Nuncius Inanimatus. Seventeenth-Century Telegraphy: the Schemes of Francis Godwin and Henry Reynolds

Abstract

I ForewordIn his own time Francis Godwin (1562-1633), Bishop successively of Llandaff and of Hereford, was best known as an antiquary and a gifted nepotist. Today, conversely, he is celebrated as the first writer of science fiction in English. His posthumously published The Man in the Moone (1638), purportedly the narrative of a diminutive Spaniard named Domingo Gonsales, was read widely, joked about, borrowed for the stage, and bowdlerised over the century following its publication. Gonsales, after some military and mercantile adventures, finds himself in enforced medical isolation on St Helena, attended only by a Negro servant called Diego. There he builds a machine levitated by a trained flock of geese-like birds called 'Gansas', and flies to the moon, where he finds a utopian society. His voyage itself furnishes occasion for some up-to-date astronomical speculation, as Gonsales sees the Earth turning below him, and escapes the field of 'that tyrannous Loadstone the earth'.1In addition to his antiquarian work and his science fiction, Godwin also produced a shorter, considerably more mysterious work, an unsigned Latin proposal for a system of hyperswift, hypersecret signalling, the Nuncius Inanimatus or 'Inanimate Messenger' published as a short, unsigned Latin tract 'in Vtopia' (really London) in 1629.2 This essay examines Godwin's telegraphy, its sources and reception, as well as a potential rival, the Macrolexis of the London schoolmaster Henry Reynolds. One component of this enquiry will ask what these schemes actually were. But the other component will address the rhetorically obscure nature of the written proposals for these schemes. In other words, although we may fail to understand exactly how such telegraphic devices operated, we will succeed in understanding a little more about how their descriptions operate, two quite different things.II The Nuncius InanimatusDuring Gonsales' sojourn on St Helena, he experiments with various systems for communicating swiftly with Diego, using methods based on flame-signals at night and dust-signals by day, contrivances well-known to contemporary readers of the sixteenth-century popular manuals of Giambattista della Porta, Blaise de Vigenere, or William Bourne.3 Over the ages, many such systems had been operated as early-warning mechanisms for foreign invasion. A line of beacons, for instance, had been erected from 1569 stretching from Portsmouth to London: it was this that alerted London to the approach of the Armada in 1588.4 Domingo then insinuates that he is privy to 'a more refined and effectual way' than these typical methods:But this Art containeth more mysteries then are to be set downe in few words: Hereafter I will perhaps afford a discourse for it of purpose, assuring my selfe that it may prove exceedingly profitable unto mankind, being rightly used and well imployed: for that which a messenger cannot performe in many dayes, this may dispatch in a peece of an houre.5Domingo's 'discourse' - or something rather like it - did indeed appear in 1629, which was roughly the year when The Man in the Moone was completed, but in the future for the fictional Gonsales, writing these words in around 1602.6The Nuncius starts simply enough, dividing communication into forms appealing to either the ear or the eye, and later, to touch. Next, various ancient and more recent methods of telegraphy are surveyed: pigeons, beacons, smoke signals, semaphore, and the brazen speaking-tube Camden claimed to have found in the ruins of Hadrian's Wall.7 Interspersed remarks whet the reader's appetite: the Nuncius Inanimatus is not a bird, nor winged, nor even living; but it is 'somewhat nigh' (7) to systems employing flame- or smoke-signals. But arriving at his own system, Godwin turns coy.8 At first his ars seems, by excluding the senses of sight and touch, to rely on sound: 'Let nobody come near him, secure the body in a prison, let the hands be bound, hoodwink the face, but be not troublesome any other way, and he shall understand the words of his absent friends' (14). …