Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800

PART I

LIFE WRITING

LIFE WRITING IS A BURGEONING FIELD—especially in combination with a transnational perspective—not only as a subject for literary scholarship, but also with the diversification of its practices in the Internet age. Across cultures and ages, the various practices of biographical and personal writings have provided important ways of constructing one’s identity in relation to the surrounding culture and society. Life writing generally refers to the various types of writing that take a life as the subject, including both self-referential and biographical texts.¹ It raises awareness and yields power that can challenge mainstream and hegemonic discourses, such as in the life narratives of women, indigenous groups, ethnic minorities, and migrants. In British North America, for example, the biographies of the New England governors, military officials, and church leaders featured in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) contrast with the lives of servants, slaves, and minorities who emerge from the selection of late eighteenth-century confession narratives. Similarly, the oral records of Native American lives found their way into the writings of colonial officials, ministers, and missionaries, leading to the combination of authoritative texts and marginalized voices that are included, for example, in both the Jesuit Relations and Christopher Sauer’s Description of Pennsylvania.

Exploring, conquering, and traveling the new continent are mirrored in a host of autographed and printed documents ranging from informal diaries to the highly stylized journals of Columbus. Rather than full-fledged autobiographies, the documents selected for this chapter represent only episodes or turning points in the lives of the writers. However, the construction of a subject position has to balance individual experience with the influence of conventions as well as the intentions of the writers, printers, editors, and other intermediaries involved in publishing life writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most prevalent autobiographical form of the seventeenth century—the spiritual autobiography—is a retrospective account that divides a life into three stages that sometimes repeat themselves. The subject first revels in worldly behavior, is then awakened through a religious experience, and subsequently decides to lead a holy life. Going back to Augustine’s Confessions (c.398) and flourishing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual autobiography fashions its subject’s life according to biblical patterns to legitimate the writing and its writer, much like the lives of saints related in Catholic hagiography (Bertsch 2004, 4). For their authors to be considered exemplary Christians and their writings truthful and instructive, these writings had to conform to biblical models and norms, as many of them were addressed to the members of the author’s family. Consequently, elements of the spiritual autobiography—such as a conventionalized plot and biblical formulations—have influenced Protestant narratives of all kinds; this can be seen in Mary Rowlandson’s Souvereignty of God (1682), in The Narrative of Marie le Roy and Barbara Leininger (1759; see Part II) where the experience of captivity is compared to a spiritual journey, and also in many of Daniel Defoe’s novels. At the same time, personal writings—from letters to diaries and reports—were a primary source for information about the New World that both captivated the European readership and kept communities connected and informed (Imbarrato 2012, 65). The Jesuit Relations, for example, comprise a number of letters, journals, and formal communications that were sent by Jesuit missionaries in modern-day Canada to their superiors in France. These reports not only document the progress of the missionary activities, but also describe Native life, folklore, language, and religion, and trace the health and personal thoughts of each writer. Between 1632 and 1673 the Relations were collected and published annually in Paris, but then forgotten about until the Canadian government reissued them in 1894 along with other archival material. The excerpt printed in this volume illustrates the tensions between French colonial rule, the Jesuits’ willingness to accommodate and live among the Natives, and the complex relationships among the various Native tribes both with the French and among themselves. When the French commander Samuel de Champlain refuses to liberate a Huron murderer, his explanation of French law is at first accepted but then challenged by the family of the accused, and the Jesuits act as mediators even though they are unable to pacify all the Natives. Colonial law emerges as a master discourse that delimits subjects, geographies, and knowledge (Boyer 2010, 26), as illustrated by the negotiations between missionaries Paul Le Jeune and Jean de Brébeuf with the Wyandot people (Hurons in French) in a report that is similar to that of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s historical account of the Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690). The Jesuit Relations thus register the complicated and dangerous position of the missionaries who found themselves caught between the intentions of French colonization and the policies of the different Native tribes. The Jesuits’ interest in understanding the Hurons’ customs and principles is obvious; as they record the Hurons’ argumentation, they endow the indigenous peoples with a distinct voice and offer multiple perspectives on the issues.

For Puritans like Edward Taylor, diaries relate individual experience to patterns of religious history as they search for divine communications in daily events. Confronted with the question of whether their souls were elected for eternal communion with God or doomed to damnation, Puritans carefully noted what happened to them and to their surroundings, searching for signs of God’s approval or discipline as demonstrated by the journals of John Winthrop, William Bradford, and John Hull. In contrast, the diaries of Samuel Sewall and of John Pike, a minister in Dover, New Hampshire, present events in an objective and succinct style, using a chronological sequence for short remarks on the weather and activities of each day with few theological references. Still, they are all involved in the Puritan practice of self-examination in which the status of the soul is assessed and its progress made visible. As the personal records in Part I deal with transatlantic travel and life on the new continent, they also participate in the network of texts and intentions surrounding the voyage to and exploration of America.

Edward Taylor was an English minister who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1668, where he studied at Harvard and worked as a pastor and physician in Westfield. Considered one of the most eminent colonial poets, he continued the tradition of the metaphysical poets in England of a generation earlier, most notably John Donne and George Herbert, whom Taylor greatly admired. Poetry, like diary-keeping, was regarded as a tool for private meditation and reflection; it was not considered an artistic activity deserving publication (Mather 1726, 42). Taylor’s diary is preserved in manuscript form, and its material condition becomes visible when individual words are missing or unclear due to a torn page or to Taylor’s use of shorthand (also a typical element of Puritan diaries), all of which are indicated in the text by the original editor.

While Taylor exemplified the Puritan production of devotional texts and scribal publication, Christopher Sauer was one of the most active publishers and printers in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. At his press in Germantown, he published almanacs, pamphlets, primers, and books (such as a German Bible translation), along with newspapers and periodicals. Born in 1693, he immigrated to Pennsylvania by way of Rotterdam in 1724, and worked as a pharmacist, a clockmaker, and a farmer before acquiring a printing press from German pietists in 1738. His German Bible was the first Bible printed in America, and his almanac, Der Hoch-deutsch americanische Calender (1739–77), and newspaper, Der Hoch-Deutsch Pennsylvanische Geschicht-Schreiber (1739–77), were widely read among Germans in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Both Taylor’s and Sauer’s reports of their journeys to and arrivals in America can be related to a number of similar texts and forms of travel writing, which were not only promotional tracts but also shipwreck and providence tales.

The arduous and dangerous sea journey becomes a defining experience for colonial settlers, explorers, and missionaries alike. With its exceptional length of at least six weeks, and dangers that ranged from unpredictable weather conditions to starvation, political conflicts, and pirates, the journey provided travelers with a great many new experiences. Yet in their reactions to hitherto unknown threats, theological and cultural differences emerge: French Jesuits resign themselves to God in the midst of a storm, while Puritan historiographers like Edward Johnson recount stories of safe passages that serve as signs of divine favor (see Suggestions for Further Reading). Similarly, Edward Taylor records instances of divine help: as the ship stalls, it pleased the Lord . . . to answer our prayers as to cleare the aire . . . and to give us a fresh, gentle gale that made us slide on at a great pace. In addition to his observation of nautical phenomena and the sea, Taylor’s entries correspond to those of other Puritan ministers who account for their spiritual lives and devotional activities: observing the Lord’s Day, praying, and studying the Bible. Taylor also records the strange foods and animals that he encounters, thereby anticipating the marvelous descriptions in other exploration accounts, such as John Josselyn’s Account of Two Voyages to New England (1675). In contrast, Sauer uses another common strategy to mediate the American experience, comparing the climate and plants that he finds in America to those in Europe.

Apart from the voyage, Sauer embraces the religious freedom and multiethnic conditions of Pennsylvania, but he also records the exploitation of Native Americans by colonial traders and settlers. With great respect for their morality and peacefulness, as well as a lively interest in their customs and religion, Sauer remarks that the Native Americans are putting most Europeans to shame by their behavior. He is also acutely aware of Pennsylvania’s unique position among the North American settlements of the time, in that it is based on religious freedom, a welcome departure from the kind of persecution that he and other radical Protestants suffered in their native Europe. While the Americas are divided into English, Spanish, French, and Dutch territories, Pennsylvania’s tolerant religious policies make it a multi-faith community of French, Welsh, Swedes, Dutch and Germans. Throughout Sauer’s account, Pennsylvania emerges as a land of opportunity. He outlines the need for skilled workers and describes how he was welcomed upon his arrival and embraced by the German-speaking community; strangers immediately offered money and a job. Both Taylor and Sauer wrote during a period in which letters and journals were circulated among friends and copied—a time when the modern distinction between public and private spheres did not exist (Hewitt 2004). Sauer, for example, communicates with his [d]ear Brothers and Friends as a group, [s]ince it is not possible to make a special report to each one [and] many may make shift with one account. These public letters served as a primary source of information about the New World and also as advertisements to promote emigration to America. Sauer’s letter, for example, contains both specific and general advice about coming to Pennsylvania—practical information about farming and living conditions, prices for commodities and food, and occupations that were particularly sought after.

Anthony Thacher’s letter to his brother Peter in England was copied by a number of New Englanders and has survived in the Mather papers. As the news of his shipwreck spread throughout the colony, it was recorded, for example, in John Winthrop’s diary of 1635, which also circulated as a manuscript until 1790 (Winthrop 1996, 153). When collecting wonders of Divine goodness roughly fifty years later, Increase Mather quotes the account of the storm and shipwreck from Thacher’s letter. Its various uses and transfer into print indicate that individual experience can always be related to the community as a whole. Thus, John Winthrop subsumes Thacher into an account written from the perspective of the colony at large. In Mather’s Illustrious Providences (1684), however, the letter becomes the source for a historical event that illustrates God’s unbroken care for the New England Protestants.

In contrast to the Atlantic voyage in The Remarkable Deliverance of Major Gibbon, first published by James Janeway in England (1674) and most likely based on John Winthrop’s journal (see Suggestions for Further Reading), Anthony Thacher’s shipwreck actually did take place during a journey along the New England coast. A comparison of publication histories reveals the different uses to which a narrative can be put, ranging from personal information to the establishment of a communal history and evidence of divine interventions. Protestant reports counter the danger and chaos of sea journeys with patterns of providential history or divine favor, while Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora records the experience of Alonso Ramírez as a series of misfortunes and hazards that kept him away from home for fifteen years, during which he traveled around the world as a sailor, slave, and captive. Ramírez’s eyewitness account embodies the Atlantic and Pacific struggle of Spanish America against English, Dutch, and French colonial powers. Often regarded as a foundational text of South American literature, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690) raises a number of issues related to life writing in the seventeenth century and the construction of a subject in the position of both teller and writer. While English providential collections, such as Increase Mather’s Illustrious Providences, are based primarily on written sources, Alonso Ramírez introduces himself as the subject of his account, even though it is transcribed by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a mathematician and astronomer as well as a member of the Creole elite of Mexico City. Sigüenza’s historical account consists of a complex network of three entities: Ramírez’s experience, Sigüenza’s penmanship, and the censorship of the King’s Royal Convent of Jesus and Mary in Mexico City (Lázaro 2011, 103–4). Misfortunes marks a transition from historiography to the articulation of a specific voice of a Creole intellectual culture that is strategically negotiating his position towards the European within the framework of what is for the first time a view of the World that, if very problematic, is realistic, organized, and comprehensive (Buscaglia-Salgado 2005, n.p.; cf. Boyer 2010, 26–28). Distinct from Spanish genres like the picaresque, in whose tradition many critics have tried to place the text, Misfortunes unfolds a unique cultural, legal, and maritime history about colonial Spanish America.

Similar to the selections in Part III, The Circum-Atlantic World, the narrative situates Ramírez’s journey in an economy based on trade and slavery and the colonial contest for power and territory among European nations. Like a modern autobiography, it starts with the situation of the Ramírez family in Puerto Rico, which has been reduced to poverty level because the country’s main exports—gold and cacao—have dwindled over the years. On his journey Ramírez travels the Spanish and Portuguese empires and is also held captive for two years by British pirates in the Philippines. Against this background of shifting roles and ambiguous identities, Misfortunes evolves as an amalgamation of voices and intentions that mirrors the complexity of colonial communication networks and economic relationships.

Similarly, the confessions of convicted money forger John Syllavan (alias Owen Syllavan) and rapist Thomas Powers provide evidence of the hardships experienced by marginal groups in the colonial economy—many of which are still present in today’s society—and of the desire to keep the social order intact. The Irishman John Syllavan arrived in Boston as an indentured servant, as did many others who were too poor to fund the journey or were convicts seeking their freedom. Syllavan worked for seven years clearing land for a farmer in upper Massachusetts and as a soldier in the British army. After his term of indenture was complete, he stayed on with the army. As chief armorer, he developed skills at engraving and became a successful money forger, eventually heading a club of associates that operated throughout New England. Though he evaded or escaped imprisonment multiple times, he was finally captured and executed in 1756. Thomas Powers, an African American born into servitude in Connecticut, was executed in 1792 for raping a woman in New Hampshire. Before their executions, both Syllavan and Powers wrote their confessions, which were then published as small octavos of twelve pages; Syllavan’s account was reprinted in 1802, but without the woodcut of an execution that was inserted on the second page of the 1756 version. The frontispiece of Powers’s confession highlights both his ethnicity and his crime, featuring a woodcut image of a skull and bones and establishing a visual connection through the capitalization of both Negro and