Thevet Revisits Guanabara
Il nous faudroit des topographes qui fissent narration particuliere des endroits où ils ont esté” [We need topographers who can provide detailed accounts of the places where they have been].1 In his essay on “Cannibals,” the early version of his celebrated plea for objective accounts of the fauna, flora, local cultures, and singular features of the New World, Montaigne admonished a tradition of reports made by cosmographers who bore false witness to the Americas. Those observers, he implied, filled Europe with ill-formed and fanciful fiction and had little to do with any first-hand contact with spaces unfamiliar to Europeans. He impugned a line of writers, from Boemus and Sebastian Münster to François de Belleforest and André Thevet, who used the overarching network of a new but compendious genre to capture in its descriptive webbing customs at once primitive and refined, facts archaic and modern, and material both classical in aura and uncanny in shape. Montaigne’s praise of the topographer shared affinities for the person who later became Pierre Bayle’s ideal historian and, no less, the modern ethnographer: one who belonged to no land, was uprooted, déraciné, and capable of casting a candid gaze on any cultural foible that met the eye; one who refused to jump to any moral judgment about cultural practices or the outcome of historical events in past or present; one who was aware of the allure of allegory and rhetoric, on whose seductive delight the effusive and amplified style of the cosmographia was constructed; and one who could report in simple language—of a clarity and measure precise as a toise and discrete as a measured piece of prose—what constituted a singularity. Montaigne’s call for a scientific view of things also suggested that he and his readers wished to know what “really” happened when the French first sought to gain a foothold in the New World. Two failures were on the hori-