History of American Literature: The Literature of Exploration

Had history taken a different turn, the United States easily could have
been a part of the great Spanish or French overseas empires. Its present
inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one nation with Mexico, or
speak French and be joined with Canadian Francophone Quebec and
Montreal.
Yet the earliest explorers of America were not English,
Spanish, or French. The first European record of exploration in America
is in a Scandinavian language. The Old Norse Vinland Saga recounts how
the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of wandering Norsemen settled
briefly somewhere on the northeast coast of America -- probably Nova
Scotia, in Canada -- in the first decade of the 11th century, almost 400
years before the next recorded European discovery of the New World.
The
first known and sustained contact between the Americas and the rest of
the world, however, began with the famous voyage of an Italian explorer,
Christopher Columbus, funded by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and
Isabella. Columbus's journal in his "Epistola," printed in 1493,
recounts the trip's drama -- the terror of the men, who feared monsters
and thought they might fall off the edge of the world; the near-mutiny;
how Columbus faked the ships' logs so the men would not know how much
farther they had travelled than anyone had gone before; and the first
sighting of land as they neared America.
Bartolomé de las Casas is
the richest source of information about the early contact between
American Indians and Europeans. As a young priest he helped conquer
Cuba. He transcribed Columbus's journal, and late in life wrote a long,
vivid History of the Indians criticizing their enslavement by the
Spanish.
Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters.
The first colony was set up in 1585 at Roanoke, off the coast of North
Carolina; all its colonists disappeared, and to this day legends are
told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area. The second colony was
more permanent: Jamestown, established in 1607. It endured starvation,
brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the period paints
America in glowing colors as the land of riches and opportunity.
Accounts of the colonizations became world-renowned. The exploration of
Roanoke was carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True
Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's book was
quickly translated into Latin, French, and German; the text and pictures
were made into engravings and widely republished for over 200 years.
The
Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain John Smith, one
of its leaders, is the exact opposite of Hariot's accurate, scientific
account. Smith was an incurable romantic, and he seems to have
embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous story of the Indian
maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in
the American historical imagination. The story recounts how Pocahontas,
favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith's life when he
was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English persuaded Powhatan
to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness, intelligence,
and beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe,
an English gentleman. The marriage initiated an eight-year peace between
the colonists and the Indians, ensuring the survival of the struggling
new colony.
In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers
opened the way to a second wave of permanent colonists, bringing their
wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen's tools. The early
literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals,
ships' logs, and reports to the explorers' financial backers --
European rulers or, in mercantile England and Holland, joint stock
companies -- gradually was supplanted by records of the settled
colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North
American colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial
literature is English. As American minority literature continues to
flower in the 20th century and American life becomes increasingly
multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the
continent's mixed ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now
turns to the English accounts, it is important to recognize its richly
cosmopolitan beginnings.