Encounters, Objects and Commodity Lists in Early English Travel Narratives

Abstract

This article reconsiders the construction and significance of commodity and word lists in early travel narratives from the Americas by examining the meanings that objects accrued in cross-cultural encounters and their representation in lists. I focus in particular upon English colonist James Rosier's True Relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the discovery of the land of Virginia, which documented encounters between Rosier and the eastern Abenaki Indians and listed the commodities that made ‘Virginia’ (present-day Maine) a promising location for settlement and trade. Scholars of early American and early modern travel narratives have argued that colonists' lists detached New World objects from their indigenous contexts by placing them in categories that were familiar to European audiences. By contrast, by reading Rosier's lists in the contexts of English and Abenaki knowledge of American plants and fish and of Abenaki rituals of trade and hospitality, I show that his lists reflect the cross-cultural exchanges through which they were constructed.

Keywords:

• early American literature
• colonial encounters
• word and commodity lists
• cross-cultural exchange

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mary Fuller for directing and facilitating the conversations about ‘European Encounters with the Americas, 1550–1610’ during a 2011 NEH Summer Seminar, from which this article emerged. I'm grateful to the following people for offering feedback on the article at various stages: Zach Hutchins, Scott Lyons, Marianne Montgomery, Jason M. Payton, Dahlia Porter, Cassander Smith and Coll Thrush. My thanks as well to the two anonymous readers, whose advice improved the article.

Notes

1. Colin G. Calloway, Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), 14. The word ‘list’ came into use in the seventeenth century; before then, the older word ‘catalogue’, was employed to refer to a ‘list, register, or complete enumeration’. See Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. ‘Catalogue’, 1a and ‘List’, 6a.

2. See Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London: 1590). Harriot's Virginia corresponds to present-day North Carolina.

3. See John Smith, A Description of New England: or the Obseruations, and Discoueries, of Captain John Smith (Admirall of That Country) in the North of America, in the Year of Our Lord 1614 (London: 1614), 10–12 and 20–21 and Smith, Generall historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Iles . . . By Captaine John Smith, Sometymes Governour in Those Countryes & Admirall of New England (London: 1625), 40. For just a few more examples of colonial writing featuring lists of objects or words, see also John Brereton, A Briefe and true Relation of the Discouerie of the North part of Virginia (London: 1602); John White, The Planters Plea, Or The grounds of plantations examined … for the satisfaction of those that question the lawfulnesse of the action (London: 1630), William Wood, New England's Prospect: A True, Lively, and Experimentall Description of that Part of America, Commonly Called New England . . . Laying Downe That Which may Both Enrich the Knowledge of the Mind-Travelling Reader, or Benefit the Future Voyager. By William Wood (London: 1634); and Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of Barbados (London: 1657).

4. It is likely that the word list was part of Rosier's original manuscript. Purchas probably obtained the manuscript from Richard Hakluyt, who had the manuscript in his possession when he died. See David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, ‘Introduction: Preliminary Observations’, in The English New England Voyages, 1602–1608, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M Quinn (London: The Hakluyt Society 1983), 1–111 (65–7).

5. Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 21.

6. Margaret Bridges, ‘Trafficking Words’, in Fiction and Economy, ed. Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 45–62 (47).

7. Bridges, ‘Trafficking’, 57.

8. For two studies that examine the ways in which colonists employed Old World frameworks to describe their encounters with New World places and peoples and that emphasise the incommensurability between European and indigenous epistemologies, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Anthony Pagden, European Encounters With the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

9. For a few of these studies, see Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, ed. Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008); and Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

10. Cohen, Networked, 2.

11. I conceptualise objects as actors by following the work of Bruno Latour, who emphasises that objects were not the ‘hapless bearers of symbolic projection’ but functioned as actors in so far as they made a ‘difference in the course of some other agent's action’. See Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10 and 71.

12. Scholars do not agree about the course of the men's travels. Some argue that the expedition travelled up St. George River while others argue that they were on the Kennebec or Penobscot Rivers. The questions regarding the location of the voyage does not discount the colonists' accounts of the Abenaki or of Maine's natural resources. I follow James Axtell and David B. Quinn in taking Rosier's account to refer to the St. George River. See James Axtell, ‘The Exploration of Norumbega: Native Perspectives’, American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, ed. Emerson W. Baker, Edwin A. Churchill, Richard D'Abate, Kristine L. Jones, Victor A. Konrad, and Harald E.L. Prins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 149–65 (160) and Quinn and Quinn, ‘Introduction’, 64.

13. Quinn and Quinn, ‘Introduction’, 57.

14. Arundell had been appointed May Lord Arundell of Wardour and was hired to lead an officially recognised mercenary English regiment in the service of the Archdukes in the Spanish Netherlands. See Quinn, 65.

15. Quinn and Quinn point out that the 1605 title page for the True Relation was characteristic of the printer George Bishop, who had close ties with Hakluyt's publications. See Quinn, 65–7.

16. On Gorges' practice of taking Native captives with the goal of teaching them English and transforming them into guides for colonists, see Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

17. James Rosier, ‘A True Relation of the Most Prosperous Voyage Made This Present Yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Discovery of the Land of Virginia’, in The English New England Voyages, 1602–1608, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (London: The Hakluyt Society 1983), 250–311 (304). Future references to this text will appear parenthetically.

18. Rosier would have known of tobacco's value as a commodity, and, as I discuss below, he would probably also have known of its uses in Native religious ceremonies, since European descriptions of Natives allegedly employing tobacco to communicate with the devil were already circulating throughout Europe. On the process whereby Europeans detached tobacco from its place in Native religious practices and gave the herb medicinal and social significance, see Peter Mancall, ‘Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, Environmental History 9, no. 4 (2004): 648–78. As Marcy Norton points out, the diabolic significance of tobacco was the legacy of Spanish chroniclers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés rather than the first explorers, who experimented with tobacco as they attempted to survive in the New World. The publication and translation of Nicolás Monardes's herbal (first published in English as Joyful News Out of the New Found World in 1577) was a key turning point in the history of tobacco and its consumption, for the text justified using tobacco for medical consumption. It is possible that Rosier had already encountered tobacco as a commodity in England, where it was already being illegally shipped from the Caribbean. See Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate In the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

19. See Frederick Matthew Wiseman, The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), 75.

20. Samuel Purchas, ‘Extracts of a Virginian Voyage made An. 1605 by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Archangell. Set forth by the Right Honorable Henry Early of South-hampton, and the Lord Thomas Arundel, written by James Rosier’, in Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrimes vol. 28 [1625] (London: James Maclehose, 1906), 358. The narrative sections of Rosier's Relation suggest that he observed most of the fish included in the commodity list, for he provided in the narrative the names of the fish the men caught along the Maine coast.

21. Purchas, ‘Extracts’, 357.

22. Purchas, ‘Extracts’, 357.

23. See Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v., ‘losh, n.1’.

24. Purchas, ‘Extracts’, 358.

25. Philip L. Barbour, ‘James Rosier's List of Indian (Eastern Abenaki) Words, Recorded in Samuel Purchas, Pilgrimes (1625): A Preliminary Analysis by Philip L. Barbour’, in The English New England Voyages, 1602–1608, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (London: The Hakluyt Society 1983), 481–93 (488).

26. Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 184.

27. Bragdon, Native People, 185.

28. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London: 1643), 118.

29. ‘Manedo’ appears in the word list but is absent from the commodity list, a fact that suggests that Rosier encountered the fish in the context of encounters with the Abenaki, since he mentioned all of the fish in the commodity list in his narrative account of the men's fishing.

30. Arjun Appadurai argues that objects can take on multiple values as they circulate in different contexts or ‘regimes of value’. They may be commodities at one point in their circulation and enter a different state at other points. In Wabanaki, objects such as the fish could be commodities at some point in their circulation and could enter a different state at other times. The line between the fish's status as a commodity and its definition in terms of its spiritual significance was a fluid one. See Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.

31. Rosier probably heard the Abenaki word kizws, which translates to the sun or the sky. See Barbour, ‘List’, 485.

32. Purchas, ‘Extracts’, 358. Barbour translates these words as: narsim: ‘a beast’; pisho: ‘a beast’ (possibly a lynx); and tasquus: ‘a beast’ (possibly a coney). See Barbour, ‘List’, 486–7. It is also possible that Rosier spelled the words phonetically and that they correspond to the following Abenaki words: ‘towsao’, ‘it flies or moves through the air’; ‘piasso’, ‘animal hair or fur’; and ‘mkwassem’, ‘red dog’ (there is no ‘r’ in the Abenaki alphabet). See Gordon M. Day, Western Abenaki Dictionary, vol. 1: Abenaki-English (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), 464, 435, and 322.

33. Franklin, Discoverers, 21.

34. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.

35. Lorraine Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe’, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 97.

36. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 24.

37. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 24.

38. ‘Lodestone’ is the modern spelling of this word; I use ‘loadstone’ because Rosier did.

39. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.

40. Robert Norman, The new Attractiue (London: 1592), epistle dedicatory. See also William Barlow, Mathematical Advertisements: or Divers Pertinent Observations, and Approued Experiments Concerning the Nature and Properties of the Load-Stone (London: 1616). The use of loadstones as compasses originated in China. On magnetism and the compass in the history of navigation, see John B. Hattendorf, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, vol. 2, 430–36; D.W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 22–26 and 246–47; and M. Blackman, ‘The Loadstone: a Survey of the History and the Physics’, Contemporary Physics 24, no. 4 (1983): 319–31.

41. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 100.

42. George Best, ‘A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie for Finding of a Passage to Cathaya, By the North-west, under the conduct of Martin Frobisher General’, in The three voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Sir Richard Collinson (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1867), 29.

43. Best, ‘True Discourse’, 30.

44. Best's discussion of the loadstone as ‘rare’ and of Frobisher's careful observation suggests that the men were treating the loadstone not as a miracle itself but as evidence for the truth of Christianity and of supernatural agency. See Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts’, 114–16.

45. Jeffrey Knapp reads colonists' exchanges of goods with Natives very differently, by examining how ‘colonial trifling’ or the exchange of trifles or toys worked to ‘smooth and to justify possession’. Knapp argues that such trifling mirrored England's attempts at establishing New World colonies, for England's failures and Spain's success suggested that ‘England's relation to the New World was essentially a frivolous one’. See Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3–4.

46. See also Rosier, True Relation, 257.

47. See Wiseman, Voice, 73–75.

48. Calloway, Dawnland, 15.

49. Brooks, Common Pot, 3–4.

50. Brooks, Common Pot, 4.

51. Chrestien LeClerq, New Relation of Gaspesia, trans. and ed. William F. Ganong (Toronto: The Champlain Society: 1910), 288.

52. LeClerq, New Relation, 298–9.

53. Brooks, Common Pot, 7.

54. Bragdon, Native People, 246.

55. Bragdon, Native People, 246.

56. See William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England [1983] (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), especially 39.

57. See Wiseman, Voice, chapter four.

58. Bragdon, Native People, 246.

59. Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, 13.

60. See Wiseman, Voice, 57.

61. Wiseman, Voice, 42.

62. Alexander von Gernet, ‘North American Indigenous Nicotiana Use and Tobacco Shamanism: The Early Documentary Record, 1520–1660’, in Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 59–80 (59). See also Andrew Thevet, André Thevet's North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, ed. Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Phillips Stabler (Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986), 10 and 47.

63. John Josselyn, New England's Rarities (London: 1672), 54.

64. See the essays in Winter, Tobacco Use.

65. Many colonists observed these features of tobacco. For one example, see Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 16.

66. See Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), especially chapters two and three.

67. Foucault, The Order of Things, 144.

68. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For one study of natural history that complicates Foucault's account, see Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

69. Purchas, ‘Extracts’, 358.

70. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2000), 97.

71. Ong, Orality, 98.

72. Ong, Orality, 97.

73. See, for example, Claudia Swan, ‘Making Sense of Medical Collections in Early Modern Holland: The Uses of Wonder’, in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 199–213.