New Atlantis

Summary

New Atlantis is a short, unfinished prose fable that Francis Bacon probably wrote around 1623-1624, after his fall from office; his chaplain William Rawley printed it in 1627, the year after Bacon's death, bound in with the natural history Sylva Sylvarum. A Spanish-speaking ship's company sailing from Peru toward China and Japan is driven north by contrary winds, runs out of food, and prays for land. They sight an unknown island, Bensalem, whose officials first forbid them to land, then question them ("Are ye Christians?"), make them swear they have shed no blood for forty days, and on the warning of the city's Conservator of Health keep a careful distance from their seventeen sick men. The strangers are lodged in the Strangers' House, given scarlet oranges and small grey pills for the sick, confined for three days, and found to be well-behaved. Over several conversations the Governor of the Strangers' House, who is also a Christian priest, tells them how Bensalem received the Scriptures about twenty years after the Ascension in an ark of cedar sent by the apostle Bartholomew, guided by a pillar of light that a member of Salomon's House judged to be a true miracle. He explains why the world knows nothing of Bensalem: the ancient lawgiver King Solamona, about nineteen hundred years before, closed the island to strangers while providing generously for any who arrived in distress, and allowed only one kind of foreign traffic. Every twelve years two ships carry three Fellows of Salomon's House abroad in disguise to gather the books, instruments and inventions of the world, a trade "for God's first creature, which was Light." The narrator then witnesses the Feast of the Family, a state-funded honour for any father who lives to see thirty living descendants, and hears from Joabin, a learned Jewish merchant, a long praise of the chastity of Bensalem and its marriage laws, set pointedly against European vice. Finally one of the Fathers of Salomon's House enters the city in procession and grants the narrator a private audience. In a long speech the Father sets out the end of the foundation, its caves, towers, lakes, Chambers of Health, orchards, dispensatories, engine-houses and perspective-houses, the offices of its Fellows (Merchants of Light, Depredators, Mystery-men, Pioneers, Compilers, Benefactors, Lamps, Inoculators and Interpreters of Nature), and its galleries of inventors and daily hymns of thanks. He gives the narrator leave to publish the account. Rawley's note closes the book: the rest was not perfected. The fable is Bacon's picture of what organised, collaborative natural philosophy might become under a pious and well-governed state. Readers have long debated whether its Christian frame governs the ambitions of Salomon's House or merely decorates them, a question the unfinished text leaves open.

Top Lessons

• Miracle, nature and imposture in the Bensalem conversion

  The first person in the book to judge the pillar of light is a natural philosopher, who prays that his order has been given to discern 'between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures'. Bacon makes the scientist the witness who certifies a miracle, not the man who explains it away. The episode shows how Bacon wanted investigation of nature to serve, rather than rival, revealed religion, and it sets up the later ban on 'impostures, and lies' in Salomon's House.

• Hospitality joined to policy

  Bensalem's first acts are mercy (water, food, an infirmary, medicine) and caution (oaths, distance, confinement, watchers). Solamona's law aims to join 'humanity and policy': strangers in distress are relieved, but no Bensalemite trades abroad except in secret. Students can weigh whether this is a model of prudent charity or of a closed society that controls information, and compare it with the narrator's own advice to his men to behave as men under observation.

• The Tirsan and the household as the root of the commonwealth

  Between the history and the science Bacon places a domestic ceremony. The Feast of the Family rewards fruitfulness, but its two days of private consultation also reconcile quarrels, relieve poor relations, and correct the wayward, with the civil governor standing ready to enforce the father's decisions. Joabin then grounds the island's strength in chastity and faithful marriage. The section shows that Bacon's ideal society rests on ordered households as well as on laboratories.

• The end of the foundation: knowledge for power and for use

  The Father states the purpose plainly: knowledge of causes and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire 'to the effecting of all things possible'. What follows is a catalogue of controlled experiment, division of labour, and practical application, from artificial metals to submarines and new breeds of animals. Yet the House also prays daily for the 'good and holy uses' of its work and decides in secret which discoveries to withhold even from the state. The tension between unlimited aim and self-imposed restraint is the heart of the fragment, and the text does not tell us how it would have been resolved.

• An unfinished design: reading the fragment as a fragment

  The book ends with Rawley's note that 'the rest was not perfected'. We never learn the purpose of the Father's secret visit, see the island's government, or hear Bacon's laws for Bensalem. Students should resist filling the gap with confident claims about what Bacon 'really' meant, while noticing the order of what was written: rescue, revelation, history, family, and only then science.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

New Atlantis is a useful early-modern source for the imagined organisation of medicine. Its first scenes turn on what we would call quarantine: a Conservator of Health, distance kept from a ship with sick men, a fruit carried against infection, an infirmary of separate cells and three days' confinement. Salomon's House then gathers therapeutic research into institutions: Chambers of Health where air is adjusted for particular diseases, medicinal baths and mineral waters, caves used for curing disease and prolonging life, dispensatories with distillations and compound drugs, and parks of animals used 'for dissections and trials' and for testing poisons and remedies, surgical and medical, before applying lessons to the human body. Bacon's interest in the prolongation of life (pursued also in his Historia Vitae et Mortis, 1623) is evident. The vivisection and resuscitation passage reads, from a later vantage, as an early statement of animal experimentation in the service of human medicine; the text itself raises no ethical objection to it. The record raises relevance from the earlier 'none' because these passages are in the text itself.

• Arrival at Bensalem, before landing

  The dignitary keeps his distance on the warning of the city's Conservator of Health because the ship reports many sick; a notary carries a scarlet-orange fruit as a preservative against infection.

• The Strangers' House, first days

  Seventeen sick men are placed in an infirmary gallery of cedar cells, given scarlet oranges as a remedy for sickness at sea and grey or whitish pills nightly, and confined three days; they recover quickly.

• Father of Salomon's House, the caves and wells

  Deep caves are used for curing some diseases and for prolonging the lives of hermits who live there; a 'Water of Paradise' is said to be sovereign for health and long life.

• Father of Salomon's House, Chambers of Health and baths

  Rooms where air is qualified for the cure of diseases, and baths of several mixtures for restoring the body from 'arefaction' (drying out) and strengthening sinews and vital parts.

• Father of Salomon's House, parks of beasts and birds

  Animals kept for dissections and trials; life continued after vital parts are removed, apparent death reversed, and poisons and medicines, surgical and physical, tried on them to learn what may be wrought on the human body.

• Father of Salomon's House, dispensatories

  Shops of medicines with simples of many ages, long fermentations, distillations, percolations and exact forms of composition.

• Father of Salomon's House, circuits of the kingdom

  Fellows publish useful inventions and give public forecasts and counsel concerning diseases, plagues and scarcity for their prevention and remedy.