Encountering early America

Rachel Winchcombe

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526145765
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia britannica

This is the first major study to comprehensively analyse English encounters with the New World in the sixteenth century and their impact on early English understandings of America and changing approaches to exploration and settlement. The book traces the dynamism of early English encounters with the Americas and the many cultural influences that shaped English understandings of the new lands across the Atlantic. It illustrates that rather than being a period of inconsequential colonial failure in the Americas, the sixteenth century was in fact an era of assessment, adaptation and application that culminated in the survival of the first Anglo-American colony at Jamestown. Encountering early America will appeal to students and scholars working on early English colonialism in North America and European cultural encounters with the New World.

1

Understanding America: The theoretical origins of English colonialism

Tuesday, October 23^rd / I wished to-day to set out for the island of Cuba, which I believe must be Cipangu [Japan], according to the indications which these people give me concerning its size and riches.¹

– Christopher Columbus

With these words from his journal of 1492, Christopher Columbus, the Genoese merchant sailor and somewhat reluctant ‘discoverer’ of America, made a geographical mistake that he was to repeat consistently until his death. Columbus was convinced that the land he had sailed to in 1492 was not a newly discovered world, but instead the eastern extremities of the Asiatic continent. Columbus’s unwavering belief was the product of his understanding of the size of the world, the distance between Europe and Asia, and the proportion of land to sea. Columbus’s assumptions were based on his interpretation of Aristotelian and biblical explanations of the earth’s formation and on the findings of earlier explorative expeditions such as those of Marco Polo.² European perceptions of the new lands across the Atlantic, as illustrated by Columbus, were thus often informed and coloured by European knowledge and Old World tradition. When European eyes gazed upon America, they saw what they expected to see. As J. H. Elliott famously put it, for these explorers, tradition, experience, and expectation were their ‘determinates of vision’.³ This did not mean, however, that this process of viewing, in which expectation and experience were key, was in any way passive or subconscious in nature. Europeans expertly manipulated, adapted, and selectively appropriated a number of intellectual frameworks to make sense of the radical difference of America, and to justify their colonial decisions and responses to Indigenous peoples. By examining the European use of theories of American origins, the discourse of monstrous races, and classical climate theory, in an American context, it becomes clear that ideas about the New World circulated internationally, being adapted and manipulated to serve the particular needs of those employing them. For Spanish conquistadores of the early sixteenth century, for example, monstrosity was used to highlight American alterity and exoticism, while for the English it was used to establish political authority and colonial validity. Theories of American origins were used by the Spanish to legitimise their colonial approach to the New World, in which conversion of rational Indigenous people was imperative, whereas for the English, hypotheses about exactly where Indigenous Americans had come from were used to illustrate ancient English ties to the New World and the likelihood of finding a Northwest Passage to Asia. Although a shared European cultural heritage informed many European responses to America, creating the theoretical tools of empire, the ways in which it was employed differed radically. English explorers, authors, translators, and editors borrowed information from their continental European neighbours and adapted it to suit their own needs. The ways in which the English engaged with America and legitimised their own specific approach to settlement and colonisation is the focus of what follows.

The impact of European knowledge, tradition, and experience on the reception of America into early modern European thought has been dominant in the scholarship to date and yet it has tended to portray this European inability to recognise the uniqueness of America as a product of an inflexible and monolithic early modern mind. Lynn Ramey and Margaret Hodgen, for example, have both suggested that early accounts of America were heavily influenced by classical and medieval models of ethnography and fantasy, colouring and distorting the ways in which America was portrayed in the early decades after ‘discovery’.⁴ Anthony Pagden, in his pioneering work on the origins of comparative ethnology, has also argued that in the early years of European contact with the Americas there was a severe ‘problem of recognition’ and a strong belief that ‘the new could always be satisfactorily described by means of some simple and direct analogy with the old’.⁵ In contrast, I contend that Old World knowledge relating to human history, exotic peoples, and climate was consciously employed by English writers to justify their approaches to the New World, rather than being an unconscious reflection of their own incapability to recognise American difference.⁶ Anthony Grafton has complicated this image of the inflexible European mind through his analysis of how the shock of the ‘discovery’ of the New World collided with the enduring power of Old World tradition. As he argues, despite the growing realisation that experience in the New World called into question the validity of hallowed classical texts on geography and natural history, these canonical texts nonetheless proved remarkably resilient, being adapted to incorporate the new knowledge discovered in the Americas.⁷ This conscious adaptation of classical theory to meet the new demands of knowledge gained in the Americas became a crucial aspect of English colonial validation. By adapting classical theories on climate, for example, English explorers could promote certain regions of the New World by proving their habitability and fertility.

Old World understandings of both natural and human history were not only utilised to contain the American lands within the bounds of European experience, they were also used to define what European experience in America could and should look like. A number of studies have begun to unpack how some of these conceptual frameworks were applied to the New World, illustrating the peaks in popularity of certain ideas, and the various ways they were employed by different colonising nations.⁸ In what follows, I show how traditional European frameworks of religion, natural history, and culture were transformed to meet the needs of England’s burgeoning overseas identity. By utilising Old World ideas relating to monstrosity, human diversity, and climate, English writers, explorers, and colonists created a set of tools of empire that could successfully justify and shape their approach to the New World. In adapting European theories that were first applied to the new American lands by Spanish, Portuguese, and French writers and explorers, the men involved in early English colonial projects in America were able to legitimise their claims to territory in the New World, explain their increasingly positive assessment of Indigenous peoples, validate their decision to focus their colonial attention on the lands of North America, and convince potential investors and colonisers of the validity of their projects. In this way, then, Old World frameworks of understanding, rather than being restrictive, became flexible rhetorical tools that made America comprehensible and more importantly open to European manipulation. It was, therefore, not the innocent nor incapable eye, but ‘the selective eye’ that first viewed America, seeing not what was really there, but what was most advantageous to the political, economic, cultural, and colonial aims of different viewers.⁹

American origins and the legitimisation of empire

In 1520 the English printer, and sometime dramatist John Rastell, put down in print, in the form of a play, a question that was to puzzle Europeans for centuries. The play was composed soon after Rastell’s own disastrous colonial venture that aimed to reach the New World.¹⁰ In the play Rastell pondered the nature of the inhabitants of the strange new lands of America, describing how they ‘lyve all bestly / For they nother know god nor the devell / Nor never harde tell of hevyn or hell / Wrytynge, nor other scripture’.¹¹ He also posed an intriguing question about the Indigenous populations of the New World; ‘but howe the people furst began In that countrey or whens they cam’, i.e. what were the origins of the Indigenous inhabitants of America?¹²

Rastell would not be the last to pose this question. The debate over where the peoples of the Americas had originated became a hot topic for many authors writing about the discoveries in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Unlike Rastell, however, who offered no theory of his own, preferring to leave such questions ‘for clerkes’, these other writers did propose a variety of theories that would connect the peoples of the New World to the history of the peoples of the Old World.¹³ Once the newness of America had been accepted, and Columbus’s consistent belief that he had in fact reached Asia had been shed, the recognition that the very existence of Indigenous people in the Americas posed a problem for early modern Europeans began to emerge.¹⁴ In early sixteenth-century Europe Christians believed that all peoples were descended from Adam and Eve, and more specifically from the three sons of Noah: Ham, Shem, and Japhet.¹⁵ To preserve the veracity of the biblical account of the dispersal of humankind, the Indigenous peoples of America had to be linked to the sons of Noah, and by extension, to the peoples of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

To date, the emergence of sixteenth-century European theories on American origins has been interpreted by scholars as being motivated by an urge to reconcile the scriptural account of the dispersal of humankind with the discovery of a continent filled with peoples previously unknown to the Old World. In this reading, then, the debate surrounding the origins of Indigenous Americans was in essence a theological one.¹⁶ While this is undoubtedly true in some cases, it is also clear that Europeans manipulated theories of American origins to meet other political, economic, and colonial objectives. How this was achieved depended heavily on who was writing and for what reason. English responses to American origin theories, while undoubtedly shaped by Spanish views, were presented in a way that emphasised the particular concerns of late sixteenth-century English explorers and potential colonists. As we shall see, the English in particular harnessed these theories, not merely to prove the validity of the Bible, but to prove the validity of the English territorial claim to America and their belief in a Northwest Passage to Asia.¹⁷ English theories of American origins thus reflect the process by which information regarding the new lands was circulated, digested, and transformed to meet specific English needs.

For English readers, their first exposure to theories regarding the origins of the Indigenous peoples of America came, as did much of the early information on the New World, through Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades. First published in its entirety in 1530 under its Latin title, De Orbe No...