Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion

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Early Modern C ultural Studies Ivo Kamps, Series Editor PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 by David Hawkes Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England by Bruce Boehrer Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place by Rhonda Lemke Sanford Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture by Jennifer A. Low Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India by Pompa Banerjee Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn by Douglas Bruster England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism by Mark Netzloff Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean by Daniel Vitkus Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism edited by Linda Woodbridge Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe edited by David Glimp and Michelle Warren The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World edited by Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and its Double by Ian Munro Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays by John Michael Archer Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama by Denise Walen

Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer Re-Mapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings edited by Goran V. Stanivukovic Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton by Benedict S. Robinson Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain by Catharine Gray Global Traffic: Discourse and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 edited by Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion by Mary C. Fuller

Remembering the Early M odern V oyag e English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion Mary C. Fuller

REMEMBERING THE EARLY MODERN VOYAGE

Copyright © Mary C. Fuller, 2008. Parts of chapter 1 previously appeared in Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002), 1–28, published by Nottingham Trent University, and are reprinted by kind permission of White Horse Press, the journal’s current publisher. Parts of chapter 3 appeared in Decentring the Renaissance, Germaine Warkentin and Caroline Podruchny, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), and are reprinted by kind permission of the press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60325–7 ISBN-10: 0–230–60325–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuller, Mary C. Remembering the early modern voyage : English narratives in the age of European expansion / by Mary C. Fuller. p. cm.––(Early modern cultural studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–230–60325–4 1. Discoveries in geography––English. 2. Explorers. I. Title. G242.F85 2008 970.01⬘7––dc22

2007041296

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my mother, Nancy Hines Grayson

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations Series Editor’s Foreword Introduction English Worthies: The Age of Expansion Remembered

xiii xv

1

1 Sea-Dogs: Frobisher, Grenville, and the Definition of National Selves

21

2 “Three Turks’ Heads”: Reading the True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630)

69

3

“Rebellious Fish”: Newfoundland Unremembered

117

Afterword

165

Notes

175

Bibliography

213

Index

229


List of Illustrations

Cover: Frontispiece, John Sellers, The English Pilot, 1671. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.) 1.1 Frontispiece (after Howard Pyle), Walter Ralegh, A report of the truth concerning the last sea-fight of the Revenge (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1902). (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 1.2 Title page, Walter Ralegh, Old English Valor (London, 1757). (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 2.1 Frontispiece, John Smith, True Travels (London, 1630). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 2.2 “His encounter with Turbashaw,” True Travels (London, 1630). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 2.3 “Three Turks heads in a banner given him for Armes,” True Travels (London, 1630). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 2.4 Frontispiece, David Lloyd, Legend of Captain Jones, (London, 1659). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University) 2.5 Annotation inside back cover, John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1632), Huntington RB 3346. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 2.6 “King Powhatan commands C. Smith to be slayne,” John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1632), Huntington RB 3346. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

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73

87

88

91

103

104

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L i s t o f I l l u s t r at i o n s

2.7 Annotations, page 60, John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1632), Huntington RB 3346. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 2.8 A Congratulatory Poem upon the Noble Feast Made by the Ancient and Renowned Families of the Smiths (London, ?1684). (Copyright © The British Library, G.7195*)

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Acknowledgments

I

am grateful for the many opportunities offered to present portions of this work, over the twelve years of its composition, to audiences at the AHA, the British Academy, the Chicago Map Society, FEEGI, the Florida Institute of Technology, GEMCAS, the John Carter Brown Library, the Mediterranean Studies Association, MLA, RSA, and the University of Kansas; in particular, I feel fortunate to have participated in the 2005 NEH Institute “British and Indigenous Cultural Encounters in Native North America: 1580–1785” and in an unforgettable conference on early modern Canada at the University of Toronto in 1996. My thanks for these invitations to Jim Akerman, Norman Fiering, Diana Henderson, Peter Mancall, Nabil Matar, Shannon Miller, Carla Rahn Phillips, Geraldo de Souza, Scott Stevens, and Germaine Warkentin. Matthew Day, Peter Mancall, Anthony Payne, David Sacks, and Bill Sherman have been invaluable and congenial interlocutors for thinking about Hakluyt. Capt. Raymond Jourdain shared with me his local knowledge of Frobisher Bay along with a copy of the Arctic Pilot, during a trip to the Canadian Arctic made possible by Melissa Chapman Gresh and the MIT Alumni Travel Office. A long-ago paper given by Mark Rosen first called my attention to materials on Frobisher and Grenville. For expert help with copies of Smith’s book, I’m grateful to Peter Blayney, Clive Hurst, Richard Ring, Daniel Slive, and Steve Tabor; any inaccuracies in the account that follows, however, are wholly my own. For the history of early Newfoundland, I am more indebted than I can say to the work and conversation of William Gilbert, Don Holly, Peter Pope, and Laurier Turgeon. Donna Butt and Bill Edwards kindly took time to speak with me about presentations of public history in Newfoundland and North Carolina. Luca Codignola, Natasha Korda, David McNab, Jeff Reed, and Lesley Thompson all provided useful references I would not have found without their help. Finally, the late David Quinn’s monumental bibliography of work was indispensable to my research, as to anyone working on early modern voyages.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For reading chapters and outlines, I would like to thank John Black, Dympna Callaghan, Frances Dolan, Lynn Enterline, Philippa Levine, Peter Mancall, Bill Sherman, and the anonymous reader for Studies in Travel Writing. Above all, after heroically reading the manuscript in three different incarnations, Bruce Smith made the crucial suggestions that allowed me to finish the book; I and the book both owe him a great deal, but he is not liable for its failings. Sharon Achinstein, Cath Davies, Kate McLoughlin, Seamus Perry, and Jayne Plant enlivened a stint at Oxford made possible by the generosity of the MIT-Balliol Exchange. In acknowledgment of other intellectual debts and good company, I would like to thank Mary Campbell, Edmund Campos, Julia Crawford, Susan Danforth, Lissa Gifford, Diana Henderson, Julia Kuehn, Sanford Levinson, Nabil Matar, Jim Muldoon, Ann Plane, Shankar Raman, Chris Slivon, Nicolas Wey-Gomez, and Tim Youngs, as well as my cherished colleagues in Literature at MIT. The book was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Library, the Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library. I would also like to thank the staff of those libraries, and of the John Carter Brown Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library, and the British Library, for the many ways in which they supported the preparation of this book, both practically and intellectually. Timely financial support came from Deans Philip Khoury and Deborah Fitzgerald, and Peter Donaldson as Literature Head provided both moral support and release time. Jan Ellertsen and Julie Saunders saw me through many technical difficulties with patience, efficiency, and good humor. Mary Tran and Joyce Henderson performed wonders of last-minute editing. My thanks also go to my editor, Ivo Kamps and to Julia Cohen, Brigitte Schull, Erin Ivy, and Farideh Koohi-Kamali at Palgrave. I would like to thank John Black for absolutely everything. Finally, for all she has done in the preparation of the author herself, I would like to dedicate this book to my mother, with admiration and love.

Abbreviations

ESTC Worthies 1662 Worthies 1684 PN

Naval Tracts

NAW

Pilgrimes

DNB

Works

GH Travels

English Short Title Catalogue (online, The British Library). Fuller, Thomas. The History of the Worthies of England. London, 1662. Fuller, Thomas. Anglorum speculum, or The worthies of England. London, 1684. Hakluyt, Richard. Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600). Reprint. 12 vols. Hakluyt Society Publications, extra series no. 1–12. Glasgow: James MacLehose and sons, 1903–05. Monson, Sir William. The naval tracts of Sir William Monson. 6 vols. Edited by M. Oppenheim. London: Navy Records Society, 1902–14. Quinn, David, ed. New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. 5 vols. New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, 1979. Samuel, ed., Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas. 4 vols. London, 1625; Reprint. 20 vols. Hakluyt Society Publications, extra series nos. 14–33. Glasgow: James MacLehose and sons, 1903–05. Smith, George. Dictionary of National Biography. 22 vols. Edited by Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press, 1967–68. Smith, John. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith. 3 vols. Edited by Philip L. Barbour. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986. Smith, John. Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1624). In Barbour, Works. Smith, John. True Travels (London, 1630). In Barbour, Works.


S eries E ditor ’ s Foreword

The Early Modern Cultural Studies series is dedicated to the exploration

of literature, history, and culture in the context of cultural exchange and globalization. We begin with the assumption that in the twentyfirst century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiography, and cultural studies have become so interwoven that we can now think of them as an eclectic and only loosely unified (but still recognizable) approach to formerly distinct fields of inquiry such as literature, society, history, and culture. This series furthermore presumes that the early modern period was witness to an incipient process of transculturation through exploration, mercantilism, colonization, and migration that set into motion a process of globalization that is still with us today. The purpose of this series is to bring together this eclectic approach, which freely and unapologetically crosses disciplinary, theoretical, and political boundaries, with early modern texts and artifacts that bear the traces of transculturation and globalization. This process can be studied on a large as well as on a small scale, and the volumes in this series are dedicated to both. The series is just as concerned with the analyses of colonial encounters and native representations of those encounters as it is with representations of the other in Shakespeare, gender politics, the cultural impact of the presence of strangers/foreigners in London, or the consequences of farmers’ migration to that same city. This series is as interested in documenting cultural exchanges between British, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch colonizers and native peoples as it is in telling the stories of returning English soldiers who served in foreign armies on the continent of Europe in the late sixteenth century. IVO KAMPS Series Editor


Introduction

English Worthies: T he Age of E xpansion R emembered TAVERNER: This be the age of discovery, of iron men and wooden ships [when John Cabot discovered Newfoundland for the English king]. MATEY: What about the Vikings? TAVERNER: I’m talking about us English! .... MATEY: But there were fishermen here all the time—the Basques and the Portuguese and the Normans and the French— TAVERNER: They don’t matter— MATEY: They were scum, lower than scum, because they weren’t English— TAVERNER: Now you’re getting it. Donna Butt and Rick Boland, The New Founde Land Memory is not at all the opposite of forgetting. The two terms which should be placed in contrast to each other are erasure (forgetting) and preservation; memory is, always and necessarily, a play between these two. . . . memory . . . is of necessity a selection: some features of the event will be retained, others immediately or progressively left behind, and thus forgotten. Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire

English Worthies Between the years 1480 and 1620, the English moved from early contacts with North America, recorded and unrecorded, to the beginnings

2

R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e

of colonial societies implanted there. This book looks at three sets of narratives and documents from this era. “English Seadogs” examines the deeds of two memorable figures from the Elizabethan competition with Spain, which spanned both old and new worlds, as represented in Richard Hakluyt’s monumental anthology, the Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1598–1600). “Three Turks’ Heads” outlines the intellectual and practical formation of one of the first American colonists through distant battles in the east, as narrated in John Smith’s autobiography, The True Travels . . . of Captaine Iohn Smith (1630). “Rebellious Fish” follows the history of Newfoundland from John Cabot’s landfall in 1497 through its settlement and formal possession as England’s first colony, and the cornerstone of the British Empire. In describing these topics in this way—through iconic phrases and in relation to some central narratives of British and American history—I mean to invoke the second topic of this book: that is, the ways this history of expansion and implantation has been both remembered and forgotten over the intervening centuries, or in other words, historical memory. This brief summary provides one example: it will become apparent, I hope, from reading the chapters themselves how much the account of their subjects which I have just given both distorts and omits, in the interests of (first) coherence and (then) memorability. I suggest in the course of the book, as well as in conclusion, what other things I think might be usefully remembered, from the documents that have survived. Let me introduce both the topics, and the question of memory, at more length with another example, which has the virtue of not being fabricated for the purpose, and can also thus serve us as evidence. During the last years of the Commonwealth and the first years of Charles II’s restoration of the monarchy, an English clergyman named Thomas Fuller assembled a huge manuscript compilation of short biographies. Edited and published by Fuller’s son after his death as The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), this voluminous work gathers together short biographies from the whole span of English history in order to commemorate, and sometimes celebrate, both the worthy and the notorious. Successive editions of the Worthies (1684, 1811, 1840) and its very frequent citation suggest the utility and interest of this work for generations of readers. Fuller’s collection brings together the subjects of chapters 1, 2, and 3: Hakluyt and his voyagers; the travels of John Smith; and the early history of Newfoundland. It also tells us something about what the Elizabethan and Jacobean history of travel, exploration, and sea

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power looked like a few decades or generations later, as personal memory began to shade into historical memory, and the meanings of this history began to take shape. Under his notice of the mariner Edward Fenton, Fuller wrote that Fenton, along with Sir Martin Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Thomas Cavendish, formed a “generation of military men, both by sea and by land, which began and expired with the reign of Queen Elizabeth, like a suit of clothes made for her, and worn out with her.”1 Other writers might add different names, but Fuller’s identification of a kind of generational project and identity has been endorsed by subsequent tradition. Beyond simple chronology, what linked these men together for Fuller? The men of Elizabeth’s generation were fighters and sailors, who were engaged in a number of common projects. One part of the generational project was the involvement in linked attempts to establish or consolidate colonies outside of England, and to open new trade routes beyond Europe. Frobisher, Drake, and Gilbert, along with Sir Walter Ralegh (who Fuller associates with them elsewhere), all figured in the Elizabethan attempt to colonize and subject Ireland. Drake, Cavendish, and Fenton all attempted to reach the East Indies by sailing west and south around the tip of South America; Drake famously succeeded (1577–80), Cavendish succeeded once and failed a second time, and Fenton failed miserably (1582), a fact Fuller charitably omits. (Ordered to sail east around the Cape of Good Hope, Fenton insisted on attempting to go through the Straits of Magellan instead, and in the end was glad simply to get home). Fenton had also been involved in earlier attempts by Frobisher to reach the East Indies by sailing Northwest (1576–78). Gilbert argued before the Queen and in print for the viability of such a Northwest passage, and was granted a patent for the discovery and settlement of North America. His cousin Ralegh inherited the patent after Gilbert’s death at sea in 1582, and in 1585 established a colony on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, with Sir Richard Grenville as commander of the various voyages of settlement and supply. The desperate colonists were visited and relieved by Drake and Frobisher on the homeward leg of a 1586 voyage aimed at raiding and trading with Spanish colonies in the West Indies. As this last conjunction suggests, all of these projects took place within the larger frame of English relations with Spain, which were largely hostile for the duration of Elizabeth’s reign. In the New World, the English attempted to establish colonies and to tap the wealth of Spanish ones, by licit or illicit means. In the Old World the

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competition was military, and here too, Fuller’s “generation” played their part—raiding Cadiz as well as Cartagena, lying in wait for Spanish treasure ships, fighting Hapsburg armies in the Low Countries, serving against the Spanish Armada of invasion in 1588. In all these enterprises, the men Fuller names served predictably and interchangeably, sometimes succeeding each other turn by turn in command of the same ships. As Fuller suggests, by Elizabeth’s death in 1603, all were dead, “worn out” in battles and voyages. But they were not forgotten. A chief instrument for the perpetuation of their memory was the publication in two editions of that great collection of travel and voyage narratives, Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589 and 1598–1600). Fuller was not silent on the importance of this contribution. Of Hakluyt, a clergyman who had lectured on both Aristotle and geography at Oxford, Fuller wrote: He set forth a large Collection of the English Sea Voyages, Ancient, Middle, Modern, taken partly out of private Letters which never were (or without his care had not been) printed; partly out of Small Treatises, printed, and since irrecoverably lost, had not his providence preserved them. For some Pamphlets are produced, which for their Cheapnesse and Smalnesse men for the present neglect to buy, presuming they may procure them at their pleasure; which small Books, their first and last Edition being passed, . . . cannot afterwards with any price or pains be recovered. In a word many of such useful Tracts of Sea Adventures, which before were scattered as several Ships, Master Hackluit hath embodied into a Fleet, divided into Three Squadrons, so many several Volumes, a work of great honour to England. . . . (Worthies 1662, Ff4r–v).

What Fuller identified as Hakluyt’s work brought “great honor” to his country, but it was neither the work of doing deeds nor of writing about them—rather, it was the work of collecting what had already been written (or even printed), the contents of private letters and small pamphlets, and relocating it from these ephemeral media into large volumes. How large? The second edition of Principal Navigations runs to over 2,000 pages, divided into 3 folio volumes— a “fleet” indeed. By contrast, component texts such as Thomas Hariot’s Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land (1588)—the first eyewitness account of continental America by an Englishman— had appeared originally in small quartos, cheaper to buy, less likely to be cared for in the way one cares for a large and expensive book, less likely to last. Rare books are one of the cases where size does matter.

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Hakluyt’s second edition even now survives in roughly 230 whole or partial examples, the first edition in another 120 odd; Hariot’s Report, among the rarest of early Americana, exists in only six copies, one imperfect.2 (De Bry’s illustrated 1590 folio Hariot, a very different kind of production that appeared simultaneously in multiple languages, is a relatively common possession of scholarly libraries). The smaller books that Hakluyt reprinted doubtless were less rare for Fuller in 1662 than for us in the early twenty-first century. But the utility of Hakluyt’s work for Fuller lay not only in preserving texts, but also in assembling them into a single, readily accessible source. Fuller visibly relied on the anthology for numerous biographical notices— for instance, those of the explorer Sir Hugh Willoughby, who froze to death with his crew in an attempt to find the Northeast passage, or the sailor Job Hortop, left ashore in the West Indies on the disastrous voyage of John Hawkins in 1567–69. (Other examples are Hugh Eliot, the circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish, and Charles Howard, Elizabeth’s lord admiral). In his reliance on Hakluyt’s collection, Fuller followed in the footsteps of earlier authors such as William Segar (Honor Military and Civil, 1602) and William Warner (Albion’s England, 1612) who drew on Hakluyt’s anthology for their details of famous travelers and voyages, as well as Henry Holland, whose Latin Herpologia (1620) was an earlier version of Fuller’s vernacular biographies.3 Hakluyt’s predominance was not total—not all the marking events of Elizabethan maritime history relied for their fame on his collection. One key example would be Drake’s circumnavigation of the world in 1577–80, which remarkably produced no important printed account by a participant.4 Drake’s fame did not rely solely on publication, publication that indeed there is some indication the government tried to suppress. The English ambassador to Paris wrote in a letter home of October 1584, “Drake’s journey is kept very secret in England, but here it is in everyone’s mouth.”5 Another key event, the defeat of the Spanish Armada of invasion in 1588, is represented in Hakluyt only by a translation from the Dutch of Emanuel van Meteren.6 Again, however, here was an event that in a sense did not need Hakluyt to be remembered. David Cressy has shown how powerfully both the events of 1588, and a particular understanding of them, entered the collective memory through forms of public celebration—sermons, bonfires, bell ringing, the striking of commemorative medals.7 Drake and the defeat of the Armada were hardly typical narratives, however. For the very largest reputations and national events, print was not the only guarantor of memory and fame. For everyone else, there was Hakluyt.

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Walter Ralegh’s account of the loss of the Revenge and the death of its commander, Sir Richard Grenville, was just such an ephemeral pamphlet as Fuller must have had in mind. A report of the truth of the fight about the Iles of Açores (London, 1591) was a slender quarto of some twenty-eight pages, nine examples of which survive. Hakluyt paired Ralegh’s account with another taken from the Itinerario (London, 1598) of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a larger narrative (both topically and physically) of Linschoten’s geographical observations; this alternate account in some sense also falls to Hakluyt’s credit, as he was instrumental in the appearance of the English translation. Hakluyt gave Sir Martin Frobisher’s three Arctic voyages of the 1570s even more extensive coverage, printing not only the synthetic account by George Best and Best’s prefatory discussion of climate (1578), but also participant accounts by Christopher Hall (1576), Dionyse Settle (1577), and Thomas Ellis (1578). These, too, owe much to Hakluyt for their continued currency. Best’s True discourse of the late voyages of discouerie survives in twelve copies, Settle’s A true reporte in seven copies (not including French and Latin translation), Ellis’s A true reporte in two complete copies and one fragment; Hall’s log survives only in manuscript.8 By the time Hakluyt published, Frobisher’s failure to achieve any of the voyages’ objectives was old news: he had not found a Northwest Passage to China, had failed to install the proposed colony on Baffin Island, and the tons of supposed gold ore that his crew quarried with such hardship and expense in the Arctic had proved worthless. Reprinting these narratives gave them a new life and a different set of meanings, as a contribution to knowledge and an example of fortitude and daring to be imitated by subsequent explorers and colonists. Best’s discourse was prefaced with a list of what could be learned from reading it: 1. First, by example may be gathered, how any Discoverer of new Countries is to proceed in his first attempt of any Discovery. 2. Item, how he should be provided of shipping, victuals, munition, and choice of men. 3. How to proceed and deal with strange people, be they never so barbarous, cruel and fierce, either by lenity or otherwise.9 These lessons were apparently independent of the expedition’s actual (lack of) success. In the same way, Ralegh’s A report of the truth begins to look a little different when it appears in the context of Hakluyt’s anthology. The

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companion narrative by Linschoten offered confirmation of what were, in all truth, incredible details: Sir Richard Grenville deliberately led his ship, the Revenge, against a vastly larger Spanish fleet, and in the face of inevitable defeat called for death rather than surrender. Placing the Ralegh and Linschoten narratives among related accounts of other Anglo-Spanish encounters at sea suggested that Grenville’s action was one example of a class rather than something singular. Ralegh’s account also transformed the defeat of the Revenge into a victory, not a trivial victory but one whose outlines made it part of a larger story about English virtue and Spanish perfidy toward those they encountered abroad; his invocation to this end of Spanish cruelties in the Indies gives A report of the truth a point of comparison with texts such as the one by Best, which among other things struggled manfully to demonstrate the exemplarity of English conduct toward indigenous Americans. Thanks to Hakluyt, in large part, the narratives of Grenville’s action and Frobisher’s voyages did not merely survive, but also acquired new meanings that guaranteed their continued currency. Taken individually, like many of Hakluyt’s other documents these were (as I have argued elsewhere) narratives of failure, which might have been—as narratives—quite ephemeral.10 Taken together they are what Fuller calls them, a “mighty fleet,” whose imposing volumes have perpetuated the story of English maritime valor down the centuries. In its conceptual outlines and in its attention to the mechanics of memory, instanced by Hakluyt’s work in collecting and preserving narratives, Fuller’s 1662 account gives us a fairly good sense of how the Elizabethan seamen would be remembered. Fuller’s account of the colonist Captain John Smith has been equally influential. One anonymous early reader copied Fuller’s biography of Smith virtually in its entirety (and complete with mistakes) from the second edition of Worthies onto the flyleaf of Smith’s Generall Historie: Captain John Smith. Bourne in Cheshire, spent the most part of his life in fforigne parts. First in Hungary under the Emperor, fighting against the Turks, three of which he himself killed in single duells, and therefore was authorized by Sigismund king of Hungary to bare three Turks heads as an augmentation of his arms. How he gave inteligence to a Besieged Citty in the night, by significant Fire Works formed in the Air in legible Caracters. Thenne he went into America about the end of the Reigne of Queen Eliz: such his perils and Preservations, they seem to most men above belief. They are mentioned in a treatise done by himself. He was very instrumental in settling the plantation of Virginia, whereof he was Governor as also Admiral of New England. When old

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e he lived in London where being high-minded and Poor, he was exposed to the contempt of disingenuous Persons. Yet he efforted his spirits with a commemoration of the days of old. He was buried in Sepulcher-Church-Quire. A line of his Ranting epitaph Here lies one conquered that hath Conquered Kings. England’s Wortheys pag 90.11

The copyist has omitted a phrase or two that make Fuller’s faint praise of Smith more concessive, and his criticism more cutting, but the general outline remains consistent (and consistent with the longer version in Worthies, 1662). The salient points are that Smith served against the Turks in Eastern Europe, and was granted a coat of arms by Zsigmond Báthory, prince of Transylvania, for distinguishing himself in the matters of duels and signals that Fuller notes. He played an important role in the early years of the Virginia colony, in which he served as governor, and was later named “Admiral of New England,” a title granted by London investors, which indicated that he had been given command of an exploratory fleet. (Smith repeatedly expressed his disdain for the “Brownists” of the Plymouth colony, who declined to pay for his services but tried to exploit the information contained in books resulting from his explorations.) Despite his ambition, he died poor, but his achievements were recorded both in print and in an epitaph, no longer surviving but transcribed by several observers.12 Even in this transcription, the lines of Fuller’s criticism are visible. Smith told stories about his own achievements that were hard to believe, both because they claimed things “above belief ” and because these things had happened very far away rather than close to home where other Englishmen could testify to them. In the longer version of 1662, the criticism of Smith’s storytelling is more pointed: “Such his Perils, Preservations, Dangers, Deliverances, they seem to most men above belief, to some beyond Truth. Yet have we two witnesses to attest them, the Prose and the Pictures both in his own book, and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds, that he alone is the Herauld to publish and proclaime them” (Worthies 1662, 180/Z4v). The disjunction between his own and others’ sense of his standing exposed him to contempt. The epitaph on his grave serves as an instance of a textual production that was uncomfortably excessive in both its claims and its size: “a ranting epitaph . . . too long to transcribe” (Worthies 1662, 180/Z4v). (This interminable text, from which Fuller declines to quote more than two lines, signals the elision of Smith’s works in general as anything other than a form of bragging.) Fuller added an anecdote to drive home the point: that for a

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captain to relate his own achievements was not only less effective than letting others tell the story—a gentleman would know not to do it. None of this will be unfamiliar to anyone who has read Smith; he has reliably irritated and inspired centuries of readers just as he did his fellow colonists. Fuller’s criticisms seem almost too obvious, yet that may be in part because his book helped shape how Smith was remembered. And they may not be entirely fair or accurate in distinguishing what was uniquely characteristic of Smith, whose published work (for instance) reliably included precisely the relations of other men, even a halting poem or two by men who claimed to have served with him against the Turks. (The epitaph itself—which extends to fifty-one lines, although they are very short ones—indicates that it was dedicated to the memory of Smith by a friend.)13 Nor was Smith unique in praising his own deeds. Drake spent a period of enforced retirement writing (or attempting to write) a defensive account of his career at sea (perhaps along the lines of Ralegh’s apologetic and self-promoting Discoverie of Guiana, 1596); the preface survives, and was printed in The World Encompassed (1628).14 His contemporary William Monson wrote that Drake too was despised for “the baseness of his birth and education, his ostentation and vainglorious boasting.”15 Grenville, for his part, grated on his colleagues in the colonizing ventures of the 1580s, but as a written record left only an account in Holinshed’s Chronicle said to be compiled from his notes. Frobisher wrote almost nothing, because (according to James McDermott) he was largely illiterate.16 Smith, however, was fortunate enough both to be literate, and to have access to publication; he was unfortunate enough to be frequently unemployed, with the leisure to write and the hope that by doing so he might better his position. From the perspective of the present, there are other things to note about Fuller’s account beyond the familiar lines of its criticism. The first thing that will strike at least any U.S. reader is its emphasis. Fuller pays far more attention to what Smith did in Eastern Europe than in what he did in Virginia. Compare the detailed account of Smith’s single combats and his achievements in signal intelligence already cited with what we learn from this text about Smith as a colonist: “Thence he went into America about the end of the Reign of Queen Eliz: such his Perils and Preservations, they seem to most Men above belief. They are mentioned in a Treatise done by himself. He was very Instrumental in settling the Plantation of Virginia, whereof he was Governor, as also Admiral of New-England” (Worthies 1684, 90–91/H5v–H6r). Smith did something in America, after being granted a coat of arms for his prowess in Hungary. When he did it is

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left unclear (Elizabeth died in 1603, Jamestown was settled in 1608) and what he did is both unclear and not quite believable, although somehow also “instrumental.” Fuller’s earlier text has the somewhat grudging “moderate men must allow Captain Smith to have been very instrumental” (Worthies 1662, 180/Z4v; my italics). How do we explain Fuller’s priorities? One explanation would be sources. Fuller claims to have obtained his information from the derided epitaph and from Smith’s supposed kinsman Arthur Smith, his own former schoolmaster. (Smith had no children, and Fuller gets his county of origin wrong, so we may doubt the kinship, or at least that it was sufficiently close to provide any real information.) The epitaph details Smith’s duels with “pagans three” and consequent grant of arms from the “King of Hungarion” for “his former service done in honor of his God and Christendom.” His “adventures since, done in Virginia” are described very generally along the same lines: “he subdued kings unto his yoke, and made those heathen fly . . . and made their land . . . a habitation for a Christian nation” (Deane, Last Will, 6–7). Smith’s colonial experiences—including such diverse matters as the famous rescue by Pocahontas and the unglamorous promotion of a New England fishery—were assimilated in the epitaph to a military model provided by his earlier career: it is all about the conquest and subjection of the infidel. If the additional details were provided by Arthur Smith, his information was curiously selective: very detailed on Smith’s use of fireworks, very vague on anything else. The particular information on the use of fireworks as signals appeared in Smith’s 1630 autobiography, True Travels, which detailed Smith’s travels and achievements before Jamestown and then picked up the colonial history again after 1624, when Smith himself was no longer involved. The inclusions and omissions of Worthies strongly suggest that neither Thomas Fuller nor Arthur Smith read any of the other, copious publications on Virginia and New England which Smith sent to press with regularity between 1612 and 1631. If they read anything at all, it was the autobiography. Fuller’s memorial notice thus takes a view of Smith’s career and its marking achievements in some respects strikingly different from what we know today; yet to a certain extent, it replicates the contours of the story John Smith chose to tell about himself. Fuller attributes Smith’s activities in the New World to a period “toward the latter end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth,” confusing them with the dates for Smith’s activities in Eastern Europe. What does this tell us, besides that Fuller did not read any of the six editions of Smith’s Generall Historie? For one thing, it is a reminder that Fuller

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could not rely on Hakluyt for exact details about Smith’s life, as he could for Elizabethans such as Hugh Willoughby or Thomas Stukely. The reason is of course chronological, since Smith’s production of written accounts (though not all of his experiences) postdated the appearance of Principal Navigations in 1600. Yet even if Smith came too late to figure in Principal Navigations, Fuller’s failure to record the details of his biography can hardly be accounted for by the scarcity or ephemerality of the physical books in which he might have found them. If True Travels survives at an only slightly higher rate than Ralegh and Best (ESTC lists twenty copies, several bound in with other works), there remain more than sixty copies of the six editions of Generall Historie—many of these (as of other works by Smith) contain evidence of the persistent energy with which the author presented copies to persons and corporate bodies seen as potential patrons.17 We can speculate that these presentations led to a wider distribution of copies than might have resulted from market forces and reader interests alone. Nor were Smith’s own publications the only means of access to his work and the details of his career. Too late for Hakluyt, Smith’s narratives were included prominently in the collections of Hakluyt’s successor, Samuel Purchas, beginning in 1616. The benchmark Purchas anthology Purchas his Pilgrimes, incorporating part of Smith’s autobiography, counts no less than 215 surviving copies;18 in material terms, it was comparable with Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, if not actually more substantial. But (in the opinion of many readers) being in Purchas was not quite the same. An unkind editor wrote of Purchas in 1808, that venerable author has exerted his utmost judgment, ability, and discernment, in selecting the most useless parts of the unhappy authors imprisoned in his jail; leaving the patient reader to consult the originals, if he wish for solid information. With the noble example of Hakluyt before his eyes, it is surprising that he should fall into this error; but the want of judgment can never be supplied by fancy . . .19

Fuller does not appear to draw on Purchas, and is silent on whether he, too, brought honor to his country. Smith’s actual belatedness, with respect to that compilation which most related the doings of the “Elizabethan generation” identified by Fuller, made for a failure of documentation—not because there was no documentation of Smith’s life, but because it was absent from Hakluyt, and being in Hakluyt was what counted. Information about Smith was of the wrong kind, and in the wrong place.

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Fuller’s treatment serves as example of a larger phenomenon: whether in Purchas or in his own works, Smith has been culturally situated differently than were those Elizabethan seamen and soldiers whom one could look up in Principal Navigations. By this I mean not so much that he was of a different social class, as that later generations have tended to think of him as inhabiting a different kind of category than the one including Frobisher, Drake, Ralegh, Grenville, and their fellows.20 Not only because his best-known achievements were on land: Smith’s Sea Grammar and Accidence are still cited in works of English naval history, and were taken as model and source by Admiral William Smyth, RN, in his Sailor’s Word-Book (London, 1867).21 (Smith claimed in Advertisements [1631] to have been writing a general history of the sea). Commendatory poems prefacing Smith’s Generall Historie compared him to “rare Martin Forbisher . . . Gilberts brave Humphery . . . Sir Richard Grevill, . . . Drake”: “though these be gone, and left behinde a name, yet Smith is here.” Later, and without the prompting of friendship, John Sellers put Smith in the company of Drake, Cavendish, Hugh Willoughby, John Davies, and Ralegh on the title page of his English Pilot, reproduced as the cover of this book (1672). (Smith is seated in the top right-hand corner of the image.) Evidently, it was thinkable to place Smith alongside the members of the Elizabethan once “greatest generation” of naval heroes. But such a grouping remains anomalous—Smith has been largely absent from discussions of English Renaissance history, except in his “American” role as colonist and colonial promoter. American literature (once it existed) welcomed Smith and his writings on Virginia; whether criticized or celebrated, he was clearly a figure at the origins of American history and an American literary canon. The autobiography, though, was a different matter. True Travels is unfamiliar even to a good cross-section of those to whom Smith and early American writing are of some professional interest. This lapse of attention might be chalked up in part to the text’s predominant concern with travels in Europe and the Old World, rather than in America. Perhaps part of the problem, however, is also the kind of text it is. In Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman called for a purging of chivalric romance in order to inaugurate a truly American literature: “To offset chivalry, indeed, those vanish’d countless knights, old altars, abbeys, priests, ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause today demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger grander work, more than the counterpart and tally of them.”22 Elsewhere, Whitman criticized popular literature for its indebtedness to “the Amadises and Palmerins . . . over there in Europe” (Democratic Vistas, 363). Smith’s autobiography, which he presents as

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the bildungsroman of a successful colonist (virtually the successful colonist), took its inspiration precisely from chivalric romance, those modes of conduct and imagination that Whitman later rejected as regressive and un-American. True Travels, which Smith wrote late in life as a kind of recapitulation, unmistakably announced his social ambitions; he drew from his military adventures in the East a title, a track record, and a coat of arms, which both served as a riposte to those who mocked his pretensions, and inspired more mockery. Fuller’s biographical sketch gives a taste of the near-term reaction. (His description of Smith as the possessor of a prince’s mind imprisoned in a poor man’s purse has often been quoted; he goes on to note that this characteristic “rendered him to the contempt of such who were not ingenuous”; Worthies 1662, 180/Z4v.) In effect, Smith has always made people uncomfortable— a yeoman’s son acting like a knight, an Englishman with a Transylvanian rank, a proto-American with un-American impulses—and his autobiography in particular brings to the fore an insistent transgression of narratives of national identity, both in his own time and in times to come (if True Relation is “the first American book,” True Travels looks in a different direction, back to a definitively feudal Europe).23 Smith’s persistent efforts to represent himself as an English hero were precisely what set him at cross purposes to national norms and communal narratives. Fuller’s worthies include most of the figures important to this book; he includes entries for Sir Walter Ralegh, for Sir Martin Frobisher (though not for Sir Richard Grenville), for Richard Hakluyt, and for Captain John Smith. He also includes at least one entry for an activity: the fishery. Entries relating to the fishery and to the discovery and attempted settlement of Newfoundland register Fuller’s awareness of this—to most readers—more obscure area of the history.24 Fuller’s prefatory material reviews the kinds of worthies his book will discuss, giving a chapter to each category: princes, saints, martyrs, confessors; popes, cardinals, prelates before and after the Reformation; worthy statesmen; capital judges, and writers on common law; soldiers and seamen; writers on law, physic, chemistry, surgery; writers; benefactors of the public. Appended to the chapter on soldiers and seamen is a digression on “the necessity to encourage the trade of fishing” (Worthies 1662, 21/D3r). Fishermen are the spawn, or young frie, of Seamen; yea such as hope that Mariners will hold up, if Fishermen be destroyed, may as rationally expect plenty of

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e honey and wax, though only old stocks of bees were kept, without either casts or swarms. Nor can Fishermen be kept up, except the public eating of Fish at set times be countenanced, yea enjoined by the state. (Worthies 1662, 22/D3v)

Fuller insists, that, as a matter of state policy, English subjects should be enjoined from eating meat at least two days a week. Greater consumption of fish would support the fishery and the breeding of fishermen; the fishery and fishermen would support the navy; and the navy, in turn, the state. Otherwise, “the not forbearing of Flesh, for the feeding on Fish, for the good of the state, will in process of time prove the ruin of fishermen; they of Seamen; both of Englishmen” (Worthies 1662, 22/D3v).25 His assertion of the Western fishery’s vital importance was echoed by William Monson. Monson argues at some length that fishing is “this best business that was ever presented to England, or King thereof: nay, I will be bold to say, to any state in the world. I will not except the discovery of the west Indies by Columbus; an act of greatest renown, of greatest profit, and that has been of greatest consequence to the Spanish nation” (Naval Tracts 5:226). Monson’s comparison of England’s nameless fishermen with Columbus becomes tighter and more specific later in Worthies; the “tedious digression” on fishing, which Fuller attributes to “my zeal for the good of the Commonwealth” (Worthies 1662, 23/D4r), marks only the first appearance of the fishery in his book. A chapter on the city of Bristol praises it particularly as advantaging the realm by the Western voyages of its seamen. “Of these [discoveries], some have been but merely casual, when going to fish for cod, they have found a country . . .” (Worthies 1662, Eee2r). Fuller attributes the “discovery” of Newfoundland to “Hugh Eliot, a merchant of the city, who was in his age the prime pilot of our nation. He first, (with the assistance of Mr. [Robert] Thorn his fellow citizen) found out Newfound land, anno 1527. This may be called Old-found-land, as senior in the cognizance of the English, to Virginia and all our other plantations” (Worthies 1662, Eee2r). The “Old” of “Old-found-land” indicated in practice not so much that Newfoundland came first as that it had already been largely forgotten. Who had discovered Newfoundland, anyway? Fuller said Eliot and Thorne, Hakluyt said the Cabots, though confusing Sebastian the son with John the father; some histories credit Humphrey Gilbert, who merely took possession (in 1583) before the gaze of wondering fishermen. No one could quite decide, or remember, who the heroes of Newfoundland’s discovery were, if indeed there were any.

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Northern America was found “casually,” in the process of doing something else. Fuller’s double-sided treatment shows the ways in which assertions and perceptions about the importance of Newfoundland and its fishery—both for the wealth it brought, and for its practical contribution to a heroic and martial history—coexisted with an antitriumphalist rhetoric about accidental discovery, which apologizes for its own tedium. Early writing about Newfoundland seems to have resisted the categories so familiar from other early English writing about the New World. When the speaker of John Donne’s famous elegy eulogized his naked mistress as “my America, my new found land,” despite a long tradition of nomenclature—which makes the reference almost as pointed and specific as calling her “my New Jersey”—we feel sure that he was not thinking of that foggy, rock-bound island in the north.26 Newfoundland—Old Found Land—was not the eroticized, fertile virgin land of so many colonial tracts. The teeming cod, which were its principal attraction for the English, do merit mention in many an early text. Anthony Parkhurst’s 1578 letter to Richard Hakluyt from Newfoundland described fishing as a kind of sport: “For my pleasure I take a great Mastive I have, and say no more than thus—Goe fetch me this rebellious fish that obeyeth not this Gentleman that commeth from Kent and Christendome” (PN 8:8–9). Parkhurst’s vocabulary of Christian conquest, not to say setting dogs on resistant Americans, echoes accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, but in a radically deflated, even comic mode. These citations might suggest some of the issues associated with early writing about Newfoundland, a body of documents that— despite its relative obscurity—does exist. What did you say about a place where the land had no riches, and there were no visible human inhabitants to boast of having subdued? How did you compose an epic narrative whose only encounters were with fish? What, in fact, appeared in place of the narrative of conquest and possession that could not be written? These are questions about narrative. Newfoundland resisted settlement in other ways as well. The nature of the land, and the activities it supported made life difficult, despite the optimistic picture painted by promotional tracts—and the difficult colonial life it did eventually support did not suit the policies or narratives of a home country in the process of becoming an imperial power.27 Not fame, but forgetfulness has characterized Newfoundland’s place in larger colonial and imperial histories. Yet to be forgotten is not to disappear. Textual records remain to point us toward the reconstruction of a history whose material

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traces are still, literally, being excavated, dug up from behind gas stations and out of backyard potato plots. Asking how the past thought about the past tells us something in and of itself, but such inquiries can also tell us something by implication about choices and omissions that now seem so natural as to be necessary, if not actually invisible. Thomas Fuller’s anthology shows the mechanics of memory at work: identifying significant careers and events, assigning meanings to them. This well-known book still has a few surprises, enough to suggest how much the memory of history has a history itself.

What We Know Hakluyt’s voyagers defined an idea of nation and an empire at its origins. John Smith quixotically hoped his exotic battles would ennoble him at home, a project that set him at odds with his audiences. The men who fished off Newfoundland fed Europe largely in obscurity and silence. These are the three cases—of fame and forgetting in the age of expansion—which are considered in this book. I approach them with some larger questions in mind: what do we know, here in North America, about our past? Why do we know the things we do know, and not other things? These questions already beg many others. By “our past,” I mean—writing in Cambridge, Massachusetts—the past which led here, to a massive European, African, and Asian implantation in a North America that was already inhabited. “What we know” is harder to pin down—who “we” are, what counts as knowing, and how the contents of that knowledge are to be made visible and described. Yet I feel the effects of this common knowledge. Whenever I read primary sources, I find myself in some way surprised. Why is that? I think it is because there is already some idea or expectation about the past that has come from many sources—from conversations, from public media, from books, from classes. I cannot say exactly where these ideas have come from—I was a poor student of the little history that came my way as a younger person—only that somehow, they have left a residue. Familiar phrases such as “the Age of Discovery” are part of that residue. Others have shown how loaded such phrases are, and how much they leave out. As my epigraph suggests, the celebration of a heroic “Age of Discovery” depends on a number of deliberate and specific omissions—in other words, on remembering some things and forgetting others. Forgetting may be ideological, and operate along the lines of particular interest; it can result from a deliberate suppression

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of certain memories or histories. It is also a function of narrative. To tell a story, one creates a frame, a beginning and end and a central line that moves from one to the other. Likewise, as a history, is composed some things will be brought to the center and some moved to the side, or off the margins of the page altogether. Finally, though, forgetting is a function of memory itself. We cannot remember everything, a statement with ever more resonance in an age when simply in day-today life, there seems to be more to remember all the time. Some days, indeed, it is a question of whether we can remember anything. What is remembered about the past often coalesces around powerful images and iconic narratives. The pilgrim’s hat that serves as a visual shorthand for the Massachusetts Turnpike. The “mad affair” of Captain Smith and Pocahontas as the topic of popular song and of movies. Columbus discovering the virgin land. What can be made memorable is remembered, and to a great extent it becomes what we know, in the general sense of those things we think we know before we set out deliberately to acquire knowledge. Of course, this “what we know” can be wildly inaccurate. Or—better—it can encode a whole network of wishes and beliefs into what passes as fact and indeed has some mark of historicity: a name, a date, an event. I am interested in these wishes and beliefs that inflect our understanding of the past. That is not to say that wishes and beliefs about the past are all there is. Indeed, they matter because something happened, and is still happening—here, to me, to us. Our collective memory of history represents the continuity of the present with the past as well as an indispensable economy, providing that each generation does not have to create knowledge anew. But the price is an inevitable sifting, and this in turn imposes on scholars the obligation to broaden and enrich the contents of public memory over and over again. That is one of the undertakings of this book. A great deal of writing was produced during the years that England gradually began to contact, map, and settle North America. Besides the letters or journals a person might compose for personal use, the practices of navigation, exploration, trade, and colonization all had their own requirements for writing. From the perspective of literature, this writing has peculiar properties, depending as it does on a historical experience that both constrains it and requires its production. As a writing from experience, however, it already has embedded in it from the beginning the effects of desire, supposition, narrative framing, and the construction of meaning that I have described as part of historical memory after the fact. The process of selecting and making meaning from the material of experience is not only attributable to

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us as the audience of history, but already present when what is experienced sifts into memory through a first level of selection, choice, and framing. This level of selection is invisible to me in others, but I know from the phenomenology of my own experience that it must take place; of all the moments of my life, only a few can be remembered. The next level of selection and of interpretation is reached when what is remembered is also recorded, and the trace of memory becomes a written trace. (Of all the things I remember, only a few have been written down.) Once memories are externalized as writing, they become available in principle to other readers. In practice, others may have very limited access to what has been written. (Of all the words I have written, very few have been read by anyone else.) Another threshold of both selection and visibility is crossed, therefore, when the choice is made to commit writing to print. This marks the point at which what may have been an individual memory undoubtedly becomes public; here, a history of transmission begins. By tracing out such a history, we can watch the elaboration and the evolution of beliefs, desires, and responses to what has been represented about the persons, events, and places of the past. Printed books on their own, even accounts by firsthand observers, are of course incomplete as evidence about what has happened in the past: as the material for writing history. Rather, they add their testimony to the evidence of objects, of statistics, and of nonnarrative records. Alison Games’s study of migrants from London to the colonies in 1635 provides one example of a different approach to the subject of English expansion, employing other kinds of sources.28 Beginning from the register of persons leaving the port of London in 1635, Games tracks these travelers in archival and printed sources for the colonies. Most are unknown to history, selected “not . . . for their distinctiveness of experience or pedigree, but simply for their appearance in the records” (Migration, 7). As a sample, they have to stand for the larger number of migrants who embarked from other ports, embarked in other years, or sought different destinations, and also for the larger number of names in the port register who cannot be found in the colonial records (“altogether some 1,360 colonial passengers could be found, or approximately 27 percent of the total cohort bound for America”; Migration, 7). When these travelers are found, it is most often in “snippets and legal minutiae.” In Games’s book, moments of vivid biographical detail balance against lists and charts: “Sex ratios by colonial destination (%),” “Initial colony of settlement (1635 cohort),” “Comparative persistence rates.” Despite the calming

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presence of statistics, the “flaws and limitations” of the sources, as a representation of a total picture, are kept resolutely in view. It is easy for readers of the vast Hakluyt and Purchas anthologies to lose sight of how unusual, even exceptional, narrative sources are, and how much they may not represent, especially as we enter into the detailed analysis of texts. For the historian, textual analysis may be one tool among others; for a literary scholar, it is the primary method of inquiry. Rhetorically, this book begins with questions. In practice, it begins from the tools I have with which to look for answers. Rather than trying to “do” history through the study and interpretation of texts, I want to accept the limits that this kind of evidence imposes— or offers—as a way of directing and particularizing what is to be done, the kind of inquiry that best fits the evidence and the methods available. On the one hand, printed texts such as those by Hakluyt, Smith, or Whitbourne are unusual or exceptional with respect to the larger universe of English expansion as it was enacted and experienced. On the other hand, printed accounts such as these allow us to consider more than the interaction between English voyagers and authors and the places and peoples they encountered; they also provide us with concrete evidence of how these constructions of a distant experience were, in turn, received by audiences and articulated with other, larger narratives. I am interested not only in memory itself, but fame—which is to say, a remembering that is public, whether it be celebratory or only notorious. It has to do not necessarily with acts of commemoration— another kind of public memory—but rather with “common knowledge,” what many people know about. Manuscript materials are not necessarily excluded from an inquiry into what was public knowledge in the early modern period—indeed, letters are one particularly interesting source of evidence about the ways events were represented both by firsthand observers and by others who had only heard about them. Printed books, however, can tell us something more, once we add to textual analysis the kinds of inquiry usually characterized as the “history of the book.” The printed book serves as material evidence for a set of choices— not only to remember, to record, to transmit—but also to accept for transmission, to retransmit, to receive, to preserve. A book is accepted for publication: what will it look like when it comes off the press, and how much will it cost? Who will respond to the book, by writing in the margins, by quoting its words or images, by commenting on it elsewhere? Will it appear in new editions, or in anthologies, and of what kind? What libraries will it enter, and what company will it keep

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on their shelves? The answers to questions such as these provide rich evidence not only of what people knew, by reading a given book, but what they thought about it, what it meant to them. This trajectory of the book extends of course not only in space but also in time. We may know only a little about how audiences responded to a book in 1600 but we can also track responses to the same book in 1660, or 1700, or 1850. This temporal trajectory, and the play of fame and forgetting that it reveals, remind us that history is subject to change: not only because the history we know is always subject to revision by new discoveries, but because different times have needed different things from the past and paid attention to them differently. If the stories told in this book begin by tracing the careers of persons (and places), these stories have a history themselves. This history of transmission is an indispensable adjunct to the primary work of analysis that I undertake with respect to the ways the texts frame the experiences they record. In the chapters 1 and 2, I have traced the history of stories about history as the history of books—how particular narratives fared in the larger marketplace of books and stories (translated, anthologized, cited, alluded to, in what context)—and how the books that housed them were treated as physical objects (produced, purchased, bound, annotated, preserved, destroyed). In the chapter 3, I turn to another kind of evidence, which the historical character of these materials makes available: the public history (and geography) of plaques, statues, archaeological sites, reenactments, plays, and “living museums,” which extends beyond the academy and the library. At this point, history touches the present, and can be seen in action, both as it is produced and as it is received.

Chapter 1

S ea- Dogs: Frobisher, Grenville, and the Definition of National Selves

In [the sixteenth] century, and especially in the last years of the century during England’s naval war against Spain, the sea and seamen entered the national consciousness in a way they had not done in England for over 500 years. N.A.M. Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea Add Gilbert, Grenville, Frobisher, of knights to make up five, all in their better parts with God, with men their fame’s alive . . . William Warner, Albions England

Introduction Richard Hakluyt—in his massive documentary anthology, The Principal Navigations . . . of the English Nation (1598–1600)— sought to prove something about the English: first and most explicitly, to assert that the English both in his own time and earlier had projected their presence far beyond their own shores, both by sea and by land, and in all directions; second, that the scope of England’s achievements in this regard rivaled those of other European nations, those “strangers” whose navigations and discoveries Hakluyt himself “had long since published in Print . . . in diuers languages, as well here at London, as in the citie of Paris.”1 These broader arguments marshal a collection of documents whose contents are quite varied,

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more so than Hakluyt’s patriotic prefaces might lead us to expect. Among them, however, some make a stronger case: not simply that English encounters with other nations can be documented, but that the details of these encounters manifest the national superiority of the English to those they encounter. This chapter compares two such groups of documents, and two kinds of encounter: one with “strangers” far away, in the New World; the other, with strangers close to home. The first group of materials concerns Sir Martin Frobisher’s three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage, in 1576, 1577, and 1578: a synthetic narrative of all three by George Best is printed by Hakluyt as “A true discourse of the three Voyages of discoverie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northwest, under the conduct of Martin Frobisher Generall.”2 The central narrative of the second group is by Sir Walter Ralegh, and gives the story of a naval battle just off the Azores between his cousin Sir Richard Grenville, aboard the ship Revenge, and a much superior Spanish force: it is printed by Hakluyt as “A report of the truth of the fight about the Isles of Açores, the last of August 1591 betwixt the Revenge, one of her Majesties shippes, and an Armada of the king of Spaine.”3 The texts by Best (on Frobisher) and Ralegh (on Grenville) had appeared individually, as we noted in the Introduction, before becoming part of Hakluyt’s “mighty fleet” of documents; within Hakluyt’s collection, both have contributed to a dominant sense of what the collection is “about,” forming part of categories of documents they might also be taken to represent. Their location within the anthology reflects certain obvious logics of classification on the editor’s part. Ralegh’s text appears near the end of Hakluyt’s original second volume, on voyages to the East and Southeast, where accounts of travel to Africa are interleaved with (Hakluyt’s title) “certain sea-fights, and other memorable acts performed by the English nation”; these are generally episodes from the Anglo-Spanish sea war of the late sixteenth century. Best’s account of the Frobisher voyages appears near the beginning of the original third volume, following legendary voyages to the Americas, documents on the Cabots and Columbus, and a theoretical discourse by Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The contemporary narratives of travel to America that follow are ordered geographically, from north to south along the Atlantic coast of North and South America—an organizational scheme that lends prominence to the Frobisher documents and to the early voyages of Cabot and Gilbert, fortifying Hakluyt’s assertion of English priority in the northernmost parts of the New World. These expeditions were at the opposite ends of a larger common project: England’s political, economic, and military competition with

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Spain. The careers of the men at the center of these narratives intersected repeatedly, in both the Old and New Worlds. Both Grenville and Frobisher figured in the brief history of Walter Ralegh’s colony at Roanoke in the 1580s, which was conceived in part as a base for raids on the Spanish Indies. Grenville shared Frobisher’s interest in finding a western sea route to China and the spice islands of the Pacific, but in the south rather than the north; he favored a search from the Pacific end after garrisoning the straits of Magellan, and proposed such a voyage to the Queen in 1574.4 Like Grenville, Frobisher participated in naval actions against Spain as well as the exploration for which he is better known. In 1590, the year before Grenville’s famous battle, Frobisher was himself in command of the Revenge off the Azores in England’s ongoing attempt to waylay the Spanish treasure fleet homebound from America, the same project (and ship) in which Grenville met his end the following year. In Hakluyt’s headnote to an account of the Azores actions of 1589–91, Frobisher, Grenville, and the Earl of Cumberland are all named as prime actors, with “divers other English Captaines.” And if Frobisher’s expeditions to Baffin Island, in the present-day Canadian territory of Nunavut, were free of any direct conflict with Spanish ships or colonists, they were motivated by competition and rivalry; Spain’s uneasy interest even in this faraway venture was indicated by the recruitment of a spy among the crew in 1578 (his reports passed to Philip II through his ambassador in England, Don Bernardino de Mendoza).5 In other words, these texts emerged from a common practical context. They also participated in a common rhetorical project: that of asserting national virtue in an international context of encounter. Within Hakluyt’s anthology, both sets of documents seem to make claims about the special abilities of the English, and the virtuous or heroic qualities of their national character. These and other documents like them—accounts of Drake’s raids on the West Indies or the defeat of the Armada, Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, to name a few—provide a rationale for understanding Principal Navigations as especially bent on glorifying the English nation. Principal Navigations offers particular challenges to any inquiry into what it is “about”; the book is an anthology of primary sources, a collection of documents by various hands, in various forms and genres, largely unedited and without a synthetic narrative to tie them together except by implication. Nonetheless, at least some of these originally disparate texts seem to converge toward something like a collective argument, a “discourse” of Elizabethan maritime heroism. (I use the term to indicate that these texts shared a particular vocabulary of words, ideas, and relationships). It is by virtue of this

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discourse that Hakluyt’s anthology can be seen as “England’s great prose epic,” and its protagonists as dashing sea-dogs. James Froude, the original coiner of the cited phrase, viewed Frobisher and Grenville as both outstanding and characteristic of their age. Froude’s essay “England’s Forgotten Worthies” originated as a critical review of several early publications by the Hakluyt Society, including one devoted to “Voyages to the Northwest.” Mutilations to Best’s account of the Frobisher voyages drew forth his particular wrath: “We opened [the] volume with eagerness . . . in hope of finding our old friends Davis and Frobisher,” the original narratives of whose voyages “with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt.”6 The Ralegh and Linschoten accounts of Grenville’s last fight in the Revenge serve as counterexamples, demonstrating the riches that unedited narratives from Hakluyt had to offer. The essay concludes with a lengthy account of Grenville’s naval battle, “without its equal in such of the annals of mankind as . . . history has preserved to us,” an account alternating paraphrase with lengthy direct quotation from Hakluyt’s texts (“England’s Forgotten Worthies,” 193). Walter A. Raleigh’s essay in the Hakluyt Society edition of Principal Navigations lauds Frobisher as one of the three vice admirals who defeated the Armada, that great moment of Elizabethan self-assertion: “The history of Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher henceforward is a part of the history of England.”7 Grenville (along with Essex and Cavendish) was “among the most characteristic figures of the Elizabethan age . . . the gentlemen adventurers” (“English Voyages,” PN 12:68). Again, the essay incorporates a detailed account of the Revenge, this time drawing on Bacon and Camden as well as Linschoten. “These Elizabethans,” he continues, “had nothing about them of tame civility. They are arrogant, excessive, indomitable, inquisitive, madmen in resolution, and children at heart. The great fight of the Revenge was undertaken against all the rules of orthodox naval tactics, and in defiance of common sense” (“English Voyages,” PN 12:68). Both Grenville and Frobisher figured in a list of persons and actions whose narratives were taken as somehow representative both of the anthology and of its age as a whole. The particular narratives about them examined here indeed seem typical, in a deeper sense than their ability to be classed with other “memorable sea-fights” or “voyages to the Northwest.” They share structures of thought and experience that were common to multiple narratives and narrators. The examination I undertake in this chapter has two goals—first, to sketch the outlines of the discourse that I

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argue unifies these documents by different hands; second, to place these documents more rigorously in dialogue with each other and with other, related documents within the Hakluyt anthology, a contextualization (largely not done by earlier readers) that will become available from the standpoint of more detailed readings of both texts. The second move, as we will see, complicates the first considerably. Recalling in detail is necessary both for an analysis of these particular documents and, by extension, for discussion of Hakluyt, whose voluminous work has been particularly subject to generalization. Accordingly, the next two sections of this chapter map out the background and central storylines of Best’s and Ralegh’s texts, as an introduction to the reading in detail and in context that the rest of the chapter performs before returning, in conclusion, to Principal Navigations.

Frobisher’s Story The English had begun by searching for a northern passage to China by way of the east. Instead, they found a sea route to Russia, and while Anglo-Russian trade for a time replaced the original search for a passage, the Muscovy Company—which conducted that trade—insisted that searches for a Northwest Passage were in violation of its monopoly. In 1574, Elizabeth I wrote a letter to the Muscovy Company commanding them either to organize an expedition of discovery to the northwest, or to leave the way open for others to do so. Later that year, Frobisher was granted a license jointly with Michael Lok, the Muscovy Company’s London agent.8 Three expeditions followed, toward what is now Baffin Island in the new Canadian territory of Nunavut, initially in hopes of locating a viable route to China around the northern edge of the Americas. In 1576, having entered what is now known as Frobisher Bay in southeastern Baffin Island, Frobisher believed he had found the passage between America and Asia, lacking only time and means to explore it. Frobisher believed that the south shore of the bay corresponded to the coast of North America and the north shore either to the coast of Asia or a hypothetical Terra Septentrionalis surrounding the pole.9 His mistake was not without some reason: the north and south shores of Frobisher Bay look noticeably different from shipboard, the south shore being considerably higher, more deeply indented, and covered with snow yearround. If he erred in failing to penetrate the bay far enough to find it lacked an outlet, later explorers would make similar mistakes: in 1818, Commander John Ross declined to enter Lancaster Sound to the north of Baffin Island because he believed it to be a bay surrounded

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by mountains, thus missing the chance to explore what proved to be the eastern end of the long-sought Northwest Passage. For that matter, modern charts still lack soundings for inlets in Frobisher Bay (Jackman’s and York’s Sounds, for instance) that were named and explored by the Frobisher expeditions over 400 years ago.10 Frobisher’s mistake had a different cause; he lacked the means to explore the supposed passage further in 1576 because five men (a quarter of the ship’s crew of twenty) had been taken captive along with the ship’s boat, which was required for getting anywhere close to the shore (see Best, PN 7:281). In return, Frobisher also took a captive before he left. Following the expedition’s return to England, one of the Baffin rocks was assayed and erroneously found to contain gold; a second, larger expedition returned the following year, 1577, to prospect for ore. This expedition did its work in outer Frobisher Bay, and had more extensive contact with the Inuit; most of these encounters were or became violent in varying degrees, and resulted in the capture first of another Inuit man, and then of a woman and child, all of whom were brought back to England and, like the previous captive, died there. These captives will be pivotal to a later phase of the discussion. The last and largest expedition, in 1578, had the aim both of extracting ore (from Kodlunarn Island, on the northern shore of Frobisher Bay) and of leaving a group of men on the ground to winter over. Frobisher’s ships met with exceptionally bad weather as well as navigational difficulties. As the supplies intended for the colonists were substantially diminished by shipping losses, the expedition contented itself with constructing a sort of model home full of English artifacts, left behind as a mute testimonial to the attractions of English culture.11 Frobisher’s ships returned to England laden with Baffin ore, to discover that in their absence, the quantities of ore brought back the previous year had proved worthless. Investors lost their money; Frobisher and his co-licensee Michael Lok sued and countersued; Lok went to prison for a time. Frobisher subsequently held other commands at sea; he died of a poorly treated wound in 1594. Frobisher’s lieutenant George Best provides the most fully elaborated account of the northwest voyages. Best was concerned not only to give an account of what happened on all three voyages, but also to interpret them, and to draw explicit conclusions about what, and how, the events and experiences of the three expeditions meant. The freestanding version of Best’s text (1578) began by placing Frobisher’s voyages in a larger intellectual context; it opened with a lengthy excursus on the power of human wit and inventiveness, thanks to

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which “more than halfe the worlde hathe beene discouered by men, that are yet (or might very well for their age be) alive.”12 This modern display of wit in the form of discovery permitted older forms of knowledge to be corrected, revising what had been basic conceptual paradigms: for instance, the theory of zones that asserted the tropics and the polar regions to be uninhabitable. As Best asserted, “I know the contrarie by my owne experience.” He drew not only on his own observations in the Arctic, but on that of “our Englishmen in An. 1553, . . . [who] entred so far within the Torrida Zona that [they were] within .3. or 4. degrees of the Equinoctial.”13 (This practical context for thinking about the Arctic and its climate was also a textual context, as accounts of the Marian voyages to West Africa to which Best refers were also printed in Principal Navigations; we will have occasion to refer to these voyages again.) Frobisher’s supposed discovery of gold also appeared to disprove the necessary association of gold with hot climates posited by a theory of zones. These new ideas about where gold might come from in turn had implications for an international politics in which Spain had monopolized the gold of the New World.14 Best’s 1578 text reflects a moment when English enterprises in the North briefly promised resources that would allow England to rival Spain in wealth as well as prestige. By the time Hakluyt printed the Best narratives in 1600, Frobisher’s northern gold had proved to be an illusion. The version printed in Principal Navigations retains from the original introduction a discussion of climactic zones—“a twofolde discourse, conteining certaine reasons to prove all partes of the World habitable”—and a prefatory reader’s guide to “what commodities and instructions may be reaped by diligent reading this Discourse” (PN 7:250). Even though after 1578, Baffin Island was known to have no useful commodities, either mineral or agricultural, Best’s narrative could still offer the reader forms of exemplary behaviour. For Best, accounts of English travel not only provided scientific data about the nature of the world, but also showed something about national character: Best writes that “I mention these [African] Voyages of our Englishmen, not so much to proove that Torrida Zona may bee, and is inhabited, as to shew their readinesse in attempting long and dangerous Navigations” (PN 7:252). The point was not just to claim something about the terrain, but rather to claim something about those who traveled over it. If Frobisher’s voyages allowed Best to demonstrate something about English character, this demonstration unfolded alongside the contrasting example of another nation. On the first voyage, both

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Christopher Hall and George Best record a number of meetings between English and Inuit, mostly aboard the Gabriel, with some trade. According to Michael Lok’s account, Frobisher perceived from the first—when an Inuit man came on board the Gabriel with the security of an Englishman held as pledge—“these strange people to be of countenance and conversation proceding of a nature geven to fyersnes and rapyne.”15 Nonetheless, Frobisher agreed “by signes” with a subsequent visitor that he would “be their pylot through the Streiets into the West Sea,” rowing ahead of them in his kayak, in exchange for some small trade goods. It was when five crew members rowed the supposed pilot to shore that they were taken captive, having continued to head away from the ship with a view (Lok believed) of engaging in some unsupervised trade. Frobisher then devised “a prety policy” to take prisoner one of the now cautious Inuit, and “to deceive the deceivers”: luring alongside one man in a kayak by ringing a bell, Frobisher seized him boat and all (Best, PN 7:281–2). As others have noted, Best characterizes Inuit behavior in this episode in terms of reflexivity—because they “are” deceivers, they can be deceived.16 For his part, the captive on being made prisoner bit his own tongue in half. (The captive’s silencing is not mentioned by Christopher Hall, whose terse account of the first voyage in Principal Navigations does provide a short glossary of Inuit words; somehow or another, the English at least believed they had communicated either with this man or another one.) Within the narrative, this act of selfwounding echoes Best’s earlier claim that the Inuit captive was a deceiver deceived, and so begins to suggest to English readers that “savage” actions are characteristically reflexive and self-defeating, having the property of turning back against their agents: a property Frobisher and his men were able to exploit. This exchange of persons on the 1576 voyage set in train a later set of exchanges in 1577, when Frobisher returned with three ships, and sought along with his other projects to locate and rescue the five Englishmen lost the previous year. Again, the two groups engaged in cautious trading, described by Best in considerable detail (PN 7:292–3), more briefly by Settle (PN 7:210); then Frobisher and Hall (“who was best acquainted with their maners,” PN 7:293) went by themselves to meet two Inuit men, ostensibly to trade but actually with the intent “if they could lay sure hold upon them, forcibly to bring them aboord, with intent to bestow certaine toyes and apparell upon the one, and so to dismisse him with all arguments of curtesie, and retaine the other for an Interpreter” (PN 7:293). Settle records that after a skirmish, in which Frobisher and Hall were seconded by the ship’s company, “we

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tooke the one, and the other escaped” (Settle, PN 7:216). Best, at more length, records that that they “hurt the Generall in the buttocke with an arrow,” and that the captive was taken by a swift-footed Cornishman, Nicholas Conger, who caught him up and used a wrestling trick to throw him down (Best, PN 7:294). This man was questioned about the whereabouts of the five captive Englishmen, and replied (or was thought to reply) by signs (Best, PN 7:301–302). Soon after, an Inuit campsite was found to contain torn clothing recognized as English, and the Frobisher group would hypothesize from this evidence that “they had eaten our men” (Best, PN 7:303).17 Cannibalism, that sure sign of the other’s savagery, had arrived in the Arctic. What finally sealed cultural judgment of the Inuit by Hakluyt’s authors was not just their supposed cannibalism, however, but the perception that they saw the English themselves as savage and inhumane. It should be said that, if English actions in 1577 were conditioned by the knowledge that five of their countrymen had been taken captive and, they believed, killed, so too Inuit attitudes were surely affected by Frobisher’s abduction of the man in the kayak the preceding year. Kirsten Seaver has suggested as much (recalling some Inuit captives who reached Europe in the 1560s): “It would be surprising indeed if the Baffin Island Inuit whom Frobisher and his men encountered in 1576 did not know what had happened to some of their people because of another European ship in those waters just ten years earlier.”18 In short, the English believed the Inuit to be people who would take and kill captives, and they in turn may have been justifiably suspected of doing precisely the same thing. This mutual suspicion reached its crisis as encounters moved from trade to open violence, at a place named by the English as “Bloody Point.” As the English tried to encircle a group of Inuit boats and pin them against the land, a skirmish began, distinguished by the determination of Inuit combatants not to be captured. (Nonetheless, the last two of the Frobisher captives, a woman and child, were taken here.) This encounter marks a pivotal point in the narratives by Best and Settle. For purposes of comparison, both are cited below (my italics). Settle: When they were landed, they fiercely assaulted oure men with theire bowes and arrows, who wounded three of them with our arrowes: and perceyving them selves thus hurt, they desperately

Best: . . . [They] resisted [our men] manfully in their landing, so long as their arrowes and dartes lasted, and . . . maintained their cause untill both weapons and life fayled them. And when they found they

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leapt off the Rocks into the Sea, and drowned them selves: which if they had not done, but had submitted them selves: or if by any meanes we could have taken them alive . . . we would both have saved them, and also have sought remedie to cure their woundes received at our handes. But they, altogether voyde of humanitie, and ignorant what mercy meaneth, in extremities looke for no other then death: and perceiving they should fall into our hands, thus miserably by drowning rather desired death, then otherwise to be saved by us (PN 7:220).

were mortally wounded, being ignorant what mercy meaneth, with deadly fury they cast themselves headlong from off the rockes into the sea, least perhaps their enemies should receive glory or prey of their dead carcaises, for they supposed us belike to be Canibals or eaters of mans flesh (PN 7:305).

At the moment of defeat, the Inuit chose to leap off the rocks and drown rather than surrender and be taken. Best and Settle, in identical language, understood this action to indicate that the Inuit as a people did not possess the concept of mercy, understanding and expecting only violence. Settle writes immediately after describing the battle that, “having this knowledge both of their fierceness and cruelty, and perceiving that faire meanes as yet is not able to allure them to familiarity, we disposed our selves, contrary to our inclination, something to be cruel” (PN 7:221). The incident reappears as generalized in Best’s ethnographic description, appended to the narrative: “Their sullen & desperate nature doth herein manifestly appeare, that a company of them . . . chose rather to cast themselves headlong down the rocks into the sea . . . then to yeeld themselves to our mens mercies” (PN 7:370). In other words, this scene (as Best and Settle understood it) became pivotal in defining for the English an Inuit racial character; their understanding led them to conclude that the Inuit, “desperate” and “cruel,” had to be treated with cruelty, as a people outside the pale of humane behavior. For Best and Settle, the moment when the Inuit fighters died to avoid capture made them terminally other. In outlining a sequence of events (first voyage, second voyage, third voyage), I have also sketched out a narrative about the Frobisher voyages—that narrative, admittedly selected from the text, revolves

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around captives, the forms of mercy or violence surrounding them, and the kinds of cultural judgment that result. It turns on the moment when, under pressure, the English observed Inuit fighters throwing themselves off a cliff to avoid being taken alive, with the conclusion we have seen. Yet these conclusions seem far from necessarily entailed by events. If a man resists capture, and chooses to die rather than surrender to the enemy, is he a hero, a victim, or a monster—brave, desperate, or crazy? Do his actions reflect the ideals or norms of a larger community? Do they also reflect expectations about the consequences of captivity, and if so, do these expectations tell us about the practices of the victors, or those of the vanquished?19 Just such a gesture of defiant self-immolation figures at the center of the Grenville narratives—and there, it comes to represent not the absolute other, but an extreme version of the ideal self. These questions, then, begin to hinge together the narratives about Grenville and Frobisher around an ethnography of responses to violence and ways violence can be understood.

Grenville’s Story In 1589–91, the English made several raids on the Azores, hoping to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet returning from the West Indies.20 In August of 1591, a small fleet was at anchor off Flores; Sir Thomas Howard was admiral in the Defiance, with Sir Richard Grenville vice admiral in the Revenge. Howard’s fleet of roughly seventeen ships was short on provisions and water, their ballast was foul and needed replacing, and many of the crew “sicke, and utterly unserviceable”; these were all ordinary phenomena for ships that had been at sea for close to five months (Ralegh, PN 7:41). Howard received word of a sizeable Spanish fleet approaching, which proved to be already so close at hand that a number of his ships slipped their anchor cables in order to get to sea; Grenville in the Revenge was the last to weigh anchor. As the English ships stood out from Flores, they saw not the expected treasure fleet, but two squadrons of Spanish war ships— hidden by the island until the last minute—converging on them from the southeast and southwest. Howard made sail to escape the trap, and gain the weather gauge. Sir William Monson (who was jailed in Lisbon when the eventual prisoners arrived) writes that Howard signaled the fleet to follow him, but Grenville “being a stern man, and imagining this Fleet to come from the Indies, and not to be the Armada of which they were informed, would by no means be persuaded by his master or company to cut his

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cable to follow the Admiral, as all discipline of war did teach him” (Naval Tracts, 1:254).21 Instead, he gave orders to take the Revenge in another direction, through the Spanish fleet (specifically, the eastern squadron, to windward of him).22 Here is Ralegh’s account, as printed by Hakluyt: Sir Richard utterly refused to turne from the enemie, alleaging that hee would rather choose to die, then to dishonor himselfe, his countrey, and her Maiesties shippe, perswading his companie that hee would passe through the two squadrons, in despight of them, and enforce those of Siuil to giue him way. Which hee performed upon diuers of the formost . . . But the other course had beene better, and might right well haue bene answered in so great an impossibility of preualing. Notwithstanding out of the greatnesse of his minde, he could not be perswaded. (PN 7:42)

The Revenge was overtaken, rammed, and boarded by the San Felipe, a vastly larger Spanish ship of 1,500 tons (against the Revenge’s 500);23 driven off by an English broadside at point-blank range, the San Felipe was succeeded by the San Bernabe, whose men succeeded in grappling onto the Revenge and lashing the ships together from stem to stern, putting the Revenge’s main guns largely out of play. Two more Spanish ships grappled on to the Revenge’s bows. The battle then became one of close-range artillery fire and a struggle between the English crew and wave after wave of attempted boarders. Ralegh’s account of attack by “fifteen several Armadas” is an exaggeration (Linschoten says six or seven, more than that stated by Spanish accounts), and his assertion that “all the powder of the Revenge to the last barrell was now spent” (PN 7:44) is belied by inventories that show seventy of ninety barrels remaining after the battle.24 However, all accounts agree that the crew of the Revenge fought on against overwhelming odds, through the night and until morning of the next day; 100 to 150 men, possibly more, were killed out of a crew of 250 (Earle, Last Fight, 124, 139–40). The vast numerical superiority of the Spanish fleet, both in ships and men, made it a fight without any hope of prevailing. Spanish and English accounts also confirm a final, astonishing turn of events. Grenville, finding that they were unable any longer to make resistance, . . . and that himself and the shippe must needes be possessed by the enemy . . . commanded the Master gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and sinke the shippe; that thereby nothing might remaine of glory or victory to

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the Spaniards: . . . and perswaded the company, or as many as hee could induce, to yeelde themselues unto God, and to the mercie of none else; but as they had, like valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not nowe shorten the honour of their Nation, by prolonging their owne lives for a few houres, or a fewe days. (PN 7:45)

The gunner and some of the crew agreed with this proposal to destroy the ship and themselves—but the master, the captain of the vessel’s soldiers, and others did not, arguing that they might live to fight again, while the Revenge was so damaged it would do the Spaniards little good to capture it. As the two sides argued it out, the captain persuading most to his view but Grenville “refusing to hearken to any of those reasons,” the master made his way aboard the Spanish commander’s ship and negotiated reasonable terms of surrender. The company readily agreed, with the exception of Grenville and the gunner; prevented from blowing up the ship, the gunner had to be forcibly restrained and locked in his cabin after attempting to fall on his sword. The wounded Grenville was removed from the Revenge, which was “marveilous unsavorie, filled with blood and bodies of the dead, and wounded men like a slaughter house” (PN 7:47), to the Spanish commander’s ship. Though “used with all humanitie” by his captor, who admired his valor, lamented his condition, and spared no medical attention, he died a few days later—in a sentence omitted from the English translation of Linschoten, allegedly cursing his men as “traitors and dogs.”25 Grenville’s death was followed by a storm that sank many of his assailants, as well as the greater part of the Spanish West Indies fleet. A letterbook records one proud survivor’s account of the battle in which Grenville figures only marginally, as having received a fatal wound.26 In extant accounts, however, Grenville’s action excited commentary, not all positive. Another letter writer (Thomas Phelippes) saw little to be proud of: “Can write no good news from hence; the loss of the Revenge, with Sir R. Grenfield is stale; they disguised it here with the sinking of so many of the King of Spain’s ships and men . . . they condemn the Lord Thomas [Howard] for a coward, and some say he is for the King of Spain.”27 (Anna Beer notes that the taking of the Revenge particularly needed to be “disguised” because it was the first English ship to be taken by the Spaniards; [Sir Walter Ralegh, 4]). In particular, Grenville’s decision to engage the Spanish alone against his orders became the subject of controversy. More than one important voice among subsequent writers— including Monson, a contemporary and the first Englishman to write

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a critical history of battles at sea—judged Grenville’s initial disregard for Howard’s orders and the master’s advice on how to follow them as criminally stupid, at least insubordinate, possibly the result simply of inexperience and misunderstanding. Monson says that Grenville “offered violence” to those counseling him to obey the order to retreat, a violence that of course pales before the culminating proposal of mass suicide (Naval Tracts 1:254). Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, though generally sympathetic, wrote that the Revenge could have gotten clear away, even after her delay to recover her crew: “But sir Rich. Greenuil threatned both him & al the rest that were in the ship, that if any man laid hand upon [the sail] he would cause him to be hanged, and so by that occasion they were compelled to fight & in the end were taken” (PN 7:82; italics mine). He described Grenville as “very unquiet in his mind,” “of nature very severe, so that his owne people hated him for his fiercenesse” (PN 7:81–2). Monson charged to Grenville’s account a loss not merely that of a single ship: “This wilful Rashness of Sir Richard made the Spaniards triumph as much as if they had obtained a Signal Victory, it being the first ship that ever they took of Her Majesties” (Naval Tracts 1:255). Samuel Purchas printed Linschoten’s account in a chapter on the Azores, but also included (from manuscript) the highly critical comments of Arthur Gorges, for whom the “inconsiderate unfortunate action of Sir R. Greenfield and the Revenge” provide a monitory example of “what inconveniences and detriments do follow such unbridled heat, and headdy humors” (Pilgrimes 18:108). Yet Ralegh was not alone in his encomiastic public praise. Even before the retrospective lists of Elizabethan heroes produced in the seventeenth century, Grenville was the subject of a narrative poem by Gervase Markham, The most honorable tragedie of Sir Richard Grinuile, Knight (1595); the poem hews closely to Ralegh’s line. Francis Bacon was another enthusiast, praising Grenville in Considerations touching a war with Spain (1624) for a defeat that “exceeded a victory.” By his proponents, Grenville’s action was understood as moved by “greatnesse of minde” (Ralegh), “valour and worthinesse” (Ralegh), “courage and stout heart” (Linschoten), “mine honour’s will, my countries loue, religion, and my Queen” (Markham).28 Ralegh played the most important role, however, in devising what became the heroic reading of Grenville’s action in the Revenge. His text, published soon after the event, not only exculpated Grenville but established his action as exemplary of, in the words of Richard Hawkins, “the true valour of our nation” (Observations, 28)— and this national valor was (again) set against the contrasting example

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of another nation. Ralegh’s narrative opens with a series of oppositional contrasts between Spanish and English character as an introduction for the story he is about to tell—not only of Grenville’s naval action, but of the larger conflict within whose frame it took place. I have a little digressed . . . onley by the necessarie comparison of theirs and our actions: the one covetous of honour without vaunt of ostentation; the other so greedy to purchase the opinion of their owne affaires, and by false rumors to resist the blasts of their owne dishonours, as they will not onely not blush to spread all manner of untruthes: but even for the least advantage, be it but for the taking of one poor adventurer of the English, will celebrate the victory with bonefires in every towne. . . . When as we never thought it worth the consumption of two billets, when we have taken eight or ten of their Indian shipes at one time, and twentie of the Brasill fleete. Such is the difference between true valure, and ostentation. (PN 7:40)

The loaded account of national difference that opens the narrative is bracketed at its conclusion by the claim of providential endorsement for the English project—one echoed by Linschoten. The storm that followed Grenville’s death, Ralegh argued, represented God’s own vengeance against the Spanish, as it fulfilled the English project of destroying their ships. 14. saile together with the Revenge, and in her 200 Spaniards, were cast away upon the Isle of S. Michael. So it pleased them to honor the buriall of that renowmed ship the Reuenge, not suffering her to perish alone, for the great honour she atchieued in her lifetime. [Details of other Spanish losses in the storm are given.] Thus it hath pleased God to fight for us, and to defend the iustice of our cause, against the ambicious and bloody pretenses of the Spaniard, who seeking to deuoure all nations, are themselues deuoured. A manifest testimony how iniust and displeasing, their attempts are in the sight of God. (PN 7:49–50)

Ralegh began by asserting a set of national differences that made the Spanish empty rhetoricians, and the English modest but effective men of action; he ends by claiming that the Spanish have become offensive to a God who now fights on England’s side. Several features of Ralegh’s account are indeed representative of a larger group of documents devoted directly or in part to Anglo-Spanish conflict. First, the aggressively playful irony of the first sentence, the Spanish ships “pleased” to accompany the Revenge; this characteristic note of humor is struck as well in several moments of the Frobisher

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narratives. Second, that God “fights for” the English, an assertion not only claiming a divine preference for the English nation, but also displacing responsibility for the aggression required to “defend . . . our cause.” Finally, a culpable Spanish aggression is imagined both as cannibalism, “seeking to deuoure all nations,” and as (in effect) reflexive— seeking to devour, they are devoured (much as George Best’s Inuit man was a deceiver deceived). Linschoten virtually echoes Ralegh’s construction, suggesting its importance to Protestant understandings of this encounter: “. . . It might truely be sayd, the taking of the Reuenge was iustly revenged upon them, and not by the might or force of man, but by the power of God, as some of them openly sayd in the Ile of Tercera, that they beleeued verily God would consume them, and that he tooke part with the Lutherans and heretiks” (PN 7:86–7). They further believe, he writes, that when Grenville’s body was thrown overboard, he sank to the bottom of the sea and from there to hell, from which “he raised up all the diuels to the revenge of his death,” causing the storm. Cannibalism serves again to figure the savagery of the other: Spanish greed for devouring calls forth God’s punitive wrath. Yet one of the most striking moments in Linschoten’s account shows Grenville himself in a spectacular moment of oral aggression and (self) consumption: He was of so hard a complexion, that as he continued among the Spanish captains while they were at dinner or supper with him, he would carouse 3 or 4 glasses of wine, and in a brauerie take the glasses betweene his teeth and crash them in pieces & swalow them downe, so that oftentimes the blood ran out of his mouth without any harme at all unto him. (PN 7:82)

This scene condenses what I take to be the core elements of “The Last Fight of the Revenge”: defiance, festivity, aggressive impassivity, selflaceration. Grenville’s willingness to consume himself “in a brauerie” might be taken as the defining sign of that Englishness which, Ralegh argued, God favors; yet the same kind of self-wounding defiance also marked the terminal otherness of those the English saw as northern savages. Grenville’s actions—his initial, quasi-suicidal defiance of orders to evade the Spanish fleet, the later proposal of an actual mass suicide to avoid surrender, this final odd image of a man eating the glass with which he toasted his enemies—threaten to make him, not the Spanish, the real stranger in the text. While the excessive quality of Grenville’s character and actions was already apparent to contemporary observers, it raises added questions

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in the context of the Hakluyt anthology and particularly of New World encounter narratives, like the narratives of the Frobisher voyages that concern us here. In what follows, I want to look more closely at the signs of difference deployed across these and other narratives in the anthology, to get at just how these sets of documents articulate with each other, not only around the convergent claim of national virtue, but around the demarcating terms by which they identify what is distinctively English.

Signs of Difference: Violence, Hunger, Mercy In Ralegh’s text, a defeated Grenville received from the victorious Spanish the kind of merciful treatment that, elsewhere, the English claimed they would have shown the Inuit, given the chance; the terms of surrender resulted in good treatment for the prisoners, and the commander Bazán treated Grenville “with all humanitie” (Ralegh, PN 7:47). This mercy toward the crew, however, is not allowed to modify the text’s estimate of Spanish national character, but rather subsumed within Ralegh’s concluding account of “Spanish cruelties” in Sicily, Naples, Milan, Antwerp, and the New World (PN 7:52–3). These distant cruelties—rather than the immediate humanity of his captors—form the horizon against which Grenville’s exorbitant response makes sense. This larger context of encounter narratives begins to suggest why, for George Best and Dionyse Settle, the Inuit fighters’ “failure” to recognize Frobisher’s Englishmen as merciful was so critically important. Frobisher’s instructions from Richard Hakluyt the elder, printed in Principal Navigations, enjoined him to use “all humanitie and curtesie and much forbearing of revenge to the Inland people”; the Queen’s instructions, similarly, recommended the use of courtesy toward “the people of those partes.”29 The Frobisher narratives share with numerous other texts their stake in making mercy or humanity (rather than fury) the particular property of the English. Another document, taken from the set surrounding Ralegh’s account of the Revenge in volume II, provides a good example. Two years before Grenville’s fatal encounter off Flores, the Earl of Cumberland with William Monson, among other captains, made a cruise in the same waters off the Azores. Much of the cruise was taken up with trying to replenish the fleet’s water, an attempt frustrated on the one hand by difficulties in finding safe landings, and on the other by the reluctance of the inhabitants to satisfy or indeed even reply to

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Cumberland’s messages that “his desire was onely to have wine and water of them, and some fresh victuals, and not any further to trouble them” (PN 7:11). When no answer was returned to this request, Cumberland wrote again that “he could not a litle marvell at their inhumanitie and crueltie which they had shewed towards his men. . . . were it not for Don Antonio their lawfull king his sake, he could not put up so great injury at their hands, without just revengement upon them.”30 Though the islanders eventually provided wine and victuals, there was no water to be had; and after several more unsuccessful attempts, interspersed with prize-taking, the ships’ companies agreed to steer for the Spanish coast, on half-rations of water. The narrator represents Cumberland’s abstention from violence as exemplary temperance; after all, such violence would only have been “just,” not an act of aggression so much as a response to or revenge against the islanders’ inhumanity. (Sir Francis Drake’s whole career of depredations against the Spanish was framed in these terms, as “revenge” for earlier injustices done to him by the Spanish crown).31 English mercy would receive a more spectacular enactment on the protracted journey that followed. After taking several rich prizes, the fleet set a course for home, going meerily before the winde with all the sailes we could beare . . . which caused some of our company to make accompt they would see what running at Tilt there should bee at Whitehall upon the Queenes day. Others were imagining what a Christmas they would keepe in England with their shares of the prizes we had taken. But so it befell, that we kept a colde Christmas with the Bishop and his clearks (rockes that lye to the Westwards from Sylly, and the Western parts of England:) For soone after the wind scanting came about . . . in such sort, that we could not fetch any part of England. (PN 7:21–2)

Tortures of thirst ensued for the fortnight that followed, on an allowance of “three or four spoones of vinegar to drinke at a meal,” men licking the deck when it rained. Yet even in this extremity, as men were dying of thirst, when the Spanish prisoners came begging “for the love of God, but so much water as they could holde in the hollow of their hand” (that is, beyond the ration they had already received along with the crew), they were given it—“to teach them some humanitie in stead of their accustomed barbaritie, both to us and other nations heretofore.”(PN 7:23) This narrative tells us that the English were different. Cumberland forbore taking any action in the face of islanders’ “inhumane” refusal

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to let his men water, even though such action would have been “revenge” rather than simple aggression; later, even in torments of thirst, his crews gave extra water to their Spanish prisoners. The conspicuous, pedagogical nature of this second action insists (perhaps a little too much) on how and how much the English differed from the Spanish, and it also suggests that making this point was felt to be worth some amount of self-denial: asserting this kind of national identity was more important than getting water to drink. The dramatization of thirst in the Cumberland narrative invites us to return to issues around appetite and consumption. The ability to make a choice such as the one described earlier, to ignore appetite, could also be taken as an indication of character. Along with claims that the English were merciful, while the Inuit did not understand mercy, the Frobisher narrators also supposed that the Inuit believed the English to be cannibals, because they were cannibals themselves. This English conviction that the Inuit were cannibals (and thus their projection of a reciprocal conviction about themselves) seems largely to have been a perception about Inuit appetite, inferred from what and how Inuit people ate. Ralegh’s and Linschoten’s vocabulary of excessive appetite—the Spanish hoped to devour other nations, or feared they would themselves be consumed—operates more literally in Best and Settle’s anxious and critical accounts of appetite in the Arctic, and what it might mean. Best and Settle gave evidence not so much that the Inuit ate human flesh in particular as that they ate, in English terms, improperly and with indiscriminate appetite.32 Best wrote, “Considering also their ravenous and bloody disposition in eating any kind of raw flesh or carrion howsoever stinking, it is to bee thought that they had slaine and devoured our men” (PN 7:306). The inference is echoed by Settle: “I thinke them rather Anthropophagi, or devourers of mans flesh then otherwise: for that there is no flesh or fish which they find dead (smell it never so filthily) but they will eate it, as they finde it without any other dressing” (PN 7:227). Inuit “cannibalism” seemed in practice to mean that they ate food raw, perhaps stinking, and without culinary processing.33 Settle insisted on the savagery indicated by their failure to prepare food, divide it into courses (“sallet-wise”), or set a table: They eat their meat all raw, both flesh, fish, and foule, or something per boyled with blood and a little water which they drinke . . . If they for necessities sake stand in need of the premisses, such grasse as the Countrey yeeldeth they plucke up and eate, not deintily, or salletwise to allure their stomachs to appetite: but for necessities sake without either

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e salt, oyles, or washing, like brute beasts devouring the same. They neither use table, stoole, or table cloth for comliness: but when they are imbrued with blood knuckle deepe, and their knives in like sort, they use their tongues as apt instruments to lick them cleane: in doing whereof they are assured to loose none of their victuals. (PN 7:224)

More than actual cannibalism is at issue in these texts: they suggest the key role of real, as well as fantasized, dietary practices in demarcating the boundaries of civility. Settle both recognized the pressure of necessity on diet in an Arctic climate, and refused to abstain for that reason from a judgment of Inuit foodways as the result of responsible choice, and as the indicator or even the cause of character. Dietary practices and climate meet in a passage that, again, condenses a number of arguments: “As the Countrey is barren and unfertile, so are they rude and of no capacitie to culture the same to any perfection: but are contented by their hunting, fishing, and fouling, with raw flesh and warme blood to satisfie their greedy panches, which is their only glory” (PN 7:228). The Inuit ate raw flesh taken by hunting, the argument goes, because they lived in a cold country, as incapable of being cultivated as they were of cultivating it. And to culture—to plow and manure and reap and sow—is to be cultured, or to have culture. Thus, after repeatedly offering as trade goods or gifts knives, mirrors, and “threaden points,” Frobisher’s men as a parting gesture left on Baffin Island a house with an oven, baked bread, and peas and corn for seed: here is culture, the bread-oven says—eat this and become civil. (As Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, the English insistence that the Inuit would eat anything, however disgusting, did not quite accord with the ensuing comment that their captives were unable to “digest our meat”—although the captives’ inability to digest English food does seem to imply that they tried to eat it, at least at first.)34 The English concluded that the Inuit cared only about eating, no matter what or how. Settle saw Inuit culture as centered on the belly, glorying only in its gross feeding on “raw flesh and warme blood.” An autopsy performed on the captive taken in 1577 literally pathologized his appetite; on opening the body, the attending physician found an “enormous stomach, which, being flooded with liquid and swollen out, seemed much larger than is the case with our people; a consequence, I think, of his unhealthy voraciousness.”35 We might align with this judgment the preoccupation of the earliest English colonial narratives with castigating and disciplining appetite—for instance, Thomas Hariot’s dismissive mention of Roanoke colonists who “had

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little or no care of any other thing but to pamper their bellies.”36 But in fact we do not need to go so far for an example. In a passage chastising both literal and figurative forms of guilty appetite—one Hakluyt excised from the text he printed—Dionyse Settle rebuked members of the Frobisher expedition who turned from desperation to ecstasy when a vein of ore was located on the second voyage: A souden mutation. The one parte of us being almost swallowed up the night before, with cruell Neptunes force, and the rest on shoare, taking thought for their greedie paunches, how to find the way to New found land: at one moment we were all rapt with joye, forgetting, both where we were, and what we had suffred. Behold the glorie of man, to night contemning riches, and rather looking for death than otherwise: and to morrowe devising howe to satisfie his greedie appetite with Golde. (NAW 4:210)

(Newfoundland figured in more than one colonial fantasy, as a place where ship’s crews in the sixteenth century knew they could always find food.)37 The double denial of English appetites here—censure and elision—forms the negative side whose positive image might be the English sailors who gave their water to Spanish captives. To be “English” was (ideally) to rise above appetite. What of appetite and eating in the Grenville narratives? We have already noted the attribution of devouring, cannibalistic ambition to the Spanish. Linschoten’s great image of Grenville chewing and eating glass as the blood ran down his face might also be read as a kind of auto-cannibalism. Ralegh, of course, points us in another direction, toward seeing in Grenville’s conduct a high-minded disdain for the body. its weaknesses, and its needs. (He replied when Alfonso Bazán sent to him indicating that he should leave the “marveilous unsavory” Revenge with its covering blood and corpses, “that he might doe with his body what he list, for hee esteemed it not”; PN 7:47). Ralegh’s Grenville exhibited a different kind of stomach than the “greedy paunches” of Frobisher’s men or the “enormous” and “voracious” belly of the anatomized captive: the Elizabethan sense of “stomach” as disposition or temper, especially one tending to “spirit, courage, valour, bravery . . . pride, haughtiness, obstinacy, stubbornness.”38 Yet this heroic reading leads us back by another route to the problematic dialogue between Ralegh’s and Best’s narratives. That route passes apparently through the core of Elizabethan national rhetoric. The quintessential appearance of the Elizabethan stomach is, of course, Elizabeth’s address to the forces waiting to

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meet the Spanish Armada at Tilbury in 1588: “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too—and think foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”39 As in the well-known Ditchley portrait where the hem of Elizabeth’s skirts traces the borders of the map on which she stands, local and personal boundaries coincide with national ones: a line is drawn, beyond which all is sovereign.40 In a similar vein, Richard Hawkins wrote of the Revenge, “one ship, and of the second sort of her Maiesties, sustained the force of all the Fleete of Spaine, and gaue them to vnderstand, that they be impregnible.”41 But the defiance offered here to various boundary invasions, to being taken or invaded, is less one of physical strength than of mental fortitude. The Revenge was, in fact, capable of being taken, even as the queen’s defiant voice was housed in a “weak and feeble” body. Yet even if the Revenge was taken, even if Grenville’s body was made captive, even then, will or stomach remained to voice defiance—and to return after death (according to Ralegh and Linschoten) as a pure will to vengeance given body by the God-sent storm. Elsewhere in Hakluyt’s anthology, however, narratives show no particular reticence in attributing a heroically resistant stomach (rather than a greedy paunch) to native people. John Davis, for instance, found his mariners complaining that his “friendly using” of the Greenlandic Inuit “gave them stomacke to mischiefe” (PN 7:400). More to the point, that scene in which the Inuit captive of 1576 bit his tongue in half out of “choler and disdain” bears a marked likeness to the scene when Grenville, at dinner with the Spanish captains, ate glass “in a bravery” till his mouth bled. Ann Savour and Sir James Watt remind us that wounding the tongue in this way would make eating almost impossible, weakening the body’s resistance to infection.42 Even if Best was mistaken in his belief that this was a deliberate act of “disdain,” anyone who believed as he did—that the captive angrily deprived himself of both speech and food—must have been deeply impressed. As we have seen, contemporary observers were well able to perceive the savagery of Grenville’s conduct on the Revenge as well as its courage. The corresponding possibility exists of reading Inuit actions otherwise—to understand the suicides at Bloody Point as examples of heroic defiance just along the lines of a Richard Grenville. This was not only a theoretical possibility. Similar scenes were read otherwise, and the results are telling: even cannibals could be heroes of defiance.43

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The suicides of Caribbean islanders under the Spanish regime were read by sympathizers principally as evidence not of Indian savagery but of Spanish tyranny, if not actually of Indian valor. Lopez Vaz wrote of Hispaniola that the inhabitants had “so resolute and desperate minds” that “they murthered themselves rather then they would serve the Spaniards.” Hakluyt emphasizes the point with a marginal note: “The Indians killed themselves, rather then they would serve the tyrannous Spaniards” (PN 11:238). The English text of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevissima relación, similarly, attributes the suicide of indigenous Cubans to Spanish cruelty, after quoting them as believing the Spaniards to be “by nature voyd of humanitie.”44 This was the background against which the Frobisher voyages and their narratives played out. By contrast, the French translator of Settle’s account sounds rather anxious in his assertions that the English, in Meta Incognita, would not be prone to creating the same “disorders” as the Spanish further south. It need not be feared that it will happen to these poor savages as it has to some others of similar condition, which the histories tell us have been so cruelly and inhumanely treated, that even simply to hear of it is horrible. For having to do with a Queen so humane and debonair, and who (as I assure myself) fears God, one cannot but hope for a good outcome, being certain, that she will know so well how to remediate, and by her great prudence will give such good orders, that with the help of God, she will prevent that the disorders and accidents which have been seen in the Indies, and in some other newly discovered countries, be committed with regard to these people, and the northern regions described in this discourse.45

English practice was supposed to be different, and to yield different results. A late account of Drake’s circumnavigation in 1577–80, The World Encompassed (1628), gives one model example of what that difference might look like.46 At Drake’s landfall somewhere on the Pacific coast of North America, the narrative claims that the native inhabitants, confronted with their English visitors, “as if they had beene desperate, vsed vnnatural violence against themselues, crying and shrieking piteously, tearching their flesh with their nailes from their cheekes in a monstrous manner, the blood streaming downe . . . they would with furie cast themselues vpon the ground.”47 As the narrative proceeds, this perceived distress resolves itself into a form of worship, albeit mistaken or idolatrous worship that is to be redirected to its proper object.

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e . . . They presently enclosing [some Englishmen] about offred their sacrifices vnto them, crying out with lamentable shreekes and moanes, weeping and scratchimg and tearing their very flesh off their faces with their nailes; . . . We . . . laboured by all meanes [to stop them], both by shewing our great dislike, and when that serued not, by violent withholding of their hands from that madnesse, directing them (by our eyes and hands lift vp towards heauen) to the liuing God whom they ought to serue. . . . (World Encompassed, 60)

In this account, the English appear not only as the source of correct understanding, but as the benevolent and disinterested source of remedies for earthly pain. After that time had a little qualified their madnes, they then began to shew and make knowne vnto vs their griefes and diseases which they carried about them; . . . in most lamentable manner crauing helpe and cure thereof from vs. . . . Their griefes we could not but take pitty on them, and to our power desire to help them: but that . . . they might vnderstand we were but men and no gods, we vsed ordinary meanes, as lotions, emplaisters, and vnguents. (World Encompassed, 61)

For this writer (the narrative was adapted from the log of Drake’s chaplain), self-mutilation was the sign of incorrect belief; as they were unable to worship correctly, the natives of California were also unable to heal their own “griefes and diseases” without English help (help that continued to come with a doctrinal lesson included). Soon, the narrative claims, they proved unable even to feed themselves without Drake’s paternal intervention, so fixated were they on the English visitors—abstaining from sacrifice only to avoid displeasing them. . . . . [T]hey continued still to make their resort vnto vs in great abundance, and in such sort, that they oft-times forgate to prouide meate for their owne sustenance; so that our Generall (of whom they made account of as of a father) was faine to performe the office of a father to them, relieuing them with such victualls as we had prouided for our selues. . . . Seeing that their sacrifices were displeasing to vs, yet (hating ingratitude) they sought to recompence vs with such things as they had. . . . (World Encompassed, 61)

In the process of these descriptions, self-violence has become sincere tribute, an acknowledgment of one’s own tutelage; the benevolent, adored superiority of the English emerges as they halt the violence, heal wounds, convert sacrifice to affection, direct worship away from themselves and toward God. Even Hakluyt’s brief notice of the

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Drake circumnavigation contained the detail of the women’s selfwounding tribute. Doubtless this is the kind of scene the Frobisher authors would have liked to describe, and its general contours are not unlike the one Settle and Best do describe: the Inuit hurt themselves, the English want to only to help. But things looked a little different when flesh wounds became fatalities, and fatalities followed a violent exchange; the battle at Bloody Point did not look so clearly like proof of English benevolence and humanity. The poet Thomas Churchyard, for one, saw valor rather than misprision in what the Inuit did. Churchyard’s pamphlet began by praising Frobisher’s party for their resolute minds, but went on to describe the Inuit in precisely parallel terms: Carriyng such a dreadlesse mynde, and desperate intention, thei rather flyng themselues headlong into the Sea (from the top of a mightie mountaine) then yeld to the mercie of any that maie subdewe them. This is a straunge kynd of stoutnesse, and peraduenture procedes frõ some wronges thei haue suffered by some other Nation then ours, whose crueltie hath made them so fearfull to come in handes: That thei haue no skill of submission, nor will not learn to knowe the courtesie of a Conqueror, which resolution in them (though barbarous it seeme) showes a settled opinion thei haue in their force and liberties, and utters a miraculous manlinesse to abound in that brutish Nation.48

For a nonparticipant writer sitting at home in London, it was possible to locate Inuit behavior on a continuum of more or less heroic resistance to oppression (in doing so, Churchyard casually sacrificed the English claim to have been first in the North). On that continuum, they might be seen as adjacent to Spanish subjects in the New World, who were in turn adjacent to Spain’s competitors in Europe—that is, to the English themselves, and the “miraculous manlinesse” of a Richard Grenville. Best and Settle were less eager to concede a heroism that required the English to occupy the “Spanish” role, as cruel oppressors of innocent, even heroic others. They were aware, if Churchyard was not, of the implications of context: if Grenville’s defiance and rejection of mercy made him a hero, the Inuit suicides were not evidence of savagery; yet if the Inuit were heroes, perhaps their English assailants were cruel and inhumane. The possibility of Inuit bravery was problematic particularly because of what it implied within the AngloSpanish context Ralegh and others invoked. Ralegh argued against even individual yielding to the Spanish (Grenville’s rescued crew had been solicited to change allegiance) by referring to just the kind of

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passage from Las Casas—on the “courtesy” of conquerors—that Churchyard might have had in mind: In one onely Island called Hispaniola, [the Spanish] haue wasted thirtie hundred thousand of the naturall people, besides many millions else in other places of the Indies: a poore and harmelesse people created of God, and might haue bene wonne to his knowledge, as many of them were, and almost as many as euer were perswaded therunto. The storie whereof is at large written by a Bishop of their owne nation called Bartholomew de las Casas, and translated into English and many other languages, intituled The Spanish cruelties. Who would therefore repose trust in such a nation of ravenous strangers. . . . (PN 7:52–3)

In this three-way encounter of England, Spain, and the Americas, who was the innocent, even heroic victim, who the ravenous stranger, and on what terms? This collocation of documents suggests the difficulty, in practice, of assigning these roles in a consistent fashion, even within the anthology. This argument raises a number of questions, both about the strategies of the editor (what did Hakluyt mean by his choice of documents?), and about the strategies of readers (could readers ever be expected to scrutinize the documents in this way?). Is it reasonable to put these texts in the kind of analytic proximity that makes these issues apparent, and if it is, what are the consequences for our understanding of Hakluyt and his work in assembling Principal Navigations? What are the consequences for a history and practice of reading Principal Navigations? Before moving to these questions, however, I want to hesitate further on the documents and what lies behind them. Taking Principal Navigations as the horizon of inquiry has promised to lend coherence and precision to a reflection on context of potentially indefinite extension. Yet I do not wish, in the name of this coherence, to forget the origin of the anthology in the first person—in testimony, and before that, in the experiences of historical persons. In shifting the focus of inquiry from the narratives in Hakluyt’s collection to the figures concerned in them, I listen for voices around the margins, literal and figurative, of the text—because these narratives do not only record the passing of figures or characters, such attention becomes both possible and necessary.

In the Margins The question one wants to ask about Richard Grenville is why he did what he thought he was doing. This is potentially a biographical, even

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psychological question. Even eulogists of Grenville’s action in the Revenge, understanding what they saw as heroism in terms of character, found that character problematic elsewhere. Walter A. Ralegh writes of Grenville’s role in the Roanoke colony of the 1580s, “His right work was fighting, not civilizing” (PN 12:41). Grenville’s involvement with Roanoke has left a rich documentary trace: several collections by David Quinn in particular give ready access to a variety of narrative and other documents, both print and manuscript, exhibiting diverse perspectives on events as well as different degrees of elaboration.49 In what follows, I examine the sources for what they can say about Grenville before the Revenge. The first source—the journal of the Tiger—records observations by an anonymous number of Grenville’s company on the ship by which he transported some of the first settlers to Roanoke in 1585.50 Hakluyt printed this text, which resembles other shipboard journals in the anthology in being a selective account, with entries given only for days on which something noteworthy to the writer occurred. (“June. The 1. day of June we anchored at Isabella, in the North side of Hispaniola”; PN 8:313). Of the entries for Roanoke, the only two of more than cursory length list the participants in a voyage of discovery upriver, and note without comment the English response to a theft: “The 16. we returned [from Secotan], and one of our boates with the Admirall was sent to Aquascococke to demaund a silver cup which one of the Savages had stolen from us and not receiving it according to his promise, we burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people beeing fledde” (PN 8:316). Similar treatment was accorded the Spanish colonists in the Antilles who had failed in their promise to bring provisions: “Our Generall fired the woods thereabout, and so retired to our Fort, which the same day was fired also, and each man came aboord to be ready to set saile the next morning” (PN 8:312). The log is strikingly combative in its tone—at the same time, it represents English aggression always as a reaction to some provocative act. We have seen this before. It is fair to say that the author of this document was interested chiefly in the Spanish (whose sphere of influence the Tiger and its consorts crossed both going and coming) and only secondarily in the colony. The text describes in considerable detail the ship’s repair to the Antilles (May 15–June 7) on the voyage out, where the company erected fortifications and built a pinnace; the longer stay at Roanoke (June 16–July 25) receives much briefer attention. The unnamed author treats the confrontations of this voyage, both on land in the Antilles and at sea, as occasions to take material and symbolic profit

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from the Spanish. He rebukes “Spanish proud humors” and “their old custome for perjurie and breache of promise”; Spanish courtesy, when it appeared, could be attributed to English ability to force the conditions of encounter, due “rather to the force that we were of, and the vigilancie, and watchfulnesse that was among us, then to any heartie good will, or sure freindly intertainement” (PN 8:315). More materially, the journal records the “good and rich fraight” carried by one of the two Spanish frigates taken by the Tiger on her voyage out (PN 8:312) and makes brief mention of an even more spectacular capture on the way home: “About the 31. of August [Grenville] took a Spanish ship of 300. tunne richly loaden, boording her with a boate made with boards of chests, which fell asunder, and sunke at the ships side, assoone as ever he and his men were out of it” (PN 8:3176). This prize makes its way across several of the documents, but only this one gives the remarkable detail of Grenville’s boarding with an improvised raft. While an account in Holinshed (discussed later) says Grenville’s ship gave chase, Grenville claimed in a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham (October 29, 1585) that the Spanish ship provoked him, offered violence, and forced him to fight (NAW 3:287, 294). The contradictory assertions of these two texts—Grenville attacked the other ship, or was attacked by it—raise the rhetorical strategy we have seen earlier, of representing one’s own aggression as someone else’s, to a literal uncertainty about the facts of how the encounter was initiated. The next account of the 1585 voyage comes from Holinshed’s Chronicle, and was apparently compiled by Abraham Fleming from notes given to him by Grenville himself.51 This account gives additional details on the voyage over: the fleet was separated by bad weather, so that “sir Richard Greenefield being singled from his fleet, all alone arrived in the Iland of Hispaniola in the west Indies” (NAW 3:287). Even though here, as in the Tiger account, Grenville appears in the third person, he is characteristically made into the sole agent of the company’s actions; what the Tiger account attributes to “us,” Fleming’s account attributes to Grenville “all alone.” Here is Holinshed’s version of the repair to the Antilles: . . . Immediatelie after his landing, finding a place to his liking, [Grenville] esconsed himselfe in despite of the Spaniards, who by all possible means did there best indevour by proffering of sundrie skirmishes, to inforce him to retire to his ship: but he nothing appalled with their brags kept his ground. . . . The Spaniards finding it too hard for them (notwithstanding their multitudes) to remoove these few resolute Englishmen by violence, came to a parlee, and in the same concluded an amitie, that the one nation might in safetie traffike with the

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other. Now when Sir Richard Greenfield had taried in that Iland almost a moneth, and had built his bote, revittled himselfe, and laden his ships with horses, mares, kine, sheep, swine, &c: to transport with him to Virginia . . . he departed thense; and in his waie he made discoverie of manie Ilands and havens upon the continent adjoining, and arrived safelie in the new discovered countrie (where he met with the rest of the fleet that attended his coming thither).52

To paraphrase, as soon as he was separated from the fleet, Grenville chose to provoke and confront the apparently more powerful Spanish. He succeeded in imposing his will, not only in possessing the ground on which he had fortified and “ensconced himself,” but in setting the terms of encounter, successfully opposing a resolute resistance to a greater force. Not only did the Spanish finally yield to his presence and indeed engage the English in trade, but Grenville was able to turn this unplanned diversion to good in other ways, by loading the ship with livestock that Virginia lacked—a lucky break—and by “discovering” the islands and harbors along his way. Here is the story of the Revenge with a happy ending. A third set of documents cast yet another light on Grenville’s 1585 voyage: these are letters to Francis Walsingham written by Ralph Lane, Grenville’s lieutenant. Lane’s complaints about Grenville did not appear in the edited version of his Roanoke narrative printed by Hakluyt, which repeatedly referred to the difficulties arising from the colony’s insufficient supplies of food. While such problems with supply were a regular problem of early colonies, and hardly unique to Roanoke, they had been exacerbated by a mishap for which Lane blamed Grenville, and Grenville blamed his pilot. When the Tiger finally arrived at Roanoke, in entering the harbor it was so damaged through bad luck, poor seamanship, or a combination of the two that the provisions it carried for the colonists were largely spoiled. Lane wrote to Walsingham that the action “by the generalles only grete defalte [had] beene made both moost payenefulle and moost perellouse.”53 He complained that Grenville had performed “farre otherwyse then my hoope of him, thoughe very agreeable to the expectaciones, and predycciones of sundry . . . that knewe hym better then my selfe.” Moreover, Grenville had proposed to bring Lane “to the questione for my lyfe, and that onely for an advyse, in a publyke consultacione by me gyven” (NAW 3:291). It was indeed a sign of God’s miraculous blessing on the new colony, Lane wrote, that it had so far survived Grenville’s intolerable pride, insatiable ambition, tyrannous violence, and (finally) incompetence.

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These documents present several configurations of elements that sound remarkably like what might have happened at the Azores: going off by oneself gratuitously into the middle of Spanish territory, taking ground, making them yield; rejoining at leisure with not only the laurels of conquest but other kinds of profit unavailable to those who simply followed orders; at the same time, attempting to impose one’s terms by excessive violence, not only on the Indians or on the Spanish but on one’s own second in command, and displacing one’s own frustration or anger onto subordinates who cannot defend themselves. Like Grenville’s actions in the Revenge, the documents are capable of being read in terms either of improvisational daring, or of vengeful incompetence. If we bracket Lane’s complaints, however, the accounts given by other hands describe a series of what they construed to be successes, gained by provocation, heedless risk, and the acceptance of unfavorable odds. Anna Beer’s account of Ralegh’s Report of the truth stresses how hard he had to work in order to reconcile, in writing, Grenville’s actions with the larger aims of national enterprise. We ask ourselves whether Grenville was simply trying to do again in the Revenge what had worked before elsewhere, not improvising so much as failing to improvise, working off a limited script that actually belonged to a different play. That script also looks much like the larger narrative toward which many of Hakluyt’s documents converge: the English are few fighting against many, victimized by the unrighteous, but God will uphold their righteous cause. Did Grenville help to write the script, by his actions, or were his actions already being directed toward conformity with a narrative they would only reinforce? Neither answer feels like the whole story. Resistance to capture forms the central node of “The Last Fight of the Revenge”; by contrast, the drama of capture forms a central element of George Best’s narrative, whether as the search for English captives or the taking of Inuit captives. Hakluyt highlighted this feature of the narrative by printing under a separate index heading the letter Frobisher sent to his men by way of Inuit intermediaries: “A letter of M. Martin Frobisher to certaine Englishmen, which were trecherously taken by the Salvages of Meta Incognita in his first voyage” (PN 7:ix). (The letter is embedded in Best’s narrative, as “well worth the remembring”; PN 7:309). Making much of the lost men has a logic—one familiar to present-day readers from a long tradition in American literature and history, beginning with Roanoke’s Lost Colony in 1587. But this logic of emphasis was not inescapable. It represented a choice, an allocation of energies, both by Frobisher and

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by the narrator Best. Joyce Chaplin notes the Inuit oral tradition that five men were left behind by Frobisher on the third voyage, “probably deliberately” because of short supplies, and comments that “the abandonment was carefully obscured in the records of the voyage, probably to avoid lawsuits, that great transhistorical constant.”54 If we consider cases of captivity and loss elsewhere, this kind of forgetfulness seems less unusual. George Best refers early in his text to the West African voyages of the 1550s; the reference is not by chance, as these voyages had numerous overlaps in both their investors and personnel. On the second voyage, in 1554, five African men were taken captive and returned to England, apparently to be trained as interpreters and middlemen on future voyages. They arrive in the narrative silently, without any of the fanfare, self-congratulatory cleverness, or cultural judgment that would accompany the taking of Inuit captives in the narratives by Best and Settle; rather, on the return journey, the narrative finds them already present on board ship, a recognition apparently triggered by a medical reflection on the responses of different bodies to variation in climate (PN 6:176). Nor did the narrator attach to these African captives—at least some of whom indeed returned as middlemen for later trade—any of the language about retribution, information, or compensation linking the capture of Inuit men and women with earlier English captives. Yet there had indeed been earlier losses of personnel on African voyages. In the previous year, 1553, the Moon had been abandoned at Benin with all its passengers, one of them related to the investors in the voyage, when the rest of the company panicked over the mounting death toll from disease. In 1554, there was another captive, mentioned by Hakluyt literally only in the margins of his text: Martin Frobisher. Frobisher went on this (and perhaps the previous) voyage as a very young man, through the agency of his guardian Sir John Yorke, an investor. In the course of it, he was taken captive and held for some nine months, first by the Africans and then by the Portuguese. The young Frobisher had gone on shore as a pledge to guarantee peaceful trading, a common procedure he would later use himself in Baffin Island, but the captain of the village refused to give him back, and drove the English ships off by firing ordnance. Only a marginal note identifies the captive pledge as “sir John Yorke his nephew”; a few pages later, the anonymous writer comments that: “Martine by his owne desyre and assente of some of the commissioners that were in the pinnesse, wente a shore to the towne.”55 Frobisher seems not to have suffered greatly from his captivity, and indeed to have profited from it in some ways. The Africans quickly

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handed him over to the Portuguese at Mina, and the Portuguese used him to run errands outside the fort. His experience enabled him to serve the government as an informant on the coast in 1562.56 It was at least rumored that his captivity gave him privileged information for the later voyages that made him famous. Hakluyt’s predecessor Richard Willes, writing in 1577, alleged that in a Lisbon jail, Frobisher met a Portuguese man who claimed to have navigated the Northwest Passage.57 (The Arctic navigator Luke Fox repeated this story.) This narrative—of profit from capture—might have served Hakluyt well, had anyone found it worth telling. As it is, Frobisher’s captivity has left only scattered and vestigial traces on the record. Yet we can find it there, both in the archives and literally in the margins of the text. Were we to begin to talk about what the documents leave out, the question is potentially without limit. Were Englishmen left behind in 1578? Any attempt to assess the losses on this voyage comes up against the absence even of a number for the original size of the company, much less the names of those who were lost or died.58 Yet in the margins of the story are other names, and other losses. Another document permits us to follow two individuals beyond the borders of Hakluyt’s anthology, and of the voyage narratives proper—indeed, beyond death to entombment. And they are indeed persons toward whom in particular a historian may feel what Paul Ricoeur calls the duty of sepulcher.59 The first is the man captured by Frobisher in 1577, whose name other documents record as Kalicho.60 Kalicho’s autopsy was performed in Bristol by Dr. Edward Dodding, a physician who had known him in life, and Dodding’s autopsy report has been preserved.61 In Dodding’s report, Kalicho’s body made legible the specific history of injury and disease that caused his death. His actions betrayed to the doctor’s eye feelings of “Anglophobia” concealed by his cheerful face, identical with the symptoms of fatal illness discernible in his pulse and confirmed by the autopsy. Opening his body, Dodding found two ribs “had been badly broken . . . and were still gaping apart”; this injury, it seems likely, occurred when the Cornish wrestler threw Kalicho violently to the ground to prevent his escape—Best writes “he made his sides ake against the ground for a moneth after” (NAW 4:216; PN 7:294). As a result, the injured area of the lung had “developed . . . an incurable ulcer.” Dodding also finds the “enormous stomach” described earlier (NAW 4:217). For Dodding, Kalicho’s diet testified not only to an “unhealthy voraciousness” attributable to national character, but also to his patient’s temperament and social relations. Dodding describes

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the man’s distended stomach as the sign both of unhealthy appetite— continuous with pathologizing of Inuit eating in participant accounts—and of an overindulgence by this particular man’s English captors, an overindulgence that ended by damaging his body’s resistance to disease. They fed him a diet too rich for his habits and weakened physical condition: “This situation was brought about by the utmost solicitousness on the part of . . . the Captain, and . . . those with whom he lodged. Everyone’s judgement was deceived . . . rather by misguided kindness, than by ill will . . .” (NAW 4:217). That overindulgence hints at forms of personal relationship. On his sickbed, Kalicho recognized the Englishmen he knew, “spoke those words of ours which he had learned, the few that he could, and in turn replied quite relevantly to questions.” Indeed, he learned enough English to say as his last words “God be with you” (NAW 4:217). In the end, Kalicho spoke not only through signs, but in recognizable words recorded by Dodding directly, if only to say what was expected; and yet such a willingness to say what was expected, believing or not believing in its efficacy beyond social convention, suggests a remarkable lack of rancor, perhaps even a difficult empathy.62 And despite Dodding’s evident familiarity with Kalicho in life, he does not seem to have been an especially sympathetic observer. Kalicho’s speech contrasts with another possibility: that of resonant silence. Dodding’s remarkable report offers evidence on a second person, the Inuit woman who was captured along with Kalicho and taken by Dodding to witness his burial. While Kalicho (“our Savage”) was treated as a native informant, able to reply by means of signs to questions such as the whereabouts of five sailors lost, no similar use of the woman is recorded: she figures little in the printed records. Her name is given elsewhere as “Arnaq,” which simply means, “woman.”63 Once the woman had been captured and brought on board ship, she was brought together with Kalicho while the English waited to see what they would do. In time the man and woman “turned together” but they “did . . . never use as man and wife”; Best sees the sexual abstinence of these strangers as evidence of national modesty (PN 7:307, 370–371). In Dodding’s description, she was evidently already suffering from the illness from which she herself would die only four days later. Perhaps for this reason among others, she was as he records only very unwillingly led to Kalicho’s burial. Dodding insisted that she assist at the interment of Kalicho’s body “lest there be implanted in her any fears about human sacrifice among us”; she was kept there “all the time” until the body was covered with earth; then Dodding further

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showed her human bones dug from the ground in order to make her understand the process and “in order to remove from her mind all anxiety about human flesh being eaten . . . and that she might learn to put aside the fear henceforward” (NAW 4:219). On his account, she was an entirely mute observer of what he insisted she witness. Her silence stands out in a document where Kalicho was made to communicate even more clearly and copiously than in Hakluyt’s narratives—his body spoke, through its symptoms, of his injuries, his temperament, his social relations, while direct and indirect quotations registered his speech. By contrast, the woman remained silent—not only in failing to speak any words, either English or Inuktituk, that have been recorded, but also (except for her unwillingness) by her silence in the language of gesture and affect. To its observer, this silence spoke volumes: “That woman either excelled all our people in decorum and stoicism or else was far outstripped in human sensitivity by the wild animals themselves. For . . . as far as we gathered from her expression, [his death] did not distress her.” In that blankness of expression, Dodding continues, She has expressed quite clearly what we had long before arrived at by conjecture: [and here he returns to those quasi-conjugal relations already described by George Best] that she had regarded him with an astonishing degree of contempt, and that although they used to sleep in one and the same bed, yet nothing had occurred between them apart from conversation,—his embrace having been abhorrent to her. (NAW 4:218)

There the text ends. Dodding understood the absence of a sexual relationship between the two captives in terms of a refusal or rejection on the woman’s part, and understood that rejection in the pejorative terms of abhorrence and “astonishing . . . contempt.” Her failure either to have sex with Kalicho or to show recognizable grief at his interment drew Dodding’s reproach, as a cold repayment for Kalicho’s offered “embraces.” This shadowy identification with Kalicho against the woman’s conduct here, and the accompanying projection of sympathetic desire onto Kalicho, stand out in relief against a powerful lack of empathy in the part of the text leading up to it. Dodding concluded his description of Kalicho’s illness and injuries, the various traumas to the body revealed at autopsy, and finally Kalicho’s affecting deathbed scene, by commenting that he was “bitterly grieved and saddened, not so much by the death of the man himself as because the great hope of seeing him which our most gracious Queen had entertained had now

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slipped through her fingers, as it were, for a second time” (NAW 4:217). Grieved, but not by the death of the man, whom he had known and prescribed for, and the diseases and injuries of whose body he knew so intimately, he pitied Kalicho and identified with his imagined wishes only when, and because, the woman apparently failed to do so. Against the open and legible body of the man, in some measure made to consent to communicate with his English audience, Dodding’s text places the closed face of the Inuit woman, marked by illness and by refusal: in Dodding’s imagination, the refusal of empathy, and in his text, the refusal to consent to those projects in which his understanding of the world required him to engage her. We cannot assess from this distance how much custom, trauma, or choice played their part in this refusal to act as Dodding would have had her do: as a lover, as a cannibal, as someone who was not dying before his eyes. Yet Kalicho’s ability finally to speak even through Dodding’s hostility suggests we might see this woman’s silence, too, not just as a marker of otherness but as a signifying act. If not revenge, it was—in effect—defiance.

Afterwords Let us return to the question of how things are understood. At the end of the section titled “Signs of Difference,” I raised a set of questions about the history and practice of reading Principal Navigations. Here, I circle back to these questions through a history of reception for the Grenville and Frobisher narratives outside the anthology, before returning in conclusion to the reception of Principal Navigations. Hakluyt’s inclusion of the Grenville and Frobisher narratives within his anthology was of course not at all surprising. As we saw earlier, Frobisher and Grenville themselves were linked in retrospect as central figures in a generation of Elizabethan naval and military heroes; this identification was not unique to Thomas Fuller, but began early and has persisted late. Yet the particular narratives about them that I have discussed have been read within distinct domains of interpretation, and their afterlives as (re)printed texts distinguish them further. Linschoten and Ralegh’s narratives about Grenville and the Revenge had a continuing career in anthologies of voyages and travels after Hakluyt.64 The reception of Ralegh’s report in particular can be described as bracketed by two later editions. The first of these two appeared in 1757, in the midst of the Seven Years’ War. The Report of

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the truth was reprinted as a small, quarto pamphlet with the following title page: Old English Valour: Being an Account of A Remarkable Sea-Engagement, Anno. 1591. Written by Sir Walter Ralegh, Knt. Very Proper to be read by Sea-Officers and British Sailors.

(The text is headed “English Valour Exemplified”). The price is given on the title page as six pence. The 1757 quarto frames the document explicitly as an aid to morale for the Navy, a piece of what we might call (without pejorative intention) practical propaganda. A century and a half later, in 1902, the same text was printed by a small press in Cambridge, Mass., in a limited edition of 300 copies: the type, designed by Bruce Rogers, was handset and printed onto fine paper with a title-page engraving by Howard Pyle, whose illustrating projects included numerous other stories of adventure—Robin Hood and the pirates of the Spanish Main among them—largely directed at boys.65 At nineteen pages, the contents of this book are counterweighted by its properties as a crafted object; in short, this edition highlights the aesthetic qualities of Ralegh’s account. These two physical instantiations of an otherwise unaltered text mark the opposite poles of its reception, as popular propaganda, and as art (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). The 1757 Ralegh serves as reminder that cheap quartos might not last long, but they might reach “Sea-Officers and British sailors” as a more costly book might not. (Froude would later object to the cost of the Hakluyt Society’s volumes as out of reach for the common man who should have been their best audience.) Grenville’s fame seems to have flowered more widely in the nineteenth century, and attention to Ralegh’s narrative became attention to its subject rather than its author. As we have seen, Froude’s important review essay, “England’s Forgotten Worthies” (1852) gave detailed attention to Grenville’s last moments. In 1845, John Barrow’s Naval Worthies of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign turned to William Camden rather than Ralegh, but also celebrated Grenville as the great precursor and spiritual progenitor of Admiral Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar: “It has been owing to such stuff as Greenvil was made of, that the navy of Great Britain has acquired that high pre-eminence which, since his time, it has never ceased to hold; that, in short, produced a Nelson, who, in like

Figure 1.1 Frontispiece (after Howard Pyle), Walter Ralegh, A report of the truth concerning the last sea-fight of the Revenge (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1902). (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Figure 1.2 Title page, Walter Ralegh, Old English Valor (London, 1757). (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

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circumstances with Greenvil, would have fought like Greenvil.”66 (Barrow, who was head of the Admiralty Records Office, was also a founding member of the Hakluyt Society.) Two extensive editions of the sources followed in the ensuing decades. Edward Arber’s reprint of the accounts by Ralegh, Linschoten, and Markham appeared in 1871, followed by another edition of the same sources by Edmund Goldsmid in 1886.67 Literary recollections of Grenville, like Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855) and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet” (1878) accompanied re-issues of the documents, and at least in Tennyson’s case were inspired by them.68 The naval historian N.A.M. Rodger writes of the late sixteenth century that “this was an age when the English language itself was written with an incomparable freshness and vigor . . .” (Safeguard, 310). The 1591 pamphlet reprinted by Hakluyt was Ralegh’s first published work of prose, and it has been long regarded as a marking example of the stylistic qualities Rodger points out. Willard Wallace describes the narrative’s style as “superb . . . vivid, muscular, and grand.”69 Robert Lacey claims that The Last Fight of the Revenge deserves credit in “establishing the rhythms and style of modern English prose”; the presence of Ralegh’s account in modern anthologies of English literature seems to ratify such an assessment.70 Ralegh’s stylistic achievement of course vehicled his argument of defeat as victory, one that it is not clear he fully believed himself; Anna Beer characterizes this text as a task assigned him by the state.71 (He wrote to Lord Burghley of another prize-taking expedition to the Azores, “Wee might have gotten more to have sent them afishinge”).72 Subsequent literary recollections of Grenville have reflected related versions of special pleading on behalf of this egregiously complicated character. The Grenville of Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, for instance, is “a wise and gallant gentleman . . . in whose presence none dare say or do a mean or ribald thing; whom brave men left, feeling themselves nerved to do their duty better, while cowards slipped away, as bats and owls before the sun.”73 Kingsley bravely concedes that the gallant gentleman may at times have been given to eating glass in a rage, “but that was only when his impatience had been aroused by some tale of cruelty or oppression; and, above all, by those West India devilries of the Spaniards, whom he regarded (and in those days rightly enough) as the enemies of God and man.” (Westward Ho!, 21). Grenville’s death takes place after the conclusion of the novel. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem took up the fatal sea-fight itself, with a similarly partisan view. Inspired by Tennyson’s reading of Arber’s

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documentary collection, “The Revenge: A ballad of the Fleet” appeared in the winter of 1878 at what has been described as a moment of “‘jingo’ frenzy” during the Crimean war.74 Like Kingsley, Tennyson represented Grenville not as idiosyncratic but rather as defining the norms of English masculinity, of “English pride” and doing one’s duty “as a man is bound to do” (ll. 82, 102). To make Grenville a hero, however, Tennyson fixed his history. The poem has the personnel of the Revenge cheering Grenville’s order to attack rather than resisting it, as reportedly they did. He merely echoed Ralegh in asserting that “all the powder of the Revenge to the last barrell was now spent” (PN 7:44).75 And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold, And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent; And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side; But Sir Richard cried in his English pride: “We have fought such a fight for a day and a night As may never be fought again! We have won great glory, my men! And a day less or more At sea or ashore, We die—does it matter when? Sink me the ship, Master Gunner—sink her, split her in twain! Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain! (ll. 79–90)

As the passage demonstrates, a particularly excessive set of chiming rhymes makes this version of “The last fight” not only memorizable, but as hard to shake off as an advertising jingle. Aesthetics and propaganda, in this poem, are not at all distinct. Within naval history, in another strand of its reception, the text has a different look. John Barrow’s Memoirs of the Naval Worthies of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign (1845) announces by its title a kind of prejudgment about the figures he will discuss, and indeed he found Monson’s censure of Grenville to be “cold, unfeeling, and heartless.”76 Yet critical historians later in the century found Monson’s critique persuasive, and it was reprinted by the Naval Records Society in 1902 (the same year as the Pyle reprint of Ralegh). As Peter Earle writes, “Boys may have been convinced by this image [of Grenville as a hero], but some men were still not quite sure” (Last Fight, 168). Historians looked to the Elizabethan age for “the origins of the modern,” particularly “the concept of the naval battle as an artillery duel.” Grenville’s particular brand of heroism was something else, “a medieval throwback, a representative of a class of Elizabethan Englishman who, in Sir Julian

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Corbett’s words, ‘had in it more of the fabled knight-errantry of the Middle Ages then of the naval science . . . of Tudor times’” (Last Fight, 169). The entry on Grenville in the original Dictionary of National Biography reflects the colder eye cast on him by these historians.77 Although the resistance put up by his company during the battle has “grandeur,” Grenville’s “fatal error” of choosing to engage the Spaniards is attributed to “what is difficult to describe otherwise than as a false notion of honor” in a man who was “not a seaman” and had little experience of war, abetted by “violent and obstinate temper, and a flagrant disobedience to the orders of his commanding officer.” Most recently, Anna Beer has provided an astute reading of Ralegh’s text as negotiating between “the interest of Howard power and Tudor prestige” and “the male world of honor values which . . . could be seen as an ideological alternative to the Elizabethan state.”78 Accounts of the Frobisher voyages, as we have seen, also spoke of violent encounters, and these encounters were central to their meaning. For several centuries, however, these accounts were primarily read as a contribution to geographical and scientific knowledge—an understanding already embedded in Best’s text—rather than as accounts of battle or of cultural conflict. Although the voyages did not succeed in providing solid information about the location of the Northwest Passage or the relation between climate and precious metal, they did extend the boundaries of European knowledge about the North. Particularly as the idea of a scientific method emerged, it became possible to understand Frobisher’s record under the guise of geographical experiment rather than simply as failure. Even in 1662, Fuller commented that “no wise men [will] laugh at his mistake, because in such experiments they shall never hit the mark who are not content to miss it.”79 The twentieth century has seen a flourishing of attention to the Frobisher voyages from virtually every angle, from the still-valuable documentary edition of Stefansson and McCaskill in 1938 to multidisciplinary research and publications under the aegis of the Meta Incognita Project in the 1990s. (Kodlunarn Island was designated a National Historic Site by the government of Canada in 1964.) As far as documents are concerned, however, the greatest part of the work has been done by the Hakluyt Society. The Hakluyt Society volume that drew Froude’s criticism was Narratives of Voyages towards the North-West, ed.Thomas Rundall (1849); it was followed by The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Richard Collinson (1867), a notice of Frobisher in Voyages of Captain

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Luke Foxe of Hull, ed. Miller Christy (1894), and most recently by the excellent Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher, ed. James McDermott (2001). All but the third include manuscript material not previously printed. The Hakluyt Society’s early interest in Frobisher was part of a larger interest in the Northwest Passage more generally (the subject of five additional volumes in the years 1851–99); in turn, this interest formed part of a history of northwestern exploration with which a number of the society’s early members were closely involved.80 In 1815, the second secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow (father to John Barrow of Naval Worthies) proposed a renewed search for the Northwest Passage; a reward had been offered by Acts of Parliament in 1745 and 1775, but efforts were interrupted by decades of war at sea.81 Barrow had found a new mission for the Royal Navy, and men otherwise idled by the end of the Napoleonic wars. (The expedition by John Ross in 1818 has been mentioned earlier, and there were a number of others.) A few decades later, the search for a passage merged into the search for John Franklin and his party, who had set out in Erebus and Terror on a Northwest Passage search in 1845 and had never come back. Fifteen expeditions were sent in search of Franklin over the next nine years, most by sea; some of these had to abandon ship themselves after becoming stuck in the Arctic ice. The younger John Barrow was a civilian member of the Arctic Council formed to coordinate the search. By 1868, when the Hakluyt Society edition of Best appeared, the Northwest Passage had become a national project; once again, it came to offer the nation, along with daring deeds, a drama of loss, as well as eventual imputations about national character, which could hardly be borne. This history was one in which the volume’s editor— Rear-Admiral Richard Collinson, RN—was personally involved. In 1850–54, as a Royal Navy captain, Collinson commanded the Enterprise which, after rounding Cape Horn, spent three successive winters in the Arctic (1850–54), coming closer than any prior expedition to the point where the Franklin expedition had ended. At the same time Collinson’s colleague Captain Robert M’Clure in Investigator, from whom he had been separated off Cape Horn, finally brought to conclusion the long search for the Northwest Passage, reaching from the west a point that had been reached from the east in 1820 by Lt. William Edward Parry. Collinson’s dual role as explorer and editor itself provides more than a conceptual linkage between the Elizabethan and Victorian explorers, but such a conceptual linkage was part of his take on the documents. He took his text from a copy of Best’s original in the

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Grenville collection at the British Museum, commenting that it was “an extremely rare book, with two maps, to be found in only one other copy.”82 Here are the opening lines of his introduction: Five years after the discovery of America by Columbus, the English, baffled in their attempts to reach Cathay by the Northeast, turned their attention in another direction, and on the morning of the 24th of June, 1497, Newfoundland was discovered by John Cabot. Thus began the series of memorable voyages which have been continued, unto our day, with but short interruption, until the northern seaboard of the American continent has been perfectly discovered. The annals of these Arctic voyages have been read and re-read, published and re-published, evincing that deep interest which generation after generation has taken in these touching records of skill and daring, perseverance and longsuffering. . . . (Three Voyages, vii)

Collinson characterized Frobisher’s voyages as a search for the Northwest Passage (an aim actually abandoned early on), locating them in a more or less unbroken tradition of English exploration in the North beginning with Cabot in 1497 and extending to the Northwest Passage search of Collinson’s own day. Removed from the context of Hakluyt’s anthology, Best’s narrative is situated diachronically rather than synchronically, as part of a lengthy genealogy rather than of a generational narrative. The continuity of Frobisher’s era with later times bound the practice of northern voyages to a tradition of publishing and reading voyage narratives, transmitting them from generation to generation for posterity. Both the voyages and their annals were “proof of that spirit of maritime enterprise which always has been Great Britain’s boast and glory” (Three Voyages, vii). Hakluyt would have been pleased. Northwestern exploration in the nineteenth century focused first on the geography of the Arctic, and then on the drama of searching for men who were lost, not to human antagonists, but to the forces of nature. The Inuit figured as bystanders or observers rather than as the antagonists or objects of scrutiny that they were in the Frobisher narratives. But there is a sting in the tail of this story. In 1857–59, Captain Francis Leopold McClintock finally located the remains of Franklin’s expedition. He knew where to look because, a few years earlier, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had been given both information and artifacts from the site by Inuit interlocutors, who had in turn received them from others who had been there. The information Rae received contained some controversial information: that the expedition had resorted to cannibalism before dying of hunger and cold.

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Rae reported what he learned about the location of the Franklin party to the Times, and wrote more frankly to the Admiralty; the Admiralty, however, sent on his letter as well to the Times, where the following passage caused a sensation on publication: “From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative, as a means of sustaining life.”83 Such information could hardly be received by the popular imagination. Charles Dickens objected in print that “it is in the highest degree improbable that such men as the officers and crews of the two lost ships would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by such horrible means.”84 Over the years that followed, the Inuit continued to report that cannibalism had taken place. Scientific analysis of the expedition’s remains in 1981 and 1992 has provided good evidence that bodies were indeed eaten.85 We may seem to have diverged from Collinson’s edition of Best, but the search for Franklin provided him with an appendix, and provides us with a final link between Elizabethan editors and explorers, and their successors—a link mediated again by Inuit testimony. Charles Francis Hall, an American explorer, was another searcher for Franklin. During a sojourn for this purpose on Baffin Island in 1860–62, Hall by chance discovered and recorded an Inuit oral tradition regarding much earlier visits by Europeans, which proved to be a memory of the 1570s, including new details about men whom Frobisher had left behind. (These conversations allowed Hall to locate artifacts associated with the Frobisher voyages, listed in an appendix to Collinson’s volume.)86 Hall was not sure exactly what kind of story he was hearing from his Inuit interlocutors—he knew little about the Frobisher voyages, and was skeptical about the accuracy of oral traditions—but the Inuit stories fell into place on his return home, when he “saw for the first time in my life Hakluyt’s work,” and read in print the other half of the story he had been told in the Arctic.87 Collinson’s edition, with the inclusion of Hall’s materials, tells us that the search for Franklin led Hall to a rediscovery of Hakluyt’s work. This act of recollection exemplifies something like what Paul Ricoeur calls “happy memory”—that memory of the past which fits our search, which is there at the right time, which tells us what we need to know.88 Collinson’s edition of Best was also a work of memory, the labor of recovering and preserving one piece of the past so rare and unknown as to have almost vanished from sight. In so doing, he was of course replicating not only Hakluyt’s materials, but his work and his conception of that work.

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Hakluyt’s prefaces conceive of his undertaking as that of recovering for collective and national memory the “memorable acts” of the distant and (especially) recent past, in order to urge their celebration and imitation: in the preface to the original first volume of Principal Navigations, he claimed to have “brought to light many very rare and worthy monuments, which long have lien miserably scattered in mustie corners, & retchlesly hidden in mistie darkenesse, and were very like for the greatest part to have been buried in perpetual oblivion” (PN 1:xxxii). If we care about history, this work of rescuing or recalling to memory the records and knowledge of the past cannot be indifferent to us. But to stop there, with the work of recollection, would be in some measure simply to replicate Hakluyt’s own project, and to repeat his motives and rationale. Thus John Barrow: his own text was necessary because the records of Elizabethan naval history survived only in “ponderous and costly folios [which] can only be consulted in great public repositories, or in the libraries of the wealthy—mostly inaccessible, and always inconvenient, to the general mass of readers, and still more so to the majority of country residents.” Chroniclers had indeed “bequeathed to their posterity the noble deeds of the heroes of their times, . . . but most commonly in detached fragments, and rarely brought together under one connected view. My principal aim therefore has been to collect and arrange, into one connected memoir, the scattered notices . . .” (Naval Worthies, viii–ix). If we simply replicate Hakluyt, insisting on recollection and memory, our distance from him in time will not have produced the benefit of a sufficiently critical distance on his project; we risk becoming, not historians, but epigones. I have of course appealed to memory in this chapter, both to the large, “memorable” shapes of narrative about events, and to the forgotten details and margins of these narratives. The question now arises of how this appeal to memory can improve on or even diverge from Hakluyt’s own commemorative project, aimed at celebration and repetition. If the purpose of celebration and imitation is over, its obverse of condemnation and repudiation seems not a sufficient reason to recall Hakluyt’s narratives in detail—though our moral obligation to recall and understand this history of contact is hardly finished. (Indeed, one might say that a deliberate decommemoration of the Frobisher voyages has begun with the renaming of “Frobisher,” capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, as “Iqaluit.”) But the resources of Principal Navigations are not exhausted by praise and blame of the past. Hall’s act of recognition may provide an alternate angle of approach to this problematic. In one dimension, Hakluyt’s book

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comes to the fore as a witness whose fidelity to the truth about the past has been revalidated, and consequently merits being published and read again on a broader scale. In the other direction, however, the Inuit testimony that allowed Hall to recognize the usefulness and veracity of Hakluyt’s book finds itself vouched for not only by artifacts and other material evidence, but also (reciprocally) by Hakluyt’s book.89 This is a strange path, when the documents that condemned one’s ancestors as savages are the same documents that attest one’s own truth—a truthfulness that, generalized, obviously posed certain challenges in the era of the search for Franklin. This intersection of contrasting projects, in the nineteenth-century reception of Hakluyt, can be located as well within the anthology itself—or so I have argued through a close juxtaposition of several of Hakluyt’s key documents. What seemed to be conventional or selfevident meanings nonetheless collide within the context of the anthology, even as these documents also converge toward certain common ideas and the articulation of what might be called a collective discourse of Elizabethan identity. How does the collision of texts within Hakluyt’s anthology matter, and what does it mean? It is possible that the forms of close scrutiny and comparison performed in this chapter would never have been done by Hakluyt’s earlier audiences. Anthony Payne speculates, in the light of recent arguments about early modern reading practices, that Principal Navigations may have been read (and indeed designed to be read) as something like a “gigantic printed commonplace-book”: not consecutively, but here and there, piece by piece, without ever being integrated by a rigorously continuous and comparative reading.90 Matthew Day has argued that the paratextual material of Principal Navigations facilitates or even encourages such reading, and that “judging from marginalia contained in surviving copies, the vast majority [of early readers] seem to have read excerpts.”91 Both claims are in effect caveats, balanced against the editor’s evident aim of “fashioning a present identity” for England by contributing “to the establishment of a usable past.”92 But I believe they should be taken seriously. Releasing our hold on a Hakluyt who is “the great Elizabethan exponent of missionary colonialism,” a “zealot,” “an unscrupulous propagandist,” for one whose intentions are less programmatic, less clearly expressed in his book, helps to account for the “undigested” nature of the anthology’s material, and the apparent irrelevance, triviality, or redundancy of some of its parts.93 In turn, the reader is allowed in effect to create her own Principal Navigations, by selection

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of what does not seem redundant, trivial, or irrelevant; indeed, the creation of many such sub-anthologies is allowed. Yet we have to contend not only with Hakluyt’s prefaces, but also with the emergence of consistent reading traditions, which have tended precisely toward the kinds of views I have cited earlier. Hakluyt’s gathering of scattered pieces to form a coherent body—or story, or argument—was only partly completed by the assembly of the anthology; it has been completed and ratified by traditions of reading that have constituted our understanding of the text, appropriating it for and as a constituent part of a celebratory nationalist narrative— which, in turn, may be either applauded or condemned. We have not, in fact, generated many anthologies out of PN, but only a few.94 Selection is (almost) an inevitable practice, invited both by the anthology form and by the generous length of this particular anthology; arguably, it is inseparable from the larger phenomenon of memory itself, which Todorov has argued is not at all the opposite of forgetting: “The two terms which should be placed in opposition to each other are erasure (forgetting) and preservation; memory as, always and necessarily, a play between these two.”95 Yet because of the very continuities with which selection has operated, much in Hakluyt remains unstudied, virtually unread. Are we to read the book only where it falls open from wear, and follow the real or imagined interpretive trails marked out by our most recent predecessors? Or cut the pages, and read what has ceased to be read? Perhaps our reading has yet not been aleatory enough in its selections. Perhaps we should wear some new pathways through the text, and see where they lead. Then we may say, collectively, that it has been read.


Chapter 2

“ Three Turks’ H eads”: Reading the T RU E T R AV E L S , A DV E N T U R E S , A N D O B S E RVAT I O N S O F C A P TA I N J O H N S M I T H (1630)

Though first Columbus, Indies true Christofer; Cabots, brave Florida, much admirer; Meta Incognita, rare Martin Forbisher; Gilberts brave Humphery, Neptunes devourer; . . . . Though these be gone, and left behinde a name, Yet Smith is here, to Anvile out a peece To after Ages, and eternall Fame, That we may have the gold Jasons fleece. Anon., in John Smith, Generall Historie (1624) As much as any personage discussed in the study, Captain John Smith illustrates the fragility of human reputation. Jennifer Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630

Introduction In 1630, the year before he died, the Virginia colonist Captain John Smith published his autobiography. Despite what a modern reader might expect, Smith’s autobiography had nothing to say about his American captivity and rescue, the events for which he is now, sometimes inaccurately, famous. Indeed, the autobiography had nothing to

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say about Smith’s experiences in America at all.1 The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith told the story of Smith’s early life before Jamestown: his attempts to find patronage, his travels around Europe and the Mediterranean, and his experiences as a mercenary in Eastern Europe, with his captivity, enslavement, and escape from Turkey. The events of Smith’s autobiography are, at best, mildly notorious, at worst, entirely unknown. Instead, public memory has chosen to celebrate him for the love affair with Pocahontas that he never had. Why have the exploits Smith himself saw as ideally constitutive of his life story been of so little interest to audiences eager to canonize him both as a pioneer of intercultural harmony, and “the writer of the first book in American Literature”?2 Smith sought fame, and he is famous. But the fame he sought, and the fame he got, are two different things. True Travels has its own history of reception, which largely recapitulates, off to the side and in more pronounced form, responses to Smith’s career as a whole. Smith cannot have told this story in order to have it reflect badly on himself, yet the book’s reception has combined skepticism and marginalization: for much of its existence, Travels has been seldom read, and when read, rarely believed.3 The negative half of this text’s reception, its failure to receive the kind of attention given to Smith’s other work, can be attributed at least in part to its failure to offer the kinds of information that other work did provide. Smith’s significance as a writer over the last 150 years has been linked in large part to his status as an “American writer” and, more recently, the insights his work provides on American matters: the formation of a colonial society, early encounters between native Americans and English colonists, and the shape of indigenous societies in the Chesapeake a few decades after European contact. Travels covers a far more familiar geography, but that is not the only difference; for the first twenty-one of the book’s twenty-eight chapters, it is far more closely focused on Smith, without the counterweight of larger, shared concerns. Smith’s copious publications on Virginia and New England were nothing if not self-promoting, but they also included, from very early in his career, the signed observations and testimony of other participant writers, and aimed at promoting corporate enterprises of national significance. Gesa Mackenthun characterizes Generall Historie as “national narrative,” “endowing . . . actions with a coherence that would authorize England’s colonial project.”4 The title page of True Travels advertises in capsule form what the book will contain: both the highlights of its autobiographical portion

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(“his accidents and sea-fights . . . his service and stratagems of war . . . his three single combats . . . how he was taken prisoner by the Turks . . . and escaped . . .”) and “a continuation of his generall history” of England’s American colonies, “all written by actuall Authours.” In True Travels, the personal and national narratives of Generall Historie precipitate out into distinct sections of the book, joined only by the title’s note that the adventures of the author in Europe are presented “together with” the history of Virginia, New England, and the English Caribbean from 1624—in other words, after Smith’s personal experience of the Americas gave out. Smith’s Advertisements (1631) would claim that his early adventures in Europe, Asia, and Africa taught him to “subdue the savages” of America, but Travels provides no rationale for joining components so disparate both in scale and in geographical focus. Was Smith seeking to amplify the market for his own life story by attracting readers more interested in colonial history? To promote colonial activities by attaching them to a story of exotic adventures in a more familiar vein? Perhaps we have to content ourselves with noting the incoherence of the book. And True Travels is incoherent. Although it does not yield anything like Generall Historie’s implicit claim that Smith’s personal history “is” the history of early Jamestown, the confusion or interpenetration of personal and impersonal narrative characterizes this book in a pervasive way. Smith gives his life story (Chapters 1–21) in a consistent third-person voice: “He was borne in Willoughby in Lincolneshire.” He attributes the narrative of some central events in this life (Chapters 4–11) to a book on “The warres of Hungaria, Wallachia, and Moldavia, written by . . . a learned Italian,” and relies for his account of the Tartars on a medieval account printed by Samuel Purchas; at the moment when he arrives in Morocco (Chapter 18), the narrative abandons its hero’s trajectory altogether, and shifts for two chapters into what is largely a digest of Leo Africanus and Duarte Lopes. (Smith’s sources can be tracked in the footnotes to the Barbour’s edition.) These autobiographical chapters, in short, use the Caesarian third person exclusively, and where possible cite or incorporate other texts in place of Smith’s own experience and firsthand observations. The colonial chapters, by contrast, shift unpredictably between “he,” “I,” and a “we” that does not include the author. Only in these chapters does the author speak of himself in the first person. Chapter 21 refers the reader to “my letter of advice [about the Virginia colony] to the Council and Company” (Travels, 214), and throughout designates the colonists as “they,” Smith as “I.” The chapter, however, is “signed” by seven named men “and others,” not

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including Smith. Chapter 23 begins an account of the New England colonies with “when I went first to the north part of Virginia,” only to shift into the third person, referring to the author as “Captaine Smith” and “this Smith” (Travels, 223). The problem of pronouns in True Travels points us toward what I see as the central problem of the book itself, giving it claim here to a broader interest than its narratives alone might attract: that is, how personal biography can be articulated, if not necessarily with national history, with the kinds of larger narratives in which communities become stakeholders. In other words, Travels attempted to secure for its author and subject a particular place in collective memory, and failed. That failure may tell us something about historical memory as well as something about Smith. In this chapter, I examine three sections of the autobiographical narrative: an overtly formative scene from the close of the first chapter, and two later episodes that are both the best remembered and the most debated by the book’s readers. The chapter begins and ends, however, with evidence about reception: first, by parsing both Smith’s own statements and the physical book itself for evidence about where in the market Travels was (so to speak) aimed; second, by examining both editions and original copies of Travels to see where, both literally and figuratively, the book ended up. The evidence is frustratingly incomplete—nonetheless, the surviving copies of Smith’s books have a few things to say about their own journeys through space and time.

Paratexts The physical book True Travels is a thin folio; at only sixty pages, its dimensions are comparable to a modern children’s book.5 On the verso of the title page is an elaborate engraving of Smith’s coat of arms (see figure 2.1): in the first and fourth quarters, Smith’s own arms— three Turks’ heads; in the second and third quarters, “What purport to be family coats of a Smith and a Rickards, respectively” (Rickards was Smith’s mother’s maiden name).6 The book also includes a double-page foldout of engraved illustrations from the narrative, printed by James Reeve who had printed Smith’s map of New England. (This sheet was often cut up, and the engravings distributed throughout the text.) The engraver is Martin Droeshout, best known for the portrait of Shakespeare in the front matter of the First Folio. True Travels came from the shop of John Haviland, who had also printed Smith’s Generall Historie—several editions of it during Smith’s life—his Sea Grammar and Advertisements


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Figure 2.1 Frontispiece, John Smith, True Travels (London, 1630). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

for the Unexperienced Planters of New England. The folio format—on the face of it ill-suited to the book’s slender dimensions—suggests aspiration. The production values of the book suggest more than a minimal outlay, in the use of decorative capitals, ornamental borders, italic and Greek fonts, and especially the engravings; at the same time the quality of type is not of the first order, the inking is uneven, and the paper is cheap. (A copy of Ralegh’s 1591 quarto Report of the truth, e.g., has less decoration but a more clean and easily read page.) Smith’s dedication to the book tells us little: William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Cary, Lord Hunsdon, were the universal patrons of the age, recipients of dedications from all quarters. The

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third dedicatee, Robert Bertie, Lord Willoughby, was the son of Smith’s early patron, and figures briefly in the autobiography; his presence in the dedication suggests an ongoing and (at least on Smith’s part) acknowledged clientage relation between the two. The opening lines of the text invoke yet another powerful patron: Sir Robert Cotton, that most learned Treasurer of Antiquitie, having by perusall of my Generall Historie, and others, found that I had likewise undergone divers other as hard hazards in the other parts of the world, requested me to fix the whole course of my passages in a booke by it selfe, whose noble desire I could not but in part satisfie. . . . (Travels, 141)

This is a fascinating statement. As the work of Kevin Sharpe and others has shown, Sir Robert Cotton owned the most important library of his time. (He was also an investor in Jamestown, but it is not in that capacity that Smith invokes him here.)7 Cotton’s manuscript collection included the Lindisfarne Gospels, the unique MS. of Beowulf, and one of two copies of Magna Carta; the collection would eventually form the core holdings of the British Library on its foundation in 1753, after being donated to the nation by his grandson. At the end of the 1620s, Cotton’s collection was one of the most important repositories of primary sources for English political history. Englishmen turned to the Cottonian library to find precedents, to discover the origins and prerogatives of powerful offices like those of the Earl Marshal, to collect historical evidence for or against prevailing constructions of royal and parliamentary power—in the decades leading up to the Civil War, antiquarianism was a volatile practice. In the early decades of the seventeenth century Cotton’s library became a site of political contestation, viewed as a source of seditious claims and writings; he was himself imprisoned in 1629, following Buckingham’s assassination, and the library remained closed for several months after his release.8 This was the library toward which Smith directed his autobiography. Smith’s invocation of the Cotton library can be juxtaposed with one of the prefatory poems attached to True Travels, composed by Cotton’s librarian, Richard James; it appears to allude to a play based on Smith’s life staged at Richard Gunnell’s theater, the Fortune. Can it be, That Men alone in Gonnels fortune see Thy worth advanc’d? no wonder since our age, Is now at large a Bedlam or a Stage. (Travels, 147)


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Louis B. Wright characterizes Gunnell’s theatre as specializing in lowbrow spectacles, “plays of action, the noisier the better, . . . beloved by apprentices, artisans, and tradesmen.”9 Smith’s dedication supports the suggestion of a play based on his life: “They have acted my fatall Tragedies upon the Stage, and racked my Relations at their pleasure. To prevent therefore all future misprisions, I have compiled this true discourse” (Travels, 141). Smith’s opening remarks bear a family resemblance to the large number of contemporary addresses “To the Reader” in which the author explains his decision to publish as the need to displace a pirated version already in circulation with the corrected and authorized text. To this is added a shift in genre—from stage play to written text—as well as a shift in physical (and consequently social) location. Sir Thomas Bodley had excluded printed plays from the library he endowed at Oxford in 1609 (whose librarian was Thomas James, uncle of the Richard James quoted earlier); this exclusion is often cited as evidence that theater in general was a scandalous and abject medium. To relocate one’s life story from the Fortune to the Cottonian library would be a significant move up in the world, from a popular to an elite venue and genre. Smith’s disavowal of the play based on his life as a distortion (“racking” or “misprision”) of his experiences should be treated with some skepticism, at least in so far as it suggests that he was an unwilling and uninvolved subject. The poem Gunnell supplied to Smith’s Description of New England in 1616 certainly suggests friendship; both the inclusion of the poem and the appearance of “Gunnell’s isles” on Smith’s map of New England make clear that this goodwill was, at least for a time, reciprocated.10 The putative play at the Fortune is not the only other book hovering around Travels. The title page courteously acknowledges the use of “actuall authors,” not unusual in Smith’s other works; the acknowledgment indicates the book’s double identity as autobiography and travelogue. One anomalous source is an alleged account of Smith’s feats as a soldier in Transylvania written by “Francisco Ferneza a Learned Italian,” a book no one has yet located although it is the most clearly referenced of all the sources used.11 Twentieth-century scholars have treated this hypothetical book as an index of Smith’s truthfulness (and of Purchas’s credulity and honesty as an editor, since he cites it in his collection). It seems to me that this sourcing of the autobiography signifies in several ways. The allusion to Ferneza’s book indicates that Smith’s experiences mattered enough already to be documented, and in other languages. (The alleged book by Fernaza aside, Fuller’s reproof of Smith for not allowing other men to tell his story

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seems somewhat unfair given Smith’s systematic reliance everywhere but the autobiography on signed testimony and printed works by other men.)12 The existence of documentation also implied that Smith himself could draw on written sources in composing his life, as he did in composing the history of the colonies. The written quality of the life positions it against the staged version Smith disavows, but also suggests a certain conscious distance between Smith, the writer of an autobiographical work, and Smith, the man in the book: it suggests a Smith who was assembling himself both as self and as character. The opening scene of the autobiography lends powerful support to such a view. Perhaps we should think of the True Travels in the terms suggested by a holograph copy of Richard James’s commendatory poem: “To Captain John Smith on the edition of his own life” (emphasis mine).13 To move from being the subject of a stage play—a work at the confluence of labor not only by the playwright but by actors, directors, perhaps audiences—to being an editor of one’s own life: this was surely to gain not only in prestige, but also in control over the text, a kind of control not possible in the theater. Smith writes in the dedication to his Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Iles (1624) that despite the broad geographic and chronological span of the text, “of the most things therein, I am no Compiler by hearsay, but have beene a reall Actor; I take myselfe to have a propertie in them: and therefore have beene bold to challenge them to come under the reach of my owne rough Pen” (GH, 41). In Travels even more than in Generall Historie, Smith occupied at the same time several roles that were more often discrete: actor, redactor, editor, and collector. In other words, he assumed in his own person not only the functions of Gunnell’s hypothetical playwright, but also the functions of an anthologist such as Purchas, who controlled how much of a narrative to print, what company to put it in, and the kind of book in which it would appear. To be an editor as well as a writer and a subject was also to produce a physical book rather than simply a narrative. A book was something that could be collected. A few early owners of Smith’s works are known, and they seem to have entered the Bodleian and at least one Oxford college library fairly soon after their publication, certainly before they began to be regarded as “rare Americana” and bound accordingly.14 We do not know whether Smith succeeded in depositing his autobiography in Cotton’s collection, either in ms. or in print; the printed books were apparently dispersed before being catalogued, and although no Smith ms. is recorded in the collection, that negative evidence cannot be definitive given Cotton’s habits of


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lending and the normal entropy of libraries over time. At least one letter addressed to Smith had entered the Cotton collection by the time of the fire that damaged it in 1731; Barbour dates the letter tentatively to 1616 (Works 3:319). Indeed, the presence of a Smith ms. in itself might tell us nothing unambiguously about his relationship to Cotton. Sir Francis Bacon was the recipient of an early, holograph version of Smith’s New Englands Trials in 1618; the ms. survives in the Public Record Office. The text eventually published in 1620 and 1622 was not dedicated to Bacon and bears no indication that he responded to Smith’s address. Yet whatever Smith’s actual relation to Sir Robert Cotton, his declared intention matters. It does more than tell us about Smith’s search for connections to important men, something that the autobiography indicates began early in his life and continued late. The first sentence of True Travels tells us that Smith regarded his life as collectible, that he aspired to make it part of that great archive of English history that was the Cotton collection. As we will see, posterity has not endorsed that judgment—but that too is a phenomenon worth examination. Smith’s autobiography marked an attempt to frame his life and identity in more prestigious and generally recognized terms, though its reception has been marked by forms of resistance to that effort. Here is the story he tells.

Reading and Riding Smith was born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, in 1580.15 His father died in 1596, and his mother remarried shortly after. After a brief apprenticeship to a Norfolk merchant he used some of his small inheritance to go abroad, and served as a soldier in France and the Netherlands until 1598 or 1599. In 1599, he attended the younger son of Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby to the continent (the Berties were a local gentry family), but his companionship was no longer needed once they reached Robert Bertie, the older brother, at Orleans. A relative of the Berties whom Smith met in Paris gave him “letters to his friends in Scotland to preferre him to King James” (Travels, 155); Robert Bertie had also charged him to bring a report to Lord Willoughby, at Berwick. At the Scottish court Smith met with “much kinde usage, . . . but neither money nor meanes to make him a courtier” (Travels, 155). Tiring of these unsuccessful attempts, he turned home. The passage that describes what happens next occurs at the end of Chapter 1, and it is brief enough to quote in full.

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e . . . [H]e returned to Willoughby in Lincolne-shire; where within a short time being glutted with too much company, wherein he took small delight, he retired himselfe into a little wooddie pasture, a good way from any towne, invironed with many hundred Acres of other woods: Here by a fair brook he built a Pavillion of boughes, where only in his cloaths he lay. His studie was Machiavills Art of warre, and Marcus Aurelius; his exercise a good horse, with his lance and Ring; his food was thought to be more of venison than any thing else; what he wanted his man brought him. The countrey wondering at such an Hermite; His friends perswaded one Seignior Theadora Polaloga, Rider to Henry Earle of Lincolne, an excellent Horse-man, and a noble Italian Gentleman, to insinuate into his wooddish acquaintances, whose Languages and good discourse, and exercise of riding drew him to stay with him at Tattersall. (Travels, 155–6)16

This is quite a remarkable scene. First, it is evidently a moment of deliberate self-formation and education. Smith’s efforts in retraining himself, so to say, are directed both toward technical skills (the study of horsemanship and of military science) and toward a certain selfformation, through books. The scene in the woods is certainly also a performance, for audiences both within and beyond the text. Smith’s very withdrawal from company makes him a spectacle, mystery, and wonderment to the countryside (consider, e.g., the self-conscious mystification of “his food was thought to be more of venison . . .”). The performance of heremitical withdrawal in fact attracts the attention of “friends” in a position to do something for him: Smith begins by sleeping on the ground, but ends up at Tattershall, the Earl of Lincoln’s country house, tutored by a descendant of the Byzantine royal house. The sense of successful mobility that this conclusion indicates must be to some degree a projection of the narrative, given that Smith was permitted to be on the land and take the venison to begin with;17 Smith performs for the reader an ideally successful search for patronage and favor, ideal partly because (unlike hanging around the Scottish court) it can be read as not trying. Fictional or real, this was a performance Smith chose, a rehearsal for a life whose components are still visible in the process of their assimilation. What, exactly, did he think he was doing? The syllabus Smith set for himself comprised readings and practice. We might begin by thinking about Smith’s readings. In equipping himself with “Machiavills Art of warre, and Marcus Aurelius,” Smith had chosen two sixteenth-century bestsellers that could be characterized— only somewhat reductively—as mass market stoicism and a soldier’s


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how-to book. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, originally written in Greek, were unavailable in English during Smith’s lifetime; Meric Casaubon’s translation appeared only in 1634, after Smith’s death. The “Marcus Aurelius” Smith read in the 1590s was almost certainly a book by the Spanish humanist, Antonio de Guevara, which Irving Leonard describes as a literary hoax: a “farrago of dissertations, with copious anecdotes and quotations,” it was loosely based on the life and letters of Marcus Aurelius.18 Guevara’s work was translated into English first in 1535 from an unauthorized text, as The Golden Booke of Marcus Aurelius, and then in a longer version, The Diall of Princes (1557), by Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch.19 The Golden Booke in particular was astonishingly popular: it went into roughly eleven editions in the sixteenth century. In its original Spanish, as Irving Leonard has documented from Inquisition reports and booksellers’ records, it was a “perennial favorite” of conquistadors bound for South America, and a bestseller in colonial markets as well.20 The jurist Sir Edward Coke—one of the dedicatees for Smith’s early works on New England, The Description and New Englands Trials—later had in his library both the Casaubon translation of Marcus and a copy of Diall that appears to have previously belonged to Christopher Hatton (he also owned the Arte of Warre).21 Machiavelli’s Art of War was another popular book, more (or more avowedly) popular than the scandalous Prince; as modern editors note, it was the only one of Machiavelli’s major works published during his lifetime (in 1521).22 The book went into eight Italian editions during the sixteenth century, was plagiarized in Spanish, translated into French, and finally into English by Peter Whitehorne, while he was serving with Charles V’s forces against the Moors in North Africa. (Whitehorne’s translation appeared in 1562, and again, expanded, in 1573 and 1588).23 The Art of War advocates a return to Roman military practice and its “orders” as a remedy for the weakness of Italian states; its technical suggestions are couched as a dialogue between the mercenary captain Fabrizio Colonna and a group of young Florentines gathered around Cosimo Rucellai. (English versions add a second part including instructions on “howe to make Saltpeter, Gunpoulder, and diuers sortes of Fireworkes or wilde Fyre”; Smith drew on this material for a device noticed by Purchas and Fuller as well as in his own book.) If we are to believe Smith, that the autobiography describes those experiences that “made” him a soldier and a colonist, his ostentatious reading of these books demands that we pay them some attention. It is not hard to find continuities between Smith’s later practice and this

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early reading. Guevara’s Marcus speaks approvingly of the time when the criterion for Roman citizenship was work-hardened hands rather than origin, status, or lineage, and laments the rise of a hereditary imperium.24 Machiavelli’s Fabrizio insists that a captain’s reputation depends on personal virtue, “because neither bloud, nor authoritie gaue it euer without virtue” (Arte of Warre 1562, fo.90v). Both insist on discipline, imposed on others and on oneself, as a necessity for military victory or political rule. In Guevara’s imagined Rome, as in Smith’s Jamestown, those who would “eate the foode gotten by sweat of theim that labour” are seen with an unfavorable eye (Golden Booke 5r; see GH, 208, 213–214). Examples could be multiplied of such correspondences between reading and career: on temperance and command, self-control and the means of controlling others, belief in advancement by merit rather than birth, the virtue of labor, the value of experience. These concerns are among those that would later come to seem particularly “American” in Smith. This account of his reading tells us that they were neither simply a fact of character, nor a pure product of American experience. Rather, Smith claims for them a particular literary pedigree, footnoting himself—as it were—with reputable authorities.25 Other elements of these books interacted in a more complex way both with the local context of this chapter and with the larger context of Smith’s life and writing. This writing lacks the sense of inescapable belatedness shared by Machiavelli and Guevara’s books, which look to antiquity as a corrective to the falling-off of their own times. Machiavelli’s speakers describe the present time in terms of “vilenesse” and “disorder,” while Marcus’s best solace is retreat to a private study full of ancient books.26 Smith’s work lacks both the historical perspective of these works, and their tinge of mournfulness. When he lamented the fall of past civilizations, it was the recent fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and then only as a monitory example of the dangers courted by those “whom pride or covetousness lulleth to sleep in a cradle of slothful carelessnesse.”27 (The context is a plea to fund and organize a New England fishery as a national enterprise.) Smith turns to the past, but it is the past not of classical antiquity but of the late Middle Ages, at most. Not for the last time, this early scene in Travels gestures to traditions or sources by comparison with which Smith’s own writing seems conspicuously impoverished. In his chivalric performance, Smith imitated courtiers who were themselves imitating a partly imagined medieval past. This nostalgia for a medieval chivalry is evident in the second element of his retraining: practice with a horse and lance. Here, the juxtaposition of reading


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materials with practice seems peculiarly jarring. The Art of War, largely focused on the movements of a well-drilled infantry, clearly had little use for the kind of horsemanship that Smith’s performance equally clearly invokes.28 Both from the perspective of Smith’s reading and from the standpoint of military efficacy, his choice of riding and the lance as skills to practice merits some comment. For a soldier between wars in the last decade of the sixteenth century, Smith’s training was curiously impractical and outdated. The late sixteenth century had already seen “a ‘revolution in tactics’: the replacement of the lance and pike by the arrow and musket, as the feudal knights fell before the firepower of massed archers or gunners.”29 An innovation in the eleventh century, the cavalry charge with lance was virtually extinct as a military tactic by the late sixteenth century, and the lance itself had fallen out of use as a weapon of war. Yet both retained the status associations that they had acquired, and survived primarily in the upper-class world of the tournament—which, J.R. Hale notes, “could no longer be seen as an adequate training for war” (War and Society, 37). Yet if the lance was only vestigially useful in practical terms, it remained laden with social meanings.30 Smith imitated Elizabethan aristocrats who were themselves involved in an antiquarian project, what Roy Strong has called the “imaginative feudalization of late Tudor Society.”31 By 1581, tilting had become a regular feature of the Queen’s Accession Day. Chivalry was both an operative vocabulary of Elizabethan court culture, and the image of that culture, mediated through romances and printed descriptions that represented aristocratic experience and conduct to a broader audience.32 The different facets of Smith’s performance (knight, hermit, woodsman) all featured frequently in the entertainments for Elizabeth mounted both at court and on progress. It is possible to imagine that Smith would have had access to printed or oral accounts of these even if he was not present, as a young man, at the events; certainly Smith knew Sir William Segar, and could have read his descriptions of tournaments at court, in print by 1590.33 He might also have heard accounts of the Earl of Essex’s “chivalric” behavior on the battlefield.34 One need not assume Smith’s presence at or knowledge of (for instance) the entertainments at Theobald’s or Elvetham to argue for his employment of courtly conventions or grasp of their status associations. Understanding the chivalric note in Smith is complicated by what one might call the double chronology of True Travels: written under the second Stuart king at the end of the 1620s, it purports to narrate events that took place late in the 1590s. Between these moments, the

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cultural place of chivalry shifted markedly. Under James I, the chivalric mythology of the Elizabethan court had attached itself to young Prince Henry, as Roy Strong has argued. After Prince Henry’s death in 1612, the continuation or revival of chivalric identities became less of a going proposition; the post-Elizabethan chivalric revival associated with him had already conceived of itself as the belated recuperation of an institution declined and in ruins.35 (A 1613 letter from Philip Gawdy, who had been a volunteer on the Revenge, complains of that year’s tilting being “as poorly worth the seeing as any that ever I saw in my life, and very few runners”).36 Jousts were held for the accession of Charles I in 1621; subsequent ones were planned, but probably not actually held.37 At the same time, J.S.A. Adamson suggests that Elizabethan knighthood became for some the emblem of a martial and godly past contrasting with the degenerate present. The late 1620s were the moment when full accounts of Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation and raid on the West Indies finally saw print, as The World Encompassed and Sir Francis Drake Revived (1626); both had been in preparation prior to Drake’s death in 1595. Sir Walter Ralegh and the Earl of Essex were also “revived” in pamphlets by Thomas Scott (1626, 1624) as spokesmen for a more martial foreign policy.38 True Travels was published in 1630, and it has been argued that part of Smith’s motivation was to counter another work published in the same year: David Lloyd’s Legend of Captain Iones.39 Unlike Travels, Lloyd’s poem was issued in multiple editions over the course of the seventeenth century, with the addition of a second part, commendatory poems, and illustrations.40 The identification of the poem as satire of Smith seems altogether convincing; but the poem’s longevity argues that it also had an appeal larger than topical satire of a man whose life had been “racked” on the popular stage. Part of this appeal, I believe, was in the poem’s historical dimension, its ambivalent, retrospective gaze toward a heroic earlier era receding in time. Lloyd’s Captain Jones “at once both made and writ all Chivalrie”; he is author and hero of a fraudulently inflated life story modeled on the romances “of our old English Worthies, and their glories” read to him by his cabin boy. Among these models are the old chestnuts of popular reading: “How our S. George did the fell Dragon gore: The like atchievement of Sir Eglamore: Topas hard quest after th’elf-queen to Barwick: S. Bevis cow, & Guy’s fierce boar of Warwick.”41 Yet Jones also appears to have been influenced by material more up-to-date: as he prepares to lead an English fleet against “the doughty Dons of Spain,” a “better fate in this designe he wisht not, Then to cope single with their great Don Quixot” (Legend, 10). The point of the passage


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seems double: first, to mock Jones as someone who read Quixote as history; second, to identify sea fights with Spain as one of those mighty feats that a would-be English hero might undertake, along with the conquest of New World empires. The opening lines of part 2, which appeared first in the 1648 edition, lament the change in times and in poetry. Will nothing please the taste of these rough times but Rue and Wormwood stuffed in prose or rhymes? No verse to make our Poets laureate but smart iambics lashing king or state? Must all turn Mercuries, these times to fit by poisoning Fame with their quicksilver wit? (Legend, 25)

Lloyd’s present was a “rough time,” a time of satire rather than epic and of politics rather than heroic deeds. But the past in which Jones is located is specifically Elizabethan, as Lloyd’s character interacts with historical figures—Grenville, Drake, Ralegh, Cumberland, Essex, Norris—who are more than just chronologically Elizabethan: these are the heroes of that maritime and martial history chronicled by Hakluyt, the “sea-dogs” of chapter 1. Part I, indeed, casts Jones as the hero of something very much like the last fight of the Revenge. The details match very closely. Cumberland appoints Jones viceadmiral of a fleet aimed against the Spanish, but Jones—separated from the other ships—encounters them alone. Nine thousand soldiers was the force that fought this day with Jones, whom six huge galleys brought, the stoutest boats to make a bold bravado that were in Spain’s invisible [sic] Armado. (Legend, 11)

Jones and his crew fight on until only he is left alive. “Death was his wish, captivity he feared”—but a heavenly voice prevents him “from self murder” by exhorting him to live on “not for himself but for his country’s good, and common wealth” (Legend, 13, 14). It is hard to tell who is being mocked here. As a hero who can fill the sail of a becalmed ship with his mighty fart, Jones goes Grenville one better by fighting until all his men are dead; but it is not clear whether Grenville is entirely off the hook either. One cannot help suspecting that the poem appeals both to a guilty sense of living in what the full title of Sir Francis Drake Revived (1626) calls this “dull or effeminate age” and to a reactive feeling that the Elizabethans were simply a bit too

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much. Certainly, their chivalry was out of date, and so was Smith in seeking to imitate it. Like Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, the Legend mocked aspiring middle-class readers who, trying to imitate an aristocratic milieu to which they only had access in books, always got it wrong. Alden Vaughan, arguing that Smith was the target of the Legend’s satire, notes as “perhaps most important of all, an unseemly boasting—especially in print—by a man of limited education and social standing.”42 As Vaughan points out, the point of the satire is the “unseemliness” of the match between who Smith was and the grander terms in which he imagined, experienced, and recounted his life. (Along the same lines, Thomas Fuller described Smith as “having a Prince’s mind imprisoned in a poor man’s purse.”)43 Smith was both out of date, and out of (social) place. “Out of place” may be as much a function of perception, as of location. Smith’s writing, and the writing about him, provide ample instances of the anxiety and friction that this disparity inspired in those around him. Smith spent most of the voyage to Jamestown in chains because it was alleged that he “intended to usurp the government, murder the Council, and make himself king” (Proceedings, 5; Works 1:207). The tension created by his pressure on social hierarchy permeates the debate on his writings and character as well as the record of his American experiences. The details of his practice, however, provide an important qualification in the specification that “his exercise [was] a good horse, with his lance and Ring” (italics mine). While tilting pitted armored combatants against each other, riding at the ring could be practiced individually, exercising skill at pointing the lance into a ring-shaped target. The first was an aristocratic sport, which looked back to the use of heavy cavalry in war. Riding at the ring was practiced across a far broader social spectrum, recommended by James I to his heir as appropriately princely exercise, by Roger Ascham as “not onelie cumlie and decent, but also verie necessarie, for a Courtlie Jentleman to use,”44 and also by the Puritan William Prynne, who joined “running at the ring” to his own list of “lawdable, cheape, and harmlesse exercises.”45 Riding at the ring was treated at some length in Caualerice (London, 1607), a treatise on horsemanship written by one of the period’s most prolific authors of manuals and grammars of practice, Gervase Markham (whose works also included the poem on Grenville’s death referred to in chapter 1). Book II of Caualerice describes in some detail how the would-be rider can learn on his own,


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with an elaborated system of lines directing the lance toward the ring in the manner of a bicycle’s training wheels; it also tells us something about the spatial, and social, location of this and other practices. Solitary practice with the ring is desirable . . . forasmuch as Tilt barres & places conuenient for his practise are euer about the Pallaces of Princes, where is continuall concourse of people, to whom scollers at first are loath to prostitute their ignorance: If therefore you would practise in a more priuate maner, it shall not be amisse for you then in some remote peece of ground . . . to set vp your Ring. . . . (Caualerice, 253–4)

Riding at the ring could not only be abstracted from the actual encounter that tilting at least suggests; it could also be detached from the courtly venue of the tournament. Smith needed no pedigree to practice this version of an aristocratic skill. But Smith’s performance in the Lincolnshire woods was also a rehearsal for something more. He had already tried and failed to go to court, “about the Pallaces of Princes.” The acquaintance with Theodore Paleologue seems to have turned his thoughts toward the East. When he finally arrived in Transylvania, Smith would employ his practice with the lance to both martial, and social, ends.

A Grant of Arms Smith’s itinerary in the chapters that follow covered much of Western Europe; his intention is identified at the outset as “to see more of the world, and trie his fortune against the Turkes” (Travels, 157). The end of Travels, Chapter 3, finds him preferred to a regiment on its way to Vienna. Chapters 4–11, in which Smith achieved his objective, are identified in the early version printed by Purchas as taken from “a Book . . . written by Francisco Fernaza a Learned Italian, Secretary to Sigismund Bathor the Prince” (Works 3:345).46 These chapters recount the series of individual feats from which Smith derived his soldierly reputation, as well as his coat of arms: a signaling strategem using torches, several inventive pyrotechnic devices (Travels, 163–4, 166, 184), and most notably, the three single combats described in Chapters 7 and 8. The first of these was recalled even by the critical Thomas Fuller. Smith first distinguished himself by offering to communicate with the garrison of a besieged Christian town by means of a signaling code that “he had taught the Governour, his worthy friend” (Travels, 163); Smith

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had profited from the translator’s appendix to Machiavelli for both the code and the means of signaling.47 This cleverness about communication certainly mattered; after the relief of the town, Smith was promoted to Captain of 250 horse, gaining the title he would retain to the end of his life. But it was his single combats, not his signaling, which were commemorated on the coat of arms that he would bring back to England. These occurred as the Christians were preparing to besiege a Turkish city:48 . . . which slow proceedings the Turkes oft derided, that . . . they grew fat from want of exercise, and fearing lest they should depart ere they could assault their Citie, sent this Challenge to any Captaine in the Armie. That to delight the Ladies, who did long to see some court-like pastime, the Lord Turbashaw did defie any Captaine, that had the command of a Company, who durst combate with him for his head: The matter being discussed, it was accepted, but so many questions grew for the undertaking, it was decided by lots, which fell upon Captaine Smith, before spoken of. (Travels, 172)

The modestly clothed Smith met an opponent from the pages of romance (see figure 2.2). The description of Turbashaw’s entry compares closely with accounts of courtly Elizabethan jousters.49 “Turbashaw with a noise of Howboyes entred the field well mounted and armed; on his shoulders were fixed a paire of great wings, compacted of Eagles feathers within a ridge of silver, richly garnished with gold and precious stones, a Janizary before him, bearing his Lance, on each side another leading his horse. . . .” (Travels, 172). Despite its ostensibly recreational purposes, however, this was not a purely ceremonial combat but a fight à outrance. Smith claims to have defeated, killed, and decapitated first Turbashaw and then two subsequent Turkish challengers (one at a later date) by “his judgment and dexterity.” He was rewarded first by his general (Mózes Székely) by “a faire Horse richly furnished, a Semitere and belt worth three hundred ducats” and a promotion to regimental major; on the arrival of the Transylvanian prince, Zsigmond Báthory, Smith was rewarded for his record of service with a patent under Zsigmond’s seal for “three Turkes heads in a shield for his Armes,” the prince’s picture in gold, and an annual pension of 300 ducats (Travels, 174, 175). On the page of engraved illustrations inserted into True Travels, the three combats and their sequels receive attention disproportionate


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Figure 2.2 “His encounter with Turbashaw,” True Travels (London, 1630). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

to the space they occupy in the text; four out of a total nine images represent scenes from this episode. Smith had illustrated each of the three individual combats: the combatants are in complete armor, hiding their faces, but can be distinguished by the crescent moon and cross floating above their heads. Later, we see the results. In the foreground, Smith presents the heads of his enemies to his commanding officer. In the background, he is apparently receiving a banner displaying his new coat of arms, under the legend “pro Christo et patria,” from the Transylvanian prince Zsigmond Báthory. Smith apparently came home with this Transylvanian coat of arms, and— around the time that Purchas printed the early version of Travels—he had it officially recorded by Sir William Segar, the Garter King of Arms. These images, and the passages I have cited, provide a history for a coat of arms that had been appearing in Smith’s publications since at least 1624 (see figure 2.3); True Travels stood out only into supplying it more prominently. Within the autobiography, Smith’s single combats gesture back toward the scene of preparation discussed earlier, and its context both

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Figure 2.3 “Three Turks heads in a banner given him for Armes,” True Travels (London, 1630). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

in Elizabethan chivalric culture and its Stuart afterlife. But the scene that Smith describes also took place somewhere else, along a frontier; that “somewhere else” invites us to glance back toward the narratives of national/confessional encounter discussed in chapter 1. In the illustrations of the duels, armor obscures the combatants’ faces, but their identities are marked by the cross and crescent respectively. We might understand from these and other indications (e.g., the legend “pro Christi et patria”) that the text frames Smith’s victory not just as by an individual but as by a Christian and Englishman. Yet the identifications here are complicated in ways they were not for the figures examined in chapter 1. The patria for which Smith was fighting was in practical terms fairly unclear. Transylvania was not his country; England was not at war with the Ottomans (on the contrary). Even the larger battle was in no sense his to fight except by choice. We might hesitate as well over the very choice of the duel, which (unlike some other proposed duels) had no relation to the outcome of the war—it was not meant to settle the fate of the besieged city, for instance—but was expressly designed as pastime and amusement. Cui bono? Why did this scene matter to Smith?


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The dimension of choosing to fight a battle one did not have to fight, of fighting almost purely to prove something, may remind us of Grenville in the Revenge, but the differences are also instructive: the absence of national enemies (to Hakluyt, the Ottomans were allies); the absence of countrymen (even skeptics thought Grenville’s crew were heroes); the absence of something symbolic to be fought for (proving that the Queen’s ships were “impregnible”). Without entirely abandoning the idea of Smith’s duels as cultural conflict, perhaps we can look elsewhere for their meanings. Most visibly, the duel is cordoned off from actual warfare by its limits. The participants, the means, the ground, and the stakes, are carefully delimited and specified. While combat may reward a kind of heroic savagery—a man ready to chew glass—the duel speaks to a fantasy of violence as capable of being ordered, ritualized, almost sublimated. The mounted duel in particular refers back not only to older military modes, but to a tradition in art and intellectual history identifying the man on horseback both with government and with selfcontrol. Examples are not far to seek. A 1586 emblem dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney by George Whitney shows a man in a plumed hat, armed, astride a curvetting horse, over the motto Non locus virum, sed vir locum ornat. The accompanying poem associates skill in horsemanship with fitness to govern. To the Honorable Sir Phillip Sidney Knight, Gouernour of the Garrison and towne of Vlissing. The trampinge steede, that champes the burnish’d bitte, Is mannag’d braue, with ryders for the nones: But when the foole vppon his backe doth sette, He throwes him downe, and ofte doth bruse his bones: His corage feirce, dothe craue a better guide, And eke such horse, the foole shoulde not bestride. By which is ment, that men of iudgement graue, Of learning, witte, and eeke of conscience cleare, In highe estate, are fitte theire seates to haue, And to be stall’d in sacred iustice cheare: Wherein they rule, vnto theire endlesse fame, But fooles are foil’d, and throwne out of the same.50

(There was, of course, a certain irony in praising the perpetually underemployed Sidney as a governor.) The emblem of the rider stood not only for personal self-restraint, but also for the ability and right to compel obedience from others, a right subscribed to by the “natural”

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obedience of the horse. In A Boke named the Governour, Sir Thomas Elyot described riding as conveying to others a sense of one’s fitness to govern: riding “undoubtedly . . . importeth a majestie & drede to inferiour persones, beholding him above the common course of other men, dauntyng a fierce and cruell beast.”51 Renaissance riding manuals and equestrian statuary both offer rich examples of the associations made by Elyot and Whitney.52 Here again, we may begin to sense a convergence with some of the national values that Hakluyt’s anthology (from time to time) laid claim to: temperance and self-restraint.53 The latter two in particular are much emphasized in Smith’s accounts of dealing with the Indians and other colonists, in Generall Historie and elsewhere. Perpetually able to control his appetite, Smith nonetheless fed others; always claiming righteousness, Smith claimed both the power and right to revenge “injuries” and the restraint to do so at a time of his choosing. The single combats highlighted by Travels suggest a very particular kind of victory over the other, one suggesting not only class aspiration, but the assertion of a self-mastery that gave both the means and the right to dominate. Yet the casual savagery of Smith’s severed heads does not fit well into this kind of story; indeed, the frontispiece to later editions of Lloyd’s Legend appears to mock this particular detail of Smith’s account. (Notice the knight on horseback, and also the severed head looking dolefully up at him [see figure 2.4].) De Bry’s illustrations to Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report showed ancient Britons carrying the severed heads of their enemies, but only to show how much they resembled “savage” Americans before they were conquered and civilized by Rome.54 Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s display of the severed heads of Irish rebels outside his camp, described by Churchyard, was thought by some to be “too cruel”: His maner was that the heddes of all those . . . whiche were killed in the daie, should bee cutte of from their bodies, and brought to the place where he incamped at night: and should there bee laied on the ground, . . . so that none could come into his Tente for any cause, but commonly he muste passe through a land of heddes, whiche he used ad terrorem . . .55

This practice, a notable display of savagery, could at least be understood as an act of public violence on behalf of the state; Churchyard justifies it as retribution. Yet Smith’s combats, with their brutal outcomes, were avowedly a pastime. True Travels made not even a token


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Figure 2.4 Frontispiece, David Lloyd, Legend of Captain Jones, (London, 1659). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

claim to conquer or civilize those whose heads were taken, in the end, for the benefit of Smith’s reputation. In its bombast and violence, this scene is too much; in its absence of any felt need to justify this excess, even to frame it in terms of ideology, it feels curiously flat. Yet (as we

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will see), it had its audience and its enthusiasts. Before we meet them, another important episode remains to be examined.

A Turn to the East Captured after a Christian defeat, Smith was sold as a slave in Axiopolis. His purchaser sent him to Constantinople, presenting him there to the “Noble Gentlewoman” he was courting as the prize of his valor. Smith’s new owner is named in the text as “the young Charatza Tragabigzanda,” which Barbour reads as Greek for “girl from Trebizond.”56 Curious about her new possession, she had him questioned in various European languages, finally satisfying herself that Smith was, as he claimed, an Englishman taken prisoner after a battle but not by her suitor. Charatza then sent Smith to live on her brother’s estate at some distance, with a letter telling him that Smith “should there but sojourne to learne the language, and what it was to be a Turke, till time made her Master of her selfe” (Travels, 188). Others have read this, and the inference seems reasonable, as implying the intention to marry Smith when she should come of age. Nonetheless, on Smith’s arrival “the Tymor her brother, diverted all this to the worst of crueltie,” treating him brutally as the “slave of slaves.” Barbour has argued that what Smith experienced was credibly part of the preparation for inducting foreigners into the Turkish bureaucracy (Works 3:188, n.11). Smith, at any rate, found it unpalatable—taking an opportunity, he killed the brother, hid the body and escaped on his horse, fleeing across the steppes and eventually back to Transylvania, where he rejoined his friends and “near drowned with joy” (Travels, 203). Finding Zsigmond Báthory in Leipzig, he was rewarded with 1,500 ducats of gold and a document that, among other things, formally recorded his right to wear three Turks’ heads on his shield. The cultural fantasy represented by this story is not unlike the story of Princess Pocahontas loving and saving the once again captive Smith in Virginia—who himself linked Pocahontas with Charatza (in the dedication to True Travels), though on the grounds of benevolence rather than romantic love. If the story of Smith and Charatza Tragabigzanda, like that of Smith and Pocahontas, adumbrates a broader cultural fantasy about the natural appeal of Christian manhood to alien women, it also has some historically specific resonances. Smith’s Turkish story resembles in its outlines other stories set in the East; Philip Massinger’s play The Renegado (1630) or the interpolated captivity narrative of Don Quixote I, Chapters 39–41.57 Part of that


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common story is that the impecuniousness or low rank of the Christian man is compensated for in the East by the benefit of his religion and his enactment of Christian masculinity; Cervantes’s Zoraida wants nothing better than to confer her stunning beauty and her father’s wealth on the first Christian gentleman she sees, from afar, as a prisoner in the baño. In The Renegado, Donusa, an Ottoman woman of high rank, rejects a succession of noble Turkish suitors only to become infatuated at sight with Vitelli, a Venetian gentleman playing the part of a china merchant, to whom she insists on swiftly surrendering her virginity. Smith’s persistent chastity, which others have noted, contrasts with Vitelli’s (ecstatic but guilt-ridden) compliance; also missing are his betrothal to Donusa and her conversion, which concludes Massinger’s play. What is really remarkable about the Charatza Tragabigzanda episode, in relation to its fictional analogues, is what (besides admitted erotic interest) it does not contain: Smith did not offer or attempt to convert her to Christianity; she in turn did not release him, enrich him, or go with him.58 Charatza Trabigzanda was not asking to be rescued; she preferred Smith to her Turkish suitor, but she wanted him as a Turk. And so there was the request, hope, or demand that Smith “learn what it was to be a Turk.” What was it to be a Turk? The narratives our man might have read described the Turks as barbarously cruel, but also as something else. Late sixteenth-century English accounts located familiar chivalric practices at the Turkish court. A 1584 account of “the Turkish Emperor that now is” translated by Thomas Hacket described festivities at Constantinople that include jousting, mock cavalry battles, and “such notable feates, as the olde auncient speare men were wont and accustomed to doo in courses and feates of Cheualrie.”59 Another text printed in 1562 outlines the life of a Christian boy adopted by “Amurath” (Murad), whom life at the Turkish court seems to have imbued with a love for chivalric skills: he “delighted to ride, and to run, and also with his companions to use the lance.”60 More practically, a traveler’s narrative ca. 1600 described a band of janissaries in terms that sound just like Smith in the wood: “The moste of them weare horsmen, and everie man had his Lance, and most of them his boye, or slave, to beare his Lance.”61 Something such as chivalry was still possible on the Transylvanian frontier, against adversaries who might be seen in England as the traditional enemies of crusading knights, and destroyers of the Greek civilization cherished by humanists.62 This distant, military context was one place where Smith could actually do things that at home were the

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prerogative of highly placed courtiers—the real-world equivalent of riding at the ring—and could by doing them win rapid advancement in rank, wealth, and status. The possibility was to mobilize not only the forms of chivalry (weaponry, ritual, individual prowess), but also its subtext, that arms and ennoblement go together. Sir William Segar, the Garter King of Arms, asserted the mutually constituting relations of military chivalry and rank: “The Actions of Armes (chiefly on horsebacke) are, and euer haue been used of Noble personages, and Gentlemen of best qualitie.”63 The East offered Smith multiple possibilities of advancement. One was the promotion and grant of arms, which he actually received. Another was the possibility—in literary terms, a rather familiar possibility—that a woman of high birth would fall in love with him and seek him in marriage. (Something similar happens to Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle.) Yet another was the possibility—less common in literature, but more so in history—of actually becoming a “Turk.” Smith registered protest only against the brother’s treatment of him, not against the project itself of learning “what it is to be a Turke.” In Turkey as in America, the flight of Christians to the other side of the border seems not to have been uncommon, and motivations for defection and conversion might be pragmatic as much as spiritual. Certainly there were pragmatic effects. Hakluyt spoke of conversion to Islam as a usual difficulty of the Levant trade, common enough to eat into the profits of English merchants: “I omytt to shewe here howe divers have bene undon by their servauntes which have becomme Renegadoes [converts to Islam], of whome by the customme of the Contrie their Masters can have no manner of recoverye, neither call them into Justice.”64 Despite Hakluyt’s omission here, numerous documents both in Principal Navigations and its successor, Purchas’s Pilgrimes, register the presence of renegades, as well as telling stories of men who resisted conversion’s lures. Purchas printed the account of an English mariner, enslaved on a Turkish ship, who attempted to gain freedom by winning over the crew’s many European converts.65 Although “willing to be reconciled to their true Saviour,” they declined to begin the mutiny because “they were . . . Renegadoes, and so had alwayes beneficiall entertaynment amongst them” (Pilgrimes 6:169, 163). Richard Knolles wrote admiringly in his Generall Historie of the Turkes (London, 1603) that among the Ottomans, “the way laied open for euery common person, be he neuer so meanely borne, to aspire unto the greatest honours and preferments both of the Court and of the field, yea euen unto the


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neerest affinitie of the great Sultan himselfe, if his valour or other worth shall so deserue” (“To the Reader”). With advertisements such as these, no wonder conversion was attractive to men with aspirations. Another contemporary text on war looked both to the past and to the East to show “how Gentilitie beganne, and where and in what sorte honour was first gotten and maintained.” Both originated, according to Thomas Churchyard, in the recognition given to “noble Soldiours.” On his account, the Turks were bearers into the present of the classical regard for arms: “These Paganes . . . did make suche lawes and orders for Soldiours, as the Turke to this daie obserueth, and holdeth in greate reuerence. Regard but the liberties and aucthoritie of the Jenessaries: and that shall manifestlie proue, that menne of warre are had in greate admiration” (Generall Rehearsall of Warres, M1v). Had Smith yielded to these suggestions about the possibilities opened by an Ottoman military career, he would not have been alone, even among his fellow soldiers along the border. Some of the French troops under the Duc de Mercoeur, whose successes are described in True Travels, defected and converted to Islam, though Smith does not say so. The regiment reached Hungary in 1597; in 1599, while the Duc de Mercoeur was appointed “generalissimo of the Christian forces,” “most of the survivors, ill-treated and unpaid, went over to the enemy; many of them not only fought for the Turks against the Christians in Hungary but lingered for years in Constantinople.”66 Zsigmond Báthory was himself from time to time a pensioner of the Ottomans, and the “Turks” Smith campaigned against were Hungarian mercenaries known as Hajdus.67 True Travels concludes with what I take to be an oblique complaint about the conditions that lay behind such defections. At a glance, this final chapter—“The bad life, qualities and conditions of Pyrats; and how they taught the Turks and Moores to become men of warre”— seems an odd non sequitur. But in Smith’s account the origin of early seventeenth-century piracy was the denial to a military class of opportunities for employment and advancement. Pirates, under James, were the same men who had been gallant privateers a decade or so earlier. After the death of our most gracious Queene Elizabeth, of blessed memory, our Royall King James, who from his infancy had reigned in peace with all Nations; had no imployment for these men of warre, so that those that were rich rested with that they had; those that were poore and had nothing but from hand to mouth, turned Pirats; some, because they became sleighted of those for whom they had got much

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e wealth; some for that they could not get their due; some, that had lived bravely, would not abase themselves to poverty; some vainly, only to get a name; others from revenge, covetousnesse, or as ill; and as they found themselves more and more oppressed, their passions increasing with discontent, made them turne Pirats. (Travels, 239)

It would be odd if Smith did not see himself in this particular collection of discontents, organized by the social degradation of military identities: “Those titles of Sea-men and Souldiers, have beene most worthily honoured and esteemed, but now regarded for most part, but as the scumme of the world” (Travels, 240). Fuller’s biography of the colonial promoter John Popham would sound a similar note: in the early seventeenth century, he wrote, “The land . . . swarmed with people which had been soldiers, who had never gotten (or else quite forgotten) any other vocation. Hard it was for peace to feed all the idle mouths which a former war did breed . . .” (Worthies 1662, Ddd1r). In Smith’s list of motives for piracy, necessity, injustice, the habit of honor, and the desire for reputation preceded the “ill” motive of greed. Smith recorded without comment Charatza Tragabigzanda’s proposal and its implied invitation to enter a society in which men very much like him had attained positions of power and wealth, but he criticized colonists who defected to Powhatan, and denied any interest in marrying Pocahontas to become an “Indian king.” Although a whole tradition of reception has insisted on seeing Smith as a pioneer of interracial romance, he clearly rejected the possibility (real or fantasized) of rising by subjecting himself to the embrace of another culture. (The Barbary pirates are rejected for their “disorderly lives,” a disorder that is surely in part cultural.) Smith’s autobiography records the formation of an identity that was not a simple one, culturally or otherwise; he was not above borrowing from a variety of sources to tinker with the modest place that family and society had combined to give him. He wanted to be somebody, to be a hero—but not just any somebody, not a Turkish admiral or an Indian king, but an English worthy. True Travels begins following the dissolution of Smith’s family, with a scene in which he practiced a new identity, one whose elements were taken from disparate and sometimes conflicting discourses— chivalry, humanism, stoicism, military science, romance, and so on. In the travels that the autobiography records, Smith left England in search of patrons, employment, knowledge of the world, and the chance to make good on the ennobling promise of chivalry. Yet rather


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than imitating in a more literal sense the models the text offers us (explicitly and silently) for men of middling means making good— conquistador, lover, convert, or pirate—the Smith of True Travels worked to shape an English identity that would profit from them without losing itself. This resourcefulness, both in personal and narrative terms, was necessitated by what he perceived as the closing off of avenues along which his predecessors had risen to wealth and glory. Belonging to a generation without the common military and naval projects of its predecessors, Smith was on his own in living (perhaps) and narrating (certainly) a story of personal advancement through deeds of arms. But he does not seem in any lasting way to have enlisted the readership of Travels in the belief that his was a shared or representative project. On the contrary. Frobisher and Grenville would be celebrated as both extraordinary and typical; the singular “I” of Travels never became “we” or (better) “men like Smith.” I began this chapter by juxtaposing the broadly unfavorable reception of True Travels against Smith’s intention to position this aspirational text in an aspirational way within the larger universe of books, scripts, and so on. The evidence reviewed in that introductory section recapitulated a story already told by Thomas Fuller, about Smith’s pretensions and their failure. But there is another story to tell about the autobiography, and about memories of Smith. In the last section, I look at two editions, and three copies, of Smith’s books, for evidence of how Smith was remembered by other readers.

Reading Smith, 1648–1850 Edward Arber, a scholar of vigorous and catholic interests whose edition of documents relating to the Revenge has been cited in chapter 1, edited Smith’s Works in 1884. Arber argued explicitly that Smith was comparable to his Elizabethan predecessors, if not superior: What Sir Francis Drake was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that was Captain John Smith in the reign of her successor. The times were changed. It was easy for Drake to equip fleets with wealth acquired by captures at sea; a career that Smith would have only been too glad to have followed: but Colonial Pioneering brought with it no gains; so that the victory therein lay rather in the endurance of starvation and hardships, in patience and self-forgetfulness, and in the unfaltering pursuit of a noble work through all losses and disparagements.68

Arber shared with Froude a sense that forms of failure or loss might be a higher form of heroism (which led to the enshrining of Grenville as

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the worthiest of Froude’s “Forgotten Worthies” in his essay of the same name.) Applied to Smith, the results were striking. Drake was no longer the Elizabethan predecessor whose grand career a later generation could hardly hope to imitate, but a mere collector of easy profits, while Smith exemplified the hard work, self-sacrifice, and short-term failure that both Hakluyt and his Victorian editors associated with English maritime heroism. Arber’s edition did not succeed in shifting the reception to make Captain John Smith an English hero equal or superior to Sir Francis Drake. Even if it had, Travels would hardly have fit the model of patient, unglamorous, and largely unrewarded colonial work that underwrote Arber’s proposal of Smith as an English worthy. On the other side of the Atlantic, Smith seems to have become an “American” writer sometime in the nineteenth century. Travels was not initially rejected in this reframing, as indicated by a Richmond, Virginia, edition of True Travels and Generall Historie in 1819. Richard B. Davis has shown that the publication of this edition was “part of a conscious attempt at founding a native literature” for Virginia by the two men who sponsored it; “that flower of chivalry the most renowned Knight Captain John Smith,” in their view, clearly formed part of Virginia’s own literary antiquities, whether acting in Jamestown or in Transylvania.69 The edition opens with the autobiographical chapters of True Travels, rather than the earlier Generall Historie (which follows), concluding with Travels Chapters 21–28. Facing the title page, where Generall Historie has a portrait of the volume’s patron, the Duchess of Richmond and Lenox, the 1819 editors place a portrait of Smith himself along with a laudatory poem, both taken from a map of New England printed in several of his works (the 1819 portrait improves considerably on its original). The Richmond edition heralds the identification of Smith as, anachronistically, an American. What was he before—for English readers and audiences, closer in time to the book’s publication? One kind of evidence about how early readers read is the physical evidence of what they did to, and with books. The three case studies that follow each examine a different kind of evidence: how an early reader annotated one of Smith’s books; how True Travels got into the Bodleian library; and how the central, graphic image of the autobiography was repeated and reused in other contexts. A Reader’s Notes: Huntington 3346 Sometime in the mid- to late seventeenth century, a reader wrote in the margins of his book, “Vide p. 46 of Captain Smith’s


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Travels, & Adventures.”70 The note appears in a copy of Smith’s Generall Historie, at the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, which has been annotated by an early reader. These annotations include the biographical notice copied from Fuller (Worthies, 1684) already cited in the introduction; they extend literally from cover to cover, from the inside front to the inside back cover. Among the annotations are two names on the title page: Arthur Cotton and George de Horne, with the date 1707; neither has been identified. Setting aside the signatures and the excerpt from Fuller, the annotations appear to be the work of a single hand. Most of the annotations simply recopy in the margins passages that appear in the text. Effectively, these marginalia function as a form of highlighting, a more laborious version of the pointing hands that readers sometimes drew to call attention to passages of particular importance. These highlighted passages are of several kinds, broadly speaking. First, many contain practical information about goods and commodities; for instance, “Rawrenoke is white beades which are much esteemed among the Saluages euen as siluer & gold among Christians vide page 58” (GH 116); “pocones a Red Roote/ vide 70 . . . they account it very precious & of much worth.” Others perform a kind of accounting: giving dates, numbering fishing ships in a given year, tracking the numbers of livestock and persons in the colony: “Of 500. within six months after Captain Smith’s departure, there remained not past 60 men, women & children.” Less frequently highlighted are evaluative statements and personal experiences. The note on 47 about Smith’s captivity—“Capt. Smith tyed to a tree to be shot to death”—contains virtually the only notice of the personal information about Smith contained in the text. On 206, next to a statement in the text of Smith’s disinterested hope that the colony will prosper even without him, the annotator has written “a noble resolution of an heroical mind.” The annotator also has some interest in colonial policies, particularly subsequent to the Indian uprising of 1622, and follows in some detail the policy recommendations of an English minister: “The opinion of Master Jonas Stockham a minister of Virginia concerning the best means that are to be used, for the conversion of the savages. Vide page 147 150.” Another very large (and overlapping) group of annotations provide cross-references. Some of these are to other places in the same text (as in the case of the first two examples earlier); in one case, two adjacent pages have identical notes—“Oranges & Lemons an undoubted remedy for the scurvey, Callenture, & other Diseases”—each carefully crossreferenced to the facing page: “vide page 108” and “vide page 109.”

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In the case of several passages describing reports that “the Massawomecks inhabit upon a great saltwater” (33, 61, 63), which might have inspired hopes of access to the Pacific, the annotator has provided references to a later passage on 68 that he has also underlined: “but for any saltwater . . ., the Relations you have had from my people are false” (Margin, “vide page 33”). A second group of cross-references connect places in this text to a small set of other publications on America. These publications include three important early accounts of New England, by Francis Higginson, William Wood, and Thomas Morton.71 Associated with these by its focus on the northeastern seaboard is a much more obscure text, Description of the Province of New Albion (1648), by Beauchamp Plantagenet (the latest of all the works cited, it gives us an earliest date for the annotations). Also figuring in the annotations are the Decades of Peter Martyr. Decades was a standard work on Spanish activities in the Americas, but an early one; the first partial translation into English was by Richard Eden in 1555, and a complete translation by Michael Lok went into several editions from 1612 on (the edition used has not been identified).72 Finally, the annotator gives two references to “Captain Smith’s Travels, & Adventures” (167, 230)—the information he draws from Smith is on New England. The annotator was clearly interested in New England, but does not cite Description of New England (1616), New Englands Trials (1620, 1622), or the later Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters (1631). Page references as well as comparison of the texts make clear that the work referred to is the autobiography (“the last treatise of his Travels printed Anno.1630”) rather than the three books on New England. Finally, marginal annotations cross-referencing passages with other pages and other books appear to overlap with another large group of annotations, which are written in code. At least some of these are also cross-references to pages in the same text. In other cases, the page numbers do not match for Generall Historie. In a few places—the margins of page 20, and the verso of map of Virginia, between pages 40 and 41—the annotator has written more extensively in what bears some resemblance to diplomatic cipher. The most extensive annotations are found on the verso of the back flyleaf and inside the back cover. In tabular form, the annotator assembles information drawn from the text on the number of ships involved in the New England fishery annually from 1614 to 1624, with the profit made per share; below, he lists “the seasons for fishing in New England,” and what can be caught in each month. The nature of what the annotator gathers together here suggests a practical interest


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in the possibilities of a New England fishery similar to that at Newfoundland—focused on producing dried, salted fish for home consumption and European trade. (Passages in the text concerning salt are also marked and commented.) But there is a curious quality to this practical concern. Although the annotator has evidently consulted other books, he carries his information only up to 1624—at least twenty-four years before the annotations were made. Why not include more recent information? Another detail of this page suggests that however practical the annotator’s interests, he was far from well informed. These notes on the fishery reference a second source beside Travels: “vide page .9. in the directions for New Albion.” Nova Albion was probably the least well-informed and least reliable, as well as the most obscure, of the annotator’s sources. Beauchamp Plantagenet “of Belvill in New Albion,” the book’s supposed author, appears to be nonexistent; Richard McCormick, a historian of early New Jersey, suggests that the name was “doubtless” a pseudonym used by Sir Edmund Plowden.73 In 1634, Plowden received a patent from Charles I for lands in the lower Delaware Basin. Almost ten years later, after serving several terms in a London prison for debt . . . Plowden . . . worked his way to Virginia and there prepared an expedition to the Delaware. He succeeded in embarking, but his crew seized the vessel and abandoned him on an island off Cape Henry. On reaching Fort Elfsborg, the mutineers were taken by [the Swedish governor] Printz and returned to Virginia, where they were hanged. Plowden himself was rescued by two loyal followers. By 1648, back in England, this enthusiastic visionary was preparing a more grandiose expedition, but he was unable to find the necessary support.74

Nova Albion is remarkable for its fantasy of a neo-feudal colonial paradise, but it was hardly a mine of experienced knowledge. (Fishing and colonial fantasy were not a totally unique combination; George Calvert planned to establish his colony of Avalon in Newfoundland as a county palatine, though this plan did not survive the first winter he spent on the ground.) Plantagenet’s book does incorporate a shorter, earlier text by Robert Evelin, who had some experience of the coast, but the page reference on the flyleaf of Huntington 3346 is not to the part of the text Evelin wrote. Another piece of circumstantial evidence similarly suggests a dim idea of what were reliable sources. The annotator cites a passage on cod from Smith’s text, both in the margin and inside the back cover, which Smith himself had drawn from Richard Whitbourne’s Discourse

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containing a Loving Invitation (London, 1622), a practical manual on settling and fishing in Newfoundland based on experience of some forty years in the fishery. (Smith misattributes this portion of the text to “Charles Whitbourne” in all editions of Generall Historie.) Although Whitbourne’s work on Newfoundland had been very widely publicized and distributed—James I had ordered copies of his Discourse and Discovery of Nevv-fovnd-land (1620) to be sent to churches with a letter directing ministers to collect contributions from their parishioners—it was apparently unknown to the annotator, despite his piscine interests. This reader’s use of the text raises some interesting questions. Did people read Travels for the addenda, as another book with information about New England and Virginia? Was this reader, for instance, interested at all in John Smith and his achievements, or did he only notice information about practical matters? One last group of annotations will take us back to the text and to an important piece of evidence about the annotator’s understanding of its priorities. Inside the back cover the annotator has written a list of maps, with their subject and location in the text. As can be seen from figure 2.5, the line “with the mappe of Old Virginia” was evidently added as an afterthought after the lines above and below had already been written. At last, we seem to have found signs that the reader was paying attention to biography, and particularly to the interesting narrative of Smith’s captivity, which has so fascinated modern audiences. This table of maps graphically suggests that the biographical scenes—which surround the actual map of “Old Virginia” (Roanoke and the Outer Banks) in Smith’s text—had priority over its geographical information, at least for this reader. Turning to the map of “Old Virginia,” we find another set of annotations, most simply linking the images from Smith’s biography to the appropriate pages in the text. A blizzard of page numbers, however, marks the image of John Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas at bottom right (see figure 2.6). But the modern reader would be wrong in guessing what these numbers indicate. They do not link the image of Pocahontas saving Smith’s life to other appearances of Pocahontas in the text. In fact, they do not relate directly to the image at all, but rather to the caption beneath it: “he subjected 39 of their Kings.” On all but two of the twenty pages referenced, the annotator has carefully identified and numbered, in the margins, the thirty-nine Kings referred to in this caption (see figure 2.7). On page 163, a reference back to the map makes the connection explicit. Next to a printed marginal comment—“How the Salvages became subjected”—the annotator has added “so that 39 of their

Figure 2.5 Annotation inside back cover, John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1632), Huntington RB 3346. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Figure 2.6 “King Powhatan commands C. Smith to be slayne,” John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1632), Huntington RB 3346. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)


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Kings paid contribution to the English. Vide page 81.in the Map of old Virginia.” Smith’s captivity, and Pocahontas’s mercy, were not the point: for this reader, the text documents Smith’s power, not his suffering. Early Collecting: Bodleian Fol.BS.94 (3) Smith claimed that he wrote True Travels for Sir Robert Cotton. Collections and collecting can also tell us something about the reception of the text. The Bodleian’s copy of True Travels is interesting for two reasons: it is in a close-to-contemporary binding, and the Bodleian has good records of its acquisitions. Many volumes of early Americana that a reader will find now in rare book libraries reflect the preferences of their nineteenth-century collectors: their pages have been washed and cut down to be rebound in attractive tooled and gilt leather bindings. Books were treated this way because they had become valuable as objects and as memorabilia. But we would like to know more about the motives for acquiring them before they became the rare and valuable memorabilia of early American history. What did Travels look like to the book-buying public in 1630 and thereafter? Books in contemporary bindings can yield layers of evidence about

Figure 2.7 Annotations, page 60, John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1632), Huntington RB 3346. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

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the acquisition and handling of a work, where it was located after purchase both physically and within the categories of topic (and value) that organized collections. Inspection of the book’s binding indicates that it was at one point attached to shelving by a chain; patrons would read chained books at lecterns adjacent to their shelves. This feature suggests that when the book was bound, it was part of an institutional collection, since only institutions such as cathedrals and colleges chained their books. The Bodleian chained most of its collection until much later than did libraries at Cambridge, for instance: chains for books were still being purchased in the early 1750s, and volumes only began to be unchained after 1760.75 The binding indicates, even before the book is opened, that this volume probably became part of the Bodleian collection sometime within the first hundred or so years after its publication. Opening the book reveals a second interesting feature: Smith’s work is bound into a volume with an unusual set of other texts. This in itself is not a unique occurrence: Travels can occasionally be found bound together with Generall Historie, and one of the two British Library copies of Travels, from the library of Sir Joseph Banks, also exists as part of a larger volume of works by other hands. It was not unusual for different works to be bound together, since purchasers generally paid for bindings themselves, and materials were expensive. The likelihood of Smith’s book in particular being bound as part of a larger volume was surely very high, given its very slender dimensions. Yet the contents of the Bodleian volume raise a few particular and suggestive questions about the ways in which this text was treated by Bodley’s librarians in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Travels has on its title page the signature of Robert Burton, famous as the author of Anatomy of Melancholy.76 Burton owned other works by Smith in addition to Travels, Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), and Accidence (1626), and his brother George may have been in Virginia with Smith.77 More specifically, the appearance of “Burton” and “Democritus Jr.” (Burton’s pseudonym) on Smith’s maps suggests some kind of acquaintance between Smith and Burton; without further evidence nothing can be definitely asserted beyond that Smith knew Burton’s work, but more is certainly possible. Smith’s habit of making up and distributing presentation copies of earlier books also allows speculation that the copy could have been a gift—again, in the broader context of Smith’s practice, not necessitating a close acquaintance with Burton. Roughly 5 percent of

Edited by Foxit Reader T h r e Software e T u r k s ’ Company,2005-2008 Heads” 107 Copyright(C) by“ Foxit For Evaluation Only. Burton’s collection focused on geography and travel; a list of geographical writers figured in Anatomy.78 He also owned a first edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589), originally purchased by his father, now in the library of Christ Church, Oxford; another book on Virginia, A Declaration of the State of the Colony (1620) came to him as a gift from Henry Briggs, Savile professor of mathematics at Merton, who had written on the likelihood of a Northwest passage. Burton bought the book, as geography or because of a personal acquaintance, or was given it; its presence in the collection seems well explained. Burton’s books came into the Oxford libraries after his death as a result of a bequest made in his will of 1639: “If I have any books the university library has not let them take them. If I have any books our own [Christchurch] library has not let them take them” (Kiessling, Burton, vii). (It looks like Generall Historie came into the library in a similar way, after the death of Selden and the acquisition of his collection in 1659.) Bodley’s librarian, John Rous—who had succeeded Thomas James—selected from the Burton collection, and the remainder of the books went to Christ Church. Rous’s list survives, and it differs in interesting ways from the kinds of criteria articulated by Thomas Bodley, the library’s founder, who had died in 1613. Earlier in the chapter, I noted that Bodley did not wish the library to include plays, and this exclusion extended to other ephemeral—or vernacular— literature. Bodley articulated his views in some detail to James in a series of surviving letters. Rous’s selection from the Burton library effectively “countered” Bodley’s earlier dismissal of ephemeral books, choosing “especially comedies, tragedies, poetry, and comic works mainly in the vernacular, collections which because of their number we have not added” (Burton, ix). Indeed, Rous’s list included a number of books he grouped under the heading of “Ridicularia”—titles such as The Melancholy Knight, Bevis of Southampton, and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Burton, Plate I). Burton’s collection of 1738 volumes was especially strong on books published in his own lifetime; Kiessling says that 74 percent of the collection fell under this heading. The collection contrasted in this regard with some other contemporary private collections whose catalogues survive—that of Lord Lumley, for instance, consulted by Hakluyt, was weighted much more heavily toward antiquarian and historical materials, and also toward materials in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew rather than in English.79 Bodley’s aversion to the vernacular was even stronger, “scorning English books in general as ‘idle bookes and riffe-raffes.’” 80 The

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strengths of Burton’s collection matched the Bodleian’s needs as articulated by Rous, and Rous’s selection, precisely by diverging from Bodley’s wishes, netted real treasures for the library: among the volumes he acquired through the Burton bequest were fifty-one books for which the Bodleian owns the only known copy, and fifty-eight more for which no copy exists in the major institutional libraries of Europe and the United States (Burton, xxxii). Thus, Smith’s autobiography was acquired by Burton probably under the auspices of the latter’s interest in travel, possibly through personal acquaintance, and entered the Bodleian through the Burton bequest in 1641. None of Smith’s books appear to have been acquired by Thomas James, the first librarian, under Bodley’s criteria. This seems worth remark only because we have already seen Smith’s association with Richard James, the nephew of Bodley’s first librarian as well as being Cotton’s librarian himself; the holograph copy of James’s commendatory poem on True Travels, cited early in this chapter, is in the James family papers in the Bodleian. Perhaps the timing was wrong; perhaps the younger James did not recommend or offer Smith’s books to his uncle; perhaps Smith was not interested in Bodley’s library in the way he was in Cotton’s, or the Earl of Pembroke’s—private collections which might come with private patronage. In any event, his works were never likely acquisitions for a collection focused as was the Bodleian, prior to and during Rous’s tenure, on works in classical languages. 81 What did the Bodleian do with Burton’s True Travels once it was in the library? Some of the Burton volumes came into the Bodleian already “coupled”—that is, as a number of separate works joined together in a single binding. This was the case for Smith’s Map of Virginia; it formed part of a volume whose other contents included works on the Americas, Henry Hudson (1612) on the Northeast, Robert Johnson (1609), on Virginia, Silvester Jourdain (1613), on the Bermudas, and Walter Ralegh and Robert Harcourt on Guiana (1596, 1613). Rous catalogued the volume under the title of the first work it included, a Latin edition of Bartolomé de las Casas printed by Theodore de Bry in 1598. In other words, Smith’s Map of Virginia was selected by Rous as part of a group of books rather than individually. Nonetheless, this group was a coherent one, reflecting Burton’s interest in geography and travel as well as the interests of the librarian. True Travels is a rather different case. It is not bound with other works on travel; if there is a logic at work in organizing the contents


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of this volume, it is not readily apparent. The contents of Fol.BS.94 are as follows: 1. De Commutatione Monetarum (one sheet, used as waste paper). 2. Corona Suecica sive Panegyricus Pot. Ser. Regi Carolo Gustavo (Heidelberg, 1655). 3. Epithalamium Auraico-Brittanicum (London, 1641). 4. Smith, True Travels (London, 1630). 5. R.p. Nicolai Serarii . . . Prolegomena Biblaica (Mogunt, 1612). 6. Matthew Owen, “Carol o gyngor, yn galennig ir Cymru” (Rhydychen, 1658). Broadside, two copies. 7. A Francisco Daza Secretario del Ex. Señor Duque de Lerma . . . (fragment). 8. Catalogus Arborum . . . in horto Johanni Gerardi (London, 1599). 9. Diataxis Kupria tou Alexandrou Papa tou Tetrartou (Rome, 1636). [Greek and Latin]. 10. Holograph letters, Edward Fenton and John Ferrar, 1641. The latest work in the volume, no. 6, dates to 1658, well after the Burton volumes came into the library. Fol.BS.94 was evidently not bound in its present form by Burton; and it was not bound in the summer of 1641, when most of the other new accessions from the Burton bequest were sent out to the binders. The two items in the volume that particularly attracted my attention are Prolegomena Biblaica (uncatalogued) and the two letters. Jesuit commentaries on the Bible are not something a student of the Elizabethans expects to find in a mid-seventeenth-century English library—scholars of religion are less surprised. Even under Elizabeth—whose Act of Obedience in 1580 penalized nonattendance at Anglican worship, and sent subjects to prison for hearing mass, whose ministers discovered plots to kill her to put a Catholic monarch on the throne—being a Protestant or a Catholic was not always as clear-cut as we might expect. The juxtaposition of Smith’s Travels with the Prolegomena of Nikolaus Serarius, S.J., serves to remind us of an incident in the autobiography that displays just such a confessional ambiguity. As the autobiography testifies, Smith not only visited Rome in the 1590s but while there was curious or broadminded enough to hear Clement VIII say mass at the church of Saint John Lateran. He also “saluted Father Parsons, that famous English Jesuite” (Travels, 162). Father Robert Persons was probably the most famous English Jesuit of his day, and (again) not someone you would expect a good

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Anglican subject of Elizabeth I to drop in on. Persons was an active controversialist who had repeatedly attacked Elizabeth I’s government in print; ordained in 1578, he had visited England secretly in 1580 to dissuade English Catholics from occasional conformity with the state church. (His companion, Fr. Edmund Campion, was caught and executed for seditious printing in 1581.) Persons escaped to the continent, where he worked actively to further the invasion of England, the overthrow of the queen, and the restoration of Catholicism; he published a broadside in the year of the Armada justifying force against an illegitimate and heretical ruler.82 From 1589 to 1596, he was in Spain, working with English sailors who might turn up there as captives—whether to assist them or persuade them to heresy and treason depends on which side of the controversy you read, but Hakluyt certainly viewed the danger to religious conformity posed by men such as Persons as a significant disincentive to AngloSpanish trade.83 Certainly Persons assisted Smith. Smith was recommended to his first commander in Transylvania by an Irish Jesuit to whom (it seems likely) he had in turn been recommended by Persons (Travels, 162). Nonetheless, in the context of the 1590s, it is nothing short of astonishing that Smith would seek out someone so notorious as Persons in the first place—an indication that this is a history that is not yet understood as well as it might be.84 The second item is the set of two letters bound in at the end of the volume. These letters—copied in the same hand, and dated 1641— reflect an exchange between one Edward Fenton (not the Elizabethan explorer) and John Ferrar. Edward Fenton had been requested to pay a visit to the religious community that the Ferrar family had established at Little Gidding to investigate the rumors that the Little Gidding community was suspiciously Catholic in its practices. The first letter contains his detailed report on what he saw, the questions he asked, and answers he received. One such question concerned the frequent display of the insignia “IHS” (with a cross placed above the bar on the H). Why did they display these letters, so closely associated with the Jesuits? (The title page to the Serarius text in the same volume has an example that makes the visual resemblance very clear.) The Ferrars answered that it was the name of God, Alpha and Omega. Fenton commented that “I could have wisht it written . . . in any other way to have differenced it from that the Papists only used but no Protestants.”85 The Little Gidding community has its own interest for readers and students of English literature, as the title and setting for one of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It has another set of associations in the


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context of colonial history. The Ferrar brothers, Nicholas and John, had been heavily involved with the Virginia company, at one point serving as deputy treasurers for the Jamestown colony. Their turn to the contemplative life, expressed in the “nunnery” at Little Gidding, was a reaction against their experience of “perplexities, distraction, and almost utter ruine in other calling”—namely, the bad outcome of their involvement with Virginia. The gathering of works within Fol.BS.94 principally suggests that Smith’s autobiography was being treated as “miscellaneous” or “other,” not grouped with other works on travel, for instance (the category within which the Churchills would understand it some fifty years later), but with works that were both difficult to categorize and (mostly) too short or fragmentary to stand alone. This indirect evidence matches the indirect evidence of the autobiography’s acquisition. The inclusion of the letters, however, suggests something different. The volume begins and ends with materials by men who were centrally involved with the Jamestown colony, who surely knew each other whether or not they were friends. How did the Ferrar letters become part of the volume catalogued under Smith’s name? If their conjunction within the same binding is not simply a striking coincidence, it suggests that someone in the library had read Smith’s book, and mentally categorized both it and the letters not only as “miscellaneous,” but also as “colonial history.” At least Travels was not bound with Bevis of Southampton.86 Graphic Images: British Library G.7195 If the librarians of Oxford were unsure what to make of Travels, it found an enthusiastic audience elsewhere. The final copy to be described here came to the British Library through the bequest of Sir Thomas Grenville in 1848. Grenville was a major collector (unrelated to his Elizabethan namesake), with particular interests in early voyages and travels—along with rare pamphlets on the Armada of 1588 and materials on the divorce of Henry VIII he owned a number of works by Smith, including True Relation, Map of Virginia, Description of New England, and Generall Historie as well as True Travels.87 (Grenville had also owned a copy of Ralegh’s 1591 pamphlet on the Revenge, now in the Huntington; an inscription identifies it as a gift from Grenville to an unidentified recipient relatively early in his collecting career: “e dono Thomae Grenville 26 Nov: 1801.”) Bound into the Grenville copy of True Travels is a well-preserved broadside poem, accompanied by the penciled note, “To this copy is subjoined

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a poem on Captain Smith and his family, of which I do not know or hear of any other copy.”88 The title of the poem is “A Congratulatory Poem upon the Noble Feast Made by the Ancient and Renowned Families of the Smiths” (London, ?1684).89 It figures here because it recapitulates for a public occasion, in word and image, what were at least for one author the salient events of Smith’s biography. The broadside marks its occasion by listing (rather vaguely) the great deeds of Smiths throughout English history, fighting alongside William the Conqueror in 1066 and with Drake in 1588. (“Of none we read, excepting Mighty Drake, than Famous Smith that made more fierce attacque; he made the haughty Spaniards feel his pow’r, giving them ruin on their Native Shore.”) The climax of the list is John Smith. Stewards, the poet writes, will bring to the feast “glittering flags” bearing . . . those Turkish heads, Purchas’d by Smith of Crudwells famous deeds When ‘twixt two Potent Armies he made fall, The strong Turbashaw, Turkys General, And in the self same day, to crush the Pride Of all his followers, vanquish’d two beside, And brought their gasping heads besmear’d with gore To mighty Sigismund the Emperor, Who thinking not enough for that brave man Who fought so stoutly for the Christian fame, To make his royal gratitude appear, Order’d 300 Duckats ev’ry year To be allow’d this noble Captain, and Charg’d him by all the pow’r of his Command Never again to enter Martial Field Without three Turks-heads graven in his shield, And sign’d a patten that the same should be A Coat of Arms to his Posterity.

Fifty years after his death, the broadside invoked Smith as a heroic predecessor whose kinship enhanced the prestige of the lord mayor. If details such as Smith’s birthplace and Zsigmond’s title were incorrect, the writer clearly did know the details of Smith’s grant of arms and the amount of his pension. What stands out here, both in the poem and the illustration, is the frank invocation of “gasping heads besmeared with gore,” the heads that Smith cut off and then displayed on his coat of arms. The illustration to the broadside juxtaposes in two compartments images taken from Smith’s True Travels (figure 2.8). The bottom half


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Figure 2.8 A Congratulatory Poem upon the Noble Feast Made by the Ancient and Renowned Families of the Smiths (London, ?1684). (Copyright © The British Library, G.7195*)

of the illustration reproduces a smaller image, which forms the background to one of the True Travels engravings. In the foreground of the original image, Smith approached his general followed by three men bearing the heads on pikes. In the background, reproduced in “A Congratulatory Poem,” the heads are returned to Smith as symbols

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when he receives a banner from Zsigmond bearing his arms. The top half represents Smith’s third duel, and the engraver makes two significant changes. First, he shows Smith (again, indicated by a cross) with his visor up. Second, to the image of two armored knights in mounted combat, he adds two severed heads already lying on the ground. These heads are not only absent from the original image, but since Smith’s third duel took place some time after the first two, they would hardly have been there in life either. This graphic image of the severed head, and its transformation into symbol, insist on both recalling Smith’s elevation in status and reanimating its origins in the specific acts of violence that were translated with great literalness into the images of the coat of arms. What other resonances, beyond the circuit of violence and ennoblement, made this image meaningful and attractive to its author and audience? One frame for reading this image would be traditions of heraldry. The heads of Turks and Saracens (the terms were sometimes used interchangeably) are among several armorial heads mentioned in grammars of heraldry.90 They appeared on armorial bearings for families whose members had fought in the Crusades (thus visually backdating, in a way, Smith’s claim to arms). In what may have been a conflation of the Crusades with other Eastern wars, the mid-seventeenth century also yields several references to “Turk’s Heads” and “Saracens” along with the ring as targets for training with the lance; the practice suggested a conventional link between Turks’ heads and the licensed, recreational, and only symbolically violent activity of riding at the ring.91 The broadside’s explicit location in the City of London invites us to consider other contexts for the image as well: in particular, advertisement and commerce. Tavern and shop signs displayed the disembodied heads of every notable figure imaginable, from Kings to unicorns and dogs, passing through Queens, dukes, bishops, admirals, men of letters, and foreign figures: the Czar, the Sultan, the blackamoor, the Saracen, the Turk. These signs generally did not overlap with the actual severed heads that one might have seen in early modern London as a result of English penal practices. You could not have a drink or receive mail at the Traitor’s Head, Queen of Scots’s Head, Guy Fawkes’s Head. There was no “Irishman’s Head” to celebrate the ferocity of Humphrey Gilbert.92 More than a hundred establishments had “Turks Head” signs between 1650 and 1850. The earliest such sign seems to have been the “great Turk or great Turks head in Fleet Street,” a bookseller around 1600.93 Generally, however, the Turk’s Head was associated


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with the appearance of coffee-houses in London after 1650 or so, places to find an exotic drink quickly becoming domesticated as part of everyday life.94 For Londoners in the late seventeenth century, in other words, the heads on Smith’s arms were familiar, as heads, as the sign for a commodity both foreign and readily available. The heads of Turks were unique in straddling the boundary between violence and commercial representation. Even as decapitation was implied by the graphic image and its accompanying text, the freestanding head was already a sign of known value, implying only commerce and consumption, and balancing the harmless exercise of riding at targets against actual violence. In this City context, Smith’s story manages to have the cachet of violence virtually without the guilt. The second remarkable feature of “A Congratulatory Poem,” besides its visual addition of the severed heads, is its claim of a family connection. As best we know, Smith was childless. Parents and, indeed, relatives of any kind are conspicuous by their absence from the autobiography. Narratively speaking, Smith’s father and mother died in Travels as soon as he had noted his own birth and their descent: “His father anciently descended from the ancient Smiths of Crudley in Lancashire; his mother from the Rickards at great Heck in York-shire” (Travels, 153). (Smith’s mother actually survived to remarry.) At the other end of his life, Smith left bequests in his will to a sister-in-law, who received ten pounds, and to two cousins. The sister-in-law sued unsuccessfully for a greater share in an estate left principally to Smith’s friends. The two “family” coats of arms with which Smith quartered his own are characterized by Barbour as largely the creative imaginations of his engraver, only somewhat resembling the arms in use by branches of the Smith and Rickards families to which Smith may, or may not, have been related. (Smith’s will identifies him as “armiger” and “Esquiour”; his father is designated in his own will as “husbandman.”) The 1684 poem shows that at least one audience was willing not only to take Smith’s story on its own terms, but to perform a similar act of fictional affiliation by taking Smith as, in some poorly defined way, a forebear. This adoption of Smith as ancestor was not unique. Two hundred years later, William Smyth (1788–1865), an admiral in the British Royal Navy, adopted Smith’s arms as part of his own. Admiral Smyth was a distinguished hydrographer and a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society who served as its president during 1849–50; he edited a translation of Benzoni for the Hakluyt Society. Smyth’s father had been a large landowner in New Jersey before the American Revolution, and lost his lands because of

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his loyalty to the crown. He claimed to be descended from the colonist; his son, the admiral, adopted this belief and passed it on to his own son, whose travelogue A Year with the Turks cites Smith as “an ancestor of the author’s.”95 Coats of arms have traditionally been designed at least in part to identify lineage. This particular one speaks not so much to Smith’s family as to his individual achievements. Furthermore, the specific achievements memorialized by the coat of arms make it tempting to say that the Smyths, like the earlier City Smiths, claimed descent not from John Smith the colonist, but from a historically identical John Smith who wanted to be remembered in quite different terms. We should note that that this kinship was claimed at the level of family, rather than of national community. Appropriations of Smith as an ancestor, literary or otherwise, say something about how we want to see the past and also ourselves. American popular culture has insisted, in defiance of all the evidence, in locating Smith at the center of a narrative about cross-cultural romance. The fossilized violence of Smith’s coat of arms crystallizes the way in which Smith wanted to be remembered. It marks a relationship toward the other of successful violence, legitimated by distance and by its recapitulation of older histories. The genealogy of images and interpretations beginning with David Lloyd, and extending through Thomas Fuller, the anonymous broadside writer, the Huntington annotator, and three generations of the Smyth family, recovers for us an earlier sense of what his life was about, as well as a different sense of who his modern heirs might really be. Of course, this too is a partial memory of the life the autobiography records—as it also hints at a narrative of cross-cultural romance in Istanbul and briefly entertains even the possibility of Smith’s religious and cultural conversion while in the East. Arguably, these hints sit comfortably within Smith’s larger narrative of profiting from cultural encounter— but whether it is about violence or attraction, the autobiography offers us stories that Disney has not yet wanted to tell.96

Chapter 3

“R ebellious F ish” : Newfoundl and Unremembered

The cod fishery was the training school for the conquest of the Invincible Armada, a much earlier training ground than the buccaneering and channel roving to which Mr. Froude . . . attributes our maritime supremacy. D.W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland [E]xploitation of [the Newfoundland fishery] was one of the great economic activities of Europe during the latter sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries . . . it trained generations of mariners, employed thousands of craftsmen and suppliers, and involved families and friends, syndicates and whole communities in North American activities long before any Pilgrim or Puritan, Norman or Dutch colonist took root in American soil. D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America Wee might have gotten more to have sent them afishinge, I ashure your lordshipp. Sir Walter Ralegh to Lord Burleigh, 1591

Introduction In 1996, a team of archaeologists working at Jamestown announced the discovery there of the first English fort’s foundations, dated to 1607; the site of the fort had previously been believed to be on land eroded by the James River. The New York Times quoted James Axtell,

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an eminent historian of the period, on this find: “Any time we get early Colonial artifacts, it’s important. . . . There’s also the symbolic significance here. Jamestown represents the founding of Virginia and of English America, even though other places are better examples of successful colonization.”1 For a number of reasons, this article seized my attention. To begin with, coverage of the Jamestown excavation on the front page of the New York Times demonstrates that the colonial past may still be news, and a matter of compelling public interest. Second, Axtell’s comment suggests that, even as facts about the past (at least as we know them) are in motion, the way we think about these facts exhibits certain constants: we persist in looking for the origins or foundations of the present. These foundations are generally not the literal, material foundations whose excavation we can read about in the Times. Jamestown already represented a founding moment before this actual fort came to light. What constitutes a foundation, symbolically speaking? Is it the birth of an English child in the new land (Roanoke), or the arrival of a colony that survives (Jamestown)? Perhaps it could be the “cultural and material investment” represented by “the New World’s first Anglican sermon and . . . the first English building with a mortared foundation” at Frobisher’s camp on Kodlunarn Island.2 As colonial history amply testifies, the identification of European origins and foundations in North America will always be qualitative, rather than simply chronological. Jamestown is one of multiple possibilities, if an important one. The island of Newfoundland offers the story of an origin not only rejected, but never really proposed. Newfoundland was probably England’s earliest landfall, and certainly its earliest land claim in North America—but more than that, it was the central experience of America for the vast majority of sixteenth-century Englishmen who had such experience at all. Yet centrality has not led to memory, and this experience remains startlingly unremembered and unrecorded. As John Reid comments, “Colonization was a conceptual as well as a physical process.”3 Understanding how to exploit Newfoundland’s resources was one thing. Finding a way to think about Newfoundland, which would give the land and its people a place and meaning in European consciousness, proved to be less simple. The failure to attach significance and meaning to Newfoundland’s particular history has made for a failure of memory—not, to be sure, in Newfoundland itself, but within the larger communities whose understandings have shaped our sense of North American history after contact. “Successful colonization” and “symbolic significance” may not be exactly the same thing. A comparison with another sixteenth-century

“Rebellious Fish”

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colonial site offers a case in point of this disjunction: the colony at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, sponsored by Sir Walter Ralegh in the 1580s, failed on the ground, yet came to have great symbolic importance both to contemporaries and to modern audiences. The settlement left in 1587 was essentially abandoned and cut off from supply, as shipping was kept close to home in response to the threat of the Armada; when searchers returned to the island in 1590, the colonists were gone. Yet Roanoke’s very failure was put to use. The “lost” colonists served first as Ralegh’s justification for the continuing validity of his patent, which depended on the settlement of a colony, and later—following rumors of their massacre by Powhatan—as “the talking point for aggressive expansionist propaganda.”4 The failure of the colony served to promote claims about ownership, as notional colonists replaced visible, tangible, wilful ones who might well have insisted (like the men removed by Drake in 1586) on going home. A literature and mythology grew up around the lost colonists that has been the subject of study in its own right. The Jamestown story reminds us that places are linked to documents, to be sure, but they also offer other resources and other experiences. As brief a presence as the Frobisher voyages left an important archaeological trace, and in places where presence persisted, new evidence literally continues to surface. Archaeological traces have the potential not only to supplement the historical and documentary record, but to contest its claims—a situation I return to in the Afterword.5 Even for sites in colonial America which have been studied for decades, the facts as we know them are still in motion.6 This chapter studies a place, and the writing about that place over more than a century. In that respect, we are working on quite a different scale from that of chapters 1 and 2, focused as they were on a relatively small group of individual persons, events, and books. An important set of contributing evidence comes not from marginalia or the history of collections, but from archaeology—in effect, moving us several steps further from biography and toward a more broadly based history of communities. Yet the richness of archaeological traces in Newfoundland supplements a documentary record so sparse— especially for narrative texts—that in respect at least of available materials, the difference in scale is considerably less than might be apparent. If we begin to think about the relative attention paid—say, on the shelves of a given library in the United States—to Hakluyt’s heroes, to John Smith’s inconvenient autobiography, and to the rocky island off the coast of Labrador, the difference may shrink to altogether manageable proportions, or indeed reverse itself. To take an

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earlier example, Purchas gave twenty pages to the manuscript that would become Smith’s True Travels, fully half as much as the forty pages of material devoted to all colonial activities in early seventeenthcentury Newfoundland.7 When we turn back from the historic record, the archive, and the library to the persons involved, a massive disproportion again appears: between a small number of more or less celebrated individuals, and the “generations” and “whole communities” (per Meinig) traveling to and living in Newfoundland in relative obscurity. This larger history has been underrepresented both in the archival record, and in the kinds of secondary sources that populate the libraries of mainland North America. The gap between textual representation and colonial reality—and the reasons for its persistence—asks to be better understood, as does the question of origins. It is not wrong to begin American history with North Carolina (or Virginia, or Massachusetts, or Baffin Island); at the same time, there are things to be learned from reflecting on why it seems obvious to almost everyone that Newfoundland is not the place to begin.

In the Beginning: English Origins in North America One of the numerous books sponsored by America’s Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee in commemoration of the Roanoke colony begins in this way: “Twenty-two years before John Smith and the Jamestown settlers first sighted Chesapeake Bay and thirty-five years before the Mayflower reached the coast of Massachusetts, the first English colony in America was established on Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina.”8 Just as Jamestown might be understood as “more significant” than more successful Anglo-American colonies that came later, Roanoke’s chronological priority here displaces Jamestown and Plymouth as origins for British North America. Yet Roanoke displaces not only what came after, but also what came before it. The colony Sir Walter Ralegh sponsored at Roanoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, was licensed under a patent inherited from his older half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert; Gilbert had arrived at St. John’s, Newfoundland, and claimed land for the Queen there in 1583, four years before the founding of Ralegh City at Roanoke. While Roanoke—first explored in 1584—was abandoned by 1590, the land claimed by Gilbert was continuously used, and settled before 1625.9 More to the point, Gilbert was not the first to


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arrive. His claim formalized (indeed, intended to exploit) the preexisting seasonal presence of Englishmen and other Europeans who went to Newfoundland to fish. (Gilbert’s “discovery” was beside the point as far as either the fishery or plantation was concerned, but it has formed the basis for retrospective claims of foundation.) Although the English did gradually populate both Newfoundland and the Outer Banks, both sites proved peripheral to the centers of developing colonial societies—New England, New Amsterdam, Virginia, New France. In a debate about origins, neither Roanoke nor Newfoundland matter because they were central in the way other places came to be (or continued to be, in the case of Hochelaga/Montréal and Stadacona/Québec); they matter because they were early. Early, but not equally early: Gilbert’s prior claim also had a prehistory. John Cabot made landfall somewhere in the Maritimes in 1497 under a patent granted by Henry VII, and Newfoundland itself was the destination of numerous early voyages.10 Evidence of earlier westward voyages, in the 1480s, has led historians to propose even earlier contact, although surviving information does not allow us to be sure where these voyages may have arrived.11 As early as 1517–19, the printer and voyager John Rastell already saw the “new landes,” rich with fish, with regret—as an opportunity, now lost in the past, both to compete with Spain in laying claim to America and to take advantage of Newfoundland’s particular and known resources. Tyll nowe within this .xx. yere westwarde be founde new landes That we never harde tell of before this. . . . O what a thynge had be than Yf that they that be Englyshe men Myght have ben the furst of all That there shulde have take possessyon And made furst buyldynge & habytacion. . . . Fyshe they have so great plente That in havyns take and slayne they be with stavys withouten fayle Nowe Frenchemen & other have founde the trade That yerely of fyshe there they lades Above an .C. sayle.12

Rastell imagines England taking possession of Newfoundland as a counterfactual “if only”: as if the Cabot claim had faded, by the failure to make good on its nominal claim; or as if it had already itself been forgotten. Chronology, in short, matters to discussions of origins, but

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not exclusively. The language of “establishment” and “founding” implies not merely presence or arrival in North America, but certain collective and signifying acts. The overlap of nationalism with colonial history, and its consequences for both motives and resources, have undeniably shaped our sense of North America in the sixteenth century. A narrative of colonial history effectively beginning at Roanoke makes sense for several reasons. One reason might be that Roanoke can be construed not only as “the dawn of English colonization in the New World,” but also as what Paul Green calls it in his play, The Lost Colony: “the spiritual birthplace of our nation.”13 Tiny Roanoke Island, inhabited for less than a decade, eventually became part of the United States, while Gilbert’s landfall would be first British territory and then, late in the game, Canadian. And if Canada is marginal for most U.S. perspectives, Newfoundland has been marginal from a Canadian perspective, joining Confederation only in the late 1940s. J.M. Bumstead writes that Canadian history crucially lacked a common and unifying traumatic experience, such as the war of national liberation experienced by the American colonies . . . there was no powerful fusion force of a national revolution in British North America and no development of a pervasive national political and sociocultural ideology. . . . The process [of moving toward nationhood and dominion status] was gradual and piecemeal; and, while hardly free from ideologies, those that developed, such as “responsible government,” were difficult to translate into cultural symbols and icons. . . .14

“Some places,” he continues—Newfoundland, Rupert’s Land, and Acadian New Brunswick—were left “to work out their cultural existence almost totally unimpeded by an official British culture.” Canadian culture was formed neither by violent reaction against Britain, nor by hegemonic imposition from Britain.15 Politically, Canada remains a country without the imaginary coherence of the United States, and this is reflected in the relative absence of forceful, American-style narratives about origin and foundation as well as in the continued possibility that one or more parts of the country may separate from it.16 Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith concur that in Canada, “a weak conception of national identity seems to encourage a strong sense of internal differences” (my italics).17 If Canada as a whole has not been definitively shaped by the centralizing, homogenizing forces either of hegemonic culture or of unifying trauma, Newfoundland has itself long been a “segmented


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society” of disparate and often isolated communities.18 Justice Reeves wrote in the late eighteenth century that “the population, though said to be great, is scattered as thinly as the products of the earth. Distant harbours and coves, not easily accessible by sea, are the places chosen for residence, the people of which have little knowledge or connection with one another to unite them.”19 The historical geographer D.W. Meinig notes that “each cove tended to be served by a particular merchant who had recruited crews and laborers from a particular port and hinterland”; in particular, he finds that West Country Anglican and Irish Catholic hamlets coexisted without mingling (Atlantic America, 88, 224). Until relatively recently, a significant part of the population was scattered among small outports accessible only from the sea. Even now, following programs of relocation and centralized resettlement that began in the 1950s, local differences (in accent, for instance) continue to matter. Given the history of Newfoundland, of Newfoundland within Canada, and of Canada within North America, it seems unlikely that Cabot and his successors would be the source of a commanding narrative of English origins in the Americas; their constituency was not a powerful or unified one. Yet the problem is not only one of social and political location; Newfoundland’s physical location and geography must also be taken into account. The general lag in English enterprises to the west has been attributed among other factors to the “northernness” of Cabot’s initial discovery, whether in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or elsewhere in the Maritimes. Meinig comments that “whereas only five years separate the voyage of Columbus out of Palos from that of Cabot out of Bristol, more than one hundred years separate the founding of Santo Domingo by the Spanish from that of Jamestown by the English.” Cabot and Columbus happened onto “two utterly different Americas”: “a formidably northerly America of foggy seas, ice-scoured lands, and punishing winters . . . [and a] Tropical America, a deceptive paradisaical America of green-mantled islands and perpetual warmth.”20 Franklin McCann, narrating the English discovery of America up to 1585, finds Roanoke (with which he concludes), “a fitting place to top the pursuit of discovery.” Newfoundland proved to be simply a false start, after which interest “was bound to shift away from a ‘new found land’ which had only codfish and timber to offer, products readily obtainable elsewhere and consequently not especially valuable or profitable. . . . There was little reason to explore this cold, inhospitable, and unattractive land except to search for a passage that could lead to the wealth beyond.”21

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There are a number of things to argue with in this passage—among them, McCann’s view of Newfoundland’s commodities as valueless— but it raises a question that has to be addressed. Does latitude not in fact explain the historical invisibility of which McCann’s book provides another instance? There are, of course, facts about location and climate that no rhetoric will make go away. Grant Head attributes Newfoundland’s slow rate of growth to “the properties and limitations of the physical environment, the problems of survival and adaptation, and especially the critical importance of food supplies from external sources.”22 The Historical Atlas of Canada shows only a fraction of the island’s land as capable of supporting the kinds of agriculture practiced by the English.23 Yet these geographic and climactic factors do not tell the whole story, particularly for the earliest period—say 1497–1630. Early colonial writing, on Newfoundland as well as Virginia, makes apparent that early seventeenth-century perceptions of climate were subjective, value-laden, and unstable.24 In other words, different observers looked at the same place and saw different things, sometimes different not only from each other but from what we understand to have been the facts. Indeed, some firsthand reporters saw the Avalon peninsula as verdant and agriculturally promising: Edward Wynne wrote to Lord Calvert in August, 1621, that their late-sown grain crop “ripens now so fast, that it carries the likelihood of an approaching harvest”; the “plentiful kitchen garden” is “so rank, that I have not seen the like in England.”25 Others defended the climate by analogy with other northerly regions; Richard Whitbourne, after forty years in the fishery, writes that if those concerned with cold would visit Muscovy or Sweden, “where the people live well and grow rich; such ill reporters of Newfoundland would alter their opinions.”26 Finally, some argued that the climate was in fact one of Newfoundland’s attractions. John Hagthorpe writes in 1625 that of all the English colonies, Newfoundland had the best climate, “agreeable with this of ours.”27 Robert Hayman, an early colonist who wrote a book of promotional poems, may have had to assuage well-grounded fears about Newfoundland’s winters, but his praise of its air as “wholesome, good” was not without many parallels in other writing from and about the colony. Despite growing awareness that Newfoundland really did get cold in the winter—a realization that led to George Calvert’s abandonment of his colony at Ferryland in 1629 in favor of a land grant further south—it was not an impossible place for English people to live, and they did live there, in the face of official disinterest and even occasional


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opposition. The economic demise of the early seventeenth-century colonizing companies nonetheless left a small population tenaciously clinging to the land after the official colonizers had gone home. The climate and land were indeed inhospitable, but not so much as to form an insuperable barrier to European settlement. On the other hand, Newfoundland did offer some powerful attractions in the form of resources: the cod and timber McCann dismisses as of little value.28 Codfish was a commodity of particular value, given its uses and place in the market. When Gilbert advocated to Queen Elizabeth the seizure of Spanish, French, and Portuguese fishing fleets at Newfoundland, he argued that “the retourne shall certainely be with greate gayne, For the N.F. [Newland Fish] is a principall and rich and everie where vendible merchaundise: and by the gayne thereof, shipping, victuall, munition, and the transporting of five or six thousand soldiors may be defrayed.”29 Gilbert’s praise for the value of fish was echoed in print by Robert Hitchcock a few years later, in a detailed proposal for the revival of the English fishery at home and abroad: “in tyme of warres, nothing doeth passe with lesse daunger, soner is vented and made readie money, then these herrynges, Codde, Lyng, and Newlandfish. So there is no doubt of utterance for fishe, either in warres or in peace.”30 Sir David Kirke boasted in the mid-seventeenth century that neither the Dutch, the Spaniards, nor the Portuguese could “well get any ship to the Indies without Newfoundland fish, there being no fish that will endure to pass the line sound and untainted but the fish of that country salted and dried there.”31 For all its importance, however, cod remained an inelegant commodity. John Smith recognized that fish “may seeme a mean and a base comoditie” to his readers; his Description of New England (1616) labored to make plausible and acceptable a New World enterprise based on fishing rather than gold. Gillian Cell attributes Richard Hakluyt’s omission of Newfoundland from his earlier colonial writings to a royal preference for gold over fish: “Wishing above all to enlist Elizabeth’s financial support for Raleigh’s Virginia, he knew that a prosaic commodity such as codfish would appeal little to a Queen eager for more spectacular profits and more glittering spoils.”32 Cell’s comment strikes a recurrent note in the secondary literature on Newfoundland, and that is a particular use of the language of literary genre. Not only the commodities but the place and its history are felt to be prosaic, in contrast with descriptions of English endeavors elsewhere as epic or romance. This language of genre bears returning to, but it should not obscure the fact that, at least commercially, English enterprise in Newfoundland was generally a success.

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Newfoundland was consistently an exception to the generally unhappy story of England’s frustrated search for American gold, as McCann backhandedly suggests: after 1497, “voyages to that part of America north of Mexico, except those concerned solely with the Newfoundland fishing, had ended in failure and produced only disappointment and bitterness” (69; italics mine). As the fishery developed, proponents argued that it was a means toward keeping precious metals within the kingdom, since a triangular trade with southern Europe allowed “exchange of Newfoundland fish for costly Mediterranean commodities with no draining away of bullion from England.”33 Bruce Trigger asserts that in the sixteenth century, simply in terms of numbers, “more European ships and men frequented the coasts of Newfoundland and the Gulf of the St. Lawrence each year than traveled between Spain and its rich and far-flung colonies in the New World.”34 David Quinn and James Axtell both compare the cod fishery off Newfoundland to the mines of Mexico and Peru. Mexican gold might be more exciting or evocative a form of wealth, but the value of the cod and whale fisheries off Newfoundland and in the St. Lawrence was such that “the Gulf of Mexico could not afford to look down its nose at its Laurentian cousin.”35 Quinn guesses that a comparison between “the calories of nutriment provided to Europe by Newfoundland products between about 1500 and 1650” and “the ounces of bullion extracted from Mexico and Peru” might find that their effects on human life on Western Europe were at least equal.36 The two Americas, in other words, provided comparable profits and spoils to Europeans; southern products were just more glamorous than the northern ones. Yet Roanoke had neither gold and silver nor cod to justify its fame, and the commodities catalogued in Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report (1587) existed only in prospect. Another approach to the problem may be signaled (strangely enough) by the language of genre. One island was perennially described in the glowing terms of epic or romance—Hakluyt refers to Roanoke as “that fairest of nymphs”—the other, characterized not only incidentally but almost universally as “prosaic.”37 Perhaps the language of genre signals that the real wealth of Roanoke lay somewhere in the domain of narrative and representation. R.B. Davis argues that the Roanoke colony was not a failure precisely because of the images and narratives it produced. Roanoke Island, the lost colony, was not a false start or an incident in exploration unconnected with the later permanent settlements. For it left a stirring adventure-story description soon in print, the first book


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written both in and on North America by an Englishman, and a magnificent collection of drawings and watercolors . . . which when engraved were in Western Europe for at least a century the major representations of English America.38

Davis identifies Roanoke’s legacies, and its particular forms of significance and success, in the generation of symbols, images, and representations. In a book on the Roanoke colony, Karen Kupperman argues that “despite the completeness of [the colony’s] failure,” Roanoke was part of both “the foundations of the first British Empire and the beginning of the American nation” as well as providing American citizens with a symbolic ancestry: “all Americans must trace their roots back to [the lost colonists]” (my italics).39 Although her book begins with the observation that Roanoke is relatively unknown compared to Plymouth, Kupperman’s project of bringing attention to the Roanoke story proceeds with some confidence in the topic’s inherent attraction for readers.40 The case was different for the most important historian of Newfoundland. D.W. Prowse opened his monumental History of Newfoundland by lamenting that Newfoundland history at its origin cannot yield a good story. Alas! for the glory of our island, for the praise of our discoverers, there are no portraits to discuss, no noble Isabella la Catolica, no devoted friar. No golden haze of romance surrounds our earliest annals. The story of the discovery of Newfoundland and North America, as told by the Cabots, is as dull as the log of a dredge-boat. Every picturesque element is eliminated from it, and the great voyage, so pregnant with moral and material results, is brought down to the low level of a mere trading adventure.41

Prowse is specifically comparing the Cabots to Columbus, but his point is also a more general one about the kinds of narrative resources available for Newfoundland history, and, by extension, the kind of history that can be made of them. A national history surrounded by the “golden haze of romance” will attract more affiliations than one “dull as the log of a dredge-boat.” We should recall again that these quasigeneric distinctions—between lyric or romance and prose—have to do with the properties of representation rather than with comparisons of economic or demographic importance. There were populations, and there was profit, but no glory, and no praise. What does Prowse’s “log of a dredge-boat” amount to, in terms of a documentary record? Samuel Eliot Morison’s work on Columbus and Cabot illustrates the narrative problems Prowse describes for early

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Newfoundland history, of a record either blank or dull. Consider the titles of Morison’s books. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus is a book devoted, as its title suggests, to Columbus. For Cabot, one must look to The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500–1600; as the title indicates, Cabot is one among a multitude. The chapter on Cabot gives pragmatic reasons why this is so, in the dearth of specific knowledge about him. No portrait or personal description of him, no letter, no scrap of his handwriting, not even a signature, has been found. His momentous first voyage can not definitely be traced. His fate, on his second voyage, is not certainly known. Part of the historical muddle is due to the fact that John’s son Sebastian . . . [claimed] the discovery for himself, and as John disappeared in 1498 and Sebastian became a great man, people believed him and forgot his father. . . . We have no sea journal by Cabot himself as we have for Columbus, nor did any of his shipmates leave an account of the voyage. All the evidence is hearsay, mostly at third hand, and by people who made wild guesses.42

The absence of documentation, or simply of documents to work with, makes a crucial contrast with Columbus (as well as with Grenville, Frobisher, Smith . . .). We may not know as much as we would like either about Columbus’s first voyage or about its purported primary texts, but there are texts to read, discuss, and argue with—as, for instance, the different versions of Columbus’s first letter compared by Margarita Zamora.43 Morison makes use of these texts; his chapter on the Columbus landfall is remarkable for its richness of detail. This includes long quotations from primary sources; factual details that can be deduced from date and position: “At 2 A.M. October 12 the moon, past full, was riding about 70o high over Orion on the port quarter . . . Jupiter was rising in the east; Saturn had just set, and Deneb was nearing the western horizon”; and details inferred from Morison’s own experience at sea.44 “Anyone who has come onto the land under sail at night from an uncertain position knows how tense the atmosphere aboard ship can be” (Admiral, 223). The better-known qualitative observations are attached to these documentary, factual, and experiential details: Anyone . . . knows how tense the atmosphere aboard ship can be. And this night of October 11–12 was one big with destiny for the human race, the most momentous ever experienced aboard any ship in any sea. At 2 A.M. October 12. . . . the caravels are rolling, plunging and throwing spray as they cut down the last invisible barrier between the


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Old World and the New. Only a few moments now, and an era that began in remotest antiquity will end. (Admiral, 223, 225)

These passages, with their evaluative assertion of the landfall’s worldchanging nature, lead up to the chapter’s famous, or notorious, conclusion: “Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians” (Admiral, 236).45 Morison’s concluding image participates in what has probably been the most crucial mythic construction of the European encounter with America. The metaphor of the New World giving up her virginity when “found” by Europeans implies that there is a distinct moment at which discovery takes place, and that it is a moment of existential change. Yet Morison’s chapter in general does not locate the lost virginity, the broken membrane, securely on the American side. The “invisible barrier between the Old World and the New” breached by Columbus’s ships is one on the other side of which the Spaniards themselves will find “a clean break with past experience.” If the landfall ends “an era that began in remotest antiquity,” surely the phrase refers not to American but to European innocence—their ignorance of a second, separate landmass. The imaginary gendering of America as female or as “virgin land” has been persuasively read as a self-interested response to the presence of native peoples—to describe the land as virgin would be to see it as not already possessed by someone else46—or as an ideological response to the encounter that transforms race into gender, mapping the encounter between two peoples onto a system of already existing decorums and understanding within which possession and hierarchy were both natural and pleasurable.47 Representing the land as female does an enormous amount of cultural work of different kinds, but principally its effect is to justify European possession and conquest.48 Yet Morison’s image of the virgin land remains multivalent, at least in potential: if Morison reads the encounter in terms of Spanish pleasure, wonder, and gratified desire, he also sees in it the seeds of an at least momentarily condemned colonialist violence, alongside the visions of a Golden Age that the discovery would arouse in Europe’s intellectuals: “. . . this guilelessness and generosity of the simple savage aroused the worst traits of cupidity and brutality in the average European. Even the Admiral’s humanity seems to have been merely political, as a means to eventual enslavement and exploitation” (Admiral, 231).

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Morison’s prose narrative itself calls into question whether we should read the encounter as graceful yielding rather than rape. My point is not to praise Morison’s sensitivity; rather it is to note how his account develops. Beginning from primary sources that hypothetically make possible a “realistic” reconstruction of the moment, Morison’s account moves to evaluative and finally symbolic language; that symbolic language both sharpens his point and complicates it. When Morison imagines discovery as a moment, and the event of the moment as a loss of virginity, part of the image’s power is its imagination of the landfall as encounter between two presences, a response complicated in its reference (whose virginity?), its sympathies, and its moral evaluations. However invested one thinks the author to be in the pleasure of deflowering the New World, in that very metaphor are the seeds of counter-readings and other stories, an ongoing generation of historical responses. But the metaphor begins with a documentary record. While scholars have used the existing documents from the first Columbus voyage to do an extraordinary degree of intellectual, imaginative, and ideological work, Cabot left no records from which a narrative of landfall, of the moment of encounter, could be reconstructed. Most of the details we have on the voyage come from a letter written by the Anglo-Spanish merchant John Day, discovered in the Simancas archives and first published only in 1956, by Dr. Louis André Vigneras.49 Day writes that Cabot “landed at only one spot of the mainland, . . . and they disembarked there with a crucifix and raised banners with the arms of the Holy Father and those of the King of England.” Cabot found “tall trees of the kind masts [of ships] are made,” rich grass, and “many fish like those which in Iceland are dried in the open and sold in England and . . . called in English ‘stockfish.’” He also found the ashes of a campfire, the dung of what he thought to be domesticated animals, and a painted stick: “By such signs they believed the land to be inhabited” (NAW 1:98). The letter’s only moment of contact comes at a distance, and ambiguously: “. . . following the shore they saw two forms running on land on after the other, but they could not tell if they were human beings or animals; and it seemed to them that there were fields where they thought might also be villages . . .” (NAW 1:98–9). Cabot met no native inhabitants around whom potent myths could assemble; he left no journal that one could use to count down toward the moment of contact; he is clearly associated with no physical site. Yet the Day letter has resonances on which one could comment: Cabot’s reluctance to enter the land “beyond a cross-bow shot,” or in


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more than one place, and the resulting distance from which the land is described; the semiotic shape assumed by the encounter, across this distance, and the tentativeness of the observers’ conclusions; finally, the extraordinary moment when the mariners see two shapes on land, one chasing the other, but cannot tell whether they are human or animal, engaged in violence, courtship, or simply exercise. The Day letter articulates these first contacts in terms of hesitation and untransformed doubt. Although Morison mines this solitary document for information, in a critical sense it has until quite recently remained largely unread.50 And if it provides materials toward a reading of the encounter, it gives us nothing toward a biography of the discoverer, an account of Cabot as hero, villain, suffering self, individual. Cabot’s discovery remains, relatively speaking, unmystified and unromanticized. Morison writes at the beginning of his account, “The Landfall, 24 June 1497,” “What a pity that we have no exact account of the momentous landfall!” Following his spare account of the landing, he adds, “Any Cabot buff who reads the above will feel that I have assumed a lot—and I cheerfully plead guilty!” (European Discovery, 171, 174). The assumptions are about Cabot as navigator, the location of the first landfall, about what his mariners might have mumbled to themselves. There are no metaphors.

Forgetting Newfoundland, 1497–1600 Part of the Roanoke colony’s appeal for U.S. Americans is the affiliation it offers to the particular past of the Elizabethan era. The brochure of the National Park Service site at Fort Raleigh portrays this cultural linkage in glamorous terms: . . . it was amidst the mind-awakening Renaissance in England during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, 1558–1603, that these first adventures occurred. The attempts to establish a settlement on Roanoke Island directly connect the American people with the Court of this great queen, and with the golden age of English art, literature, and settlement. The figures who play the chief roles in this story . . . are epic figures of English history: Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen . . .; Sir Walter Raleigh, poet, soldier, courtier . . .; and Sir Francis Drake, the first Englishman to sail around the world.51

As this passage suggests, Roanoke is felt to provide America with a particular genealogy; it assures us that the American people “directly connect” with an English sixteenth century populated by epic figures

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covered in the same gilding whose absence, in Newfoundland, Prowse lamented. Newfoundland’s historical connections with early modern England are, of course, legion; yet the characteristic of these connections and contacts was, in the end, that they were forgettable. John Cabot’s claim in 1497 was associated with Newfoundland on early maps such as Juan de la Cosa’s (1500), which labels Newfoundland as “descubierta por inglese.”52 Less than a decade later, European ships had begun to return loaded with Newfoundland cod. A number of English voyages to “the newe lande” are documented, albeit sketchily, in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Regular exploitation of the fishery by English ships in any numbers was late in coming, and perhaps motivated by problems with the Iceland fishery closer to home, on which Denmark imposed fees in 1580;53 meanwhile, Newfoundland was fished by Normans, Portuguese, Spaniards, and Basques. These continental fishermen used methods different from those employed by the English, salting their cod wet in the ships’ holds and completing the curing process at home. The English drew on their experience in the Iceland fishery to effect a dryer cure on shore, splitting the cod and laying them out on drying racks or flakes with a light salting. Historians have speculated that this particular technique drew the English, in particular, toward connection with the land.54 As the sixteenth century drew to a close, conditions favored the growth of the English fishery, and for a time it grew. Yet all this, as we have observed, went on as it were in the background, not on the front of the stage where those “epic figures of English history” played their roles. Some ninety years after Cabot, the would-be colonizer Sir Humphrey Gilbert staked a formal claim to the island of Newfoundland by taking a rod and piece of turf, a scene with which Patricia Seed opens a recent book on the ceremonies devised by different European powers to take legal possession of American land.55 Yet in 1610, when the Newfoundland Company was chartered with a view toward colonizing the island, neither moment seems to have left a trace as claim, let alone a trace on Newfoundland itself. The charter describes Newfoundland as a place to whose coast and harbors the subjects of this our Realm of England have for the space of fifty years and upwards yearly used to resort in no small numbers to fish. . . . We being well assured that the same land or country adjoining to the foresaid coasts where our subjects used to fish remaineth so destitute and so desolate of inhabitants that scarce any one savage person


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hath in many years been seen in the most part thereof, and well knowing that the same lying and being so vacant is as well for the reasons aforesaid as for many other reasons very commodious for Us and our Dominions, And that by the law of nature and nations We may of our royal authority possess ourselves and make grant thereof without doing wrong to any other prince or state, considering they cannot justly pretend any sovereignty or right thereunto in respect that the same remaineth so vacant and not actually possessed and inhabited by any Christian or any other whomsoever.56

Even Newfoundland’s name testifies the extent to which it remained conceptually as well as practically and legally unpossessed or even disowned. Other American place names of the same vintage were deliberately chosen and significant: Florida, Virginia, Meta Incognita. “Newfoundland” evolved from a more general designation and was not infrequently left in lower case—“the newe landes,” “the new founde islande,” “the New Ilande,” “the newe founde lande.” (Or, prosaically, “Baccalaos,” the Portuguese for cod.) Newfoundland was claimed not once but many times by the English—it had always to be refound. As a consequence, all of this history’s moments of beginning are ironized by the traces or suspicions of earlier English presences: Gilbert, by the fishermen who are already there; Cabot, by the Bristol fishermen David Quinn posits in the 1480s.57 As several scholars have noted, no matter how far back one goes in the chronology of traveler’s accounts, natives of the region always seemed accustomed to meeting Europeans, and often were already possessed of European goods.58 John Guy’s 1610 colony at Cupids, the first under the Newfoundland Company charter, inherited more than a century of European experience on the island. A history of British North America that began with Newfoundland could not possibly be imagined in Morison’s notorious Columbian image, as “the new world gracefully yielding her virginity to the conqueror”—even speaking strictly of Europeans, someone had always been there first. Morison complains: “We have no details whatsoever of these many hundreds of northern voyages, since fishermen kept no journals and published no narratives” (European Discovery, 479). Most of these early visitors left traces if at all in port records and archaeological sites: the greater part of Newfoundland’s early history is silent.59 Yet if fishermen did not write, others did, and produced a substantial documentary record. For sixteenth-century printed sources, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations remains both the crucial resource and an important index of where (conceptually) accounts of Newfoundland were felt to belong.

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As we have noticed, seventeenth-century writers such as Monson, Smith, and Fuller all saw the fishery as an endeavor of national significance. The Atlantic fishery was central not only to the wealth of the nation but to its naval power, by virtue of its function as the “nursery” of seamen; modern maritime historians concur.60 Given these associations between the Newfoundland fishery and the sea war Hakluyt documents so prominently, we might reasonably expect it to have a relatively central place in the anthology. Indeed, the Cabot voyage features prominently in Principal Navigations; but the documents Hakluyt prints, brief notices from English and continental printed texts, as well as the confusion of Cabot with his son Sebastian, indicate how much the voyage of 1497 had already faded from memory. From the 1520s, Hakluyt prints two texts by Robert Thorne, who describes himself as the son of a Bristol merchant who discovered “the New found lands” (PN 2:178; these were doubtless the source for Thomas Fuller’s assertion that America was discovered by Hugh Eliot and Robert Thorne senior). Thorne’s letter to the English ambassador to Charles V tries to connect England’s northern claims with the more lucrative, southern territories commanded by Spain. As he writes, It appeareth plainely, that the Newefound land that we discovered, is all a maine land with the Indies Occidentall, from whence the Emperour hath all the gold and perles. . . . So that to the Indias it should seeme that we have some title, at least that for our discovering we might trade thither as other doe. But all this is nothing neere the Spicerie. (PN 2:176)

Thorne’s letter, even as it commemorates his father’s achievement in discovering Newfoundland, finds value in what was discovered only in as much as it is connected to someplace else—a relation that he acknowledges is only distant and indirect. Ambivalent toward Newfoundland itself, the letter advocated voyages of discovery toward the north and west; in fact, it heralded a period of official inattention to Newfoundland and the northern latitudes that lasted into the 1570s. The largest group of Newfoundland material in Hakluyt stems from the Gilbert voyage of 1583, and includes one firsthand description, by Edward Hayes.61 Apart from the Hayes narrative, this material bears less relation to Newfoundland than might at first appear. Gilbert’s voyage had been intended for “Norumbega” (probably northern New England), where he hoped to plant a colony; his arrival at St. John’s was a kind of pitstop aimed at quickly replenishing stores,


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and reconfigured to capture potential profit. (Leaving St. John’s, Gilbert declared himself “a Northern man,” but drowned at sea before this new interest could be pursued.) Other documents in the group—colonizing proposals by Christopher Carleill and Sir George Peckham—were motivated after the fact by Gilbert’s voyage, and draw on Hayes for their information; neither was put into effect. Hakluyt provided several documents with headnotes indicating that Newfoundland had been Gilbert’s intended destination and the planned site of his colony. One example would be the headnote to a poem by Stephen Parmenius: “Concerning the voyage of sir Humfrey to Newfound-land, for the planting of an English colonie there” (PN 8:vi). This formal and intentional framing of Gilbert’s voyage was constructed in hindsight—and perhaps faute de mieux. It has nonetheless been widely reproduced elsewhere, as in Herman Moll’s System of Geography (London, 1701): “In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was order’d to take possession of the Island for Queen Elizabeth, who had a Design to establish a Colony therein; but his misfortune in suffering Shipwrack, as he return’d quash’d that Purpose” (172). Moll read his sources on Newfoundland rather credulously; given Hakluyt’s close involvement with the project, we can attribute his misrepresentation of the voyage’s aims to deliberate intention rather than ignorance. Principal Navigations tells us that in 1586, Sir Francis Drake’s ships concluded a famous series of raids on the Spanish West Indies and a call on Sir Richard Grenville’s group at Roanoke by shaping a course “[to Ne]wfownd Lande & so homewardes.”62 Such passing references make up the bulk of Newfoundland’s presence in the 1598–1600 Principal Navigations. Hakluyt gives us only two accounts for which Newfoundland was both the topic and the intended destination. They follow each other closely: one, a participant account of Richard Hore’s 1536 voyage, and the other a letter concerning Newfoundland written to the elder Hakluyt by Anthony Parkhurst in 1578.63 Morison describes Hore as “a citizen and leather merchant of London, [who] chartered two ships . . . for the double purpose of catching codfish and giving certain gentlemen of London a pleasure voyage” (European Discovery, 237). While Hore himself, in the William, made a successful fishing voyage, the other voyagers in the Minion seem to have arrived on a part of the shore largely unused by the fishery at that time (Quinn suggests the Strait of Belle Isle, between northern Newfoundland and Labrador). The Newfoundland that they initially describe is, nonetheless, populated after a fashion—with

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penguins and bears, which they eat, and with several human inhabitants who flee in their boat, leaving a campfire with meat cooking on it. The flight of the native hunters, though, leaves the landscape empty in an almost absolute and quite uncanny way. The signs of other human and animal presence are mere traces—a wooden spit, decorated boot, and “certaine great warme mitten” (without a mate) are found near the campfire. Food also virtually vanishes. The English “found small relief, more then that they had from the nest of an Osprey, that brought hourely to her yong great plentie of divers sorts of fishes.” There is virtually nothing there in this place, at least nothing recognized by the English as being something. In this contracted or shrunken landscape, the starving travelers cannot see “anything else but the soyle, and the things growing on the same, which chiefly were store of firre and pine trees.” The English turn in on themselves—the company begins itself to shrink mysteriously. One day, a man quarrels with another because he smells meat roasting that has not been shared. The second man “burst out into these wordes: If thou wouldest needes know, the broyled meate that I had was a piece of such a mans buttocke.” The best the Captain can offer as a civilized alternative is that they cast lots for who will die (and, presumably, not be eaten). The group escapes, eventually, by capturing a French ship on a fishing voyage and leaving its crew ashore. The narrative of Hore’s voyage passes in review every nightmare fantasy one might have about the New World: a land barren of human, cultural, and natural resources, where the civilized revert to savagery, a place of unending privation and loss, abandonment in an utterly strange and desolate land. It functions almost as a parody of discovery. (W.P. Cumming describes the Hore narrative as both “ludicrous and gruesome”).64 The Hore narrative has two sources. Some details were told to Richard Hakluyt the lawyer by one Oliver Dawbeny, “merchant of London”; the second source is the account of Thomas Buts, who on his return was so changed in the voyage with hunger and misery, that sir William his father and my Lady his mother knew him not to be their sonne, untill they found a secret marke which was a wart upon one of his knees, as hee told me Richard Hakluyt of Oxford himselfe, to whom I rode 200. miles onely to learne the whole trueth of this voyage from his own mouth, as being the onely man now alive that was in this discoverie. (PN 8:7)

Hakluyt’s version of the narrative is conspicuously marked with the signs of identity, personal experience, and eyewitness testimony; and


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yet it leaves out a great deal. How did the Minion and the William come to separate? What happened to the Minion that another ship was required for the return home? Why did the Minion’s passengers land where they did? A lawsuit against Hore by the owner of one ship accused him of illegally retaining profits from codfish caught and cured on the voyage.65 Why were the starving passengers not able to catch fish for themselves? The second document from Principal Navigations will make evident, perhaps, the force of this last question. Anthony Parkhurst’s 1578 letter on Newfoundland might have been written at the other end of the world from the Hore narrative, testifying as it does not to dearth but to incredible abundance. His accounts of a temperate climate and arable soil resemble numerous other colonial texts, including even some on Newfoundland.66 What is really striking, however, is the way Parkhurst talks about fish. Squid “doe come on shore when I commaund them in the name of the 5. ports.” Flounders can be speared “as fast as you would take up fritters with a sharp pointed stick.” Cod are equally easy and entertaining: “For my pleasure I take a great Mastive I have, and say no more than thus—Goe fetch me this rebellious fish that obeyeth not this Gentleman that commeth from Kent and Christendome.” Early accounts of the fishery (and some later ones) echo Parkhurst’s sense of an abundance that overruns both ordinary ways of taking fish and ordinary ways of talking about them.67 The striking part of Parkhurst’s account is not so much the content of what he says as the way he says it: he describes an abundance so profuse as to be ludicrous, capable of being described only as a joke or “merie tale.” These narratives might be written about two different islands—yet the documents share two significant features. One is a function of style or narrative detail that gives both documents a tone of the incongruous, strange, or ludicrous: Parkhurst’s “strange newes” of fish who are like fritters, or rebels, or who heed the name of the Cinque Ports; the circumstantial details of the mitten, the osprey, the birthmark, the awkward echo of Buts and the roasted buttock. The other is topical: a concern with food rather than gold, glory, or conversion. Perhaps what is distinctive is not so much the concern with food as the failure to mystify it as something else. While food is a central concern in other colonial texts, typically this concern is dispersed into lyrical praise of the land’s fertility, as in Amadas and Barlowe’s account of their scouting expedition to Roanoke in 1584: We viewed the land about us, being, whereas we first landed, very sandy and low towards the waterside, but so full of grapes, as the very beating

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and surge of the sea overflowed them, of which we found such plenty, . . . as well on every little shrub, as also climbing towards the tops of high cedars, that I think in all the world the like abundance is not to be found. (PN 8:298)

As Kupperman writes, Barlowe “not only praised the supposed great fruitfulness of the island, but recklessly compared it to the Garden of Eden: ‘the Earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labor’” (Roanoke, 17). However crucial codfish was in supplying Europe’s protein needs, and whatever its abundance, no one claimed it made Newfoundland seem like paradise.68 Whatever other English sixteenth-century writings make of America, they tend not to make it laughable. What makes for this difference? Were writers under less pressure to shape their narratives in the absence of colonizing projects, or was the experience itself distinctive? The documents in Principal Navigations suggest that early experiences at Newfoundland did not readily fall into a conventional language of praise. At Roanoke, descriptions of the territory recognized it as continuous with familiar ways of describing, possessing, and using land. Newfoundland, by contrast, remained both mundane and irreducibly strange, escaping at both ends the range of phenomena colonial rhetoric could comfortably describe.

The Promotion of Newfoundland, 1600–26 Outside Hakluyt’s anthology, printed materials on Newfoundland were scarce indeed during the sixteenth century. Newfoundland emerged into greater prominence in the early seventeenth century, when several factors combined to encourage a renewed interest in overseas enterprises; moreover, a changing climate of thought focused particular attention on Newfoundland in a number of ways. Among other factors were the beginnings of settlements in New England organized around a colonial fishery: early writers on New England can be relied on to compare fishing on George’s Bank to “the new fowndLand.”69 Questions about the economic organization of the fishery, jurisdiction over it and over its associated territories began to intersect with politically hot topics such as taxes and monopolies in the years leading up to the English revolution.70 As England began to see the Dutch rather than the Spanish as its main rivals, writings on trade and wealth evinced envy and emulation not toward Spain’s lucrative gold mines but toward the industrious fishermen of the Netherlands.71


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More copious writing on and proposals about Newfoundland registered increased interest in the island and its fishery. Richard Whitbourne’s Discourse and Discovery, one of the best-informed of these publications, was both supported by the crown, and promoted from the pulpit.72 After more than a century’s experience, the English knew a few things about Newfoundland. These facts about the island’s location, its history, its very insularity, were all subject to interpretation, to being made meaningful, in the promotional literature of the 1620s and 1630s. The most copious records of Newfoundland before colonization are cartographic. Some version of the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador was shown on maps of America from the earliest date, and placenames still current—Cape Race, Cape Spear, Baccalieu, for instance—appear on maps in the first decade of the sixteenth century.73 At the same time, accurate cartographic representations of Newfoundland’s outlines were long in coming; as late as the 1670s, the map of Newfoundland provided to the Lords of Trade and Plantations in the Blathwayt Atlas grossly distorted the shape of the island.74 A series of sixteenth-century maps from 1540 on showed Newfoundland as an archipelago rather than a single island.75 Such interpretations (not unreasonable ones) of a deeply corrugated coastline perhaps reflect a desire not to have a large landmass in the way of a hypothetical passage to Asia. They also suggest—significantly, in an age when much of Europe’s interest in America had to do with mining—that Newfoundland was not thought of as having an interior, that it appeared to the European imagination as a set of liminal harbors. Geography loomed large in the seventeenth-century promotion of Newfoundland as a site for colonies. John Mason, who produced an early printed map of the island as well as a brief promotional text, thought of Newfoundland in terms of its useful proximity to Europe relative to other colonies. This proximity made it cheaper to transport settlers to the island, and permitted an easier return to “our owne home, which naturally we are so much addicted to.”76 John Hagthorpe (1625) noted that unlike Virginia, which the Spanish threatened to cut off, Newfoundland was an island, “free from all pretence of challenge of any forraine prince.”77 Whitbourne argued that Newfoundland should be cherished because “trading thither and returning home thence, wee little feare the Turkes bondage and circumcision, nor any outlandish Inquisition” (Discourse and Discovery, 45). The fishery represented both freedom from religious or cultural impositions, and an economic freedom from dependence on foreign exchange: “And this also to be gathered and brought home by the

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sole labour and industrie of men, without exchange or exportation of our Coine, and natiue commodities, or other aduenture (then of necessary prouisions for the fishing)” (Discourse and Discovery, 13). This isolationist strand of thinking led Mason to extol even the ice that surrounds the island in winter as a defense against invasion. Newfoundland’s isolation and insularity made it, both practically and ideologically, suitable for an English colony: Sir William Vaughan, writing as “Orpheus Junior,” speculated that “Heauenly prouidence ordained this Iland not without a Mystery for vs of Great Britaine, that Ilanders should dwel in Ilands.”78 As Vaughan suggests, that Newfoundland was an island had more than merely practical significance to the English; it allowed Newfoundland to be understood as not only closest to England but most like it, and hence in some ways not a new land at all.79 Richard Whitbourne articulated a view of Newfoundland’s location as analogous to the location of England within Europe, “It is an Iland, neere as spacious as Ireland, and lieth so far distant from the Continent of America, as England is from the neerest part of France, and neere halfe the way between Ireland and Virginia.”80 This sense of Newfoundland’s location as marking a natural correspondence with England was connected to the sense that the North was “reserved for the English” as the place where they really were first.81 It drew also on concerns about whether southern climates would suit English constitutions and characters, for which the mortality rate in Jamestown (or on earlier voyages to West Africa) must have seemed to provide some foundation. John Mason described Newfoundland’s climate as “agreeable with this of ours,” more so than was the case for more southerly colonies. First, for the Ayre, it is pleasant, and as temperate in Summer as here: whereas Virginea and Barmudaes are very hot; whereby . . . Cawsons and Calentures doe many times there raine . . . which hath bin the death of so many men, and throwne that indeluble infamy vpon the place, as a second Golgothae: and the greatest part of these mischiefes arising for want of Beare. But none of these neede be feared in Newfoundland. . . . (A briefe discourse, 32)

Whitbourne saw beer as the remedy for any anticipated difficulties with the Newfoundland winter, and suggested that those inconvenienced by the cold were “accustomed to sit by a Tauerne fire, or touched with the French disease” (Discourse and Discovery, 54).82 When Richard Whitbourne located Newfoundland in a symbolic geography of resemblance and relationship to Ireland, France,


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Virginia, and England, he placed it practically as well, at the center of a developing colonial economy in the North Atlantic. Newfoundland’s middle position, “neere halfe the way between Ireland and Virginia” was remarked on over and over in the seventeenth-century literature. Simon Stock, a would-be Catholic missionary to Lord Baltimore’s colony at Ferryland, told his superiors: “Avalon [i.e., Newfoundland] lies midway between England and Virginia, and when the Faith is spread to Avalon, with greater ease may we extend it to Virginia, New England, New Scotland and amongst the Canadians.”83 For ships traveling between Europe and the Americas, Newfoundland was an easy intermediate stop for provisioning, and not only for English ships: Whitbourne remarked on the presence of Spanish ships returning from the West Indies, and Portuguese ships taking on fish for Brazil (Discourse and Discovery, 17–18); Newfoundland also continued to provide alternate resources for voyages whose own aims had failed. Ralegh’s captains headed there after the failure of his second Guiana expedition for a bit of compensatory fishing and piracy.84 Beyond its intermediate position, Newfoundland was also represented as a rich destination in its own right. Writers repeatedly compared the fishery to the gold and silver of the Indies; for the colonial promoter Vaughan, Newfoundland was “A myne of Gold.”85 Whitbourne suggested more prosaically that “the trade to that Country . . . may yeerely be so beneficiall to your Maiestie . . . as the West Indies are now yeerely worth to the King of Spaine” (Discourse and Discovery, 61).86 At the same time, Whitbourne derided voyages aimed at the pursuit of actual gold, animated on by some turbulent spirits that haue outrun themselues, and so brought men in such mindes, that on the coast of Guinnie there, they might gather vp gold along the Sea-shore, washed vp with the Sea in great abundance; and likewise if they would aduenture to the West Indies, there they should load their ships with gold-oare, and drawe it aboord their ships with Wheele-barrowes, and then share it by the pound; and such like projects. (Discourse and Discovery, 34)

Fish were better than gold because the fishery involved the English in labor, a labor seen as morally salutary, socially necessary, and strategically useful. Not only was the product a commodity both vendible and comestible but since the fishery trained mariners, the process of fishing was beneficial as well. Training might have more than practical implications: Anthony Parkhurst praised the fishery as imposing on workers a laudable discipline.

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“Thes men that travell thether kepe a longe lent of halfe one yere, and spare mutche drynke and vytteles that at home and in other cuntryes they would wantonly wast. Lyvynge nowe by fysshe, sower bere, byskt, bad syder and that more then halfe myngeled with water.”87 In The Newlander’s Cure, Sir William Vaughan associated Newfoundland with the health-giving effects of a frugal diet; Hagthorpe played off the necessary moderation of a colony at Newfoundland against the unhealthy or even dangerous fertility of Africa and Virginia where nature “(like a luxurious wombe) casts out many times, but an abortiue fruite” (England’s Exchequer, 31, 36).88 More intriguing than Vaughan’s assertion that Newfoundland was a “mine of gold” was his characterization of the Newfoundland fishery as England’s “golden fleece” (the title of his book): “This is our Colchos, where the Golden Fleece flourisheth on the backes of Neptunes sheepe, continually to be shorne. This is Great Britaines Indies, neuer to be exhausted dry” (Golden Fleece, 9).89 Vaughan’s image concisely incorporates the two primary benefits of the fishery: the acquisition of gold and the ongoing need for English labor. Significantly, that labor is imagined in the form of shearing sheep: not just a domestic, land-based husbandry but that practice of husbandry which had traditionally produced England’s primary commodity for foreign trade. John Mason suggests a more direct comparison of land and sea: For could one acre [of the sea off Newfoundland] be inclosed with the Creatures therein in the monthes of Iune, Iulie, and August, it would exceed one thousand acres of the best Pasture with the stocke thereon which we haue in England. (3v) I haue heard some countries commended for their two fowld Haruest, which heare thou hast, although in a different kinde, yet both as profitable, I (dare say) as theirs so much extolled, if the right course be taken; & well fareth, that country say I, which in one months time with reasonable paines, wil pay both land-lords rent, seruants wages, and all Houshold charges. (A briefe discourse, 4r)

Mason’s and Vaughan’s images suggest that the fishery’s capacity to produce wealth had to be translated into other terms—sheep shearing, or agricultural work—for its productivity to become “meaningful” to home audiences. Promoters clearly had no shortage of ideas about how to make Newfoundland symbolically or ideologically important. Yet we cannot say that this rhetoric actually had much of an effect in carving out for Newfoundland a place closer to the center


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of national interest and attention. Instead, the story was of numerous small, private colonies whose support from home was very temporary. Settlements persisted, when they did, largely under the radar. Why did the promotional writing of the early seventeenth century fail to “take,” setting the terms on which iconic images and narratives about Newfoundland could enter the collective memory? Patricia Seed has recently suggested that the usage of “planting” as a synonym for “colonizing” in early modern English tells us something important about what was truly necessary for possession of New World land in English thinking; the English, she argues, saw settlement as necessarily bound up with traditional ways of using the land: hedging and fencing, manuring and planting, building permanent houses.90 Early Newfoundland colonists report erecting fences (both Cupids and Ferryland had palisades), engaging in gardening, and preparing meadows for cattle. Yet these colonists, official and unofficial, settled in a place where agriculture and husbandry would never be as productive or as economically rewarding as the fishery, which remained the dominant activity of Europeans in Newfoundland.91 By contrast with such other activities, the fishery seems to have fostered a relation to the land of opportunistic exploitation. Early legislation for Newfoundland targeted less the social behavior of Englishmen there—though they were enjoined not to murder and to attend divine service—than their economic behavior, which included a number of environmentally wasteful practices favored by the industry. A pamphlet of laws printed under Charles I (1633) forbade the dumping of ballast or anchors in harbors, the destruction of usable flakes (for drying fish) and sheds, the firing of woods, and removal of treebark beyond that needed for roofing; these are the same offences adjudicated by Richard Whitbourne when he held an Admiralty Court at Newfoundland in 1615.92 Although there were some practical advantages for the fishery in having a permanent base on shore, there was no absolute need for Englishmen to settle in Newfoundland in order to fish there. Nor was there any strong incentive for fishermen to take care of the shores and harbors they used—these were effectively treated as a somewhat calmer or drier extension of the sea itself. As recent history has amply borne out, the idea of the sea and its resources as “common” worked against the kinds of long-term views—preservation, maintenance, improvement—associated with private property on land. Fish were not sheep, and fishermen were not necessarily colonists, however the rhetoric of promoters might strive to equate them. Some observers could not think of the island as land at all. Jacques

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Cartier said of Newfoundland (in a text that Hakluyt printed in translation) that if the soile were as good as the harboroughes are, it were a great commoditie: but it is not to be called The new Land, but rather stones and wilde cragges, and a place fit for wilde beastes, for in all the North Iland I did not see a Cart-load of good earth. . . . To be short, I beleeve that this was the land that God allotted to Caine. (PN 8:188)

In the late 1700s Chief Justice Reeves wrote dismissively that “Newfoundland is still nothing but a great ship, dependent upon the mother country for every thing they eat, drink and wear or for the funds to produce them. . . . They all look to the sea alone for support; . . . and those who carry cultivation furthest reap no produce but what can be furnished by a garden.”93 Pope has shown that gardening was not only widespread but relatively productive in Newfoundland, making a meaningful contribution to colonial diet and trade. The nature of the primary English enterprise in Newfoundland seems to have foreclosed recognition of Newfoundland as a colony, even as Englishmen steadily colonized it; the very texts often cited in accounts of how settlement was discouraged evidence how persistent settlement actually was.94

Cultivation and the Lyric: Hayman’s Q UODLIBETS The prosaic history of early Newfoundland was rife with metaphor. When we read that fish are sheep, that an island is a great ship, or that Newfoundland was the Indies, we see the ways in which debates or decisions about practical matters extended into a struggle over meaning and identity. Yet the documents of this early history were not, in fact, entirely prose. In 1628, a poem was addressed to “the Reuerend and diuinely witty, Iohn Dun, Doctor in Diuinity, Deane of Saint Pauls, London.” The context was obscure: a collection of short poems written in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, by a colonist named Robert Hayman, and published in London under the title, Quodlibets. Hayman’s book formed part of the wave of promotional material on Newfoundland associated with the colonizing projects of the 1620s and 1630s, material ranging from the wholly practical (Richard Whitbourne’s Loving Invitation, 1622) to Sir William Vaughan’s eccentric allegory, The Golden Fleece (written under the pseudonym of “Orpheus Junior”). Hayman’s project, at least in theory, was not only


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directly to promote the Newfoundland colonies but also to transplant English poetics into Newfoundland and to inaugurate a colonial North American literature. The long title of Hayman’s book announces what is explicitly (at least in intention) a New World book: QVODLIBETS, LATELY COME OVER FROM NEW BRITANIOLA, OLD NEWFOVNDLAND. Epigrams and other small parcels, both Morall and Diuine. The first foure Bookes being the Authors owne: the rest translated out of that Excellent Epigrammists, Mr. Iohn Owen, and other rare Authors: With two Epistles of that excellently wittie Doctor, Francis Rablais: Translated out of his French at large. All of them Composed and done at Harbor-Grace in Britaniola, anciently called Newfound-Land. By R.H. Sometimes Gouernour of the Plantation there.95

Quodlibets’ translations were “composed and done” there, and only “lately come over” to be printed in England. This book of poems insistently associates itself with a particular place, and as we have seen, geography lent itself to interpretation. When Robert Hayman was in Newfoundland, where did he think he was? Robert Thorne’s early letter, printed by Hakluyt, asserted that Newfoundland was somehow, if only distantly, connected to “the spicery” of the Indies. Hayman’s prefatory material makes a curiously similar connection: Hayman attaches an anagram on his name— “harm I bare not”—to the engraved image of an iguana. The iguana, which Hayman helpfully labels as “the West-Indian Guane,” figured frequently among the iconography of southern America on maps of the period, where personifications of Mexico and Peru take it as a mount. (Guanahaní, “the iguana,” was the indigenous name for San Salvador, Columbus’s first landfall).96 By Hayman’s day, Newfoundland and the Caribbean were linked, by a chain of British colonies along the Atlantic littoral, from Newfoundland, to New England, Virginia, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. His emblem’s conflation of Newfoundland poet and “West-Indian guane” suggests that these, as well as the intermediate links in the chain, had something in common, a kind of hemispheric, colonial identity. But what makes an American poet like an iguana? The anagram that links them, “harm I bare not,” suggests that both may frighten—presumably by their strangeness, the shared “American” qualities that defined their deviation from European norms. What is American may be rude, grotesque, or misshapen, but it is not actually dangerous: a disarmingly understated claim. (Hayman is thought to have died in Guiana,

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where he had led a colony shortly after the appearance of Quodlibets; like George Calvert, the proprietor of Ferryland, he came to dislike not America but simply North America.) The identification of colonial writer and colonial things recurs in Hayman’s dedication; here, with reference not to America generally but specifically to Newfoundland and its new English colonies. In dedicating his collection of poems to Charles I, he hopes for the like successe, that some unripe eares of corne, brought by me from the cold Country of Newfound-land, receiued from some honest, well-minded louers of that action, when they saw them: who with much-affected ioy often beholding them, tooke much comfort in what they saw: but more, when they suppos’d it might be better’d, by industry, care, and honestie. These few bad unripe Rimes of mine (comming from thence) are in all humility presented with the like intendiment to your Maiestie, to testifie that the Aire there is not so dull, or maleuolent, but that if better wits were transplanted thither, neither the Summers heat would dilate them, nor the Winters cold benumme them, but that they might in full vigour flourish to good purpose. (A2r)

Hayman invites the reader to understand forms of inadequacy as modesty and promise, even as a call for further investment—this is not an uncommon strategy in English promotional literature, as I have argued elsewhere.97 What is local about the dedication is the implied defense of a cold climate, the “cold Country of Newfound-land,” and its stunted fruits. The rhymes, like the corn, are as yet unripe but promising; the land, like Hayman’s invention, is potentially fertile if as yet uncultivated. If Newfoundland’s climate is one where “industry, care, and honestie” will cause both wit and wheat to flourish, then it is by implication one where (unlike, say, Bermuda) nature responds to human labor, rather than challenging human temperance. The dedication also links, by comparison, poetry and agriculture. Both Hayman’s lyrics and the “ears of corn,” which are the early fruits of his colonists, are a synecdoche for the possibility of transplanting English culture writ large. Hayman’s corn is, presumably, wheat—we are brought back here to the moment when Frobisher’s men built a bread oven on Baffin Island, apparently for display purposes, and to the importance for culture of certain kinds of food, and ways of eating. Indeed, early letters from Newfoundland printed by Whitbourne (and reprinted in Purchas) are careful to claim that cereal crops can be raised in Newfoundland, although mixing hardier grains with the more highly valued wheat. (For instance, John Guy wrote in 1610 that “we have sowed all sorts of grain this spring, which prosper well hitherto”;


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Pilgrimes 19:414). Gillian Cell, again, criticizes Hayman for taking “his practical responsibility . . . somewhat lightly”; she quotes a manuscript treatise in which he describes his work as “having only had the overseeing others hard labor.”98 Given the extent to which actual “hard labor” by Newfoundland colonists did not register on English observers, perhaps Hayman’s admittedly quixotic project made sense as colonial promotion. Even as agricultural labor proceeded, Hayman sought to enact a conceptual domestication and cultivation of Newfoundland that would make it attractive and visible to his audience. Given how closely Hayman identifies poetic production with place in his introductory material, one opens Quodlibets with an eye to what is American about the book, or even (given the emphatic locations of the title) what is Newfoundland-ish. Yet for all the collection’s ostentatious concern with where it is being written, Book I is virtually at an end before any reference to America or Newfoundland appears; the majority of the poems, epigrams of a few lines, are mild social commentary of a conventional kind, often proverbial, clearly embedded in an Old World matrix of established and highly structured communities. Poems are addressed to friends from Oxford or the Inns of Court, cousins and brothers-in-law, doctors of divinity and physic, or to types: a handsome whore, a “mad Sea-man of Warre,” “a great Gamester,” “Politike Bankrupt,” “a Mad-man,” “a lusty Widdow.” Jokes are made about baldness and wigs, covetousness and pennypinching, women’s behavior, court favorites; Jesuits and Puritans are confuted, preachers teased, and a number of poems contain serious religious reflections. The first poem with overtly colonial reference, addressed “To all the shrewd Wiues that are, or shall be planted in Newfound-land,” follows the title with a few lines of unremarkable (and unlocalized) misogyny. It is only in the last two poems of the first book that Newfoundland, so to say, appears. The first of these two poems is a “praise of my New-found-Land.” Although “in cloaths, company, buildings faire,/With England, New-found-land cannot compare,” it is nonetheless a place of contentment, demanding “little paines, lesse toyle, and lesser care,/ Exempt from taxings, ill newes, Lawing, feare.”99 These litotes are characteristic of Hayman’s practice; if he repeatedly states that he wishes to praise Newfoundland, the actual substance or motive for the praise remains unstated (“more, then I will now declare”). Indeed, the last poem of Book 1 falls back on the briefest formulation of Hayman’s systematic understatement, the reiterated claim that both poetry and its subject are unripe or premature: “Thus for this hopefull country at this Time, As it grows better, Ile haue better Ryme.”

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Several poems in Book 2 defend Newfoundland: the air, for instance, is repeatedly praised as wholesome (no. 79), even or especially in winter (no. 81)—two poems (nos. 86 and 88) attribute health-giving properties to it. (Although such praise of the air infers a certain vacancy—is there not anything in it?—it might be compared with contemporary accounts of mortality in Jamestown, which blame the oppressive heat and excess of foliage for the colony’s insalubrity.)100 In another poem, the roughness of the land itself reflects only its need for human labor and cultivation; more than that, Newfoundland now can be compared to England in the past. 100. To the right worshipfull William Robinson of Tinwell, in Rutland shire Esquire, come ouer to see Newfound-Land with my Lord of Baltamore. 1627. When England was vs’d for a Fishing place, By Coasters only, ’twas in the same case, And so vnlouely ’t had continued still: Had not our Ancestors vs’d paines, and skill: How much bad ground with mattock and with spade, Since we were borne, hath there beene good ground made? You and I rooted haue Trees, Brakes, and stone: Both for succeeding good, and for our owne.

Hayman’s description of the colonists’ work looks not so much like production as possession, the “rooting” of hedges (“brakes”) and stone that marked property and divided the cultivated (owned, dug, inhabited) from the wild, or from land merely “coasted” rather than cultivated. The poem implies both that the land can be bettered by familiar means, “good ground” made of bad, but also that it is the site of true implantation. Like the poem to William Robinson, most of Hayman’s Newfoundland-related poems bear titles or headnotes that address them to persons associated with colonial endeavors, as investors, colonists, ship-masters, and/or spouses. The poems praise or castigate their addressees for their efforts, prescribe future attitudes, respond to actual or potential objections; most frequently, they chastise investors for impatience, delay, insufficient conviction. For a number of poems, some of which are only a few lines, the “address” is longer than the body of the poem, overtaking or competing with its content. The point sometimes seems to be not so much the poem itself (much less its description of the land), as Hayman’s enumeration of a social network of people associated by friendship and by actual or potential ties to Newfoundland.


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Most of these poems cluster in Book 2 (nos. 74, 88–104). A second cluster, smaller and more diffuse, occurs in Book 3, beginning with a poem to the ship-master Fabian Sanford. This second cluster might more accurately be characterized as a group of poems addressed to women, among which a few refer to Newfoundland (nos. 84–5, 98): nos. 79–98 are all addressed to women, virtually all named and identified as the widows or wives of planters, captains, Bristol merchants. (Two poems in Book 3 address classes or groups of women, rather than individuals, in connection with Newfoundland.) Of these, the three Newfoundland poems are addressed respectively to Henrietta Maria, to a young woman loved by the colonist/poet, and to the returned widow of a colonist. 84. To the same most Royall Queene. When wise Columbus offerd his New-land, To Wise men, they him held, vaine, foolish, fond, Yet a wise Woman, of an happy wit, With good successe aduentur’d vpon it: Then the wise-men their wisedomes did repent, And their heires since their follies doe lament. My New-land (Madam) is already knowne, The way the ayre, the earth, all therein growne, It only wants a Woman of your spirit, To mak’t a Land fit for your Heires t’inherit. Sweet, dreaded Queene, your helpe here will doe well: Be here a Famous second Isabell. 85. A Newfound-land Poeticall Picture, of the admirable exactly featur’d young Gentlewoman, Mistris Anne Lowe, eldest daughter to Sir Gabriel Lowe, Knight, my delicate Mistris. The Preface to her Picture. At sight, Loue drewe your picture on my heart, In Newfound-Land I limm’d it by my Art. 98. To the modest, and vertuous Widdow, Mistris Elizabeth Gye of Bristoll, whose dead Husband Master Philip Gye, was sometimes Gouernour of the Plantation in Newfound-Land, where he, and she liued many yeeres happily and contentedly. Though Fortune presse you with too hard a hand, I heare, your heart is here, in Newfound-Land.

Let me take these poems in reverse order. The headnote of “To . . . Mistris Elizabeth Gye” locates in Newfoundland a lost past of contentment, married love, and position;

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in Bristol she is a “modest, and vertuous Widdow,” in Cupids Cove she was the Governor’s wife. Death and fortune separate her from what she loves, yet the heart remains faithful to its happiness; her body may be in Bristol, but the “heart is here, in Newfound-land.” The poem to “Mistris Anne Lowe” enacts a slightly different disjunction, in a trope familiar from (for instance) Shakespeare’s Sonnets: “Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled / Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart” (Sonnet 24).101 Hayman’s poem has simpler concerns than Shakespeare’s: once Love has drawn the beloved’s image on the heart, it can be transcribed—“limn’d . . . by my art” (in some other poem than this, one hopes)—and called forth into the place from which Anne Lowe, “my delicate Mistris,” is absent. Hayman is writing in Newfoundland because it is a place where Lowe, like Guy, is not. Both these brief poems disconnect women from the colony, mapping a romance of loss or longing across the distance between England and Newfoundland. The first of the three poems, addressed to Henrietta Maria, articulates the relationship of women to Newfoundland in more broadly motivated terms. America requires women as patrons for their romantic ability to see wisdom in apparent foolishness, for the happy wit of their illogical belief in its possibility.102 That willingness of a royal woman to connect herself to the land will make it “fit t’inherit,” a land to passed down in the family, which will reproduce and support reproduction. (Meanwhile, the georgic labor of men, invoked in no. 100 as “paines and skill,” presumably goes on in the background.) The presence of women as subjects and addressees of Hayman’s poetry makes geographically particular the disjunction of image and beloved, of person and heart, legible in more familiar poems. Yet it also imagines that the land lacks a powerful female figure willing to identify herself with it and in doing so to make it viable in a lasting way. In other words, Newfoundland is the place from which these women are absent; and, in this absence, Newfoundland is both practically and representationally disadvantaged. Anne Lowe’s absence may allow Hayman to represent her in Newfoundland, but until Newfoundland can be identified with a patroness—an Isabell, an Elizabeth, a Mary—he will produce only “unripe rhymes,” of which the poem to Anne Lowe is surely an instance. Hayman’s representation of women as absent from Newfoundland corresponds to another famous remark about the colony by an English observer: Francis Wheler, a Royal Navy captain, remarked of Newfoundland in 1684, “soe longe as there comes no women they


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are not fixed.”103 Wheler’s comment, which is often quoted, suggests another requirement for recognizing settlement, landedness, plantation: the presence of women and of families reproducing themselves. For other colonies as well, the presence of women changed the way others viewed them. The Spanish ambassador Pedro de Zúñiga reported on Jamestown: “It is not their intention to plant colonies, but to send out pirates from thence, since they do not take women, but only men.”104 The Earl of Southampton explained to the governor and Council of State “that the Plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soyle.” (The first English women were sent to Virginia in 1621.)105 Asserting the importance of women to the colonial endeavor, Wheler also implies that the Newfoundland settlers were as yet all male. What of actual women, which imagery of a feminized land, virgin or otherwise, has never told us much about? Women were scarce in Newfoundland for a long time: by 1790, in a population of 10,000 long-term residents, some records indicate that men still outnumbered women five to one.106 This “acute sexual imbalance” reflected in part a preponderance of migratory male servants (Pope, Fish, 215). To this, one might add the seasonal presence of male fishing crews; Innis writes that “settlers . . . were outnumbered three to one by English fishermen during the summer” (Cod Fisheries, 70).107 Yet John Guy had brought sixteen women to settle in Cupids Cove as early as 1612, and records in his diary for 1613 that “Nicholas Guies wife was delivered of a lusty boy March 27” (Fish, 50; Pilgrimes 19:418–419). Even Hayman’s poems register that women accompanied their husbands to Newfoundland, though some later returned to England. One widow, Lady Sara Kirke, stayed on, and “according to census figures from the 1660s and 1670s, . . . owned more stages, boats and train (cod liver oil) vats and employed more servants (fishermen and fish processors) than any other planter on the English shore.”108 It seems apparent that there were women at Newfoundland early on, though their presence may have been underreported and underrecognized.109 Roanoke Island again provides a striking contrast: the gender makeup of the Roanoke colonists was closer to six to one, yet no one counted them as “not fixed.” Roanoke, indeed, was imagined (famously) as female, a “Virginia” ready to bring forth fruit for an English suitor/colonizer. Newfoundland may never have been described as a fertile, virgin land, but it was occasionally represented as feminine by Hayman and others. The terms of these images are telling. The following poem by Hayman was, again, addressed to a colonist.

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R e m e m b e r i n g t h e E a r ly M o d e r n V o y a g e 94. To my very good Friend, Mr. Iohn Poyntz, Esquire, one of the Planters of Newfound-Land in Doctor Vaughans Plantation. ’Tis said, wise Socrates look’t like an Asse; Yet he with wondrous sapience filled was; So though our Newfound-Land look wild, salvage, She hath much wealth penn’d in her rustie Cage. So haue I seene a leane-cheekes, bare, and ragged, Who of his priuate thousands could haue bragged. Indeed she now lookes rude, vntowardly; She must be decked with neat husbandry. So haue I seene a plaine swarth, sluttish Ione, Looke pretty pert, and neat with good cloathes on.

Hayman’s poem reverses the action of Donne’s speaker in “To his Mistress going to Bed”: he clothes the new-found land in order to see and know it—or be able to love it. “Joan” is not beautiful in herself—she is wealthy, but vulgar. While the body of Donne’s mistress is itself both beautiful and rich, “a mine of precious stones,” incorporate wealth, Newfoundland’s wealth is extrinsic rather than native or embodied. Hayman indicates by his adjectives a woman who is plain and of lower class; whatever “private thousands” are belied by a “rude,” “swarth,” “sluttish” appearance, at her best she is but “pert” and “neat,” adjectives that might describe a maid.110 This particular image of Newfoundland as a lower-class woman reflects the “mean and . . . base” quality of the product and work with which it was synonymous; it also points to the class associations already embedded in more familiar images of the “virgin land.” Hayman’s poem was not unique: it represented a small but consistent set of feminizing images in the early seventeenth-century promotional literature. Sir William Vaughan writes that God “had bestowed a large portion for this Countries mariage with our Kingdomes, euen this great Fishing, that by this meanes it might be frequented and inhabited the sooner by vs” (The Golden Fleece, 5). Elsewhere, Vaughan confers on the island the title of “Great Britaines Sister, or Britanniol, in regard that for these forescore yeares and vpwards, She hath furnished vs with Fish and Traine, which by Exchange returne vs sundry kinds of Commodities” (The Newlanders Cure, A5v). Both these images link the attribution of gender to Newfoundland closely and even causally to “her” economic contribution: she should be called England’s sister in regard that “she hath furnished vs with Fish and Traine,” or she should be England’s bride because her “large portion” makes her marriageable. Making the land female, in other words, is not accompanied here


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by the lyrical accounts of its attractions found elsewhere in early colonial writing, nor by anything looking like a romance narrative.111 In his introduction, Prowse characterizes Newfoundland as “a meagre and haggard kind of mother, yet for all that she saved the ancient Colony of Virginia from semi-starvation by a timely cargo of fish.” In this resonant image of the island as “nursing mother,” he echoed Richard Whitbourne several centuries earlier:112 For as great Brittaine hath euer been a cherishing nurse and mother to other forraigne sonnes and daughters, feeding them with the milk of her plenty, and fatting them at her brests, when they haue been euen starued at their owne: Euen so hath this worthy Country of New-found land from time to time giuen free and liberall entertainment to all that desired her blessings: and chiefly (aboue all other Nations) to the English.113

Whitbourne imagined Newfoundland not as a bride or a virgin, but as wet-nurse to children, colonies, nations, giving to all “free and liberall entertainment.”114 The English are not husbands but children; not her own children, but the first among those she fosters. The image suggests that Newfoundland did not need discovery. Being like the mother, she was already well known. Since she was not the mother, there is no sense of attachment. The image corresponds to what Quinn calls a paradox in the early history of the island: to thousands of fishermen in Western Europe, “Newfoundland was almost regarded as an outpost of Europe itself. Yet . . . to Europeans of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Newfoundland was scarcely known at all. It was simply taken for granted.”115 John Donne’s famous apostrophe to his mistress as “America, my new found land” has come to exemplify the way sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen thought and talked about the New World. But as we have seen, it was not the only way. The early history of Newfoundland is rather different: antiromantic, foregrounding economic activities and motivations, emphasizing the discontinuity and incoherence of colonial efforts, it suggests narratives that would disrupt a sure sense of discovery as entering and possessing the New World. If there is a mythic narrative for Newfoundland history, it might be among other things a narrative more about class than gender, a narrative of discovery and settlement imagined as undertaken by the largely anonymous common man: unofficial, unrecorded, untheorized, thematically anti-courtly, even illicit. It is this anonymous working man who the Newfoundland historian D.W. Prowse celebrates over

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more than 600 pages: “Clearly those old cod smacks had discovered all around . . . long before the court gallants and their grand expeditions” (History, 45). For all its sentimentality, Prowse’s History succeeds in imagining labor, rather than a sexualized “discovery,” as the central component of colonial enterprise, a conceptual move that was difficult for even some early colonists to make.

“When You Go . . .”: History in the Present Colonial places, unlike colonial persons, are still here. Places that were the subject of seventeenth-century English documents, and the sites of seventeenth-century English settlement, continue to exist: as locations, as communities, as tourist destinations, as the subject of landclaims suits.116 They are also the site of historical representations in many different forms: plaques, monuments, museums, theater, costumed interpretation, videos, marked paths, guided walking tours. The early modern history presented through the sites reaches a broader audience than the one that, in all likelihood, will read this chapter, and thus it was both accessible and of interest to me as I wrote this book.117 In 1995 I went to Roanoke, and also to eastern Newfoundland to visit a series of sites associated with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history; I returned to Newfoundland in 2006.118 I wanted to see the places, and also to see what is being made of colonial history now. Roanoke Island is literally marginal. Geographically, it is tucked behind the barrier islands of the Outer Banks, whose exposed and unconnected position led both to early settlement and late development. On the land side, it is bordered mostly by swamp. When the historian D.B. Quinn first went there in 1948 for research on Roanoke, the Outer Banks were still “isolated and inaccessible”; his visit was made possible only by the assistance of the Coast Guard.119 By Quinn’s return in 1958, though, a significant amount of development had taken place: “We were able to drive down Rte. 158 . . . viewed the Wright Monument, by then complete, and crossed the new causeway to Roanoke Island.” Ralph Lane’s 1585 fortifications had been reconstructed at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, and Quinn was able to see “a performance of Paul Green’s ‘Lost Colony,’ which was colorful and effective even if in places anachronistic.”120 Since then, nearby Nags Head and Kitty Hawk have become popular resorts; rental properties line the beaches of Bodie Island as far south as the Roanoke Island causeway. The National Park Service


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has added to the reconstructed earthworks at Fort Raleigh a second site, on a small island across from the town center of Manteo: there, one can visit an encampment of Elizabethan soldiers standing guard, and go on board the Elizabeth II, a reconstruction of the ship captained by Thomas Cavendish in 1585.121 (The soldiers were added when the numbers of visitors grew to overcrowd the ship.) The site also houses a small archive—the Outer Banks Historical Center, along with a gift shop and a slide presentation. Adjacent to Fort Raleigh are the Elizabethan Gardens, intended as “a living memorial to our first English colonists.” (Within them, one finds the statue of Virginia Dare.) On the grounds of the Fort Raleigh site, The Lost Colony—a symphonic drama commemorating the 1587 colonists—is performed in an outdoor amphitheater by the water during the summer months, a local tradition since 1937. Roanoke attracts significant numbers of tourists, and for these visitors history is prominently on offer: in particular, various instantiations of the Roanoke colony. The island’s proximity to the Outer Banks resort area centered on Nags Head guarantees a certain flow of visitors, and those visitors would find it difficult to ignore a history densely mapped onto the island, whose two towns—Manteo and Wanchese—are named after the native men who returned to England with Amadas and Barlowe in 1584. Street names are taken from the personnel associated with the Roanoke colony, buildings are half-timbered or painted with Ralegh’s face, and the reconstructed Elizabeth II is readily visible from anywhere on Manteo’s main street. Though Karen Kupperman notes in her book on the colony that people do not know about the Roanoke colony in the way they do about the Pilgrims—and is undoubtedly correct—I was first told about the Fort Raleigh site by my doctor’s secretary, who had been there as a tourist; at least one scholar I know first became interested in Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and true report after finding it in the Fort Raleigh gift shop, which sells scholarly and popular books alike. In the 1930s, a reconstruction of the Elizabethan settlement at Roanoke was erected by the Works Progress Administration. The reconstructed settlement has been dismantled, giving place to a less instrusive treatment of the site in which the grass-covered earthworks of a fort are the only visible representations of European presence. A nature walk indicates plants mentioned by Hariot, along with their uses in native and European societies. Near the end of the walk, a marker comments that the English at Roanoke “possibly didn’t follow the native ways as closely as they should have.” The

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implied narrative of the “Thomas Hariot Nature Trail,” that the English died of ingrained presuppositions, because they failed to adapt, differs from that offered more explicitly by the theatrical production associated with the site, which played to a large audience the night I attended. Paul Green’s The Lost Colony was commissioned by residents to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the birth of Dare’s daughter Virginia (after whom Dare County was named) in 1937. The play is contemporary with the reconstructed dwellings that are now no longer there; unlike the physical site, the text of the play remains unaltered, treated as an aesthetic object—even a beloved tradition—rather than as a work of history. (What changes, from season to season, is the cast, which recently included Lynn Redgrave; local auditions are also held each season.) The Lost Colony continues to offer an account of the colony that Quinn already found anachronistic in 1958. The play’s anachronisms are not uncomfortable only for a historian. Green’s play stages the practical and ideological importance of women to the colonial project in no uncertain terms. Ralegh tells Elizabeth early in the play, “Without women there is no stability, no permanence, no home.”122 The central figure of The Lost Colony is thus, somewhat surprisingly, the governor’s daughter, Eleanor Dare. The choice is surprising not only because of Dare’s gender, but because virtually nothing is known about Dare beyond her name, her family connections, and the fact that she bore a daughter after arriving in the colony. Green attributes to Dare some anachronistically democratic ideals, imagining in her a kind of foremother for the American identity that would come to be.123 Yet the point of her character seems not only to be the yearnings for liberty that any character might have expressed equally well. As the play’s occasion reminds us, Eleanor Dare could do one crucial thing that her male companions could not, and that was to bear a child in the new land, a female child named Virginia for the land. At Roanoke, biological and social reproduction are recalled as the real ceremonies of possession: two large plaques at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site mark the first Christian baptism in North America, and the first English birth.124 The Lost Colony is unusual not simply in giving prominence to a female protagonist but also in choosing to focus on Eleanor Dare rather than her daughter—about whom, as Robert Arner documents, most fictional writing on the Roanoke colony has gravitated. This writing has been deeply and anxiously engaged by issues of miscegenation.125 As Arner remarks, “If America is in any way to be imagined as arising from the fruitful loins of Virginia Dare . . . then


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Virginia must perforce be provided with a husband . . . [and] only Indians seem to be truly available to take on the job” (Lost Colony in Literature, 28). The prospect of transculturation did not only involve Virginia Dare. The lost colonists, as we can well imagine, did not simply vanish into an alien spaceship between 1587 and 1590: either they survived, assisted by the hospitality of one of the indigenous groups along the coast, or they died, rejecting or being denied assimilation, or coming into conflict with the enemies of their friends. Green’s play has Virginia’s mother and stepfather engaging and explicitly rejecting this possibility of acculturation, “going native.” Borden: (Jocularly.) And now let me ask you—could you love an Indian king? Eleanor: (Half-rising from her seat in alarm.) No, no, not you, John— don’t talk so. Borden: (Patting her head.) Oh, it’s not the fever got me. Cross my heart, Manteo’s tribe want me as chief in his place. Eleanor: With feathers and beads and ear-rings? Borden: (Indulgently.) Maybe. Eleanor: And now it comes at you—this thing we have to fear far worse than death. Bit by bit, little by little this wilderness, this everlasting darkness of the forest creeps in upon us. The end is savagery. (Lost Colony, 118)

Rejected by the play’s heroine with melodramatic horror, cultural accomodation appears elsewhere in the play as a comic subplot in which another, lower-class Englishman is pursued by a native woman. Initially designated in the text only as “Beggar,” the male character gives his name in a conversation with Ralegh, and subsequent speech headings are “TOM” or “OLD TOM.” The native woman is not a speaking part, appearing only in stage directions (as “the Indian woman” or “the squaw”) though Tom eventually christens her “Agona, which is to say in Indian tongue, ‘Agony’ ” (Lost Colony, 106). Tom is described as “a poor specimen of a beggar with rotting shoes, ragged breeches, and tattered doublet,” with “ill-kept” hair and an “elderly thin face marked with the ravages of penury and exposure”; she is “a middle-aged pudgy Indian squaw” (Lost Colony, 17, 80). Yet he evidently holds a magnetic attraction for this woman, which is not reciprocal; he tries repeatedly to drive her away, without success. “TOM. (Yelling.) Get out! Trot, run, march! (But the Indian woman only smiles the more blissfully at him)” (Lost Colony,

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81). He yields to her pursuit only when he realizes that she will do his work for him: (Old Tom, the last to go, picks up his buckets and yoke from behind a box at the right front. As he starts to hoist them onto his shoulders, the Indian woman with a sweet smile reaches for them. He stares at her in joyful astonishment, and then begins to sing . . .) OLD TOM (Fitting the yoke on the squaw.) Oh, once I was courted by a lady of color. . . . Lead on, my honey, you have won my manly heart away. (Lost Colony, 92)

Evidently only a comic Englishman, chiefly interested in food, could lower himself to the love of a native woman; such an accommodation would obviously have to be pragmatic rather than romantic. I was frankly surprised, as they say, at what passes for colonial history even now.126 The amphitheater stands on a part of the island that has been considered as one possible location for the actual 1587 settlement, sought by archaeologists for decades. The site of the amphitheater was leveled during construction, and whatever was there is now in Roanoke Sound. If the settlement’s conjectural location were accurate, we could say that the amphitheater has consumed the traces of the historical colony, in order to stage in its place a static rehearsal of an almost wholly fictionalized story.127 Probably things are not that neat; indeed, the search still continues for what Eric Klingelhofer describes as the “very, very fragile and very, very sparse evidence” of English settlement on Roanoke in the 1580s.128 Meanwhile, Green’s imagined history is not only performed on stage: a street near the center of Manteo is named “Agona.” This mapping of fictional character onto real territory seems particularly troubling given that one of the great unanswered (and generally unasked) questions at the site is, precisely, what happened to the native people who were there when Hariot, Grenville, John White, or Eleanor Dare first arrived. White’s images of these people, in the famous edition of 1590 by de Bry, became iconic representations of American natives, which (as Joyce Chaplin has shown) were being appropriated and recirculated as late as the eighteenth century.129 Paul Hulton praises their accuracy: “Not until the nineteenth century was any Indian tribe so accurately observed and so convincingly portrayed.”130 Yet by 1704, when John Lawson visited what was from the European perspective still a distant and isolated coast, he found groups that had dwindled to vanishingly small numbers.131 Among


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the praise of White’s accuracy and the many analyses of Hariot’s ethnography, it would seem worth mentioning that the people who they described were largely gone little over a century later, no less “lost” than the colonists or the site of the colony. But North Carolina’s coastal Indians are not the only native people that at least popular American history seems symptomatically to keep forgetting. I see Green’s play now as regressive in very problematic ways; yet his artistic practice in general might be described as not only formally innovative, in developing the native vernacular form of symphonic theater, but also political in the sense that as a writer, he sought actively to promote racial equality. (Green wrote for what was then described as the Negro theater, and collaborated with Richard Wright on a stage adaptation of Native Son.) An audience to whom this information was unavailable might walk away from the Lost Colony—as I did—with quite a different impression, that Green simply did not perceive native people as stakeholders in this history of origins.132 A trip in search of Newfoundland’s history will take a different shape than one directed toward the Outer Banks. The island is separated by long distances and the sea from North America’s major population centers; there is no very quick or inexpensive way to get there from Boston or Montréal, and it is no longer on the way to anywhere. The earliness of European contact and settlement is one of the selling points of Newfoundland history, but that history is at once less accessible and more tangible than that of Roanoke. St. John’s claims to have “the oldest main street in North America”—and has one of its most spectacular harbors—but Water Street has burned over and over again, so that its earliest buildings date from the nineteenth century. Colonial history has left its mark as an official inscription. At one end of the street, looking out toward the narrow mouth of St. John’s harbor, a plaque commemorates Gilbert’s arrival in 1583. It announces that “On June 11, 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with a fleet of five ships, sailed from Plymouth, England to claim the ‘New Found Land’” and that “near this site on August 5, 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert assembled all present and formally proclaimed the ‘New Found Land’ as territory appertaining to the Queen of England. Newfoundland thus became the first British possession and cornerstone of the British Empire.”133 Centuries later, the commemorative plaque duplicates Hakluyt’s promotional impulse to make Gilbert’s arrival intentional, and thus to make it signify. Only in retrospect, and with motivation, could this event be taken as beginnings of “the British Empire.” The modern city bears no trace of the impermanent structures built by the fishermen who preceded Gilbert.

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Sixteenth-century contacts tend to manifest in terms of names— and claims—rather than as visible traces; signs of English settlement in the seventeenth century are visible and tangible, but dispersed in space. Excavation has located and begun to uncover the sites of two early colonies, at Cupids Cove (1610) and Ferryland (1621), as well as a site at Russell’s Point identified by the governor of Cupids as a place where Indians and Europeans met to trade. Cupids and Ferryland were both “official” colonies, well documented and clearly located, on sites that are still inhabited in the present. At Cupids Cove, the first traces of early seventeenth-century buildings were uncovered in 1995, in a private potato garden where, according to (inaccurate) local tradition, ancestors of the previous owners had bought their land from John Guy. When I first visited, in the summer of 1995, all three sites seemed startlingly underfunded and underdeveloped—particularly as compared to Roanoke. At Ferryland, graduate students from the University guided visitors around the site and described artifacts displayed on tables inside a prefabricated building. One of the young women at the Visitor’s Center told me she and one other woman worked 9 a.m.–8 p.m. without a break, as she apologized for eating her lunch at the desk. In Cupids Cove, where the museum had just opened, the local newspaper complained that it was impossible for visitors to get so much as a coffee; at Russell’s, I looked at artifacts in plastic bags in the back of the archaeologist’s car. By 1997, Ferryland had a small museum to house and display artifacts. By 2006, continuing excavations had led to the presentation of richer information not only about the seventeenth-century colony, but also about other presences on the site; visitors can now also see artifacts of Beothuk, French, Basque, Dutch, Portuguese, American, and Irish provenance, as well as learning about early use of the site by the Beothuk and by migratory fishermen before 1580. The Colony of Avalon Foundation has developed an extremely rich web site, including historical documents and images, a “virtual tour” of the physical site at its various levels narrated by the lead archaeologist for Avalon, James Tuck, and an “artifact explorer,” which allows some of the site’s “more than one million specimens” to be viewed online.134 The web site also describes the proprietorship of Lady Sara Kirke. Cupids Cove has also been the site of ongoing excavations.135 The museum now displays a number of artifacts from the seventeenth century, as well as housing an archaeology lab; the site of the dig is close by and well marked to invite visitors. The team had most recently been looking for evidence of the wooden palisade described by Guy in


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his diary, and was preparing to explore a possible site for a fort built to protect the settlement against the depredations of the pirate Peter Easton. The excavations at Cupids Cove form part of a larger survey which also located the Beothuk site at Russell’s Point; in addition to archaeology, projects include the transcription of letters and journals written by colonists that form a rich resource for future work.136 As with Ferryland, documents, artifact images, and news have been made available on the Web under the aegis of the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation, a nonprofit founded to preserve and promote the heritage of the region (roughly, the large peninsula between Conception and Trinity Bays). Many hope that (in particular) cultural and historical tourism will cover some of the losses experienced as the fishery, Newfoundland’s traditional economic base, has collapsed. The museum staffers who directed me to Russell’s Point in 1995, as well as some people working there and at Cupids Cove, were former fisheries workers.137 The story of Rising Tide Theatre, based in the town of Trinity, is one example of artistic and commercial success in the public presentation of history.138 Richard Whitbourne held the first court in Newfoundland at Trinity, Trinity Bay, in 1615. The town of Trinity is said to have been a center of the international fishing trade, rivaling St. John’s in size and population; now, it is a charming, carefully maintained village one could make the circuit of in a matter of minutes, housing numerous B&B’s, restaurants, and other tourism-focused businesses such as walking tours, gift shops, and sea kayaking. Trinity is also the home to the new, year-round home of Rising Tide Theatre, completed in 2000. Rising Tide’s historical pageant, The New Founde Land, is perhaps Newfoundland’s closest equivalent to Green’s Lost Colony.139 The pageant premiered in 1993, drawing on research from the reconstruction of the town’s historic area, local archives, and the work of an important historian of Newfoundland who also consulted to the company (Gordon Handcock). The New Founde Land is composed of a series of scenes or vignettes set at different locations around the town; the audience is led from place to place by two narrators, Taverner and Matey (“fellas from here”), who gave background and commentary as well as doing a bit of crowd control. The Lost Colony has been treated as art rather than history, not substantially revised in the light of later findings or perspectives (though Quinn found it already anachronistic in 1958). Rising Tide’s artistic director Donna Butt, the pageant’s coauthor, described the script of The New Founde Land as relatively stable since the pageant’s

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inception; a few scenes have been added or “tinkered with.” The pageant’s segmented form presents a series of different moments in history rather than a continuous narrative, making it relatively open to revision. With or without tinkering, it incorporates a range of voices and tones, from comic to solemn and even tragic. The two narrators have more scope for improvisation than other characters, given the interactive nature of their role, and their parts are indeed modified to include references to current events. (In 1995, e.g., they commented on the closure of the recreational or food fishery to local people: “Great day to be out on the water, but what would we do once we got there?”). The dialogue form of Taverner and Matey’s parts also adds to the multivocal feel of the production. In particular, their exposition of Newfoundland’s history sets off mainstream history (Taverner) against the more critical perspectives expressed by Matey. (For instance, Taverner comments that when Whitbourne set up his court in 1615, “he was the law here”; Matey adds that this meant he got there first, and so could lord it over all the others.) Jokes about sex (building on the uneven gender ratio of the early years) and pirates (Peter Easton and his crew seemed to be recruiting for Rising Tide’s production of Pirates of Penzance) leavened a great deal of information about things such as the Reformation and the English Civil War. The early moments of the pageant both outline and undermine a celebratory history of Newfoundland as Britain’s first colony, founded in “the age of discovery.” That history, as the dialogue between Taverner and Matey indicates, operates by systematically excluding other, non-English histories—the Basques, the Portuguese, the Vikings, the Beothuks—as “lower than scum,” as well as by forgetting the difficult relationship between Britain and its accidental or forgotten island colony. As Matey says, “It was a mistake we were discovered, and it’s been an accident ever since.” The critical or political bent of the pageant’s history does not mean there is no celebration. Indeed, the audience participation built into the event celebrates both religion and state. The pageant begins with three women leading the audience in singing the national anthem of Newfoundland and Labrador and later, inside the Anglican church, the audience is invited to join in singing hymns. (In 2006, donations to the parish for maintenance were also gently invited.) Both the pageant’s contents and its description, in print and speech, make evident that it seeks to play (and actually does play) a role in consolidating memory and identity, by recalling and honoring “the hardships that we endured.”140 Indeed, the company describes the play as “a moving and joyous tribute to our beloved New Founde Lande.”


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In 2006, the audience for The New Founde Land evidently included faces familiar to the company, and many were from Newfoundland; several of the other visitors I met were expatriated Newfoundlanders revisiting friends, relatives, and communities of origin. While in many ways, the presentation at Trinity presents a sharp contrast with the presentation at Roanoke, in the following regard, they are quite similar: both productions identify themselves explicitly as rooted in the community.141 Donna Butt describes the productions put on by Rising Tide Theatre as telling “our story, the way we want to tell it.”142 The web site for The Lost Colony production at Roanoke describes the play as commissioned by island residents; Paul Green, himself born on a North Carolina farm, is quoted on the site describing his play as “people’s theatre,” “By [which], I mean theatre in which plays are written, acted and produced for and by the people for their enjoyment and enrichment and not for any special monetary profit.”143 At the same time, attracting audiences from elsewhere implicitly invites those audiences to connect the local, “our story,” with larger narratives; commemorations of dates like the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare’s birth in 1937 or the 400th anniversary of Cupids founding in 2010 both promote visits, and connect this history to the time scales of North America writ large.144 How will this story, the story of colonial Newfoundland, articulate with larger narratives of North America, and what will be the effect of inserting this history into the larger history of North America or the Atlantic world?145 A recent op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail, written in the aftermath of another reported terror plot on planes leaving Heathrow airport, suggests that Newfoundland represents to mainland observers, whose very mobility and relative privilege make them vulnerable to anxiety and danger, both a peaceful place and a simpler time, where the legacy of epic endurance combines with respite from present turmoil.146 I read this article immersed in the tranquility and beauty of precisely the part of the island’s northeast coast that it describes; both are undeniable. But of course they too have a history. Newfoundland’s “sense of remove” is itself the product not only of geography but of harsh economic forces—the exhaustion of resources, resettlement, unemployment, outmigration. It is inhabited in a present that the past has shaped.147 The challenge of integrating this history still remains.


Afterword

The idea of debt is inseparable from the notion of heritage. We are indebted to those who have gone before us for part of what we are. The duty of memory is not restricted to preserving the material trace, whether scriptural or other, of past events, but maintains the feeling of being obligated with respect to those others, of whom we shall later say, not that they are no more, but that they were. Pay the debt, I shall say, but also inventory the heritage. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. These memorable enterprises in part concealed, in part scattered, and for the most part unlooked after, I have brought together in the best Method and brevitie that I could devise. Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations

C

hapters 1, 2, and 3 examine three examples of the ways in which the history of early modern English voyages, exploration, and settlement have been written, printed, circulated, and read over the intervening years. Each chapter has found a different kind of situation, with regard to memory. First, the conscious, collective, and successful transfer of event narratives into national memory as a monumental, almost obligatory book. Second, the unsuccessful attempt to define a career that inaugurated a national history and literature, through an autobiography that almost no one reads. Last, the repeatedly forgotten history of a territory paradoxically remembered (and then again obscured) as England’s first colony and the beginnings of the British Empire. In other words, the memory of history; memory and forgetting; history forgotten. These are only a few fragments of the larger history of the “age of expansion” under whose auspices the book is written. To pick out certain documents, certain places, certain stories always implicitly suggests that these are a synecdoche for the rest; such selectiveness seems both insidious, in its implied claim to representation, and also (as the opening quotation from Todorov proposed) inevitable. Forgotten or

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remembered, however, this is a history with consequences lived out every day and everywhere around us, dwellers in a continental North America still largely dominated by English-speaking societies that are still coming to terms with their environment, their neighbors, and with the original, indigenous presence. Arguments about possession and settlement and meaning are far from over, and the period from 1480 to 1620 is where many of those arguments really begin. In other words, there is a particular sense of obligation attached to memory here, and against a background of that obligation, a concern with what is memorable or famous becomes open to scrutiny. Undertaking to study figures such as Fuller’s “worthies,” by definition, leaves out a great deal. The people I have written about are in many ways exceptional, and one way is in showing up in narrative documents at all. To recall a point made earlier, Alison Games’s study of English migration to the colonies reminds us that the possibility of biography is very fragile. Twentieth-century biographers of Richard Grenville and of Martin Frobisher have complained that these lives, despite their famous or even mythic stature in English culture, left only “threadbare materials” as a record. (The resulting books by A.L. Rowse and James McDermott testify to the resourcefulness of their authors.)1 If this is true of English worthies such as Frobisher or Grenville (as it also was for the even more famous Drake), it is of course much more so for more common mariners and colonists, and very much more so for indigenous Americans. What kind of attention is owed to these unremembered and unfamous persons, and—as a practical matter—how might that attention be paid within the framework of an inquiry confined to written records? These records have their limits. Yet the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century anthologies of travel writing by Hakluyt and Purchas are not wholly without promise for tracing the careers of individuals far less famous than a Richard Grenville; if the documents give very little information about individuals, very little is still not the same as none. Principal Navigations was organized by geography. For this reason, individual persons sometimes appear in widely separated parts of the anthology, and bringing together these dispersed pieces of evidence may tell us something more than reading them in isolation. For instance, two accounts in Hakluyt document the voyages of James Lancaster, one to the East Indies, and the other to raid Portuguese settlements in Brazil. The first voyage was a series of desperate trials and dramatic vicissitudes; after illness, accident, shipwreck, mutiny, and bad weather, roughly eighteen men out of three ships’ companies survived to complete the first voyage and return home,

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after three years, in May of 1594. Edmund Barker, another survivor, embarked with Lancaster on their second, “prosperous” voyage to Brazil in October of the same year, only five months after returning from a three-year ordeal in other seas. The account in Hakluyt notes that Barker was “most resolute” to perform the voyage. Nowhere in either document is the brevity of this interval remarked, but it leads us to reflect about lives in which the most appalling experiences at sea were seen as preferable to life at home.2 Michael Lok’s brother John captained the trading voyage to West Africa in 1554 in the course of which the young Frobisher was taken captive. In a document from the preceding year, 1553, Lok narrates what appears to have been an utterly conventional pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only all the more surprising because he came from a family not only of venturesome merchants—later key players in the Frobisher voyages—but of hard-line Protestants, who harbored fugitive preachers and in some cases fled to the continent when Mary took the throne.3 Taking these narratives together complicates our picture of a family intimately involved with the developing religious and mercantile networks of early modern England. Narratives in Hakluyt or in the later Purchas anthology are generally only the beginning, but they can alert us to figures who may then be traced further elsewhere, if not actually in the archives, in the enormous volume of manuscript sources now in print. Edward Dodding’s report on the Inuit Kalicho and his unnamed fellow-captive provides one example of what such supplementary reading may produce. Here are two others. Hakluyt printed a significant number of accounts from early voyages to West Africa in search of gold and pepper, the earliest of them borrowed from Richard Eden’s Decades (1555). These voyages—which merit only passing mention in the preface to Hakluyt’s volume on the South and Southeast—regularly resulted in a staggering death toll from disease as well as a handsome return. In consequence, otherwise anonymous mariners bound to Africa left wills, which allow us a glimpse both of their possessions and their relationships, both familial and professional. Elsewhere, Samuel Purchas printed several accounts of Henry Hudson’s voyages in search of a Northern passage, including the last, which ended in a mutiny. In 1611, after a winter caught in the Canadian ice, Hudson’s crew put him and several others out of the ship into an open boat and sailed for home, leaving them to die in the bay that now bears Hudson’s name. The survivors were deposed in the Admiralty court; their testimony joins the printed narratives (the captain’s journal among them) to provide a vivid and textured account of what happened aboard Hudson’s ship.4

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To move from Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations to Smith’s True Travels changes the scale of discussion definitively from the collective to the individual—even though Smith’s autobiography (again) leaves some of the most basic questions unanswered. Yet that change in scale is at least partly an phenomenon or accident of reception. As we might look for individuals in the great anthologies of Hakluyt and Purchas, Smith’s Travels demands to be read in the context of larger structures than that of Smith’s personality, not only as a recuperative move aimed at this particular book but as a strategy with wider implications for other texts.5 Whatever we know or don’t know about the circumstances of production, the archives or print contexts where a document lands tell us something about its social location and context. If being memorialized by Hakluyt carried a particular set of consequences and connotations, what did it mean for Smith and others to be published in Purchas—whose work, despite the strictures of later writers, was a favorite of James I?6 More generally, the obligation to write often came as an explicit instruction from employers, patrons, and superiors. Letters were one of the most common genres of early modern travel writing, as William Sherman has noted; these carry and express their own range of obligations.7 To these institutional frameworks for reading should be added experiential and structural ones. Early modern travel writing began from the first person, but was only partially shaped by personal concerns. Forms like the diary or log provided multiple, external, structural “cues” for writing: calendar time, movement in space, events, changes in the conditions of travel (embarkation, arrival, weather, currents). We often know or can estimate the trajectories and the timescales of a given voyage, which (along with other versions of the text and other accounts of the voyage, when these are available) in turn tell us something about what isn’t written by observation of the choices made in a particular text to write about one thing, and not another, against the “grid” of movement in time and space.8 In each of these cases, the whole record—sparse as it may sometimes be—proves greater than its parts and begins to give some sense of the choices—both inclusion and omission—which a printed narrative represents, as well as of the lives which brush against its margins. These are suggestions about method, ways in which we can use textual analysis and leverage the documents we have to tell us more. On the one hand, by looking for individuals within and beyond the pages of a book like Principal Navigations, which has so often been the subject of generalization; on the other hand, by depersonalizing our approach to particular narratives whose dense and idiosyncratic

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texture has isolated them from consideration within a larger context, whether documentary or social. We need to be both imaginative and conservative with the evidence: imaginative in thinking about how to look at it and conservative in not wasting any of the information it can give us. In regard to the larger history that I have invoked as a background, it is not really enough to displace one story by another, to replace celebration with condemnation or to reinstitute it under another guise. We need to know more, or rather to learn more, even from familiar stories. And from unfamiliar ones. Part of what has drawn me to Newfoundland as a topic is the sense that as far as the broader North American public goes, the story of the past here is still in the making. Though the history of the island, like any other, has its established myths, in effect the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is in the process of emerging from the ground and from the archive, making its way into displays, onto markers, and into arguments. This emergent history also speaks to critical issues. Newfoundland invokes the difficult question of where Englishspeaking “North America” begins, a question that still matters, because it implies something about where we (North Americans, early and late) come from as a society and the kinds of ancestry we choose to acknowledge. Plymouth, Jamestown, Roanoke, Newfoundland: each brings to the fore its own set of images, its own vision of beginnings. Smith’s autobiography has seemed useful to me in this context of ancestry and national identities precisely for the ways in which it is transgressive in relationship to other narratives of identity. As I have argued elsewhere, the Smith of Travels might remind us of the heterogeneity of our colonial origins, if reception had not made of it a singular case unconnected to generational or national narrative.9 In the same way, if on a larger scale, early Newfoundland has been conspicuously absent from the ways we think about the origins of European societies in the Americas. Newfoundland is not only another lost or forgotten colony, like Roanoke, like Kodlunarn Island, or indeed like Jamestown or Plymouth, at other dates. Its repeated and almost programmatic elision from historical memory dates from the very beginnings of European contact, which for Europe were the beginnings of regular contact with North America. This resistance to the incorporation of Newfoundland in larger histories invites us to consider what our present memory of the past has been shaped to leave out. What is occluded by alienating the history of Newfoundland from the story of European origins in North America? The history taking

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shape now depends on sites and artifacts along with documents, and so it tells us something about what was not recorded for posterity as well as what was. It looks at unwritten contacts with native people as well as at Newfoundland’s place in an emerging global economy, not only at the stone houses built by colonists, but also the traces of use by unnamed fishermen. “Firsts” are duly noted on the historical markers that dot the coast—but generally speaking, this is not a triumphalist history. Chiefly, I think, it insists on the extent to which the European settlement of the Americas was undertaken through enormous and unglamorous hardship, both imposed and endured. One of the key strategies we’ve seen in other materials throughout this study narrates or defines identity, whether national or personal, through an encounter with what is categorized as foreign to the self. Best’s Frobisher was more clever, merciful, or cultured than the Inuit, who were savages, cannibals, deceivers deceived. Ralegh’s Grenville was more resolute than the Spanish, as Ralegh was more truthful, and the English in general were more humane. Stories like these populate the volumes of Hakluyt’s anthology. John Smith, in turn, sought the frontiers of Europe, and found there a new identity through successful violence. His opponents were at once men like him, ideals to be admired and imitated, and barbarians whose objectification required no apology. Smith’s attempt to portray a self which was at once savage and temperate does no more than unite in one scene what Hakluyt presented in distinct narratives. I suspect that readers’s uneasiness with this text bears at least some relation to these conflicting claims. Yet whether the other is to be distanced and abjected, imitated, or assimilated into new, hybrid identities and forms, all of these narratives absolutely depend on the presence of what is perceived to be foreign to the nation or the self.10 Early writings on Newfoundland not only declined to employ the familiar tropes of the virgin land, but also declined to offer narratives organized by conflict in the way so familiar to us from reading Hakluyt, Smith, and others. Promoters claimed that colonists in Newfoundland had no need to fear “the Turkes bondage and circumcision, [or] any outlandish Inquisition”—that it was a New World without the danger of Old World encounters (Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, 45). Public history and historical archaeology both remind us of the other Europeans evacuated and made invisible by (for instance) the claim that Humphrey Gilbert “discovered” Newfoundland: the Portuguese, Basques, Bretons, and others who Matey of The New Founde Land understands “don’t count,” both as foreigners and as sailors. Yet Hakluyt drew on the polyglot maritime

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world of the fishery for no narratives of triumph over the Portuguese or the Basques. Newfoundland was unusual among early colonies in that the area the English initially sought to occupy was largely unfrequented by native people: the 1610 patent claimed that “the same land or country adjoining to the aforesaid coasts, where our subjects used to fish, remaineth so destitute and desolate of inhabitants, that scarce any one Savage person hath in many years been seen in the most parts thereof.” Archaeological findings have, so far, confirmed this usually suspect claim of the land’s vacancy.11 They also suggest that once Europeans began to frequent Newfoundland, the indigenous Beothuk were drawn to seasonal fishing sites like Ferryland for the nails and other ironwork they yielded once the fishermen had gone home. The ground reveals interleaved layers of English and indigenous artifacts, as at Russell’s Point; at the Beothuk site at Boyd’s Cove, trade beads have been found alongside stone points and scavenged metal. Such exchanges of artifacts, whether through faceto-face contact, arms-length barter, or raids on deserted sites, were in themselves a form of interaction, even communication.12 But it appears that the Beothuk and the English found no incentive to engage with each other in any more sustained way, peacefully or otherwise.13 Such objects, deposited, discarded or destroyed, offer one kind of testimony; they are “witnesses in spite of themselves.”14 In terms of their value as evidence, they are at the opposite end of the spectrum from (for instance) the theatrical productions of public history considered at the end of chapter 3. But they can tell us far less about the intentional production of meaning. In other words, we know from the evidence of objects that the English and the Beothuk made contact, at least through the voluntary or involuntary exchange of material goods; we know from the evidence of documents that such exchanges played very little part in the history of seventeenth-century Newfoundland as it was written, and as it has been transmitted. The archaeologist William Gilbert comments that the early seventeenth century was an exception to the general invisibility of the Beothuk in English records: “documents related to either the Cupids colony, . . . or from the writings of Richard Whitbourne, . . . are an invaluable source of information on the Island’s aboriginal people during this early period.” Yet this the information is likely to remain fragmentary, adumbrating contacts that took place largely outside the realm of words. Don Holly contrasts these sources with those available for other subarctic people, and comments that “the few surviving documents on the Beothuk . . . do not facilitate the production of rich

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narrative histories.”15 This absence of signifying encounters did not mitigate the harshness with which the Beothuk experienced the consequences of contact. They shared the island with European incomers until sometime in the nineteenth century, when the last known Beothuk died. It is a difficult history to hear, and also—technically— a difficult one to write. Peter Pope has suggested that neither Newfoundland nor its English-speaking colonists were ever firmly part of an imagined, English national self, that the English men and women who settled Newfoundland themselves appeared alien and inferior in the perspective of observers at home. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts give considerable support to this argument. Pope summarizes the evidence in a table listing the opposed associations assigned to England and Newfoundland by early writers: culture versus nature, harvest versus hunt, order versus disorder, good versus wicked. Just as “everyone is somebody’s Indian,” he concludes, “everybody is somebody’s Newfie” (Fish, Table 38, 434). The actually cosmopolitan character of the fishery seems to have fostered an inclination to see the island itself, and its English inhabitants, as themselves alien, disorderly, and needing to be civilized. The burden of the Beothuk’s dispossession and death during the historical period remains to haunt the story; yet no conquest of the other—actual or imagined—offers itself in this history as a shortcut to sure possession or to symbolic profit.16 Rather, Newfoundland’s heroic narratives—of “iron men, and their no less epic wives”—have turned outwards towards the sea.17 Risking their lives in extremes of weather, fishermen could never control a resource which fluctuated in timing and quantity from year-to-year. Nor could they own it. Early in the seventeenth century, in a landmark defense of the freedom of the seas, Hugo Grotius wrote (in a text translated by Hakluyt) that “the sea . . . cannot be made proper.” Even the shores which surround it can be possessed only as they are in use, because the sea seemeth to resist possession, by the example of a wild beast which, if it betake itself to the natural liberty, is no longer his who was the taker; so also the shore, which afterward giveth place onto the sea again.18

Practically and legally, the sea has resisted ownership as a common resource. Historically, the laws of the sea—including those regulating the fishery—have been different to police. Here, the territory that mattered would never be possessed. Nor has its conquest been one to celebrate. In Newfoundland (as in coastal New England), mastering the sea, and turning hunting to

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harvesting through the use of modern fishing technologies, has entailed another kind of harsh consequence: the resource’s exhaustion, as fisheries of legendary abundance have become commercially extinct.Some have experienced these consequences more deeply and closely than others: communities that participated in the fishery could not own the sea and its stocks, but their ties to the shore and its history have in many ways have continued to bind them. Most of the rest of us have difficulty recalling this strand of history, and yet—in its doubly-bound struggle with nature—it seems increasingly to involve us all. Memory and narrative share a property of condensing the unruly matter of experience and (eventually) history. Reading limits us again, if differently, to certain kinds of evidence and to the areas in which that evidence is concentrated. Yet these very limitations and condensations are themselves legible, and marking them allows us to listen not only to the speech of the past, but to its silences. In this way, the partial testimony of the printed record can help us to consider, once more, what to remember and what to forget in these stories whose consequences promise to linger on, not only in the present, but into the future as well.


Notes

Introduction English Worthies: The Age of Expansion Remembered 1. Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), 318/Sss2v (pagination to both editions is unreliable; I have given page numbers where these seem useful, followed by signature). Subsequent citations to the two editions of Fuller’s work are given in the text as Worthies 1684 or Worthies 1662. 2. For copies of Hariot, I have consulted the online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) at http://estc.bl.uk (accessed July 2007). 3. I am indebted for these references to Matthew Day’s excellent thesis on Hakluyt, Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600) and the Textuality of Tudor English Nationalism. (D. Phil., York, 2003). 4. Hakluyt’s 1589 collection included a brief account of the circumnavigation summarized from a manuscript no longer extant—these “Drake leaves,” 12 folio sides of black letter text, fall between pages 643 and 644 but are themselves unpaginated, an indication that they were added at some point after the rest of the volume had gone to press. The first full-length account of Drake’s epochal voyage in English, The World Encompassed, did not appear until 1628, several decades after Drake’s death. 5. Cal. S.P. For. 1584–85, 19:108. Harry Kelsey thinks the reference is to the circumnavigation of 1577–80 (Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998], 178). Mary Frear Keeler believes the reference is to evolving plans for what became Drake’s voyage to the West Indies in 1585–86 (Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage. Hakluyt Society Publications. 2nd ser., no. 148. [London: Hakluyt Society, 1981]). I lean to Keeler’s view. Kelsey remarks in general that Drake’s reputation “was created by his enemies”: Spanish colonists in the West Indies lauded his abilities as a way of explaining their failure successfully to resist him; Spanish historians anticipated by several years accounts of Drake by the English chroniclers William Camden and Edmund Howes (Drake, 394). 6. On Dutch perspectives on the Armada, see Jonathan Israel and Geoffrey Parker, “Of Providence and Protestant Winds: The Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Dutch Armada of 1688,” in Israel, ed., The Anglo Dutch Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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7. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989), esp. ca. 117. 8. BL Harleian MS 167/42, ff. 184r–200r; printed in James McDermott, Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 105–131. 9. Richard Hakluyt, ed., Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600); reprint, 12 vols. (Glasgow: Hakluyt Society, 1903–05), 7:250. Further page references will be given to the 1903–05 edition as PN. 10. Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 11. The text transcribed is Worthies 1684, 90–91/H5v–H6r. This copy of the 1632 edition of Generall Historie is Huntington RR3346, discussed in chapter 2. Both Fuller and the annotator have misidentified Smith’s birthplace as being in Cheshire, rather than in Lincolnshire. 12. The epitaph was reproduced in Anthony Munday and Henry Dyson’s enlarged edition of John Stow, Survey of London (London, 1633), and is reprinted in Charles Deane, ed., The Last Will and Testament of Captain John Smith (Cambridge: John Wilson, 1867), 6–7. 13. The heading reads: “To the living memory of his deceased friend, Captain John Smith.” Smith’s use of the third person for first-person observations makes such a conclusion tentative. His will, dated the day of his death, allocates 20 pounds to be spent on the funeral, without any further instructions; in addition to real estate and movable possessions, the will anticipates a total of about 120 pounds in cash, of which the funeral expenses thus represent a significant amount. Smith’s executor (and heir to his properties in Lincolnshire, along with his coat of arms) was Thomas Packer, one of the clerks of his Majesty’s Privy Seal (Barbour, Works 3:382–3). 14. On Drake’s writing activities, see Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, 302–304. 15. William Monson, The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, M. Oppenheim, ed., 6 vols., (London: Navy Records Society, 1902–14), 4:271 (subsequent citations in the text as Naval Tracts); cited in N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660–1649 (London: Norton, 1998), 302. The circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish’s journal of his second attempt at circumnavigation in 1591–92 makes for unpleasant reading; produced as he slid into madness, it was—fortunately for his reputation—not published in full until the late twentieth century. The journal came to Purchas through Hakluyt, and an excerpted version was published in Pilgrimes (London, 1625). D.B. Quinn gives the details in his introduction to the facsimile edition of the holograph, The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish 1591–92 (Chicago: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Chicago Press, 1975). 16. James McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), xiv.

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17. ESTC may not list all existing copies, but provides at least a reasonable idea of the rate at which a book has survived. 18. Pamela Neville-Sington, “The Primary Purchas Bibliography,” in L.E. Pennington, ed., Purchas Handbook (London: Hakluyt Society, 1997), 2:551–69. 19. John Pinkerton, preface to A General Collection of . . . Voyages and Travels (London, 1808), 1: vi. 20. McDermott points out that Frobisher came from different origins than did the other men. His name is often grouped with those of Grenville, Hawkins, Drake and Ralegh; yet the implied association is misleading. Though these men may have shared a physical proximity with Frobisher at certain times during their careers, their society [i.e., their upbringing and social standing] was not his . . . All these men’s lives have become part of the currency of eventshistory, and thus they have been given a community of identity that is entirely spurious. They shared with Frobisher a number of mutual connections, and in some cases, a life passed upon the deck of a wooden ship; and that is all. (Martin Frobisher, 425–6) 21. Smyth claimed John Smith as an ancestor, but as Smith had no direct descendents the ancestry was chosen rather than actual. Two other works that reference Smith on nautical terms are Peter Earle, The Last Fight of the Revenge (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), and Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea. 22. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Walt Whitman, ed. Mark van Doren, rev. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1974), 379. 23. Smith’s chivalry is often characterized as weirdly out of place— temporally, socially, generically, culturally. See Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature Vol. I (1607–1676) (New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons, 1879), 18; John Seelye, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 61; Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World. American Culture: The Formative Years (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 71. 24. See Worthies 1662, Chap. 8: “Of soldiers and seamen, with the necessity to encourage the trade of fishing.” 25. Elizabeth I’s minister William Cecil had attempted to institute secular days of fasting—or abstinence from meat—for this purpose. Evidently they fell into abeyance. 26. “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” in John Carey, ed., John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 27. Peter Pope gives the most recent perspective on the settlement debate in Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the 17th-Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2004).

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28. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

1 Sea-Dogs: Frobisher, Grenville, and the Definition of National Selves 1. Richard Hakluyt, “Epistle Dedicatorie,” PN 1: xxi. 2. George Best, “A true discourse of the three Voyages of discoverie” (PN 7:250–375). I also refer to two other sources on Frobisher as printed by Hakluyt: “The first voyage of Master Martin Frobisher, to the Northwest, . . . written by Christopher Hall, . . .1576” and “The second voyage of Master Martin Frobisher . . . Written by Master Dionise Settle” (PN 7:204–211, 211–30). The account by Best appeared in 1578 as A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie: for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northvveast (London, 1578), reprinted in Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Eloise McCaskill, eds., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 2 vols. (London: Argonaut Press, 1938). Settle’s account was also published separately, as A true reporte of the last voyage . . . by Capteine Frobisher (London, 1577). The 1577 text is printed in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols. (New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, 1979), 4:207–216. (Subsequent references given in text as “NAW”). Visual images related to the Frobisher voyages are surveyed in William C. Sturtevant and David Beers Quinn, “This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577,” in Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Aachen: Rader-Verlag, 1987), 61–140. 3. Walter Ralegh, “A report of the trueth of the fight about the Isles of Acores . . .” (PN 7:38–53); published anonymously as A report of the truth of the fight about the Iles of Açores (London, 1591). References are to the PN text. I also refer to “A large testimony of John Huighen van Linschoten Hollander, concerning the worthy exploits atchieved by the right honourable Earle of Cumberland, By Sir Martine Frobisher, Sir Richard Greenvile, and divers other English Captaines, about the Isles of the Acores, and upon the coasts of Spaine and Portugall . . .” (PN 7:62–87). This text was excerpted from the English translation of Linschoten’s Itinerario, translated into English as Discours of Voyages into ye Easte and West Indies (London, 1598). 4. A.L. Rowse, Sir Richard Grenville (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 102–108; 291. Rowse also discusses Grenville’s consideration of the Northwest Passage, “A discourse concerning a Strait to be discovered toward the north-west” (Lansdowne MSS, no. 100, f.4). 5. See Bernard Allaire and Donald Hogarth, “Martin Frobisher, the Spaniards, and a Sixteenth-Century Northern Spy,” Terrae Incognitae 28 (1996), 46–57.

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6. J.A. Froude, “England’s Forgotten Worthies,” in David Ogg, ed., Short Studies in Great Subjects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), 155. I discuss both essays and their authors at more length in Voyages in Print: English Voyages to America 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 158–72. 7. Walter A. Ralegh, “The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century,” PN 12:63. 8. K.R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 168. The general narrative can be followed in Andrews. 9. The map prepared by Michael Lok for Hakluyt’s first collection, Divers Voyages (1582), also reflects the understanding of northern geography associated with the Frobisher voyages; the map is reproduced in David Quinn, Richard Hakluyt, Editor, 2. vols. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968). For a detailed discussion of maps drawing on the Frobisher voyages, see Richard I. Ruggles, “The Cartographic Lure of the Northwest Passage: Its Real and Imaginary Geography,” in Thomas H.B. Symons, ed., Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery, 2 vols., Mercury Series Directorate Paper 10 (Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999), 1:179–256. 10. Captain Ray Jourdain, personal communication. 11. This site has subsequently proved a rich source for archaeologists; some of this research is described in Symons, Meta Incognita. 12. Stefansson and McCaskill, eds., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 1:16. 13. Stefansson and McCaskill, eds., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 1:26. 14. It is surely no coincidence that one encomium to Frobisher’s supposed discovery comes in the translator’s preface to Francisco Lopez de Gómara’s account of the conquest of Mexico: see Thomas Wilson, “Dedication,” The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India (London, 1578). 15. Lok, “East India by the Northwestw[ard],” MS Otho, E., viii, fol. 46 (47); in Stefansson and McCaskill, eds., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 1:161. 16. See Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 122, on “the backfire of the trick on the native’s face.” 17. For oral traditions regarding men “lost” from the Frobisher expedition, see Réginald Auger, “Exploring the Archaeology of Early European-Inuit Contact,” in Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny, eds., Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multi-Disciplinary Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 277–8.

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18. Kirsten A. Seaver, “How Strange Is a Stranger? A Survey of Opportunities for Inuit-European Contact in the Davis Strait before 1576,” in Symons, Meta Incognita, 2:523–52; 545. 19. Inga Clendinnen’s work on violence as a signifying practice has helped me in forming these questions; see her essay “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters: Essays from Representations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 20. The account that follows here relies substantially on Peter Earle, The Last Fight of the Revenge (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), which should be consulted for more detail. Earle’s attention to the testimony of Spanish combatants adds an important dimension to the records of the encounter. 21. No firsthand account of the battle by an English participant has yet come to light. Ralegh had access to the accounts of survivors, who were officially questioned on their return home (PN 7:43). Both Linschoten and Monson, however, were close to the scene. Linschoten describes contacts with prisoners from the Revenge, including the master and captain (PN 7:83–4). Monson had accompanied the Earl of Cumberland’s expedition to the Spanish coast in the summer of 1591, and was a prisoner in Lisbon when survivors from the Revenge arrived there (Monson is mentioned in a letter home from one of the Revenge’s gentlemen volunteers; see Letters of Philip Gawdy, ed. Isaac Herbert Jeayes [London: J.B. Nichols and sons, 1906], 64). His ms. account, written some years after the event, was printed in full by A.J. Churchill, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (London, 1704), and reprinted by the Naval Record Society as Monson’s Naval Tracts, ed. M. Oppenheim (London: Navy Records Society, 1902–14); the 1902–04 edition is cited in the text as Naval Tracts. The section of Monson’s work relevant to Grenville is also reprinted in Edmund Goldsmid, ed., Bibliotheca Curiosa. The Last Fight of the Revenge and The Death of Sir Richard Grenville. (A.D. 1591.) Related by Sir Walter Raleigh . . . together with The Most Honourable Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinuile, Knight, by Gervase Markham (1595), 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1886); cited in the text as Bibliotheca. 22. Earle gives more specific information: Grenville was too far behind the main English fleet to go through the gap Howard had used; he may have been too far to receive Howard’s signals. He did have room to escape by sailing in another direction—due west, between the coast of Flores and the rearguard of the main Spanish fleet. Instead Grenville ordered the helmsman to steer towards the leading galleons . . . on his weather bow. As they closed, the English opened fire with their great guns and then at the last moment the Revenge suddenly altered course closer to the wind . . . This move took the Revenge to windward of the leading galleons and forced

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25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

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them under her lee. . . . Now there was a gap among the galleons of Castile and the way lay open for the Revenge to sail through it close-hauled and catch up Lord Thomas Howard. (Last Fight, 117–20) Earle provides a list of Howard’s ships with tonnage and numbers of crew (Last Fight, 53). Anna Beer has noticed that “Ralegh highlights the great forces of the Spaniards, exaggerating their numbers: Hakluyt, often seen as an unscrupulous propagandist, but here seemingly concerned with accuracy, would reduce them to their correct amount in his printing of the work” (Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers [Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997], 6). The DNB entry for Grenville notes a similar numerical exaggeration in Froude’s essay, regarding the number of Spanish warships (DNB s.v. “Grenville, Sir Richard”). Linschoten, Itinerario, cited in Rowse, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, 315. A.R. Braunmuller, A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V.a. 321 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), no. 96, 314–317 (f.66r in original). Goldsmid, Bibliotheca 1:24. Bacon, in Goldsmid, Bibliotheca 1:25; Ralegh, PN 7:42, 47; Linschoten, PN 7:81; Markham, Bibliotheca 1:41. “Notes framed by M. Richard Hakluyt of the middle Temple Esquire, given to certain gentlemen that went with M. Frobisher,” PN 7:246; Frobisher’s commission is printed in James McDermott, The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island 1578 (London: Hakluyt Society, 2001), 60. Don Antonio was the claimant to the Portuguese throne supported by Elizabeth; after Cardinal-King Henry of Portugal died without issue in 1580, Philip II had assumed the throne, while the Azores held out for Don Antonio until subdued by force in 1582–83. See Philip Nichols, Sir Francis Drake Revived (London, 1626), 2. A pro-Spanish source turns this rhetoric inside out: It is well-known what insolence and tyranny Drake used in the years 1586 and 1587, both in Santo Domingo and in Cadiz. It is also known how this man of nothing made these places his prey, and with what oppression he treated the inhabitants. And what marks of arrogance and pride he left imprinted on Spanish territory, so outrageously that he forced and constrained the King, against his will, to pursue vengeance against him. (Response a l’inivste et sanguinaire edict d’Elizabeth . . . Contre les Catholiques de son Royaume [Lyons, 1593], 43v; my translation) In 1577, the male captive repeatedly denied English suggestions that cannibalism was being practised: “Being demanded by signes whether his countrymen had not slaine this [dead] man and eat his flesh so

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33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

N ot e s from his bones, he made signes to the contrary, and that he was slaine with Wolves and wild beasts” (PN 7:299). George Best writes that the English clothes discovered in an Inuit campsite and thought to belong to the captive crew were found near “rawe and new killed flesh of unknowen sorts” (PN 7:303); the juxtaposition no doubt was significant to him. Raw meat provided an important source of vitamin C, counteracting scurvy, in a climate where sources more familiar to Europeans were largely unavailable. Contemporary accounts of the Frobisher captives in 1577 made much of the fact that they ate raw meat; see Sturtevant and Quinn, “This New Prey.” This remarkable essay includes transcriptions of manuscripts, handbills, and text accompanying woodcut illustrations, from both English and continental sources. Citations from primary sources alluding to the captives’ diet can be found on 114 (n. 4a), Appendix 2, 135, 137 (bis), and Appendix 3, 139. The authors of the article suggest that the connection made between cannibalism and eating raw meat may have been influenced by a passage from Mandeville’s Travels, which was purchased for the voyage (115, n.7). Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 111 n.51; Tim Youngs, personal communication. NAW 4:217 (see later for fuller citation and discussion of this text). The sources cited by Sturtevant and Quinn, “This New Prey,” make frequent reference to the enormous appetite of captives. Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), 6. I discuss the topics of food and appetite in the literature on early Jamestown in “Mastering Words,” Voyages in Print, Chap. 3. John Smith told unruly colonists at Jamestown that “if I find any more runners for Newfoundland with the Pinnace, let him assuredly looke to arrive at the Gallows” (GH, 2:213). References to Newfoundland as an alternate destination for voyages in trouble can be found throughout Principal Navigations: for instance in the troubled return voyage of James Lancaster from the Indies in 1591 (PN 6:411). Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “stomach,” http://dictionary. oed.com./. “Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the troops at Tilbury, August 9, 1588,” in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 326. On the portrait, attributed to Marcus Gheerarts the Younger (1592?), see Louis Montrose, “Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters, 189–90. Sir Richard Hawkins, The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins (London, 1622), ed. James A. Williamson (Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Da Capo Press, 1970), 16.

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42. Sir James Watt and Ann Savours, “The Captured ‘Countrey People’: Their Depiction and Medical History,” in Symons, Meta Incognita, 2:553–62; 554. 43. Montaigne described the Brazilian Tupi—who were certainly cannibals— precisely in terms of Stoic valor. See David Quint, “A Reconsideration of Montaigne’s Des Cannibales,” in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 166–91. 44. Bartolomé de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe Chronicle of the Acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies (London, 1583), B4v, B4r. 45. Nicolas Pithou, preface to La Navigation du capitaine Martin Forbisher Anglois (n.p., 1578); my translation. 46. Christopher Hodgkins identifies this scene from Drake as paradigmatic of an English “White Legend” (Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002], 78). 47. Sir Francis Drake, The World Encompassed (London, 1628), in Sir Richard Carnac Temple, ed., The World Encompassed and Analogous Contemporary Documents (Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Da Capo Press, 1926), 56. Further citations are to this edition. 48. Thomas Churchyard, A Praise and Report of Maister Martyne Forboishers Voyage (London, 1578), B1v. 49. In addition to New American World, see also David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955). 50. “The voyage made by Sir Richard Greenvile, for Sir Walter Ralegh, to Virginia, in the yeere, 1585” (PN 8:310–317); the journal is also printed in Quinn, NAW 3:283–6. 51. David Quinn notes that this account “was compiled by Abraham Fleming from material apparently supplied to him by Sir Richard Grenville, whose personal narrative of the voyage would seem to be in part preserved here” (NAW 3:286). 52. R. Holinshed, Chronicles, 2nd edition (London, 1587), 3:1401–1402; NAW 3:287. 53. Lane to Sir Francis Walsingham, September 8, 1585, NAW 3:291. 54. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) 58; my italics. 55. PN 6:160, 163. Hakluyt took over these early African narratives from the previous editor, Richard Eden, who had added the marginal note about a young man as yet virtually nameless (see Eden, The decades of the newe worlde or west India [London, 1555], 352, 354); yet even in 1589 and 1600, when Hakluyt made much of Frobisher’s voyages to the Northwest, nothing identified this young man as the future explorer.

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56. State Papers, Public Record Office, Domestic, SP/70/32; cited in James McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 35, 440 n.21. 57. This detail first appears in Richard Willes, History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (London, 1577), who says Frobisher heard the information in a Lisbon jail. 58. See Sir James Watt, “The Medical Record of the Frobisher Voyages of 1576, 1577 and 1578,” in Symons, Meta Incognita, 2:607–632. 59. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 366. 60. See Sturtevant and Quinn, “This New Prey,” n.8, 115–116. Kalicho’s name also appears in the Bristol chronicles, the burial records of St. Stephen’s, Bristol, and in two early continental accounts (a 1578 French translation of Dionyse Settle and a Dutch manuscript of 1577–78) seeming to have drawn on information not available in the printed English accounts (these do not give names for any of the captives). 61. PRO, State Papers, Domestic, SP 12/118, 40, I; printed as “Postmortem report by Dr. Edward Dodding, at Bristol, on the Inuit Eskimo man brought by Frobisher,” NAW 4:216–218 (citations to this version given in the text). A translation with commentary is given in Neil Cheshire, Tony Waldron, Alison Quinn, and David Quinn, “Frobisher’s Eskimos in England,” Archivaria 10 (1980), and the document can also be found in Patrick Collinson, ed., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in search of a passage to Cathaia and India by the Northwest (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867) and in Stefansson and McCaskill, eds., Three Voyages. 62. Dodding’s description of Kalicho’s death raises numerous questions and need not be taken as entirely reliable; see Erik R. Seeman, “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches,” Journal of American History 88 (2001), 17–47. I’m grateful to Scott Stevens for this reference. 63. Sturtevant and Quinn, “This New Prey,” 80. 64. Purchas reprinted Linschoten’s chapters on English cruises in the Azores. Monson’s naval writings, with his critical account of Grenville, first appeared in 1682, and were reprinted in Churchill’s 1704 anthology. A hundred years later, John Pinkerton (explicitly a disciple of Hakluyt, and critical of Purchas) printed Ralegh’s account with other material on the Azores in General Collection of . . . Voyages and Travels (London, 1808), vol. 1. 65. The Veatchs Arts of the Book, Northampton MA, gave this detailed description of a copy for sale: Riverside Press, (1902), 1902. A Report of the truth concerning the last sea-fight of the Revenge. 7 5/8 ⫻ 11 3/4. 19 pages. Green cloth spine, green patterned boards with paper label on upper cover. Light wear at corners, narrow band of discoloration

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66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

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along top edge. The foxing in this copy is mostly (but not entirely) in the lower margins and is less offensive than in many other copies. Copy No. “Editor’s copy. Not to be sold” of 300 copies, on Unbleached Arnold hemp. Designed by Bruce Rogers. The title page woodcut after Howard Pyle is printed from the block, surrounded by a woodcut Renaissance-style border by Frank Chocteau Brown. Eight-line initial by BR. Printed in a trial fount of BR’s Montaigne type, based on Jenson. The first of BR’s Riverside books to be printed on a hand press. Artists of the Book in Boston # 61. Book Decoration in America 1890–1910 # 48. Warde 27. (ABEbooks.com, July 13, 2006) John Barrow, Memoirs of the Naval Worthies of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign (London: John Murray, 1845), 427. Froude, “England’s Forgotten Worthies”; Edward Arber, The Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea under the Command of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Grenville (Westminster: A. Constable, 1895). (The reference to Goldsmid appears earlier.) I discuss the Victorian rediscovery of the Elizabethan voyagers in Voyages in Print, 156–72. In his headnote to the poem, Christopher Ricks gives details of Tennyson’s exchanges with Edward Arber and Clements Markham; he had also read Froude’s “Forgotten Worthies” and received a copy of Arber’s documentary collection on the Revenge (The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks [Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987], 3:25). Further citations are to Ricks’s edition. Willard M. Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 88. Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1973), 162. Beer, Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century: Speaking to the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 3. Ralegh to Lord Burleigh, October 16 [1591], in Agnes Latham and Joyce Youings, eds., The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 57. Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! or, The voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, knight: of Burrough in the County of Devon in the reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), 20. In his headnote to the poem, Ricks cites Priscilla Metcalf, James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 281. Earle, Last Fight, 124. The original entry for Grenville in the DNB notes a similar numerical exaggeration in Froude’s essay, regarding the number of Spanish warships (DNB, s.v. “Grenville, Sir Richard”). Barrow, Naval Worthies, 426. Barrow’s notice of Grenville occurs in his notice of Lord Thomas Howard. Barrow describes Monson as

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77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

N ot e s “unhappy without a grievance real or imaginary” and prone to find “fault with the conduct of almost every other officer and services [sic]” (483). DNB s.v. “Grenville, Sir Richard.” See also the discussion by Oppenheim, Naval Tracts, 1:262–6. Earle briefly reviews the treatment of Grenville by early twentieth-century naval historians in the concluding chapter of Last Fight. Beer, Ralegh and His Readers, 6–7. Worthies 1662, Cccc2r. See also Ann Savour’s biographical essay on Clements Markham, secretary and president of the Hakluyt Society, who participated in the search for Franklin as a young man (Savours, “Clements Markham,” in R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair eds., Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth: Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society 1846–1996 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996), 165–88. There is a copious literature on this topic. For the eighteenth century, see Glyndowr Williams, The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Nineteenth Century (London: Royal Commonwealth Society/ Longmans, 1962) and Voyages of Delusion: The Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (London: Harper Collins, 2002). For the nineteenth century, I have relied on William Barr, Searching for Franklin: The Land Arctic Searching Expedition (London: Hakluyt Society, 1999). See also Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Collinson, The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, viii. Twelve other copies are currently listed by ESTC (accessed July 16, 2007). Edwin E. Rich and A.M. Johnson, John Rae’s Correspondence with the Hudson’s Bay Company on Arctic Exploration, 1844–55 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 276; cited in Barr, Searching for Franklin, 15. Dickens, “Lost Arctic Voyagers,” Household Words 245, December 2, 1854, 361; cited in Barr, Searching for Franklin, 18. Barr, Searching for Franklin, 18. Barr gives references to the original reports published in Historical Archaeology and Arctic in the years shown. David C. Woodman looks at Hall’s collection and use of oral testimony regarding Franklin at Repulse Bay in Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). Collinson, Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 367. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 494–5. Hall’s appendix to the Collinson edition cross-references artifacts with passages from both editions of Hakluyt as well as from the text of Best as reprinted by Pinkerton. Anthony Payne, Richard Hakluyt and His Books (London: Hakluyt Society, 1997), 10.

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91. Mathew Day, Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600) and the Textuality of Tudor English Nationalism, D. Phil. York, 2003, 93–4. 92. Payne, Richard Hakluyt, 10. 93. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 33; Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion 1558–1625 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 17–18. (This book is out of date on some factual details with regard to Hakluyt, and should be used with caution.) The last quotation, by Anna Beer, attributes this view of Hakluyt to others as a common assumption; Hakluyt is “often seen as an unscrupulous propagandist” (Ralegh and His Readers, 6). 94. This argument can of course only claim to describe reading practices that are in some way public: on the one hand, accounts of Principal Navigations, which in some way identify the parts that “matter,” on the other, the many “selections from” Principal Navigations. These would repay more sustained study than I have been able to do for this chapter. A good example of the first would be G.B. Parks’s essay on “Tudor Travel Literature,” in D.B. Quinn, ed., The Hakluyt Handbook (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), 1:97–132. My own idiosyncratic (but material) evidence for the point on traditions of selection was the discovery that two copies of the 1903–05 edition, in the MIT and JCB libraries, had pages that remained still uncut when I consulted them in the mid-1990s, almost a century after their acquisition. 95. Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire (Paris: Éditions Arléa, 1995), 14; my translation.

2 “Three Turks’ Heads”: Reading the T RUE T RAVELS , A DVENTURES , AND O BSERVATIONS OF C APTAIN J OHN S MITH (1630) 1. The second part of the volume—titled the True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain Iohn Smith—used other sources to carry forward the history of England’s Atlantic colonies from 1624 to 1629, continuing on from his compendious Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). 2. Moses Coit Tyler, History of American Literature, Vol. 1. (1607–1676) (New York, 1878), 1:18. 3. What has excited readers about this text is the debate over Smith’s truthfulness. I take the broader question of credibility to have been more or less settled by the archival research of Philip Barbour and Laura Striker—something like this probably happened.

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4. Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 210. 5. More specific information about the different states of the book can be found in Joseph Sabin, A Dictionary of Books Relating to America (New York, 1868–1936), 20:259–60. 6. Barbour, Works 3:140. Joseph Sabin notes that in some copies, the arms are on a separate page (Dictionary 20:259). 7. Smith’s Generall Historie (1624) includes Cotton in the list of “Adventurers for Virginia . . .1620” (Works 2:273). 8. Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 145. See also C.J. Wright, ed., Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy (London: The British Library, 1997). 9. Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 612; on this hypothetical play, see also Philip Barbour, “Captain John Smith and the London Theatre,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975), 277–9. 10. Smith habitually used maps to record ties of friendship, patronage (actual or solicited), and collaboration; other topographical features were named after Robert Vaughan, who engraved/designed the “Map of Old Virginia” included in Generall Historie, James Reeve, who printed the “Map of New England” and illustrations for True Travels, and John Payne, who “extracted out of the history” the scenes from Travels that Martin Droeshout engraved. Payne, Gunnell, and Reeve appear on the map of New England; Vaughan on the map of old Virginia. 11. In the prefatory material to Sea Grammar, Smith describes the Ferneza book as “a life of Sigismundus Bathor, Prince of Transilvania, writ by his Secretary Francisco Fernezsa” (Works 3:13). Smith’s earlier editor Edward Arber reported that a Spanish translation of this book had been seen by the Spanish bibliographer Don Pascual de Gayangos y Arce, but neither this nor the Italian original have subsequently been traced (Works 3:331). Barbour’s edition clarifies the different treatment of material putatively cited from Ferneza by Purchas, Pilgrimes, and Smith, Travels. 12. Attached to Smith’s Description of New England (1616) was one commendatory poem by a man who describes Smith as “my Captaine . . . in the fierce wars of Transilvania” (“To his worthy Captaine, the Author,” Works 1:362). 13. Bodleian Library, MS *James 35, page 8; Barbour, Works 3:147 n.4. I have not examined this poem; Barbour noticed “no significant variants.” 14. See later on Robert Burton’s ownership of a copy of Travels that later came to the Bodleian as part of his bequest.

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15. I have followed Barbour in his rectification of the chronology, based on supporting documents and known dates—see the notes to his edition, Works 3:153–6. 16. For another discussion of this scene, see Jennifer Goodman, “The Captain’s Self-Portrait: John Smith as Chivalric Biographer,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1981), 27–38. 17. “Deer and venison remained the prerogative of landowners, their friends and protégés . . . [venison] had the peculiar characteristic that it was not bought or sold in the open market” (C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age to Recent Times [London: Constable, 1973], 92.) 18. Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 70. Antonio de Guevara, The Diall of Princes, ed. K.N. Colvile (London: P. Allan, 1919), xxiv. 19. The two books differ substantially, and if one were to choose which Smith might have read in the woods, Golden Booke seems more likely simply on the basis of size: Diall of Princes is a sturdy folio, but the editions of Golden Booke I have examined are manageable octavos about the size of a hand. References in the text are to the 1586 edition of Golden Booke. 20. Leonard, Books of the Brave, 164, 209, 298, etc. 21. W.O. Hassall, A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 22. Two modern editions have been helpful to me: Neal Wood, ed., The Art of War: A revised Edition of the Ellis-Farneworth Translation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965); Christopher Lynch, ed. and trans., The Art of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 23. All citations are to Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre, trans. Peter Whitehorne (London, 1562). 24. The Golden Booke of Marcus Aurelius, Emperour, and eloquent Oratour (London, 1586), K8r–v, N6v. 25. Andrew Fitzmaurice notes that “Smith has been neglected as a figure in intellectual history,” (Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonization, 1500–1625 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 185); see his useful discussion of Smith and Machiavelli in this book. 26. Arte of Warre 38v (see also the ensuing discussion, 38v–40v; on 40v, “utilitie” appears to be a misprint for “vileness”); Golden Booke, H6v–7r. 27. New Englands Trials, Works 2:405; see also Description of New England, Works 2:345. 28. While cavalry has its place in the Machiavellian army, Fabrizio characterizes it as inherently less suited to the kinds of ideal order he envisions, and sees it as indispensable to true military reform (see Arte of Warre 26r–v, 29v). For a balanced discussion of Machiavelli’s views on

190

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

N ot e s cavalry, see the “Interpretive Essay” appended to Christopher Lynch’s edition of the work. For a general discussion of infantry and cavalry in Renaissance warfare, see J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985). Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1; Parker is citing Michael Roberts. Lesley Thomson was able to tell me that the lance, unlike other weapons (sword, pike, and so on), appeared very infrequently as the stage directions of Renaissance plays, and then only in about six plays set in medieval or classical times (Coriolanus and Edward III were two of them). Comparing Smith to another famous soldier of his age, J. Leo Lemay writes that “[t]he commoner Pike fought on foot and won his battles with a pike, whereas Smith began on horseback and employed the usual weapons of the aristocratic knight in a tournament” (J. Leo Lemay, The American Dream of Captain John Smith [Charlottesville, Va., 1993], 235 n.8). Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 129. On Elizabethan entertainments, see Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980); Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth; Sydney Anglo, ed., Chivalry in the Renaissance (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1990); Arthur Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986). Sir William Segar, The Booke of Honor and Armes (London, 1590); Honor Military and Ciuill (London, 1602). Smith later had to do with Segar over the recording of his Hungarian grant of arms. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51; Richard McCoy, Rites of knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 80–82. See Strong, “Astraea’s Heir,” in The Cult of Elizabeth, 187–91. Yet another locus for reading chivalry under the Stuarts, might be the neo-feudalism of the Earl of Arundel and his circle, manifested in George Calvert’s plans for his colony in Newfoundland (Kevin Sharpe, “The Earl of Arundel, His Circle and the Opposition to the Duke of Buckingham, 1618–1628,” in Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England [New York: Pinter, 1989], 182–206). Letter to Framlingham Gawdy, Ms. Egerton 2804, f. 207; in Isaac Herbert Jeayes, ed., Letters of Philip Gawdy (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1906), 173. J.S.A. Adamson suggests that the discontinuation of the accession-day tilts indicated less a repudiation of the chivalric inheritance from earlier reigns than a reappraisal and reallocation of its terms (Adamson, “Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England,” in Kevin Sharpe

N ot e s

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

191

and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994], 161–98). See Anna S. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century: Speaking to the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 116–22. On the association of the Legend with Smith and True Travels, see Alden Vaughan, “John Smith Satirized: The Legend of Captaine Iones,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 45 (1988). ESTC lists editions of Legend in 1631, 1636, 1648, 1656, 1659, 1671, 1766 (exact titles vary). [David Lloyd] The Legend of Captain Jones (London, 1659), 27; further citations in the text are to this edition. Vaughan, “John Smith Satirized,” 720. Fuller, Worthies 1662, 180 (or Z4v). Jeffrey Knapp comments on the problems with Smith’s social status in Jamestown: “Smith’s famous hostility toward the idle gentlemen of the colony, those ‘holding it a great disgrace that amongst so much action, their actions were nothing’ . . ., is matched on the gentlemen’s side, however, by their identification of his ‘base’ speech and views with his low social status” (An Empire Nowhere, 207). For a strong statement of Smith’s leveling views, see Lemay, American Dream, Chap. 8. Roger Ascham, Scolemaster (London, 1573), 19v–20; cited in Marcia Vale, Gentleman’s Recreations: Accomplishments and Pastimes of the English Gentleman 1580–1630, Studies in Elizabethan and Renaissance Culture I (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1977), 6. William Prynne, Histriomastix. The Players Scovrge, or Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633), 966; cited in Vale, Gentleman’s Recreations, 14. In the earliest printed version of Travels, printed by Purchas in Pilgrimes, the part of the narrative from Smith’s proposal of the signaling strategem up to and including the battle in which he was taken prisoner by the Turks—in other words, all of the material on Transylvania—is set off in italics under the heading “Extracts of Captaine Smiths Transylvanian Acts, out of Fr.[ancisco] Fer.[neza] his Storie” (Pilgrimes 2:1364; Works 3:346). Smith marks the citation more discreetly at the end of the Transylvanian narrative, with a marginal note that it is “Extracted out of a Booke . . . written by Francisco Ferneza, a learned Italian, . . . and translated by Master Purchas” (Travels, 185). The account of battle next to which the marginal note appears differs from Purchas’s version both in content and style. Barbour makes the connection (Works 3:163 n.5); the last two chapters of The Art of Warre (1562) concern sending coded messages by flashing lights. Laura Polanyi Striker cites Hungarian sources on the practice during this period of “beautiful tournaments” during battle, and of duels

192

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

N ot e s regulated by a well-defined code of honor (“The Hungarian Historian, Lewis L. Kropf, on Captain John Smith’s True Travels: A Reappraisal,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 66 [1958], 37). See, e.g., the tilting portraits of the Earl of Essex by Nicholas Hilliard, of the Earl of Cumberland, and of James Scudamore reproduced and discussed by Roy Strong in The Cult of Elizabeth. Cf. also William Segar’s descriptions in Honour Military and Ciuill, ca. 198. George Whitney, Choice of Emblemes, and Other Devises (Leyden, 1586), 38. Elyot (1531), 68v, cited in Vale, The Gentleman’s Recreations, 11. I am grateful to Elise Goodman for pointing me toward the context of Renaissance equestrian statues. On the Marcus Aurelius statue and representations of Charles V, see Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (New York: Viking, 1972) studies relevant material closer to Smith’s time. These associations (horsemanship, self-government, the right to rule) also played out vividly in at least some accounts of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish—accounts that Smith seems to have read avidly, given his repeated admonitions that Englishmen should seek to emulate Cortés. For one example, see Francisco Lopez de Gómara, Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the VVeast India (London, 1578), 44–5. On the (related?) inflation of the role played by horses in Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, see D. Katherine Abbass, “Horses and Heroes: The Myth of the Importance of the Horse to the Conquest of the Indies,” Terrae Incognitae 18 (1986). “Now all their plots Smith so well understood . . . with facility he could revenge when he would, because all those countryes more feared him than Powhatan . . . and many of the rest for love or feare would have done any thing” (Generall Historie; Works 2:217). Lorna Hutson has valuable things to say about temperance in her article, “Chivalry for Merchants; or, Knights of Temperance in the Realms of Gold,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (1996). Don Holly Jr. notes that anthropologists have offered the “preference for decapitation over scalping” by Newfoundland’s Beothuk people “as evidence of their . . . highly primitive state” (“A Historiography of an Ahistoricity: On the Beothuk Indians,” History and Anthropology 14 [2003], 131). Churchyard, Generall rehearsall of warres, called Churchyardes Choise; wherein is fiue hundred seuerall seruices of land and sea, Q3v. Philip L. Barbour, Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (London: MacMillan and Co., 1964), 58. I am indebted to Professor Pépé Amor of Brown University for acquainting me with the episode in Cervantes, as well as with other Spanish analogues.

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58. Robert Schwoebel describes an earlier festivity at the Burgundian court (1454) in which the captured city of Constantinople, and the church itself, are represented as women in Turkish captivity (Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk, 1453–1517 [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967], 86–7). There is evidently a rich narrative and symbolic tradition around women as captive to Islam that Smith’s account of this episode might have exploited. 59. Franciscus Billerbeg, Most Rare and straunge Discourses, of Amurathe the Turkish Emperor that nowe is . . . (London, 1584), E3r, F1r, etc.; the festivities are described at C1r and following. 60. Andrea Campini, “A commentarie of the warres of the Tvrkes made against George Scanderbeg,” in Two very notable Commentaries, tr. John Shute (London, 1562), 1r. 61. J. Theodore Bent, ed., Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 32. The traveler is Thomas Dallam. 62. Knolles uses “Turks” and “Saracens” together and interchangeably in his account of the Crusades (Generall Historie of the Turkes, 12–14). 63. Segar, Honor Military and Ciuill, 49. 64. Hakluyt, A Particuler Discourse . . . Known As Discourse Of Western Planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, Works issued for the Hakluyt Society, extra series no. 45. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 12. 65. “The wonderful recovery of the Exchange of Bristol, from the Turkish Pirats of Argier, published by John Rawlins . . .,” in Purchas, Pilgrims 6:151–71. I discuss the narratives by Rawlins and Dallam (note 61 earlier) in “English Turks and Resistant Travellers,” in Jyotsna Singh and Ivo Kamps, eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Witnesses” to “Navigations, Traffiques, and Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 66–73. This volume includes the primary texts discussed. 66. Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (Paris: Boivin & cie, 1941), 78. 67. Striker, “The Hungarian Historian, Lewis L. Kropf, on Captain John Smith’s True Travels,” 33 and passim. 68. Edward Arber, ed., Captain John Smith . . . Works, 1608–1631 (Birmingham, 1884), 1:ix–x. 69. Richard Beale Davis, “The First American Edition of Captain John Smith’s True Travels and General Historie,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 48 (1939), 97, 102. Davis cites a letter by Francis Walker Gilmer, 1/5/1818. 70. As the annotator’s identity is unknown, my identification of gender is of course conjectural. Generall Historie did have its female readers, as evidenced by annotations to Huntington RB 3350: “Anna Leo her book.”

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71. Francis Higginson, New England’s Plantation (1630); William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634); Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (Amsterdam, 1637). 72. Michael Lok was treasurer of the Muscovy Company; he was jailed for debt after the financial debacle of the Frobisher voyages. His ms. comments on the voyages have already been cited in chapter 1. 73. Richard P. McCormick, New Jersey from Colony to State, 1609–1789, The New Jersey Historical Series volume I (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1964), 14. 74. John E. Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey; a History (New York: Scribner, 1973), 19. 75. Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library (London: Macmillan, 1931), 207. 76. I am grateful to Mr. Clive Hurst, Head of Rare Books & Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, for this identification and related references. 77. Barbour, Works 1:xxxii. 78. Nicholas Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, new ser., v. 22 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), xxiii. Further citations in the text as Burton. 79. Less than 7% of Lumley’s collection was in English. Some of these English books would have been on travel and geography, however; Lumley was an early investor in the Muscovy Company, and his interests were represented in the collection. For more information, see Sears Jayne and Francis R. Johnson, eds., The Lumley Library: The Catalogue of 1609 (London: British Museum, 1956); note that many of Lumley’s English books on travel were catalogued as “Historici.” 80. Jayne and Johnson, Lumley Library, 11. 81. See Ian Philip, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) on the Bodleian’s active acquisition of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian MSS in the seventeenth century. 82. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Parsons” (by Victor Houliston), http://www.oxforddnb.com; see also the essays in Thomas McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1996). 83. For a description of Persons’s benevolence toward English prisoners, see M[artin]Aray, The discovery and confutation of a tragical fiction (London, 1599). Hakluyt complained that “in all the kinge of Spayne his Domynions, . . . our men are dryven to flinge their Bibles and prayer Bokes into the sea, and to forsweare and renownce their rebellion and conscience and consequently theyr obedience to her Majestie. . . .” (Particuler Discourse, 12). 84. Along similar lines, Katherine Duncan-Jones has noticed the friendly relationship between Philip Sidney and Edmund Campion, who met

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85.

86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

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in Prague in the 1570s; Campion had also received protection from both Henry Sidney and the Earl of Leicester (Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier-Poet [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991], 124–5). These were earlier days—Persons distributed a famous slander of Leicester in the 1580s—but Duncan-Jones suggests these matters might bear reexamining. See her “Sir Philip Sidney’s Debt to Edmund Campion,” in McCoog, The Reckoned Expense, 85–102. Subsequently, a libelous account of the community appeared in print, which appeared to draw some of its material from Fenton’s observations; the second letter is a request to him from John Ferrar to confirm on his word as a gentleman that he had no involvement with this publication, and the third letter contains Fenton’s affirmative response. John Smith had his own library of books when he died. About these, we know only that half were left to a Thomas Packer, and half to John Tradescant. The latter makes for a fascinating legatee—a great collector of curiousities, Tradescant was succeeded by a namesake who bequeathed this collection, along with his books, to Elias Ashmole. Ashmole in turn left Tradescant’s curiosities and their conjoined libraries alike to the University of Oxford. A room in the Ashmolean Museum displays many of the remaining items from Tradescant’s collection, and its spectacular centrepiece is a Native American robe said to have belonged to Powhatan; the gift has been conjecturally ascribed to Smith. Ashmole’s copy of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations is still in Duke Humphrey’s library at the Bodleian—perhaps Smith’s own books are still there as well. John Thomas Payne and Henry Foss, Bibliotheca Grenvilliana I (London, 1842), 3–4 and passim. One other known copy is in the British Library; ESTC incorrectly lists a copy at Michigan, which the Michigan catalogue specifies is a microfilm. In all, three 1684 texts remember Smith. Thomas Fuller’s memorial in English Worthies (1662, 1684) has already been mentioned. An unpublished biography of Smith in Latin was among the voluminous writings of the young divine Henry Wharton; the manuscript is dated 1685. In her edition of the biography, Laura Striker suggests that Wharton’s Vita Johannis Fabricii Militis Angli was inspired by the lord mayor’s feast of 1684, probably commemorated in the broadside poem (Henry Wharton, The Life of John Smith, English Soldier, ed. and trans. Laura Polanyi Striker [Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1957], 28–31). W. Sloane Sloane-Evans’s A Grammar of British Heraldry, 2nd edition (London, 1854) lists among armorial heads those of the Wild Man, the Moor, the Saracen, the Saxon, the Englishman, the Old Man, the Woman, and the Child; those of the Saxon and the Englishmen were associated exclusively with Welsh families (105). Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Saracen.”

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92. Churchyard, Generall rehearsall of warres, Q3v. 93. Bryant Lillywhite, London Signs (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 593, 244. 94. For acting companies, Turks’ heads were literally a property. Henslowe’s diary lists among the goods of the Lord Admiral’s Men the heads of mythological figures, animals, and Turks: “Item, Cathemer sewte, j payer of clothe whitte stockens, iiij Turckes hedes . . .,” Appendix 2 “Playhouse Inventories Now Lost,” in Henslowe’s Diary, Edited with supplementary material, introduction and notes, R.A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 318–319. I am indebted to Lesley Thomson for this reference. Natasha Korda suggested that these “heads” might be headdresses or turbans: indeed, something that could be removed without gross damage (personal communication). 95. Warrington Smyth, A Year with the Turks (New York: Redfield, 1854), 27. 96. On Disney’s Pocahontas and the history of Jamestown, see my chapter, “The First Southerners: Jamestown’s Colonists as Exemplary Figures,” in Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, eds., A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Malden, Mass.: Blackwells, 2004), 29–42.

3 “Rebellious Fish”: Newfoundland Unremembered 1. John Noble Wilford, “Jamestown Fort, ‘Birthplace’ Of America in 1607, Is Found,” New York Times, September 13, 1996. 2. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47. 3. John Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), xiv. 4. David Quinn, “The Lost Colony in Myth and Reality, 1586–1625,” Chap. 17 in England and the Discovery of America 1481–1620 (New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1974). 5. For instance, settlement at Cupids Cove, NL is recorded through 1624, but archaeological evidence suggests occupation “up until about 1660” (William Gilbert, “Baccalieu Trail Archaeology Project, 1997: Excavations at Cupids,” in K. Nelmes, ed., Archaeology in Newfoundland and Labrador 1997, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Archaeology Office, http://www.tcr.gov. nl.ca/tcr/pao/, cited August 11, 2006). 6. In the summer of 2006, Jacques Cartier’s settlement of 1541 was located––shortly before the 400th anniversary of Québec City’s founding in 1608: “This is where it all started,” said archeologist Yves Chrétien. . . . “This was where the Europeans made the very first attempts at

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7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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colonizing the continent north of Mexico. This was the first of everything: the first European women to arrive here, the first carpenters, the first farm animals, truly the first real attempt at building a settlement” (Rhéal Séguin, “A Window into World of First French Settlers,” Globe and Mail, August 29, 2006). Smith’s autobiography is at Pilgrimes 8:321–42, materials on colonial Newfoundland at 19:406–448. David Stick, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), xi. Peter Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the 17thCentury (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2004), 73. For documents relating to these voyages, see volumes 1 and 4 of David B. Quinn, New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. 5 vols. (New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, 1979). For early voyages out of Bristol, see David H. Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 34. John Rastell, A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the iiij. elements, excerpted in NAW 1:170–171. See NAW 1:161–71 for Henry VIII’s patent and other documents relating to Rastell. The first quotation is taken from the slide presentation at the Visitors’ Center of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site; the second, from Paul Green, The Lost Colony: A Symphonic Drama in Two Acts (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), 5. J.M. Bumstead, “The Cultural Landscape of Early Canada,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 391. On Newfoundland’s cultural distinctiveness, see Leslie Harris, “The Owl of Minerva,” in G.M. Story, ed., Early European Settlement and Exploitation in Atlantic Canada [St. John’s, Nfld.: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1982], 7. See, however, Bruce Trigger’s description of post-Confederation Canadian history and its investment in a “Heroic Age” of founding figures and great deeds (Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered [Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985], 6). Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith, “DEPENDENCY/SPACE/POLICY: An Introduction to a Dialogue with Harold Innis,” in Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 7 (1993), 8. For a discussion of how the fishery influenced Newfoundland’s settlement pattern—a population dispersed into small, isolated outports— see W. Gordon Handcock, So longe as There comes no women: Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland (St. John’s, Nfld.: Breakwater Books, 1989), and Meinig, Atlantic America 1492–1800, esp. 86–8.

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19. Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 299. 20. Meinig, Atlantic America, 55. 21. Franklin T. McCann, English Discovery of America to 1585 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1952), 56. 22. C. Grant Head, Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A Geographer’s Perspective (Toronto, 1976), quoted in Handcock, So longe as There comes no women, 14. 23. R. Cole Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada Volume 1, From The Beginning to 1800 (Toronto, 1987); see plate 20. Peter Pope notes the constraints of Newfoundland’s ecosystem, not only with respect to soil and climate, but also its animal populations (Fish, 45). However, Pope comments that agriculture in Newfoundland was consistently practiced, and as consistently “underperceived” (435). 24. See Karen O. Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review 87 (1982), 1262–89. 25. Letter from Edward Winne to Sir George Calvert, August 17, 1622; printed in Gillian T. Cell, Newfoundland Discovered (London: Hakluyt Society, 1982), 201. 26. Richard Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of Nevv-found-land (London, 1620), 52–3. See Cell, Newfoundland Discovered, 32–3, for an assessment of Whitbourne on climate. 27. John Hagthorpe, Englands-Exchequer, or A discourse of the sea and navigation with some things thereto coincident concerning plantations . . . (London, 1625), 31. 28. Timber was also a staple of major importance in the seventeenth century. John Smith talks about wood’s abundance in New England, and “decay” in Europe (Description of New England 22; Works 1:337). Pope describes boat-building and logging as “a significant part of [Newfoundland’s] planter economy” in the seventeenth century (Fish, 342). See also David B. Quinn, “Why They Came,” in Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625 (London, 1990), 157–8. 29. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, “A Discourse How Hir Majestie may annoy the King of Spayne” (PRO, State Papers, Domestic, SP 12/118, 12 [i]), cited in David B. Quinn, Voyages and Colonizing Expeditions of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), 1:172. 30. Robert Hitchcock, A Politique Platt (London, 1580), E4v. Jeff Reed kindly pointed me toward this book and its engraved illustrations. 31. Cited in Innis, Cod Fisheries, 52. 32. Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 43. 33. Cell, English Enterprise, 15. See also Hitchcock, Politique Platt, A1r– A4r. Hitchcock’s proposals are discussed in G.R. Elton, “Piscatorial Politics,” in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, vol. 4

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34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

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of Papers and Reviews 1982–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 115–117. Peter Pope’s study of early Newfoundland, Fish into Wine, takes its title from this argument. Bruce Trigger, “Introduction to Fur Trade Papers,” Man in the Northeast 33 (1987), 28. Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 146. Quinn, Explorers and Colonies, 301. Quinn also uses this generic language with an explanatory intention: “The exploitation of the riches of offshore North America by hundreds of European vessels—their numbers growing steadily throughout the period down to the early seventeenth century—has seemed too prosaic to be particularly interesting or even pertinent to American colonization.” (“Introduction,” NAW 4:xix). The Newfoundland-born writer Harold Horwood uses the same adjective: “Perhaps four hundred years of drudgery and barter have not been conducive to the flight of the imagination. There is something incurably prosaic about trading in fish. . . .” (St. John’s Evening Telegram, September 11, 1952; cited in Patrick O’Flaherty, The Rock Observed: Studies in The Literature of Newfoundland [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979], 164). Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South (Knoxville, Tenn., 1978), 1:xxi. Karen O. Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 172. “Roanoke is a twice-forgotten colony. It was abandoned by its sixteenthcentury founders and has been almost completely ignored by twentiethcentury Americans” (Roanoke, vii). Samuel Eliot Morison traces the history of interest in Roanoke (The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500–1600 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], 683). More recently, Joyce Chaplin has suggested that the voyages of Frobisher and John Davis “much more than Roanoke, are the ‘forgotten’ ventures of colonial America” (Subject Matter, 43). Daniel W. Prowse, History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial, and Foreign Records (London: Macmillan, 1895), 6. O’Flaherty writes that despite the “sentimental editorializing” of Prowse’s book, “no comparable work has appeared in the twentieth century to challenge its dominant position in Newfoundland historiography” (The Rock Observed, 79). Morison, European Discovery of America, 157. Peter Pope writes that “the limited and ambiguous documentation of Cabot’s exploration of 1497 has, paradoxically, encouraged luxuriant growth in the secondary literature on the topic of his itinerary . . . the fact that there is no conclusive evidence for any particular landfall has opened a historiographic space in which nationalists of various persuasions have pronounced on the question of what must have been”

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43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

N ot e s (Pope Peter, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997], 7). The chief claimants are Cape Breton, NS, and Bonavista, NL. On the (slender) known facts of Cabot’s life and the controversies surrounding them, see also Robert H. Fuson, “The John Cabot Mystique,” in Dennis Reinhartz and Stanley H. Palmer, eds., Essays on the History of North American Discovery and Exploration (College Station, Tex: published for the University of Texas at Arlington by Texas A&M University Press, 1988), 35–51. Margarita Zamora, “Christopher Columbus’ ‘Letter to the Sovereigns’: Announcing the Discovery,” in Greenblatt, New World Encounters: Essays from Representations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). David Henige summarizes what is known about the primary documents for the first Columbus voyage in “Tractable Texts: Modern Editing and the Columbian Writings,” in Germaine Warkentin, ed., Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). For controversy over the cartographic evidence relating to Cabot’s voyages, see Fuson, “The John Cabot Mystique,” 43–5. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1946), 225–6. See Peter Hulme on this passage’s inaugural force in “the construction of American mythology” (Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 [London and New York: Methuen, 1986], 158–9). See, e.g., Peter Hulme on Samuel Purchas et al. (Colonial Encounters, 157–8); Patricia Seed on the English generally (Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], Chap. 1). See, inter alia, Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 152–4, 171); Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender,” in Greenblatt, New World Encounters; Patricia Parker, “Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon,” Chap. 7, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). In a 1587 dedication to Ralegh, Roanoke is characterized as “your own Virginia, that fairest of nymphs . . . whom our most generous sovereign has given you to be your bride” (Hakluyt, De Orbe novo Petri Martyris . . . Decades octo [Paris, 1587], trans. E.G.R. Taylor, Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 2:367. The letter is translated in Morison, European Discovery, 206–209 and in Quinn, NAW 1:98–9. All citations are to NAW. See Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620, 15–23, for discussion of the Day letter and its implications.

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50. Daniel Richter uses the Day letter to imagine what the makers of the campfire Cabot found might have made of the artifacts he himself left behind; this scene opens the first chapter of his book (Facing East from Indian Country [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001], 11–12). Peter Pope concludes his book on Cabot with an eloquent reading of the letter: One of the most powerful metaphors in the history of [Cabot’s] exploration is non-contact. He did not meet Native people. He found their land; he even found their tools and traces of their hearths; but John Cabot and his crew raised King Henry’s flag, the Pope’s, his own Venetian banner, and a cross in the absence of Native peoples. That was the real precedent. (Landfalls, 177) 51. Charles W. Porter III, Fort Raleigh and the First English Settlement in The New World, NPS Historical Handbook 16 (Washington, D.C., 1985), 3. 52. This map is discussed in Henry Harrisse, The Discovery of North America: A Critical, Documentary, and Historic Investigation (London and Paris, 1892; repr. Amsterdam, 1961), 412–415; Harrisse also reproduces part of the map depicting Newfoundland between pages 40 and 41. The majority of later sixteenth maps dropped the English marking of Newfoundland in favor of the slightly later Portuguese claim—the exceptions are maps such as those of Jean de Rotz and Robert Thorne, which aimed fairly explicitly at promoting English interests. 53. Evan Jones gives an account of this other English fishery in “England’s Icelandic Fishery in the Early Modern Period,” in David Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, eds., England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham, 2000), 105–110. 54. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 9; Innis, Cod Fisheries, 51; Cell, English Enterprise, 23, 27. For some qualifications to the account given by Innis, see Pope, Fish, 14–15. 55. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 1. 56. NAW 4:133–9. O’Flaherty mentions an 1813 tract by William Carson whose title captures succinctly the phenomenon in question: Reasons for Colonizing the Island of Newfoundland, in a Letter addressed to its Inhabitants (Rock Observed, 54; my emphasis). 57. See Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, Chap. 1, 5–23. These voyages in turn had of course been preceded by the Vikings whose settlement has been unearthed at L’Anse au Meadows in northwestern Newfoundland. 58. See, inter alia, Axtell, “The Exploration of Norumbega,” in Emerson W. Baker et al., eds., American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 154; Alain Beaulieu and Réal Ouellet,

202

59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

N ot e s introduction to Samuel de Champlain, Des Sauvages (Montréal: Typo, 1993), 15. See Quinn, Explorers and Colonies, 125, 302. Richard Whitbourne, writing in 1620, dates his first voyage to Newfoundland in 1578; the few lines describing his forty years in the fishery are the only accounts of it from the period which I have encountered (Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, B3v–C1v). “The Iceland fishery, and even more the Newfoundland fishery which Bristol opened up in the early sixteenth (possibly late 15th) century, were fine schools of seamanship” (N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660–1649, 305). See also Pope, Fish, 237 and Jones, “Icelandic Fishery,” 108. Sir George Peckham, A true reporte, of the late discoueries (London, 1583); Christopher Carleill, A breef and sommarie discourse vpon the entended voyage to the hethermoste partes of America (London, 1583); both reprinted by Hakluyt, along with manuscript materials by Hayes, Stephen Parmenius, and Richard Clarke. “The discourse and description of the voyage of Sir Frawncis Drake & Master captaine Frobisher, set forward the 14. daie of September. 1585 . . .,” printed in NAW 3:307. Hakluyt, PN 8:3–7, 9–16. A second Parkhurst letter on Newfoundland is printed by Quinn (NAW 4:5). W.P. Cumming, R.A. Skelton, and D.B. Quinn, The Discovery of North America (New York: American Heritage Press, 1972), 153. See “Proceedings in the High Court of Admiralty in London Regarding the William, 1536–1537,” NAW 1:209–214. For instance, Edward Hayes describes an abundance of peas, “Roses passing sweet . . . raspases, a berry which we call Hurts” and grass which “doth fat sheepe in very short space” (PN 8:59). A century later, Herman Moll was still able to give an extraordinarily optimistic account of Newfoundland flora and fauna in A System of Geography (London, 1701), 172. Patrick O’Flaherty reads the Parkhurst letter as a “clever rejoinder to fantastic reports circulated by early visitors,” a kind of satire on New World tall tales unevenly balanced between the desire to expose lies and to create wonder itself, in which it “borders perilously on fiction” (Rock Observed, 6). David Quinn comments pragmatically that “fishermen were poor and smelly; their ports were crammed with unattractive vessels; their produce was mainly employed in feeding ordinary people, who were of little account in the social scale, or in victualling ships and armies whose main tasks were far removed from the unattractive food their men ate . . .” (Explorers, 301). Regarding the products for which Newfoundland was principally known, Laurier Turgeon finds that for early modern consumers, “tous les poissons perdent . . . leur noblesse lorsqu’ils passent à la saumure: la salaison les avilit” (all fish lose status

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69.

70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

203

when they are cured: salting makes them common) (“Le temps des pêches lointaines: permanences et transformations,” in Michel Mollat, ed., Histoire des pêches maritimes en France [Toulouse: Privat, 1987], 157). See Smith, Description of New England, Works 1:334; John Brereton, A true relation of the discoverie of the north part of Virginia (London, 1602), 5. On the impact on the fishery of duties on imported salt, see Jones, “Icelandic Fishery,” 107. See, e.g., Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, B2r; Whitbourne, Discourse containing a Loving Invitation (London, 1622), 22; Tobias Gentleman, Englands Way to Win Wealth (London, 1614), ca. 1–15; John Smith, Description of New England in Works 1:330–331; John Mason, A Briefe Discourse, B1r. Whitbourne’s Discourse and Discovery was printed with prefatory letters (some extant in manuscript) declaring that its publication had been recommended by the King and the Privy Council, who requested that the archbishops of Canterbury and York have collections taken up in the parish churches to help defray Whitbourne’s costs; parish clergy were further charged with recommending the book from the pulpit. Some materials are printed by Cell in Newfoundland Discovered, 100–105. For place names, see E. Seary, Place Names of the Avalon Peninsula of the Island of Newfoundland (Toronto: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1971), 12. On seventeenth-century cartography, see Jeanette Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, Volume 2, Commentary (Providence: Brown University, 1975), 61. Black, The Blathwayt Atlas 2:59–60. See Quinn, Explorers and Colonies, 304–306. Mason, A briefe discourse, B1v. Hagthorpe, Englands-Exchequer, 32. Sir William Vaughan, The Golden Fleece (London, 1626), 5. This sense of analogy persisted: D.W. Prowse opens his monumental History of Newfoundland by describing the island of Newfoundland as occupying “nearly the same position in the new world that Britain does in the old” (xiii). Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, A3v. Thorne wrote in 1527, “There is left one way to discover, which is into the North . . .” (PN 2:60). On the achievement of England’s northern voyages, see also Hakluyt’s preface to the reader in the original first volume of Principal Navigations, PN 1:xl–xliv. In Newfoundland as in Jamestown “disease” becomes a way of talking about social as well as physiological disorder. Vaughan’s Newlander’s Cure (London, 1630) moves between these two modes of disease so smoothly as to suggest they are not completely distinct. I discuss this text in “The Poetics of a Cold Climate,” Terrae Incognitae 30 (1998), 41–53.

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83. Luca Codignola, The Coldest Harbour of the Land (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 86. 84. See Whitbourne on “an English erring Captaine [that went forth with Sir Walter Rawleigh]” (Discourse and Discovery, C1v). 85. Vaughan, Golden Fleece, 81. 86. In a later pamphlet, he claimed the Newfoundland trade would bring in more precious metal than the Indian mines, “and with lesse hazard, & more certainty and felicity” (Discourse containing a Loving Invitation, 22). 87. This letter, which Quinn tentatively reads as addressed to Edward Dyer, is dated 1577; NAW 4:7. Settlement created problems for this disciplinary scarcity. Sir Josiah Child, arguing against settlement late in the seventeenth century, claimed that The Planters . . . do keep dissolute Houses, which have Debauch’d Sea-men, and diverted them from their Laborious and Industrious Calling; whereas before . . ., the Sea-men had no other resort during the Fishing Season (being the time of their abode in that Country) but to their Ships, which afforded them convenient Food and Repose, without the inconveniencies of Excess. (A New Discourse of Trade [London, 1698], 208) On consumption and morality, cf. Pope, Fish, 349–50. 88. For a discussion of Vaughan’s ideas of diet in the colonial setting see Fuller, “Poetics of a Cold Climate,” 41–53. 89. Anne Lake Prescott points out, however, Vaughan has in mind not only the myth of the Argonauts but also the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, named “by reason of his large customs which he received from our English Woolls and Cloth in the Low Countries” (Bbbi; cited in “Relocating Terra Firma: William Vaughan’s Newfoundland,” in Warkentin and Podruchny, eds., Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multi-Disciplinary Perspective [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001], 136). 90. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, Chap. 1. 91. See Pope, Fish, 341–6 on agriculture and animal husbandry as economic activities in early Newfoundland. 92. A Commission for the well gouerning of Our people, inhabiting in Newfound-land; Or, Traffiquing in Bayes, Creekes, or fresh Riuers there. (London, 1633); Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, C1r, 62f. 93. Innis, Cod Fisheries, 299. 94. For primary documents, see Innis, Cod Fisheries, 311, 317, and passim. Settlement was discouraged as potentially interfering with the historical control of the fishery from England. O’Flaherty discusses the historiography (“part of the mythology of the island”) in The Rock Observed, esp. 51–6. See the books by Pope (Fish), Head, and Handcock for more recent discussions.

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95. Robert Hayman, Quodlibets, lately come over from New Britaniola, Old Newfoundland (London, 1628). 96. Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 233. 97. Fuller, Voyages in Print, esp. 22–36, 85–102. 98. Cell, English Enterprise, 87. The manuscript is “A Proposition of Profitt and Honor,” [1628], BM, Egerton MS 2542, ff 164–9v (cited in Cell, English Enterprise, 87 n.26). 99. Quodlibets, Book 1, no. 19; references in the text are to Hayman’s numbering of the poems. 100. See, e.g., Hagthorpe, England’s Exchequer, 29–32. 101. Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), sonnet 24. 102. Compare the dedication “To the Hand,” in Smith’s Map of Virginia: If it be disliked of men, then I would recommend it to Ladies and hath not England an Izabell, as well as Spaine, nor yet a Collumbus, as well as Genua? yes surely it hath, whose desires are no lesse then was worthy Collumbus, their certainties more, their experiences no way wanting, only there wants but an Izabell, so it were not from Spain. (Works 1:135) 103. Peter Pope points out that Wheler’s report to the Lords of Trade and Plantations referred to ships’ crews rather than colonists (Fish, 215–216 n.17). 104. Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States 1:119, cited in John Parker, Van Meteren’s Virginia, 1607–1612 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), 34. 105. Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590–1642 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 419. 106. Historical Atlas of Canada, 50; see Plate 25. 107. For instance, the Historical Atlas records that “by the 1670’s . . . [there was] at least one family in thirty different English settlements along the eastern coast of Newfoundland. St. John’s had almost thirty planter families” (48–9). 108. “David Kirke and the Pool Plantation,” Colony of Avalon, http://www.heritage.nf.ca/avalon/history/kirke.html. See Pope, Fish, for more on Sara Kirke and her family. 109. Pope has noted that early census-taking practices misrepresented the composition of the island’s population, by habitually “omit[ting] the names of wives, children, and servants . . . women were named only if they were heads of households” (Fish, 199). On women’s participation in the labor of the fishery, see Pope, Fish, 296–9, and Marilyn Porter, “She was Skipper of the ShoreCrew,” Labour/Le Travail XV (1985), 105–123; and, for more modern times, Frances Ennis and Helen Woodman, eds., Strong as the Ocean: Women’s Work in the Newfoundland and Labrator

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110.

111.

112. 113. 114.

115. 116.

117.

118.

119.

120.

N ot e s Fisheries (St. John’s, Nfld.: Harrish Press, 1996). On Newfoundland’s early population more generally, see also John Mannion, ed., The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography (St. John’s, Nfld.: Memorial University of Newfoundland, ca. 1977). In The Golden Fleece, William Vaughan criticizes the English for their expenditures on foreign luxuries, particularly the inappropriate purchase and use of costly garments by those who are not aristocrats: “with us, Ioane is as good as my Lady” (“To the indifferent reader”). Perhaps we should register some ambivalence in Hayman’s suggestion that Joan be dressed up. Joyce Chaplin has recently suggested that English colonial writing more generally came quickly to suppress the erotic potential of the gendered land, describing America as sister or daughter rather than spouse. This change in metaphors suggested that the relation between Englishmen and the natives of America would be one of friendship or tutelage rather than romantic embrace (Subject Matter, 134–5). Prowse, History of Newfoundland, xiv, xiii. A Discourse Containing a Loving Invitation, A4r. Compare to the more pejorative description of the Dark Lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets, as an ocean or harbor “which receives men still.” Quinn, “Newfoundland in the Consciousness of Europe,” in Quinn, Explorers and Colonies, 309. Although the Beothuk did not survive as a people beyond the midnineteenth century, Newfoundland has also long been inhabited by the Mi’kmaq. The editor of Journal of American History, David Thelen, notes that after 1985, JAH began extending peer evaluation “to include evaluation of how the past is presented to visitors in museums, to viewers of movies, to student readers of textbooks, to users of archives and oral history narratives” (“Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” JAH 79, no. 2 [1992], 433). In 1996, I visited St. John’s, Ferryland, Trinity, Russell’s Point, South Dildo, and Cupids Cove. In 1997, following a conference in St. John’s, I was able to revisit Ferryland, and in 1999 and 2001, I visited the Viking site at L’Anse aux Meadows, in northern Newfoundland. In 2006, I visited Boyd’s Cove, and returned to St. John’s, Trinity, and Cupids Cove. David B. Quinn, “North Carolina: My First Contacts, 1948–1959,” in H.G. Jones, ed., Raleigh and Quinn: The Explorer and His Boswell (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 203. Quinn, “North Carolina,” 211. The play was originated in 1937; the theater burned down in 1947, probably accounting for why Quinn did not see the play on his first trip in 1948.

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121. I would like to thank Bill Edwards, director of interpretation at the Elizabeth II State Historic Site, who kindly took time to answer my questions. 122. Green, The Lost Colony, 41. Consider also the proliferation of writing about Virginia Dare, born at Roanoke; a sample may be found in Powell and Powell, England & Roanoke: A Collection Of Poems, 1584–1987: People, Places, Events (Raleigh, N.C.: America’s Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1988). 123. Robert Arner points out that Green, following the 1834 history of George Bancroft, projects America’s subsequent history back into its origins: as Bancroft wrote, “The first period . . . contains the germ of our institutions. The maturity of the nation is but a continuation of its youth. The spirit of the colonies demanded freedom from the beginning” (George Bancroft, History of The United States, from The Discovery of The American Continent [1834], quoted in Arner, The Lost Colony in Literature [Raleigh: America’s Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1985], 13). 124. A similar plaque commemorating the first English birth exists at Cupids Cove, Newfoundland. 125. The following discussion of Virginia Dare in fiction draws from Arner’s chapter, “Archetypes of American Experience: The Romance in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Lost Colony in Literature. 126. A far more positive reading of the play’s take on these matters is provided by John Herbert Roper, Paul Green: Playwright of the Real South (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 179–86. Indeed, Roper notes that Green had originally planned a tragedy focused on one of the colonists’ mixed race descendants. 127. This suggestion was made to me privately by an archaeologist familiar with the site. For an update, see Willie Drye, “America’s Lost Colony: Can New Dig Solve Mystery?” National Geographic News, March 2, 2004; http://news.nationalgeographic.com (accessed July 22, 2007). 128. Catherine Kozak, “Archaeologists Plan to Return to Scour Roanoke Sound,” The Virginian-Pilot, October 14, 2005. 129. Chaplin, Subject Matter, 36–7. 130. Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 19. 131. John Lawson, A new voyage to Carolina (London, 1709). 132. The play Green wrote for Jamestown suppresses the SmithPocahontas narrative almost entirely. The Founders disposes of Smith as a character early in the first act, dismissing his initiatives as a false beginning and omitting any contact between Smith and Pocahontas as well as the period of Smith’s government. Instead, Pocahontas— who is not kidnapped in this version of the story—falls in love with

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133.

134. 135.

136. 137.

138.

139. 140.

141.

N ot e s John Rolfe at first sight. Her claim that her people “yearn for peace” is personalized and sexualized by other characters as “her yearning for white flesh” (The Founders: A Symphonic Outdoor Drama [Samuel French: New York and Hollywood, 1957], 74). The important cultural work is arguably performed not so much by the RolfePocahontas marriage as by her subsequent, early death: as another character remarks, “In the symbol of [Pocahontas’s] sacrifice the old land and the new are the more securely bound in the heartstrings” (Founders, 184). Text at the bottom of the plaque reads: “This is a 400th anniversary celebrations project, funded by the Government of Newfoundland, Department of Culture, Recreation, and Youth and Mobil Oil Canada Ltd.” The Colony of Avalon Foundation web site can be found at: http:// www.heritage.nf.ca/avalon/. William Gilbert was more than generous with his time and knowledge on both my visits to the area, and I would like to thank him again here. Document transcriptions are available on the Web at http://www. baccalieudigs.ca/journal.asp. TAGS (“The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy”) has provided funding to retrain workers in the fishing industry as historical interpreters (The Compass, August 22, 1995). A discussion of TAGS—a project of Human Resources and Social Development Canada—within the historical context of the Newfoundland fishery can be found in “The History of the Northern Cod Fishery,” in Canada’s Digital Collections, at http://collections.ic.gc.ca/. Interviewees in “Outport Archaeology,” a video produced by the Newfoundland Archaeological Heritage Outreach Program (Memorial University), talk about archaeological sites as a resource supporting outport communities through directly creating jobs, providing new skills, and attracting visitation, which in turn creates other opportunities. Peter Pope kindly provided a copy of the video, which can be ordered at http://www.arts.mun.ca/nahop/catalogue.htm. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, “Successful Theater Company to Receive Support for Year-Round Venue in Trinity,” News Release, February 22, 1999, http://www.releases.gov.nl.ca/ releases/1999/drr/0222b.htm. The Pageant was created by Donna Butt and Rick Boland, is directed by Donna Butt, and produced by Rising Tide Theatre. The quotation is from a song recorded by Figgy Duff, a well-known Newfoundland group: “Woman of Labrador” (lyrics by Andy Vine), Weather out the Storm, Amber Music 0250325. Both projects, it should be added, have also received federal support: Green’s play and the building initially housing it were funded by the Works Progress Administration, while Rising Tide receives support

N ot e s

142. 143.

144.

145.

146. 147.

209

from Canadian Government partners including Human Resources Development Canada and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. Donna Butt, personal communication. Green, cited in “History: The Production,” “The Lost Colony,” http://www.thelostcolony.org/production.html (accessed June 22, 2007); no source given. The 2006 Visitor’s Map for St. John’s, produced by the Provincial Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, advertises on the back of the fold “Cupids 400. Canada’s First English Colony. 1610–2010.” Below are an invitation and directions to the dig and museum at Cupids. Daniel K. Richter’s remarks on Indian history form a background for these reflections: “For the white general public, for Indian activists, and even . . . for professional specialists in early American native history, the contested ground is the mythic terrain of the master narrative that explains who people are, where they have been, and what they hope to be” (“Whose Indian History?” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 50 [1993], 386). Rex Murphy, “Yearning, In Vain, for the Peace of Twillingate,” Globe and Mail, August 12, 2006. For instance, discussion within the province of current plans to build important hydroelectric capacity in Labrador repeatedly reference earlier contracts for selling hydroelectric power, whose unfavorable provisions were “burned in the soul of a generation of Newfoundlanders.” (Murray Campbell, “Newfoundland Has the Power—and It’s No Patsy Any More,” Globe and Mail, August 21, 2006). The same article quotes Premier Danny Williams as lamenting that “there has been a history of giveaways” in the province. These relatively recent experiences fit within a long-term history in which the exploitation (and eventual exhaustion) of Newfoundland’s fishery largely enriched persons and places elsewhere.

Afterword 1. Peter Mancall’s recent biography of Hakluyt offers another case in point both of writerly resourcefulness and of the scarcity of biographical information about a very major figure (Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007]). 2. PN 6:387–407 (East Indies); 11:43–64 (Brazil); see also Sir William Foster, ed., The voyages of Sir James Lancaster to Brazil and the East Indies 1591–1603. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940). 3. PN 5:76–105 (Jerusalem); 6:154–77 (Africa); on the Lok family, see James McDermott, “Michael Lok, Mercer and Merchant Adventurer,” in Thomas H.B. Symons, Meta Incognita: A Discourse

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Expedition, 1576–1578. 2 vols. Mercury Series Directorate Paper 10 (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999), 1:119–46. Hakluyt’s African materials are clustered in the original second volume of Principal Navigations. For seaman’s wills, see P.E.H. Hair and J.D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea 1553–1565, (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). Materials on Hudson can be found in Pilgrimes, 13:374–410. Quinn prints the “Examination of the survivors of the Discovery on behalf of Trinity House,” in NAW 4:293–7. Philip Gura called for such contextualizing some time ago in his review of Barbour’s Works of Captain John Smith, and it has been underway in the work of Goodman, Fitzmaurice, and others (“John Who? Captain John Smith and Early American Literature,” Early American Literature 21 [1986/87], 260–267). See also Pompa Banerjee, “The White Othello: Turkey and Virginia in John Smith’s True Travels,” in Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, eds., Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 135–51. David Ransome, “A Purchas Chronology,” in L.E. Pennington, The Purchas Handbook, Hakluyt Society Publications, 2nd ser., no. 185–6 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1997), 1:365–55. William Sherman, “Distant Relations: Letters from America, 1492–1677,” Huntington Library Quarterly 66 (2003), 225–45. Here, I have two examples in mind. One would be the multiple printed and manuscript accounts of Edward Fenton’s “Troublesome Voyage” in 1582 (documents can be found in Donno, An Elizabethan in 1582, and E.G.R. Taylor, Troublesome Voyage). Another would be parallel accounts of one sojourn in the near East by John Sanderson (see Pilgrimes 9: 412–86; Sir William Foster, ed., The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant 1584–1602 [London: Hakluyt Society, 1931]). Mary C. Fuller, “The First Southerners: Jamestown’s Colonists as Exemplary Figures,” In Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, eds., A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Malden, Mass.: Blackwells, 2004), esp. 37–9. Laurier Turgeon makes a detailed argument for the mutual necessity of heritage and hybridity in Patrimoines métissés. Contextes coloniaux et postcoloniaux (Laval: Presses de l’université Laval, 2003). The charter is printed in Pilgrimes 19:406–09. Peter Pope writes that “there is little evidence that the Natives had, in the pre-contact period, regularly exploited the Avalon Peninsula south of Trinity Bay” (“Scavengers and Caretakers: Beothuk/European Settlement Dynamics in 17th-Century Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Studies 9 [1993], 286).

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12. Laurier Turgeon, “Pêcheurs français et amérindien”, in Dans le sillage de Colomb: L’Europe du Ponant et la découverte du Nouveau Monde (1450–1650) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 201. For John Guy’s account of trade with the Beothuk, see Pilgrimes 19:420–23. 13. Ralph Pastore, “Archaeology, History, and the Beothuks,” Newfoundland Studies 9 (1993), 260–278. See also Pastore, “Fishermen, Furriers, and Beothuks,” Man in the Northeast 33 (1987), 48–51; Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); Barrie Reynolds, “Beothuk,” in Bruce Trigger, ed., (Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast [Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1978], 101–108). 14. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 170–171, 178. 15. William Gilbert, “The Russell's Point Beothuk Site, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland,” in K. Nelmes, ed., “Archaeology in Newfoundland and Labrador 1996,” http://www.tcr.gov.nl.ca/tcr/pao; Don Holly Jr., “A Historiography of an Ahistoricity,” History and Anthropology 14 (2003), 134. 16. While the Beothuk have been identified as the single group indigenous to Newfoundland, the Mi’kmaq Nation also has claimed a traditional relation to the land, which a narrative of Beothuk extinction may obscure by assigning indigenous proprietorship to a group no longer able to claim its rights. (See Adrian Tanner and Sakej Henderson, “Aboriginal Land Claims in the Atlantic Provinces,” in Ken Coates, ed., Aboriginal Land Claims in Canada, A Regional Perspective [Toronto, 1992], 131–66; I’m indebted to David McNab for this reference). Newfoundland was inhabited by a number of different native peoples in the millenia prior to the historical period. Recent archaeological work has yielded artifacts from six distinct cultures, from as early as 3000 BC and to late as 1750. These sites suggest how rich the history of the island’s human habitation has been. 17. Murphy, “Yearning, In Vain, for the Peace of Twillingate,” Globe and Mail, August 12, 2006. 18. Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, trans. Richard Hakluyt, ed. David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 30, 27.


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Index

Accidence, An (Smith’s), 12, 106 acculturation and The Lost Colony, 157–8 and Ottoman Turks, 94–6 Act of Obedience, 109 Adamson, J.S.A., 82, 190n37 Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England (Smith’s), 12, 71, 72, 100 Africa, 1550s voyages to, 51–2, 140, 167, 183n55 Agona, in The Lost Colony, 157–8 agriculture and Frobisher voyages, 40 and Newfoundland, 124, 142–4, 146–7, 198n23, 202n66 Amadas, Philip, 137–8, 155 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton’s), 106, 107 Angus, Ian, 122 Antilles, Grenville in, 47–9 Antonio, Don, see Don Antonio appetite and eating and Hore’s voyage, 136–7 as indication of character, 39–42, 52–3, 90, 146 and Newfoundland, 137–8, 142 see also cannibalism; Inuit, dietary practice Arber, Edward, 59, 97–8, 185n68, 188n11 archaeology and Cartier’s settlement, 196–7n6 and Frobisher voyages, 119, 179n11

and Jamestown, 117–18 and Newfoundland, 119, 160–1, 170, 196n5, 201n57, 208n137, 211n16 and Roanoke, 158 Armada, Spanish, see Spanish Armada of 1588 “Arnaq” (Inuit captive), 53–5, 167 Arner, Robert, 156–7, 207n123 Art of War, The (Machiavelli’s), 78–81, 86, 189n28, 191n47 Arundel, Earl of (Thomas Howard), 190n35 Ascham, Roger, 84 Ashmole, Elias, 195n86 Ashmolean Museum, 195n86 autopsy, of Kalicho, 40, 52–3, 54–5 Avalon colony, 101, 124, 190n35 Axtell, James, 117–18, 126 Azores, 23, 59, 181n30, 184n64 see also Cumberland, Earl of, his 1589 cruise; Revenge, last battle of Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation, 161 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24, 34, 77 Baffin Island, 6, 23, 25, 27, 29, 40, 64, 146 Baltimore, Lord, 141 Bancroft, George, 207n123 Banks, Sir Joseph, 106 Barbour, Philip, 77, 92, 115, 187n3, 188n11, 191n47 Barker, Edmund, 167 Barlowe, Arthur, 137–8, 155

230

INDEX

Barrow, John (father), 62 Barrow, John (son), 56–9, 60, 65, 185–6n76 Basques, 132, 162, 172 Báthory, Zsigmond, 8, 85, 86, 87, 92, 95, 112 Bazán, Alfonso, 37, 41 Beaumont, Francis, 84 Beer, Anna, 33, 50, 59, 61, 181n24, 187n93 benevolence, see mercy and benevolence Beothuk, 160, 161, 162, 170, 172, 192n54, 206n116, 211n16 Bertie, Peregrine, see Willoughby, Peregrine Bertie, Lord Bertie, Robert, see Willoughby, Robert Bertie, Lord Best, George, 6, 26 see also Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher…The (Collinson’s); True discourse of the late voyages of discouerie…A (Best’s) Bevis of Southampton, 107, 111 Blathwayt Atlas, 139 Bloody Point battle, 29–31, 42, 45 Bodleian Fol.BS.94(3), see True Travels…of Captaine John Smith, in Bodleian Fol.BS.94(3) Bodleian Library, 75, 76, 104–9, 111, 195n86 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 75, 107, 108 Boke named the Governour, A (Elyot’s), 90 Boland, Rick, 208n139 books cost of, 56 historical study of, 19–20, 98, 104–6, 108–9 survivability of, 4–5, 177n17 Boyd’s Cove (Beothuk site), 170 Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, A (Hariot’s), 4–5, 90, 126, 155

Briggs, Henry, 107 Bristol, voyages from, 14, 123, 133, 134, 202n60 British Library, 74, 106, 111 British Library G.7195, see True Travels…of Captaine John Smith, British Library G.7195 Bumstead, J.M., 122 Burton, Robert (pseud. Democritus Jr.), 106–8 Buts, Thomas, 136, 137 Butt, Donna, 161–2, 163, 208n139 see also The New Founde Lande; Rising Tide Theatre Cabot, John, 14, 22, 133 his 1497 voyage, 2, 63, 121, 123, 130–1, 134, 201n50 absence of documentation on, 127–8, 130, 199–200n42 in Principal Navigations, 134 Cabot, Sebastian, 14, 22, 127, 128, 134 Calvert, Lord George, 101, 124, 146, 190n35 Camden, William, 24, 56, 175n5 Campion, Edmund, 110, 194–5n84 Canada, history and culture, 122 cannibalism, 42, 183n43 and Franklin expedition, 63–4 and Frobisher voyages, 29–30, 39–40, 54, 181–2n32, 182n33 and Hore voyage, 136, 137 imagery in Revenge narratives, 36, 41 captivity and 1550s African voyages, 51–2 and Frobisher voyages, 26, 28–31, 42, 50–1, 52–5 Frobisher’s African, 51–2, 183n55 and Smith, 92–3, 94, 99, 102 Caribbean islanders, suicide of, 43 Carleill, Christopher, 135 Carson, William, 201n56

INDEX Cartier, Jacques, 143–4, 196n6 Cary, Henry, Lord Hunsdon, 73 Casaubon, Meric, 79 Catholicism, 109–10, 167, 194n83, 194–5n84 Caualerice (Markham’s), 84–5 Cavendish, Thomas, 3, 5, 12, 24 his 1591–2 voyage, 176n15 and Roanoke, 155 Cecil, William, 177n25 Cell, Gillian, 125, 147 Chaplin, Joyce, 51, 158, 199n40, 206n111 Charles I, 82, 143, 146 Charles V, 79, 134 Child, Sir Josiah, 204n87 chivalry early Stuart, 82, 190n35, 190n37 Elizabethan, 81 and Ottoman Turks, 93–4 and Smith, 12–13, 80–1, 87–8, 177n23, 190n30 in Transylvania, 86, 191–2n48 Whitman on, 12 Chrétien, Yves, 196–7n6 Christ Church, library, 107 Chronicles (Holinshed’s), 9, 48–9 Churchill, A. and J.A., 111, 184n64 Churchyard, Thomas, 45–6, 90, 95 class and chivalry, 81, 190n30 and Machiavelli, 80 and Newfoundland, 152, 153–4, 206n110 and Smith, 84–5, 95–7, 191n43 and “turning Turk”, 94–6 Clement VIII, 109 Clendinnen, Inga, 180n19 climate climactic zone theory, 27 in Quodlibets, 146, 148 seventeenth-century perceptions of, 124 suitability for English, 140 see also Newfoundland, climate and geography

231

coat of arms, Smith’s, 85–7, 92, 94, 112, 114–16, 188n6, 190n33 cod, 15, 101, 123, 125–6, 132, 133, 137, 138 see also fishery, the coffee-houses, 115 Coke, Sir Edward, 79 collection, of texts, 4–7, 22, 23, 65, 104–9, 111 Collinson, Rear-Admiral Richard, 61–3, 64 see also Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher…The (Collinson’s) colonization and agriculture, 143–4 English, 3 and gendered metaphor, 129–30, 206n111 nature of, 118 and women, 150–1, 156 Colonna, Fabrizio, in The Art of War, 79, 80, 189n28 Colony of Avalon Foundation, 160 Columbus, Christopher, 14, 22, 123, 145 his first voyage, 128–30 Morison on, 127–9 “Congratulatory Poem…of the Smiths, A” (broadside), 111–12, 115, 195n88 Corbett, Sir Julian, 60–1 Cosa, Juan de la, 132 Cotton, Sir Robert, 74, 77, 105, 188n7 library of, 74, 75, 76–7, 108 Cressy, David, 5 Crusades, 114 Cumberland, Earl of (George Clifford), 23, 83, 180n21 his 1589 cruise, 37–9 Cumming, W.P., 136 Cupids Cove colony, 133, 143, 151, 196n5 present-day site, 160–1, 163, 207n124, 209n144

232

INDEX

Dallam, Thomas, 193n61 Dare, Eleanor, 158 Dare, Eleanor, in The Lost Colony, 156–7 Dare, Virginia, 155, 156–7, 163, 207n122 Davis, John, 42, 199n40 Davis, Richard B., 98, 126–7 Dawbeny, Oliver, 136 Day letter, on Cabot’s 1497 voyage, 130–1, 201n50 Day, John, 130 Day, Matthew, 66, 175n3, 187n91 de Bry, Theodore, 5, 90, 108, 158 de Rotz, Jean, 201n52 Decades (Eden’s), 167 Decades (Martyr’s), 100 decapitation and Beothuk, 192n54 and Smith, 86, 87, 90–1, 112–15 see also Turks’ heads defiance and Caribbean islanders, 43 claimed as English characteristic, 41–2, 49 and Grenville, 24, 36, 45 and Inuit, 28, 31, 42, 45, 55 Description of New England (Smith’s), 75, 79, 100, 111, 125, 188n12 Description of the Province of New Albion (Plantagenet’s), 100, 101 Diall of Princes (Guevara’s), 79, 189n19 Dickens, Charles, 64 Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), on Grenville, 61, 181n24, 185n75 Discourse and Discovery of Newfound-land (Whitbourne’s), 102, 139, 203n72 Discourse containing a Loving Invitation (Whitbourne’s), 101–2, 144, 204n86

Discoverie of Guiana (Ralegh’s), 9, 23 divine intervention, claimed by English, 35–6, 50 DNB, see Dictionary of National Biography Dodding, Dr. Edward, on Inuit captives, 52–5, 167, 184n62 Don Antonio, 38, 181n30 Don Quixote, 83, 92–3 Donne, John, 15, 152, 153 Donusa, in The Renegado, 93 Drake, Sir Francis, 3, 12, 23, 38, 82, 83, 112, 119, 135, 166, 183n46 Arber on, 97–8 biographical information, 9 his circumnavigation, 5, 43–5, 175n4 and Spain, 175n5, 181n31 see also World Encompassed, The Droeshout, Martin, 72, 188n10 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 194–5n84 Dutch, English rivalry with, 138 Dyer, Edward, 204n87 Earle, Peter, 60, 180n20, 180–1n22, 181n23 Easton, Peter, 161, 162 eating, see appetite and eating Eden, Richard, 100, 167, 183n55 Eliot, Hugh, 5, 14, 134 Eliot, T.S., 110 Elizabeth I, 25, 41–2, 43, 81, 125, 131, 156, 109–10, 181n30 Elizabethan military heroes, see heroes, Elizabethan military Ellis, Thomas, 6 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 90 “England’s Forgotten Worthies” (Froude’s), 24, 56, 98, 181n24, 185n68, 185n75 see also Froude, James English Pilot (Sellers’s), 12

INDEX Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux), 24, 81, 82, 83 Evelin, Robert, 101 Fabrizio Colonna, see Colonna, Fabrizio fame nature of, 19 and Principal Navigations, 4–5, 11 and Smith, 70 see also heroes, Elizabethan military; True Travels…of Captaine John Smith, as failed bid for fame Fenton, Edward, 110, 195n85 Fenton, Edward (mariner), 3, 210n6 Ferneza, Francisco, 85, 191n46 his putative book, 75, 188n11 Ferrar, John, 110–11, 195n85 Ferrar, Nicholas, 111 Ferryland colony, 124, 141, 143, 146, 170 present-day site, 160–1 Figgy Duff, 208n140 fishery, Iceland, 130, 132, 202n60 fishery, New England, 10, 80, 100–1, 138 fishery, Newfoundland, 121, 132, 134, 202n60, 202–3n68, 204n87, 204n94 economic value of, 125–6 as exploitative, 143 and national identity, 172–3 present-day, 161, 162, 173, 208n137, 209n147 promotion of, 101–2, 137, 139–40, 141–2 fishery, western (general), 138 economic value of, 126–7 promotion of, 13–14, 125–6, 134, 177n25 Fitzmaurice, Andrew, 189n25 Fleming, Abraham, 48, 183n51

233

forgetting, see memory, historical, as selective Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, 131, 154–6 Fortune (theater), 74–5 Founders, The, 207–8n132 Fox, Luke, 52 Franklin expedition and cannibalism, 63–4 search for, 62, 64, 186n80 Franklin, John, 62 Frear, Mary, 175n5 Frobisher Bay, 25–6 Frobisher voyages, 7, 23, 65, 118, 146, 167, 179n9, 194n72, 199n40 archaeological traces, 64, 119, 179n11 in Collinson’s Three Voyages…of Martin Frobisher, 62–3 described, 25–30, 41 as geographical experiment, 61 and Hakluyt Society, 24, 61–3, 64 interaction with Inuit, 26, 28–31, 37, 39–41, 45, 50–1, 52–5, 181–2n32, 182n33 and mercy, 30–1, 37, 39 narratives, listed, 6 and nineteenth-century Inuit oral tradition, 64 in Principal Navigations, 6, 22, 50–1, 55, 66 twentieth-century study of, 61 see also Frobisher, Sir Martin; True discourse of the late voyages of discouerie, The (Best’s Frobisher narrative); True reporte of the last voyage…by Capteine Frobisher, A (Settle’s) Frobisher, Sir Martin, 13, 28, 29, 50, 97, 171, 184n57 his African captivity, 51–2, 167, 183n55

234

INDEX

Frobisher, Sir Martin—continued biographical information, 9, 26, 166, 177n20 career intersection with Grenville, 23 as heroic figure, 3, 24, 55 see also Frobisher voyages Froude, James, 24, 56, 97–8 see also “England’s Forgotten Worthies” Fuller, Thomas, 55, 61, 79, 96, 116, 134 as author of The History of the Worthies of England, 2–3 his reading of Smith, 10–11 on Smith, 75–6, 84, 85 see also History of the Worthies of England, The Games, Alison, 18–19, 166 Gawdy, Philip, 82 gender, 193n70 literary gendering of Newfoundland, 151–3 and The Lost Colony, 156–7 and metaphors of colonization, 15, 129–30, 153, 200n48, 206n111 see also Newfoundland, and women Generall Historie of Virginia, The (Smith’s), 7, 10, 11, 12, 70–1, 72, 76, 90, 106, 107, 111, 187n1, 188n10, 193n70 1819 Richmond edition, 98 Huntington 3346, 98–104, 176n11 genre, literary and Columbus narratives, 127–30 and Newfoundland narratives, 125, 127–8, 130–1, 199n37 and Roanoke narratives, 126 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 3, 22 and Ireland, 90, 114 and Newfoundland, 14, 120–1, 122, 125, 132, 133, 134–5, 159, 171–2

Gilbert, William, 172, 196n5, 208n135, 211n15 gold derided by Whitbourne, 141 English search for, 125–6, 138 and Frobisher voyages, 26, 27 metaphorical, and Newfoundland, 141, 142, 204n89 Golden Booke of Marcus Aurelius, The (Guevara’s), 79–80, 189n19 Golden Fleece, The (Vaughan’s), 142, 144, 204n89, 206n110 Goldsmid, Edmund, 59 Gorges, Arthur, 34 Green, Paul, 122, 156, 163, 207n123 his The Founders, 207–8n132 and race, 159, 207n126 see also Lost Colony, The Greenblatt, Stephen, 40 Grenville, Sir Richard, 3, 6, 7, 12, 13, 45, 55, 89, 135, 158, 166, 171, 183n51, 184n64 his 1585 voyage to the Caribbean and Roanoke, 47–50 career intersection with Frobisher, 23 his character, 9, 31, 32–4, 36, 41, 42, 46–50, 60–1 contemporary denunciation of, 33–4, 49–50 as heroic figure, 24, 34, 56–60, 83, 97–8 and The Legend of Captain Iones, 83 nineteenth-century fame of, 56–61 see also Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van, his Revenge narrative; Report of the truth…A (Ralegh’s); Revenge, last battle of Grenville, Thomas, his library, 111 Grotius, Hugo, 172–3 Guevara, Antonio de, 79–80 see also Diall of Princes; Golden Booke of Marcus Aurelius, The

INDEX Guiana, 108, 141, 145 Gunnell, Richard, 74–5, 188n10 Gura, Philip, 210n5 Guy, John, 133, 146, 151, 160 Hacket, Thomas, 93 Hagthorpe, John, 124, 139, 142 Hakluyt Society, 59, 115, 186n80 its Frobisher and Northwest Passage publications, 24, 56, 61–4 Hakluyt, Richard, 2, 13, 14, 43, 83, 89, 98, 107, 125, 126, 159, 172, 176n15, 183n55 biographical information, 4, 209n1 on conversion to Islam, 94 his intent, 65 and nationalism, 21, 66, 181n24, 187n93 and religious concerns, 110, 194n83 see also Principal Navigations of the English Nation Hakluyt, Richard (the elder), 15, 37, 135, 136 Hale, J.R., 81 Hall, Charles Francis, 64, 65–6 Hall, Christopher, 6, 28 Handcock, Gordon, 161 Harisse, Henry, 201n52 Hariot, Thomas, 4–5, 40, 90, 126, 155, 158–9 see also Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, A Haviland, John, 72 Hawkins, John, 5, 24 Hawkins, Richard, 34, 42 Hayes, Edward, 134–5, 202n61, 202n66 Hayman, Robert, 124, 144–7 see also Quodlibets Head, Grant, 124 Henry of Portugal, 181n30 Henry VII, 121 Henry, Prince (Stuart), 82

235

Henslowe, Philip, 196n94 heraldry, 114, 195n90 Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke, 73, 108 heroes, Elizabethan military, 3–4, 12, 23–4, 55, 82–3, 177n20 heroism, achieved through failure, 7, 34, 97–8 Herpologia (Holland’s), 5 Higginson, Francis, 100 Hispaniola, 43, 46 Grenville in, 47–9 historical memory, see memory, historical history and contextualization of documents, 168–9, 210n5 methods of studying, 166–9 narrative transmittal of, 17–18, 19–20, 46, 63, 173 non-narrative transmittal of, 18–19, 20, 119, 167, 168, 170–1 as recovery of memory, 65–7 History of the Worthies of England, The, 99, 166 and Elizabethan military heroes, 3–4 on the fishery, 13–14 on Hakluyt, 4 and historical memory, 2–3, 16 and Principal Navigations, 4–5 on Smith, 7–12, 13, 75–6, 84, 176n11 see also Fuller, Thomas Hitchcock, Robert, 125 Hodgkins, Christopher, 183n46 Holinshed, Raphael, 9, 48–9 Holland, Henry, 5 Holly, Don, 172, 192n54 Hore, Richard, 135, 137 Hore’s 1536 voyage, 135–7 horsemanship, 189n28 associated with governance, 89–90, 192n52 and Smith, 78, 80–1, 84–5 see also ring, riding at the

236

INDEX

Horwood, Harold, 199n37 Howard, Sir Thomas, 31, 33, 180n22, 185n76 Howes, Edmund, 175n5 Hudson, Henry, 108, 167 Hulton, Paul, 158 Huntington 3346, see Generall Historie of Virginia, The, Huntington 3346 Huntington Library, 99, 111 Hutson, Lorna, 192n53 Iceland fishery, see fishery, Iceland iguana, as symbol, 145 Innis, Harold, 151 Inuit captives, 52–5, 167, 184n60, 184n62 dietary practice, 39–40, 52–3, 182n33, 182n35 English characterization of, 28–30, 45, 52–5 interaction with Frobisher expeditions, 26, 28–31, 37, 39–41, 42, 45, 50–1, 52–5 nineteenth-century oral tradition, 63–4, 66 Ireland, 123, 140–1, 160 as colony, 3, 90 Itinerario (Linschoten’s), 6, 178n3 see also Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van, his Revenge narrative James I, 82, 84, 95, 102, 168 James, Richard, 74, 75, 76, 108 James, Thomas, 75, 107, 108 Jamestown, 10, 74, 111, 123, 203n82 and American origins, 118, 120, 169 its climate, 140, 148 and The Founders, 207–8n132 recent archaeological finds, 117–18, 119 and Smith, 71, 80, 182n37, 191n43 and women, 151

Jones, Evan, 201n53, 202n60, 203n70 Jones, Captain, in The Legend of Captain Iones, 82–3 Journal of American History, 206n117 Kalicho (Inuit captive), 52–5, 167, 184n60, 184n62 Kelsey, Harry, 175n5 Kiessling, Nicholas, 107 Kingsley, Charles, 59, 60 see also Westward Ho! Kirke, Lady Sara, 151, 160 Kirke, Sir David, 125 Klingelhofer, Eric, 158 Knapp, Jeffrey, 191n43 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The (Francis Beaumont’s), 84[MF1], 94 Knolles, Richard, 94–5, 193n62 Kodlunarn Island, 26, 61, 118, 169, 179n11 Korda, Natasha, 196n94 Kupperman, Karen, 127, 138, 155 Lacey, Robert, 59 Lancaster, James, 166–7, 182n37 lances, see weaponry Lane, Ralph, 49, 50, 154 L’Anse au Meadows, 201n57 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 43, 46, 108 Lawson, John, 158 Legend of Captain Iones, The (Lloyd’s), 82–4, 90–1, 191n40 Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley), 195n84 Lemay, J. Leo, 190n30 Leonard, Irving, 79 libraries Bodleian, 75, 76, 104–9, 111, 195n86 British, 74, 106, 111 Burton’s, 106–9 Christ Church, 107

INDEX Cotton’s, 74, 75, 76–7, 108 Huntington, 99, 111 Lumley’s, 107, 194n79 Smith’s, 195n86 Thomas Grenville’s, 111 Lincoln, Earl of (Henry Clinton), 78 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van, 184n64 Itinerario, 6, 178n3 his Revenge narrative, 6, 7, 24, 32–6, 41, 42, 55, 59, 180n21 see also Revenge, last battle of Little Gidding (Ferrars’), 110–11, 195n85 Lloyd, David, 82, 116 see also Legend of Captain Iones, The Lok, John, 167 Lok, Michael, 25, 26, 100, 167, 194n72 his 1582 map, 179n9 his account of Inuit, 28 Lost Colony, The, 122, 154, 155, 161, 163, 206n120, 207n123, 207n126, 208n141 described, 156–9 see also Paul Green Lowe, Anne, 150 Lumley, Lord John, his collection, 107, 194n79 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 78–81, 86, 189n28, 191n47 Mackenthun, Gesa, 70 Mancall, Peter, 209n1 Manteo, 155, 158 Map of Virginia (Smith’s), 106, 108, 111, 205n102 maps, 145, 179n9 and Newfoundland, 132, 139, 201n52 and Smith, 188n10 Marcus Aurelius, 78–80 Markham, Clements, 185n68, 186n80 Markham, Gervase, 34, 59, 84

237

Martyr, Peter, 100 Mason, John, 139, 140, 142 Massinger, Philip, 92–3 Matey, in The New Founde Land, 161–2, 172 McCann, Franklin, 123–4, 125, 126 McClintock, Captain Francis Leopold, 63 McCormick, Richard, 101 McDermott, James, 9, 166, 177n20 M’Clure, Captain Robert, 62 Meditations (of Marcus Aurelius), 79 Meinig, D.W., 120, 123, 197n18 Memoirs of the Naval Worthies of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign (Barrow’s), 56, 60, 65 memory, historical, 2, 64, 173 and American origins, 118–22, 169 and nationalism, 122 and Newfoundland, 15–16, 118–20, 127, 132, 134, 143, 162, 163, 169 in North America, 16–17, 166 and obscure persons, 166–7 and present-day sites, 154–63 and Principal Navigations, 4–7, 65–7 as selective, 16–17, 18, 67, 165, 187n94 and Smith, 72, 116 see also history Mendoza, Don Bernardino de, 23 Mercoeur, Duc de, 95 mercy and benevolence, claimed as English characteristics, 30–1, 37–9, 43–5 Meta Incognita, 43 see also Baffin Island Meta Incognita Project, 61 metaphor and early Newfoundland histories, 144 and New World discovery, 15, 129–30, 206n11

238

INDEX

migration patterns, study of, 18–19, 166 Mi’kmaq, 206n116, 211n16 military tactics, 81, 189n28 see also signalling codes Moll, Herman, 135, 202n66 Monson, Sir William, 9, 37 on the fishery, 14, 134 on Revenge’s last battle, 31–2, 33–4, 60, 180n21, 184n64, 185–6n76 Montaigne, Michel de, 183n43 Morison, Samuel Eliot on Cabot, 127–8, 131 on Columbus, 127–30, 133 on Newfoundland, 133, 135 Morton, Thomas, 100 Muscovy Company, 25, 194n79 national identity and American origins, 169 defined by opposition to “others”, 171, 172 national identity, English, 50 and defiance, 41–2, 49 and Frobisher voyages, 27 and islands, 140 and mercy and benevolence, 30–1, 37–9, 43–5 and Newfoundland, 171–2 and Principal Navigations, 23, 66 and self-denial, 39, 40–1 and Smith, 77, 88, 90–1, 96–7, 169 and violence justified, 28–30, 36, 47–8, 50 see also nationalism, English nationalism, and American origins, 122 nationalism, English and Principal Navigations, 7, 22, 23–4, 66 and Revenge’s last battle, 34–6 see also national identity, English native Americans, 166, 209n145

and Newfoundland, 170–1, 172, 201n50, 206n116, 210n10, 211n16 and Roanoke, 157, 158–9 see also Beothuk; Inuit Nelson, Lord Admiral Horatio, 56 New England’s Trials (Smith’s), 77, 79, 100 New Founde Land, The (historical pageant), 161–3, 172, 208n139 Newfoundland, 2, 41, 138, 154, 182n37, 199n41, 203n82, 206n118 agriculture, 124, 142–4, 146–7, 198n23, 202n66 and American origins, 159, 162 and archaeology, 170, 196n5, 201n57, 208n137, 211n16 and class, 152, 153–4, 206n110 climate and geography, 123–5, 139–40, 146, 203n79 “discovery” and early history, 13, 14–15, 118, 120–1, 124–5, 130–1, 132–3, 134–8, 153–4, 199–200n42, 201n57 early writings on, 15, 137, 170, 202n67 and the fishery, 101–2, 121, 125–6, 132, 137, 141–2, 143–4, 161, 162, 172–3, 202–3n68, 204n87, 204n94, 208n137, 209n147 as gendered in literature, 151–3 and historical memory, 162, 163, 169 its history as prosaic, 15, 125, 127–8, 131, 199n37 and maps, 132, 139, 201n52 and national identity, 171–2 and native Americans, 170–1, 172, 201n50, 206n116, 210n10, 211n16 present-day economy, 163, 209n147

INDEX present-day historical sites, 159–63, 209n144 in Principal Navigations, 133–8, 145 in Purchas his Pilgrimes, 120, 146 scarcity of historical texts, 119–20, 128, 130–1, 133, 202n59 settlement patterns, 122–3, 143–4, 151, 204n94, 205n107, 205n109 seventeenth-century promotion of, 139–43, 144–52, 171, 203n72, 204n86 strangeness of narratives, 136, 137 and women, 150–1 Newfoundland Company, 132, 133 Newlander’s Cure, The (Vaughan’s), 142, 203n82 North, Thomas, 79 Northwest Passage, 107, 139 nineteenth-century search for, 25–6, 62–3 sixteenth-century search for, 3, 22, 52, 61 see also Frobisher voyages Nunavut, 23, 25, 65 O’Flaherty, Patrick, 199n41, 201n56, 202n67 origins, American and Canada, 122 and Cartier’s settlement, 196–7n6 and Jamestown, 118, 120, 169 and Newfoundland, 118, 121, 123, 159, 162, 169–70 and Roanoke, 156–7, 207n123 and signifying qualities, 118–22, 126–7, 169 Ottoman Turks, 80, 88, 89, 191n46, 193n58 and chivalry, 93–4 and English conversion, 94–6 and soldiering, 95

239

see also Smith, Captain John, in Eastern Europe; Smith, Captain John, his Turkish captivity Outer Banks Historical Center, 155 Packer, Thomas, 176n13, 195n86 Paleologue, Theodore, 78, 85 Parkhurst, Anthony, 15, 135, 137 on the fishery, 141–2 1578 letter, 15, 137, 202n67 Parmenius, Stephen, 135 Parry, Lt. William Edward, 62 Payne, Anthony, 66 Payne, John, 188n10 Peckham, Sir George, 135 Persons, Father Robert, 109–10 Philip II, 23, 181n30 Pinkerton, John, 184n64, 186n89 piracy, early seventeenth-century, 95–6 Plantagenet, Beauchamp [Plowden, Edmund?], 100, 101 Plymouth colony, 8, 120, 127, 169 Pocahontas, 10, 70, 92, 96, 102, 105 Pocahontas, in The Founders, 207–8n132 Pope, Peter, 144, 171, 198n23, 198n28, 199n42, 201n50, 205n103, 205n109, 210n10 Popham, John, 96 Portugal and the Portuguese, 51–2, 141, 162, 171, 172, 181n30, 201n52 Powhatan, 96, 119, 192n53, 195n86 Prescott, Anne Lake, 204n89 preservation, of texts, 4–7 Prince, The (Machiavelli’s), 79 Principal Navigations of the English Nation (Hakluyt’s), 2, 11, 42, 44, 51, 64, 90, 94, 107, 168, 171, 175n4, 195n86 described, 4–7

240

INDEX

Principal Navigations—continued editorial choices, 22, 23, 46, 50–1, 52 and English nationalism, 7, 22, 23–4, 66 and Frobisher voyages, 6, 22, 27, 50–1, 55, 66 and Grenville’s 1585 voyage, 47–8 and Newfoundland, 133–8, 145, 172, 182n37 and obscure persons, 166–8 readership of, 46, 66–7 and Revenge’s last battle, 6–7, 22, 32–3, 181n24 and Roanoke, 49 as source for Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England, 5 its stated intent, 21, 65 ways to read, 25, 66–7, 166–8, 187n94 Prolegomena Biblaica, 109, 110 Prowse, Daniel W., 127–8, 132, 153–4, 199n41, 203n79 Prynne, William, 84 Purchas his Pilgrimes (Purchas’s), 166, 168 and Cavendish, 176n15 and conversion to Islam, 94 described, 11 and Hudson, 167 and Newfoundland, 120, 146 and Revenge’s last battle, 34 and Smith, 11–12, 75–6, 85, 87, 120, 188n11, 191n46 Purchas, Samuel, 71, 79, 176n15, 191n46 criticism of, 11, 75, 184n64 see also Purchas his Pilgrimes Pyle, Howard, 56, 60, 185n65 Québec City, 196–7n6 Quinn, David B., 204n87 on Frobisher captives, 182n33 on Grenville, 183n51

on Hore’s Newfoundland voyage, 135 on Newfoundland fishery, 126, 133, 153 on Roanoke, 47, 154, 156, 161, 206n120 on western fishery (general), 199n37, 202n68 Quodlibets (Hayman’s) its poems addressed to women, 149–53 as promotion of Newfoundland, 144–52 race, 129 and The Lost Colony, 156–7, 207n126 and Paul Green, 159, 207n126 see also native Americans; Spain and the Spaniards, English characterization of Rae, John, 63–4 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 3, 9, 13, 141, 171 as heroic figure, 12, 82, 83 his literary style, 59 and Roanoke, 23, 119, 120, 155, 156, 200n48 see also Discoverie of Guiana; Report of the truth…A (Ralegh’s Revenge narrative) Ralegh, Walter A., 24, 47 Rastell, John, 121 readership of Principal Navigations, 46, 66–7 of Smith, 70, 71, 98–105 reading, Smith’s, 78–80, 189n19, 192n52, 195n86 Reeve, James, 72, 188n10 Reeves, Chief Justice John, 123, 144 reflexivity, in defining “others,” 28, 36, 39 Reid, John, 118

INDEX renegades, see Ottoman Turks, and English conversion Renegado, The (Massinger’s), 92–3 Report of the truth of the fight about the Iles of Açores, A (Ralegh’s Revenge narrative), 24, 42, 50, 61, 73, 111, 180n21, 184n64 1757 reprint, 55–6 1902 reprint, 56, 184–5n65 its description of Revenge’s last battle, 32–6 in Principal Navigations, 6–7, 22, 32–3, 181n24 on the Spanish, 37, 45–6 its stylistic quality, 59 see also Grenville, Sir Richard; Ralegh, Sir Walter; Revenge, last battle of Revenge. last battle of, 47, 50, 83, 89, 180n20, 185n75 contemporary condemnation of, 33–4 contemporary praise of, 7, 34–5 described, 31–33, 180–1n22, 181n23 and divine intent, 35–6 and metaphors of appetite, 41–2 nineteenth-century praise of, 24 in Principal Navigations, 6–7, 22, 32–3, 181n24 and Spanish behavior, 37 survivors’ accounts, 180n21 see also Grenville, Sir Richard; Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van, his Revenge narrative; Report of the truth…A (Ralegh’s Revenge narrative) “Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet, The” (Tennyson’s), 59–60, 185n68 rhetoric, Elizabethan, 41–2 Richter, Daniel, 201n50, 209n145 Rickards family, 72, 115 Ricks, Christopher, 185n68 Ricoeur, Paul, 52, 64

241

ring, riding at the, 84–5, 114 see also horsemanship Rising Tide Theatre, 161–3, 208n139, 208n141 see also Donna Butt; New Founde Land, The Roanoke colony, 3, 23, 40, 50, 135, 207n122 and American origins, 118, 120–1, 122, 123, 126–7, 131–2, 169 described, 119 its fertility, 137–8 and gender, 151, 200n48 and Grenville, 3, 23, 47, 49 and historical memory, 199n40 and native Americans, 157, 158–9 present-day historical site, 154–9, 161–2, 163 see also Lost Colony, The Rodger, N.A.M., 21, 59, 177n21, 202n60 Rolfe, John, in The Founders, 208n132 Roper, John Herbert, 207n126 Ross, John, 25, 62 Rous, John, 107–8 Rowse, A.L., 166, 178n4 Russell’s Point, Newfoundland, present-day site, 160, 161, 170 Russia, English trade with, 25 Sabin, Joseph, 188n6 Sanderson, John, 210n6 Savour, Ann, 42 Schwoebel, Robert, 193n58 Scott, Thomas, 82 Sea Grammar (Smith’s), 12, 72, 188n11 Seaver, Kirsten, 29 Seed, Patricia, 132, 143 Segar, Sir William, 5, 81, 87, 94, 190n33 Selden, John, 107 Sellers, John, 12

242

INDEX

Serarius, Nikolaus, S.J., 109, 110 Settle, Dionyse, 6, 184n60 see also True reporte of the last voyage…A (Settle’s Frobisher narrative) Shakespeare, William, 150, 206n114 Sharpe, Kevin, 74 Sherman, William, 168 Shoesmith, Brian, 122 Sidney, Henry, 195n84 Sidney, Sir Philip, 89, 194n84 signalling codes, 85–6, 191n47 signs, tavern and shop, 114–15 Sir Francis Drake Revived (Philip Nichols’s), 82, 83 Smith, Arthur, 10 Smith, Captain John, 2, 189n25, 198n28 biographical information (general), 7–8, 10, 77, 109–10, 115, 176n13, 177n21 his character, 75, 93, 187n3 and chivalry, 12–13, 80–1, 87–8, 177n23, 190n30 and class, 13, 84–5, 95–7, 191n43 his coat of arms, 85–7, 92, 94, 112, 114–16, 188n6, 190n33 in Eastern Europe, 8, 9–10, 85–92, 110, 191n46 and fishery promotion, 80, 125, 134 in History of the Worthies of England, 7–11, 13 his Lincolnshire sojourn, 78–81, 84–5, 93 and maps, 188n10 and national identity, 13, 72, 77, 88, 90–1, 96–7, 169 his reading, 78–80, 189n19, 192n52, 195n86 his reputation, American, 12, 70, 80, 98, 116 his reputation, nineteenthcentury, 97–8

his reputation, seventeenthcentury, 8–13, 112, 195n88 satirized in The Legend of Captain Iones, 82, 84 and self-construction, 76–7, 78, 96–7, 116, 171 his Turkish captivity, 92–3, 94 in the Virginia Colony, 8, 9–10, 84, 96, 99, 102, 105, 182n37, 191n43, 192n53 his writings, 9, 10–11, 12, 70 his writings’ disposition, 76, 99, 106–7, 108, 111 see also Accidence…An; Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England; “Congratulatory Poem…of the Smiths, A”; Description of New England; Generall Historie of Virginia, The; Map of Virginia; Sea Grammar; New England’s Trials; True Relation…A; True Travels…of Captaine John Smith Smith, Captain John, his autobiography, see True Travels…of Captaine John Smith Smith, Captain John, in The Founders, 207n132 Smyth, Admiral William, 12, 115–16, 177n21 Sonnets (Shakespeare’s), 150, 206n114 Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley), 151 Spain and the Spanish, 141, 172, 179n14, 194n83 in the Caribbean, 43 and Drake, 175n5, 181n31 English characterization of, 35–6, 37, 38–9, 45–6, 48–9, 171 English rivalry with, 3–4, 7, 22–3, 27, 45–6, 47–9, 138, 181n30, 181n31

INDEX in Mexico, 192n52 see also Revenge, last battle of Spanish Armada of 1588, 5, 23, 24, 42, 110, 119 St. John’s, Newfoundland, 120, 134–5, 161, 205n107 present-day, 159, 209n144 Stock, Simon, 141 stomach, as metaphor, 41–2 Striker, Laura, 187n3, 191n48, 195n88 Strong, Roy, 82 Sturtevant, William, 182n33 suicide, mass of Caribbean islanders, 43 of Inuit, 29–31, 42, 45 and Revenge’s last battle, 32–3, 36 TAGS (The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy), 208n137 Taverner, in The New Founde Land, 161–2 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 59–60, 185n68 theater, and Captain John Smith, 74–5, 76 Thelen, David, 206n117 Thomson, Lesley, 190n29 Thorne, Robert (father), 14, 134 Thorne, Robert (son), 134, 145, 201n52, 203n81 Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher…The (Collinson’s), 61, 62–3, 64, 186n82, 186n89 Tiger journal, 47–8 timber, 125, 198n28 Todorov, Tzvetan, 1, 67, 165, 200n47 Tom, in The Lost Colony, 157–8 tongue-biting, Inuit episode, 28, 42 trade, 3, 25, 138 see also fishery Tradescant John, 195n86 Tragabigzanda, Charatza, 92–3, 96 Transylvania, see Smith, Captain John, in Eastern Europe; True

243

Travels…of Captaine John Smith, on Smith’s Transylvania exploits Trigger, Bruce, 126 Trinity, Newfoundland, present-day, 161–3 True discourse of the late voyages of discouerie…A (Best’s Frobisher narrative), 7, 24, 51, 61, 186n89 on climate zone theory, 27 in Collinson, 62–3, 64 described, 26–30 on English national character, 27 on Inuit captives, 52, 53, 54 on Inuit dietary practice, 39 on Inuit encounters, 28–30, 37, 42, 45, 50, 182n32 on lessons of Frobisher’s voyages, 6 in Principal Navigations, 22, 27 True Relation…A (Smith’s), 13, 111 True reporte of the last voyage…by Capteine Frobisher, A (Settle’s Frobisher narrative), 6, 43, 184n60 condemnation of English greed, 41 on Inuit dietary practice, 39–40 on Inuit encounters, 28–30, 37, 45, 51 True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, 2, 81, 82, 100, 120, 187n1 1819 Richmond edition, 98 in Bodleian Fol.BS.94(3), 105–11 British Library G.7195, 111 and class issues, 13, 95–6 dedications and acknowledgements, 73–6 described, 12–13, 69–72, 187n1 its engravings, 72, 86–8, 112–15, 188n10 as failed bid for fame, 72, 77, 97, 169

244

INDEX

True Travels—continued as physical book, 72–3, 188n6 readership of, 10–11, 12, 70, 102 and self-construction, 76–7, 96–7 on Smith’s Lincolnshire sojourn, 78 on Smith’s Transylvania exploits, 85–88, 90–2, 191n46 on Smith’s Turkish captivity, 92–3, 94 studying in context, 168 see also “Congratulatory Poem…of the Smiths, A” Tuck, James, 160 Tupi, Brazilian, 183n43 Turbashaw, 86, 112 Turgeon, Laurier, 202–3n68, 211n14 Turks, see Ottoman Turks Turks’ heads, used symbolically, 114–15, 196n94 see also decapitation Vaughan, Alden, 84 Vaughan, Sir William (pseud. Orpheus Junior), 204n89, 206n110 on Newfoundland, 140, 141, 142, 144, 152–3, 203n82 see also Golden Fleece, The; Newlander’s Cure, The Vaz, Lopez, 43 venison, 78, 189n17 Vigneras, Dr. Louis André, 130 Vikings, 162, 201n57 violence and colonization, 129 culturally understood, 31, 180n19 English justification of, 28–30, 36, 47–8, 50 and Smith, 89–91, 114, 116 Vitelli, in The Renegado, 93 Wallace, Willard, 59 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 48, 49 Wanchese, 155

Warner, William, 5 Watt, Sir James, 42 weaponry, 81, 190n29, 190n30 Westward Ho! (Kingsley’s), 59 Wharton, Henry, 195n88 Wheler, Captain Francis, 150–1, 205n103 Whitbourne, Richard, 19, 101–2, 143, 146, 161, 162, 203n72 his derision of gold, 141 and the fishery, 202n59 on Newfoundland’s climate, 124, 140 his promotion of Newfoundland, 139–41, 144, 153, 171, 204n86 see also Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-land; Discourse containing a Loving Invitation White, John, 158–9 Whitehorne, Peter, 79 Whitman, Walt, 12–13 Whitney, George, 89 Willes, Richard, 52, 184n57 Williams, Premier Danny, 209n147 Willoughby, Peregrine Bertie, Lord, 77 Willoughby, Robert Bertie, Lord, 74, 77 Willoughby, Sir Hugh, 5, 11 women, and colonization, 150–1, 156 Wood, William, 100 Works Progress Administration, 155, 208n141 World Encompassed, The (Drake’s), 9, 43–4, 82, 175n4 Wright, Louis B., 75 Wright, Richard, 159 Wynne, Edward, 124 Yorke, Sir John, 51 Zamora, Margarita, 128 Zoraida, in Don Quixote, 93 Zúñiga, Pedro de, 151

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