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Working with David Quinn
Dr Joyce Lorimer
In one way or another my entire intellectual development, first at school, then as a student, finally as a professional historian, has been the result of working with David Quinn. My history teacher at Retford County High School for Girls in Nottinghamshire, a Welshman whom we all affectionately called ‘Taffy’ Williams, had been David’s student at Swansea. Mr Williams had entered Swansea in his twenties like many men of his generation, after serving in World War II, and it was David Quinn, he told me, who had seen the promise in him, knocked off his rough edges, and encouraged in him the passion for history which he brought to our classroom. When it became clear that I too had such a passion for the subject and wished to pursue it at university, then, as far as Mr Williams was concerned, there was only one place for me to go. I must apply to Liverpool and work under Professor David Quinn. And so I did. David Quinn was on the interview panel the year I was accepted in 1962. I took courses with him in my first and third years. Alison and David even took me into their home for a week, when I had been foolish enough to work myself into exhaustion while preparing for final examinations. David took the time to ask me to bring my parents to meet him on Graduation Day where he told them that he had every confidence that I could go on to do a PhD. Both my parents are dead now, but neither of them ever forgot that meeting with Professor Quinn and the courtesy that this great scholar had shown to them. I then went on to do my PhD under David’s formal and, as I always think of it, Alison’s informal supervision, for the two were so closely bonded in affection and scholarship that I have never been able to separate them intellectually in my academic development. As a graduate student I went to my first major conference with David and Alison at the Centre for Studies in the Renaissance in Tours, France, an event attended by receptions of such gastronomic splendour that nothing in our joint experience has ever matched it since. When I married and emigrated to Canada, it was David’s brilliantly timed strategic nagging, which ensured I finished my PhD and started on the publications which would be necessary to get over the hurdles of part-time employment to my present full-time position at Wilfrid Laurier. My first article was published in the first of the two Festschrifts produced by the University of Liverpool to celebrate David’s long career.
Any student working with David Quinn, even as an undergraduate, was quickly made familiar with the publications of the Hakluyt Society. The volumes dealing with sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century travel to the New World were the staple readings of his third year seminar. David’s graduate students were all left in no doubt that getting a manuscript accepted for publication by the Hakluyt Society would be their highest scholarly achievement. His own works set the Society’s unrivalled standards for transcription of manuscripts and annotation and contextual analysis of documents and early printed travel literature. It was David who encouraged me to think that the material I had collected on English and Irish settlement activities on the river Amazon would make an interesting volume for the Hakluyt Society. This was eventually published in 1989, as no. 171 in the second series. It was David who told me that a manuscript draft of Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana was preserved in the collections of Lambeth Palace library and suggested that I should undertake to produce another volume for the Hakluyt Society comparing the draft to the three editions printed in 1596. The Hakluyt Society has done me the great honour of designating this volume as its forthcoming commemorative volume for David Quinn. I have been asked to devote the rest of my remarks here to talking about that volume and reflecting on how my construction of it has been influenced by my long apprenticeship in scholarship under David’s tutelage.
David Quinn’s Hakluyt Society editions were set apart by his willingness to bring other scholarly methodologies to the elucidation of the historical narrative. His painstaking reconstruction of the record of European exploration, attempted colonization and settlement of the Atlantic seaboard of North America was illuminated by his geographical training. He made the surviving accounts intelligible by his study and actual field reconnaissance of the environmental conditions which defined when and where ships could sail, and whether fledgling colonies could survive in their chosen location. His great interest in anthropology was manifested in his signal contributions to the ethnohistorical record of the encounters between Englishmen and indigenous North Americans. It is also shown in his engagement in the location and excavation of the material remains of colonies ranging from Baffin island to Florida. Alison had studied English literature as well as botany. Her knowledge informed his approach to the literary texts of Ireland and the New World by great Elizabethan authors like Ralegh and Spenser. It inspired his meticulous attention to the description of New World eco-systems which sixteenth-century European visitors entered when they first set foot on the shores of North America. Simply put, David felt that historians must learn to use whatever tools might assist them to bridge the gulf of time and culture between themselves and those whom they had chosen to study.
Like other Hakluyt Society overseas representatives, I recently received a letter from Professor Bridges, asking for my comments on, among other things, how Hakluyt Society editions might respond and appeal to the growing scholarly interest in travel literature, particularly by scholars trained in the theories of post-modernist literary criticism. My own forthcoming edition of Ralegh’s Discoverie has, perforce, been deeply influenced by this kind of interpretative, literary analysis. When I began to work on this second Hakluyt Society project about 1990, during two Summers spent as a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, it was suddenly brought forcibly home to me that I would have to learn to use a new disciplinary tool if my planned edition of Ralegh’s Discoverie was to meet the standards expected by David Quinn. I found, to my considerable discomfort, that in the post-imperialist climate of the late twentieth century ‘new historicist' literary scholars had come to focus on Ralegh's text as a, if not the, prime example of the literary act of colonial appropriation. Ralegh’s account of his first expedition to the Orinoco is used as an exemplary text for how rhetorical practices were bent to the service of English imperialism. Ralegh’s Discoverie, Stephen Greenblatt points out, was meant to draw English adventurers and investors to Guiana, ‘to testify, to persuade, to provoke action’. It is, Louis Montrose argues one of the clearest examples of what Michel de Certeau termed, ‘writing which conquers', deliberately using gendered language, to represent the land of Guiana as the body of a beautiful virgin. Ralegh’s incitement of his male contemporaries to join in the assault upon her ‘Maydenhead', is justified by her own desire for possession and protection from the Spaniards, who threaten to despoil her just as they violate her Amerindian women. Early Modern travellers’ accounts of peoples they encountered, Peter Hulme informs us, were subconsciously shaped by their implicit confidence in the superiority of their own culture and by the common stock of descriptive metaphors which they drew from it. The picture of indigenous peoples which Ralegh ‘produced’ was a consciously designed to support the interests of his particular colonial objective. The native material in Ralegh's text, some have argued. was merely as a projection of European cosmographies and ethnographies onto native cultures. For others, the content of Ralegh’s text is as much an allegory of his life experiences as it is a report of his expedition. Recent work sees the text as a pivotal piece in the development of the genre of English travel literature which stemmed from failed early colonial endeavours, and which was central to the building of perceptions of English nationhood.
I remember complaining in one of my annual summer visits with David about the impenetrable prose in which so much of this criticism was written and of my frequently recurring desire to throw such books against the wall. He gently made it clear to me, in his ineffable way, that he was sure that I would get something useful out of such work if I had the patience to reflect on how I could use it as a historian. He brought to my attention the book Last Voyages by Philip Edwards, the King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool, who had sensibly noted that ‘for the Elizabethan voyager, writing was participation, as necessary to the eventual outcome of the voyage as hauling on ropes or joining a shore-party’. I found this book particularly helpful in helping me to sort out my thoughts. The requirements of a report, Edwards argues, dictated a ‘form of literature which cannot be granted the freedom permitted to “the poet” and which can legitimately incur the charge of lying or falsification’. Those who wrote such narratives faced questions of ‘design, interpretation, and presentation in narratives which as often as not were as keen to make out a case as to give a faithful record of events, there are imponderable forces pushing these accounts away from “what actually happened” ... the quite unconscious sifting and rearrangement that time, memory, and language must have imposed are incalculable.’
David Quinn was, as always, quite right. Historians studying particular colonial encounters have had to learn from rhetoricians that they must pay much greater attention to the processes of selection and representation involved in the production of colonial promotional texts. Over the course of the ten years which it took me to produce this volume it has become more concerned with how Ralegh approached the production of his travel narrative than the events described in it. It is, perhaps, more about the ‘painefull pilgrimage’ he endured as he tried to describe his ‘so great trauel’ than his actual ‘iorney’. At the same time, I hope, this approach has cast new light on both Ralegh the man, and the nature of his interest in Guiana, both of which so strongly interested David Quinn. By adapting, if not totally adopting the techniques of the new historicist literary critics, I hope that I have been able to give the reader a much closer sense of Ralegh as traveller, to hear more closely the voices of those indigenous peoples which he encountered, and to understand the politics of the transition from traveller’s tale to promotional account after he returned home.
I hope that my book will give readers an opportunity to look at how Ralegh struggled to reduce his experiences into a readable report, immediately after his return from the Orinoco in the Autumn of 1595. Until now scholars have only had access to what he eventually published, rushed into print in three editions in 1596. Ralegh's letters, as well as his 'EPISTLE DEDICATORIE’ and his preface ‘To the Reader', make it clear that he had found the production of his printed work a bruising experience. In his letter to Sir Robert Cecil of the 12/22 November 1595, Ralegh inveighed against the ‘blockishe and slouthfull' dullards whose carping criticisms stood to lose England treasure equal to that possessed by Spain. In the face of personal attacks and ‘malicious slaunder’ Ralegh had, like all travellers, to assert the authority of the eyewitness over the scepticism of the armchair critic: ‘to answere that out of knowledge, which others shall but obiect out of malice’.
What he eventually published was not how he first chose to characterize his experiences in South America. The degree to which these pressures noted above shaped his final text can be judged by comparing the printed versions to the manuscript, completed shortly after he returned from the Orinoco. The manuscript version of The Discoverie which Ralegh circulated for advice and comment varies frequently and significantly from the printed text, both in content and in style. It is possible to see which passages passed virtually unaltered from draft to print, what was omitted, what was changed and what was added. Even more importantly, it allows the reader to appreciate the difference between Ralegh’s unedited and edited voice. The manuscript represents how Ralegh first felt and chose to write about his expedition in search of the empire of Guiana. The text contains what it was felt advisable for him to publish.
Here then we have a rare opportunity to look at how an author's earlier draft was edited in preparation for wider dissemination in print. A close comparison of the two affords a rare insight into the strategy and process behind the transformation of one into the other. Even more unusual is the fact that the manuscript gives evidence of the way that editorial process was influenced by criticism from Sir Robert Cecil, who clearly had his own decided opinions about the difference between a travel text designed to amaze and entertain the armchair reader, and a promotional piece designed to prod that reader to offer either his money or his person to the Guiana enterprise. Faced with a general climate of scepticism about the profitability of colonial ventures, Elizabethan and early Jacobean venturers were forced to find ways of theorizing about their enterprises to make them acceptable to potential investors. The changes between Ralegh’s manuscript and printed text demonstrate how his original authorial voice was shaped and restrained by Cecil as well as Charles Lord Howard and trusted members of Ralegh’s household like Thomas Hariot who had not travelled with him to the Orinoco but had a direct financial interest in the undertaking.
Sixteenth-century travel accounts, as Stephen Greenblatt notes ‘once they are written, texts do not simply appear in the world ... they are marked, placed, licenced, authorized’. If, as Mary Fuller argues, in the published DISCOVERIE Ralegh eventually opted for the strategy of trying to claim ‘that the truth about the voyage to Guiana could be read in his suffering (weary body, exhausted state) ...’ this was not of his own choice. His first instinct, as the rambunctious, swaggering voice of the manuscript indicates, was to demonstrate how hardships endured had been mitigated by hair-raising experiences and the thrill of promised treasure. Ralegh, whom Anthony Pagden rightly dubs as the most ‘conquistador-like’ of English New World adventurers, had experienced the same golden hallucinations as Pizarro, Urs?a, Quesada, Berr?o and the rabble who trailed through the South American jungles after them. Reason has very little to do with dreams of undiscovered golden empires. Ralegh’s gold-fever was initially so acute that even actual gold mines which the English might open themselves seemed unimportant to him. Its effect upon him can be heard in the confused but much more authentic, voice of his manuscript. There the tales of heroic skirmishes with the Spaniards, his fond recollections of narrow escapes from jaguars and crocodiles and of the potency of indigenous beverages, his garrulous musings on the attractions of indigenous women, and his flamboyant promises of adventure and fortune flowed unchecked, unimpeded by his reports of his negotiations with tribal chiefs. Even the latter had been drawn into his vision as ‘borderers’ whose testimony proved the existence of Manoa and whose promised support made the location and conquest of it easy. It took the caution of his collaborators, combined with the doubts of ‘this dolt and that gull’ to bring home to him the critical difference between telling a tale of adventure and promoting a venture. However much he might resent it, Ralegh was finally ‘assured that whatsoeuer shalbe done, or written by me, shall neede a double protection and defence.’ Cecil’s endeavours were, as Richard Hakluyt reported, consistent with his care ‘not to be overtaken with any partiall affection to the Action’ and his concern to understand ‘... the likelihood and reason of good or ill successe of the same, before the State and common wealth (wherein you have an extraordinarie voyce) should be farther engaged’. In the progress from manuscript to print, Ralegh was induced to shift the focus of his appeal to investors from Manoa to mines, but neither of them could be pursued without the support of a significant invasionary force. By 1600, rather than the golden vice-regency which he had dreamed of developing, Guiana had become a magnet for small traders shut out of the Caribbean by the improvements in Spanish defences. Hopes of finding Manoa, gold mines and precious stones had not been abandoned but they were to be the long-term objectives of more modest colonizing initiatives. For Ralegh, confined to the Tower after 1603, the gold mines to which, ironically, he had given such scant attention in his manuscript, and which had been subsequently placed in the forefront of the printed text solely for the purpose of attracting investors, loomed ever richer in his memory. Mineral samples which had been discarded as worthless in 1595 were subjected to dubious assays and the tale of an easily exploitable mine shown to him by Topiawari in the vicinity of San Tome was floated. Whether he had actually seen such a mine or had merely fabricated it to gain his release from the Tower is, perhaps, beside the point. It is more instructive that Ralegh seems to have waited until after Cecil’s death before he made these claims. Cecil, who was deep in Ralegh’s confidence in 1595, could probably have spoken to their veracity and, more importantly, warned him, as he had Sir Thomas Roe, of the dangers of intrusion so close to the Spanish settlement on the Orinoco. As it was Cecil was dead and the close circle of associates who had disciplined Ralegh’s imagination and prose in the Autumn of 1595 were long dissipated by the Autumn of 1612. In the published version of the Discoverie Ralegh was forced to make the best reasonable case for what might reasonably be presumed to exist. With no one to dissuade him otherwise in 1612, Ralegh once again offered more than he could hope to accomplish and paid for his failure with his head after his return from his second voyage to Guiana six years later.
I visited David Quinn twice in the last summer of his life. His body was by then failing but his mind was as clear as ever. He was looking forward to the completion of my book and asked how my work on it had affected my former perceptions of Ralegh and of his place in the history of English interest in Guiana. I told him that I had come to appreciate why some of Ralegh’s contemporaries had found him something of a ‘pain in the neck’. I said that I had come to believe that Ralegh’s interest in Guiana would have been transitory had it not been for his political misfortunes at home, and that it was Robert Cecil, Charles Lord Howard and other lesser men who had kept interest in Guiana alive when dreams of El Dorado faded. Nevertheless I remarked that reading Ralegh’s manuscript had given me a greater sense of his soaring, mercurial, creative spirit and the way that had been caged by more practical men. He was, deeply interested in what I had to say. Ralegh’s role in the origins of the British Empire had been of life-long interest to him. His book on that subject remains the seminal work, and it was typical of David, that he should be excited by those aspects of mine which would tend to question and modify his own earlier views. In producing this volume then, which now will commemorate the end and the achievements of his long and wonderfully productive life, I was doubly working with David Quinn. I benefited from his never-failing friendship and scholarly mentorship in the process and I was working within the framework of understanding of Ralegh which his seminal works have produced. To misquote Ralegh’s words to Cecil and Charles Howard, it is but a ‘poore recompence’ for ‘ al which though I can not requite, yet I shal ever acknowledge: & the great debt which I have no power to pay, I can ...but confesse to be due’. |
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