Bartlebooth, 3
TWO PAPERS read at the IIIrd Congress of the International Union of Historical Sciences, held in October 1887 in Edinburgh, under the joint auspices of the Royal Historical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, caused a sensation in international scholarly circles and, for a few weeks, aroused wide public interest.
The first of these papers was read in German by Professor Zapfenschuppe of Strasbourg University. It was entitled Untersuchungen über die Taufe Amerikas. Whilst studying archives retrieved from the cellar of the Bishop’s Palace at Saint-Dié, the author had discovered a collection of old books which, beyond any possible doubt, came from the famous printing press founded in 1495 by Germain Lud. Amongst these books he found an atlas to which many sixteenth-century texts referred, but of which no single copy had previously been known to exist: namely, the famous Cosmographiæ introductio cum quibusdam geometriæ ac astronomiæ principiis ad eam rem necessariis, insuper quattuor Americii Vespucii navigationes by Martin Waldseemüller, called Hylacomilus, the best known of the cartographers of the School of Saint-Dié. It was in this cordiform atlas that the new world discovered by Christopher Columbus, and which he himself called West India, first appeared under the designation TERRA AMERICI VEL AMERICA, and the date given on this copy – 1507 – finally put an end to three centuries of bitter controversy concerning Amerigo Vespucci: some held him to be a man of sincerity, a scrupulous and upright explorer who had never dreamt of having a continent named after him one day and never knew that it had been so named, or they believed that he only learnt of it on his deathbed (there are indeed many romantic prints – including one by Tony Johannot – showing the explorer as an old man passing away in Seville, in 1512, amidst his loved ones, with one hand on an open atlas held out to him by a man kneeling in tears at his bedside, for him to see once before he dies the word AMERICA unfurling across the new continent); but others viewed him as a buccaneer of the same breed as the Pinzón Brothers, trying, like them, at every turn to displace Columbus and to steal the glory of his discoveries. Thanks to Professor Zapfenschuppe, it was now proven that the custom of calling the new lands America had been established during Vespucci’s lifetime. Vespucci had certainly been told this, even if he fails to allude to it in his letters and journals: the fact that he never disputed the appellation, and its persistent usage, suggest very strongly indeed that Vespucci must have been not at all displeased in the end to leave his name to a continent which he believed in good faith he had done more to “discover” than had the Genoese adventurer who, when all was said and done, did no more than explore a few offshore islands, taking cognisance of the mainland itself only much later on, on his third voyage, in 1498-1500, when he reached the mouth of the Orinoco and finally realised that the huge scale of such a hydrographic system was definitive proof of the existence of a vast, unknown hinterland.
But the second paper was even more sensational. It was called New Insights into Early Denominations of America and was read by a Spanish archivist, Juan Mariano de Zaccaria, who was working in Havana, at the Maestranza Donation, on a collection of almost two thousand maps, a number of which came from Santa Catalina after the fort there was dismantled; amongst these, he had come across a planisphere dated 1503 on which the new continent was explicitly designated by the name TERRA COLUMBIA!
When the aged Lord Lowager Colquhoun of Darroch, permanent Secretary of the Caledonian Society, whose imperturbable phlegm was never so valued as on this occasion when he was in the chair, had managed to quieten down the exclamations of amazement, excitement, disbelief, and delight which shook the austere dome of the Senate Room in Old College, and had brought the session back to a relative state of order more conducive to the dignity, impartiality, and objectivity which should always be the appanage of true scholarship, Zaccaria was able to proceed with his paper, and he passed around the electrified audience a photograph of the whole planisphere, as well as an enlargement of a (fairly damaged) fragment where the letters
were printed along a few inches of the edge of an approximate but undeniably recognisable representation of a large portion of the New World: Central America, the West Indies, and the coastline of Venezuela and Guyana.
Zaccaria was the hero of the day, and correspondents from The Scotsman, The Scottish Daily Mail, The Scottish Daily Express (Glasgow), the Aberdeen Press and Journal, and not forgetting The Times and the Daily Mail, of course, took it upon themselves to spread the news throughout the world. But a few weeks later, when Zaccaria was back in Havana putting the finishing touches to the article he had promised to give the American Journal of Cartography, in which a full reproduction of the precious document was to be inserted on a “special fold-out leaf”, he received a letter emanating from a certain Florentin Gilet-Burnachs, curator of the Municipal Museum at Dieppe: chance had it that he had opened an issue of Le Moniteur Universel and had read its detailed account of the Edinburgh congress and especially of Zaccaria’s paper, including a description of the damaged fragment on which the Cuban archivist had based his claim that the New World was named COLUMBIA in 1503.
Florentin Gilet-Burnachs, who quoted in passing a sentence from someone called Monsieur de Cuverville (“enthusiasm is no state of mind for a historian”), and who of course fully appreciated the brilliance of Zaccaria’s paper, wondered nonetheless whether the revelation – not to say revolution – it contained should not be subjected to a thoroughgoing critique. Obviously it was very tempting to read
as
and this reading gave voice to a widely shared feeling: unearthing a map where the West Indies were dubbed COLUMBIA, geographers and historians felt they were making amends for an historical error; for centuries, the West had resented Amerigo Vespucci’s usurpation of the name which Christopher Columbus ought to have given to the lands he had been the first to explore: by applauding Zaccaria, the congress had meant to rehabilitate the Genoese seafarer and thus bring four centuries of injustice to an end.
However, the curator continued, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, dozens of navigators, from the Cabots to the Cabrals, from Gomes to Verrezano, sought the westward route to the Indies and – he was coming to the point – there was a deep-rooted tradition in Dieppe, still flourishing in the late eighteenth century, which attributed the discovery of “America” to a local seaman, Jean Cousin, called Cousin the Bold, who was supposed to have reached the West Indies in 1487–1488, five years before the man from Genoa. The Municipal Museum at Dieppe, having inherited a selection of the maps made by order of the shipowner Jean Ango, which had given the Dieppe school of cartography (including mapmakers like Desceliers and Nicolas Desliens) its reputation as one of the best of the sixteenth century, possessed a map dated 1521 – markedly later, that is, than Zaccaria’s map from the Maestranza Donation – on which the Gulf of Honduras – Christopher Columbus’s “deep gulf” – was called MARE CONSO, clearly an abbreviation of MARE CONSOBRINIA, a Latin translation of “the sea of the cousin”, Cousin’s Sea (and not MARE CONSOLATRIX, as Lebrun-Brettil had stupidly claimed).
Therefore, Florentin Gilet-Burnachs went on mercilessly, the
which Zaccaria had read as
could be read much more plausibly, given the spacing of the three final letters, as
By way of conclusion, the curator suggested that Zaccaria should take pains to establish the provenance of the 1503 map. If it was of Portuguese, Spanish, Genoese, or Venetian origin, then the
could indeed be a designation of Columbus, despite the fact that he himself had imposed the usage INDIA. In any case it would not refer to Jean Cousin, whose fame went no further than Dieppe itself, and who had for rivals, even in the nearby ports of Le Tréport, Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, Fécamp, Etretat, and Honfleur, sailors just as bold as he was, and all busy at finding new routes. But if, on the other hand, the map was of the Dieppe school – that could be easily checked, all Dieppe maps having a monogram decorated with lower-case d at the centre of one of the mariner’s cards – then it was TERRA CONSOBRINIA that was meant.
Finally, Gilet-Burnachs wrote in a postscript, if the monogram was two Rs intertwined, that would mean that the planisphere was the work of Renaud Régnier, one of the earliest cartographers of the Dieppe school, who was believed to have accompanied Cousin on one of his voyages. The selfsame Renaud Régnier had drawn a map of the coast of North America some years later, around 1520, and by an extraordinary coincidence had given the name of TERRA MARIA to the territory which, on account of Henriette-Marie, the daughter of Henri IV of France and wife of Charles I of England, would be baptised MARYLAND one hundred years later.
Zaccaria was an honest geographer. He could have ignored Gilet-Burnachs’s letter, or he could have taken covert advantage of the generally poor condition of the planisphere to destroy any signs of its possible origin and then declare to the Dieppe curator that his was a Spanish map, and that therefore the latter’s critique would not stand. But instead of doing that, he ascertained conscientiously that it was indeed a map by Renaud Régnier, informed his correspondent, and offered to co-author a correction with him which would close the debate on this thorny toponymic problem. The joint article appeared in 1888, in the journal Onomastica, but it caused infinitely less of a stir than his paper at the IIIrd Congress.
It remained the case nonetheless that the 1503 planisphere was the only map on which the continent now known as America was called Cousinia. This singular fact came to the ears of James Sherwood, who succeeded in purchasing this unique map a year later from the Rector of Havana University, for an undisclosed sum. And that is how the map is to be found today on one of the walls of Bartlebooth’s bedroom.
It was not because it was unique that Bartlebooth, as a child, grew attached to this map, which he could look at in the great hall of the manor house where he grew up, but because it possessed another feature also: the map’s north is not at the top, but at the bottom. This difference of orientation, much commoner in the period than is often realised, fascinated Bartlebooth to the highest degree: representations rotated not always by one hundred and eighty degrees, but sometimes by ninety or forty-five, completely subvert habitual perceptions of space; the outline of Europe, for instance, a shape familiar to anyone who has been even only to junior school, when swung round ninety degrees to the right, with the west at the top, begins to look like Denmark. And in this minimal switch lay hidden the very image of his jigsaw-puzzle mind.
Bartlebooth was never a collector in the usual sense of the word, but nonetheless, in the early thirties, he looked out or had others look out for similar maps. He has two of that kind in his bedroom. One, which he got at an auction at Hôtel Drouot, is a fine impression of the Imperium Japonicum . . . Descriptum ab Hadriano Relando, part of the atlas published by Reinier Otten of Amsterdam; specialists rate the map very highly, not because north is to the right, but because the names of the sixty-six imperial provinces are given for the first time in Japanese ideograms with their transcriptions in Latin characters.
The other one is even more curious: it is a map of the Pacific of the kind used by the coastal tribes of the Gulf of Papua: it consists of an extremely dense network of bamboo sticks indicating the currents and prevailing winds of the sea; here and there, in seemingly random distribution, seashells (cowries) are set to represent islands and reefs. In terms of the universal standards of modern-day cartography, this “map” would seem to be an aberration: at first sight it provides neither an orientation, nor a scale, nor an identification of distances, nor a representation of relief; but, in fact, it appears that it serves its purpose incomparably well, just as, Bartlebooth explained one day, a diagram of the London Underground is quite impossible to match with a map of London but is sufficiently simple and obvious to be used without any trouble at all when you want to go from A to B by tube.
This map of the Pacific had been brought back to Captain Barton, who had studied the migrations of one of these New Guinea tribes at the end of the last century: he had looked at the Motu of Port Moresby, whose voyages bring to mind the Kula of the Trobriand Islanders. When he got back to London, Barton presented his trophy to the Bank of Australia, which had part-sponsored his expedition. The bank exhibited it for a while in a reception room at its main office, then, in its turn, donated it to the National Foundation for the Development of the Southern Hemisphere, a semi-private agency aiming at recruiting emigrants for New Zealand and Australia. The Foundation went into liquidation at the end of the nineteen twenties, and the map, offered for sale by the official liquidator, was eventually brought to the attention of Bartlebooth, who bought it.
The rest of the room is almost devoid of furniture: it is a bright room, painted white, with thick cambric curtains and an ordinary bed: an English-made bedstead of brass, with a flowery printed cotton spread, and two Empire bedside tables. On the left-hand table stands a lamp with a base shaped like an artichoke and an octagonal pewter plate bearing two lumps of sugar, a glass, a spoon, a crystal water jug with a pine-cone stopper; on the right-hand table, a small rectangular pendulum clock whose mahogany case is inlaid with ebony and gilded metal, a monogrammed silver cup, and a photograph in an oval frame portraying three of Bartlebooth’s grandparents – James’s brother William Sherwood, his wife Emily, and James Aloysius Bartlebooth – all in formal dress, standing behind Priscilla and Jonathan, the newly-weds being seated at each other’s side in the midst of a profusion of baskets of flowers and ribbon bows. On the lower shelf lies a large desk diary bound in black leather. On the cover the words DESK DIARY 1952 and ALLIANCE BUILDING SOCIETY in large gold-leaf upper-case lettering stand above a crest, of gules with chevrons, bees, and yellow bezant, adorned with a phylactery bearing the motto DOMUS ARX CERTISSIMA, the English translation of which is given immediately below: The surest stronghold is the home.
It would be tiresome to draw up a list of all the cracks and contradictions which appeared in Bartlebooth’s plan. For if, in the end, as we shall now soon see, the programme the Englishman had set himself gave way under Beyssandre’s resolute onslaught as well as Winckler’s far more hidden and subtle attack, Bartlebooth’s failure must be ascribed in the first place to his own inability to respond to those onslaughts at the appropriate time.
It is not a matter here of minor faults of the kind which never endangered the system Bartlebooth aimed to build, even if such blemishes did sometimes exacerbate the system’s excessively rigid tyranny and the exasperation it caused. For instance, when Bartlebooth decided he would paint five hundred watercolours in twenty years, he chose the figures because they were round numbers; he would have done better to pick four hundred and eighty, which would have made two a month; or, at the limit, five hundred and twenty, that is to say one every fortnight. But to get to exactly five hundred, he was sometimes obliged to paint two a month except for one month when he would paint three, or alternatively to do one approximately every two and a quarter weeks. Added to the variability of his travels, this was a factor which compromised the temporal regularity of his plan, but only to a small degree: in general, Gaspard Winckler received a watercolour approximately every fortnight, for there were of course in practice minor variations of up to a few days and occasionally even a few weeks; but these, similarly, did not bring into question the overall organisation of the task Bartlebooth had set himself, any more than did the minor delays he got into when reassembling the puzzles and which meant that very often the watercolours, on being sent back to the places where they had been painted, were “erased” not precisely twenty years after, but roughly twenty years after, twenty years plus a few days after.
If we can speak of an overall failure, it is because Bartlebooth, in real terms, in concrete fact, did not manage to carry his challenge through to the end within the rules he had laid down: he wanted the whole project to come full circle without leaving a mark, like an oily sea closing over a drowning man; his aim was for nothing, nothing at all, to subsist, for nothing but the void to emerge from it, for only the immaculate whiteness of a blank to remain, only the gratuitous perfection of a project entirely devoid of utility; but though he did paint five hundred seascapes in twenty years, though Gaspard Winckler did saw the seascapes into puzzles each of seven hundred and fifty pieces, not all the puzzles were reassembled; and not all the reassembled puzzles were destroyed on the very site where the watercolours had been painted, roughly twenty years before.
It is hard to say whether the plan was feasible, or to know if it could have been completed without crumbling beneath the weight of its internal contradictions or falling to pieces as its constituent elements wore out. And even if Bartlebooth had kept his eyesight, perhaps, even then, he would not have managed to reach the end of the implacable adventure to which he had resolved to devote his life.
It was in the final months of nineteen seventy-two that he realised he was going blind. It had begun a few weeks before with headaches, a twisted neck, and disturbances of vision which gave him the sensation, at the end of a day spent working on a puzzle, that his eyes were clouding over, that the outlines of objects were acquiring a fuzzy halo. To begin with, he only needed to lie down in the dark to make it disappear, but soon the disorder grew worse, became more frequent and more intense, so that even in half-light it seemed that things were reduplicating themselves, as if he were constantly drunk.
The doctors he turned to diagnosed a double cataract, for which they operated on him, successfully. They fitted him with thick contact lenses and forbade him, obviously, to tire his eyes. In their mind that meant reading only the headlines in newspapers, not driving in the dark, not watching television for too long. It didn’t even occur to them that Bartlebooth might ever envisage starting on another puzzle. But after only a month Bartlebooth sat down at his table and tried to catch up on lost time.
The trouble came back very quickly. This time Bartlebooth thought he could see a fly forever flitting somewhere to the side of his left eye, and he caught himself constantly wanting to raise his hand to swat it. Then his field of vision began to shrink; in the end it was no more than a tiny crack which let in a dim fringe of light, like a door ajar in the dark.
The doctors he called to his bedside shook their heads. Some mentioned amaurosis, others said pigmentary retinitis. In neither case could anything be done, and the inexorable outcome was blindness.
Bartlebooth had been handling the little puzzle pieces for eighteen years, and the sense of touch played almost as great a role for him as sight. He realised with exhilaration that he could carry on working: henceforth it would be as if he had to strive to reassemble blank watercolours. In fact, in this period, he could still distinguish shapes. In early 1975, when he began to see nothing save immaterial spots of brightness quivering and shifting far away, he decided to find someone to help him sort the pieces of the current puzzle into their dominant colours, their shadings, and their shapes. Winckler was dead, and anyway he would have refused; Smautf and Valène were too old; and the trial runs he did with Kléber and Hélène did not prove satisfactory to him. Finally he turned to Véronique Altamont because he had learnt from Smautf, who had got it from Madame Nochère, that she was studying watercolours and enjoyed doing puzzles. Since then, almost every day, the chit of a girl comes to spend an hour or two with the old Englishman, putting the little wooden pieces into his hand one by one, as she describes in her still, small voice the imperceptible differences of colour between them.