of Noah’s (here Noe’s) “wicked sonne Cham,” who “used company with his
wife” on the Ark, against his father’s orders, and whose offspring were there-
fore cursed with blackness ( 7 : 264 ).^57 Best concludes “that the cause of the
Ethiopians blacknesse is the curse and naturall infection of blood, and not the
distemperature of the Climate” ( 7 : 264 ). Yet his purpose is to show that black-
ness is notcaused by the climate of “the middle Zone,” which covers both
these cursed inhabitants and “our people” of the the West, the “Meta Incog-
nita,” “of whom and for whom this discourse is taken in hande” ( 7 : 262 ). Best
enforces the same point with a related story, which has also been pivotal to
critical treatments of race and gender, of “an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole
brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a
sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his
native countrey” ( 7 : 262 ).^58 As he himself asserts, this example speaks to “a
more fresh example, [of ] our people of Meta Incognita,” who are colored in
ways that climate cannot explain ( 7 : 262 ), and it counters the false impression,
created by “some there be that thinke” and “others [who] againe imagine,”
that in the New World the white-skinned English might turn black
( 7 : 260 – 61 ). Best’s use of these stories does not undo their codification of
blackness as the thing that is—or should be—not, not at least in the West.
But what is nevertheless significant, if not also surprising, here is that the rep-
resentational priority, which colors Africa’s features, is first and foremost the
West.
Hakluyt’s representation of the New World “remained resolutely the his-
tory of transitory voyages, traffics, and discoveries, not of permanent planta-
tions, colonies, and empire,” as Armitage has argued, themselves initially
catalyzed by the search for the Northwest Passage to Cathay.^59 Still, their story
is unified in the Navigationsby an overriding theme of discovery and acquisi-
tion, by a sense that the parts all contribute to a new world whole upon which
England could and should leave its mark—even if neither Hakluyt nor En-
gland had a clear idea of quite what that mark would be. From the very first
document onward, “possession,” which Stephen Greenblatt has distinguished
as a New World trope, is literally everywhere: from Henry VII’s “letters
patents” to John Cabot and sons, licensing them to “subdue, occupy and pos-
sesse all...townes, cities, castles and isles of them found” ( 7 : 143 ); to Hak-
luyt’s “Notes” to the Frobisher company, directing them to choose a “seat”
where they “may possesse alwayes sweete water, wood, seacoles or turfe, with
fish, flesh, graine, fruites, herbes and rootes” and not to worry about “possess-
ing of mines of golde, of silver, copper, quicksilver, or of any such precious
62 chapter two