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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 301
This imagery persisted for many centuries, and, for that
reason, we can find explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries still looking for the warrior women and their gold in
the so-called Amazon forest, even when Spaniards are not
involved, as in De Bry’s Portrait of America (1596) or in Walter
Raleigh’s Voyages (1601). The approach to American origins
was usually based on ‘an uncritical acceptance of the comparative
ethnological technique of determining origins and a tendency
to accept trans-Atlantic migrations’, 15 and the tradition
of Gregorio Garcia, 16 which was predominant until the early
eighteenth century, mixed deductive and exegetical ethnology,
Christian theology, and classical literature and mythology.
Such thinking did not hesitate to locate the Amazons, the lost
tribes of Israel, Phoenician settlements, and so on, in America.
17 There was, however, a dissenting cartography, which
located the Amazons not in America, but in the north-east
of the Venerean Republic represented in Johann Andreas
Schnebelin’s Accurata Utopiae Tabula (Nuremberg, 1716
(?)), 18 within the heart of his cartography of Paradise, a geographical
portrait of vices and virtues. Despite that dispute, the
honour of hosting them in modern times has been granted to
Brazil, and so we keep them in our territory, forever trying to
escape from burnings and the incursions of anthropologists,
zoologists, and film-makers.
2. bernardo ramos: myth and epigraphy
The Amazon is among the most potent and lively pieces of land
in the planet. In its impressive majesty, the trees there grow to
15
L. E. Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts,
1492–1729 (Austin, 1967).
16
Gregorio García, El origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo e Indias
occidentales (Valencia, 1607; repr. Madrid, 1729, and México City, 1981).
17
‘Perhaps [the exercises of Santa Ursula] inspired the interest of Columbus
as much as the stories of the Amazons had clearly done’, Flint, Imaginative
Landscape, 99.
18
Cf. cartography (Homann, c.1748) in http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/ub/
sosa/karten/[on 28/09/2002]. Cities in the ‘state of Amazonia’ in Schnebelin’s
Republica Venerea: Blauefenster, der Camer Forst, Camerau, Cratzau, Flohdot,
Flohjacht, Hastrecht, Herrinhausen, Kantlberg, Rauffinbart, Schlagenmann,
Schelmschlag, Unternbanck, Wiederbellingen, Xantippa.