Content area
Full Text
On 16 September 2009, two German ships-the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight-passed Novaya Zemlya, an island off Russia's north coast. Global warming has serendipitously opened up the fabled Northwest Passage, an Arctic route that had been earnestly sought after and ultimately deemed impassable by navigators in early modern England. While modern nations compete over their rights to the polar sea-lanes, few realize that the Arctic dream has originated from England's desire to reach China and the Far East in the sixteenth century. This essay traces the genesis of the Arctic passage project as related to the China dream by examining the historical and metaphorical associations of John Donne's image of the Anyan Strait in his poem "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" (1623). By uncovering the Far Eastern background of early modern maritime adventures, I mean to show how Donne's invocation of some seemingly incidental geographical features reveals a surprisingly global vision and cosmopolitan spirit.
Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589-1600), an extensive travel compendium that documents maritime explorations, proved pivotal to raising England's consciousness of a globalizing world. Donne was numbered among those who responded nimbly to the new message about the recently discovered worlds that was trumpeted by Hakluyt's multivolume compilations.1 Images of new geographical discoveries pervade Donne's works, especially his divine poem "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness." Here we hear the speaker remark,
Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.
(Hymn, lines 16-20)2
This stanza distinguishes both by the number of geographical references that it contains and the juxtaposition of biblical figures with some newly revealed regions. There are two general critical approaches to Donne's spatial imagery. One focuses on his physical places. Robert R. Owens claims that "since Donne's geography is mystical in intent, exact designation of places is unimportant."3 But other scholars recognize the importance of "exact" locations to understand Donne's works. Donald Anderson associates Donne's images of the earth with medieval T-in-O maps.4 Whereas Robert Sharp traces these images to sixteenth-century cordiform maps, Claude Gandelman and Noam Flinker link them with anthropomorphic landscapes.5 Second, some scholars...