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The Beginnings of English Settlement

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The Beginnings of English Settlement Chapter 1 The Beginnings of English Settlement We must begin this inquiry into the emergence of the colonial project of settle- ment in New England with the idea of the land itself, as discussed by the men who wrote and published accounts of America for the early modern English public. Literature was not a by-product of colonization, but an integral part of the act of conquest. It took considerable amounts of writing on the part of ex- plorers and metropolitan geographers and cosmographers to bring the English to pay even the slightest interest in the wonders of the new American world. Colonization also entailed commercial and territorial competition between nations and companies, and the accumulation of knowledge and know-how about European expansion in the New World. Because texts were the medium through which this knowledge was shared across time and space in the Atlan- tic World, this chapter traces the emergence of a working concept of settle- ment in the wide corpus of English promotional literature about America, in order to problematize this genre in the commercial and acquisitive motives that gave its impetus to colonization in the first place. I isolate and comment on a series of narratives, letters, sermons, and petitions, which were built on pre-existing depictions of American land and peoples, mediated over decades of maritime trade and exploration. By the 1600s, promotional texts shared a growing concern for the plight of the settlers effectively appropriating indige- nous land, and for the means of turning human and commercial failure into managerial success. New England was the place where this change of perspec- tive occurred, in the writings of John Smith, the key figure in the settlement ventures of the 1610s. 1 The Idea of America Literature about America was first travel literature, telling of discovery, en- counter and the taking of prizes. European accounts dominate the extent re- cords because of the sheer amount published by the western printers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They have shaped representations and expectations about America, making alternative perceptions hard to come by.1 1 Peter Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 2006), 8. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004435�16_003 <UN> 20 Chapter 1 Even if all texts opened with formal claims of truthfulness and reliability, they were written from a tradition that medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum has called the “literature of entertainment,” built on the wonder (admiratio) trig- gered in the reader’s mind on encountering stories of “fabulous places, of stones with marvelous powers, of monsters, mermaids and fairies, of bizarre races with eyes in their chests or enormous umbrella feet,” of the likes de- scribed in the Travels of Marco Polo and mentioned by Raleigh in his Discovery of Guiana.2 The point was to appeal to the readers’ sense of wonder, fascina- tion and fear, not to create proximity or identification with the places and the people described. Distance and mediation also accompanied accounts of American reality be- cause the existence of the New World challenged prevalent knowledge and scientific understandings of biblical time and world history. America “first needed to be textually represented in a way that exposed the errancy of the thought that preceded it,” Michael Householder has argued, creating tensions and contradictions within the texts pertaining to issues of veracity, credibility, and truthfulness. Early travelers could only apprehend what they saw in the terms at their disposal, mobilizing familiar biblical or classical images, such as the Prelapsarian man or the Golden Age, mediating reality into acceptable rep- resentations that audiences at home could relate to.3 Early writing about America was a “disparate act of inventing” the land as “a discursive formation.”4 This essentially meant classifying and associating unknown flora, fauna and peoples with familiar images, species, behaviors and values, “describing new places by comparing them to known locales.”5 Seeing walruses for the first time, the French navigator Jacques Cartier described them as “many great beasts, like large oxen, which have two tusks in their jaw like elephants’ tusks 2 Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 68; Joyce Lorimer, ed. Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (London: Ashgate, 2006), 154–156. An il- lustration of the Ewaipanoma was added to the 1599 edition of this account and is repro- duced in Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives, 339. 3 For very early contrasting interpretations of Atlantic encounters, see Abulafia’s remarkable analysis of European responses to the discovery of the Canary Islands. David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press, 2008). 4 Michael Householder, Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 5 (“the errancy of the thought that preceded it”), 7 (“inventing America,” “discursive formation”). 5 Peter Mancall, “Introduction: Observing More Things and More Curiously,” Huntington Li- brary Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2007): 3. <UN>.
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