22 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodshas been one of pluralism: collision, conflict, and even congruence between different
languages and literatures, each of them struggling to articulate the experience of
being in the world. The congruence is certainly there. English settlers, and those
promoting English settlement of America, undoubtedly shared with Columbus and
others a dream of Eden. Or, if they were simply trying to sell the idea of colonization
to businessmen or aristocratic investors, they at least claimed to believe in that dream.
America, one writer quoted earlier on insisted, was a “Virgin Countrey” sealed in its
aboriginal state so as to remind humanity, and more particularly visitors from the
Old World, what the earth was like when it was “vigorous and youthfull,” before it
had fallen into decrepitude and dismay, “the Old Age of Creation.” It unfolded visions
of lost innocence and innocence regained, past perfection and future promise. That
writer, the author of this not untypical piece of nostalgic utopianism, was one Edward
Williams (fl. 1650). He was writing in 1650, in one of the pamphlets (“Virginia, more
especially the South Part thereof Richly and Truly Valued”) supporting the coloniz-
ing enterprises of the London Company in what was then known as Virginia. And it
is in the literature dealing with the English colonization of this area that the sheer
abundance of the New World, its fertility and the opportunity it offered for the
recovery of a mythical good life, is most energetically and unambiguously expressed.
In the early years of English exploration of Virginia, as it was then understood,
this sense that the New World might offer a new start was expressed in a relatively
tentative way. So, the elder Richard Hakluyt (?–1591), in a pamphlet for the Virginia
enterprise, merely proposed for the reader’s consideration the idea that “the poor
and idle persons which are either burdensome or hurtfull to this Realm at home may
become profyttable members by ymploying theme ... in these Countreyes”; while
one Sir George Peckham (?–1608) simply mentioned in passing that the “great num-
ber of men which doe now live ydely at home” might “imploy [them]selves ... in
matters of husbandry” across the seas. The younger Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616)
was a little more forthright. In his Discourse Concerning Western Planting addressed
to Elizabeth I (and eventually included, along with the pamphlet of the elder
Hakluyt, in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts
(1935)), he gave careful attention to the possibility of using the New World as a
means of release and revival. He began by citing the example of other countries. This
in itself was not a new device. Other writers had suggested a parallel between the
condition of England and that, say, of ancient Rome before it became an imperial
power. Here, for example, are some typical lines from a poem, “M.J.H., His Opinion
of the Intended Voyage,” which, like the comments of Sir George Peckham, served as
a preface to an account of English adventuring called The Voyages and Colonising
Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1610):The Romans when the number of their people grewe so great,
As neither warres could waste, nor Rome suffice them for a seate,
They led them forth by swarming troops, to foreign lands amaine,
And founded divers Colonies, unto the Roman raigne.
Th’ Athenians us’de the like devise ...GGray_c01.indd 22ray_c 01 .indd 22 8 8/1/2011 7:54:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 54 AM