to the organization of our knowledge there are things that we know in this same alphabetical order or in relation to this alphabetical order. Because the Roman alphabet is written left to right, we know that when it’s used to set up a coordinate system on a printed map that A will always appear to the top left, orientating the way the map should be held. Likewise, a reader can quickly scan through an index in any language written in the Roman alphabet by following along with the order of the letters. How individual languages index objects from that point on differs, but the foundational element remains the same. The Roman alphabet works best for Latin, the language for which it was originally developed, so it tends to be adapted in its phonetic values depending on which language is using it. This is why English uses the letter W to represent a [w] sound while German and in loanwords French uses W to represent a [ˈv] sound. Meanwhile, Irish represents the [w] and [ˈv] sounds with two digraphs, bh and mh that represent both depending on the context. Typically, bh represents [ˈv] while mh represents [w], but it depends on context. The reasoning behind this is that when the Roman alphabet was adapted by Latin speakers to fit Old Irish in the fifth and sixth centuries CE they approximated the phonology of their Latin in rendering the Roman alphabet usable for Irish. So, to these monks the Irish [ˈv] sound in a Gaelic name like Medbh sounded enough like how the letter b was used at the time that they used that letter to approximate this [ˈv] sound. It’s notable to me that in Modern Greek the letter β is today pronounced veta and in the Cyrillic alphabet the letter В represents this same [ˈv] sound while the letter Б represents the [b] sound that we English-speakers associate with the letter B. Cyrillic and its predecessor the Slavonic alphabet were being developed around the same time that the Roman alphabet began to be used for Irish so there must’ve been something going on with the pronunciation of people’s Bs becoming closer to Vs in late antiquity. Thus, the ways in which our alphabets represent specific sounds today reflect the prestige dialects of our two classical languages–Latin and Greek–as they were spoken over a millennium ago.

Consider then how we distinguish technical, scientific, or artistic terminology depending on the prestige language of that field. History has largely become a vernacular field, where we adapt terms that will be more familiar to the non-professional enough to initiate them into what Ada Palmer calls the History Lab. Yet often these terms will have etymologies beyond English itself. Consider the word photograph, or its more common shortened form photo. This word comes purely from Greek, the classical language more associated with science and technology. It blends the Greek φωτο-, the blending form of φῶς (phôs), or light with the suffix –γρᾰ́φος, from the verb γρᾰ́φω meaning to draw, sketch, or write. So, photography at its core is light writing. Neat! The word photography entered English from the French photographie, that etymology referring to the French origins of the art and craft of photography itself in the middle of the 1820s. Yet the linguists who modernized Irish a century ago decided to favor indigenous terminologies, rendering this word grianghraf using the Irish word grian for Sun instead of a variation of φωτο- (light) while adopting the Greek –γρᾰ́φος suffix to center this new Irish conception of the term within the same technological corpus as the English photograph. While consequential to have a particular Irish name for this technology that elevated the Irish use of photography as equal to any other culture’s photography and particular within the Irish language, it still remains rooted in the same western tradition of grounding our names for scientific and technical things in Greek.

Language directly influences how we know things because it is the vehicle by which we recognize those things around us. I know that a photograph is something made by “light writing” therefore I will also recognize that anything else beginning with “photo” also refers to “light” and that anything ending with “graph” refers to some form of record or writing. I come from a culture where light is connected with goodness and dark with ill. Likewise, for me I think of blue and green as happier colors rather than red or orange which are angrier colors. There is safety in light, in the daytime we can see people or things coming toward us easier than in the dark of night. At the Easter Vigil the celebrant lights the Paschal Flame which is then passed around the church so that we all share in the Light of Christ (Lux Christi) returned to the world with the Resurrection. The central question in my dissertation is linguistic: what did André Thevet (1516–1590) mean when he referred to the Americas overall as sauvage? This French word translates into English as both savage and wild, yet I chose to retain the original French to better represent the original concept which encompasses both concepts in English. This word was not necessarily racial in the modern sense, rather Thevet used sauvage to describe people, places, and things which existed beyond civilization. This word itself betrays its original meaning, that is city life. Thevet himself understood the sauvage to be the antonym of this city life. I describe it in the introduction to my dissertation in terms of light and dark, following the cultural connotations already illuminated: the city is the sun whence radiates the light of civilization. The further one goes from that sun, the darker things become and the less civilized they remain. Thevet’s sauvage existed at that furthest extreme in the dark. I imagine the character of Gollum in this sort of darkened existence, deep beneath the Misty Mountains uninterested in light save for the Ring of Power which consumed his day rendering it eternal night. In the literature of Thevet’s time a fine sauvage characterization is Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest, wild as the waters which wrecked King Alonso and his men on the island in Act 1 of that play.

Roberts notes how these linguistic attributes influenced Linnaeus’s systemization of humanity in the 1735 second edition of his Systema Naturae. The Swede divided humanity into four subcategories described by color over any other facet.[7] Roberts spends the following five pages questioning Linnaeus’s methodology, asking “why four?” and why these specific colors? There is some historical context for Linnaeus’s choice to refer to Black Africans, even Thevet referred to the varied peoples of Africa as “black” in his Singularitez de la France Antarctique. Thevet hints at a possible environmental cause for blackness, writing that the peoples “of Barbary” who are “the blackest” are “of the same manners and conditions as their region is hotter than others.”[8] Thevet’s understanding of African geography is somewhat uncertain, so his definition of Barbary may not align with the Berbers from whom the Barbary Coast of the Maghreb was named. Still, it hints at an understanding that the hotter, or more torrid, the climate got the darker the skin of the people would become. Roberts notes that the Portuguese were the first to use the “word negro to signify African origin or descent” in the middle of the sixteenth century.[9] This makes sense considering the Portuguese were the first European power to sail down the West African coast in the fifteenth century. That Roberts notes this Portuguese definition of blackness first appears in the middle of the sixteenth century likely refers to Damião de Góis’s (1502–1574) Chronica do Dom Emmanuel I of 1566 to 1567 which is an early source that I’ve consulted for information on the voyages of Vasco da Gama (d. 1524).[10] Geraldine Heng, the leading authority on medieval notions of race, wrote in her 2018 book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages that blackness was already well established as an element in religious and secular iconography by the beginning of the First Age of Exploration.[11] Roberts concludes his discussion of this particular racial element of Linnaeus’s great contribution to taxonomy sullenly noting that it’s thanks to Linnaeus that this cultural connotation of blackness with darkness was given scientific credence which continues to support racist ideologies to this day.[12]

How do we use our own words to describe things to which they are not suited, in turn transforming the nature of those things that they may become part of our own world? My research is most interested in understanding these questions of how those things at the boundaries of knowledge were understood by André Thevet using the tools afforded to him during the French Renaissance of the sixteenth century. Thevet used the word sauvage to do this and create a category of life against which he could measure and proclaim the existence of something civilized closer to home. Michael Wintroub, Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at Cal-Berkeley, wrote in his 2006 book A Savage Mirror that Thevet’s countrymen sought to “civilize the barbarians” to make up for an insecurity they felt at being called barbarians themselves by Italian intellectuals at the turn of the sixteenth century during the French invasion of Italy under King Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498).[13] As long as there was someone else who the French could look down upon beyond their own cities they felt secure in their own civility. Yet the sauvage exists within a larger framework of singularities, a word which is central to Thevet’s cosmography. Thevet used the word singularity to describe those things which were exotic, wonderous, and immensely collectable in his eye and hopefully in the eyes of potential readers who would buy his books. I see various layers and categories of singularities in Thevet’s cosmography, for instance he only included images of certain animals in his book of the same name, the aforementioned Singularitez of 1557. The sloth and toucan were depicted as well as described, yet the mysterious Ascension Island aponar remained a bird worthy only of a textual description. This suggests that somethings were more singular than others, or more worthy of attention and the money needed to produce these woodcut images than others. These systems of knowing framed around the singularity are the subject about which I intend to write my first academic monograph. Classifying something as singular gives it an appeal which sets it aside from both the civil and the sauvage as belonging to a higher level of category which can include both the urbane and the agrestic.

Jason Roberts describes Buffon and Linnaeus’s mutual missions to make something of themselves and to rise above their provincial origins to the heights of society. I laughed out loud reading Roberts’s introduction to Linnaeus’s character, what felt like an iconoclasm of sorts for this Fellow of the Linnean Society. “Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish doctor with a diploma-mill medical degree and a flair for self-promotion, who trumpeted that ‘nobody has been a greater botanist or zoologist’ while anonymously publishing rave reviews of his own work.”[14] Buffon by contrast took advantage of a golden opportunity to build his own demi-paradise at his manor in the Burgundy countryside until his good reputation as a botanist brought him to royal attention and the appointment as Intendent of Jardin du Roi.[15] The Jardin des Plantes, as Buffon’s charge is today known, is perhaps a better place to conclude than most. Situated in the Fifth Arrondissement across Boulevard de l’Hôpital and Rue Buffon from Gare d’Austerlitz, the Jardin is an urban oasis created for the purpose of crafting systems of knowing. Its original intent was to serve as a medicinal garden existing beyond the purview of the Sorbonne, Paris’s sole licensed teaching medical school in the seventeenth century.[16] I’ve spent several happy hours wandering through the Jardin, home to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle’s Grande Galerie de l’Évolution, the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie compare, and the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, which was home to Paris’s first resident giraffe whose story is delightfully told by Michael Allin in his 1998 book Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris.[17] While Allin’s heroine Zarafa is not today on display in the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution (she is instead today to be found in the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de La Rochelle), the taxidermy in the Parade of African Mammals that is the centerpiece of the Grande Galerie represents a system of knowing animal life in itself.An elephant leads the parade followed by hippopotami, zebras, and giraffes with two such camelopards standing erect their long necks rising toward the upper galleries at the center of the procession. Behind them come the horned mammals, rhinoceroses, and at the rear a crouching lion watching its prey. This is a system that Buffon would have appreciated more than Linnaeus, one which represents the nature of individual beings more than species. Each stuffed specimen seems to have its own character, its own personality. They look about as one would expect they would in life. The great artifice of this is the idea of a parade itself, a very human notion indeed, and one that is infrequent enough to be nearly singular in character, a reason for a day out, worth putting in the social calendar of a city, town, or village no matter how large or small. A parade is its own system of knowing.

[1] For my recent essays referring to this current historiographic project see “On Sources,” Wednesday Blog 6.22, “On Writing,” Ibid., 6.27, and “On Knowledge,” Ibid., 6.29.

[2] Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[3] Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnean Lens | Linnaeus’ Lapland Journey Diary (1732),“ moderated by Isabelle Charmantier, virtual lecture, 12 May 2025, by the Linnean Society of London, YouTube, 1:04:18, link here.

[4] Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, (Random House, 2024), 45–49.

[5] Roberts, 20.

[6] Roberts, 115–125.

[7] Roberts, 109.

[8] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 16r–16v. The translation is my own.

[9] Roberts, 109.

[10] Damião de Góis, Chronica do Felicissimo Rei Dom Emanuel, 4 vols., (Lisbon, 1566–1567).

[11] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 190.

[12] Roberts, 110.

[13] Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France, (Stanford University Press, 2006), 42.

[14] Roberts, xii.

[15] Roberts, 107.

[16] Roberts, 96–98.

[17] Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, (Delta, 1998).

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The North American Tour

The North American Tour – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words on the places I visited and the people I met on this North American Tour I finished on Sunday. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some words on the places I visited and the people I met on this North American Tour I finished on Sunday.

Earlier this year when I began to consider which conferences I would like to attend in Fall 2024, I knew from the start that my old stalwart of the Sixteenth Century Society would be top of the list. I was also interested in attending the History of Science Society’s conference for the first time after meeting a fair number of attendees from the 2023 meeting last year at my workshop in Brussels. Two conferences in two weeks is a fair amount of travel to undertake and money to spend. Yet there was more to be planned, for in midsummer I read a notice from the Society for the History of Discoveries about a special issue of their journal Terrae Incognitae about animals and exploration. I sent in a proposal which was accepted, leading to an outstanding offer to submit an article for the issue which I’m editing. So, knowing it would be good to meet the people of the SHD, I decided to submit a proposal to their conference as well.

If you’re keeping count, that means I went to three conferences in the last three weeks. I decided to call the series of talks my North American Conference Tour because this would take me not only to San Antonio but to Toronto and Mérida as well. I often thought about trying to do something like this where I visited two or three of the big continental countries in North America in short order; when I lived in Binghamton I fancied the idea of driving the 4 hours south to D.C. one day to sit in the gallery of the House of Representatives only to turn around soon after and drive back through Binghamton up Interstate 81 and across the St. Lawrence River to Ottawa to sit in the gallery of the Canadian House of Commons later that week. That never happened, in part because of the pandemic, yet I’ve undertaken similar trips in Europe on many an occasion so why would it be any more challenging here in North America?

The greatest challenge in this tour was that unlike stopping in Brussels, London, and Paris on a big European tour, I would need to fly between each of these cities and Kansas City in order to be where I needed to be in a prompt manner. I was excited by the prospect that all three of these cities could be reached in one way or another by direct flights from Kansas City. In the case of Mérida, the capital of Mexico’s Yucatan state, I would need to fly into Cancún and take the recently opened Tren Maya four hours east to Mérida to use that direct flight on Southwest. As it turned out though, I only had one direct flight throughout the entire tour. Southwest offers direct flights between Kansas City and San Antonio every other day, and they don’t fly that route on Wednesdays, so instead I flew to San Antonio with a couple hour connection at Lambert Field in St. Louis. Air Canada’s daily nonstop Toronto to Kansas City service only runs in a seasonal pattern and the season for that route ended 1 week before I was due to fly to the capital of Ontario, resulting in me having connections at the start and end of the trip in my original hometown at Chicago O’Hare. Then there was Mérida. I did seriously consider flying into Cancún rather than Mérida proper for the benefit of the direct flight. Yet the benefit of flying into Mérida itself and the still limited Tren Maya schedule meant I would still have to stay overnight in Cancún before flying home. So, I booked flights on United to Mérida through Houston Bush Airport which included an 8 hour layover on the way out and an 11 hour layover on the way home. I figured I could take advantage of the time in Houston in some way or another.

San Antonio

The Alamo

I traveled to San Antonio with my Mom, who jumped at the opportunity to spend a few days in that city. I’d only ever spent a few hours there about a decade ago when we were in Austin at my Mom’s office over her birthday weekend in May 2015. That visit to the Alamo City was cut short though by heavy rains and flooding. On this instance though, I fell in love with San Antonio. It often reminded me of the best parts of San Diego, another near-border city, yet it still felt closer to home both geographically and in its approachability. Before joining in the conference there at the Menger Hotel, we took a tour of the old Spanish missions south of downtown along the San Antonio River. 

These four: Missions Concepción, San José, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada brought the deep colonial history of this part of South Texas into focus. The tour guide explained that the Spanish decided to establish missions in Texas starting in 1715 in order to block French expansion from their new colony of Louisiane to the east along the Mississippi River. This was a full 200 years after the first Spanish conquistadores ventured north into Texas from their Viceroyalty of New Spain centered around Mexico City. The Franciscan missionaries who were sent north in the eighteenth century came from the Mexican city of Querétaro, some 740 miles (1,191 km) south by foot. Along with them came groups of colonists from the Canary Islands who were sent to establish a Hispanic presence around these missions alongside the majority indigenous population. The story of the Spanish colonization of Texas is a mixed one of both the story of the creation of a new ethnicity in the Tejanos, descendants of the Canarians and other Spanish colonists and the indigenous Texans including the Coahuiltecans, Payaya, and Pastia. Yet the other side of this story is the forced assimilation of these indigenous peoples to a new colonial way of life centered on the missions and their Catholic faith.

There is one more point I want to raise about the sudden Spanish urge to establish missions in Texas after 1715. This sudden colonial interest in Texas began after the War of Spanish Succession which was waged between 1701 and 1714 after the death of the last Habsburg monarch over the Spanish Empire, Charles II. Charles named Philip of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV of France as his heir, with Louis intending on having Philip succeed him as King of France as well, and uniting the French and Spanish Empires in a personal union. This terrified the Austrian Habsburgs, the Dutch Republic, and England & Scotland which in 1707 would unite to become the Kingdom of Great Britain. These opponents of the Bourbon succession of Philip of Anjou called themselves the Grand Alliance, and eventually won the war which was one of the first European wars to be fought in the Americas as well. In the peace that followed with the Peace of Utrecht, concluded by 1715, allowed Philip to keep the Spanish throne as King Philip V yet he had to renounce his claim to the French throne to ensure France and Spain would not unite in any fashion. Since 1715 then, the House of Bourbon-Anjou have held the title of King of Spain, in the process also unifying the older Crowns of Castile and Aragon save for several interregna during the Napoleonic invasion between 1808 and 1813, the First Spanish Republic of 1873-1874, the Second Spanish Republic of 1931–1939, and the Franco Regime which ruled from 1936 –1975.

With all this in mind if in 1715 France and Spain were newly ruled by members of the same family, why would it be as imperative for the Spanish to block the French from expanding further to the southwest out of the Mississippi Basin and into Texas? My suspicion may be that this intention was driven more by the fears of the viceregal officials in Mexico City than their royal counterparts in Madrid. Any of my eighteenth-century Latin American historian readers who may know the answer are invited to write in.

One of the finer parts of San Antonio is its river walk, which stretches along both banks of the San Antonio River through downtown and continues beyond the urban core as a series of foot and bike paths. We consistently saw mile markers for the river walk along our tour of the missions to the south of the urban core. Most evenings we walked from our hotel to the river and had dinner at one of the many restaurants that line its banks. My favorite of these meals were the enchiladas I had at the Original Mexican Restaurant, which was as touristy as it could get, I even paid a mariachi band to serenade my Mom with a song while we ate, yet it was still a delight.

My enchiladas at the Original Mexican Restaurant

We stayed at the Menger Hotel, an old historic edifice of San Antonio that was built by William and Mary Menger, a pair of German immigrants who arrived in San Antonio in 1847, just three years after the Republic of Texas was annexed into the United States. They opened the hotel in 1859 hoping it would increase business for the family’s brewery. The hotel is located on Alamo Plaza next to the old Alamo mission, originally named the Mission of San Antonio de Valéro, and so was built on the battlegrounds of the Alamo. The plaza was largely under construction during our trip as a new Alamo Museum is being built. I was struck to find the street we crossed the last time we visited the Alamo was gone, replaced by a fully pedestrianized Alamo Plaza that will certainly improve the vibrancy of the neighborhood once the work is finished. Upon arrival we had lunch in the Menger Bar, famous as the place where Theodore Roosevelt gathered many of the men who would sign up to join his Rough Riders in 1898 to go fight in the Spanish American War in Cuba. The bar and the hallway just beyond it are full of T.R.’s relics.

The Menger was host this year to the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries (SHD) which met alongside the Texas Map Society. I didn’t attend the Texas Map Society meeting on Thursday, instead choosing to go tour the missions with my Mom but was delighted to get to meet the other members of the SHD who I only knew to that point through our email correspondence. I presented on Saturday morning, mine was the first paper to be read that day. In my paper, I discussed how André Thevet tried to synthesize eyewitness testimony from two other explorers: Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Patagonia and Francisco de Orellana’s account of Amazonia with his own account of Brazil to create a full cosmography of the Americas as they existed at the time he wrote his Singularities of France Antarctique in 1557. In the sixteenth century, the word cosmography referred to the amalgamation of cartography, ethnology, geography, and natural history to craft as full a narrative about the known world as possible. As a part of my dissertation research, I translated Thevet’s Singularites from Middle French into Modern English and am now applying for postdoctoral fellowships that can help me finish the job of preparing to submit my translation for publication by an academic press.

The Menger’s Victorian Lobby

I truly loved my time in San Antonio this Fall, and like the other two cities I visited for these three conferences I would’ve been happy to spend more time there. On Saturday evening, we drove north to Austin to see friends who I hadn’t seen since the recent pandemic. I was struck by the stark differences between San Antonio, the old Tejano city, and Austin the gleaming new metropolis driven by tech money. Still, on Sunday, 27 October we returned home on the only direct flight you’ll hear about in this week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog. I had two days at home, during which I worked both days, before heading out again.

Toronto

Toronto’s Union Station with the CN Tower looming behind it.

This time, I traveled to the Great Lakes region and back to one of my favorite cities that I hadn’t been able to visit since 2019. Toronto is not only the largest city in Canada today, it is also like San Antonio a crossroads, yet this is a place where Canada, the United States, and the many immigrant communities with ties to the Commonwealth and the old British Empire meet. I’ve often thought of Toronto as a city similar to my original hometown of Chicago, just cleaner and with a very different set of immigrant communities owing to Canada’s longer connections to Britain and the Empire than our own. I had a 4 hour connection in Chicago at O’Hare Airport, during which time I walked the full length of Terminals 1, 2, and 3, a good 5 km at least to pass the time. Terminal 1 retains its fine 1980s architecture, the soft whites, blues, grays, and blacks from its tile floor and steel frame still as it always has been. Terminals 2 and 3 however need some work. I was struck by how dark and drab Terminal 3 seemed; this is actually one reason why I fly on United instead of American, I would rather connect at O’Hare in Terminals 1 or 2 than in Terminal 3 just for the nicer architecture of Terminal 1.

O’Hare Terminal 1 (left) and Terminal 3 (right).

I arrived in Toronto later in the evening on Wednesday, 30 October and took the UP Express train from Pearson Airport into Union Station, near which I was staying with a friend, Hariprasad Ashwene. Toronto reminded me more of Austin with its gleaming towers, though that is more of the North American standard that the urban core should have skyscrapers to make the most of what little land is available. The biggest thing about that city which struck me was that compared to my previous visit almost 5 years to the day beforehand, was how much warmer it was there. The last time I’d walked through Queen’s Park at the end of October it had been snowing. This time though, I only had to wear the sweater I’d brought on the last day of my trip when the warm weather that our continent had basked in began to fade. On the day I landed, Kansas City experienced its first rain in nearly 2 months, yet that rain came with high winds, thunderstorms, and tornadoes across the Great Plains and Midwest and resulted in both of my flights that day being quite bumpy with hard landings across the board. 

Hari Prasad and I on the lakeshore.

These are all clear signs of climate change, and it baffles me that we aren’t doing more about it. This trip, just like the San Antonio one, would have made a decent one by high speed rail. From Kansas City I would’ve again connected in Chicago before heading northeast to Toronto via Detroit. As it stood, I saw my second flight fly over the Ambassador and Gordie Howe Bridges connecting Detroit with Windsor, Ontario on that northeasterly route. To San Antonio, it would’ve required a connection probably in Fort Worth which seems to be Amtrak’s big future Texas hub based on the Federal Railroad Administration’s (F.R.A.) Amtrak Daily Long-Distance Service Study released in March of this year.

I traveled to Toronto to participate in the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society (SCS), the one conference that I’ve attended year in and year out the longest. My first trip to the SCS was in 2019 when we met in St. Louis. That was also the last conference where I presented research derived from my History Master’s thesis written at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). This time, I was presenting a very similar paper to the one I’d presented in San Antonio, only instead of looking at Amazonia and Patagonia I turned to specific animals which Thevet described in his Singularites that he himself did not see and try to trace the origins of what he wrote. 

Speaking at the Sixteenth Century Society’s 2024 Conference at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto.

The first of these two was the manatee (Trichechus manatus), which Thevet described living in the Florida Straits. His manatee account was drawn directly from the one that appears in Book 13 of the Historia General y Natural de las Indias written in 1535 by the Spanish naturalist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557). The second was an account of a wild and hairy American bull, what we today know as the American bison (Bison bison) which Thevet drew from Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s (1485–1557) recounting of Oviedo’s recording of the Relación written by the conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1488–1559). Cabeza de Vaca was one of only a handful of survivors of a failed Spanish expedition to explore and claim territories north of New Spain in the deserts and mountains of the Mexican-American borderlands. In San Antonio then I was delighted to hear a presentation given by a professor at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and one of his former students, a local high school history teacher earning his Ph.D. at the same university in secondary education, about a course the professor taught on Cabeza de Vaca’s travels in Summer 2020. I spoke with the high school teacher the following day about my own presentation that was coming up the following weekend in Toronto whether I was correct in placing Cabeza de Vaca’s bison sighting in South Texas near Corpus Christi Bay along the Nueces River. He did confirm that it was a probable place where that could’ve happened, and so armed with this new affirmation I gave what became one of my best public talks to date at the SCS. It turned out though that I missed one link in the chain, for Thevet’s bison picture originated in the 1555 Cronica de la Nueva España written by Francisco López de Gómara (1511 – c. 1566).

The famed poutail from Beaver Tails.

While in Toronto I took some time to enjoy that city. I visited the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) on the morning of All Saints’ Day, the Friday of that week. The ROM is in my opinion one of the better museums in North America, and a good marriage of natural history with human history and archeology. I like how if you climb the stairs there you have to go past the paleontology and zoology portions to get up to the galleries exhibiting artifacts from human cultures past and present. It really demonstrates that we are all a part of this same natural world, no matter how unnatural our inventions may become. On Saturday, before my talk Hari Prasad and I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where the medieval and early modern European art and Canadian art are the two main highlights. That afternoon after presenting we spent a good bit of time walking along the lakeshore and seeing some of the natural beauty of that city. Lake Ontario is far narrower than Lake Michigan, and so whereas you can only really see the opposite shore from the top of the Sears, now Willis Tower, you can see Niagara and Upstate New York from the tops of Toronto’s highest lakefront towers, as they are just under 100 miles (161 km) to the south. I ate a lot of poutine in Toronto, though less than the last time I visited. I even tried a poutail from the ice cream shop called Beaver Tails on the Harbourfront, which was poutine placed atop a frybread baked into the shape of a beaver tail. It was good, though it did attract a large audience of birds.

My Torontonian visit was about the right length, and in the circumstances of the world as they were that week where my mind was less on the current moment in Canada and more on the next trip to Mexico and the election due to be decided in the days in between I was ready to be home.

Mérida

I left home again at 5:00 am on Wednesday, 6 November, knowing the overall result of our elections had taken a sorry turn that will only be fully understood after these next four years are over. Because of the result I didn’t want to travel that morning, rather I wanted to stay home and close to my family. I was distraught and in no mood for another adventure. Yet an adventure is what was in store, and I took the first flight out of Kansas City on United to Houston’s Bush Intercontential Airport at 6:30 that morning. I’m not sure if it’s because of the flight schedules between Kansas City and Houston on United or if it’s because of the ones between Houston and Mérida but I had excessively long connections on both my outbound and return flights on this trip. On the way out, I spent 8 hours in the United Club close to the gate where my Mérida bound flight left from that evening. I was delighted to see several familiar faces on my Mérida flight, a good half if not 2/3rds of the passengers on that flight were fellow historians on their way to the History of Science Society’s centennial conference at the Fiesta Americana Hotel in Mérida.

After we landed my inadequacies in Spanish made themselves well and clear from the first moment. I gave the driver who picked me up at the airport the wrong address, and ended up at a hotel 2 miles (3 km) from where I was supposed to be. I ended up getting an Uber to take me to the correct place, arriving there close to 21:30, and was able to get dinner from the hotel kitchen by 23:00. Exhausted, I had a quick sleep before waking early around 06:00 and walking the 5 minutes north to the Fiesta Americana where I exchanged 45 dollars for around 850 pesos, got breakfast, and met more people who like me were going on the Thursday tour of the Mayan city of Uxmal, whose ruins are about 45 minutes drive-time to the south of Mérida. Mérida is a Spanish colonial city built atop an older Mayan city named Ti’ho. The Cathedral of San Ildefeonso in the city’s central plaza was built using stones from the older Mayan pyramids that were once found here.

South of Mérida, Uxmal was a fascinating place to visit. This city once housed around 30,000 people, and its pyramids still rise above the jungle canopy. It was all that I hoped it would be and more, a monument to the ancestors of the people of the Yucatec Mayans who are still the majority population in the Yucatán State and in Mérida, its capital. The tour started with the Pyramid of the Magician, the great central monument of the site, after which we walked past the Palace of the Governors, and then to the High Pyramid and the South Pyramid before descending down the steps of the latter and walking to the Ballcourt dedicated in the year 901 CE by the city’s king Chan Chak K’ak’nal Ajaw where the old Mesoamerican ballgame was played. The pyramids here have a rounder shape than those at Chichen Itza, and the Pyramid of the Magician seems to be a series of temples built one atop the other.

I spent most of my time in Mérida either at the Fiesta Americana or at my hotel in the Paseo 60 complex, a few minutes’ walk to the south. I’d intended to venture out to visit some of the city’s museums, including the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya and see the older Spanish urban core, including going to Mass at the Cathedral, but as it happened after returning from Uxmal I didn’t get very far from the conference. This was my first visit to Mexico, and there was a lot there to get used to that was different from any other country I’ve yet been to. I was struck by how affordable everything was compared to the United States. At the time 1 dollar would get you about 20 pesos, and in general everything was much cheaper than in San Antonio or Toronto let alone in Kansas City. Still, seeing prices listed in hundreds and thousands of pesos was a bit of a shock to me at first. I was very careful to not drink the water, using bottled water to brush my teeth, and keeping my mouth shut tight while showering. Where in San Antonio and Toronto there was water available in pitchers for us to pour into our own glasses and bottles, in Mérida there were bottles of water at every break alongside the coffee and pastries. Yet beyond all of this the one thing I was most worried about among all the usual domestic concerns was the inability of the plumbing to take flushed paper. This turned out to be less of an issue than I expected, though for the sake of the sanity of this post I’ll leave that topic be.

The Fiesta Americana Hotel in Mérida

This was my first visit to the History of Science Society’s (HSS) conference, and it certainly won’t be my last. I reconnected with several people who I’ve known off and on over the last five years in my doctoral studies and met many more people whose work I found fascinating and whose company I greatly enjoyed. I attended more sessions at this conference than at the Sixteenth Century Society, in part because two of the sessions I planned on attending at the SCS were cancelled. Perhaps this speaks to a stronger presence of early modern historians of science in the HSS than at the SCS, both conferences compete with each other as their meetings happen at the same time of year, opposite to the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference in the Spring. Still, when I left Mérida, I found myself sad to leave these people, colleagues and friends, who I’d gotten to know in a few short days.

At the HSS, I presented a paper drawn from Chapter 3 of my dissertation which summarized my argument that Thevet’s eyewitness description of the southern maned sloth (Bradypus crinitus) reflected the gradual shift in the sixteenth century from humanism, a discourse centered on established learning from antiquity, toward the scientific developments of the seventeenth century. This then was my only presentation among the three conferences that was drawn from my dissertation rather than the introductory essays for my translation of Thevet’s Singularites. The SHD and SCS papers will likely end up in the same essay as they cover very similar topics to the point that in moments in between conferences when I’ve attempted to explain what each of them were about, and I couldn’t remember one or another of them. That however speaks as much to the number of presentations I was giving in short order: I knew I had the papers written, printed, and placed in the correct file folders and that the slides were ready to go. All I needed to do was run a couple of rehearsals beforehand and then read the papers on the day of. What ended up happening was a bit different, following from advice I received earlier this year I tried going off script a bit more than usual. At the SCS this worked really well, though I did end up going 3 minutes over my allotted 20. Meanwhile at the HSS, knowing I only had 15 minutes to present and that the recurring technical problems during our session had taken a minute or two from the presentations, I decided to end mine early cutting some comments about the philosophy of animal behavioral psychology that I’d brought in from David Peña-Guzmán’s book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness.

One of the Mayan dishes I ate while in Mérida was perhaps the most famous of these: cochinita pibil, a Yucatec barbecued pork.

Houston

Houstonian Humidity. Photo taken from outside the Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

On the way home from Mérida I had an 11 hour layover at Houston Bush Airport again, and this time instead of staying in the United Club and working I decided to take the day to visit the Space Center Houston, the visitor’s center next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. At the beginning of the year, I looked into visiting the Space Center and booking a VIP tour of the International Space Station’s Mission Control Center, and had the trip planned out and at a reasonable price but still ended up choosing to not go to save money, a wise decision seeing how 2024 has turned out. So, on Sunday, 10 November I rented a Volkswagen Jetta from Hertz and drove across Houston to the Space Center. It turned out to be a marvelous place to explore, at times in spite of the crowds of which there were more than I expected. My only comparisons to this are visits to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington and to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex in Florida. The former is far more the museum like Space Center Houston, both very busy, while the latter is more like the other Central Florida theme parks, albeit a government owned theme park dedicated to space exploration.

I arrived close to 12:30, a good 2 hours after landing, and was at first taken aback by just how busy the place was for a Sunday at midday. One part of that was that the Houston Texans weren’t playing until later in the day, which meant more locals and tourists for the visiting Detroit Lions were taking the midday hours to do some sightseeing. My first stop in the Space Center was the Artemis gallery displaying all things associated with NASA’s international program to return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 landed in December 1972, almost 20 years to the day before I was born. There was a board where NASA invited members of the public to leave questions for the Artemis II astronauts, who are due to launch for the first crewed lunar orbit of the program no earlier than September 2025. I usually avoid these sorts of things, in a similar vein to why I like to avoid clicking on the ads on Google or any of my social media sites solely out of the enjoyment at seeing the big guy not getting my vote by engaging with their stuff. This time though was different, because as I’ve written before here on The Wednesday Blog, I worry that we may be going to Space for the wrong reasons: for profit, or glory, or conquest rather than for curiosity, or exploration, or hope that we might learn more about ourselves in finding what’s out there. My question then was this:

“How do you hope the Artemis missions will inspire humanity to become better versions of ourselves?”

This speaks to something that’s at the heart of what I do, of why I study the history of sloths in the 1550s. In that study I hope to find something about how Thevet interacted and reacted to the sloth he observed for 26 days that can tell me more about how he fit that sloth into his understanding of nature as a whole. In it beyond the study though, I hope I might learn something more about how to better interact with unfamiliar people, creatures, and things that I encounter in my life. Travel is the search for new things to know to enrich our lives by that experiential learning we do. The highlight of my visit to Houston on Sunday was touring the rooms that house the Apollo Mission Control Center where the first contact between our first human explorers to set foot on another world were first received by humans here on Earth. I know this room all too well, in fact I wonder if my fondness for the white tile aesthetic that I used to see in grocery stores or even some school classrooms isn’t in fact drawn from fond memories watching recordings of those TV broadcasts from 20 July 1969 when Apollo 11 made its landing on the lunar surface. I learned years ago to keep my camera out of my hands for most of my life and to let myself experience these moments that I have with my own eyes, and so while I did take 11 photos of the Apollo Mission Control Center while in the viewing gallery, I refrained from switching my camera to record video of the experience like many around me did. I’d rather remember those moments spent watching as the critical moments of the Moon landing played out in front of me and preserve them, however imperfectly, within my own memory that those moments get tinted with nostalgic yellowing like old paper as they age. I in fact found myself looking around Mission Control searching for all the parts of it that I know from the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind, which is one of my favorite new shows of the last five years and features Mission Control as one of its primary settings.

At the end of the day, in spite of any other troubles or annoyances that beset me, and there were some of those, I was still happy that I took the opportunity to visit the Space Center and see where one of the great vehicles of hope that remain in these dark years does its work. We may find that our best solutions to our climate crisis and to the multitude of human crises from our nigh insatiable greed or our unholy cruelty we inflict upon one another and ourselves may find a balm in reaching out and exploring our Solar System and those of other stars. I’m an optimist, even if my optimism is covered by all the debris of our pessimistic time. I hope that when Artemis II successfully orbits the Moon, and Artemis III lands humans on the Moon to establish the first lunar permanent outpost of our species that we will celebrate these accomplishments as things undertaken for all humanity and not for one nation or tribe. Our troubles today, I hope, are signs that we are beginning to move out of what Carl Sagan called our adolescence as a species and into the years when our future will really begin to look bright again.

In spite of all these troubles, this North American Tour gave me reason to hope that my future, and our future as a whole, has such great promise and opportunity if only we keep working for it and never give up the fight.

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In Toronto watching the birds. Photo: Hari Prasad.