The moose was both a familiar and unfamiliar animal to Pulter and her contemporaries.

Moose and/or Elk

The word “moose,” in reference to an animal, was a relatively new word in English at the time Pulter was writing. The OED traces its origin to two Algonquian languages of North America: Eastern Abenaki (from Maine) and Narragansett (from Rhode Island).1 Its first usage in English is attributed to Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimage (1614), a collection of travel writings. He recounts Captain Thomas Hanham’s report of the “red Deer, and a beast bigger, called the Mus [Moose]” that he observed in North America.2 When Europeans first colonized North America they found varieties of unfamiliar flora and fauna. The moose was, ostensibly, one of these.

For this reason, seventeenth-century English descriptions of moose frequently compare them to more familiar animals such as other species of deer or oxen. Alice Eardley identifies William Wood’s New Englands Prospect (1634) as Pulter’s source for The Indian Moose73, Raccoons86, and thus likely “The Stately Moose” (Emblem 27).3 Wood’s text offers a description of the topography, flora and fauna of New England, as well as an account of the Native American peoples encountered by European settlers. The moose is one “Of the Beasts that live on the land” that he describes.4 Wood not only describes the moose’s appearance for an English audience, but immediately proposes its use within the colonial economy as a potential commodity and pack animal given its strength, fertility and ability to endure without food.

Perhaps the most useful and accurate comparison offered by accounts of North America is to the elk. “Elk” in early modern English (and modern British English) tends to refer to the species of deer found across Northern Europe. This animal is now known to be the same species as the North American moose.5 Importantly, this is a distinct species from the wapiti or elk in modern American English.6 Thus, when early moderns made the comparison between Northern European elk and the moose they saw in North America, they were more accurate than they knew.

Early colonist Thomas Morton makes precisely this identification in his New English Canaan (1637), an anti-Puritan text that describes and promotes New England to those “desirous to be made partakers of the blessings of God in that fertile Soil, as well as those that, out of Curiosity only have been inquisitive after novelties.”7 Morton moves beyond comparison, seeming to understand moose as a type or species of “very large Deer.”

The details of Morton’s account are similar to those of Wood’s. Morton also describes moose as exceptionally fertile, although his claim contains the gender oddity that “He bringest forth three fauns” (my emphasis) at once. Furthermore, like Wood, Morton highlights the moose’s potential commodification as a pack animal. Whereas Wood only compares moose to red deer, Morton observes that the quality of moose flesh is better than that of “red Deer,” a highly-prized, luxury food item in England.8 By doing so he not only offers a comparison to English readers who had never seen (or tasted) a moose, but advertises the culinary wealth of New England to potential colonizers.

Woodcut illustrations of elk were available to Pulter and other seventeenth-century readers in Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607), a bestiary containing both legendary and real animals, as well their various medicinal, moral and emblematic associations. These woodcuts could have offered early modern readers familiar with comparisons between elk and moose a glimpse of the North American animal.

Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T4v. LUNA Folger Digital Image Collection, STC 24123 Copy 2. Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T4v. LUNA Folger Digital Image Collection, STC 24123 Copy 2. Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5v. LUNA Folger Digital Image Collection, STC 24123 Copy 2. Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Moreover, as Karen Edwards observes, at least some seventeenth-century Londoners would have been able to see part of a real elk.9 “Elkes hoofes” are listed in the Musaeum Tradescantianum, or A collection of rarities preserved at South-Lambeth neer London (1656).10 This was a catalogue of John Tradescant’s expansive cabinet of curiosities, a collection of zoological, botanical and manmade “rarities” collected from his travels around the world. The collection was made available to view in 1634 in Lambeth, South London in a museum called “The Ark” and would later form the basis of the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum’s natural history collection.11

Myths and Emblems

Unlike the moose’s ostensible novelty to early modern Europeans, the elk had long featured in natural histories. These descriptions, as with many other animals, contained inaccuracies as well as mythic or emblematic associations. For the elk, these associations were often medicinal and moral.

It is appropriate that Tradescant’s collection contained “Elkes hoofes” specifically. One of the most startling myths associated with the elk, recounted by Edward Topsell, is that elk were thought to have the “falling sickness” or epilepsy, and would continue to have a seizure “until the hoof of his right forefoot touch his left ear.”12 For this reason, elk’s hooves were held to have the ability to heal epilepsy, a view that Thomas Browne endorses in his Pseudodoxia epidemica and extends to elk’s antlers too.13

While elk are not commonly found in emblem books, Andrea Alciato, the founder of the emblem book tradition, does include the elk in several versions of his emblem books because his name “Alciato” derives from alce, the Latin word for elk. The elk in the woodcuts for these emblems frequently carry a banner containing the emblem’s motto “nunquàm procrastinandum (never procrastinate),” making the elk, at least in part, a symbol of Alciato’s prolific emblem writing, but also of strength, speed or endurance more broadly.14 Joachim Camerarius also features one emblem about the elk in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595). Under the title “Et Infima Prosunt (And even the lowest is useful),” he uses the elks’ hooves’ apparent ability to prevent epileptic seizures as an emblem of the worth of seemingly small or insignificant things: “Vilior haud pars est Alci, nec dignior ungue: / Ergo etiam parvis gratia magna data est (No part is commoner to the Elk, nor worthier, than the hoof: / Therefore likewise, great esteem is given to trifles).”15

Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum et Emblematum Centuriae Tres. I. Ex herbis & stirpibus. II. Ex Animalibus quadrupedibus. III. Ex volatilibus & insectis (Leipzig, 1595), sig. ²M4r. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Eating and Antlers

Pulter’s moose does not appear to have healing hooves. However, she does potentially draw on the elk’s supposed difficulty in eating. Topsell, following sources like Pliny’s Natural History (a huge Latin work of natural history) claims that elk have short necks and have to eat walking backwards due to an overly-large upper lip:

Backwards-walking moose do not appear in accounts of the New England animal. However, there are suggestions that these moose also do not find eating easy. Morton, as quoted above, describes moose as being “long legged; insomuch that he doth use to kneel, when he feedeth on grass.” Furthermore, the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645), a short sixteen page description of New England, similarly observes that moose “frequent the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet.”16

Pulter’s moose does not walk backwards, nor seem to have an inconveniently short neck or long legs. Rather, Pulter implies that the moose’s antlers are positioned so low on her head that it prevents her from lowering her mouth close enough to the ground to feed fully:

Interestingly, eating whilst going downhill, as Pulter’s moose does, would somewhat counteract the impact of having overly-long front legs. Alternatively, the moose may be travelling down the hill to reach the “low rank grounds” (rank here means growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill which would enable her to reach the grass despite her “low” antlers.17

Pulter’s she-moose’s “Stag like horns” are also intriguing because a “Stag” is specifically a male deer, usually a male red deer.18 Victoria E. Burke observes a similar blurring of gender in The Hunted Hart87 where Pulter genders the hart female, despite a hart being definitionally male.19 Burke suggests that Pulter does this to emphasize the hart’s vulnerability in the face of uncontrollable forces, a sentiment also appropriate for the devotional conclusion of “The Stately Mooz.”20 It is also possible that Pulter is distinguishing between moose and other species of deer. While we now know that female moose, or elk, do not have antlers, in the seventeenth century this does not seem to be the case. When Topsell discusses elk, he claims that “both males and females have horns” that “they lose every year.”21 This is in direct contrast to most of the other species of deer in The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes where he specifically observes that the females do not have antlers.22 Descriptions of moose in Wood’s New Englands Prospect and Morton’s New English Canaan also do not differentiate between male and female moose. In the above excerpts, Wood uses “they” throughout while Morton oddly uses “he” even while discussing the moose’s fertility in producing three “fauns” at once.

Ultimately, while the North American moose would have been a relative novelty to seventeenth-century English writers like Pulter, there were a variety of colonial, natural historical, moral and visual sources available that would have allowed Pulter to flesh out her particular understanding of the animal in “The Stately Mooz.”

Footnotes