"Clinging to the Coast and Venturing Beyond Known Shores": Recent Works on Renaissance Overseas Expansion and Colonization.

Jerry Brotton. Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 208 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-8014-3499-8.

Nicholas Canny, ed. The Origins of Empire. (The Oxford History of the British Empire, 1.) New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 533 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-19-820562-7.

Pedro de Cieza de Leon. The Discovery and Conquest of Peru. Ed. and trans. Alejandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. (Chronicles of the New World Encounter.) Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. 501 pp. $21.95. ISBN: 0-8223-2146-7.

John Dotson and Aldo Agosto, eds. Christopher Columbus and His Family: The Genoese and Ligurian Documents. (Repertorium Columbianum, 4.) Turnhout: Brepols, 1998. 452 pp. EUR 68. ISBN: 2-503-50740-9.

Harry Kelsey. Sir Francis Drake: The Queen's Pirate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 566 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-300-07182-5.

Gesa Mackenthum. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. 370 pp. $32.95. ISBN: 0-8061-2953-0.

J. R. S. Phillips. The Medieval Expansion of Europe. Second Edition. Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1998. 306 pp. $24.95. ISBN: 0-19-820740-9.

Rafael Varon Gabai. Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. 352 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 0-8061-2833-X.

Sheldon Watts. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 400 pp. $40. ISBN: 0-300-07015-2.

Glyndwr Williams. The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 288 pp. $37.50. ISBN: 0-300-07244-9.

The books discussed in this essay address several themes in Renaissance exploration, including the impact of epidemics in Europe compared to other parts of the world, aspects of European settlement in the Americas and the rationales offered for it, individual English sailing ventures and major themes in the early overseas enterprises of that nation, and the nature and purpose of sixteenth-century European cartography. These works also represent a variety of scholarly genres: systematic overviews (Phillips and Canny); a wide-ranging comparative study (Watts); edited documentary collections (Dotson and Agosto, and Cieza de Leon); narratives of exploration (Kelsey and Williams); interpretive historical monographs (Varon Gabai and Brotton); and an analysis of the rhetoric of dispossession (Mackenthun).

Roughly a decade ago, J. R. S. Phillips and Robert Bartlett released books on European expansion in the late medieval centuries, emphasizing overland campaigns more than naval ventures. [1] Shortly thereafter, Jerry Bentley published on European interactions with diverse Old World cultures, while Janet Abu-Lughod studied thirteenth-century Old World exchange areas that largely excluded European participation. [2] Phillips recently brought out a second edition of his synthesis. Its changes consist of corrections and clarifications of several small sections of the book. The bibliography is also updated and the maps increased in number. A reader of the first edition would likely identify little new in the second, which I view as a compliment, given the accomplishment of the first. In fact, the number of pages is slightly reduced. Both editions reflect Phillips's grasp of the literature on every aspect of European medieval expansion.

The work is divided into five sections. The first consists of three chapters on the beginnings of expansion and the crucial role of merchants and the circumscribed contribution of the crusades. The second part examines Europeans and their ventures into Asia, with emphasis on the Mongol invasions and realms. Separate chapters consider European merchants and missions to the east. The third section consists of individual chapters on medieval Europe and Africa and medieval Europe and North America. The fourth turns to European scholarly concepts of foreign societies and the limits of fifteenth-century geography. The final section examines the fifteenth-century overseas expansion of Europe in light of these previous endeavors to highlight numerous continuities.

Phillips well represents the extent, depth, and reliability of our knowledge in each of these topics. He offers explanations, when called for, and briefly evaluates each one. Phillips holds that the number of contacts between medieval Europe and other continents was much greater and over a longer period than is generally appreciated. Obviously, the book maintains a Eurocentric focus, but the author is careful not to suggest any inherent European superiority over other civilizations or any inevitability in the course of subsequent relationships. Rather, Phillips stresses the slight impact that Europeans had on most other areas of the world with which they came into contact. The maritime and commercial capacities of the Chinese, including the achievements of Zheng He, and of the Muslim coastal states around the greater Indian Ocean, are well described.

Throughout the book, Phillips notes many European undertakings that were targeted against the continent's Muslim rivals, even before the Ottoman victories of the fifteenth century. The notion of Christendom emerged in the ninth century, partly as a reaction to the continuing territorial conquests of Islam. Fifteenth-century Iberian explorers and colonizers in the Americas still expressed hopes that their attainments in these far-removed continents might somehow lead to the demise of Islam and its unrelenting control over the Middle East. Enthusiasts in these enterprises often referred to the early Church and their abiding belief that it had converted peoples in Asia, Africa, and even in the Americas. This belief helped to assuage concerns that these foreign religious traditions might prove intractable to conversion. It also enabled the explorers to justify their actions as assisting or relieving coreligionists rather than as directing an onslaught against an intact, autonomous culture.

Phillips makes many cogent statements about patterns in European contact with other civilizations. He points out that European merchants rarely succeeded at international trade merely through establishing formal business relationships and providing desired products. Rather, they participated actively in a variety of civic and even religious ceremonies, at times even establishing ritual bonds with the families of local magnates. In his conclusion, Phillips notes that Europe would ultimately prevail over most of the rest of the world during the several centuries that follow the end of his book, but not because of any inherent material advantages. Instead, he argues the Europeans were motivated toward expansion to restore or install the Church in foreign lands. Certainly the Europeans of this age responded to economic motivations, but these seem insufficient by themselves to explain the nature and scope of their endeavors, for some non-European groups (the Muslim trading princes of the Indian Ocean area most pr ominently) manifested equal economic motivations, but never became serious threats at world commercial domination.

Sheldon Watts has written a lengthy book about certain epidemics from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century that compares the response of Western Europe to one or more non-Western cultures. Watts provides a chapter on each of his case studies: the plague in Western Europe and the Middle East, 1347 to 1844; leprosy in the Medieval West and the "Tropical World" up to the fourteenth century; smallpox in the Old World and the New, 1518-1977; syphilis in Western Europe and East Asia, 1492-1844; cholera in Great Britain and India, 1817-1920; and finally yellow fever and malaria in Africa and the New World, 1647-1928.

Watts bases his discussion on his extensive reading of the secondary literature on the individual cases. His erudition and astute observations reward a close reading of the book. Watts does not spend much time on the etiology and precise nature of the diseases; generally he relates just enough for the reader to appreciate the distinctive nature and impact of each. Instead, he stresses the social and institutional consequences on individual countries of the onslaught of a major epidemic or series of epidemics of a particular disease.

Watts never explains why he chose his basis of comparison: Western versus one or more non-Western societies. He never establishes what in his mind made Europe so singular that it should be distinguished from the rest of the world. Rather, such a difference is assumed. The Western world is considered to be a uniform culture zone for the purposes of this study, as Watts jumps from one country to another for his particular examples, wherever he feels the best corroborating case is to be found. Nor is a distinction made between urban and rural beliefs and practices.

Even more disconcerting is Watts's implicit assumption that any non-Western example serves as well as another; hence he seemingly utilizes the best documented case for each example of an epidemic. So in one chapter he considers the Islamic Middle East, while in another China serves as the central example. But to Watts's thinking, the Middle East and China in these cases do not represent just themselves but supposedly the larger non-Western world in microcosm. In his view the non-Western world contains its own set of values and reactions to these diseases that is not differentiated by culture or region. This is a highly doubtful proposition of major consequence, and it is never explored in a systematic manner.

Watts tends to be monocausal in his explanations. The reader does not come away with a sense of the rich complexity of a society's understanding of the nature and impact of a specific disease. Nor does he remain consistently within the framework he himself establishes for the book: one Western culture compared to one non-Western. Instead he meanders in an interesting and informative way to tidbits from other societies and time periods. The chapter on yellow fever wanders among virtually every major slaveholding society in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The reader is forced finally to inquire about this informative book exactly what its point or thesis is. Even if Watts had clung to his organizational framework more rigorously, what precisely would be demonstrated? The work, though lengthy, never addresses what a strict comparison of the European reaction to epidemics to that of other world cultures illustrates. So while this study contains useful information and insights, it never attempts in a serious fashion to craft an articulated new perspective contrasting Western and non-Western societies.

Studies of cartography have distinguished the literature on Renaissance overseas exploration over the past decade. Jerry Brotton's book fits comfortably in this corpus of innovative writings. Much more a monograph than the two books already discussed, Trading Territories focuses on the Portuguese and the Ottomans in the sixteenth century to show how the Europeans turned away from depicting imaginary worlds in their illustrations of far-away parts of the globe in favor of realistic portrayals as these regions became economically lucrative. Cartographers shifted from a preoccupation with the imperial pretensions of rulers, which might require intentional distortion of distances and land-mass configurations, to reliable depictions of geographical features -- as best they knew and had the capacity to express -- to facilitate the operations of the joint-stock trading companies that rose to such importance by the early seventeenth century.

Crucial to this process were the cartographic knowledge and tradition of the Ottoman Empire, treated in depth in a substantial chapter. Heirs of the classical and Arab traditions of geographical description, these Ottoman masters expressed the most recent findings of their maritime traders to enhance cartographic descriptions. Middle Eastern mapmakers were admired by their European rivals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some European rulers even honored Ottoman rulers for their sponsorship of expanding geographical knowledge and quality mapmaking. This well-illustrated book includes photographs of some of these maps, along with others prominently discussed in it.

The depiction of the Moluccas in the sixteenth century represents Brotton's primary example of the way in which cartographers shifted their orientation from representations of imperial territorial claims to more precise pictorial descriptions of distances and dimensions to satisfy the emerging market among merchants -- particularly those organized into the joint-stock trading companies -- for maps of Asia and the Pacific islands.

He regards Behaim and Ribeiro as leaders of this shift among mapmakers to commercial purposes. Both profited considerably from this new emphasis in their creations. Behaim's famed globe of 1492 includes a quite accurate legend describing the location of spices in the region bordering the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese promoted the construction of precise and commercially useful maps more than any other European power, reflecting their own activities in Asian waters. They did so even though the new maps diminished their claims to the Moluccas, which they were contesting with Spain. Subsequent cartographers, most notably Mercator and Ortelius, used the print medium to distribute far more maps than had been the rule before them. Ortelius published a new atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, in 1570 and had it improved and expanded with new maps added to each edition.

The Repertorium Columbianum is a publishing undertaking sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Its purpose is to provide accurate translations of significant original documents of the time related to the European undertaking that resulted in the discovery of the Americas. Its scope is the years from 1492, marking Columbus's first voyage, to 1521, the third and final year of Cortes's successful campaign. The first three volumes were notably valuable compilations: James Lockhart's edition and translation from Nahuatl of indigenous accounts of the conquest of the Aztecs; Helen Nader's edition and translation of Christopher Columbus's Book of Privileges, detailing the concessions and exemptions Columbus and his descendants were to receive; and Roberto Rusconi's edition of Columbus's Book of Prophecies. [3] But the current volume, number four in the series, is very hidebound and rather useless to scholars seriously interested in European activities in the Americas during the early deca des following the discovery. John Dotson, the editor and translator, and Aldo Agosto, the textual editor, compiled and prepared for scholarly presentation every item in Genoa and the surrounding countryside that referred to Columbus and his larger family.

Through no fault of Dotson and Agosto, this compilation proves to be quite dull and routine. Even worse, it fails to inform the reader about the forces that led people to sail into unknown waters in search of profit and foreign regions. After all, when Christopher Columbus turned to maritime trade and discovery, he did so from Portugal and Spain, where members of the family had long been based. They had not pursued distant trade and exploration while still in Genoa, but did so in Iberia because of distinctive pro expansion forces present there, factors quite absent from Liguria, distant as it is from the shores of the Atlantic.

There in Genoa and its environs, the Columbus family members primarily practiced artisan crafts, though with a commercial bent, working in cloth, wine, and cheese. Oriented locally, they did not invest in overseas trade. The considerable corpus of documents that the research team uncovered in regional archives, then, speaks to the family's activities in Genoa and hardly even hints at their subsequent initiative or activities once they were in a social and business climate conducive to maritime ventures. Thus, these Genoese documents are uninteresting and extraneous to readers looking for precursors and tendencies that help to explain later actions.

Pedro de Cieza de Leon arrived in the Andean region shortly after Pizarro's conquest of the Incas and remained during the extended period of civil wars among the Spaniards over the division of wealth, Indian laborers, and political appointments. He immediately displayed great interest in the civilization of the Incas and in the Spanish conquest. Cieza de Leon traveled incessantly throughout the former empire, often interviewing prominent Incas and taking extensive notes in the process. After his return to Spain, he used these to write a four-part history of the character and conquest of the Inca empire that totalled some 8,000 manuscript pages. It is perhaps the finest chronicle composed by an early Spanish colonist, and is certainly exceptional in its broad-based research, its generally dispassionate tone, and its discussion of so many elements from both the native culture and the process of conquest.

Part One was published with royal sanction to great success in 1553. Unfortunately, Cieza de Leon died the very next year and sections of the remaining manuscript disappeared, hence the great delight in the discovery of a major section of the work, never published and missing since the sixteenth century. Part Three, whose translation makes up the volume under review, was found in the Vatican Library by an Italian scholar in the 1970s. It had apparently passed into the Spanish royal archive in the Escorial shortly after the author's demise and within a few decades had been transferred to the library of Queen Christiana of Sweden. Upon her death, the library was sold to Pope Alexander VII, who ultimately merged his collection into the Vatican Library.

This edition and translation into English was undertaken by the Cooks, both established scholars of colonial Peru. Their introduction is substantial and learned, their translation is reliable and lucid, and their notes to the text clear and illuminating. The extensive but very readable narrative begins with Pizarro's initial departure for the Andes. It ends well over 400 pages later, having covered the succeeding decade, and concludes with the arrival of a Spanish relief force that lifts the Inca siege of some 200 Spaniards isolated in

Cuzco between 1536-1537. Part Four, which follows, treats the civil wars between Spanish factions over much of the next decade.

Cieza de Leon's coverage of the conquest of the Incas is not tendentious and is drawn from a variety of sources and interviews. It is expressed in a straight-forward narrative style, with occasional explanations or discussions of disputed points thrown in. As a narrative, Cieza de Leon's treatment compares well with modern treatments of the conquest. [4] Tensions and rivalries among the Spanish leaders, and fear and dissension among the participants are discussed quite openly. The capture of the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa in Cajamarca in 1532 is treated properly as the successful implementation of a common Spanish ploy, not as a brilliant or last-hope measure, which is how some other chroniclers regard it. Cieza de Leon views the subsequent execution of Atahuallpa as unjustified, because the expedition's leaders had not yet learned the motivation and reasoning of the Andean peoples. He describes Pizarro's manipulation of the surviving royal family and its factions to secure Spanish rule over the empire. But he also well covers the growing alienation of the Inca royal lineage from Pizarro and the other Spaniards, as its members came to appreciate that the Spanish intended to remain and rule over them rather than leave with war booty, like the maritime bandits that they had initially mistaken them for. The character of the Inca revolt is well developed, as is the nature and depth of the animosity that emerged between Pizarro and his long-time business partner, Diego de Almagro, once the latter found himself and his followers excluded from the booty and laborers that Pizarro distributed so generously to his own cadre. The book ends with the Spanish suppression of this revolt and just before the outbreak of civil war in the region over the choice for next governor of the Viceroyalty.

In an innovative and significant book, Rafael Varon Gabai thoroughly covers the impact of the conquest of Peru on Pizarro family members in the sixteenth century. He spent many years in the archives of Peru and Spain assembling a portrait of their investments, businesses, wealth, and expenditures to evaluate their level of success and failure in various undertakings, and to measure their status and show how it was displayed both in Peru and Spain. As is so often the case in this world, a strategic marriage at a vital time, in this case between Hernando and his late brother's daughter, consolidated the family's holdings and situated the previously imperiled family for at least another generation among the country's highest elite.

The entire undertaking of the conquest of Peru was organized as a private, capitalist venture, largely by Francisco Pizarro, with substantial assistance from the trusted deputies whom he assigned as his lieutenants.

This was typical in these endeavors. [5] Even merchants who remained behind in Panama invested substantially in the Peruvian enterprise. The participants entered into a great number of business agreements and companies among themselves. Following the successful conquest, the crown issued a fresh series of edicts granting the Pizarro family greater wealth and standing, understandably in Peru itself, usually in the form of mines and agricultural holdings. The revolt of Gonzalo Pizarro against the imposition of crown rule caused the family to lose some important properties once the movement had been suppressed.

Although Hernando Pizarro situated himself permanently in Spain just a few years after the conquest at the request of his brother Francisco, he controlled and developed the family's still extensive holdings in Peru from the other side of the Atlantic. But the crown's legal assault on the family for its recalcitrance and attempted revolts required substantial payments directly into the royal coffers. Further, the colonists' increasing competition for resources and labor in Peru put the Pizarro family's holdings at risk, and ultimately some of its most-prized lands were lost.

The family supported a considerable cadre of professionals: bankers, merchants, attorneys, mayordomos, managing partners in specific enterprises, priests (most of them caring for the spiritual needs of the Indians entrusted to the Pizarros), secretaries, and numerous lesser types, such at tutors and stewards. All of these personnel were organized into a strict hierarchy under Hernando. However, the distance imposed by the oceans enabled the family's representatives in Peru to enjoy some latitude in their operations. The Pizarro family was related to various other lesser, but still prosperous and respectable, lineages. They all cooperated with each other in business undertakings and political matters.

In Peru, the Pizarros acknowledged their ties to certain indigenous noble families from the matings of the brothers with native women during the early years of settlement. The heads of these lineages used these political advantages to further their interests; some of these individuals became substantial regional businessmen competing effectively in the Spanish colonial market economy.

The high cost of courtly living in Madrid dissipated much of the family fortune by the end of the sixteenth century The family title -- Marquesado tie la Conquista -- endured into the twentieth century, but with scarce economic resources to support it even in the seventeenth.

The Origins of Empire is the first in a five-volume series, The Oxford History of the British Empire. Admirably edited by Nicholas Canny, the volume consists of twenty-one essays that address such themes as imperial competition, guns and sails, literature and empire, Ireland, the tobacco colonies, New England, the Caribbean, West Africa, Asia, imperial governance, and trade and economics, just to mention some of the most salient. The cutoff date for coverage is 1700, though a few essays go a bit beyond that date to complete their themes. This volume is praiseworthy in its coverage, evenness of tone, and quality of scholarly contributions. The essays are not only reliable syntheses of their subjects; most also afford fresh insights. Canny's introductory chapter on the origins of empire deserves special mention, as does Anthony Pagden's on the struggle for legitimacy and the image of empire in the Atlantic to 1700, John Appleby's on war, politics, and colonization to 1625, David Armitage's on literature and em pire, and Peter Mancall's on Native Americans and English America to 1700. The essays on England's American colonies do not disappoint, but they lack some of the freshness and originality found in the thematic chapters, probably because of the greater familiarity of the subjects themselves.

P. J. Marshall's contribution on the English in Asia to 1700 marks a notable contrast to the considerable success the English enjoyed in the Americas. In both South Asia and East Asia their ambitions were far from realized because of the strength of the economies, militaries, and polities they encountered. Rivalries with other European traders operating in Asian waters also curtailed British aspirations.

While the thoroughness of coverage is laudable, a couple of topics seem somewhat underrepresented. The lack of a chapter on the English and the Atlantic slave trade is striking, given its scale and importance already in the seventeenth century. The essay by P. E. H. Hair and Robin Law entitled "The English in Western Africa to 1700" talks mostly about European competition in the region and the role of joint-stock companies. It considers the slave trade largely as just another aspect of their trading undertakings. It does not explore the operation of the English slave trade in Africa nor the character of the Atlantic slave trade. The chapter on the Chesapeake colonies virtually ignores slavery, though that on the Carolinas contains a substantial section.

The selections on the Caribbean would seem logical sites for a developed consideration of black slavery. However, despite the economic importance of the Caribbean islands to England already in the second half of the seventeenth century, just a single chapter is devoted to the subject. And even then, Hilary Beckles devotes only several pages to slavery on the islands.

Harry Kelsey, author of Sir Francis Drake: The Queen's Pirate, claims that this is the first complete biography of the famous mariner in nearly a century and that it reveals Drake as an amoral privateer concerned with making his own fortune as much as advancing England's political and imperial objectives. But his bibliography cites at least five books on the life of Drake published in just the last thirty years, leaving aside those that cover a substantial part of his naval career. Further, few students of England's maritime history in the seventeenth century will be surprised to discover that Drake mixed a healthy share of self-interest in with his naval exploits on behalf of the country. Such was expected throughout Europe in the early modern period. Even Kelsey's subtitle acknowledges how much he himself sees Drake furthering the interests of the government; he terms him "The Queen's Pirate."

The biography is based on vast archival research in England, Spain, France, and Italy, among other countries -- even including Mexico. And the endnotes display how much Kelsey brings this original documentation to the fore. However, it seems not to have transformed the popularly accepted view of Drake. Instead, much confirms the standard depiction of his career and values.

The biography does not relate whether Drake was typical of English seamen of his time or an exception. Nor is it very good at placing Drake in the context of his times, a common fault in biographies. In substantial ways, for example, Drake's trade or raid tactics replicated the strategy of Iberian mariners during their rapid overseas expansion over the preceding 150 years. [6] Kelsey does not discuss the nature of English society and government at the time, nor the character of international relations that would place Drake so often at the forefront of naval assaults against Spain and its empire.

Scholars of the Spanish empire will find Drake involved in incidents that parallel those of Spanish explorers and conquerors. Similar to Cortes against the Aztecs, Drake fabricates a story that while he was in Upper California, an Indian king offered him sovereignty over his land and placed a crown on his head. (Note the assumption that the crown is a universal symbol of kingship.)

Kelsey's biography is substantial and worthwhile. The amount of original research he conducted and integrated into the work is praiseworthy. But in the end, the scale of the differences in his portrait of Drake from the standard one seems more incremental than the fundamental reorientation of our understanding which Kelsey sought to achieve.

Glyndwr Williams has long studied English maritime activities in the Pacific through the eighteenth century. His most recent book provides a thorough overview of England's limited presence in that ocean until about 1750. It is highly episodic, reflecting the ebb and flow of that country's involvement in that part of the world. Williams conducted considerable original archival research for this study, but all of it in English-language sources. Unfortunately, although most of the English undertakings involved attacks on Spanish settlements or vessels, no Spanish documentation is incorporated into this study.

Williams says little about exploration or English attempts to establish trading relations with any island peoples. The continual refrain is instead raids against Spanish silver shipments, most often the Manila Galleon, or against Spanish ports along the west coast of South America. Few of these endeavors succeeded, but English captains did seize the Manila Galleon three times, the last occurring in the 1740s. England eternally questioned how much it should commit to challenging the Spanish and the Dutch in the Pacific, and even these successes did not result in systematic campaigns. England also vacillated in its policy toward Spain, and by the last decade of the seventeenth century, it was cooperating in some foreign-policy undertakings with its former archrival. England also increasingly emphasized the pursuit of legal trade with the Spanish American colonies. More than a few British politicians and mariners recognized the contradiction or raiding a country's empire while pursuing peaceful trade with it.

While England occasionally dispatched an organized expedition into the Pacific, much of the activity decade after decade involved efforts by freebooters based in the Caribbean to make a quick fortune by sailing through the Straits of Magellen to descend upon an unsuspecting ship or coastal community. Often they lost men and ships to the high winds and seas at the southern end of the continent. But Spain lacked the resources to erect strong fortifications at every port on the Pacific coast and to bolster the small number of ships it operated in that ocean. So if an English force survived the transit into the Pacific and could time its arrival with that of the Manila Galleon, it stood a good chance of capturing its silver. This accomplished, it was prudent to continue westward around the world rather than to sail back into the teeth of Spanish naval strength along the Atlantic coast.

Even the famed South Sea Company of the early eighteenth century based its expectation of profit in part on seizing a Chilean port to serve as a base for expeditions into the Pacific Ocean. Despite the failure of the Company, in the 1740s English commercial interests and some politicians planned nonetheless to stir up a rebellion in Peru with the idea that the resultant government would be sympathetic to English interests. England accordingly dispatched Commodore George Anson into the Pacific in command of several ships with such orders. But with his small fleet weakened by losses from bad weather near the Straits of Magellen, he abandoned this goal and instead went out to stalk the Manila Galleon, and ultimately to capture it. But this victory was not followed up by further voyages. England was having more luck contracting with Spain for access to its American colonies, and Anson's victory proved to be that country's last belligerent foray into Spanish areas and shipping lanes in the Pacific in that century .

Gesa Mackenthum provides an excellent analysis of the rhetoric used by prominent writers about the initial colonial ventures, some being participants and others observers from afar. These authors include Richard Hakluyt, Hernan Cortes, Thomas Harriot, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Smith, and Puritan leaders. Mackenthum argues that these colonial writers sought to speak for indigenous peoples, while silencing the natives' own leaders. She reveals that the English emulated the success of the Spanish in conquering native empires and exploiting vast deposits of precious metals to establish prosperous, complex colonial societies. They also harkened back to their subjugation of Ireland. The earliest English colonizing efforts in the Americas typically sought either to erect a base from which to raid Spanish silver fleets, or to discover rich mines and subordinate large native populations. But the few raiding bases ever set up fell quickly to Spanish counterattacks, and the colonists found that eastern North America diff ered fundamentally from Mesoamerica and the Andean zone in its lack of precious metals and of densely settled, fully agricultural sedentary peoples.

The book is theoretically informed by some of the latest approaches to literary discourse, but the author maintains a critical perspective to them and to the literary sources themselves, with the result that even scholars not attuned to literary theory can likely understand her application of it in most cases. As important, it often does provide a deeper understanding of the texts. Her dissection of other theorists' misunderstanding of the character of early colonial writings is delightful to read. Todorov and Greenblatt, to cite just two prominent victims of her commentaries, can never be regarded as authoritative again.

Mackenthum conducts a sensitive reading of the sources associated with the early identification of cannibalism in the Americas to show that aesthetic judgments often replaced firm evidence as proof of the heinous practice among one ethnic group or another. Each European colonizing country sought to further its nationalist ideology and aims through the construction or tailoring of myths. The English made use of the legend of Madoc, but the Spanish under Cortes reshaped Mesoamerican beliefs in the return of Quetzalcoatl, an important god. Cortes likewise invented out of whole cloth speeches supposedly delivered by Montezuma that identified the Spanish as the rightful rulers of the land and the Aztecs as their appreciative caretakers who now turned it over to them with delight.

One of the strongest sections of the book is a textured and skeptical reading of early colonists' assertions that the natives understood them to be returning gods. These clear fictions served the aims of establishing the colonists' legitimate title to the land -- and often sovereignty over the local peoples -- and demonstrating that the natives immediately appreciated the inherent superiority of the Europeans. When the native societies eventually rose up to drive out the invaders, the Europeans accused them of treachery, which was then portrayed as an inbred deficiency in the character of the natives. With this understanding, the effort by John Smith to force Powhatan to kneel so that he could crown him in the name of the English king, and Powhatan's resistance to it, take on fresh meaning.

The author is equally attuned to reading post-contact Indian writings. She shows how the precontact indigenous historical traditions penetrate these texts in the form of historical cycles, weak and bewitched monarchs, and the expectation of prophecies and portents foreshadowing every cataclysm. Such qualities can be found in the Florentine Codex, various annales from Mesoamerican communities, and from such disparate writers as Chimalpahin and Munoz Camargo.

Much of the early British writings on the colonies was self-serving and promotional, Hakluyt and Harriott being particular examples. The colonists' pretense of superiority over the local native peoples is undercut by their military subordination to them and by their reluctant acknowledgments that they depended on them for their food -- although they simultaneously asserted that these peoples were wandering nomads with no claim to the land.

Mackenthun's bold scholarly enterprise has rewarded her audience with a deeper understanding of early colonial writings. She had addressed a variety of sources in different languages, and her approach and findings could be profitably extended to numerous other texts of the time. All of this is presented in concise and lucid prose, which is more striking because it was translated from the original German.

As a group, these books are of various types with distinct goals and levels of attainment. They certainly do not represent a new school or dominant approach to Renaissance exploration and colonization. But while some are quite traditional, and offer only a limited measure of new knowledge, others point to new questions, uses of evidence, and unanticipated perspectives that will reverberate through approaches to the subject for some years to come.

(1.) J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

(2.) Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

(3.) James Lockhart, ed. and trans., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Helen Nader, ed. and trans., Book of Privileges Issued to Christopher Columhus to King Fernando and Queen Isabel 1492-1502 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Roberto Rusconi, ed., The Book of Prophecies, Edited by Christopher Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

(4.) John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), is perhaps the most comprehensive modern account.

(5.) John E. Kicza, "Patterns in Early Spanish Overseas Expansion," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 49:2 (April 1992), 229-53, provides an overview of the organization and practices of Spanish expeditions in the Americas.

(6.) In this regard, notably missing from the bibliography are: Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); and Felipe Fernendez-Armesto, Before Columbus. Exploration and Colonizations from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).