"What Concernment Hath America in These Things!" Local and Global in Samuel Sewall's Plum Island Passage

The publication of the Plum Island passage from Samuel Sewall's 1697 Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica in Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer's The Literatures of Colonial America (2001) marks its first appearance in any anthology whose scope extends beyond New England.¹

As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the commanded Post; Notwithstanding all the hectoring Words, and hard Blows of the proud and boisterous Ocean; As long as any Salmon, or Sturgeon shall swim in the streams of Merrimack; or any Perch, or Pickeril, in Crane Pond; As long as the Sea-Fowl shall know the Time of their coming, and not neglect seasonably to visit the Places of their Acquaintance; As long as any Cattel shall be fed with the Grass growing in the Medows, which do humbly bow down themselves before Turkie-Hill; As long as any Sheep shall walk upon Old-Town Hills, and shall from thence pleasantly look down upon the River Parker, and the fruitful Marishes lying beneath; As long as any free & harmless Doves shall find a White Oak, or other Tree within the Township, to perch, or feed, or build a careless Nest upon; and shall voluntarily present themselves to perform the office of Gleaners after Barley Harvest; As long as Nature shall not grow Old and dote; but shall constantly remember to give the rows of Indian Corn their education, by Pairs: So long shall Christians be born there; and being first made meet, shall from thence be Translated, to be made partakers of the Inheritance of the Saints in Light. Now, seeing the Inhabitants of Newbury, and of New England, upon the due Observance of their Tenure, may expect that their Rich and Gracious LORD will continue and confirm them in the Possession of these invaluable Privileges: Let us have Grace, whereby we may serve GOD acceptably with Reverence and godly Fear. For our GOD is a consuming Fire. Heb. 12: 28, 29.

(Sewall, Phaenomena, 59)²

The publication of this passage is remarkable because editorial constraints—and indeed our current disciplinary situation, which invites projects such as Castillo and Schweitzer's—would seem especially binding here: given an expanding,multinational and multilingual early American canon but finite page space (and semester time), why add yet another piece from Puritan New England?

I will suggest that two disciplinary concerns, environment and empire, compel attention to the Phaenomena and particularly to the function of the Plum Island passage within it. While "nature" is a perennial topic in American studies, the Plum Island passage, read in the context of recent work in ecocriticism, opens new possibilities for the understanding of New England's (one version of "America's") environmental imagination.³ Neither an encounter with a desolate wilderness, nor a prediction of "Criolian degeneracy" resulting from "run[ning] wild in our woods" (Mather 137), the passage expands and transforms our sense of New England's "theology of place" (Conforti 42) through an unusually close attention to the natural environment. As Sewall tells it, culture is not pitted against nature; neither is culture seduced by nature away from some higher purpose. Rather, nature opens itself to culture: explicitly, to agriculture and the Congregational way, and implicitly, to the maintenance of the entire colonial project in New England. The landscape description, attuned to harmonic balance, may suggest a protoecological consciousness, a recognition that everything is connected to everything else: nature, divinity, local culture, and world history are all inextricably interlinked here. The description makes, in fact insists on, the harmonic linkage of nature and culture, in a way that even modern environmentalism has sometimes been reluctant to do.⁴ Thus, one of the links that I will emphasize here is this composite landscape's apparent promise of the continuance of colonial culture through the imagined millennium, as registered in the passage's governing syntax: "As long as. . . . So long shall . . . ." This function of the landscape as a vehicle of prophecy brings together two previously distinct Puritan hermeneutics of nature, the traditions of emblems and portents. In certain...