made in america

Bill Bryson

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062417411
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"A literate exploration of why we use—or mangle—our native tongue."—USA Today

Bill Bryson celebrates America's magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood…and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle call his befeathered cap "Macaroni."

Chapter 1

The Mayflower and Before

I

The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in Rhyllon, Wales, wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Boston, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders’ day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the Mayflower or the Pilgrims. But inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England),” which begins

The breaking waves dashed high

On a stern and rock-bound coast,

And the woods, against a stormy sky,

Their giant branches toss’d

And the heavy night hung dark

The hills and water o’er,

When a band of exiles moor’d their bark

On the wild New England shore

and carries on in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors—the Mayflower was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not “where first they trod” but in fact marked their fourth visit ashore—it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day.^*

The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn’t do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder in a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned nearby. If the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock, there is no sign of it. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and indeed it doesn’t make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.¹ Not until about the time Ms. Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly associated with the landing of the Pilgrims.

Wherever they landed, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims stepped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief. They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel small enough to be parked on a modern tennis court. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors, referred to them as puke stockings, on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.² Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom ever after reveled in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).

They called themselves Saints. Those members of the party who were not Saints they called Strangers. Pilgrims in reference to these early voyagers would not become common for another two hundred years. Even later was Founding Fathers. It isn’t found until the twentieth century, in a speech by Warren G. Harding. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn’t arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter—occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.³ Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as “Captain Shrimpe”⁴—hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England,^* just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.⁵

At this remove, it is difficult to imagine just how alone this small, hapless band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbors—at Jamestown in Virginia and at a small and now all but forgotten colony at Cupers (now Cupids) Cove in Newfoundland^*—were five hundred miles off in opposite directions. At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of “wild and savage hue,” in William Bradford’s uneasy words. They were about as far from the comforts of civilization as anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).

For two months they tried to make contact with the natives, but every time they spotted any, the Indians ran off. Then one day in February a young brave of friendly mien approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name was Samoset and he was a stranger in the region himself. But he had a friend named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe, to whom he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims’ fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local sachem, or chief. Before long, as every schoolchild knows, the Pilgrims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cordial Thanksgiving feast. Life was grand.

A question that naturally arises is how they managed this. Algonquian, the language of the eastern tribes, is an extraordinarily complex and agglomerative tongue (or more accurately family of tongues), full of formidable consonant clusters that are all but unpronounceable by the untutored, as we can see from the first primer of Algonquian speech prepared some twenty years later by Roger Williams in Connecticut (a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame, incidentally). Try saying the following and you may get some idea of the challenge:

Nquitpausuckowashâwmen—There are a hundred of us.

Chénock wonck cuppee-yeâumen?—When will you return?

Tashúckqunne cummauchenaûmisz?—How long have you been sick?

Ntannetéimmin—I will be going.⁶

Clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend, and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they called him Squanto. The answer, surprisingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English—Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).

That a straggly band of English settlers could in 1620 cross a vast ocean and find a pair of Indians able to welcome them in their own tongue seems little short of miraculous. It was certainly lucky—the Pilgrims would very probably have perished or been slaughtered without them—but not as wildly improbable as it at first seems. The fact is that by 1620 the New World wasn’t really so new at all.

II

No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. Credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about A.D. 1000, but others could have been there earlier. An ancient Latin text, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, or The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to a land across the sea claimed to have been made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Vikings—and this, it was said, on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.

Even the Vikings didn’t think themselves the first. Their sagas record that when they first arrived in the New World they were chased from the beach by a group of wild white people. They subsequently heard stories from natives of a settlement of Caucasians who “wore white garments and . . . carried poles before them to which rags were attached”⁷—precisely how an Irish religious procession might have looked to the uninitiated. Whether by Irish or Vikings—or Italians or Welsh or Bretons or any of the other many groups for whom credit has been sought—crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Ages was not quite as daring a feat as it would at first appear, even allowing for the fact that it was done in small, open boats. The North Atlantic is conveniently scattered with islands that could serve as stepping-stones—the Shetland Islands, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin Island. It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.

We know beyond doubt that Greenland—and thus, technically, North America—was discovered in 982 by one Eric the Red (Eirík Rauði), father of Leif Ericson (or Leif Eiríksson), and that he and his followers began settling it in 986. Anyone who has ever flown over the frozen wastes of Greenland could be excused for wondering what they saw in the place. In fact, Greenland’s southern fringes are farther south than Oslo and offer an area of grassy lowlands as big as the whole of Britain.⁸ Certainly it suited the Vikings. For nearly five hundred years they kept a thriving colony there, which at its peak boasted sixteen churches, two churches, two monasteries, some three hundred farms, and a population of four thousand. The one thing Greenland lacked was wood with which to build new ships and repair old ones—a somewhat vital consideration for a seagoing people. Iceland, the nearest landmass to the east, was barren. The most natural thing would be to head west to see what was out there. In about 1000, according to the sagas, Leif Ericson did just that. His expedition discovered a new landmass, probably Baffin Island, far up in northern Canada, over a thousand miles north of the present-day United States, and many other places, most notably the region they called Vinland.

Vinland’s location is a tantalizing historical puzzle. Through careful readings of the sagas and calculations of Viking sailing times, various scholars have put Vinland all over the place—on Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, in Massachusetts, even as far south as Virginia. A Norwegian scholar named Helge Ingstad claimed in 1964 to have found Vinland at a place called L’Anse au Meadow in Newfoundland. Others suggest that the artifacts Ingstad unearthed were not of Viking origin at all, but merely the detritus of later French colonists.⁹ The name is no help. According to the sagas, the Vikings called it Vinland because of the grapevines they found growing in profusion there. The problem is that no place within a thousand miles of where they might have been is likely to have supported wild grapes in abundance. One possible explanation is that Vinland was a mistranslation. Vinber, the Viking word for grapes, could be used to describe many other fruits—cranberries, gooseberries, and red currants, among them—that might have been found at these northern latitudes. Another possibility is that Vinland was merely a bit of deft propaganda, designed to encourage settlement. These were, after all, the people who thought up the name Gr...