The Historical Magazine
July 1860
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NOTE |
Old hoaxes never die; they always find new champions. The following anonymous article, from The Historical Magazine for July 1860 (pp. 196-198) discussed the penchant of French writers of the 1600s and 1700s for inventing false discoveries in the relatively unknown wilds of America. These hoaxes, while recognized as such more than 150 years ago, continue to find believers among fringe writers even today. Richard Thornton attempted to resurrect, for example, the Rochefort hoax discussed below in June 2013.
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Fictitious Discoveries in America
At a time when the continent of America, and especially that portion which, less productive in precious metals, has been the nursery of heroes and of free institutions, was, to most European readers, an unknown and unexplored land, many used a traveller’s license to exaggerate and develop, and many a crowd of listeners gaped in wonder at the extraordinary tales contained in the last hook on America. Exaggeration is bad enough, but still we can content ourselves with the sage dictum of a learned historian, “Exaggeration only proves the truth;” and as long as there was some truth at the bottom, we might pardon the exuberance of fancy, the vivacity of the imagination, or the exigency of public taste, for the adventitious circumstances under which poor naked truth was buried. But, alas! this was not all. Some invented; made their stories out of whole cloth: lied absolutely and barefacedly.
Now, we intend to take up a few of these—fellows as bad as the Jersey wreckers that used to set up false lights to lure the unwary and unsuspecting navigator to ruin; men who have misled historians, bothered students, wasted their precious time, led them to unparalleled outlay in books, merely to enable them arrive at the fact of a writer’s dishonesty.
Poor friar Mark, whose patronymic no man knoweth, but who, on entering his Franciscan convent, was called, from his birth-place, Mark of Nice, was long placed in this class; but our recent knowledge of New Mexico, subjects him at most to the charge of a lively imagination, and to exaggeration intentional or natural.
We have placed in our heading, as the first offender, Rochefort. “Histoire Naturelle and Morale des Antilles de l’Amerique, à Rotterdam, chez Arnout Leers, Marchant Libraire, 1658,” is engraven on the title of a quarto volume of fair size and sufficiently imposing appearance. Chapter viii., which extends from page 353 to page 379, inclusive, is devoted, not to the Antilles, but to a “Digression on the nature of the country of the Apalachites, their manners, their ancient and their new Religion.” The preceding chapter is devoted to the connection of these Apalachites with the Caribs, and in it we are introduced to “Monsieur Bristock, an English gentleman, one of the most curious men in the world, who, among his other rich acquirements, speaks in perfection the language of the Virginians and Floridians,” from whom he derives his information, and who, “when need shall be, will confirm the truth of his statements.” The Apalachites, according to him, inhabit the country of Apalache, running from 33° 25′ N. to 87° N., communicating with the Gulf of Mexico, by the River Espiritu Santo, or Hitanachi. These Apalachites were the ancestors of the Caribs, and at war with the Cofachites, a tribe north of them. Their territory embraced six provinces: Bemarin, Amani or Amana, Matique, Schama, Meraco, and Achalaques. The productions, animal and vegetable, are carefully described, as well as the dress, habitation, and manners of the people. Their capital was Melilot, a city of two thousand houses. Their wonderful temple stood on the equally wonderful mountain of Olaimi, near far-famed Melilot.
These Apalachites had, however, mainly renounced paganism and embraced Christianity, partly through the teaching of the French, who attempted to settle Florida, but more especially through some English people, who, seeking to escape from the Indian-war-vexed Virginia in 1621 to New England, were cast on the coast of Florida, and, attracting a considerable number of ecclesiastics and people of quality, laid the foundations of a colony. Turning their attention to the benighted state of the people, these zealous English converted, in ten or twelve years, most of the officers and heads of families in Bemarin and Amana, so that, says he, “they have at present among them a bishop, and several learned and zealous priests, who labor with joy and fidelity in this ample harvest of the Lord; and, to advance this excellent work, have erected colleges wherever there are churches.” This was the statement of his last memoirs from America.
Soon after the English got into the country, however, the Spaniards sent in a company of Religious of the order of Minims, whom Pope Urban VIII. had dispatched as Apostolic missionaries, and who, after their arrival, in 1643, labored most successfully near Achalaque.
This strange account, backed by his Carib vocabulary, has misled many, and yet the whole is a fiction. Building on a few names found in De Laet, or some Spanish account—perhaps a manuscript narrative—he has made a golden picture, which, in spite of its apparent inconsistencies, has been regarded as exaggerated, but based on truth. Yet, to place the bishop and priests among English refugees was suspicious, and equally so the fact that no Spanish writer ever mentions any mission of Minims to Florida. As an order originating in France, the Society of St. Francis de Paula might be found more readily in French than in Spanish parts; but the writer, not over familiar with such matters, confounded, doubtless, the Fratres Minores or Franciscans, with the Minimi or Minims.
Translated into English as the “History of the Caribby Islands, London, 1666,” Rochefort’s work was extensively followed by English writers, and his account is to be found in Sanson’s “Atlas,” Ogilby’s “America,” Montanus, Wapper, Oldmixon, and others. Mr. Brinton rather inclines to believe it real; but as the very points which seem to support it could be gleaned from known works at the time, we are more disposed to share the Opinion of Mr. Buckingham Smith, that it is a total invention. “The framework,” says he, “is taken from Garcilaso, and the accounts by the French of their occupation of Florida. Some names may be borrowed from the maps of the day; others appear to be those of mere fancy. Our knowledge of the geography and physical character of the country renders the story often improbable and sometimes absurd.”
The whole story of English refugees in Florida corresponding with France, but unknown to English settlers in Virginia or the English government, which sent them bishops and priests, is too untenable to stand examination; and if the latter ecclesiastics bore papal faculties, it but adds one difficulty more in the matter.
A few years after the appearance of Rochefort’s work, the Franciscan Hennepin, who had published a valuable volume at Paris, in 1683, on the expedition of La Salle, retired to Holland, and there reissued his work, with additions, in 1697. He had always had a great fancy for sailor’s yarns, and on revising his first edition seems to have deemed it deficient in that point—or his editor did; for, after all, perhaps he was guiltless of his second edition. He consequently introduced a voyage down the Mississippi, and that the first ever performed; for he ambitioned the glory of having first descended the Father of Waters. This voyage he performs in a most extraordinary manner. He waited till March 12, 1680, and then set out on the 8th, from the mouth of the Illinois for the mouth of the Mississippi, which he reached in thirteen days, arriving at the gulf on the 25th or 26th of March, and started back without any delay, but did not get off withal till April 1st. But lost time was soon made up. His arms handled the paddle as never mortal arms had done before. Ninety miles a day, he avers, he can easily paddle up stream. So in eleven days his canoe had sped up the current of the Mississippi to a point four hundred and fifty miles above the mouth of the Illinois, and this advancing for most of the way only by night! This voyage was translated, with the rest of his work, into English, and received by many, in spite of its absurdities—many of which the author manfully adhered to, against all protestation. Indeed, its authority was never completely demolished till Sparks, in his biographies of Marquette and La Salle, brought it to a strict analysis; and Hennepin, shorn of the glory he so fondly coveted of having been the first explorer of the Mississippi to its mouth, remains one of the earliest, if not the first, who ascended it to the Falls of St. Anthony, and undoubtedly the namer of that rapid.
Baron la Hontan, first a soldier in Canada, then an officer, retired to Europe in disgust and wrote a book. It is readable; and it was read, translated, and spread broad-cast. Spiced with a little of the free thinking then coming into popularity; putting the keen thrusts of the new French school at Christianity most inappositely into the mouth of an Indian chief; manufacturing a high-sounding name, Garangula or Grangula, from the French nickname Grande gueule, he invented a speech for his orator which many of us declaimed in boyhood with intense effect; then he soared still higher and manufactured a river, which long appeared on maps as The Long River of La Houtan.
The baron’s story is, that, following Marquette’s path, he descended the Wisconsin to the Mississippi; ascended that river to the Long River, which he entered, and with a tardiness equalled only by Hennepin’s speed, sailed for eighty days without reaching half way to its Bource. Its banks he lines with nations of civilized Indians, the Eokoros, Esanapes, Gnaesitares, the bearded Mozeemlak, and others, who have eluded all modern investigators, while the wondrous Tahuglauk are equally unknown. St. Peter’s River alone, by its locality, corresponds to his famous stream, but it sadly lacks the dimensions he assigns to his Long River. He wished probably to have the credit of having explored the untried wilderness, and, grouping together Indian accounts of distant rivers, compiled a voyage on one of them, which he invested with the attributes and volume of many. His account, published in 1703, was translated into several languages, and finding credit with the compilers of historical and geographical dictionaries as unreliable as modern encyclopedists, induced the insertion in many of his Long River—“as fabulous,” Charlevoix truly remarks, “as the Isle Barataria, of which Sancho Panza was made governor,” as well as of tribes whose existence rests on no foundation but his account.
Another fiction of the kind appeared originally in the Mercure Galant, in November, 1711, and found its way into English compilations, receiving a certain degree of credit. It purported to be drawn from a manuscript found in Canada.
According to this, ten men, bent on new discoveries, ascended the Mississippi in three canoes, and after a long voyage found another river, running south-southwest, to which they carried their canoes, and, sailing down, reached the country of the Escaaniba, two hundred leagues in extent, abounding in gold, and governed by King Aganzan, who claimed descent from Montezuma, and maintained his authority by an army which, in time of peace, was 100,000 strong. The capital was six leagues from the River Missi, or Golden River, and gold was so plentiful and so little valued by the people that each of the travellers carried off some two hundred and forty pounds. These Escaaniba traded with a nation distant a six months’ journey, to whom they sent regular caravans.
Now that Frazer’s River leads to lands of gold, this fable is not uninteresting, and we propose Escaaniba as the name of a new province in the auriferous land.
These are not the only inventions of the kind to be found. French literature furnished all these. A journey of two English sailors through the country, from Florida to Cape Breton, in 1568, smacks strongly of invention; and the story, of unknown origin, of the party of Spaniards who ascended the Mississippi and Ohio in boats, seeking the silver-bottomed lake in New York, must be ranged in the same class of fictitious voyages or discoveries.
These inventions are of a past century, but that our own has inventors, the Collier Shakspeare shows; and as the demand for rare tracts or unpublished manuscripts relating to our early history is great, the temptation to literary forgery is the greater. Unless caution is observed, collectors will be deceived by counterfeit manuscripts, as by counterfeit Pine-tree Shillings.
Now, we intend to take up a few of these—fellows as bad as the Jersey wreckers that used to set up false lights to lure the unwary and unsuspecting navigator to ruin; men who have misled historians, bothered students, wasted their precious time, led them to unparalleled outlay in books, merely to enable them arrive at the fact of a writer’s dishonesty.
Poor friar Mark, whose patronymic no man knoweth, but who, on entering his Franciscan convent, was called, from his birth-place, Mark of Nice, was long placed in this class; but our recent knowledge of New Mexico, subjects him at most to the charge of a lively imagination, and to exaggeration intentional or natural.
We have placed in our heading, as the first offender, Rochefort. “Histoire Naturelle and Morale des Antilles de l’Amerique, à Rotterdam, chez Arnout Leers, Marchant Libraire, 1658,” is engraven on the title of a quarto volume of fair size and sufficiently imposing appearance. Chapter viii., which extends from page 353 to page 379, inclusive, is devoted, not to the Antilles, but to a “Digression on the nature of the country of the Apalachites, their manners, their ancient and their new Religion.” The preceding chapter is devoted to the connection of these Apalachites with the Caribs, and in it we are introduced to “Monsieur Bristock, an English gentleman, one of the most curious men in the world, who, among his other rich acquirements, speaks in perfection the language of the Virginians and Floridians,” from whom he derives his information, and who, “when need shall be, will confirm the truth of his statements.” The Apalachites, according to him, inhabit the country of Apalache, running from 33° 25′ N. to 87° N., communicating with the Gulf of Mexico, by the River Espiritu Santo, or Hitanachi. These Apalachites were the ancestors of the Caribs, and at war with the Cofachites, a tribe north of them. Their territory embraced six provinces: Bemarin, Amani or Amana, Matique, Schama, Meraco, and Achalaques. The productions, animal and vegetable, are carefully described, as well as the dress, habitation, and manners of the people. Their capital was Melilot, a city of two thousand houses. Their wonderful temple stood on the equally wonderful mountain of Olaimi, near far-famed Melilot.
These Apalachites had, however, mainly renounced paganism and embraced Christianity, partly through the teaching of the French, who attempted to settle Florida, but more especially through some English people, who, seeking to escape from the Indian-war-vexed Virginia in 1621 to New England, were cast on the coast of Florida, and, attracting a considerable number of ecclesiastics and people of quality, laid the foundations of a colony. Turning their attention to the benighted state of the people, these zealous English converted, in ten or twelve years, most of the officers and heads of families in Bemarin and Amana, so that, says he, “they have at present among them a bishop, and several learned and zealous priests, who labor with joy and fidelity in this ample harvest of the Lord; and, to advance this excellent work, have erected colleges wherever there are churches.” This was the statement of his last memoirs from America.
Soon after the English got into the country, however, the Spaniards sent in a company of Religious of the order of Minims, whom Pope Urban VIII. had dispatched as Apostolic missionaries, and who, after their arrival, in 1643, labored most successfully near Achalaque.
This strange account, backed by his Carib vocabulary, has misled many, and yet the whole is a fiction. Building on a few names found in De Laet, or some Spanish account—perhaps a manuscript narrative—he has made a golden picture, which, in spite of its apparent inconsistencies, has been regarded as exaggerated, but based on truth. Yet, to place the bishop and priests among English refugees was suspicious, and equally so the fact that no Spanish writer ever mentions any mission of Minims to Florida. As an order originating in France, the Society of St. Francis de Paula might be found more readily in French than in Spanish parts; but the writer, not over familiar with such matters, confounded, doubtless, the Fratres Minores or Franciscans, with the Minimi or Minims.
Translated into English as the “History of the Caribby Islands, London, 1666,” Rochefort’s work was extensively followed by English writers, and his account is to be found in Sanson’s “Atlas,” Ogilby’s “America,” Montanus, Wapper, Oldmixon, and others. Mr. Brinton rather inclines to believe it real; but as the very points which seem to support it could be gleaned from known works at the time, we are more disposed to share the Opinion of Mr. Buckingham Smith, that it is a total invention. “The framework,” says he, “is taken from Garcilaso, and the accounts by the French of their occupation of Florida. Some names may be borrowed from the maps of the day; others appear to be those of mere fancy. Our knowledge of the geography and physical character of the country renders the story often improbable and sometimes absurd.”
The whole story of English refugees in Florida corresponding with France, but unknown to English settlers in Virginia or the English government, which sent them bishops and priests, is too untenable to stand examination; and if the latter ecclesiastics bore papal faculties, it but adds one difficulty more in the matter.
A few years after the appearance of Rochefort’s work, the Franciscan Hennepin, who had published a valuable volume at Paris, in 1683, on the expedition of La Salle, retired to Holland, and there reissued his work, with additions, in 1697. He had always had a great fancy for sailor’s yarns, and on revising his first edition seems to have deemed it deficient in that point—or his editor did; for, after all, perhaps he was guiltless of his second edition. He consequently introduced a voyage down the Mississippi, and that the first ever performed; for he ambitioned the glory of having first descended the Father of Waters. This voyage he performs in a most extraordinary manner. He waited till March 12, 1680, and then set out on the 8th, from the mouth of the Illinois for the mouth of the Mississippi, which he reached in thirteen days, arriving at the gulf on the 25th or 26th of March, and started back without any delay, but did not get off withal till April 1st. But lost time was soon made up. His arms handled the paddle as never mortal arms had done before. Ninety miles a day, he avers, he can easily paddle up stream. So in eleven days his canoe had sped up the current of the Mississippi to a point four hundred and fifty miles above the mouth of the Illinois, and this advancing for most of the way only by night! This voyage was translated, with the rest of his work, into English, and received by many, in spite of its absurdities—many of which the author manfully adhered to, against all protestation. Indeed, its authority was never completely demolished till Sparks, in his biographies of Marquette and La Salle, brought it to a strict analysis; and Hennepin, shorn of the glory he so fondly coveted of having been the first explorer of the Mississippi to its mouth, remains one of the earliest, if not the first, who ascended it to the Falls of St. Anthony, and undoubtedly the namer of that rapid.
Baron la Hontan, first a soldier in Canada, then an officer, retired to Europe in disgust and wrote a book. It is readable; and it was read, translated, and spread broad-cast. Spiced with a little of the free thinking then coming into popularity; putting the keen thrusts of the new French school at Christianity most inappositely into the mouth of an Indian chief; manufacturing a high-sounding name, Garangula or Grangula, from the French nickname Grande gueule, he invented a speech for his orator which many of us declaimed in boyhood with intense effect; then he soared still higher and manufactured a river, which long appeared on maps as The Long River of La Houtan.
The baron’s story is, that, following Marquette’s path, he descended the Wisconsin to the Mississippi; ascended that river to the Long River, which he entered, and with a tardiness equalled only by Hennepin’s speed, sailed for eighty days without reaching half way to its Bource. Its banks he lines with nations of civilized Indians, the Eokoros, Esanapes, Gnaesitares, the bearded Mozeemlak, and others, who have eluded all modern investigators, while the wondrous Tahuglauk are equally unknown. St. Peter’s River alone, by its locality, corresponds to his famous stream, but it sadly lacks the dimensions he assigns to his Long River. He wished probably to have the credit of having explored the untried wilderness, and, grouping together Indian accounts of distant rivers, compiled a voyage on one of them, which he invested with the attributes and volume of many. His account, published in 1703, was translated into several languages, and finding credit with the compilers of historical and geographical dictionaries as unreliable as modern encyclopedists, induced the insertion in many of his Long River—“as fabulous,” Charlevoix truly remarks, “as the Isle Barataria, of which Sancho Panza was made governor,” as well as of tribes whose existence rests on no foundation but his account.
Another fiction of the kind appeared originally in the Mercure Galant, in November, 1711, and found its way into English compilations, receiving a certain degree of credit. It purported to be drawn from a manuscript found in Canada.
According to this, ten men, bent on new discoveries, ascended the Mississippi in three canoes, and after a long voyage found another river, running south-southwest, to which they carried their canoes, and, sailing down, reached the country of the Escaaniba, two hundred leagues in extent, abounding in gold, and governed by King Aganzan, who claimed descent from Montezuma, and maintained his authority by an army which, in time of peace, was 100,000 strong. The capital was six leagues from the River Missi, or Golden River, and gold was so plentiful and so little valued by the people that each of the travellers carried off some two hundred and forty pounds. These Escaaniba traded with a nation distant a six months’ journey, to whom they sent regular caravans.
Now that Frazer’s River leads to lands of gold, this fable is not uninteresting, and we propose Escaaniba as the name of a new province in the auriferous land.
These are not the only inventions of the kind to be found. French literature furnished all these. A journey of two English sailors through the country, from Florida to Cape Breton, in 1568, smacks strongly of invention; and the story, of unknown origin, of the party of Spaniards who ascended the Mississippi and Ohio in boats, seeking the silver-bottomed lake in New York, must be ranged in the same class of fictitious voyages or discoveries.
These inventions are of a past century, but that our own has inventors, the Collier Shakspeare shows; and as the demand for rare tracts or unpublished manuscripts relating to our early history is great, the temptation to literary forgery is the greater. Unless caution is observed, collectors will be deceived by counterfeit manuscripts, as by counterfeit Pine-tree Shillings.
