The problem of assessing Thomas Harriot's A briefe and true report of his discoveries in North America

References

• I have consulted the British Library copy (G. 7132) of Hariot Thomas A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia… London 1588
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• All citations will be from the edition of Harriot's A briefe and true report 317 387 in Quinn
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• Greenblatt Stephen Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V Glyph: Textual Studies 1981 8 40 60 has been published in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 18–47; Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, edited by Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 276–302; and Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 21–65. Unless otherwise noted it will be cited hereafter using parenthetical page numbers from its more recent version, in which it has lost its subtitle.
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• The description ‘friend-companion-advisor’ was offered to me in private correspondence in 1975 by John W. Shirley to correct my use of the term ‘tutor’. See Sokol B.J. Thomas Harriot's Notes on Sir Walter Ralegh's Address from the Scaffold Manuscripts 1974 26 198 206 on a manuscript of Harriot's that records Raleigh's last speech, and was apparently made with great emotion, on the spot.
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• Shirley , John W. 1983 . Thomas Harriot: A Biography 364 – 364 . Oxford This further details, p. 223, that in about 1595 ‘Harriot changed his primary allegiance from Ralegh's household to that of the 9th Earl’ but that ‘his interest and friendship remained centred in both’, adding that Harriot was a friend and factotum to Raleigh, but ‘With Northumberland…he was a pensioned gentleman’. It states also, p. 365 that Northumberland supplied Harriot with ‘a lavish pension (equal that he gave his younger brothers) from the early 1580s until his death’. John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: Giant without Portfolio, unpublished typescript research proposal, Tract x447/1 at the Royal Society, London, 1966, p. 12, specifies that: ‘[Harriot] received an annual grant from the Earl of 80 pounds until 1613; 100 pounds thereafter’.
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• For a summary of these suspicions, see Shirley John W. Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist Shirley J.W. Oxford 1974 23 30 in King James's superstitiously fearful questions for the investigation of Harriot are on p. 28.
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• See Quinn D.B. Shirley J.W. A Contemporary List of Hariot References Renaissance Quarterly 1969 22 9 25 (p. 24n and passim).
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• See Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist Shirley J.W. Oxford 1974 19 19 in Perhaps some of its vital sources were lost in Harriot's and the Roanoke settlement's precipitous departure with Drake's men in 1586. On the disappearance of Harriot's American material, see Quinn, pp. 54–5 and 389; on Harriot's promised and never delivered chronicle of the earlier Virginian voyages see Quinn, p. 387n.
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• Roche John Thomas Harriot's Astronomy University of Oxford 1977 147 147 (unpublished D. Phil thesis quoted in Thomas Harriot: A Biography (footnote 5), p. 95.
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• Jacquot , Jean . 1952 . Thomas Harriot's Reputation for Impiety . Notes and Records of the Royal Society , 9 : 164 – 187 . (p. 183). A similar, but less subtle, assessment appears in Antonia Maclean, Humanism and the Rise of Science in Tudor England (London, 1972), pp. 150–5.
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• James , D.G. 1967 . The Dream of Prospero 79 – 79 . Oxford James distinguishes the ugly behaviour of later colonists from more sympathetic conduct of the earlier visitors to Virginia. For a discussion of Harriot's possible direct influence on Shakespeare, see ibid., pp. 79–82 and 114–16, and my ‘Holofernes in Rabelais and Shakespeare and Some Manuscript Verses of Thomas Harriot’, Etudes Rabelaisaiennes, Tome 25 (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1992), pp. 131–5.
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• Yet conversely Stephen Greenbaltt's essay Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century Learning to Curse London 1990 16 39 in his characterizes some Europeans' reluctance to learn or appreciate newly discovered languages as destructively colonialist.
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• Citations will be from the The British Library copy (G.6837) of the English version of Theodore de Bry, America Frankfurt 1590 pt. i This edition paginates the initial portion reprinting Harriot's A briefe and true report up to p. 33. Thereafter, following a second title page ‘The True Pictures and Fashions of the People in that Parte of America now called Virginia’, it consists of unpaginated captioned illustrations by or commissioned by de Bry. The John White watercolour drawings are in the British Museum, Prints and Drawings 1906-5-9-1. They and the de Bry engravings related to them are analysed and reproduced in Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White 1577–1590, 2 vols (London and Chapel Hill: Trustees of the British Museum and University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
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• Harriot's captions and John White's titles are printed in Hulton Quinn The American Drawings of John White 1577–1590 Trustees of the British Museum and University of North Carolina Press London and Chapel Hill 1964 2 390 464 and also with an analysis of the relation of the White drawings and the de Bry engravings in Quinn
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• Although Barlowe's narrative was first printed in Richard Hakluyt's 1589 Principall navigations (which contained also a second edition of A briefe and true report), Quinn 16 17 asserts that it was very probably known to Harriot by 1585 and possibly ‘polished’ by Harriot himself for publication. It will be cited from its reprint in Quinn, pp. 91–115.
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• Quinn . 98 – 99 . for a moving account of the superb hospitality shown to Barlowe's party by the women of Roanoke Island, see Quinn pp. 107-10.
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• Quinn . 108n – 108n . states Barlowe's claim the Americans made wine was ‘almost certainly mistaken’; see ibid., p. 110n. on ‘the gentle savage’.
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• These expert judgements of Gordon W. Hewes are in the first case paraphrased and in the second case directly quoted in Hulton Quinn The American Drawings of John White 1577–1590 Trustees of the British Museum and University of North Carolina Press London and Chapel Hill 1964 I 40 40
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• Sokol , B.J. 1974 . Thomas Harriot–Sir Walter Ralegh's Tutor—on Population . Annals of Science , 31 : 205 – 212 .
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• Jacquot , Jean . 1974 . “ Harriot, Hill, Warner and the New Philosophy ” . In Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist Edited by: Shirley , J.W. 108 – 108 . Oxford in
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• See Kupperman Karen Ordahl Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 Rowan & Littlefield Towata, New Jersey 1980
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• For a discussion of Harriot's pioneering work in mathematical inequalities, the basis of the crucial idea of limits, see Tanner R.C.H. On the Role of Equality and Inequality in the History of Mathematics British Journal for the History of Science 1961 1 159 169 (pp. 165–7).
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• A briefe and true report notes the fewness and small size of the towns near Roanoke, and the superfluity of land around them: see Quinn, pp. 343 and 369. Kupperman Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 Rowan & Littlefield Towata, New Jersey 1980 5 6 states that contact with early explorers resulted in such heavy mortality from ‘new diseases that it is difficult to estimate the size of the Indian population on the eve of colonization’. She adds, p. 115, that the colonists in New England ‘had only a fraction of the original population to confront’.
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• 1909 . Utopia , 110 – 118 . London : Alston Rivers . translated by V. Paget as More's Millennium
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• Jacquot . 1952 . Thomas Harriot's Reputation for Impiety . Notes and Records of the Royal Society , 9 : 170 – 174 . discusses remarks of Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Giodorno Bruno and others associating the European discovery of native Americans with doubts of the literal truth of Genesis, and concludes that ‘Whatever else [Harriot] may have rejected of the Old Testament, he certainly preserved the ethical teachings of universal character’. Jacquot, 1974 (footnote 21), p. 125n. further discusses this trend of thought.
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• Greenblatt Stephen Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V Glyph: Textual Studies 1981 8 41 41 has been published in and in Erickson and Kahn (footnote 3), pp. 277–8.
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• Kargon , Robert . 1966 . Thomas Hariot, the Northumberland Circle, and Early Atomism in England . Journal of the History of Ideas , 27 : 128 – 136 . (p. 130).
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• Nicoll , A. , ed. 1957 . Chapman's Homer Vol. I , 15 – 16 . London 2 vols
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• Bartlett , Phyliss Brooks , ed. 1941 . Poems of George Chapman , 381 – 384 . New York : Modern Language Association .
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