Such flights of fancy as the English indulged toward America in the early seventeenth century had, too, a distinctly gendered tone. America, specifically Virginia, named by Ralegh for the “Virgin Queen,” was frequently described not just as an Edenic garden or virgin land, but as a metaphorical female virgin. Ralegh himself famously described Guiana as “a country that hath yet her maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought.” This feminization of the landscape was neither specific to him nor to the south of the Americas, but was an intrinsic element in Virginia's appeal in early descriptive and, later, directly promotional literature. In part, this grew out of the rhetoric of colonization that looked to the New World not only as a land to be conquered by male explorers and adventurers, but as one potentially pregnant with material possibilities and capable of producing, in a sense, an heir to English ambitions in the form of a transplanted England. This was what Hakluyt was driving at when he described Virginia as Ralegh's “bride” and advised him that she would “shortly bring forth new and most abundant offspring, such as will delight you and yours, and cover with disgrace and shame those who have so often dared rashly and impudently to charge her with barreness.”10 It may hardly be surprising, in the context of Tudor England, that a fixation on fecundity might influence the language used to describe the New World, but there was more to it than that.
From the period of the earliest explorations of the Americas, but especially by the turn of the seventeenth century when England was looking to establish itself in America, there is no doubt that the possibilities offered by colonization captured not just the English but the European imagination. Through publications, prints, and performance, that imagination was offered several contradictory images of the New World and its inhabitants, themselves derived from the plethora of ideas and arguments about nature, nurture, social relations, and religion that informed the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century world. From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “‘On Cannibals” (1580), through Shakespeare’s treatment of a “‘brave new world/That has such people in’t” in The Tempest (c. 1611), to Milton’s later (1667) reference to Columbus’s “discovery” of “the American, so girt/With feathered cincture, naked and wild,/Among the trees on isles and woody shores” in Paradise Lost, many of the issues attendant upon New World settlement were circulated and explored. As the English measured and mapped the American landscape, however, their reasons for doing so changed. For the promoters of the Virginia colony, it became crucial not to draw too clear a distinction between the brave new world of America and England. Whereas its unfamiliarity rendered it exotic and potentially attractive on such grounds, the Virginia Company recognized that would-be settlers, as opposed to investors, might be more interested in how easily the unfamiliar could be transformed into the familiar. Promotional literature, therefore, hinted that, with just a little effort, this new world would become an improved extension of the old and, with perhaps rather more effort, its “naked and wild” inhabitants could become English.
The earliest reports to emerge from the New World had consistently presented it as both foreign and potentially domestic, for obvious reasons. Just as one cannot describe a color one has never seen, neither could America be described without reference to Europe, or specifically to England. Although nature was more abundant there, it was nevertheless a nature the English would recognize. Hariot’s Report, as well as detailing many unfamiliar herbs and plants, assured readers that Virginia also boasted “Leekes differing little from ours in England.” Similarly, de Bry’s rendering of White’s images of the Algonquian peoples (Figure 1.5) juxtaposed them with images of Picts (Figure 1.6) so as “to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia” (emphasis in the original). The American present, in other words, was essentially the British past. Its inhabitants were exotic, certainly, but neither unusually or irredeemably so.
Following in Hariot's footsteps, although now with settlement as the prime motivation, it was not for nothing that Robert Johnson entitled his work Nova Britannia, and highlighted a landscape that differed from that of England only in degree, not in essence. Virginia, as he described it, was England writ large, with its “goodly oaks and elms, beech and birch, spruce, walnut, cedar and fir trees, in great abundance.”11 This
was an England that had existed before deforestation and enclosures, in effect, an England of the imagination, transported in imagination across the Atlantic.
When the New World shifted from a source of potential profit to a place of possible settlement, everything changed. From simply observing the land and its peoples, the English moved to insert themselves into that environment, to align their ambitions, their aspirations, and their imaginations with the reality of America. And, as Roanoke and early Jamestown proved, that was no straightforward matter. Over the course of the decade following the “Starving Time,” the Virginia Company reinforced and, to a degree, restructured the Jamestown colony. It introduced the “headright” system, whereby settlers were given land and a financial stake in the venture in a bid to stabilize the settlement. Those who had arrived prior to 1616 received one hundred acres, those after fifty, and additional acreage was accorded to those who held shares. The draconian Lawes, more martial than either moral or in any obvious sense divine, were, after 1618, replaced by a system more closely approximating that of English common law. Under the direction of Sir Edwin Sandys, appointed treasurer of the company in i6i9, new settlers poured into Virginia, many of them drawn from the poor houses of English parishes. Finally, it seemed, at least one part of the promise of the New World was about to be fulfilled. It would be a safety valve for the increasing social pressures of the Old. Yet in the process, it introduced a whole range of new social pressures in the New.
The granting of land to settlers seemed straightforward enough, but it was far from that. The land itself was already occupied, and the new arrivals were not yet completely convinced of their legal right to acquire it. In the same year as Johnson’s Nova Britannia appeared (1609), Robert Gray had, in another promotional tract, A Good Speed to Virginia, queried by “what right or warrant we can enter into the land of these Savages, take away their rightfull inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their places, being unwronged or unprovoked by them.” Johnson did not wholly avoid the question of how the English might “warrant a supplant-ation of those Indians, or an invasion into their right and possessions,” either, and countered the accusation that “private ends” might be drawing settlers to America by stressing the need “to advance the kingdom of God, by reducing savage people from their blind superstition to the light of Religion.”12 Conversion as justification for colonization was certainly a persistent theme in English accounts of the New World from Hakluyt onward, conversion not just to Christianity, but to its Protestant variant. In i583, Sir George Peckham, another Elizabethan adventurer and a confederate of Grenville and Gilbert, published A True Reporte of the Late Discoveries of Newfound Land, in which he managed to assert English claims to the New World in the face of both French and Spanish competition by suggesting that it was to England, specifically, that the New World looked for deliverance, “praying our ayde and helpe.” Some three decades later, and much further south, on the Chesapeake, it remained the case that any aid on offer was not from incomer to indigene, which perhaps made the deterioration in relations between the two the more inevitable.