Searching for the Amazons by John Man

Author:John Man [Man, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

24 Alternatively, Pisan in French. Pizan in Italian, because the family came from Pizzano, near Bologna.

25 The name was not his invention. It had been around for over 300 years. The Song of Roland, completed in the early twelfth century, has Emperor Charles mourning Roland (Section 209), listing possible rebels, including ‘those of Califerne’ – presumably the land of the caliph, i.e. Spain.

26 In my 1664 edition, reproduced by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, these names and many others are in a modern typeface, not the original Gothic, which suggests the 1664 text had been modified from some unspecified earlier edition.

27 Nectandra cinamomoides.

28 Because large-scale tribal ‘nations’ do not exist today, Carvajal’s reports have been dismissed as fantasy. But this sounds like eyewitness evidence, and should at least be taken seriously. Recently, in southern Amazonia, aerial surveys have revealed hundreds of ‘geoglyphs’ – remains of huge rectangular and circular earthworks, evidence of long-vanished and large-scale communities. Perhaps similar states existed on the Amazon itself.

29 He was a ‘trumpeter’, says Carvajal, for his people had many ‘trumpets, drums and pipes’. I’m interested because I played the trumpet, long ago, when I thought I was musical. What on earth did he mean by ‘trumpets’? The only trumpets in Europe at the time were valveless open trumpets, like doublelength bugles. Valves came much later (the instrument in Haydn–s Trumpet Concerto used clappers and holes to play harmonics). Wooden clarinos with recorder-like holes also had trumpet mouthpieces. Rainforest tribes had no metal. Perhaps these Indians had wooden instruments, with a bore-hole, or used deer horns. It’s a mystery.

30 The two versions differ in style, but not much in content, perhaps because they were dictated separately.

31 Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique. See Bibliography.

32 The original is available on http://gallica.bnf.fr/

33 Relation abrégée . . . See Bibliography.

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