A History of American Literature

The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 23

But to this use of example Hakluyt added another element, the sense of rivalry with

the two great contemporary powers of exploration and exploitation. “Portingale

and Spain,” he declared, “... by their discoveries, have founde such occasion of

employmente, that this many yere we have not herde scarcely of any pirate of these

two nations.” Not only that, Hakluyt played on the fear, rife in Elizabethan England,

that overpopulation, the enclosure of the common land, and the eviction of those

working it might lead to widespread poverty, starvation, and even civil strife. “They

can hardly lyve one by another,” he said of the English people, “nay they are ready to

eat up one another.” The only solution was emigration to Virginia, where emigrants

could find work “in plantinge of sugar cane, in maynetenaunce and increasing of

silk worms, ... in gatherings of cotton ... in tilling of the soil there for grains, in

dressing of vines.” A safety-valve for dissent in England, the restoration of individ-

ual fortunes and the creation of a new commonwealth would all, as a consequence,

be assured.

Following on the younger Hakluyt, later writers became still more positive about

the promise of the New World. “God himself is the founder and favourer of this

Plantation,” asserted one William Crashaw (1572–1626) in 1617, in his “Epistle

Dedicatorie” to a pamphlet about Virginia, “Good Newes from Virginia” (1617) by

Alexander Whitaker (fl. 1617). In order to drive the point home, Crashaw and others

compared Virginia to the Promised Land and its potential immigrants to the

Israelites. It became commonplace to “prove” the providential nature of the place by

such things as the miraculous escape of two early English explorers, called Gates and

Somers, from shipwreck and their subsequent discovery of Bermuda. It became

equally commonplace to describe in detail the fertility and beauty of the countryside,

as in this passage from “Virginia ... Richly and Truly Valued” by Williams, suggest-

ing how the supposed virginity of the new country was accompanied by a pleasing

ripeness:

Nor is the present wilderness of it without a particular beauty, being all over a

natural Grove of Oaks, Pines, Cedars, Cypress, Mulberry, Chestnut, Laurel,

Sassafras, Cherry, Plumtree, and Vines, all of so delectable an aspect, that the

melancholiest eye in the World cannot look upon it without contentment or admi-

ration. No shrubs or underwoods choke up your passage, and in its season your

foot can hardly direct itself where it will not be dyed in the blood of large and

delicious Strawberries.

In effect, the pamphleteers claimed that, as one Ralph Hamor (fl. 1615) put it in

“A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia” (1615), this was “a land more

like the garden of Eden, which the Lord planted, than any part also of the earth.”

A cross between Arcadia and that place “in which it pleased God himself to set the

first man and most excellent creature Adam in his innocency” – as a preacher

William Symonds (1556–1616?) claimed, in “Virginia: A Sermon Preached at

White-Chapel” (1609) – it inspired some to visionary rhetoric. Others were driven

to sing their praises of the newly discovered land in verse, as in these rather

GGray_c01.indd 23ray_c 01 .indd 23 8 8/1/2011 7:54:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 54 AM