American Literature in Context

1620-1830

Stephen Fender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138691117
• eBook ISBN: 9781315535951
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation's literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1830, this first volume of American Literature in Context examines a range of texts from the writings of the Puritan settlers through the declaration of Independence to the novels of Fenimore Cooper. In doing so, it shows how early Americans thought about their growing nation, their arguments for immigration, for political and cultural independence, and the doubts they experienced in this ambitious project.

This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

PART ONE

America as Type and Thing

Introduction

First America was imagined – only then was it discovered, and then ‘invented’. European mythology associated sleep, death, rest and eternity with one or another unknown land in the west, where the sun set in diurnal imitation of these ideas. To die was to ‘go west’; Hesiod’s Garden of the Hesperides and Homer’s Elysian Fields lay west of the Pillars of Hercules. Avalon, the mythical island to which King Arthur was carried when he died, was supposedly situated in the west of the British Isles.

Another persistent idea was that of a continent, or country, once great but since sunk somewhere in the western ocean. The sometime existence of Atlantis, which gave the Atlantic ocean its name, was a widely held belief in classical times (it is mentioned in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, for example), and Celtic legend placed the birth of Tristram in Lyonesse, a large island west of Cornwall, since overwhelmed by the sea (see Jones, 1964, 1-5).

Magical lands were postulated in European fiction too, and sometimes they were put to quite specific use. The landscape of the pastoral, whether in Theocritus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Virgil’s Eclogues, or the great romances of the English renaissance by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Thomas Lodge, was an artificial, idealized country setting, away from the distracting influence of the court or city, in which meditations could flourish on the relative influences of nature and culture. What all these heavens, havens, lost islands and pastoral retreats had in common was an agrarian economy and a perfection of climate, natural process and human government. The place was sunny without being desert (a spring or river kept it watered), the season was spring-like without stasis, and there was no war or commercial competition, no harsh laws or private property – in fact none of the usual impositions of fallen man when he forms a government in cold climates.

The similarity between visions of past and future, of the lost land and the place of bliss ‘proposed for the deserver’, is no more surprising than that between the Christian paradise from which man was banished and that to which he would go if he was good. Paradise was both lost in the past and to be regained in the last days. Even classical myth, for all its concern with overwhelmed Atlantis, had its apocalyptic visions of worlds still to be discovered:

Venient annis, saecula seris,

Oceanus vincula rerum

Laxet et ingens pateat tellus

Tiphysque novos detegat orbes

Nec sit terris ultima Thule.

(In the last days there will come an age in which Ocean shall loosen the bonds of things; the vast globe will lie open; another Tiphus [the first was Jason’s pilot in the Argo] shall make known new worlds, and Thule [the frozen North] shall no longer be the extremity of the world.)

Nor were these lines from Seneca’s Medea (ll. 375-9) unknown to the renaissance chroniclers of American exploration. In his biography of his illustrious father, Don Fernando Columbus cites them, sharpening their prophetic aspect by mistranslating ‘et ingens pateat tellus’ as ‘a great country will be discovered’, then adding that ‘This prediction may assuredly be considered as accomplished in the person of the Admiral’.

The English renaissance synthesized all this classical and medieval myth from oral tradition, from a renewed interest in Arthurian materials stemming from the pseudo-Celtic content of the Tudor myth of the succession, from the general recuperation of the classics in renaissance education, and above all from the intensified millennial fervour of the Reformation. But the English of the sixteenth century had something else that Columbus did not have: the idea of progress, of knowledge advanced through the discovery of new data. When Francis Bacon needed a metaphor for the ‘Advancement of Learning’ for which he argued so passionately, he turned to the enterprise of discovering and developing new-found lands then progressing as he wrote: ‘Thus I have made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover; with a note and description of those parts which seem to me not constantly occupate, or not well converted by the labour of man.’

Bacon’s last work was an unfinished utopia set in the framework of an imaginary voyage to the New Atlantis, where he discovers an idealized research institute, untainted by Plato, Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen, practising experimental science of the kind he wished to advance. Columbus escaped the schoolmen less easily. Edmundo O’Gorman (1961) has shown how hard he struggled to reconcile the facts of his discoveries over the course of four voyages with his assumption that he had landed on the outlying islands of the Chinese mainland. He simply could not escape the a priori belief of medieval theologians that the world consisted of a single, huge island. It was only when European intellectual development had reached the stage at which it was possible to conceive of a land not part of the Orbis Terrarum prepared by God for man, inhabited by human beings not descended from Adam and as yet beyond the influence of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, that America could truly be said to have been ‘invented’ as well as imagined and discovered.

*

Since all descriptions of the unfamiliar are a mixture of the perceiver’s preconceptions and what is ‘really’ there, it comes as no surprise to find the early explorers of America encountering both good and ill in terms of European images of gardens or wastelands, noble savages or devils. Columbus’s famous letter of 1493 to the Comptroller of the Spanish Treasury, translated and widely published throughout Europe, described the landscape of Espanola (now Haiti) in terms which a student of English literature might think more appropriate to Spenser’s Garden of Adonis. The trees were ‘as green and lovely [in December] as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were flowering, some bearing fruit, and some in another stage, according to their nature. And the nightingale was singing, and other birds of a thousand kinds …’ (cited in Jones, 15). Giovanni da Verrazzano, who explored the American coast from Newfoundland to the Carolinas and who is credited with having discovered the mouth of the Hudson River, found the coast of North Carolina ‘replenished with divers sorts of trees, as pleasant and delectable to behold as is possible to imagine’, in the words of Richard Hakluyt’s translation of 1582. At latitude 34 degrees north (Cape Fear, near where North and South Carolina meet) Verrazzano saw ‘palm trees, bay trees, and high cypress trees’, and he gave the resonant name of Arcadia to the coast of Maryland (Quinn, 1971, 61, 63). Sir Walter Raleigh described the interior of Venezuela, from the Orinoco River, as a sort of gentle-man’s park, with ‘plains of twenty miles in length, the grass short and green, and in divers parts groves of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose. And … the deer came down feeding by the water’s side, as if they had been used to a keeper’s call’ (cited in Emerson, 1971, 21).

On the other hand, the country could appear poisonous. Columbus, according to a letter to Pope Leo x published in the collection of travel accounts collected by Peter Martyr of Anghiera as De Orbe Novo (1511, ‘Englished’ by Richard Eden in 1555 as The Decades of the New World or West India), found ‘plenty of sweet apples, but hurtful, for they turn into worms when they are eaten’, and a tree whose shadow ‘is contagious, for such as sleep under it any time, have their heads swollen and lose their sight’ (ed. Arber, 1885, 106-7).

Yet for all the influence of European prototypes, these accounts seldom lack an element of factual description, sometimes rivalling the best writing produced by geographers and natural historians two centuries later. Thus though the Indians could be described alternately as promiscuous, cannibalistic devils, or inhabitants of ‘that golden world of the which old writers speak so much: wherein men lived simply and innocently without enforcement of laws, without quarrelling judges and libels, content only to satisfy nature’ (171), they could also be described as they actually looked, behaved and spoke. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes wrote a natural history of the West Indies (1526, translation included in Eden’s edition of the Decades) which includes descriptions of plants, animals and native inhabitants: ‘All the Indians are commonly without beards: In so much that it is in manner a marvel to see any of them either men or women to have any down or hair on their faces or other parts of their bodies….’ He tells how they fish for pearls, how they go into battle with ‘certain shells of great whelks of the sea which they blow and make therewith great sound much like the noise of horns’ (237). Thus the First Decade describes the eating and clothing of the natives: ‘Their bread is made of roots…. They have sundry kinds of water pots, jugs, and drinking cups made of earth…. The men of this country, enclose their privy members in a gourd, cut after the fashion of a codpiece: or else, cover the same with the shell of a tortoise, tied about their loins with laces of gossampine cotton’ (95). The variety of languages is represented (In some places they call a king Cacicus: in other places they call him Quebi, and somewhere Tiba’ [151]), and occasionally brief glossaries are included, beginning with a list of fourteen words rather grandly titled ‘The Indian Language’ at the foot of the table of contents. Finally, though there are giants and chimaeras enough in the Decades, there are other animals less fabulous than they seem at first, like the ‘monstrous beast with a snout like a fox, a tail like a marmoset, ears like a bat, hands like a man, and feet like an ape, bearing her whelps about with her in an outward belly much like unto a great bag or purse’ (98), which is plainly a possum.

America could not be experienced, then, without the inextricable interaction of concept and fact, ‘type’ and thing. The type might change; as explorers moved west over the continental landscape, so might the thing. The balance between them might be altered too. As the project for imperial expansion became more urgent, so the traveller’s discourse was taken up more and more with the physical opportunities awaiting the colonist. In time, even the ‘thinginess’ of the optimist’s projection might become a convention, a rhetorical recourse for a peculiarly American argument about America, and so the thing might become a type in its turn.

1

Captain John Smith (1580–1631)

The surprising emergence of fact from apparent fiction is nowhere so well illustrated as in the career of Captain John Smith as represented in his own writings. His astonishing adventures in war and exploration, his claim to pre-eminence in the Virginia Company’s settlement of Jamestown in 1607, his strenuous attempts, in which he failed, to get further employment as a leader of colonial projects in America, and above all the fact that his encounter with the Indian maiden Pocahontas has become part of American folklore – all these and other factors have caused modern American historians, from Henry Adams onwards, to treat the story of his life with a degree of scepticism.

The events of his life as set out in his autobiography of 1630, will demonstrate the causes for doubt. Born in 1580 in Lincolnshire, the son of a yeoman farmer, Smith was educated at free schools in Alford and Louth, where the curriculum would have called for study in Latin, grammar and composition. From an early age he wanted to seek his fortune abroad, an ambition which his father hoped to modify by apprenticing him to a merchant in King’s Lynn. Only a year after he began work, however, his father died, and Smith took this chance to get away, serving with English forces against the Spanish in the Netherlands for three years. In 1600, during the temporary lull in the fighting after the Battle of Nieuport, he made his way through northern France to Brittany, thence to the French Mediterranean, where he took ship for Italy. In a spell of bad weather he was thrown overboard like Jonah (his Protestantism and Englishness rendering him suspect to a band of pilgrims bound for Rome), fetched up on a small island, and was rescued by a Captain La Roche, a Frenchman engaged in trade with the Levant. Travels with La Roche took Smith around the Italian peninsula to Cyrenaica and Alexandria, to Kalamata in Greece, and the islands of Cephalonia and Corfu. Off the coast of Sicily they fought, defeated and took as prize a rich ‘argosy’ from Venice. When they returned to France, Smith went ashore at Antibes with five hundred gold pieces in his pockets, enough to keep him for five years.

* The extract for this chapter is to be found on pp. 16–18.

For a while he toured Italy, but soon he was soldiering again, this time against the Turks in the Balkans, where he was made captain of 250 horse troops in the Imperial Army of Rudolph ii. During the siege of Alba Iulia, in Transylvania, one of the Turkish commanders holding the city challenged the attackers to single combat, the loser to part with his head. Smith accepted on behalf of the Christians, and on the first pass, ran his lance through his opponent’s beaver. The next day another challenge followed, and on the third yet another. Smith won these too, and was granted both an annual pension of three hundred ducats, and the right to sport the impress of three Turks’ heads on his shield ever after. But in a later engagement he was wounded, captured and sold as a slave by the Tartars to a pasha called Bogall, who sent him to Istanbul as a gift to his mistress, Charatza Trabigzanda (not her name, as Smith thought, but Greek for ‘girl from Trebizond’). When she discovered he was a plain Englishman who had fallen on hard times, ‘Charatza’ sent Smith to her brother near Azak (Azov in what is now the Soviet Union). Here, treated abominably, Smith lost his temper and killed the brother, dressed himself in the clothes of the dead man, and took off across the steppes into Muscovy. There he was found by a Russian border official, who took pity on him, found him a place in a convoy heading north to Moscow, and gave him a certificate to explain his presence and assist his passage. From Russia Smith headed west across Lithuania into Poland and back to the Holy Roman Empire, where he finally collected, not his pension but a once-for-all honorarium of 1500 ducats and a document attesting his service in the Imperial cause.

And all this – plus more travel and a bit more pirating – before 1605, his twenty-fifth year of life; and before embarking on the career for which he has gone down in history! And yet, his biographer, Philip Barbour, has managed to match most of the descriptions, dates and names in Smith’s autobiography to historical events. As for the gentry and petty nobility of Slovenia whom Smith mentions as having served in the Imperial Army, says Barbour, ‘he could hardly have read about them anywhere!’ (1964, 27). Even the duels, which with their suspicious arrangement into three tournaments on three successive days seem to leap out of Sidney’s Arcadia, were apparently ‘in accordance with the contemporary conventions of single combat – however crude these were on the Turkish frontier’ (49).

A man of such spirit would not rest long by the fireside, and now there was talk of an explicitly national, British venture overseas. Since the voyage of John Cabot to Nova Scotia in 1497 the English had taken a rather desultory interest in North America. At first, they used it for fishing (on one recent hypothesis deep-sea fishermen from Bristol had actually visited the Grand Banks before Cabot), but Spanish and Portuguese settlements in South America, the Caribbean and Florida began to concentrate British minds on forming an American colony of their own. Sir Humphrey Gilbert took possession of a part of Newfoundland in 1583, but was drowned in a wreck on his return journey. The next year Sir Walter Raleigh financed an expedition, headed by Sir Richard Grenville, to claim Vir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Part One: America as Type and Thing
• Part Two: ‘Rise, Wash and Address Powerful Goodness’
• Part Three: Retrospective Revolutions
• Index