When people think of Atlantic trade, they often think of sugar, tobacco and cotton. However, there was something else of crucial importance on board seventeenth-century ships: new information about distant lands. In his book An Ocean of Rumours, Professor of Maritime History Michiel van Groesen reconstructs this global form of news dissemination.
Van Groesen's book begins with the story of Sir Francis Drake, a feared English pirate. 'Eventually, a rumour spread across Northern Europe that he had captured Havana, at that time the heart of the Spanish Empire,' he explains. 'At the same time, a story was doing the rounds in Southern Europe that things were actually going very badly indeed. Drake was said to have fled to Panama following a failed attack on Puerto Rico.'
The second story turns out to be true, but the merchants in Augsburg on whom Van Groesen focuses have no way of verifying this. 'The big problem with news and information in the Atlantic world is that it couldn't be verified,' says Van Groesen. 'If a ship docked in Middelburg today, it would take nine weeks for the next one to arrive, due to all the winds and currents. You had to wait for that to get new information, and even then it was still questionable how reliable that new information was.'
At the same time, information from overseas territories does indeed matter for life in Europe. Van Groesen: 'If Havana had actually fallen, the annual Spanish Silver Fleet would no longer have existed. That would have deprived the European battlefields of a huge injection of capital.'
Culture of anticipation
Van Groesen delved into Dutch, French, Portuguese and Italian-language newspapers to find out how Europeans coped with this constant uncertainty. 'You can see a culture of anticipation emerging,' he explains. 'People are waiting for good news, so there is optimistic speculation. If you suggest in Northern Europe that Havana must have been taken by now, you'll sell more newspapers than if you say the opposite.'
Positive angle
Moreover, an accurate presentation of the facts is not always the priority. 'In English-language newspapers, news and advertising are sometimes intertwined, so you don't always know whether you're actually reading news or whether it's a sales pitch to lure people to Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania,' says Van Groesen.
Other topics are completely ignored. Van Groesen: 'Portugal had been involved in the transatlantic slave trade for a hundred years, but the few newspapers that existed made no mention of it. The only thing that occasionally features is a suppressed slave revolt.'
This positive portrayal does not always benefit the newspapers' reputation. 'In my final chapter, I show that in Spain an undercurrent of handwritten newsletters was gaining popularity,' says Van Groesen. 'Printed media were seen as unreliable, because they were supposedly monitored by the government.'
Information society
Reliable or not, Europe clearly already had a professional news culture in the seventeenth century. 'That adds nuance to the view that the American War of Independence was the first media war,' says Van Groesen. 'The media were indeed used at that time to turn North Americans against the British king, but that was not an innovation of 1750. Just like us, people in the seventeenth century felt they were living in an information society.'
