Mouthpieces: Native American Voices in Thomas Harriot's True and Brief Report of. .. Virginia, Gaspar Perez de Villagra's Historia de la Nuevo Mexico, and John Smith's General History of Virginia

Piture this: "The sea coasts of Virginia arre full of Ila[n]ds, wehr by the entrance into the mayne la[n]d is hard to finde. For although they bee separated with diuers and sundrie large Diuision, which seem to yeeld conuenient entrance, yet to our great perill we proued that they wear shallowe, and full of dangerous flatts, and could neuer perce opp into the mayne la[n]d, vntill wee made trialls in many places with o[u]r small pinnace." ¹ So begins Thomas Harriot's account of "The Arrival of the Englishmen in Virginia," as printed by Theodore de Bry in A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land in Virginia, published at Frankfurt in 1590. The reader of Harriot's text is required to situate him- or herself in space in quite precise terms: notionally as an Englishman aboard a pinnace (perhaps "The Dorothy" ² ) off the coast of North America at latitude 358519420 north and longitude 0758379180 west in July 1584, physically at about eighteen inches opposite the nine by twelve and a half-inch page surface of de Bry's folio volume. ³ Celebrated today as one of the monuments of early modern printing, de Bry's edition of A True and Brief Report is fitted out with a tipped-in map and with copperplate engravings based on watercolor drawings made on site by John White. The engraved plates, which constitute the bulk of the volume, are collected under their own title: The True Pictures and Fashions of the People in That Part of America Now Called Virginia. (Plate 2, with its long narrative caption, is reproduced here as figure 1.) The Folger Library copy of the volume measures about a half-inch thick and weighs two pounds four and a half ounces. ⁴ In effect the volume, slim but relatively heavy, presents itself to the reader as a planar surface. The visual cast of the whole affair is emphasized by the idiosyncratic spelling. De Bry's typesetters in Frankfurt were German speakers who had no idea what English sounded like; they simply cast in type what the copy text looked like.

True to the "picture" in the plates' title, Harriot's account of the English arrival in Virginia frames the object of the voyage. Mary C. Fuller has called attention to the way Harriot in A True and Brief Report fails to tell how the English voyagers got to the coast of North America. Where another writer might provide a chronology, Harriot offers a catalog. Geographical features, plants, animals, commodities, and native people are all subjected to the same synoptic treatment. As a result, "Harriot's Virginia floats free, surrounded by unmapped and unrecorded space." ⁵ That habit of mind shapes Harriot's first vision of the place in True Pictures and Fashions. Situated beyond the outer islands, the mainland remains elusive. The outer islands create perspective depth, a space apart that the English attempt to enter.

Harriot continues: "At lengthe wee fownd an entrance vppon our mens diligent serche therof[.] Affter that wee had passed opp, and sayled ther in for ashort space we discouered a migthye riuer fallnige downe in to the sownde ouer against those Ilands, which neuertheless wee could not saile opp any thinge far by Reason of the shallewnes, the mouth ther of beinge annoyed with sands driuen in with the tyde." Time is being measured here in miles as well as minutes. The short space that it took to discover the mighty river could be seen on the shore as well as reckoned with a clock: "therfore...