Picturing Greenland: Cartographic Images and Geographical Knowledge in the Making of a Boreal Utopia

MARTINEZ, CAROLINA

Los Angeles

Conferencia; The Intermingling of Cartography and Literature in the Early Modern Period; 2023

UCLA (University of California Los Angeles)

In 1720, Simon Tyssot de Patot (1655-1727) anonymously published La vie, les avantures et levoyage de Groenland du révérend père cordelier Pierre de Mésange. Avec un Relation biencirconstanciée de l 'origine, de l 'histoire, des moeurs, et du Paradis des Habitants du PoleArctique, an imaginary travel account in which its protagonist discovers an underground societyin the furthermost limits of the Northern Hemisphere. Printed in Amsterdam in a single volumedivided into two parts, Patot’s work recounted the misadventures of Pierre de Mésange, whohaving escaped from the United Provinces in 1679 encountered a utopian society in Greenland.The choice of Greenland for the novel's setting was based on the narrative possibilities offered bythe marginal condition of a still unexplored territory. A plausible but elusive scenario, theproximities of the North Pole had been the depository of the most varied theories inherited fromclassical antiquity as well as an object of speculation among early modern travelers. Throughoutthe 16th and 17th centuries, the expectations regarding the possible existence of an interoceanicnorthwest passage that would allow commerce with the Far East coexisted with the remnants ofthe ancient belief in the Hyperboreans and the debate on the habitability of the Frigid Zone. Thegeographical knowledge on these boreal territories was endorsed by the cartographic images of theNorth Pole proposed by Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) and the information provided by Isaac deLa Peyrère (1596-1676) in his Relation de Groenland (1647) or the many editions of OlausMagnus’ (1490-1557) Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555). The presence of theseelements in Tyssot’s imaginary travel account will be examined with the aim of understanding thecirculation of still diffuse visual and narrative representations of the furthermost North in the early18th century.In so doing, this presentation intends to trace the adaptation of geographical knowledge andcartographic images of the northern Antipodes in an early modern imaginary travel account. Inother words, Patot’s boreal fiction will allow us to observe how a specific set of cartographicimages of the Northern Hemisphere was appropriated and introduced in the fictional worldproposed by the son of French Huguenot refugees in the United Provinces. Finally, the study ofthe landscape depictions made by Patot, who held a modest position as a teacher of mathematicsin Deventer, will contribute to show the how the circulation of this kind of cartographic knowledgewent beyond academic or scholarly contexts.