Hamond, Walter:

$12,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

A PARADOX. PROOVING, THAT THE INHABITANTS OF THE ISLE CALLED MADAGASCAR, OR ST. LAWRENCE, (IN TEMPORALL THINGS) ARE THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. WHEREUNTO IS PREFIXED, A BRIEFE AND TRUE ... The only edition of this rare utopian work describing the island of Madagascar and its inhabitants. The author, Walter Hamond (d. 1648), had by his own account traveled several times to Madagascar in the service of the East India Company, once "resident there Foure Moneths together." During the 1630s, as King Charles I was advised that Madagascar would be an ideal location for English traders bound for India and the Far East to refresh and repair their ships, Hamond composed A Paradox, encouraging further use of the island for colonization and trade.Describing the land of Madagascar in Edenic terms, Hamond begins his characterization of its inhabitants by referring to them as "a sluggish and slothfull people." "If any where," he writes, "the Proverbe, Terra bona, gens male, may here be applied" (A4v). He swiftly recasts them, however, as an innocent and virtuous race, whose "Nakednesse, Poverty, and Simplicity" demonstrate a happy, prelapsarian state instead of one of wretchedness or misery: "Now for Pride [of clothing and appearance], such is the Happinesse of these people, that they know not what it meanes, here is no man that respectech another the better for his Out-side, but for his inward vertue, and naturall Endowmens....They know that the inordinate desire of riches in the Roo

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