Summary: a fine exploration of attitudes at the outset of Europe’s colonial plunder of the global South

In A History of Water, Edward Wilson-Lee notes how towards the end of his life, Leonardo da Vinci continued to find excuses for not painting by researching the shifting patterns of cascading water. By the thinking of the day, this represented the ultimate waste of time as received wisdom was that the Platonic ideal of the fixed and unchanging metaphysical world was the only thing that was knowable.

But human society is itself as fluid and tumultuous as water. And, with A History of Water, Wilson-Lee offers accounts of two people who tried to understand the different patterns of its flux.

The people in question are Damião de Góis, a cosmopolitan Portuguese envoy and latterly chief archivist of Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo (Tower of Records), and the much more proletarian Luís de Camões, Portugal’s greatest poet, author of the Lusiads, a romanticised account of Portuguese exploration.

Both men were travellers around the same time, when Portugal began Europe’s imperial pillage of the global South. De Gois’ journeys around Europe made him witness to the stirrings of the religious wars that disfigured Europe in 16^th and 17^th Centuries. De Camoes travelled much further afield, into Asia, and so was a more direct witness of Europe’s disfiguring of the rest of the world.

However, the two mens’ reactions to their experiences and encounters are tellingly different. De Gois, recognising the humanity of others, sought to build understanding and diminish conflict where he could. Of course, this brought him to the menacing attention of the Inquisition which, in truth, did not approve of Jesus’ admonition to love and not judge others.

De Camoes’ on the other hand, drawing on his experiences in South and East Asia, made Vasco de Gama the hero of the Lusiads.

Just one thing about Vasco de Gama: On his second voyage to India he captured a ship called the Meri bearing some 400 Muslims pilgrims to Mecca. This he set alight and kept burning for four days, deaf to all pleas for pity, until every man and woman aboard was dead. Twenty children were spared and forcibly converted to Christianity, according to some accounts, due to ransoms offered by their desperate mothers.

In this, de Camoes is perhaps the prototype of hundreds of other imperial propagandists who spent the colonial era elevating thieves, rapists and war criminals to the level of national archetypes. It happens still.

A History of Water is a fascinating book that offers a novel aspect of early modern European history and the origins of colonial conquest.

But the book also has contemporary resonances.

All societies have a sort of duality between imperial and democratic tendencies, between the Establishments and the dispossessed, between the chums of the elites on one hand and the human rights protesters on the other.

Edward Wilson-Lee’s exploration of an earlier manifestation of this duality is a stark warning of what can happen when recognition of our common humanity is suppressed by chauvinistic myths of superiority. 

It is an outstanding book and rightly acclaimed as one of the best works of history of recent years.