A History of American Literature

16 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

were without any cows was something incredible.” There were also “large numbers

of animals like squirrels and a great number of their holes:” the first recorded

account of the prairie dog towns common in the Southwest. Pedro de Casteneda’s

narrative of the Coronado expedition captures the abundance together with the

vastness of the New World: herds of buffalo, packs of prairie dogs, great seas of

“unripe grapes and currants and wild marjoram,” numerous streams all flowing

“into the mighty river of the Holy Spirit which the men with Don Hernando de Soto

discovered” – in other words, the Mississippi. What is remarkable about accounts of

exploration and conquest like those of Coronado or Columbus is that, along with

the American dream of success (the Garden of Eden, the Seven Cities), goes the dis-

covery of bafflement. The speech of Europe has no name for either the space or the

plenitude of America at this stage. To describe it requires a new language, neither

entirely of the Old World or the New: which is another way of describing the

evolution of American literature.

“I found myself lost in the woods, going now on this side now on that, without

being able to recognize my position.” In this case, the European lost in America is

French, Samuel de Champlain (1570?–1635), describing his explorations in The

Voyages to the Great River St. Lawrence, 1608–1612 (included in The Voyages of

Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618 (1907)). There is, however, the same sense of

negotiating a terrain that is terrifyingly unfamiliar, uncharted, and unnamed. “I had

forgotten to bring with me a small compass which would have put me on the right

road, or nearly so,” Champlain wrote. “I began to pray to God to give me the will and

courage to sustain patiently my misfortune.” Eventually, he finds his way back to his

Native American companions; and his delight at finding them is matched only by

their relief in seeing him again. “They begged me not to stray off from them any

more,” he explains. This is not, clearly, simple solicitude for his welfare on their part.

Nor is this episode as a whole just another rehearsal of a common story: the European

lost in a world only too familiar to its native inhabitants. Samuel de Champlain’s

companions admit to him their fear of being accused of killing him, should he have

never appeared again; their freedom, honor, and even their lives would have been

put in jeopardy, had he remained lost. Implicitly, they are acknowledging a depend-

ence on him in the new order of things: their lives have been changed by the arrival

of the European, so much so that they need him to be there and are fearful when he

is not. The European is, in short, assuming centrality and power: something that

Champlain registers in the customary way by naming his surroundings as he looks

around him, just like Adam in the Garden of Eden – notably, a great expanse of

water that he chooses to call Lake Champlain.

As the narrative progresses, Samuel de Champlain offers further revelations of

how the encounter between Old World and New transformed both. He comes across

a “strange fish,” his account tells us, that for now neither he nor any other European

has a name for. “This makes war upon all others in the lakes and rivers” and is “called

by the savages of the country, Chaousaroo”; it will eventually be christened, although

not by Champlain, “garpike.” “There are also many beavers,” Champlain observes: a

casual remark that acquires point when we remember that he was involved in the fur

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