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  • Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America by Kathleen Donegan
  • Joyce E. Chaplin
Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America. By Kathleen Donegan (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 288 pp. $49.95

In four chapters, Donegan narrates the utter horridness of the colonial experience during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She sequentially analyzes the four main sites of early English colonization—Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados—in order to show that each place was, in more than one dimension, a catastrophe. Bad news is in vogue. Donegan’s study follows the lead of several others—most recently, Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York, 2012)—that likewise stress the extraordinary waste of human life in the American colonies. Donegan interrogates published accounts of the assorted miseries (war and other extreme violence, disease, hunger and starvation, and brutal exploitation) to show that disaster defined both the events and the literature of colonization. According to Donegan, the physical and mental trials that the colonists faced challenged their very sense of Englishness and made them into new beings—colonists. “Settlers became colonial,” she writes, “through the acute bodily experiences and mental ruptures they experienced in their first years on Native American ground” (2).

Donegan set out to write a narrative history using literary tools of analysis. The result is genuinely interdisciplinary, merging the goal of history (establishing what happened in past worlds) with the goal of literary analysis (establishing how people used the written word to engage and interpret the world). Donegan makes a number of excellent discoveries, among them that the hopeful description of American nature in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589) vanished from the second edition (1600), after experience refuted the expectation (31), and that an account of early Virginia tellingly relies on conditional verbs, would and should, in place of the more confidently descriptive present and past tenses (42).

To a large extent, however, the resulting story is familiar. Donegan has identified no new sources and uncovered no new events or actors. [End Page 237] Violence and starvation, even cannibalism, are commonly emphasized in the historiography of the earliest settlements. Donegan (and Bailyn) build upon contributions that already identified suffering and disaster as central elements of English New World colonization; it is a rare textbook, at this point, that does not include these elements. Indeed, some scholars have considered an even broader frame of suffering—for instance, John Murrin’s Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in America (Ann Arbor, 1997), which emphasized that colonists profited from the terrible attrition of Native American populations.

The disasters that English colonization caused for African and Native American peoples raises an important question, which Donegan leaves for her afterword: “[W]hy we should listen to the laments of Englishmen at all?” (203). She gives several justifications, the most powerful of which is that, uncritically regarded, the narrative of suffering “remains untouched as a vehicle for national ideology” (204). This excellent point, however, might well have been worked into the narrative all along, given that the suffering became part of national ideology for the English at the time, and not just for the colonists (later Americans) in the end.

Joyce E. Chaplin
Harvard University
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