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Introductory Lecture: ERRORS AND ERRANDS: THE AGE OF DISCOVERY & COLONIZATION In 1492, the royal documents chartering Columbus' journey authorized him not, as we commonly think, to reach the "Spice Islands" and mainland China, but to "discover and acquire" unspecified lands. The documents also gave Columbus the power to title himself "Viceroy and Governor General" of those lands. Clearly, then, on the threshold of New World discovery the purposes of Spain were rather less involved with exploration than with colonization. Doubtless this is why, in provisioning his ships, Columbus bore no gifts for "the Great Khan" of China and instead liberally stocked the holds with trinkets, with beads and bells to be used in mollifying and "purchasing" lands from those "savages" they expected to encounter. This landmark departure bore all the marks of a colonial, that is to say, a political and economic, adventure. One school of thought holds that these motives were practically the whole story. Yet it is also true that, upon landing amidst the Taino people on a small Caribbean island, Columbus certainly considered himself just leagues away from the Chinese empire. His journals show that he was preoccupied with marching inland to meet "the Great Khan"; the pages also show him repeatedly misreading the natural signs about him. He thought he smelled the cinnamon trees of Asia. On reaching what is now Cuba, he mistook the geographical features (rivers, mountains) as those of Chinese outlands known from written and oral lore. He was, of course, massively mistaken; his party was half-a-globe removed from China. Another school of thought, however, holds that these mistakes illustrate how the goal of reaching China was the real story of Columbus' journey to the New World. Probably the truth lies somewhere between these two views. If so, then the very complexities of the Columbus story can make it a useful model for understanding later incidents of exploration and colonization. His efforts, for instance, were matched by later explorers such as Jean Nicolet, who would scour the Great Lakes region of North America for the fabled passageway to Asia, all the while lugging along a fabulously expensive damask robe, embroidered with multicolored birds and flowers, for presentation to the Khan. In 1603, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, commanded by John Smith's party at Jamestown, was chartered as a silkworm plantation, the colonists mistakenly thinking that the climate was similar enough to that of China. When the first harsh winter decimated that plan, the English settlers turned desperately to the cultivation of tobacco, a native American crop with a ready market in a Europe where smoking was becoming fashionable among the upper classes. In 1620, when the English pilgrims led by William Bradford and others landed at Plymouth, the first Massachusetts "plantation," they were in fact hundreds of miles north of their chartered destination in Virginia. Errors and errands. These two forces typified European settlement of the Americas. Party after party arrived in the New World on various royal errands. They were commanded to claim lands and hold them by force of arms, to establish trading centers for an increasingly mercantile European economy, and to cultivate various crops in demand by the European aristocracy--not only tobacco, but cocoa, sugar, and spices. And party after party blundered their way, generally (but not always) towards success. The first English settlement in Virginia, deposited there in 1587 under the command of Sir Walter Raleigh, had simply vanished when ships came to resupply the men next year. The Plymouth pilgrims left England with two vessels, the Mayflower and the Speedwell, but the latter began to ship so much water that it was forced to turn back. Thus arriving in the New World grossly undersupplied, the Plymouth pilgrims nearly succumbed to starvation--as you will see in Bradford's account. The survival of these European settlers would depend, in case after case, on their relations with Native American peoples. Among Columbus' first thoughts on the Taino people, he records the impression that while seemingly without civilization they would nevertheless make "servants of good skill." New World slavery, and the economic successes it enabled, could be said to have originated at that moment. But European relations with native peoples were necessarily built--at the start anyway--not only on principles of colonial dominance but on values of cooperation also. Every American schoolchild learns the story, from accounts by Bradford and others, of how the Plymouth pilgrims survived their first year to celebrate a "Thanksgiving" because the Native Americans assisted them. Bradford tells of how the Narragansetts taught them the method of planting their corn in mounds, buried with a dead fish for fertilizer; and of how the indians showed them a range of indigenous foodcrops. Yet this cooperation nearly always evaporated. After twenty years of settlement in Virginia, the Jamestown settlement was engulfed by a series of indian attacks in 1623-24 that almost, despite John Smith's rather blustering account of his own exploits, managed to wipe it out just like the Raleigh party before it. Sixteen years after landing at Plymouth and securing the cooperation of native inhabitants there, a series of skirmishes led to the 1636 "Pequot War," when members of Bradford's plantation joined those from neighboring settlements to virtually annihilate a fortified camp of several hundred Pequot men, women, and children. The pattern was set. From these early decades of colonization, when Thomas Morton (for example) was banished from New England for becoming too familiar with the Narragansetts and (still worse) for trading muskets and liquor to them, the English "errand into the wilderness" involved a complex balancing act between tentative cooperation and open hostility. We should stop to briefly consider the cultures that were meeting in these New World wildernesses. Native American culture lacked any concepts of land ownership and transference, was built on values of reciprocity and mutual obligation, on the importance of kinship ties (often defined through the mother, known as matrilineal descent), and on complex religious beliefs in which aspects of nature played powerful symbolic roles. By contrast, the English who arrived in America during the 17th Century regarded land ownership as a seemingly absolute value, the perogative of kings, aristocratic lords, and titled gentlemen. The ownership of land symbolized, to them, the very potential of being a truly free man. English culture was patrilineal, structured around hierarchical social classes in sometimes open conflict with each other, and grounded on a Judeao-Christian monotheism which was spiritually abstract, compared to Native American religions. Native American culture was dispersed, in decentralized but closely knit clans and tribes; colonists like Bradford and Winthrop were products of a Europe typified by centralized governments and major cities such as London (a city of 80,000 in 1600), Leyden (about 60,000) and Paris (with roughly 120,000). European settlers also arrived in an America whose coastal populations had been devastated by disease. In the decades prior to settlements at Jamestown, Plymouth and Boston, English fishing vessels landing on the New England seacoast quickly spread smallpox and viral diseases. Modem archaeological research now estimates that, during the decades leading up to the 17th Century settlements, some areas had seen as much as 90% of their indigenous population swept aside by wave after wave of disease. This is why the accounts of William Bradford and others record their discoveries of countless places, once settled villages but long and, to the Europeans, inexplicably emptied of inhabitants. From the Caribbean basin and Mexico to Canada, the European thus took up residence amidst native populations whose every cultural structure, noted above, had been pulverized. Weakened and dispersed, these Native Americans yielded to white settlers who were small in numbers but great in firepower. What would have been their response to the European colonist had disease not preceded him? Why did the English colonists settle the New World? Certainly they were encouraged, first by Queen Elizabeth then by King James, because the British crown perceived itself lagging behind the Spanish, French and Dutch, who all had a much more active presence in the Americas. The goal of empire building, of claiming territories and enriching the crown through mercantile adventuring, was foremost, just as it was for France or Spain. Yet the English story differs from theirs in one crucial respect: that of its religious motivation. While the Virginia Plantation was chartered by wealthy stockholders who wished principally for a financial return on their investment, the New England settlements at Plymouth and Boston were chartered with the principal aim of securing religious freedom for the dissident Protestants who led the migration. In England during the reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603) and James (1603-1625), the state-sponsored brand of "Anglican" Protestantism remained firmly in control, socially conservative, and relatively intolerant. Radical Protestants such as the Anabaptists, Nonconformists, and so-called Puritans, were often subjected to persecution. Jailed, their property confiscated under a Crown law that defined separation from the Anglican church as treason, many of the dissident congregations began planning to migrate. A group of "Pilgrims" led by William Brewster and John Robinson of Nottinghamshire, with a young William Bradford among them, began migrating to the more tolerant society of Leyden, Holland, in 1607-1609. The Dutch government gave them religious freedom, but Dutch society disdained to let these English migrants into the craft guilds then controlling mercantile production and trade. As Bradford tells it, the English were generally forced into menial work and poverty, and in response many able young men began to fall away from the Separatist community. In response, after a decade of trials in Holland the followers of Robinson and Brewster began planning a still bolder migration to America. The plan required a royal patent, quickly secured from James I, who may have been delighted to have shut of them, as well as to use them as a colonial vanguard. In addition they required financial backing, a massive and far-reaching problem according to Bradford. For decades after the establishment of Plymouth in 1620, Bradford's fellow colonists would struggle to repay their financial backers with marketable goods. The story of that struggle is recounted by the many long (and to many readers tedious yet nonetheless important) chapters from Of Plymouth Plantation which are not included in your anthology. The 1630 settlement at Boston, on Massachusetts Bay, was similarly motivated by desires for religious freedom, but differed in being backed by wealthier, more genteel interests over in England. Better educated, as well, the culture they established just north of Plymouth would soon emerge as the dominant force in New England. From it would issue the first conventionally "literary" responses, in English, to the colonial experience: the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Michael Wigglesworth for example. Unlike the unadorned, simple style of William Bradford's prose account, their poetry adapted American subjects to conventional but much more stylized English poetic forms. One further point to keep in mind, then, is that the writings of English settlers in the New World were products of subtly variable forces. Indeed, the student of these early writings does well to remember that English settlements here were little more than far-flung outposts, with scarcely any contact between them, and established by groups with widely varying socioeconomic status and divisive cultural-spiritual goals. English society in the American colonies lacked unity and connection. It would take one hundred years before it achieved even the patchworked quality of pre-Revolutionary War civilization. Despite this tendency to disunity, we can nevertheless make some useful generalizations about early New England culture. For example, as separatist Protestants they all believed in the literal authority of Biblical scripture, and the commonest trait of their writings is a pattern of careful, constant allusion to key scriptures. They were moreover driven by a common goal of purifying religious life. Regarding a European Christianity overburdened, in their view, by layers of authority (the Pope or Archbishop, Bishops, Priests and Prelates), they stressed the importance of each believer having a direct, unmediated contact with the divinity. The main consequence of this belief was not only a greatly diminished class of religious leaders, but a proto-democratic structure for decision-making in everyday religious life. In general, the New World pilgrims also used the Bible as a typological text. This means that they searched it for models, in the form of metaphors and allegories, by which to know their own lives. Indeed, one of their most widely shared desires was that of "living ancient lives"; that is, of seeing their own sectarian struggle and new world exodus as a kind of replay of that which had been lived millenia ago by the great Biblical patriarchs such as Moses and David. They were, therefore, like the Israelites, the New World like Canaan, the Old World authorities like the evil Philistines, the Native American tribesmen like the Baal-worshippers of old. Most of all, like the Israelites they saw themselves as a chosen people both privileged by God yet also saddled by the divinity with an enormous responsibility: to usher in the Millenium, the Second Corning of Christ predicted in the book of Revelations. The signs of this typological mode of imagining the Puritan "errand" will be scattered throughout the pages you will be reading, chiefly in the form of scriptural quotes and references. Finally, they all generally subscribed to the basic tenets of Calvinist Protestant thought. They believed that Mankind was depraved in its very origins, in short that we are all born sinners, from Adam onward. They also believed in a limited atonement, in short that one can do precious little to change the fact of one's depravity. They subscribed to what was known as the Covenant of Grace, which held that the divinity had chosen a limited number of people, the Elect, to be saved. Part of that Covenant involved the doctrine of predestination, according to which the Elect had been determined before their birth, in consequence of which there was nothing to be done by way of altering one's lot. If you think about it much, though, there is a ready problem in that predestinarian belief. It is simply this: Why should anyone bother to do good? If good or bad deeds will alter neither one's election nor one's damnation, then what's the good of good works? Won't the Elect be motivated to get away with the enjoyment of doing evil, since they're saved anyway? As for the Preterite, those who aren't among the Elect, why shouldn't they revel in their damnation? Puritan theologians were quick to consider that problem, though, and the "Covenant of Works" was devised to answer it. This Covenant held that, because no one can achieve advance knowledge of his Election or Preterition, the proper life must be one lived in constant scrutiny. Puritans held that while the divinity was absolutely arbitrary in the exercise of his power, God never acted with caprice or malice. Both the punishments and the rewards of divine Providence were thought to be purposeful--to chastise the sinner and to advise the saint. Living in the ceaseless light of these purposes, the Puritan saw himself compelled to analyze the black spots on his soul, to analyze as well the chastisements of daily life as admonitions from God, and accordingly to seek the good. Covenant theology held that even though individual Puritans could never decisively know whether or not they were saved, the examples set by the great patriarchs demonstrated how the Elect had always, indeed, done good works. To "live ancient lives" meant behaving accordingly. Errors and errands, again. The New England Puritan believed that to live is to be in error; for the condition of Man is that of depravity. Yet the Puritan also saw him or herself on a divine errand, a providentially determined plan whose conclusion would usher in the millenium promised by Biblical scripture. To fully be a part of this providential story meant living the examined life, and we shall see such different writers as Bradford, Bradstreet and Rowlandson meticulously combing through the facts of their daily experience for signs of what Divine Providence would have them be and do. The New England colonists thus saw themselves, in Cotton Mather's words, as "a people of God settled in these, which were once the devil's territories." That these considerations shaped their view of the natural world about them, of Native American cultures, and of important political as well as of ordinary domestic events, is the inescapable topic for the student of early American literature. As you embark on the first series of readings for this course, drawn from the period of colonization, keep these themes in mind. In this introductory "lecture" the following five points are worth noting, and bearing with you into the readings that will come.
As you read and study, the Timeline of our period should help to chronologically orient your work. |
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CONTENTS | DESCRIPTION | GUIDELINES | TIMELINE | ASSIGNMENTS | INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAM |