Lauren Beck

Claiming California: From Terra Incognita to Miguel de Venegas

Abstract Early modern European knowledge about California was informed by the impressions of the first explorers as well as by more empirical information collected over the centuries that followed, and from which the shape and extent of that territory slowly grew out of the shadows of terra incognita and Spanish possession of it became consolidated. National claims on its periphery, however, provoked continued debate about the geographical scope of California, and the desire to possess it led both English and Spanish authors and cartographers to represent these national claims, and by extension, to fill in and occupy the otherwise blank space with information that demonstrated possession. By the eighteenth century, contemporaneous textual and cartographical configurations of the American west fused empirical knowledge of that territory with an imagined landscape, sustaining an international competition for territory. This article explores early endeavours to claim California within the New World territories of England and Spain from the sixteenth century to the reception of Miguel de Venegas’ Noticia de la California, published in 1757.

Versiones, propaganda y repercusiones del descubrimiento de América: Colón, los Pinzón y los Niño

The book’s preface, prepared by its editor, ambitiously frames the essays that follow as continuing the important debates about the early years of Spanish contact with the Americas. It revisits the...

Burning Ships and Charting New Pathways in the History of Discovery and Exploration

In AD 921, the interpreter Ahmad ibn Faḍlān joined an embassy due north to convince the Volga (Bulgarian) king to accept the rule of the Abbasid caliphate, to establish Islam in the region, and to ...

Implicating Race in Exploration History

Discovery and exploration history almost always requires scholars to implicate race in one way or another, particularly due to the anthropological and ethnographic quality inherent to exploration-r...

Firsting in Discovery and Exploration History

Not exclusive to the study of the history of discovery and exploration, firsting is the process through which a scholar presents an act, circumstance, or phenomenon generated by man, or accomplishment to have occurred for the first time. Firsting necessarily implies seconding and lasting as concomitant processes that help structure historical exchanges. Firsting involves complex issues that conflict our present, including those of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion and language, and place of origin. These issues inform firsting within discovery and exploration history, or at the least are tricky to avoid implicating while firsting. In discovery and exploration history, firsting occurs when scholars attempt to precise when and where Europeans traveled for the first time. As will be shown in due course, not all scholarship or primary accounts arising from expeditions participate in firsting, but this fact does not deter subsequent academics, editors, and translators from using that scholarship and documentation to support firsting. The knowledge created from this form of scholarship, when undertaken in the West, is constrained by its limited relevance beyond the western world. Examples of firsting can be detected in scholarship about the events following the moment when Europeans came to the Americas in 1492 (although this moment really occurs before this date if we follow the Basques or the Vikings in their transatlantic voyages for economic and environmental purposes). These deliberations over when and which Europeans went where result in firsting. Firsting creates and then upholds a powerful framework through which the world can be understood, often to the detriment of those who are not constructed as firsters. In a contemporary world, firsting protects and privileges the eminence of the predominately white, western world at the expense of those who follow in the wake of its development. Thirty years ago, J.B. Harley and David Woodward acknowledged that scholarship has and continues to favor western perspectives on the nature of our world, which in turn leaves a dearth of scholarship (consulted, that is, by western scholars) with broader objectives.1 Harley and Woodward called upon scholars to engage with the problem.

The travelogue of a Moroccan ambassador to Charles II, 1690-91: the Seville MS

An unpublished manuscript, containing a unique version of a travelogue, documented the travels of a Moroccan ambassador to the court of Charles II in 1690–91 to negotiate a prisoner exchange as well as the return of a number of Arabic-language manuscripts held at the royal palace near Madrid. After summarising and comparing the travelogue to other known copies, this article explores how this narrative came to reside at the University of Sevilles archive. Seeking answers to this question, the reader is transported to the Franciscan missions in Morocco where nineteenth-century missionaries studied the Arabic language. Maghrebi- and Arabic-language documents were subsequently smuggled into Spain by the missionaries. Al-Ghassanis narrative of discovery transformed into an opportunity for missionaries and government officials to discover historical perspectives and knowledge about Spain.