Along the Hudson And Mohawk: The 1790 Journey of Count Paolo Andreani - Hardcover

Andreani, Paolo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812239148 ISBN 13: 9780812239140

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

In the summer of 1790 the Italian explorer Count Paolo Andreani embarked on a journey that would take him through New York State and eastern Iroquoia. Traveling along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, Andreani kept a meticulous record of his observations and experiences in the New World. Published complete for the first time in English, the diary is of major importance to those interested in life after the American Revolution, political affairs in the New Republic, and Native American peoples.

Through Andreani's writings, we glimpse a world in cultural, economic, and political transition. An active participant in Enlightenment science, Andreani provides detailed observations of the landscape and natural history of his route. He also documents the manners and customs of the Iroquois, Shakers, and German, Dutch, and Anglo New Yorkers. Andreani was particularly interested in the Oneida and Onondaga Indians he visited, and his description of an Oneida lacrosse match accompanies the earliest known depiction of a lacrosse stick. Andreani's American letters, included here, relate his sometimes difficult but always revealing personal relationships with Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.

Prefaced by an illuminating historical and biographical introduction, Along the Hudson and Mohawk is a fascinating look at the New Republic as seen through the eyes of an observant and curious explorer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cesare Marino is an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution. His books include The Sioux Vocabulary of 1823, Dal Piave at Little Bighorn, and The Remarkable Carlo Gentile, Pioneer Italian Photographer of the West. Karim M. Tiro teaches history at Xavier University.

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Preface

From mid-August to mid-September 1790, count Paolo Andreani of Milan undertook a month-long journey through New York State and eastern Iroquoia. Andreani kept a journal of his observations of the human and physical landscape, as well as the daily details of his progress up the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. He likely intended to publish it in some form, for afterwards he produced a partially edited, annotated, and illustrated version, copied out carefully in his own best hand. Although the journal never appeared in print, the manuscript may well have circulated among members of his family and his network of personal acquaintances in Italy. Because there is no evidence of its translation into French or English, however, it is unlikely that it circulated among his wider circle of correspondents, which included Francisco de Miranda and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt.

No copies of Andreani's original field notes seem to have survived. Nor, with a single exception, have the illustrations alluded to in the text. They may have been seized by the count's many unhappy creditors. Alternatively, they may have sunk in the Atlantic along with some minerals and "other natural curiosities" Andreani sent his brother on an ill-fated vessel; or in a New York river when Andreani's sled fell through the ice, taking with it papers, scientific instruments, and three horses. However, Andreani's fair copy of his travel journal, which runs to 119 numbered pages, survived, and some time in the twentieth century it became the possession (along with several other Andreani journals and papers) of one of Andreani's descendants, Count Antonio Sormani Verri of Milan. In the early 1950s, Count Sormani authorized Professor Antonio Pace, who was then conducting research in Italy, to have the Giornale 1790 microfilmed. Subsequently, as a symbolic return of Count Andreani to America, Pace deposited a microfilm copy of the document in the collections of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, of which Andreani had been elected a member more than a century and a half earlier. Until today, the Giornale has remained virtually unknown and unused and it has never before been translated, edited, and annotated in its entirety.

We have also reproduced a number of Andreani's American letters to his friend, Miranda, and his brother, Gian Mario Andreani. They provide valuable information about those parts of Andreani's visit to America outside the period covered by his diary. These letters also include observations and opinions that Andreani felt inappropriate for his journal. This volume ends with Andreani's departure for Canada in 1791. We are presently collecting the fragments of his extant writings from the remainder of his travels, which took him as far as present-day Minnesota, for future publication.


Introduction
A Bridge to America: Count Paolo Andreani and His Journal

Count Paolo Andreani began the journal of his 1790 trip at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. He proceeded to traverse a wooden bridge to reach the present-day Bronx, or, as he put it, "to enter the continent." Travelers of Andreani's day were acutely aware of the fact that the City of New York (then confined to the southern end of Manhattan) lay off the coast of North America, separate from the mainland.

Andreani's understanding of geography suggests important differences between his universe—both physical and mental—and our own. He presents us with a long-lost rural world, and he shows it to us from seemingly strange angles. Although he was surrounded by grand vistas, his gaze was often oriented toward rocks and minerals on the ground. His propensity to measure temperature, atmospheric electricity, and even people, seems to border on the obsessive. A dog died, he tells us, precisely forty-two minutes after being bitten by a rattlesnake with twenty-nine "knots" in its tail. Even the absence of numbers disturbed him: he railed against the therapeutic use of the springs at Saratoga "while there is not a thorough analysis of them of any sort."

Andreani was not alone in his enthusiasm for numbers. His observations reflect the esprit géometrique that suffused educated Europe, and the Italian states in particular, in the eighteenth century. Since numbers held out great promise to illuminate the workings of the natural and social orders, enlightened men and women took to measuring everything from air pressure to population. The United States would catch this fever later in the decade, in part due to the influence of persons like Andreani. Jefferson, who shared rock samples with the count, wrote a colleague that "There is a Count Andriani of Milan here who sais there is a work on the subject of weights and measures published by Frisi of Milan."

Scientific inquiry became the basis of Andreani's relationships with the Founding Fathers, who, like many learned Americans, considered themselves students of the laws of nature. The range of possible topics of discussion may be gleaned from the titles of a series of unpublished scientific studies produced by Andreani in the form of letters. These included "The impact of the sun on various substances," "Brief instructions for capture of butterflies," and "Method for the manufacture of sealing-wax."

The suitability of the travel journal for the purposes of scientific observation enhanced its appeal to Andreani and his fellow citizens of the Republic of Letters. In his 1790 journal, Andreani surveyed minerals and rocks he encountered, much as fellow Milanese Luigi Castiglioni had done with American flora. In so doing, Andreani was participating in a controversy over the origin of rocks. Did they owe their composition to volcanic heat, as Nicolas Desmarest and other "Vulcanists" asserted? To a process of slow cooling and consolidation under the crust, as "Plutonists" like James Hutton claimed? Or were they created from water, as "Neptunist" Abraham Werner charged, citing the Great Flood? Andreani fell into the last camp, as suggested by his Wernerian identification of gneiss as a "primitive" rock. His Neptunist sensibilities also were visible in his description of "big boulders . . . most of which were probably transported from far away by the waters of the river, or by some great upheaval" at Manhattan, as well as his reference to "banks" when describing the glacial landscape of the Albany Pine Bush.

Although scholars have paid considerably more attention to botany than the nascent discipline of geology during this period, both were engaged in a global classification project whose goal was to survey natural phenomena in order to expose nature's system. Indeed, the father of binomial taxonomy, the Swede Linnaeus, had proposed an organizational scheme for the mineral kingdom to complement his celebrated botanical one. But rocks and minerals were heavy, and the formations in which they were found were often of greater significance than the samples themselves. Thus, as historian Martin Rudwick has pointed out, the relative difficulty of extracting meaningful mineral samples challenged science's "indoor culture" and promoted fieldwork more than zoology or botany.

Ethnology also took Europeans out of doors. Because Europeans thought Native Americans were closer to nature, they placed them under natural history's jurisdiction, along with plants, animals, minerals, and the weather. As objects of scientific inquiry, Indian bodies and societies became important to the larger debate over the continent's prospects and limitations, aptly termed the "dispute of the New World." Roughly speaking, one camp was defined by the works of the Count de Buffon, who argued that the American climate limited its natural productions and, by extension, the potency of its inhabitants. The opposing camp was composed of Rousseau and his followers. By the time of Andreani's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812239148
• ISBN 13: 9780812239140
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 115
• Herausgeber: Marino Cesare, Tiro Karim M.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar