CENTURY READINGS FOR A COURSE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE EARLY REPORTS AND JOURNALS American literature, if we are to count as American literature all the writings in English made in the colonies during the period of the settlement, began with material produced with no literary intent-business reports to the company at home, diary entries, and jottings, some of them as carefully made as histories. They were the work of earnest men who were living under intense strain, men who were saturated with the English Bible which they read in its strong early idioms, men who wasted no words and were tremendously impressed with the significance of their pioneer work in the new world. It is customary to place Captain John Smith at the head of the list of American authors when the time element alone is considered. American literature with him as its initial writer certainly had a picturesque beginning, for of all the characters in an age uniquely picturesque he was the most picturesque. His early adventures read like chapters from oriental romance. Returning from his Eastern campaigns he was just in time to join the Jamestown expedition, an adventure as romantic in the dreams of the England of 1606 as the fabulous exploit of Jason. By his energy and his unquestioned executive ability he became at length the leader of the expedition and doubtless more than once saved the colony from destruction. His report. A true Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony, etc., first printed in London in 1608, was the first literary product of note produced on American soil. It was followed a few months later by his second report A Map of Virginia, etc., published in 1612. His other works concerning America were written in England during the period between 1615 and 1631 when he had settled down in quietness to spend his declining years. The recorder of the earliest Puritan period was William Bradford, a man vastly different from the fiery Virginia Captain. It was his fortune to see the whole of the Pilgrim adventure. He went with the exiles to Holland in 1608, he was active in the plans for the expedition to America, he sailed in the Mayflower, and shortly after the landing at Plymouth was made governor of the colony. From the first he seems to have realized the far-reaching significance of the Puritan foundations in America, and of his own responsibility as the leader of the movement, to record every detail of the period of beginnings that later generations might know of a surety of "the rock whence they were hewn." His journal, begun during the voyage of the Mayflower with a history of the early Puritan movement and continued as a complete record of all important happenings in the colony up to 1646, is of priceless value. For many years the work was known only by tradition. It had not been published and the manuscript, which had been a part of the Prince Library stored in the old South Church in Boston, disappeared during the British occupation of the city. In 1855, however, it was found in London and in 1897 was returned to Massachusetts with great ceremony and international rejoicing. The selections here used are after the text of the 1899 edition pub'ished by the State of Massachusetts. A careful journal of the first year of the Plymouth Colony, the joint work of Bradford and Edward Winslow, was published anonymously in 1622, and from the signature to the prefatory note, "G. Mourt,' became generally known as "Mourt's Relation." It supplements Bradford's journal with many important details. What Bradford did for the Plymouth Colony John Winthrop did for the colony of MasBachusetts Bay. His journal, which covers the first nineteen years of the settlements that centered about Boston, while undoubtedly inferior in many respects to Bradford's work is more human, more readable, far more important because of the greater importance of the colonies whose beginnings it records. In Bradford we see the brighter side of the Puritan character: in Winthrop very often its darker side. He delighted in recording portents, remarkable "providences," monstrosities which showed God's displeasure with anti-Puritan views, and notorious cases of witchcraft which to him were exceedingly real things. The journal was published entire by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1825-26 with the title The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, by John Winthrop, Esq., First Governour of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. The text in the following selections follows Hosmer's edition of 1908, which like earlier reprints is modernized in its spelling. |