Tamara Harvey
“The Americas were discovered in 1492, and the first Christian settlements established by the Spanish the following year,” Bartolomé de las Casas writes in his 1542 preface to A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas 1992) before outlining initial settlement patterns ranging from Hispaniola, the first major European settlement in the Americas, to the mainland, an area that he imagines “the Almighty selected … as home to the greater part of the human race” (9). This overview of Spanish settlement in the Americas gives way to a graphic account of massacres and atrocities that decimated Native populations. “The pattern established at the outset has remained unchanged to this day,” he writes (11). Las Casas’s Short Account is an unusual text to invoke at the beginning of a chapter on settlement literature. Since it was published in the sixteenth century it has been taken as an indictment of Spanish conquest – in particular by other European states laboring to distinguish their American settlements from this conquest. The vision of Spanish conquest emerging from Las Casas’s critique came to be known as the Black Legend; settlement, the advocates of other colonial projects averred, is not that. But the patterns Las Casas observes shaped settlements throughout the Americas, despite inevitable disavowals of Spanish atrocities. When John Smith (2007) sets out possibilities for British settlements in North America 70 years later, he pointedly rejects the Spanish pattern as immoral but also as unattainable, and in saying it is unattainable Smith tacitly admits a desire to emulate their success. Invoking the Black Legend, Smith writes of the Virginia settlement, “we washed not the ground with their blouds, nor shewed such strange inventions in mangling, murdering, ransaking, and destroying (as did the Spaniards)” (94). Yet Smith craves a Spanish level of success and translates their pattern of resource extraction to an alternative source of wealth, the fishing profits of the Dutch in the Americas. He tells potential English settlers that the rich fisheries of New England will produce a different kind of silver, the silver of fish scales and the silver gained by selling fish, providing an alternative to Spanish mines, for “this is their Myne; and the Sea the source of those silvered streames of all their vertue” (139). Smith and others were clearly inspired by Spain’s colonial endeavors even as they frequently disavowed that inspiration (Griffin 2005: 126–134). Even William Bradford (1981) looks to Spain in his early account of the settling of Plymouth, comparing the starving times of the Pilgrims to those of the Spanish recounted by Peter Martyr, whom he quotes: “That with their miseries they opened a way to these new lands” (135).
In recent years, scholars have taken up the task of distinguishing settler colonialism from other kinds of colonialism and settlers from other kinds of migrants. Settler colonialism is the process by which groups claim sovereignty in a new land and establish a new polity that displaces existing societies rather than subjugating them, while leaving them basically intact. Indeed, the word colony did not become the primary term for naming European settlements until well into the seventeenth century because of its associations with Roman practices that generally left colonized societies intact while demanding tribute and fealty. Especially with regard to religion but also in matters of political and social organization, Europeans did not leave Indigenous social structures in place. Instead, the Spanish established two large viceroyalties during the sixteenth century (New Spain and Peru), administrative districts that extended Spanish rule over these regions, while the English preferred the word plantation well into the seventeenth century (Bauer and Mazzotti 2009: 12–22; Pagden 1995: 79). John Cotton’s reflection in Gods Promise to his Plantation (1630) that “to plant a people … is a Metaphor taken from young Impes; I will plant them, that is, I will make them to take roote there” (14) depends on the idea that “a Country though not altogether void of Inhabitants, yet void in that place where they reside” (4) is open to plantation, following the principles of res nullius (Pagden 1995: 76). Tellingly, the settlers are planted by God but their own agency as planters and builders who tend the land and the native inhabitants takes over the metaphor as the sermon progresses. Colony became the prevalent term only when it started to name the relationship between American settlements and European metropoles (Bauer and Mazzotti 2009: 20). For instance, Samuel de Champlain (1632) writes of “habitations” and “forts” as well as “the mission” when he lists what has been established in New France, but when he describes the relationship between New France and France, he uses the word “colonie” (4–5).
Reading Las Casas’s works as both a significant foil to many settlement literatures and a work of settlement literature itself illuminates the erasures, contradictions, and disavowals that enabled and continue to sustain settler colonialism in the Americas. The pattern he observes may not be replicated exactly in other colonial endeavors, but we should understand that pattern not as the exercise of specific modes of violence and social control but rather the proliferation of extremely adaptable tactics and discourses that enable and perpetuate settlement as justified and natural. Including Las Casas’s text as an example thus allows us to situate the literatures of settlements in the Americas both within a broader geographic range and within a longer chronology stretching back to Columbus and forward to the present.
Settlement literature cannot be clearly differentiated from discovery and conquest literature since it uses and modifies rationales, discourses, and technologies for engaging the Americas developed over the first century of European presence there. According to Lorenzo Veracini (2010), disavowal is a key component of settler colonialism, concealing its actual practices. For instance, settlers justify their activities by virtue of their labors and hardship while disavowing responsibility for the displacement and murder of Natives (14). Uses of the Black Legend are an obvious example of this kind of disavowal, but many strategies are used to naturalize settlement. Discourses of settler colonialism range from Columbus’s first act of possession through histories and narratives of settlement that claim or make space for Europeans in the Americas to the tragic Indian romances of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries that celebrate sacrifice and honor suicide (including Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel [1798], James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans [1826], and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie [1827], to name only a very few) to contemporary historical markers that naturalize US settlement and sovereignty with real consequences for issues like tribal recognition. The settler literature I treat in this chapter – writings by and about early European settlements – are part of this history.
Moreover, even the briefest examination of so‐called discovery and settlement literatures reveals considerable overlap in genre, function, and historical imagination. Most settlers were familiar with a range of discovery and conquest discourses from other travel narratives, and they replicated them as a way to record what they saw, gain the authority of the discoverer, and develop important mercantile and scientific relationships with metropolitan audiences in Europe. Records of the gathering, categorizing, and disseminating of information about New World wonders and resources are almost always present while encounters with Indigenous inhabitants – even when they are peaceful, even when they go unrecorded, even when the writer is explicitly critical, as in Las Casas’s texts – cannot be separated from the large‐scale practice of conquest. These texts are both generically and ideologically messy, as Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts (2003) put it in their introduction to postcoloniality and early American studies (11), and overscrupulous distinctions tend to break down. More importantly, such distinctions can disguise the adaptability of discourses that continue to do the work of settler colonialism long after Euro‐American settlements came to dominate the Americas.
In this chapter I try to keep things messy while attending to some of the patterns and functions of settlement literatures of the Americas. Travel narratives, natural histories, ethnographies, letters, and poetry are among the types of literature that both describe and enable settlement. I focus primarily on the settlements that began around the early seventeenth century, though with an eye to earlier Spanish settler literature that influences these texts. I look first at those elements of settlement literature that emerge from and overlap with discourses of discovery and conquest and then at histories that look to an emerging state, eventually a nation. By telling the story of foundation in forms that are maintained and morphed as needed, these texts tend to naturalize settlement in support of an often invisible conquest, serving as the cultural arm of imperial missions.
Activities like mapping, naming, listing, and describing that shape truth under the guise of identifying it objectively all do the work of displacing Natives and making space for settlers, even as they deploy emerging modes of authority associated with empiricism. Much new scholarship is concerned with these discourses and rhetorical practices rather than more familiar and compelling narratives of grit and grace in the face of early hardships, particularly since stories about first founding can seem overdetermined by later nationalist readings, as in the story of the first Thanksgiving. In recent years, transnational and particularly hemispheric approaches to settlement have also started to transform how we understand European colonization of the Americas. Studies of American settlements have long stalled at generalizations about the differences between Spanish, French, and English approaches to colonization epitomized by Francis Parkman a century and a half ago: “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian, English civilization scorned and neglected him, French civilization embraced and cherished him” (quoted in Sayre 1997: 3), but ambitious comparative studies have begun to break down these easy distinctions. For instance, working across disciplines, participants in the “Before 1607” workshop held at the Huntington Library in 2013 explored what Europeans and Native Americans would have seen and known when Jamestown, Québec, and Santa Fe were all founded at the turn of the seventeenth century. Pacific interests and new information from the interior of North America fueled these efforts in ways that previous scholarship centered on east coast settlements has not acknowledged (Kupperman 2015: 3). Similarly drawing on interdisciplinary work sparked by the first Early Ibero/Anglo‐Americanist Summit, Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti’s introduction to Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (2009) examines the uneven intersection between Spanish American and British American creole identity. Though their focus is necessarily on more mature settlements that have creole subjects (here creole means people of European descent born in the Americas), they also address the differences among settlements in ways that open up long‐standing commonplaces about the motivations and practices of different countries. Even studies that are not explicitly transnational, like Michelle Burnham’s Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (2007), have started to attend to how larger economic and political concerns shaped British American settlement literature.
New scholarship looks not only at what settlers knew about the world and colonial enterprises; it also looks at how they knew – that is, how endeavors in the Americas shaped ideas about science, cosmography, trade, and religion. For instance, James Dougal Fleming argues that “an hermeneutics of discovery did not precede the conquests, as the established method for obtaining the kind of knowledge that is called power. Rather, it emanated from, and was validated by, the conquests, as the method by which power had been obtained, and therefore was called knowledge” (Fleming 2011: 8). In other words, what we have come to know as discovery did not exist until explorers and natural historians found themselves investigating a nature whose core no longer seemed self‐evident – appearances no longer directly represented the truth of a thing – and in uncovering hidden possibilities investigators exercised power and gained knowledge that enhanced that power. Similarly, María Portuondo (2009) looks at how Spanish cartography changes over the course of the sixteenth century as political pressures, competition for American colonies, and a wealth of new data led to a breakdown of older Renaissance cosmographies: “The desire to write a universal cosmography, that chimerical dream of Renaissance humanists, had dissolved when confronted with the challenge of incorporating the New World into its conceptual framework” (297). One consequence is that description and cartography, which were joined in early Renaissance cosmographies, became separated. Another is that Spanish efforts to keep their cartographic knowledge secret gave way to a willingness to publish them as support for their territorial claims (Portuondo 2009: 298). Meanwhile, exploration activities and settlements were increasingly funded by merchants rather than monarchs and nobles, with consequences for how settler literature treated economic exchanges (Burnham 2005: 29–32). Together, these changing methods of accounting for the Americas developed along with settlements, not before them, and reflected increased competition among European powers as well as a sense that power can rest both in uncovering what is hidden and circulating newfound knowledge judiciously in the service of developing and consolidating New World interests.
Comparing Spanish ceremonies of possession with early English compacts gives us some insight into how seventeenth‐century English settlements depended on earlier Spanish models regardless of how vociferously they rejected the comparison, while subtle differences reflected increased competition for New World footholds in the early seventeenth century. In 1513 the Spanish began using a formal declaration of sovereignty called the Requerimiento to take possession of Native lands and demand obedience from Native peoples in the Americas under the guise of conversion. It begins:
On the part of the King, Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castille and Leon, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants, and all those who come after us.
(Helps 1904: 264)
Written by Spanish jurist Juan López de Placios Rubios, the Requerimiento established shared descent from Adam and Eve as justification for demanding Native submission. That Natives, when they were present, neither knew Spanish nor were inclined to accept conversion based on such a declaration was unimportant – the legal framework had been asserted to the satisfaction of the Church and Spain (Restall 2003: 87, 94–95). The Mayflower Compact of 1620 as recounted by William Bradford (1981) uses similar language to inaugurate settlement:
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.
(83–84)
Though the glory of God and the honor of king and country are used to justify the compact, just as in the Requerimiento, the focus is not on demanding obedience but rather on compacting together as a body politic, a settlement. John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” while not a formal compact, similarly establishes principles of civic behavior. “Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities,” he writes, or else “open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of God,” a possibility with global ramifications for they would be “as a city upon a hill” (Winthrop 1838: 47). Both the Spanish and the English declarations essentially ignore Native sovereignty while acknowledging a European and even global audience, though the English texts focus more on unifying and organizing settlers. Later ceremonies of possession reflect increased competition and, for the French and English, greater stress on planting and building as the legal basis for claiming possession, but otherwise do not differ as significantly from early Spanish practices as anti‐Spanish writers of the period would like us to believe (Pagden 1995: 76; Seed 1995: 180). Even as the foundations of sovereignty shift, in all these cases settlers differ from other kinds of migrants because they are “founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them” (Veracini 2010: 3).
In the study of British North America, John Smith has long inhabited a murky space between discovery and settlement. Myra Jehlen (1994), for instance, sees Smith as a man whose self‐fashioning anticipated “the dominant national ideology that the American was an individual of unlimited potential in the image of an apparently boundless land” but whose writings should not be understood as settlement literature proper (76). Instead, she takes Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1630–1651) as her model of settlement literature because, unlike Smith, Bradford insisted that “colonizing meant settling (rather than simple extraction of resources)” (87), adding that Bradford’s discursive tendency to erase Indians rather than stress conquest and subjugation was a constitutive feature of settlement literature. But Smith’s writings were significantly concerned with the project of settlement, drawing on the conventions of early discovery but with greater attention to territorial competition typical of the seventeenth century. Moreover, features of his writings that seem aligned with his activities as an adventurer and promoter are also found in accounts like Bradford’s, including attention to resource extraction, the situating of colony and future mercantile activity not just Atlantically but oceanically, and gestures of heroic founding that draw on older Spanish models. And though Jehlen is right to observe that Smith recognizes Native cultures and even Native sovereignty while Bradford practices a kind of erasure, both strategies are part of a larger project of making room physically and ideologically for the naturalization of European settlement.
In his 1616 “A Description of New England,” Smith (2007) himself stresses the relationship between discovery and colonization while asking readers to understand his own efforts as like those of the great Spanish explorers:
But it is not a worke for every one, to manage such an affaire as makes a discoverie, and plants a Colony: It requires all the best parts of Art, Judgement, Courage, Honesty, Constancy, Diligence and Industrie, to doe but neere well. Some are more proper for one thing then another; and therein are to be imployed: and nothing breedes more confusion then misplacing and misimploying men in their undertakings. Columbus, Cortez, Pitzara, Soto, Magellanes, and the rest served more then a prentiship to learne how to begin their most memorable attempts in the West Indies: which to the wonder of all ages successefully they effected, when many hundreds of others farre above them in the worlds opinion, beeing instructed but by relation, came to shame and confusion in actions of small moment, who doubtlesse in other matters, were both wise, discreet, generous, and couragious.
(136–137)
In many respects Smith is using this passage to place himself in the company of great Spanish precursors; as his lists make clear, he shares a litany of virtues with a catalogue of famous and successful explorers. Eric Griffin (2005) reads this passage as an admonishment to the English, who need to be more diligent in their American endeavors (129). But the passage also demonstrates a refinement of earlier ideas about discovery, reflecting new conditions among competing colonies and the new role of leaders like Smith in navigating this international competition. The distinction Smith draws between those who serve “more than a prentiship” and those who gain their knowledge from books reflects a long‐recognized distinction between knowledge gained through navigational practices and the knowledge of scholars (Smith 2007: 136). Smith may be urging the English to keep up with other countries, but he does so with attention to the same colonial competition that Portuondo (2009) sees as the source of shifting cosmographical practices in Spain that forego totalizing, cosmographical understanding and share cartographic information strategically in support of territorial claims.
It is telling that Smith’s (2007) reflections on the virtues of the explorers follows his detailed discussion of the location of New England. Again, he highlights the difference between his hard‐won knowledge and the ignorance of those who “asked such strange questions, of the goodnesse and greatnesse of those spatious Tracts of land, how they can bee thus long unknowne, or not possessed by the Spaniards, and many such like demands” (134). And, like other early seventeenth‐century colonial endeavors, his geography lesson is informed by activity in the Pacific as well as along the Atlantic seaboard. Indeed, Smith begins by situating New England with respect to English claims in the Pacific: “New England is that part of America in the Ocean Sea opposite to Nova Albyon in the South Sea; discovered by the most memorable Sir Francis Drake in his voyage about the worlde” (134). He then details its relation to other colonies: “New France, off it, is Northward: Southwardes is Virginia, and all the adjoyning Continent, with New Granado, New Spain, New Andolosia and the West Indies” (134). Smith attends to navigational details as early explorers did, but he is situating New England with respect to other colonies, both insisting that there is unclaimed space open for settlement and outlining potential partners and competitors in trade. That he begins with “Nova Albyon in the South Sea” further stresses the global ambitions at work here – this is not solely an Atlantic endeavor (134).
Smith’s efforts to situate New England geographically while aligning himself with earlier explorers gives us some insight into the geopolitics of early seventeenth‐century settlement. His commodity lists in turn provide insight into the economic world growing out of and sustaining these efforts. Lists were common features of exploration narratives and early natural histories, both documenting discoveries and reimagining them in terms of profitable trade. In a 1493 letter describing his first voyage, for instance, Columbus (1969) includes long lists of plants, birds, and trees that he finds individually and in their variety “a marvelous sight,” but these lists of natural wonders frequently end in a statement about wealth‐creating commodities: “In Hispaniola there are many spices and large mines of gold and other metals” (116–117). Smith’s lists work similarly, but as Michelle Burnham (2007) has observed, commodity lists like Smith’s may be read as works of “anti‐wonder,” deferring narrative satisfaction for possible investors until the market potential of those commodities are realized sometime in the future (35). In a passage extolling the wealth to be gained by fishing, Smith (2007) begins simply: “The maine staple, from hence to bee extracted for the present to produce the rest, is Fish” (139), but he rapidly expands the passage with lists of commodities that demonstrate the riches gained by the Dutch and to be gained by England through trade. The Dutch have traded fish, elsewhere described as “Herring, Cod, and Ling, … that triplicitie that makes their wealth” (140), for “Wood, Flax, Pitch, Tarre, Rosin, Cordage, and such like” with “French, Spaniards, Portugales, and English, etc.” and in doing so have built a mercantile empire that ships “Golde, Silver, Pearles, Diamonds, Pretious stones, Silkes, Velvets, and Cloth of golde” (139). In both his lists and his association of discovery and settlement, Smith seems to be looking backward to an earlier model of heroism that Jehlen (1994) sees when she identifies him with the myth of American individualism. Burnham’s reading, however, suggests that he is repurposing these conventions slightly in order to lay the groundwork for settlement that will compete with other nations in a commercial world that is sustained by merchants and already decidedly transnational in its reach. Smith addresses readers who see the Americas as fully claimed and known though in rather simple terms; in making the case for English settlement, he identifies spaces for further exploration and settlement while acknowledging a colonial world that is shaped by competition and not entirely unknown. One rhetorical challenge Smith and others faced was to assert that the land was sufficiently empty of both Indigenous and competing colonial settlements to fulfill the legal demands of res nullius upon which British and French settlements were largely made (Pagden 1995: 76) while at the same time providing a fuller sense of what was known both about the peoples, geography, and resources of the Americas and about competing colonies. They addressed this challenge both through appeals to older models of authority and attention to contemporary ways of understanding the Americas shaped in part by competition for land and markets that developed over the preceding century.
Smith’s attention to mercantile circulations and competitive colonial forces that were not confined to the eastern seaboard of North America can help illuminate the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, a settler who is often read as oddly silent about her American experiences. In “The Four Monarchies,” published in 1650, Bradstreet (1967) retells the histories of great empires up through the Romans, but in the first of her quaternions, her attention is focused much more on New World riches characterized from the perspective of Atlantic trade. Responding to the charge to “impart your usefulness and force” (22), Earth is the first to stress the circulation of commodities, though she directs her attention to “where sun doth rise,” that is, the East:
But hark you wealthy merchants, who for prize
Send forth your well‐manned ships where sun doth rise,
After three years when men and meat is spent,
My rich commodities pay double rent.
…
But mariners where got you ships and sails,
And oars to row, when both my sisters fails?
Your tackling, anchor, compass too is mine,
Which guides when sun nor moon nor stars do shine.
(23)
Water responds to Earth with a catalogue of Eastern, European, and North African bodies of water that are both scientific wonders and conduits for trade, though she looks too to the Americas:
Thy gallant rich perfuming ambergris
I lightly cast ashore as frothy fleece,
With rolling grains of purest massy gold,
Which Spain’s Americans do gladly hold.
(27)
Bradstreet may not be describing the nature and people of New England, but she is registering a worldview shaped by over a century of European activities in the Americas out of which the New England project developed, as we see in Smith’s writings. Placing her poetry on a continuum with earlier discovery discourses helps us read it as settler literature doing the work of settler colonialism in ways that anti‐Spanish writers of the period disavowed, in part by insisting on a sharper antithesis between Spain and other European countries than was the case.
These elements of discovery literature often seem to work as side notes to the compelling narrative elements that shape national origin stories and paper schoolroom walls. They frequently align with global ambitions and needs – the circulations of mercantile capitalism, competition among colonies, and the needs of a colony still dependent on a home country. In that way they can be boring – as Burnham (2007) suggests, they defer narrative gratification. That said, they also reveal ambitions and investments that narrative forms of settler literature frequently draw on but also disavow. It is to these historical narratives that we turn now.
Settlement literature comprises many forms and discourses that overlap other kinds of travel, mercantile, and discovery discourses. Of all the forms that settler literature takes, settlement histories are clearly the most central. For contemporaries, they help establish legal claims, forward individual interests, and record personal experiences. For later generations, they justify ongoing political and social formations and shape national myths while providing the narrative gratification that commodity lists do not. Among histories written by first‐generation participants in settlement, some of the best known include Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1630–1651) and Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New‐England, and the Summer Isles (1624) and, if we admit a more hemispheric gaze, chronicles like Bernal Díaz’s The Conquest of New Spain (1568) and Samuel de Champlain’s Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France (1632). By including the texts of Bernal Díaz and Samuel de Champlain, we again face the problem of defining settlement literature across imperial boundaries. Added to the differences in experiences (mostly signaled by Spanish territorial success and mineral wealth) and terminology (emerging at the time and imposed by later generations) that we have already seen, differences in narrative forms complicate our understanding of settlement histories. Anthony Pagden (1995), comparing Spanish, French, and English settlement literature, writes:
There is an abundance of narratives on both the French and English settlement in the Americas. But there is, as has often been remarked, no English or French equivalent of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account of the conquest of Mexico or Garcilaso de la Vega’s evocation of the Inka empire. […] That is so, not, as some have suggested, because of a defect in the historical sensibilities of the nations, but simply because there was nothing which took place in French or British America about which such stories could be told. (66)
Though it is hard to generalize across the histories offered by works as diverse as Díaz’s chronicle, Bradford’s account, and the Jesuit Relations, all works that take forms particularly well suited to the settlement projects they recount, we can look at some of the basic components and functions of settlement histories as a way to get beyond the stark differences outlined by Pagden.
In “To My Dear Children,” a manuscript letter that remained unpublished during her lifetime, Anne Bradstreet (1967) writes, “I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston” (241). Bradstreet’s most sustained, ambitious historical work, “The Four Monarchies,” focuses on earlier empires, but this short observation to her children about first setting foot in New England might be taken as an epitome of settler histories. In the transition from Bradstreet’s first sentence to her second, “a new world and new manners” tacitly acknowledges cultural encounter with another place and peoples, only to give way without remark to “the church at Boston.” I argue that we should see this as Bradstreet’s tiny settler history, a history that both illuminates the functioning of longer, better known works of settler literature and reminds us that these histories are not only the work of colonial leaders. Bradstreet’s tiny settler history highlights two basic characteristics of such histories across the Americas. First, settler narratives were conveyed in many forms, often in personal accounts addressed to acquaintances and intimates, and longer settler histories frequently incorporated these shorter narratives. For instance, William Bradford (1981) includes many letters in Of Plymouth Plantation and after the first book shifts explicitly to an annal form that better fits this pieced‐together format. He sounds only slightly defensive when he explains that “letters are by some wise men counted the best parts of histories” (43). Second, regardless of length, form, and audience, these narratives do the work of making space for settlement. Bradstreet is one among many who makes space by focusing on European activities while ignoring Indigenous inhabitants. According to Jehlen (1994), such characterizations of the Americas as empty or savage wilderness are “structuring abstractions” that undergird English settlement (84–85). Bradstreet’s elision may be read as a fainter version of Bradford’s (1981) famous invitation to the reader to “stand half amazed” in imagining the feelings of the pilgrims upon arriving where “they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies. […] Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men – and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not” (69–70). But as we shall see, it is a mistake to overemphasize the prevalence and efficacy of these erasing strategies.
The Jesuit Relations provide some of the most detailed early histories of settlement in New France as well as accounts of missions and Native cultures for which they are known. These relations were edited mission reports compiled from letters and accounts and sent from Québec to France and other parts of the Jesuit apostolate with the aim of promoting the missions (Greer 2000: 14–15). In Father Paul Le Jeune’s 1636 report “On the present state of New France” in that year’s Relation, he describes the progress and ambitions of the settlers who “are thinking of a number of homes or settlements as far up as the great Sault de saint Louys” and even to Lake Huron. He continues by contrasting the growth of settlements in New France with the corruption of Old France:
And now we see a great number of very honorable persons land here every year, who come to cast themselves into our great forests as if into the bosom of peace, to live here with more piety, more immunity, and more liberty. The din of Palaces, the great uproar of Lawyers, Litigants, and Solicitors is heard here only at a thousand leagues’ distance. Exactions, deceits, thefts, rapes, assassinations, treachery, enmity, black malice, are seen here only once a year, in the letters and Gazettes which people bring from Old France.
(Thwaites 1897: 139)
Each year the Jesuit Relations included news on the progress of French settlements along with accounts of their efforts to convert Natives, accounts that Le Jeune suggests were more valuable objects of exchange than the grim reports coming out of Old France in return.
Among the contributors to the Jesuit Relations are Ursuline and Hospital nuns in Québec whose letters and accounts were regularly incorporated. Though many of these nuns yearned to join the Jesuit fathers as they moved around the country, gender norms and the rules of enclosure kept them within the major French settlements. Marie de l’Incarnation (Marie Guyart) and other nuns wrote letters and accounts that demonstrated their understanding that they were writing important histories of New France and their part in a global apostolate. Ursulines frequently circulated semi‐private letters that might be addressed to individuals or to the transatlantic Ursuline community more generally. Among the latter, lettres circulaires were accounts of individual convents while circulaires mortuaires memorialized individual Ursulines when they died (Lierheimer 1994: 163–164). They were then collected in annals and chronicles for later generations. That said, both because of the rules of enclosure and women’s limited access to publication, readers outside the convent would have known these texts primarily through the edited versions included in the Jesuit Relations in versions that made significant changes to the original letters. For instance, the “heroic virtues” valued by nuns might be edited out in favor of virtues of modesty and obedience while the Ursuline lineage stressed particularly in the Ursuline compilations disappeared as individual letters were absorbed into the Jesuit Relations (Lierheimer 1994: 181–198; Harvey 2008: 113–117).
In addition to the formal histories of the lettres circulaires and the circulaires mortuaires, nuns like Marie de l’Incarnation (1989) wrote more expedient letters in which the exchange of news for necessities stands in for the circulation of more profitable commodities. In one letter Marie contrasted the beaver trade with “trading in souls” (252), but like other first‐generation settlers it may be said that her first object of trade was narrative. Rather than offering future riches, she offered future conversions; rather than thrilling stories of wilderness martyrdom, she offered narratives of establishing new world institutions, that is, of settling. Marie de l’Incarnation served as mother superior of the first Ursuline convent in Québec for decades. In that role, one of her important duties was to write for support from France and in return provide information about the endeavors of nuns in New France. Indeed, in a letter to her son she reports having written more than 200 letters to be sent on a single ship (232). In another letter to him she elaborates:
Who can have told you that I have had difficulties in our establishment? Yes, I have had, and unless one has experienced this it is hard to believe how many problems one encounters in an establishment made in a new and completely barbarous country. One depends so completely on France that without its help one would not know what to do. In addition, no matter how urgent and important things are, one must wait a year in order to have them resolved; and if this cannot be done during the period when the ships are in France, then one must wait for two years. When the ships return, those to whom some concern has been entrusted are apt to think only of their own affairs; thus one can hardly ever have a clear solution to any problem. (234)
Marie told and retold the story of the nuns’ hardships in these letters, sending detailed news, for instance, of “Iroquois persecutions” while also explaining “we are in need of everything” (230, 228). The interchangeability of “necessities” and “commodities” is also evident throughout Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, as he continually seeks the former while the Adventurers, the Plymouth plantation’s first investors, demand the latter. In a letter from the Adventurers included by Bradford (1981), they write, “And after your necessities are served, you gather together such commodities as the country yields and send them over to pay debts and clear engagements here” (193). If commodity lists are forms of anti‐wonder that delay narrative gratification, the search for necessities often drives these narratives by allowing writers to spin tales of hardship that validate their efforts, underscoring a story of interdependence between metropole and colony and serving as an object of exchange with Europeans eager for news from the Americas.
The Jesuit Relations also highlight the work of Native critics and collaborators that too great an emphasis on the rhetoric of erasure masks. Because of their avowed interest in recording Native practices, the Jesuits depended on collaborators. Likewise, Bradford, Smith, Díaz, Thomas Morton, Marie de l’Incarnation, and practically every other author of settler literature included exchanges with and knowledge gained from Natives that reflect complicity, critique, and something in between. Bradford (1981) extolls the “vast and unpeopled countries of America,” unpeopled save for “savage and brutish men,” but he also details the assistance of Squanto and Hobomok and diplomatic exchanges with Massassoit and others in ways that belie this characterization (26). Indeed, these accounts are very like Bradford’s extensive discussions of his dealings with Thomas Weston and the Adventurers. That Europeans were inconsistent in their representations of Natives has long been recognized though too often with exclusive attention to the discourses of erasure with which I began this section. As Jodi A. Byrd (2011) observes, critical readings of US settler colonialism frequently treat Indigenous people as “past tense presences” or “melancholic citizens dissatisfied with the conditions of inclusion. All too rarely outside American Indian and Indigenous studies are American Indians theorized as the field through which U.S. empire became possible at all” (xx). Recent scholarship pays more attention to strategies for understanding Native perspectives and engagements.
In Spanish America, major historical works authored by Indigenous and mestizo historians provide particularly rich sources for considering Native historiography. What has come to be called New Conquest History reconsiders foundational texts of Spanish American conquest and settlement alongside Native and mestizo authored codices and Spanish texts interpreted with more knowledgeable approaches to Native languages, modes of communication, and cultures (Restall 2012: 155–156). Prominent among those texts that are at once Native, conquest, and settler histories are Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s account of Andean history and the conquest of Peru in Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Historia de la Florida (1605) and Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609), and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Compendio histórico del reino de Texcoco (c. 1610–1640), as well as narratives collected in the Florentine Codex (1545–1590). Notably, these are later histories that attempt to consolidate and make sense of events that occurred a generation or more earlier. In recent years, scholars have attended more to the middle space between resistance and complicity. For instance, Yolanda Martinez‐San Miguel (2008) uses the tools of postmodernism, subaltern studies, and postcolonialism to offer a “minor reading” of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Long print histories by Natives are not available for scholars of English and French settlements, so these scholars frequently focus on ways to identify Native discursive strategies and communication technologies through available fragments and evidence available in European works. For example, Matt Cohen (2010) reads Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan and Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation for evidence of communication technologies that move beyond long‐held assumptions about Native orality. As he explains, “it is important to extend our knowledge of the layers of deception that shape European narratives but also to acknowledge that Natives can lie and deceive like other humans” (20). The negotiation of two or more languages and communication technologies (e.g. Andean quipus and European print) as well as multiple audiences are a central focus in all these studies.
Settlement histories were written for the present and the future, for readers in the Americas and in Europe. First‐generation narratives could be found in many forms; the best known early histories are often composites of many types of texts, with a range of authors. These histories tended to become more consolidated with time: we see this in Robert Beverly’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705) and Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) but also in the works of Garcilaso de la Vega and Alva Ixtlilxochitl. In the nineteenth century, American settlement histories were more unified and more tightly linked to the needs of new nations. Even with these changes, however, the dominant histories continued to do the work of settler colonialism though in different narrative forms, a situation that William Apess (Pequot) (1992) observes when he argues, for instance, that Metacom’s (or King Philip’s) tactics were “equal, if not superior, to that of Washington crossing the Delaware” in his 1836 “Eulogy for King Philip” (297). Apess’s oration also reminds us of long‐standing and ongoing challenges to this narrative violence.
In writing this chapter I found myself struggling with two challenges. One was how to write about settlement with attention to literatures from across the Americas. As Anna Brickhouse (2015) observes,
the term settlement – against which, of course, the concept of unsettlement is semantically derived and defined – has traditionally been used in the historiography of the Anglo‐American colonies, and it has always functioned as more than just another word for colonialism: it has from its earliest usages connoted a specifically English and particularly Protestant style of colonialism that is in contrast to its (always implied, sometimes explicit) Spanish foil: conquest. (2).
The other challenge, which resonates with Brickhouse’s idea of unsettlement, is the problem of characterizing settlement literature without reifying it in such a way that its consequences seem inevitable, if not triumphant. One major factor that contributes to both these problems is the understanding of settlement that arose with nineteenth‐century nationalisms. Through the pens of writers in the United States focusing primarily on narratives and embracing an Anglocentric lens, the virtues of John Smith and the Pilgrims came to dominate ideas about American settlement in a way that was not apparent in the writings of Smith and Bradford themselves. They were far more aware of how contested and protean their endeavors were. Critical approaches of the twentieth‐century sometimes were guilty of reinforcing these issues in reverse, for instance by overemphasizing the rhetoric of erasure.
Recent scholarship provides a more accurate portrait of settlement by expanding our understanding of how this literature was situated in its own time and how the work of settlement continues in our own. Looking at contributing discourses that do the work of settlement but were not intended as histories of settlement is one fruitful line of inquiry that not only provides a more accurate understanding of European involvement in the Americas but also allows us to see hemispheric trends in a global context. This includes recognizing the ways that settlement literatures of the seventeenth century frequently build on Spanish endeavors, learning, and discourses even as they attempt to deny a likeness with Spanish conquest. There are real differences between conquest and settlement, but both ultimately served settler colonialism in ways that in hindsight seem more similar than different. When we do look at narratives and histories of settlement, scholars might attend further to how these histories are to be found in a range of discourses and smaller histories like those included in Marie de l’Incarnation’s letters and Bradstreet’s tiny settler history in “To My Dear Children” as well as in the collaboration and critiques of Indigenous interlocutors and historians. Overall, scholars can productively expand our understanding of what counts as settler literature backward (by including elements of discovery literature), outward (by including authors often neglected in histories of settler literature and by situating individual settlements more globally), and forward (by acknowledging the ways settlement literature is constructed by later generations).
See also: chapter 1 (the storyteller’s universe); chapter 4 (the puritan culture of letters); chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820).