Episode 24: Polyrhythmic History

Image: Depiction of Blemmyes, engraving in a 1603 German edition of Sir Walter Ralegh’s “Discovery of Guiana,” 1595. The Early Modern Era saw Europeans ‘discovering’ a hemisphere, whose well established native peoples they reimagined as exotic, barbarous, and mythical. Material ambitions mixed with the fantastical as the Western Hemisphere became the proving ground of European empire. Writer Maria Relvas credits the Englishman Walter Ralegh as “a privileged witness and attentive observer who tells what he sees and endures,” but who also passed along exotic legend as fact. “He never hides,” she writes, “or masquerades, the purpose of his voyage: he was, after all, looking for gold, the ancestral source of both magnificence and decay. The Western hunger for it has been the end of other societies, as we so well know, and it was specifically the end of the societies mentioned in the text, whose people were guided by completely different world visions.”