[Summertime is
perfect for travel, whether around
these United States or abroad. So this week
I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special
Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]
On what
separates colonial propaganda from travel writing, and what links the two
genres.
William
Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation
(unpublished in Bradford’s lifetime but completed sometime around 1651) is
often considered the definitive account of the Pilgrims’ first few decades in
New England, while for those looking to delve deeper Thomas
Morton’s New English Canaan
(1637) represents a prominent alternative vision of the New England Puritan
experience and community. But the first two published texts that documented the
unfolding histories of the Plymouth Pilgrim community were written by a less
well-known Mayflower passenger and
Plymouth luminary: Edward
Winslow, himself a multi-term governor of the plantation and the author of Mourt’s Relation (1622; co-written
with Bradford, but Winslow was apparently the principal author) and Good Newes from New England (1624;
entirely Winslow’s work). While Mourt’s
Relation is largely a historical chronicle, documenting the first year or
so of the Plymouth community (from the Mayflower’s
December 1620 landing off Cape Cod up through the “First
Thanksgiving” harvest festival of November 1621), Good Newes reads more like travel writing, describing the settings
and worlds of New England at least as much as it does the experiences and lives
of the Pilgrims.
It’s tricky to
call a work travel writing when it serves so blatantly as propaganda on behalf
of colonization efforts, though. Much of the tradition of English-language
travel writing (and perhaps others, but it’s English with which I’m most familiar)
was of course connected to colonies, as illustrated by the extensive travel
literature (some of it contemporaneous to Winslow’s book) of Englishmen and
women traveling to India. But Winslow isn’t just portraying the experience of
moving to or living in this colonial setting—he is, as the title’s Good Newes suggests, overtly trying to
sell that setting for continued and amplified colonization. As a result, he’s
not quite writing about an unfamiliar world for an outsider audience (as is often
the case with travel literature), but working to convince his audiences that
they should become insiders to this newly colonized New England world. That
central goal links Winslow’s text to one of first and most famous European
descriptions of the New World, Christopher Columbus’ in his 1493
letter to Luis de Santangel. While Winslow isn’t quite as hyperbolic (nor
quite as overtly exclusionary) as Columbus, he is similarly less interested in
detailed descriptions and more focused on making New England as desirable as
possible for his English readers.
Yet works can be
multiple things at once, and I would argue that there are still elements to
Winslow’s influential book that can and should be defined as travel writing.
The presence of that genre alongside propaganda is illustrated concisely by the
second and third sub-topics listed in Winslow’s typically extended full title: “Together
with a Relation of such religious and civil Laws and Customs, as are in practice
amongst the Indians, adjoining to
them at this day. As also what Commodities are there to be raised for the
maintenance of that and other Plantations in the said Country.” Columbus
focused entirely on such commodities, so much so that he treated the indigenous
peoples as literally inconsequential to his letter and colonizing perspective.
Winslow certainly does not want to present the Native Americans as an impediment
to further English colonization, but at the same time he does recognize their
status as distinct communities, and honors this part of the book’s title by
paying extended attention to their communal identities in his course of his
work. That attention makes Winslow’s book an important early Anglo American text,
and one that offers the kinds of glimpses into a specific local world—shaped by
the author’s cultural perspective to be sure—that are one of the hallmarks of
travel writing.
Next travel
writing tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?
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