2025 October Representation of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas within the Edward Worth Library

Representation of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas within the Edward Worth Library

The Book of the Month theme for October 2025 investigates the diversity of European viewpoints of Indigenous peoples of the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how Natives were represented and why they were represented in a particular manner. Some viewed Natives as strictly ‘heathens or savages’ who needed to be saved by God and instructed/controlled by Europeans. However, others, like Jean de Léry (1534-1613), viewed Natives as a society that led a much simpler life, which, in some ways, was more orderly than those back in Europe. Despite the conflicting views, most Europeans, even those who held Natives in higher regard, still viewed themselves as above them and often dehumanized them as being something between man and animal. This blog post will focus on Worth’s copy of Historia navigationis in Brasiliam quæ et America dicitur : Qua describitur authoris nauigatio, quæque in mari vidit memoriæ prodenda: Villagagnonis in America gesta… (Geneva, 1594), by Jean De Léry, and Worth’s edition of Historia natural y moral de las indias: En que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales … y guerras de los indios (Madrid, 1608), by José De Acosta (1540-1600).^[1]

Jean De Léry, Historia navigationis in Brasiliam quæ et America dicitur. : Qua describitur authoris nauigatio, quæque in mari vidit memoriæ prodenda: Villagagnonis in America gesta … , 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1594), p. [186]. Depiction of the ritual for the killing of a prisoner of war before the Tupi eat him. The prisoners are given a Tupi wife until their death, and she will mourn over him and is the first to eat him.

Depictions such as the one in the image above are common among the texts written by early modern commentators on the lives and customs of Native Americans. The acts of violence depicted here were intended to shock Europeans back at home, and missionaries/conquistadors used them as justification for their treatment of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Furthermore, showing them naked and living in huts (in a state of moral depravity, according to European standards), demonstrated to monarchs and the Church why these people either needed saving or could not be saved. For, as Hitchcock notes, ‘…as early as 1501 a decree of Ferdinand and Isabella enjoined that efforts be made to convert the natives “without using force.” Despite some efforts to change it, this remained a remarkably consistent royal policy for most of the sixteenth century’.^[2] The decree made it necessary for Catholic missionaries to provide evidence to justify their actions toward Natives, especially if those actions could be interpreted as negatively impacting their lives, or risk facing the consequences from their monarchs or the Church itself. Therefore, highlighting Native moral depravity and acts of violence was necessary in order to gain support from those in power. The need for justification was a theme that plagued the moral debates of the time about colonization and the treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Jean de Léry and his History of A Voyage to The Land of Brazil

Jean De Léry, Historia navigationis in Brasiliam quæ et America dicitur: Qua describitur authoris nauigatio, quæque in mari vidit memoriæ prodenda: Villagagnonis in America gesta … , 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1594), title page

The Edward Worth Library houses the 1594 second edition of History of A Voyage to The Land of Brazil by Jean De Léry printed in Latin in Geneva, Switzerland, by the heirs of Eustache Vignon (1530-88). The first edition had been printed in 1578 in French and was published by Antoine Chuppin (d.1609). Though we know that it was Edward Worth (1676-1733), who purchased this text (rather than inheriting it from his family), there is no available information about why he bought it. The book clearly had several previous owners before Worth because it has annotations written throughout, and Worth did not annotate his books. This work contains content about travel, Brazil, Natives, history, and the Tupi language, as well as descriptions of the environment of Brazil.

The author, Jean De Léry, was born in Burgundy, France in 1534, and he lived through various wars throughout his lifetime.^[3] At the beginning of his life, France was experiencing religious turmoil. As Janet Whatley states, ‘Léry was a child when in 1536 Calvin published his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and in 1541 established his theocracy in Geneva. By the time Léry was grown, the Genevan church was training native Frenchmen to return to France as missionaries of the Reformed Gospel, and he joined this missionary group’.^[4] Jean de Léry compiled his book after he returned to Europe from the New World, and while he was writing it, he experienced the horrors of this dark time in French history. As Whatley argues:

‘The St.Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had flooded across the land in waves of such violence that Frenchmen were to be seen roasting and eating other Frenchmen’s hearts. Léry himself had lived through the siege and famine of Sancerre. That period gave occasion for a focused meditation on the differences and similarities between the ways of the Europeans and the ways of ‘savages,’ and indeed for the growth of a nostalgia for the Brazilian forests and for his Tupi friends’.^[5]

Léry’s background in Calvinism certainly influenced his opinion on the Natives he encountered. Calvinism is a faction of Christianity (or Protestantism), and prominent in Calvinist beliefs was the concept of predestination which has been defined as follows, ‘According to this notion, God has determined from eternity whom he will save and whom he will damn, regardless of their faith, love, or merit or lack thereof’.^[6] It can be argued that this aspect of Jean de Léry’s beliefs, combined with his experiences in Europe during his lifetime, made him particularly open to the Tupi’s way of life. As he believed that man can not fully understand God’s plan, it would explain why Léry had a level of uncertainty about the safety of the Tupi’s immortal souls. Overall he thought that their souls were damned, but there are brief moments of contradictions in his account where he does not believe that they are all unsavable. For example, he states, ‘As for blessedness and eternal bliss (which we believe in and hope for through Jesus Christ alone), in spite of the glimpse and the intimation of it that I have said they have, this is a people accursed and abandoned by God, if there be any such under the heavens’.^[7] However, in the same chapter he also states in reference to the Tupi’s ability to be saved, ‘Still, I am of the opinion that if Villegagnon had not revolted from the Reformed Religion, and if we had stayed longer in that country, we would have drawn and won some of them to Jesus Christ’.^[8] Léry’s contradictions highlight the conflict that living with as well as witnessing the Tupi lifestyle had on him and his interpretations of religion, an experience in which he was not alone, as other Europeans were struggling to fit a new world and its peoples into their sense of how the world works.

One of the many aspects of Native Americans’ life that influenced the European conception of them being something between animal and man was their religious beliefs or lack thereof. While the Tupi tribe is described as having no religion, they do believe in a trickster deity called Aygnan, who is depicted as similar to the Devil. Aygnan was said to plague them, and Léry told his readers that ‘… the souls of the effeminate and worthless, who have neglected the defense of their fatherland, go with Aygnan (for so they call the devil in their language), by whom, they say, these unworthy ones are incessantly tormented’.^[9] The image above is a rendition of the many ways that Aygnan torments the tribe, as Léry mentions in the following passage that ‘In fact, they would say that they actually saw him, sometimes in the guise of a beast or bird or in some other strange form’.^[10] This added to the idea that the Natives were heathens because they did not believe or accept the Christian god, and instead they accepted ‘idols’ such as the one depicted above.

On the pro-native side of the spectrum, Jean de Léry was a strong supporter of a humanistic view of Indigenous peoples, partly due to the fact that he had lived among them. A Calvinist missionary, he and his fellow Calvinists had travelled to Brazil because they had been invited by Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon (1510-71), a Catholic who later denied the invitation and accused them of plotting against him.[11] There is debate over the actual truth behind this matter, but Léry’s account of what happened is believed to be the most accurate. As Whatley suggests, ‘Villegagon may not have been the turncoat that Léry claims, but he does seem to have been a violent and unstable man. It became clear at a certain point that his island compound was no safe place for Léry and his friends, and the task for them was now to escape with their lives’.^[12]

Léry gives his readers a graphic account of the incident in his Preface:

‘What is more, since he neither dared nor was able to hold us by force, we left that country with his permission–albeit a fraudulent permission, as I shall recount elsewhere. What is true, as you will see in due time, is that five men of our band, after our first near-shipwreck about eight days after our departure, returned in a boat to the land of the savages. He did, indeed, cruelly and inhumanely, have three of these five thrown into the sea; not, however, for any mutiny that they might have undertaken, but, as the report of it in the history of the martyrs of our time testifies, on account of their confession of the Gospel, which Villegagnon had rejected’.^[13

The incident proved to be beneficial, for it led to him and the surviving Calvinists seeking shelter amongst the Tupinambá natives for two months until another ship (not controlled by Villegagnon) arrived at port.^[14] He thus had an excellent opportunity to encounter the daily life of the Tupinambá, and, as a result, he had direct/personal exposure to the Natives’ way of life, which explains his positive views of them.

As a missionary, Jean de Léry was especially interested in the beliefs of the Tupinambá tribe and how they might be allied to the teachings of Calvinism. We can see in his work a struggle between trying to describe them in a humanistic way, without making them seem as if they are open to the idea of the Christian god. In reference to the Tupi’s ability to consider the European mindset Léry adds, ‘I have insisted on making this digression to prove that these nations of America, however barbarous and cruel they may be toward their enemies, are not so fierce that they do not consider what is said to them in a reasonable way’.^[15] There is a tension in his argument that in this life they are civil people, but that in the next they are destined for damnation.^[16] For example, when discussing the physical appearance of the Tupinambá, he remarks on their nakedness, as depicted in the image below: ‘But what I have said about these savages is to show that, while we condemn them so austerely for going about shamelessly with their bodies entirely uncovered, we ourselves, in the sumptuous display, superfluity, and excess of our own costume, are hardly more laudable’.^[17]

According to the Calvinist concept of predestination, there was nothing that missionaries could do to save the souls of the Tupinambá.^[18] Despite this, Léry simultaneously promoted the humanistic idea of the ‘Noble Savage’, and according to Frank Lestringant, made ‘… a defense of the free and happy savage whom the bloody conquerors should have left to his native ignorance, even at the risk of his eternal damnation’.^[19] Furthermore, as he believed that it was God who chose whom to save, there was little that man could do to save the Natives’ souls anyway.^[20] Given that Léry was arguing that Natives consequently lacked the ability to be converted, he claimed that the Spaniards had no right to occupy the land of Indigenous people in the name of converting them to Catholicism.^[21] This idea contrasts with those of Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566), another ‘Noble Savage’ enthusiast, who believed that Indigenous peoples could be saved by God, and that that alone warranted them to be treated fairly and equally with the Spanish so long as they devoted themselves to God.^[22] As Hitchcock notes, along with other pro-Native supporters, ‘Las Casas insisted that even pagans had basic rights of property and self government’.^[23] They used this reasoning to speak out against the mistreatment of Natives and hoped that by ending the mistreatment, more Natives could potentially be converted.

José de Acosta and his Natural and Moral History of The Indies

José De Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las indias: En que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales … y guerras de los indios (Madrid, 1608), title page.

As for the Natural and Moral History of The Indies by José De Acosta, the Worth Library has the 1608 copy that was published in Madrid and was written in Spanish. Other notable editions include the French, Italian, and English-translated editions. The surplus of editions and translations demonstrates the public’s interest in learning about the New World and its inhabitants at the time.^[24] The topics covered are Mexico and its history, the Natives of Peru and Mexico, and the natural history of Peru and Mexico. Walter D. Mignolo, in his translation, points out:

‘The Natural and Moral History of the Indies falls in the middle of a significant number of historical transformations. It responds not only to the ‘news’ from the New World but to the tensions and conflicts in one part of the ‘Old World’ (Christian Europe, the other two parts being Asia and Africa). Acosta’s book was also written at the intersection of the Renaissance revival of the Greco-Latin tradition and the emergence of something unexpected within that tradition: a heretofore unknown but impressive mass of land and an intriguing variety of people’.^[25]

Overall, these books show that Worth was especially interested in the ‘discovery’ of the Americas and their natural life. This is unsurprising both from a historical standpoint, as the presence of the Americas radically altered the way Europeans perceived the world, and also from a medical standpoint, as doctors were eager to discover new plants/medicines in the new world.

At the other end of the spectrum from Jean de Léry, José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of The Indies, embodies the Catholic Europeans’ belief in their superiority as colonizers. José de Acosta was a Jesuit missionary and naturalist who went to Latin America and travelled on foot from Panama (1570) to Peru (1572), and then later on to Mexico (c.1586) before returning to Spain (1588). The Jesuit order had been established in 1534 during the years of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and it was officially approved by the Catholic church in 1540.^[26] Acosta’s book was one of the first detailed descriptions of the New World, from both a naturalist point of view and from the moral/social point of view about the Natives. Acosta is well remembered for his quote: ‘There are no peoples so barbaric that they do not have something worthy of praise, nor are there any people so civilized and humane that they stand in no need of correction’.^[27]

He believed that Natives were a separate tribe of Adam and that they had lost their way and needed saving. Only Natives willing to accept God were considered humans by him; others he compared with animals, and there are different levels of Natives on his spectrum of humans to beasts. As Mignolo argues, ‘Acosta, like Las Casas, distinguished between three types of barbarians, judged of course from the perspective of those who have letters, sciencia, reason, and the right God’.^[28] Acosta found some tribes receptive to Catholicism, but there have been debates about whether or not they were as receptive as he claimed.^[29] The reason for this is that he and others colonizing the Americas wanted to highlight and emphasize the capacity of the Natives to be converted in order to continue to receive funding from Catholic monarchs and the Church for their missions.^[30]

Often, to demonstrate the Natives’ capability to be saved, European missionaries would highlight the Natives’ humanity, as shown in the image above. This image depicts a Tupi funeral, and the universal human emotion of mourning the dead, something to which those in Europe could relate. Acosta’s description of Native peoples stems from a need to simultaneously show both the need of the Natives to be saved, as well as their capacity to be saved. Missionaries had to justify their presence in the New World because, as Hitchcock argues, ‘The preaching of the Gospel itself does not justify conquest’, and when things were not going as successfully as planned they needed to remind others of the real reason they were there, to save those who they deemed lost. Images like the one above would be used to accomplish this goal.^[31]

Notably, Acosta was uniquely focused on not only capturing the natural life and the moral habits of Indigenous people but also in attempting to theorize how the existence of Natives aligned with the foundations and origins of the Catholic religion. Acosta’s methodology reflects the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and how it was used in regard to religious work. Caraccioli argues that he ‘effectively bridges two critical traditions in the spectrum of early modern thinkers: the religious and the rational’.^[32] This increased his popularity both at the time and in the modern era because of ‘his ability–analytical and rhetorical–to weave a narrative where science, faith and the politics of moral authority were deemed essential to European experience in the Americas’.^[33] In observing the whole spectrum of European attitudes to Indigenous peoples, José de Acosta falls somewhere in the middle but closer to anti-Native rhetoric. He was, however, not the most extreme, as he did accept some natives as humans, but others he classed as irredeemable beasts in his classification of the types of barbarians: ‘The third type of barbarian was the savages, who were closer to beasts and consequently to nature’.^[34] Moreover, many, such as Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1490-1573) argued ‘the classic Aristotelian position on the natural inferiority of the Indians (in one place referring to them as ‘beasts’), and the right of Christians to conquer and subdue them because of their paganism’.^[35] They either did not view Natives as human at all and thought they were not worthy of being saved, or thought that they were allowed to be brutalized and enslaved in order to benefit the crown, which claimed to be divinely ordained.^[36] As Hitchcock observes, this was connected to the development of the encomienda system that had been established in 1512: ‘The following year [1512] the crown issued the Laws of Burgos governing Indian affairs, which included the requirement that landowners build churches for the Indians and tend to their religious needs. The laws allowed the system of encomienda, which involved forced labor but provided that Indians were to be treated humanely’.^[37]The practice of the enslavement of the Natives eventually lessened because they were deemed to be not as productive or as healthy as African slaves.^[38] However, despite their freed status, they were deemed to still need to live with the colonizers and not on their own.^[39]

Conclusion

Both of these books reflect the variety of views concerning the Natives of the New World. There was a theological and philosophical debate in early modern Europe about how the ‘New World’ fitted into the religious beliefs of Europeans, and the works of José de Acosta and Jean de Léry illustrate this debate in depth. The early years of colonization were centred around the debate within the Church (both Catholic and other denominations) over whether the Natives of the Americas could be saved, or more specifically, if they were human enough to be saved.^[40] Hitchcock notes that there was, ‘One advisor to Cardinal Ximenes, the Franciscan Francisco Ruiz, bishop of Avila, [who] actually argued that Indians were not human. However, in 1520 the royal council officially declared that they were’^[41] Even though they decided that Natives were human, there remained a divide between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, with the former viewing Natives as a subcategory of humans who were not fully civilized. This division can be observed through their inclusion in anthologies of the natural world since they were not separated from the descriptions of plants, animals, and the natural world.^[42] This distinction was used as justification for the mistreatment and abuse of Indigenous peoples by colonizers.

These works covertly illustrate the range of methods used by Europeans to describe the world around them, and how they reacted when the world as they knew it was irrevocably changed. When introduced to a new group of people with a societal structure vastly different from their own, it led to a more in-depth theorization about the differences between races. These societal shifts in thinking, combined with the theorization of race, allowed for a discourse on how to view different races, from a humanistic viewpoint at one end of the spectrum, to the bestial viewpoint at the other. These shifting modes of thinking are common themes not only within these books but in many others that are housed in the Edward Worth Library, as throughout his lifetime, he witnessed many transformations of thought. Worth sought out books that could give him insight into the diverse theorizations of the time in order to make sense of the ever-changing world he lived in.

Text: Ms Cera Linnell, MA Student, Public History, University College of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

Sources

Acosta, José de, Historia natural y moral de las indias: En que se tratan las cosas

notables del cielo, y elementos, metales … y guerras de los indios (Madrid, 1608).

Acosta, José de, Natural and moral history of the Indies, edited by Jane E. Mangan, with an introduction and commentary by Walter D.Mignolo, translated by Frances M. López-Morillas (Durham, NC and London, 2002).

Caraccioli, Mauro J., ‘The Learned Man of Good Judgment: Nature, Narrative and Wonder in José de Acosta’s Natural Philosophy’, History of Political Thought, 38, no. 1 (2017), 44–63.

Encyclopædia Britannica, ‘Predestination’, Encyclopædia Britannica,

https://www.britannica.com/topic/predestination.

Hanke, Lewis, ‘The Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America’, Revista de Historia de América, no. 61/62 (1966), 5-22.

Hitchcock, James, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World: the Church’s View of the Natives and the Role of the Missionaries’, Providence: Studies in Western Civilization, 1, no. 4 (1993), 409-420.

Léry, Jean de, Historia navigationis in Brasiliam quæ et America dicitur: Qua describitur authoris nauigatio, quæque in mari vidit memoriæ prodenda: Villagagnonis in America gesta …, 2nd ed., (Geneva, 1594).

Léry, Jean de, History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, otherwise called America … translation and introduction by Janet Whatley (Berkley and Los Angeles, 1990).

Lestringant, Frank, ‘The Philosopher’s Breviary: Jean de Léry in the Enlightenment’,

Representations, no. 33 (1991), 200–11.

^[1]All quotations come from the English translation of Jean de Léry, History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, otherwise called America … translation and introduction by Janet Whatley (Berkley and Los Angeles, 1990); and from the English translation of José de Acosta, Natural and moral history of the Indies, edited by Jane E. Mangan, with an introduction and commentary by Walter D.Mignolo, translated by Frances M. López-Morillas (Durham, NC and London, 2002).

^[2] Hitchcock, James. ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World: the Church’s View of the Natives and the Role of the Missionaries’, Providence: Studies in Western Civilization, 1, no. 4 (1993), 409.

^[3] Léry, History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, p. xvi.

^[4] Ibid., p. xvi.

^[5] Ibid., p.xvii

^[6] Encyclopædia Britannica, ‘Predestination’, Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/predestination.

^[7] Léry, History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, p.150.

^[8] Ibid., p.147.

^[9] Ibid., p.136.

^[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., p. xx.

^[12] Ibid., p. xxi.

^[13] Ibid., p. liv.

^[14] Ibid., p. xxi.

^[15] Ibid., p. 150.

^[16] Ibid., p. xvi.

^[17] Ibid., p. 68.

^[18] Lestringant, Frank. ‘The Philosopher’s Breviary: Jean de Léry in the Enlightenment’, Representations, no. 33 (1991), 203.

^[19] Ibid., 201.

^[20] Encyclopædia Britannica, ‘Predestination’, Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/predestination.

^[21] Lestringant, ‘The Philosopher’s Breviary’, 203.

^[22] Hanke, Lewis, ‘The Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America’, Revista de Historia de América, no. 61/62 (1966), 17.

^[23] Hitchcock, James, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World: the Church’s View of the Natives and the Role of the Missionaries’, Providence: Studies in Western Civilization, 1, no. 4 (1993), 416.

^[24] Acosta, Natural and moral history of the Indies, p. xviii.

^[25] Ibid., p.xvii.

^[26] Ibid., p. xvii.

^[27] Ibid., p. 379.

^[28] Ibid., p. 510.

^[29] Ibid., p. xxi.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Hitchcock, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World’, 412.

^[32] Caraccioli, Mauro J., ‘The Learned Man of Good Judgment: Nature, Narrative and Wonder in José de Acosta’s Natural Philosophy’, History of Political Thought, 38, no. 1 (2017), 46.

^[33] Ibid., 55.

^[34] Acosta, Natural and moral history of the Indies, p. 510.

^[35] Hitchcock, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World’, 415.

^[36] Hanke, ‘The Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America’, 48.

^[37] Hitchcock, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World’, 410.

^[38] Hanke, ‘The Spanish struggle for justice in the conquest of America’, 57.

^[39] Hitchcock, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church in the Colonization of the New World’, 411.

^[40] Ibid., 410.

^[41] Ibid., 412.

^[42] Acosta, Natural and moral history of the Indies, p. 476.