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COPYRIGHT 2006 Indiana University Press
William Dampier, buccaneer turned natural scientist, modelled himself on Sir Francis Drake in his narrative of the twelve-year sequence of voyages (1679-1691) that took him "deer rownd the globe." (1) Drake brought back a fortune in gold and spices, but all that Dampier had to show for his circumnavigation was, as he says in an annotation to the account of those travels in the British Library manuscript Sloane 3236, "this Journal and my painted prince" (fol. 232v). Published by James Knapton as A New Voyage Round the World (1697), that journal--reworked, amplified, (2) and reviewed in the Philosophical Transactions (19: 426-33)--took Dampier into the circle of the Royal Society (Gill 231-32, 237-39). Financial exigency on his return to England in September 1691 had, however, forced him to relinquish all claims to his "painted prince," Jeoly, a tattooed native of the Spice Islands.
Despite his efforts to construct himself as scientific observer in A New Voyage, it was Dampier's reputation as a buccaneer and his association with Jeoly that were uppermost in John Evelyn's mind when they met at a dinner party in August 1698: "I din'd at Mr. Pepys, where was Cap: Dampier, who had ben a famous Buccaneere, brought hither the painted Prince Jolo, printed a Relation of his very strange adventures, which was very extrordinary, & his observations very profitable" (De Beer 295). Evelyn had previously nominated both Dampier and Jeoly as worthy of commemoration in medallion effigy in his Numismata (1697): Dampier "and the rest of the Buccaneers" in the category of "Great Travellers" and "the painted Prince Giolo, lately shew'd in Public" as the last in a long list of "Men of Name or Merit for something Extrordinary and Conspicuous" (263, 268).
Recent research has uncovered some of Dampier's activities between the time of his return to England and the publication of A New Voyage (Baer), but the last days of Jeoly, who died probably in 1692, remain something of a mystery. The solving of that mystery is the ultimate concern of this essay. Its more immediate aim is to examine the multiple narrative constructions of Jeoly--by Dampier, by his London exhibitors, by Thomas Hyde, and by John Pointer--as a case study of the shifting meaning(s) of curiosity and wonder, and their contingent values, in the early modern period.
The medieval sense of "curiosity" as that "morally excessive and suspect interest in observing the world, seeking novel experiences, or acquiring knowledge for its own sake" (Zacher 4) began to be contested in the first half of the seventeenth century, when curiosity began its rehabilitation as impetus to the pursuit of useful knowledge (Harrison 279-82). By the early 1700s some of its opprobrium had been transferred to "wonder" as the handmaid of gawking ignorance rather than stimulus to scientific enquiry (Daston and Park 321-28, 348-50). Curiosity had also become more or less synonymous with consumerism for seventeenth-century amassers of the collections of imported objects and local artefacts--zoological, botanical, ethnological, mineral--known as "cabinets of curiosities" (Daston and Park 310).
What was the point of this objectified assemblage of curiosity? John Pointer, sometime chaplain of Merton College, Oxford, prefaced his four-volume catalogue to the cabinet that he left to St John's College, (3) the Musceum Pointerianum (ca. 1740), with a defence of charges by "some of the Ignorant & Illiterate Part of Mankind (that only look upon the Out-sides of Things without examining their real & intrinsic Value)" that they were purely for show and sensation (Gunther 455). Individually, Pointer argued, curiosities might have medicinal properties. Taken as a whole, they offered a microcosm of God's creation: "they lead us to the Great Author of Nature, & not only serve to puzzle the Philosopher, but also to admonish (if not convince) the Atheist" (456-57).
Dampier justifies the broad scope of his undertaking in similar terms in the Preface to A Voyage to New Holland, the narrative of his 1699-1702 expedition to Terra Australis Incognita, sponsored by the Admiralty in the name of exploration: "the Things themselves in the Discovery of which I have been imployed, are most worthy of our diligentest Search and Inquiry; being the various and wonderful Works of God in different Parts of the World" (lxvii). Some of the things which Dampier brought back from that voyage--dried plant specimens from Australia, New Guinea, Timor, and Brazil--are preserved today in the herbarium at Oxford established by William Sherard in the 1680s (George 2, 22-23). As inventories of creation, moreover, both A New Voyage and A Voyage to New Holland can themselves be read as narrative cabinets of curiosities. (4)
Ever the opportunist, Dampier played curiosity's widening semantic field both ways. In a self-serving marginal annotation to the account of his travels in Sloane 3236, the manuscript precursor to A New Voyage, he eschews the persona of buccaneer for that of curiosus and, in pseudo-confessional mode, associates curiosity with voluptuousness: "I came into these seas this second time more to Endulge my cureosity then to gett wealth" (fol. 128r). On the other hand, his narrative aim as stated in the Preface to the printed A New Voyage is the selfless gratification of the reader's curiosity: "And as for the Traverses themselves, they make for the Reader's advantage, how little soever for mine; since thereby I have been the better inabled to gratify his Curiosity" (3-4). (5) It is, then, a fitting irony that Dampier's only memento of his years of quest for the fabulous wealth of the Americas, Spanish galleons, and the Spice Islands should have been a commodity destined for the gratification of audiences in the theatre of curiosity, the London show trade. "I proposed," he tells us, "no small Advantage to my self from my painted Prince ... what might be gained by shewing him in England" (347).
Just as Dampier stands midway between Drake and Cook, as the last of the Renaissance and the first of the modern English navigators, so does Jeoly between Calichough (Kalicho)--a man from the region of Baffin Island whom Martin Frobisher brought to England in 1577--and Omai, the Pacific Islander who came to England with James Cook in 1774. Kalicho was a man of principally ethnographic interest, who demonstrated his kayaking and dart skills in Bristol (Cheshire et al. 29-31) but died a month after his arrival in England; Jeoly was a trophy from the Spice Islands, the definitive locus of material gain; and Omai was the Enlightenment's Noble Savage. Whereas Omai was presented by Joseph Banks to George III and Charlotte, and inspired a Christmas pantomime, OMAI: Or, A Trip Round the World, at Covent Garden (Knellwolf 17-21), Jeoly was himself the object of a viewing by William and Mary--and the main attraction at a Fleet Street inn.
The evidence of Sloane 3236, which prioritizes information about the riches of America and the East Indies and their potential extraction over the communication of useful knowledge (Neil 43), suggests that Dampier's original design for Jeoly was of a very different order. The first reference to the "painted Man" in this version of his narrative appears in the course of its account of the year 1686, in a digression about the wealth of gold to be found in the Philippines:
... what adds moste to the riches of this place is the great quantityes of Gold which is...
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