A gift to Pope Leo X by King Manuel I of Portugal, the elephant named Hanno became a favorite of the pope himself and thousands of Romans who enjoyed watching his antics in the bestiary in Vatican City.
In the early 16th century rulers of nations across Europe vied with one another to present the reigning pope with extravagant gifts in order to show their devotion to the Church (known after the Protestant Reeormation as the Catholic
Church). Among those seeking the pleasure of the pope was the Portuguese King Manuel I. Because the Portuguese at that time were among the leading Europeans in the realm of long-distance exploration and trade, one of the benefits of Prince Henry the Navigator’s earlier sponsorship of expeditions, Manuel knew that the shipment of an Indian elephant to Rome would dazzle anyone. He entrusted the job of overseeing the elephant’s migration to Tristao da Cunha, a commander of the entire Portuguese fleet.
Hanno was not the first elephant to set foot in Europe, an honor that had taken place centuries earlier before the fall of the Roman Empire, but elephants (and other pachyderms) had almost mythic status to 16th-century Europeans, few of whom had ever seen a live specimen. With little practical experience with such animals, the Portuguese had much difficulty transporting the elephant to Rome. Even though they hired two men to guide the great beast, including a Moor who purportedly could be understood by the elephant, the actual shipment took enormous energy. At one point the elephant refused to set foot on the boat that was to take him to Europe, apparently (so the Portuguese believed at the time) because his trainer had told him about the unpleasantness that awaited him at the other end of the trip. When the Moor was threatened with death if the elephant would not board the ship, he somehow managed to convince the elephant to go along for the journey.
After an arduous sailing and then extensive overland travel across parts of Italy, the elephant finally reached Rome. By the time he got there, he had become a celebrity. Because the elephant walked slowly, crowds of people had advance word of his approach, and they lined the roads to catch a glimpse of him. According to contemporary sources, thousands of spectators managed to see him before his triumphant march into Vatican City. He arrived in front of the pope at Castel San Angelo on March 12, 1514, a bright Sunday afternoon. His trainer had the elephant stop in front of the pope, and the elephant proceeded to bark three times and then fill his trunk with water and spray it on the pontiff, who laughed in delight. Known for his love of excess, Leo X was the ideal recipient of such a gift. He soon did all he could to make the elephant, whom the Romans had named Hanno, comfortable in the Vatican’s bestiary. He appointed one of his officials to take care of the elephant, an odd assignment indeed for a cleric in the pope’s inner circle. The elephant seems to have recognized the pope, too: According to available evidence, he genuflected whenever he saw the pontiff. The people of Rome also became enamored with the beast and named inns after him. When the pope allowed Hanno outside of his enclosure to be paraded in the city, the locals cheered with delight. Poets, some in the employ of the pope, wrote verses to honor Hanno, and artists painted and sculpted his likeness.
Despite the attentions he received, Hanno fell ill and died in June 1516. The pope grieved for the loss of his favorite animal, an expression of sentiment that struck critics of the church, including Martin Luther, who mentioned the pope’s elephant in one of his critiques of the papacy. Another critic, presumably Mario de Peruschi, who was then a financial adviser to the consistory of cardinals, wrote a long satiric last will and testament for Hanno in which he attacked various prominent political and clerical figures. Such attacks, while vicious, represented a minority view, at least of Hanno, whose brief sojourn in Rome endeared him to virtually everyone who saw him.
Further reading: Silvio A. Bedeni, The Pope’s Elephant: An Elephant’s Journey from Deep in India to the Heart of Rome (New York: Penguin, 2000); Donald F. Lach, “Asian Elephants in Renaissance Europe,” Journal of Asian History I (1967): 133-176.
Harriot, Thomas (1560-1621) English mathematician English mathematician and ethnographer whose account of the Native Americans in modern-day coastal North Carolina provided Europeans with the most detailed sketch of any single Indian population during the 16th century.
Born in Oxford in 1560, Thomas Harriot entered St. Mary’s Hall of the University of Oxford in 1577. After his graduation he was hired by Sir Walter Ralegh to be a tutor in mathematics, a subject that then encompassed the disciplines of navigation and astronomy. In the early 1580s he offered guidance to English mariners traveling to North America. When they returned and brought back with them Manteo and Wanchese, two Indians, Harriot quite possibly tried to learn Algonquian from these captives. To breach the language barrier, Harriot created a phonetic alphabet of standardized English phonemes from Algonquian words that could be reproduced accurately. Harriot’s goal was to find a way to preserve precontact Native languages for future study in the hope of finding the underlying features of what Renaissance linguists assumed was the primary language that existed before the Tower of Babel. Harriot’s phonetic system lapsed into obscurity, but his manuscripts were probably used in the 1630s by English grammarians, such as Edward Howes, but, like much of Harriot’s writing, they have since disappeared.
In 1585 Harriot went to Roanoke, along with John Smith, and returned to England in 1586. Upon his return he wrote a detailed account of his travels, which was published in London in 1588. Two years later the book, entitled A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, accompanied by illustrations based on
White’s watercolor paintings rendered by the Flemish engraver Theodor Debry, became an instant sensation. Published with the assistance of Richard Hakluyt the Younger, the 1590 edition of Harriot’s book appeared in English, German, French, and Latin.
The Report described in detail the flora and fauna of the region around Roanoke, on the coast of modern-day North Carolina. It included the most detailed European map rendered of that region during the 16th century, its accuracy no doubt aided by Harriot’s mathematical skills and knowledge of astronomy as well as input from White. Unlike many of the travelers’ accounts published by Hakluyt, Harriot’s descriptions contain much more precision, reflecting both his eye for detail and the fact that he, unlike Hakluyt, was actually on the ground in the Western Hemisphere and did not have to rely on others’ reports.
Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report is a sympathetic ethnographic account of coastal Algonquians that gave England its first in-depth view of Native American life. The 1590 edition of Harriot’s Report consists of four related parts. Part one describes the natural resources around Roanoke that could be shipped to Europe profitably. These goods included such commodities as silkworms, flax, pitch, turpentine, cedar, furs from various animals, iron, and copper. In the second part Harriot described the crops that Europeans could produce in the region. In his mind the region was ideal for maize (see corn), pumpkins, peas, various herbs, an abundance of roots, nuts, fruits, animals with tasty flesh, fowl, and fish. Harriot based this part of the report on his understanding of the local environment and from observing the Carolina Algonquian who lived there and enjoyed these diverse goods. Harriot used the third part of his report to describe how potential colonists could take advantage of the area’s resources for their own good. He was especially impressed by local trees, including oak (which he called “as good timber as any can be”), walnut, maple, beech, elm, cedar, willow, and sassafras, among others. The third part of the report also includes Harriot’s description of the Indians he encountered, an account that touched on the nature of their towns and houses, how and when they conducted wars, their religious practices, and their views of the English men and women who had arrived unannounced on their shores. The 1590 edition also included a fourth part, arguably most famous of all, with de Bry’s engravings of the local Indians. These illustrations depicted individual Indians; the ways that the Native peoples fished, cooked, ate, and prayed; the layout of two of the most important towns, the palisaded village of Pomeiooc and the unfenced town of Secota; the way the Algonquian tended their dead; and the various tattoos that individuals wore. At the end of these pictures Harriot added another section, again with de Bry’s engravings. These illustrations portrayed the PiCTS, the legendary ancient inhabitants of Britain. Why did he include these illustrations in a book about
Title page of Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Dover)
North America? Because, as Harriot put it, he was trying to show that “the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as savage as those of Virginia.” In other words, the pictures provided an anthropological lesson: Europeans always argued that American Indians lacked “civilization”; here were pictures that proved that earlier Europeans were equally “savage.” If the Picts could become the British over time, Harriot argued, then the same sort of cultural evolution could take place in North America.
The engravings in the printed edition of the Report circulated widely after 1590. In fact, this book was perhaps the most successful of the America series produced by de Bry and the other artisans he worked with (at least some of whom were his two sons). Members of de Bry’s workshop re-engraved and reprinted the images in the 17th century, though they chose to do so in books that emerged in German only and they added other images to them, including a fanciful depiction of the 1622 uprising of the Powhatans against the English in Virginia. The images continued to circulate, appearing in the early 18th century in Robert
Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (first printed in London in 1705), and they provided the basis for the engravings in Bernard Picart’s monumental study of religious traditions, published (in the English version) with the title The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World. Scholars continue to debate the differences between the paintings produced in Roanoke by John White and de Bry’s engravings of them, but Harriot’s text remains as a vital source that will always be parallel to the visual evidence that has demanded so much attention.
When Harriot and White returned to England in 1586, they hoped to gain more supplies for the 110 colonists they left behind in Roanoke, but the threat of war with Spain loomed so great that not even Ralegh, who had a claim to ownership of the region that he had inherited from his half brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert (who had perished at sea on his return from Newfoundland in 1583) was willing to attempt a transatlantic journey. After the British defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 the way was finally clear for a return trip to Roanoke. However, by the time the English got back the settlers had vanished. Harriot’s Report thus became a strange epitaph for the so-called lost colonists.
Little is known of Harriot in the last years of his life. At around the same time the illustrated edition of the Report was circulating in England, Ralegh introduced Harriot to Henry, ninth earl of Northumberland, who became Harriot’s patron and provided him with financial support for the rest of his life. When Henry was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1606, he allowed Harriot to move into Syon House, in Isleworth, where Harriot continued his study of mathematics. He became a correspondent of Johannes Kepler, the famous German astronomer whose work on planetary motion formed part of the basis for modern understanding of the evening skies.
Despite his world-class mind, Harriot’s mathematical innovations remained little known in his own age. He died of cancer of the nose in 1621. Ten years later his most important treatise, after the Report, was published under the title Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas. The work helped provide the foundations for the modern study of algebra.
Further reading: Paul Hulton, “Introduction” to Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (New York: Dover, 1972); Peter C. Mancall, ed., Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640 (Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995); M. Rukeyser, Traces of Thomas Harriot (New York: Random House, 1970); Kim Sloan, ed., A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hil-University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
World History
