🟩 Discoveries

Ontdekkingsreizen van de vijftiende en de zestiende eeuw en de verspreiding van de papegaaiachtigen over de westerse wereld: het museum streeft op dit historische thema (Papegaaienkunde) geen volledigheid na, een handreiking volstaat. 

Algemeen

• Sloane, H. (1725). A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands, vol.2. London.
• A. R. Wallace; The Geographical Distribution of Animals: With a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth’s Surface; Order III Psittaci. (London 1889). 324 – 331. Geraadpleegd op (..), van //wallace-online.org/converted/pdf/1876_GeographicalDistribution_S718.1.pdf
• George, W. (1980). Sources and background to discoveries of new animals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hist. Sci. 18(40): 79–104.

Mantels en rokken van veren

The Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha

We showed them a grey parrot the admiral had brought with him. They took it in their hands at once and pointed to the land, as if there were others there. (...)

Our men exchanged some varvels and other small things of little value which they had brought with them for some very large and beautiful red parrots and two small green ones, some caps of green feathers, and a cloth of many colors, also of feathers, a rather beautiful kind of material, as Your Majesty will see when you receive all these things, for the admiral says he is sending them to you. (...)

Whilst we were cutting timber in the wood, some parrots flew through the trees. Some were green, others grey, some big, others little. It seems to me, after this, that there must be many of them in this land, even though there cannot have been more than nine or ten of those I saw, if so many. (...)

• From Pero Vaz de Caminha’s Letter to King Dom Manuel, written from Porto Seguro of Vera Cruz, the 1st of May, 1500. The Voyages of Pedro Alvares Cabral, trans. William Brooks Greenlee (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938) 

Historia naturalis Brasiliae

• Historia naturalis Brasiliae ... :in qua non tantum plantae et animalia, sed et indigenarum morbi, ingenia et mores describuntur et iconibus supra quingentas illustrantur. Lugdun. Batavorum :||et Amstelodami, Apud Franciscum Hackium ;||Apud Lud. Elzevirium, 1648.  Geraadpleegd op (..), van //doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.565

A Parrot of the Caribbean

Two small bird bones retrieved from a 17th-century shipwreck off the Florida Keys are identifiable as those of a small parrot, referred to Aratinga / Pionus. The shipwreck is one of the small merchant vessels of the Spanish Tierra Firme fleet lost in a hurricane in 1622, homeward bound after loading cargo in Spanish colonial ports around the northern South American coast and Caribbean. The remarkable discovery of parrot remains provides unique evidence of a probably thriving 17th-century transatlantic trade in small parrots from the New World, for which, despite appearing in contemporary art and literature, no archaeological record appears to exist in Europe.

• Cooper, J., Armitage, P. (2013). A parrot of the Caribbean? A remarkable find from a 17th-century Spanish shipwreck. British Ornithologists’ Club. Bull. B.O.C. 2013 133 (1). Geraadpleegd op (..), van //boc-online.org/bulletins/downloads/BBOC1331-Cooper.pdf (Abstract published online) 

 Mediaeval trade routes 2

(...) four cockatoos depicted in the margins of Frederick II’ s De Arte Venandi cum Avibus. The story is that this bird suggests a mediaeval trade route from Australia to Italy, overturning the Eurocentric notion that Australia was a dark continent until ‘discovery’ by Dutch sailors early in the 17th century. (Figuur 4).

This means that the cockatoo gifted to Frederick II was taken from the northernmost tip of what is now Australia’s mainland, New Guinea or the islands off New Guinea or Indonesia. Based on the fact that my colleagues found red paint flecks in the irises of all four images, they also surmised it was probably a female. 

• Dalton H, Salo J, Niemelä P, Örmä S. (2018). Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s Australasian Cockatoo: Symbol of Detente between East and West and Evidence of the Ayyubids’ Global Reach. Parergon 35: 35-60. (Abstract published online)