Review: Hakluyt's Promise by Peter C Mancall, and Savage Kingdom by Benjamin Woolley (original) (raw)

Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan Obsession for an English America
by Peter C Mancall
378pp, Yale, £25

Savage Kingdom: Virginia and the Founding of English America
by Benjamin Woolley
467pp, Harper Press, £25

Anniversaries usually provide a context for the rediscovery of half-forgotten historical events. In the case of the foundation of the English colony in Virginia 400 years ago next month, however, this is neither possible nor entirely necessary. For one thing, half the story - the perspective of the indigenous peoples of the place they themselves called Tsenacomoco - can never be recovered. As the most famous scion of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, noted of them in 1782: "Very little can now be discovered of the subsequent history of these tribes severally." One nation, the Mattaponies, he reckoned, consisted of "three or four men only, and they have more negro than Indian blood in them. They have lost their language, [and] have reduced themselves, by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land." Of another nation, the Nottoways, he noted "not a male is left". As for the memory of the dead, all he could say was "I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument".

Less literally, the other side of the story has also been prey to oblivion, largely supplanted by a narrative that has acquired the status of myth. The irresistible tale of Pocahontas, inserted into the imaginations of a generation of children by the corny Disney cartoon and re-imagined for adults in Terrence Malick's more complex film The New World , occupies the cultural space where early Virginia should be. The epic romance of sails glimpsed on the horizon, of cross-cultural encounters, of love across the divide, of an Indian princess dying in England, still infuses the events with its dreamy perfume.

It is striking, indeed, that two very different attempts to remind us of the broader context for the Virginia enterprise both end up being revisionist in an unusual way. Instead of emphasis ing, as revisionist history tends to do, the greed and violence of the episode, both the American academic historian Peter Mancall and the English writer and broadcaster Benjamin Woolley play up the physical and imaginative daring of those who reached across the ocean to grab a new world for England. Early Virginia still resists anything so prosaic as mere realism.

Mancall, whose book forms a neat prequel to Woolley's, has undertaken the sternest task in approaching this new world from the point of view of an Englishman who never travelled farther than Paris. Richard Hakluyt, the tireless student of, and propagandist for, the exploration and settlement of America, is, as Mancall acknowledges in an afterword, "an elusive quarry". Not only are basic facts such as his year of birth unclear, but he wrote relatively little, revealed even less of himself, and achieved his impact indirectly, through the gathering, editing and publication of the accounts of voyagers and what were then called cosmographers. Hakluyt infected Elizabethan England with the virus of American adventure, but he himself was an almost invisible carrier of the disease.

By framing his book essentially as a biography of this intangible man, Mancall is forced into using, especially in his early chapters, a great deal of narrative Polyfilla. Useless information (the thickness of the walls of the church at the Middle Temple in London; the fact that Oxford was once surrounded by thick forests) is scattered between phrases such as "Few surviving records detail Hakluyt's actions" and "Few records survive indicating what Hakluyt did ..." But the tedious voyage through these dodgy straits is eventually rewarded. For what Mancall's accumulated erudition succeeds in showing us is the sheer difficulty of persuading the recalcitrant English, worn down by the bloody and expensive wars of conquest in Ireland, into larger imperial ambitions. Hakluyt essentially had to call a new world into being through the dissemination of travellers' tales and then generate an ambition to inhabit it

Michael Drayton's "Ode to the Virginian Voyage" urged "brave heroic minds" to "Go and subdue! / Whilst loit'ring hinds / Lurk here at home with shame". The urgency came as much from the fear that rising numbers of unemployed Englishmen might "cut the throats of the wealthy" if they were not sent to new colonies abroad as from religious competition with expansionist Catholicism or dreams of imperial glory.

In such circumstances, it was not surprising that the first settlers in Jamestown tended to be misfits and desperados. The early days of the settlement are compelling precisely because the in-fighting, incompetence and near-anarchy at Jamestown so dramatically undermined the ideology of civilised Europeans taming savage Indians. Were it not so riven with suffering, hunger, disease and death, the tale of those who would govern a new world but could not govern themselves would be a great historical comedy.

Woolley captures this madcap side of the adventure and tells the story lucidly, elegantly and with a command both of the broad sweep of the early 17th century and the fine details of human behaviour. His most important addition to the usual narrative is his insertion into it of the anonymous poor of Jamestown - the Angolan slaves captured from a Portuguese ship and the paupers and orphans shipped off from England - whose history has been almost as thoroughly erased as that of the Indians. He points up the reality of Hakluyt's imagined contrast between the "proud governance" of the Spanish in Latin America and the supposedly "gentle government of the English".

And, if he does not manage to dislodge Pocahontas from the imaginative centre of the story, Woolley does at least manage to help us understand why her story was so useful. He twice quotes a line from the contemporary play Eastward Hoe in which an America-bound captain rallies his crew: "Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead." The paradox of taking by force the maidenhead of a colony named after the Virgin Queen was a troubling one, and the consequent anxieties had to be resolved.

The story of the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist John Rolfe was thus of immense psychological, as well as political, value. Rolfe, in an open letter justifying the relationship, openly disavowed any "unbridled desire of carnal affection" and claimed to have undertaken the marriage "for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ an unbelieving creature". It is not hard to understand why the letter was seized on and published by the Virginia Company. The image of Pocahontas transformed the seizure of Virginia from a rape into a consensual, selfless marriage.

Samuel Purchas, the Essex clergyman to whom Hakluyt bequeathed his vast library of travel literature, took spiritual charge of Pocahontas and her retinue when they arrived in England, but was frustrated by the failure of most of them to accept the baptism that would purify their souls. In 1622, after the colonists massacred the rebellious Indians, Purchas proclaimed, in a sermon, that England "hast washed thy feet in the blood of those native unnatural Traitors, and now become a pure English Virgin; a new other Britain in that new other World." The water that washed away the sins of conquest and created a new virginal society, purified and free to start again, was blood.

·Fintan O'Toole's White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America is published by Faber