The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  Among the legacies of Columbus’s discovery were, according to one powerful account, ‘the very structures of what we know as modern civilization’, the ‘Westernizing [of] the great bulk of humanity’, ‘the vast redistribution of life-forms … in effect rejoining the continents’, and a dramatic transformation of ‘the products and processes of the environment’ that has enabled mankind to ‘dominate the earth as no single species ever has’.4 From a Western perspective, Columbus’s exploits can be seen as the beginning of Modernity and of a Golden Age. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is the quintessential post-Columbian, exclaiming, ‘O what a world of profit and delight’ and boasting, ‘All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command.’ Not insignificantly, in the late sixteenth century Columbus became a general term in English for a successful, ambitious explorer.

  In England, the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth were a period of qualified prosperity; there was no compelling reason to look for opportunities abroad. But in the later stages of the sixteenth century, as population rose and agricultural production faltered, this changed. One harvest in six failed completely, and food was often in short supply. The motives for heading overseas were clear. Some imagined exploiting the raw materials of far-flung places; others sought to glorify their country, their God or themselves; still others set off with moral tutelage on their minds, dreaming of converting exotic infidels; and then there were those who craved the excitement of discovery – perhaps with a little piracy or pillage on the side. It would become almost a cliché of the period that Virginia was a delicate, fragrant creature, which had to be saved by English husbandry from the depraved extremes of Spanish lust. Later, the Native Americans would be characterized as children in need of the settlers’ parental guidance. Yet there were some very different stereotypes in circulation: either the colonists were the dregs of society, roguish hedonists and thieves making the most of a voluptuous paradise, or the land to which they were headed was barren and unhealthy, and only the most robust adventurers could survive there.

  Certainly the entire rhetoric surrounding colonialism was factious. One constant theme, though, was that England stood to benefit from opening up this new vista. Some insisted that the Americans, converted to Christianity, could buttress Protestant resistance to the march of Spanish Catholicism. At the same time, it was clear that people unwelcome in England – for reasons of religious conviction or social maladjustment – could be conveniently deported to the new colony. American bases could be used by privateers to launch attacks on vessels that became detached from the Spanish fleet. Furthermore, the Americas had the potential to be a substantial market for English goods, while goods imported from America would reduce the need for trade with England’s Continental rivals.

  There were hazards, of course, and these were evident from the outset. The word cannibal, derived from Arawak, first appears in Richard Eden’s 1553 translation of a part of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia about ‘the newe India’, which records Columbus’s encounter with cannibals – people he assumed to be devourers of human flesh – in a Caribbean village. The account is probably erroneous, but it suggests the background of anxiety against which transatlantic voyages were made. In the 1560s the accounts of Davy Ingrams, who claimed to have walked the length of America’s Atlantic coastline after being shipwrecked, offered a startling description of the region’s man-eaters and savages, who sheathed their genitals in gourds and drank the blood of their infirm elders.

  Before the word Indian came into regular use as a name for the native peoples of India, it was frequently used of the aboriginal peoples of America and the Caribbean. India was happily applied to America, too, after the example of the Spanish and the Portuguese. Richard Eden’s reference to ‘the newe India’ makes it clear that he is distinguishing the Americas from the ‘old’ India (a land of which King Alfred in the ninth century had been at least dimly aware, and which he had called by that name). But Samuel Purchas could declare that ‘The name of India, is now applied to all farre-distant Countries’ – and could blame Columbus for this common error.5 Only with the rise of British interests in India proper would this confusing usage come to an end.

  The risks indicated – and fantasized – by writers such as Richard Eden could best be justified on financial grounds. One of the possibilities most keenly envisaged by those who funded voyages was the discovery of a north-west passage, first mentioned in 1576. A commercial sea route around the Americas could facilitate trade with China. Early attempts to locate it included those of Francisco de Ulloa, who was commissioned by Hernan Cortés to find the mythical Strait of Anian, and of Martin Frobisher, the admirer of Sir John Mandeville, who spent fifteen years drumming up funding for his ambitious quest. Frobisher returned from his first voyage with ‘black earth’ rumoured to contain gold; his second voyage yielded further samples of ore; and his third, which resulted in a further shipment of rock, included an inadvertent 60-mile spurt up the Hudson.

  English interest in the Americas was most vigorously promoted by tobacco’s champion, Sir Walter Raleigh. With his broad Devonian accent, expensive clothes, perfumed locks and ferocious energy, Raleigh cut a memorable figure in the world of the court. He was inspired by the example of his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, who in 1583 planted the beginnings of a colony at what is now St John’s in Newfoundland: the Queen’s coat of arms was displayed, an enticing vein of silver was discovered, and his ships were loaded with fresh lobster. Even before leaving, Gilbert had sold a ‘paper empire of twenty million acres he had never seen’.6 Although he died during the return voyage to England, and his charts were lost with him, the expedition hinted at the rewards of settlement. ‘O my America! my new-found-land,’ John Donne could write around the turn of the century in his poem ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’, applying to one of his seductions the fashionable metaphor of discovery. ‘My mine of precious stones, my empery, / How blest am I in this discovering thee,’ he exclaimed – empery being a now disused word for an imperial dominion. (Imperialism does not turn up till the nineteenth century, but imperial is found in the age of Chaucer, and imperialist in the seventeenth century.) Donne’s erotic, arrogant lines articulate the colonial dream that inspired Raleigh and his successors. But, as they found out, there were many different Americas, and settlement proceeded haphazardly, rather than to the steady rhythm of triumph.

  From the first, and despite a certain amount of public indifference, there were visionaries and business-minded explorers back in England who craved information about the New World settlements. Many of the stories that made their way across the Atlantic were gossip – and gossip always travels faster than official accounts. But serious books about the New World were devoured by readers. Their hyperbole was sometimes satirized, as by Jonson, Marston and Chapman in the play Eastward Ho (1605), which poked fun at adventurers who gave up ‘competent certainties’ in order to pursue ‘excellent uncertainties’. The play succeeded thanks to excitement about Virginia. There was a groundswell of political and intellectual argument for expansionism, and the literature that supported it was eloquent. One valuable point of reference was Theodore de Bry’s collection of travel accounts. Published in thirteen parts, beginning in 1590, its detailed narratives and fine engravings informed the European picture of the New World for at least a hundred years.

  In England, the passion for discovery was given public voice by Richard Hakluyt, a keen student of voyages, maps and discoveries, who also happened to be another fan of Mandeville. He was the armchair traveller par excellence, quick to absorb the pet terms of cultures he had never directly experienced. (The furthest he ever ventured was Paris.) Hakluyt incorporated in one large body of work the scattered fragments of a whole history of travel narratives. His evangelism inspired fresh interest in the possibilities of ‘abroad’. Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation was set before the public in 1589. When the three volumes of its enlarged sec
ond edition began to appear nine years later, the title included the word Traffiques, a term that had only lately come to be used of trading expeditions. Hakluyt was confident that England would soon compete on equal terms with Spain and Portugal in carving up the spoils of adventure, and he was thus an invaluable propagandist for Raleigh’s ambitions. So was his friend Michael Drayton, Herculean author of the huge Poly-Olbion. Drayton’s ode ‘To the Virginian Voyage’ suggested that reading Hakluyt ‘shall enflame / Men to seek fame’:

  And cheerfully at sea

  Success you still entice

  To get the pearl and gold,

  And ours to hold

  Virginia,

  Earth’s only paradise.

  In fact Hakluyt saw colonial projects as ‘the necessary cure for the nation’s ills’, where ‘even miscreants could play a crucial role in economic development’.7 But he was careful to praise the heroic endeavours of travellers and to emphasize the abundance of gold, silver and pearls.

  Raleigh’s quest for this paradise was carried out only in fits and starts. In March 1584 Queen Elizabeth endorsed his wish to explore the uncharted territories beyond what Hakluyt called the ‘gruesome waters’ of the Atlantic. She granted him ‘free liberty and license from time to time to discover, search, find out and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed by any Christian prince nor inhabited by Christian people’. Moreover, she assigned him the right ‘to have, hold, occupy and enjoy … [them] forever’.8 Raleigh sent two ships out a few weeks later, under the command of Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe. They arrived in the Canaries in early May, in the West Indies a month later, and on the North American coast at the beginning of July.

  The early expeditions to America were amply documented, and the documents are evidence of the wonder the voyagers felt. After his return Barlowe wrote a glowing account. ‘I thinke in all the world the like aboundance is not to be founde,’ he enthused. The land was rich and apparently undisturbed: the valleys were ‘replenished with goodly Cedar trees’, and the woods were ‘full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle … in incredible aboundance’. ‘The soile is the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull, and wholesome of all the world,’ he could note. He and his party were provided by the native inhabitants with ‘divers kinds of fruites, Melons, Walnuts, Cucumbers, Gourdes, Pease, and divers rootes, and fruites very excellent good, and … corne, which is very white, faire, and well tasted, and groweth three times in five moneths’. They found themselves in a place that ‘smelt so sweetely … as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden, abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were allured’. The scented woodland was thick with wild muscadines and their plump bronze grapes, and with the spicy reek of cedar.9

  Barlowe’s account may have been intended as a puff to boost support for Raleigh’s proposed settlement. Later, conflicting reports filtered back to England. But his prose oozes with an excitement that is unfeigned. To the explorer in a new land, everything appears as though in italics. At the same time, the literature of exploration is one of self-legitimation. Typically, others’ claims are dismissed, and the virtue of the explorer’s own project is underscored. Thus Barlowe’s insistence on his amazement: ‘My selfe having seene those partes of Europe that most abound, finde such difference, as were incredible to be written.’ In other words, ‘Believe me. This place is something else.’ The ships returned with spoils sufficient to suggest the opportunities available in this new land: samples of the local plant and animal life, along with two ‘lusty’ native men, Manteo and Wanchese, who ended up staying in England for a year. Their appearance and conduct shaped English perceptions of what lay across the Atlantic.

  Manteo and Wanchese were taught English by another early visitor, Thomas Harriot, a gifted Oxford mathematician with interests in algebra and astronomy. The monkish Harriot was at once scholarly and practical – among his achievements was an analysis of the best way to stack cannonballs – and Raleigh involved him closely in designing his ships, as well as drawing on his expert understanding of navigation. In April 1585 Harriot crossed the Atlantic on a ship commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, his designated role being that of ‘geographer’. He spent a year in America, and his Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) tells of his contact with the natives. Sympathetic to their customs, it contains details of the local languages, and there are copious references to the many striking plants and animals he came across. Where no existing English word will do the job, he gamely transcribes the local Algonquian form, noting the names for several types of acorn and mentioning the novelties cassava and maize in addition to items less well known to us: the wholesome berries called sacquenummener, two types of beetle, the saquenuckot and maquowoc, and the seekanauk, a crusty shellfish good to eat. At pains to make the land sound as rich as possible, he itemizes the different foods it can provide – from partridges and geese to swans and ‘wolvish dogges’. To Harriot, of course, it was far from obvious that, while tobacco and canoe would survive, most of these words would perish.

  Grenville’s party established the first English settlement in America. This was at Roanoke in Virginia. The settlement was not self-sufficient, relying on provisions from back home. The newcomers explored the hinterland, hoping to find gems and gold, but they did not venture far. Relations with the native inhabitants were awkward; efforts at diplomacy were unsuccessful, perhaps in part because Wanchese, who was one of the guides, had during his time in England formed a low opinion of English values. (Among other things, he had been obliged to wear a silly outfit made of brown taffeta.) The natives were puzzled by the newcomers. Were they perhaps the reincarnated spirits of their ancestors? Were they deities? Or were they just interlopers?

  The last of these suspicions seems to have crystallized, especially when the English spread smallpox and measles. Under the thuggish management of Ralph Lane, the colony became a magnet for the natives’ malice. Left to fend for themselves, the settlers struggled. They lacked proper fishing equipment, and were poor hunters. If we believe Lane’s claims in a letter to that most polished of courtiers Sir Philip Sidney, some turned savage.10 As prospects soured, Lane returned to England with Francis Drake, and a relief ship found no one to supply.

  Raleigh dispatched a second party in April 1587. Their leader, John White, made drawings of the plants and creatures encountered both during the voyage out and in Virginia itself. Those from the journey include hermit crabs, scorpions, West Indian iguanas, fireflies, a pineapple, a flamingo (the name of which is the Portuguese for ‘belonging to flame’), bananas, a dolphin and flying fish. In Virginia he found time to draw a vast range of birds, including a brown pelican (an ‘alcatrassa’ we’re pleased to see him call it), a bald eagle and three different kinds of woodpecker, as well as many types of fish (striped bass, catfish, grey mullet), a turtle and a diamondback terrapin (which he gave the wrong number of toes), a scarlet king-snake ‘which the Salvages … doe eate’, a cicada – its shrill chirping no doubt an irritation – and a ‘dangerous byting flye’ which appears to be a gadfly.11 White was less effective as governor of the colony. The natural abundance of the land was intimidating and exciting, the settlers’ existence precarious. On 18 August White’s daughter Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, the first English child to have been born in America, and she and her husband Ananias Dare named the child Virginia. The birth of Virginia Dare seemed a symbolic moment – evidence of the colony’s potential for growth.

  However, supplies were again a problem. White returned to England to gather fresh provisions, but the Spanish Armada of 1588 disrupted his return; its menace – 130 ships and 25,000 men – was exceptional, terrifying, enough to quell thoughts of all other business. By the time he made it back to Roanoke, in August 1590, the colony had been wiped out. It appeared that the settlers (including his own daughter and granddaughter) had been exterminated. But there is a lasting suspicion that the colonists, although m
agnificently underprepared for the hardships they would face, were ultimately the victims of political skulduggery – though they would not have used that word, an eighteenth-century American coinage originally used to suggest illicit sex.

  The fascination with the possibilities of the West was not snuffed out by Roanoke’s tragic end. Grenville had been able to produce hard evidence of the land’s fertility, and wagging tongues suggested he had understated his cargo in order to keep to himself the profits of his trip. In 1592 a Portuguese craft was seized by the English off the Azores: it was laden with carpets, drugs, silks and pearls, and, best of all, among its contents was a map that showed the geography of Portuguese trade. As Jerry Brotton points out, this map was precious for commercial reasons as well as navigational ones, and ‘was even more prized for its promise of offering the English … access to territories which would yield such fabulous commodities’. It was a perfect illustration of the ways in which charts, maps and globes stirred the imagination. Possession of such a document conferred authority and power on the owner, and viewing someone else’s hinted tantalizingly at a world of ‘expanding intellectual, political and commercial horizons’, providing a key to ‘arcane information and esoteric learning, … trade routes, market-places and commodities’.12

  The key did not immediately unlock the New World, but it was another in a succession of encouragements. In 1595 Raleigh, by then a man of forty, set off in search of El Dorado, the golden city rumoured to be located somewhere in the jungle of South America. Although he had urged forward others’ adventures, this was his first trip to the Americas. It would be a couple of hundred years before people began to be speak figuratively of El Dorado – as in Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827), where we read of ‘A band of emigrants seeking for the Eldorado of their desires’ – but in truth its status was always emblematic, since, while the yearning for this gilded city was all too real, its object existed only in the imagination. When Raleigh failed to return with the spoils the government craved, his punishment was at first derision, and then, after further misadventures and the death of Elizabeth, a long stretch in prison and a brutal execution.