Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century: English Representations in Print and Manuscript (review)

Catherine Armstrong chooses 1607 as the starting point of Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century as this is the date that the Virginia Company landed three ships, the God Speed, the Discovery, and the Susan Constant, in Chesapeake Bay to found Jamestown, the first permanent English colony on the North American continent. Armstrong’s book consists of an expansive survey of English printed and manuscript texts that consider America in this first phase of colonization. These travel narratives, promotional tracts, journals, sermons, broadsides, poems, plays, and scientific analyses are used as cultural artifacts that help to uncover the complex development of the idea of the New World.

In her prologue, Armstrong sets the scene for her investigation by examining some of the more influential sixteenth-century discourses on America; she assesses how translations of French and Spanish travel narratives and the texts of Elizabethan explorers and commentators, such as Richard Hakluyt, Walter Ralegh, Martin Frobisher, Thomas Harriot, and John Davis, shaped perceptions of America, which in turn helped to establish the pattern of exploration and settlement.

Armstrong provides appropriate bookends to her volume, by discussing, in the first and the final chapters, the confluence of printing, print history, networks of news transmission, readerships, and the colonization of America; this look at the machinery of the London book trade provides useful context for the content of North American travel literature. In her middle chapters on the representation of the American landscape along with its flora and fauna, Armstrong shows how almost every travel account tended to transform the natural environment, including plant and animal life, into commodities of utility and consumption. Moreover, the English, using medieval land law as a precedent, claimed land on the basis of “occupation and settlement” (46); in turn, these notions of proper stewardship of nature served as justifications for the dispossession of native lands.

Writing North America, especially in the chapters devoted to the representations of America’s geography, climate, landscape, plants, and animals, tends to replicate the very concerns and structural categories contained in seventeenth-century travel accounts. This method of organizing information can at times appear to marginalize some categories of representation that have become increasingly important to social historians and literary critics. While accounts of relations with the native inhabitants of America, the importation of slave workers and indentured servants, and the recruitment of women for the colonies interlace this book, more might be done to foreground and emphasize how these issues were textually represented in the period.

In the sixth and seventh chapters, Armstrong compares the representation of Virginia to that of New England, identifying major differences in the motivations for colonization and the realities of colonial life. Poor relations with the local natives alongside the development of plantation cultivation of tobacco played a major role in shaping the realities and textual manifestations of the Virginian colonists. The writings of New Englanders, which tended to be in the form of letters and written manuscripts not intended for mass publication, describe in broad terms the attempt to create a new religious society in America and show both a continuity and discontinuity with English laws and customs.

Writing North America is careful to show how representations transformed over time in response to developmental, political, and intellectual changes; it appears, for instance, that the textual representations of Virginia reflected an initial wave of “over-enthusiasm,” which “gave way to disappointment,” and which in turn developed into an attitude of “measured confidence” (200). The upheavals and deprivations associated with the English Civil War seem to have led New Englanders toward greater self determination and self-reliance in that period. While emphasizing the influence of the cultural legacy of English preconceptions about America on the experience of being in America, Armstrong also highlights how settlers and explorers reacted to the realities of lived experience, which forced them...