Provocations: The Age of Failure

From the 1490s through the 1610s, the English failed more often than they succeeded in their efforts to explore and colonize the Western Hemisphere. But even when travelers did not return, chroniclers told their stories. Taken together, these texts constituted an archive of disappointment. In this essay, I identify the best-known accounts and set them into a historical narrative that unfolded before the English arrived in New Plymouth in 1620.