Sixteenth Century Expeditions and Modernity. Interview with Romain Bertrand
Romain Bertrand is an historian who works on South-East Asia. A prolific author, he speaks to us today about his new work, Les Grandes Déconvenues, la Renaissance, Sumatra et les Frères Parmentier (The Great Disappointments: The Renaissance, Sumatra, and the Parmentier Brothers) published in March 2024 by éditions du Seuil.
How did you come to work on the expedition of the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier, French navigators of the early sixteenth century?
The reasons behind the genesis of the investigation for this book are both deep-seated and purely circumstantial. The deeper reason is that I am conducting a research programme that began more than twenty years ago, which involves studying situations of contact or “first encounters” between European societies and the societies of the Malay world. This French epic is just one episode in a series of such encounters, of which I am trying to tell a slightly different story by using both sociological tools and an anthropological questionnaire.
For the first time in my research career, I am dealing with a French case. Until now, I refrained from working on France, because I felt that it was much easier, when dealing with issues of colonial history, not to work on the country from which you come. For my Ph D, almost 25 years ago, I chose to work on Indonesia using Dutch and Iberian sources. I preferred not to work on France because the field of colonial history in France had become complex and politically over-invested by the early 2000s.
This book is a continuation of my previous work, but it is also a bit special. The periods of confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and the practical impossibility of travelling to South-East Asia, particularly to Singapore and Borneo, as well as to London meant that I was denied access to the archives for the book I was working on at the time. At the same time, a publisher proposed that I edit a sixteenth-century account of the journey of brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier to Sumatra written by Pierre Crignon, a practitioner of nautical astronomy, which had not been the subject of a new critical edition since the nineteenth century. I thought I’d take the opportunity to respond to this proposal.
To prepare the critical edition of this travelogue, I needed to understand the background of the two French captains who sailed to Sumatra in 1529. What was life like for seafarers, sailors, and navigators in a medium-sized town like Dieppe at the dawn of the sixteenth century? I spent a lot of time in the archives of Rouen, Dieppe, and Le Havre and I found that there was a real need to revisit and reopen this issue. There indeed was a whole “down-to-water” social history of early sixteenth century Norman seafaring communities to write, far from the “view from above” crafted by intellectual history when it deals with long-distance maritime endeavors.
The first part of your book is a history of Normandy, Dieppe, and the figure of Jean Ango. Who is this character and what role did he play in the Parmentier brothers’ expedition?
The Parmentier brothers’ expedition is a little forgotten today, except locally, in Normandy, where the Parmentier brothers and Jean Ango are part of local legend. Yet the Parmentier brothers’ journey to Sumatra in 1529 played an extremely important role in the nineteenth century.
Why was this?
Because by that time, there was a kind of competition between European countries over the origins of the Great Discoveries: the question was who had played the biggest part. France did not invest as much as Portugal and Spain in maritime expeditions to distant lands in the sixteenth century. So, in the nineteenth century, when France redeveloped its imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia, the story of the Parmentier brothers was brought to the fore to show that France was indeed there at the beginning of the European presence in Asia, and by the same token to explain that it had, by right, a role to play in this part of the world. It’s a somewhat forgotten story, but an extremely powerful legend.
Jean Ango is one of the mainstays of this legend. He was the expedition’s shipowner, the one who chartered the two ships, the Sacre and the Pensée, which Jean and Raoul Parmentier were to command. Jean Ango is considered in nineteenth-century historiography, and even today by many novelists, as a sort of small-time humanist. There are many legends about him. He is said to have come from a humble background and to have forged his own destiny through sheer force of will. He is said to have been a close friend of King Francis I. He is seen as having been a transmitter of knowledge, someone who conversed with the great minds of the Renaissance. The raw reality, that of the archives, shows us a very different character, who came from a family of great notables from Rouen, who was not a friend of the king but one of his many servants; he had only the most superficial contact with high humanist culture; and he grew rich not only through legal trade or his activities as a collector of seigneurial dues, but also through “commerce raiding” (“course”), a form of maritime brigandage which, although usually directed against the kingdom’s enemies, was quite indistinguishable from piracy at the time.
The image of the refined scholar or the humanist spirit is also somewhat tarnished when we consider the violence that went into the making of the Parmentier brothers’ expedition.
Jean Ango is presented as an exceptional person because every legend begins by singling out a character to make him a hero. But what interests us, in history as in other social sciences, is understanding how a moment, a world, and institutions make a character like Ango possible. Along the way, we realise that there were many Jean Angos at the time in other towns along the Atlantic coast. I mention one in my book, Michel Férey, who was also a legitimate notable at times and a pirate entrepreneur at others.
It’s not so much a question of debunking the legend for the sake of quibbling as of recalling reality when necessary. Above all, by investigating Jean Ango, my aim was to investigate the very peculiar social and political world that made this type of character and his career possible.
Who were Jean and Raoul Parmentier and what were the reasons behind their trip to Sumatra in 1529?
First of all, I’d like to point out that the Parmentier brothers’ journey to Sumatra in 1529, which in the nineteenth century was celebrated as a crowning glory for France, was a failure from every point of view—human, commercial, and diplomatic. A third of the crew lost their lives on the expedition, which failed to bring back enough gold and spices to cover even the cost of provisioning the two ships.
The Parmentier brothers were the two captains in command of these ships. We know almost nothing about Raoul, the younger brother. On the other hand, Jean Parmentier is a well-known figure, but with two very different faces. On the one hand, he was the man who led the expedition to Sumatra, and it is assumed that he led other expeditions to Brazil and possibly to the coast of Guinea. He was a captain, a professional sailor, and a keen nautical astronomer. On the other hand, he is also known in literary history for having written a number of poems of a very special kind, poems of Marian devotion, dedicated to extolling the virtues and glory of the Virgin Mary, which were recited in competitions (known as “Puys”) organised by religiously minded lay brotherhoods.
Every year in Dieppe, Rouen, and elsewhere in the north of France, poetry competitions were organised where poets, often amateurs but also a few professionals, could be heard composing odes to the Virgin Mary in extremely complex poetic forms, “royal songs” in decasyllables and rhymes with common phonemes, ballads punctuated by “envois”. Jean Parmentier is known for his poems on religious and mystical issues, written using the language and imagination of his profession as a sailor and navigator. In this way, the pilot guiding his ship through a stormy sea becomes the incarnation of the good believer guided by his faith in God and in the mercy of the Virgin Mary towards the Haven of Salvation.
This blend of the lexicon of seafaring and obedience to a rhetorically complex form of religious poetry is what caught early on the attention of literary historians in the poetry of Jean Parmentier, who is, for all these reasons and more, an extraordinarily interesting and, moreover, extremely endearing character.
How did you approach the history of this expedition? How do you construct a historical account, a chronology?
The account of the expedition is not a new discovery. It was published several times in the nineteenth century, in 1832 and 1883. The status of the text itself is a bit complicated, because there are two different versions. In the nineteenth century, one of these versions was deemed to be “major” and was published without necessarily taking full account of the variations and interpolations with the other. Consequently, the first stage of my work consisted of transforming a set of documents into a source. And then, of course, it was a matter of reading this source against the grain, questioning each of its ambiguities and unspoken points.
To do this, I often asked myself very simple questions, which are the questions a scriptwriter would ask: what would I do if I had to turn Pierre Crignon’s travelogue into a film? Like many European travelogues of the time, Crignon’s account is exclusively European. He tells us about the Indian Ocean and the Malay world as seen from the deck of the ship, and about the island of Sumatra as seen from the harbour area within the coastal towns. This is a very partial vision, whereas in a film I would need to build up landscapes around my actors, to see further than the ship’s railings or the palisades of the port city.
Much has been written about the voyage of the Parmentier brothers, but no one has really asked what Sumatra was like at the time. But once you start asking these questions, you realise that there’s a lot more to the island than what the Normans saw and thought at the time. It was a society that was both highly ceremonial and ritualistic, since it was made up of city-states based on the model of the Malay sultanates, but also highly fluid and cosmopolitan, since it was the product of ancient external influences, was in the process of being Islamised, and had long welcomed Chinese, Indian, and Arab merchants. In reality, Sumatra’s political, literary, and religious cultures were extremely sophisticated at the time. Travel accounts obviously say much more about what it was like to be or feel Norman, “French”, or Christian at the time than about what Asian societies were like.
What is more, the chronologyin the book is always cut back a little to give a better understanding of who the characters are, and what they are the product of. Jean Parmentier set out to conquer the Indian Ocean in 1529. He had taken service with Jean Ango in 1522, so he had been trained in the 1510s. We need to look at what it meant to become and to be a sailor, navigator, and pilot in Dieppe in those years. In this way, we can begin to go back in time to understand how skills, know-hows and sensitive engagements with the world were shaped.
You have to read Crignon’s account of his voyage like a scriptwriter, a bit like Emmanuel Carrère tracking down the scriptural inconsistencies in the Gospel according to Luke, in Le Royaume. How did the Normans manage to strike up an exchange with the islanders of Sumatra? What day did they arrive? Did they drop anchor in the harbour of the Sultanate of Tiku, or did they anchor a short distance away and use their longboats to dock? What happened next? Who was their interpreter and what languages did he or she speak? How did they get food? How did they weigh the products they bought? Europeans always have the impression that they’re being taken for a ride when they trade, buy, or barter, but that’s not the reality, it’s just that they haven’t mastered the terms of trade. They didn’t know the local currencies and conversion rates in force at the time on the west coast of Sumatra. When they arrived, the commercial world of the Indian Ocean, with all its norms and rituals, was completely unknown to them. It’s by asking tiny questions, by looking at how things work or don’t work, that you begin to weave a story.
How does your book fit in with the construction of another narrative, that of modernity and the Great Discoveries, which can also be “great disappointments”?
While the Great Discoveries deal with events that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they are the big story of the nineteenth century. The very notion of the Great Discoveries didn’t appear until the 1810s, when it is seen first in the work of the naturalist Alexandre de Humboldt (1769-1859). It was therefore an invention, something fabricated, like most of the chrononyms we use today, most of which also date from the nineteenth century (Renaissance, Modern Times, etc.).
In the nineteenth century, a grand narrative was constructed, a litany of dates and names in capital letters, selecting the explorations or conquests—in the Americas, Africa, Asia—that were successful. However, when we delve into the sources, we find that for every successful expedition, there are dozens, hundreds, that failed. For every ship that arrived in Sumatra, ten were shipwrecked or lost on the way.
The Great Discoveries are therefore a success story, but the reality, if only statistically, is the “great disappointments”, in other words the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of failed expeditions that were commercial disasters and human misadventures. It’s important to take these other expeditions into account because they help us to understand that an expedition is not an individual, genial, and visionary undertaking, but one that mobilises substantial means, large quantities of people, knowledge and know-how, and material resources. You have to know how to build a certain type of boat, you have to be able to recruit highly specialised sailors and craftsmen, you have to find cash and therefore generate surplus capital or take out a “big adventure” loan to rig and provision the ships, pay the crews, buy a stock of barter goods, and so on. But it takes a long time, years and in fact decades, to accumulate so much skill, capital, and experience, in other words to make possible these expeditions, which so often turned out to be major disappointments.
The nineteenth century bequeathed us several categories for thinking about our past: the Great Discoveries, the Renaissance, Modernity, which still guide our intuitive interpretation of European history today. The voyages of exploration and conquest of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were the only way to make this arrow of time work, to link the Renaissance and the entry into “modernity” through the notion of the Great Discoveries.
Modernity, in the sense of a hysteresis effect of the Renaissance, that is to say seen through the lens of the key role played by humanist knowledge in the genesis of the “scientific rationalism” of the seventeenth century, this idea of modernity does not fit very well with the narrow framing that is often given to this period today. The Renaissance did not begin at a given moment at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, nor did it date solely from the Italian wars, as Michelet wanted: it can be traced back much further, but it was to tie it in with the sixteenth century that the voyages of “discovery” were made a symptom of a pivotal moment when Europe manifested a need for curiosity and knowledge of distant worlds.
This was only possible because of the extraordinary role accorded to these journeys, whose purpose was obviously not primarily to discover the humanities at the other end of the world, but to satisfy commercial interests. Jean Ango was a shipowner and a shrewd businessman, and if he sent two ships and more than a hundred men to Sumatra in 1529, it was purely for commercial reasons, to fetch black pepper, nutmeg, and above all gold, since at the time there was a shortage of precious metals on the European market and it was thought that Sumatra contained mines that produced gold of very high purity.
So it was a case of big money. Just as Magellan’s expedition between 1519 and 1522 was not an undertaking dedicated to the discovery of distant worlds, nor dictated by an interest in the lifestyles of other societies, the Parmentier brothers’ expedition was set up by representatives of a provincial bourgeoisie on the rise, both socially and economically.
In the nineteenth century, legend transformed these commercial operations into evidence of a kind of exclusively European predisposition to a humanistic interest in distant worlds, writing off other examples—Japanese, Chinese, or Ottoman—of similar curiosity.
How does this challenge the notion of modernity?
Because we realise that what makes ordinary European sailors capable, with the least possible prejudice, of understanding the inhabitants of these remote islands is a sensitive relationship with the world that they share with those Islanders. And this largely belies the official notion of modernity invented by the nineteenth century. We still think of modernity in terms of the writings of scholars and literati, and see it as the emergence of rationalist thinking that breaks away from more primitive or intuitive modes of understanding. So there’s always the idea that there was a dramatic moment of break between a “time before”, made up of myths and magic, and a “time after”, placed under the sign of Reason, and this shift is always more or less assigned to or attributed to the sixteenth century.
However, when we look closely, we realise that even in these voyages, which are presented to us as manifestations of humanist and pre-scientific curiosity in its purest expression, the way of thinking, acting, and relating to the world of the sailors and captains on board these ships has nothing to do with the rationalist spirit of the seventeenth century as it is often defined. We can therefore ask ourselves whether we should maintain this notion of modernity unchanged, whether this “early modernity” of the sixteenth century is a forgotten dimension or an unfulfilled potential of “late modernity”, whether it might not be something quite different from what we have learned to call modernity, and so on. The fact remains that we cannot avoid asking ourselves why, when we read the poetry of Jean Parmentier or glimpse the sensitive knowledge of Norman seafarers, when we take into account the way in which they think both by causality and by analogy, we do not recognise ourselves completely.
This simple expedition opens the door to real fundamental questions. Jean Parmentier’s poetry, for example, is totally baffling, and doesn’t fit into any of the boxes we have available to classify it: is it medieval? modern? contemporary? anachronistic? The point is to restore this poetry to its rightful, unstable place, if not in history then at least in a book, and in so doing to give readers the chance to hear it, to consider it, and to realise that it has nothing to do with the sixteenth century as we were taught at school. There is Ronsard and Du Bellay, of course, but before them there is everything that they told us to forget and that school didn’t teach us: the Great rhetoricians, the crazy compositions of Jean Molinet, the formidable Epîtres de l'amant vert by Lemaire de Belges, the linguistic acrobatics of Clément Marot, the grotesque poetry of Pierre Gringore—something like OULIPO in 1500!
How does our current representation of modernity and of these great expeditions and first encounters between Europeans and other populations around the world affect our relationship with the colonial history of France and Europe?
I’d say that much more generally than just the question of its articulation with colonial history, modernity is an old idea, even an antiquated one. We can’t abstract from a conventional definition of modernity things that we no longer consider to be desirable progress for humanity. The race for technical mastery of the world, for example, in a situation of environmental cataclysm, can no longer be desirable. Consequently, there is an old-fashioned aspect to the notion of modernity as it was thought of and represented at the end of the nineteenth century by people who found the smoke from trains arriving at stations and the metal invading cities absolutely magnificent. Today, we know the price of these things, or to be more precise, we are paying a high price for them, to the point of reaching the limit before the extinction of our own species.
So we can no longer embrace the notion of modernity with the enthusiasm with which we embraced it just thirty years ago. The same is true of the Great Discoveries. The Great Discoveries bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century are stories whose heroes are invariably white, Christian men, who set out to discover a world that from the outset was deemed barbaric, primitive, and populated by non-Christians whose skin was rarely white and whose religions and ritualism were dismissed as false beliefs.
Who can still believe in this tale in a society like ours, a mixed-race society, a society that needs a narrative that leaves room for other characters in order to include young people from very different post-colonial backgrounds in its national narrative? You can no longer tell the story of Magellan’s voyage in a secondary school class in the same way as you did thirty years ago, because many of the pupils won’t recognise themselves in this hero. But when we tell them that there was also an African slave, Juan Negro, and Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who were forcibly converted to Catholicism in the sixteenth century) on board Magellan’s ships, it forces us to think about centuries of Muslim history in Spain and Europe, the whole fascinating and tragic story of the first contacts with Atlantic Africa, and so on.
Africa is part of our history, Islam is part of our history, both played a critical role in the very fabric of what came to be known as “Europe”. When we open the doors of the story a little wider, by focusing not just on the central heroic character but also on the smaller characters who evolve alongside him, we can offer a narrative that is much more in tune with contemporary identity issues.
It’s all about our own history, our belief—for a very long time blind—in the infinite nature of natural resources and in scientific progress, in the purely technological resolution of all problems. In the story of the Parmentier brothers, Jean Ango is a shipowner who makes a lot of money from herring fishing, which, we were told for a very long time, was the manna of Northern Europe, the resource that had allowed powerful, beautiful, and complex cities to emerge from the Baltic Sea to the French Atlantic coast. All this was considered to be a good thing, but we now know that this area was overfished as early as the sixteenth century and that we were already engaged in a race to extinguish the resource and depopulate the seas. So today we can no longer look back on this as just one of the finest moments in our history, the golden age of our power over the world, we must also look at it as one of the moments when the tragedy began.
Do you see the expansion of the world and the quest for resources, for gold, in the sixteenth century as the first moments of capitalism, the first moments of expansion of this system that is devastating for the resources of nature?
It took a lot to make possible the predatory unleashing of European expansion in the sixteenth century. Look at what is known as “capitalist” thinking, in the very broad sense of man’s instrumental relationship with a world that is nothing but quantifiable, monetisable, extractable resources: it took centuries of thinking and ulterior motives to prepare it. In a way, the roots of the problem do not lie in the sixteenth century.
Historians like Sylvain Piron have shown this.1 From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onwards, religious thought, including monastic thought, meant the coexistence of very different visions of the world, one of which was very instrumental, based on a possessive relationship with nature. What can be said is that everything that had been brewing quietly for centuries found its loudest and most devastating expression in the sixteenth century, which was, after all, the century of the conquest of the Americas, the birth of the Atlantic slave trade, and the beginning of the bloody European settlements on the coasts of Africa, Brazil, India, etc.
The sixteenth century was indeed a century of bloodshed, when unbridled appetites could be most clearly seen or read in European history. Nevertheless, if the sixteenth century is guilty, it is not totally responsible. The centuries that preceded it had their part to play in the drama. Jules Michelet said “the 16th century, that hero”. I don't think the sixteenth century is a hero, far from it, but I don’t think it should be blamed for all the problems either.
All the more so, and I’ll say this in conclusion, because there were already people in the sixteenth century who disputed this devastation. Bartolomé de las Casas, the man said to be the great defender of the Indians, is well known. .png)
But he was not alone: at the very time of the conquest, other people voiced their criticisms. Sixteenth-century Europe is probably no more violent than the societies of previous centuries, but it has a worse conscience. It is not true that we did not know. The fact that Indians had no soul was not an opinion shared by everyone, a unanimous doxa. That’s not true, and it’s all the more terrible for that. Many religious people, like Martin de Rada in the Philippines in the 1570s, stood up and literally shouted in the face of the King of Spain and the conquistadors: “What we are doing is not acceptable, it will lead us all to Hell”. At the very moment when the conquest was being carried out with extreme violence, it produced its own critique. At least, that’s what I tried to show in Le Long Remords de la Conquête (2015), based on the case of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.
There is a debate in historiography about the fact that we should not judge yesterday’s actions with contemporary values, but we should not see the people of the past as gullible and ignorant. The historian’s job is to understand the events that come down to us, which are often mixed up with legends and prejudices. In your book, you take your time in bringing us to the Parmentier brothers. They are not really the subject of your book, even though they appear in the title. Your book is really about the way in which societies structured themselves and understood themselves at the time...
The problem is that we don’t really know what the dominant criteria for judging are today, or what they were in the past. In fact, there is never a perfect moral consensus at any given time in a society. That’s what I was saying about the sixteenth century. What were the moral criteria in then? Some people thought that the violence inflicted on the Indians was perfectly legitimate, while others considered it totally illegitimate.
Today too, values are not entirely shared, as the issue of welcoming migrants proves. I don’t think France can be defined unanimously by a spirit of progressivism and openness. Today’s criteria and yesterday’s criteria don’t mean much. A society or an era always speaks against itself.
The question of the anachronism of judgement is therefore somewhat absurd. The only thing we can do is take note of the moral polyphony of a world or an era. Record all the voices, don’t stop at the most powerful or intimidating, but also listen to the weaker ones that say something else. In the sixteenth century, there were those who howled in favour of the conquest of the world, the destruction of the Indians, and the enslavement of Africans. It is these voices, those of the conquistadors, the princes, and the great financiers of expansion, that we hear the most because they carry far and dominate the written documents, but there are also small voices that oppose, that say: “No, we can’t do that. That’s not us”. The role of the historian is to listen to all the voices.
To conclude, what projects are you working on today?
I’m resuming a project on a case set on the north-east coast of Borneo at the end of the nineteenth century, which I had to interrupt when the pandemic broke out. It’s also going to be a very small story, about a British colonial officer who has to build something like colonial sovereignty out of nothing, in the middle of a particularly complex jungle and lagoon world. I’m off to Singapore in a few days’ time to complete my documentation for this forthcoming book in the archives.
Interview by Josefina Gubbins
Photo 1: Cover of Les Grandes Déconvenues, la Renaissance, Sumatra et les Frères Parmentier, March 2024, éditions du Seuil
Photo 2: Jehan Ango, his wife and daughter praying, miniature du Maître des Heures Ango tirée de son livre d'heures, vers 1514-1515, BNF, NAL392, f.6v.
Photo 4: Le Bien public, Chant royal de Pierre Crignon. Paris, BnF, fr. 379, f° 20, reproduit dans Chants royaux du Puy des Palinods de Rouen, par Jean Lafond, Rouen, Société rouennaise des bibliophiles, 1933-1934, planche 38.
- 1. Sylvain Piron, L’Occupation du monde, Bruxelles, Zones sensibles, 2018, and Généalogie de la morale économique. L’occupation du monde 2 , Bruxelles, Zones sensibles, 2020.
