Emma Smith at Literary Review:
On his visit to London in the autumn of 1599, Thomas Platter took in a performance at the newly built Globe theatre and trips to Hampton Court, Windsor Castle and Eton College. But it was a London house crammed with global curiosities curated by Walter Cope that captured his imagination. This outlandish exhibition included a unicorn’s tail, an embalmed child and the bauble and bells belonging to Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool. Pride of place was given to items from the Americas: Cope would later become a key investor in the Virginia Company, and he had already collected fabulous feathered Native American headdresses and hung a long, narrow canoe and oars from the ceiling. A few years later there were delighted reports of ‘Virginians’ demonstrating the handling of a canoe on the Thames. In her fascinating book A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, Lauren Working observes that these indigenous men may well have been recently captured and brought to London. English colonists were patrolling Chesapeake Bay for some years before the establishment of the first permanent settlement at Jamestown.
more here.
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