George Parker Winship

“ They all shared in developing the British Empire and English literature. Martin Frobisher and North-West-Foxe beyond the polar circle, Thomas Harlot inside the Carolina sandspits, and Sir Richard Hawkins in the Gulf of Mexico are by this chance of geography given a place at the beginning of the annals of American literature, instead of sharing the scant notice allotted to their equally deserving contemporaries whom fate led elsewhere. ”

“ It is an accident of geography which gives American readers a valid claim upon Humphrey Gilbert and his precursors and successors who told their straightforward tales for Hakluyt or for the booksellers who issued the scores of thin pamphlets in which Londoners first read about the trans-Atlantic voyage. ”

“ The seventeenth-century promoters of speculation carried on the practice of distributing tracts telling about the property they wished others to buy. The little pamphlets issued by the Virginia Company, by the Massachusetts Agents, by William Penn in German, Dutch, and French as well as in English, by the Scots Proprietors of the Jerseys, and by the Lords of Carolina, are today worth more money than many of the acres that they describe. Most of these early tracts were written by men who had travelled through the regions of which they wrote. ”

“ Many of Byrd's contemporaries in the New World could not do either of these things, and it has come to be the fashion among their descendants to excuse those eminently respectable and often brave and prosperous men and women, because of a belief that their short-comings were in accord with the practice, or lack thereof, of their own day. Byrd's writings, and even more clearly those of the Maryland physician Alexander Hamilton, furnish the best of evidence that illiteracy was ignorance due to a lack of education as truly in 1700 as it is two centuries later. ”

“ Byrd has been made known for his “happy proficiency in polite and varied learning.” He was not peculiar, however, among the gentlemen of his generation for a style which shows an acquaintance with what is recognized as literature. Most of the people who possessed inherited wealth and established position were able to spell correctly, and they obeyed the laws of English grammar. ”

“ Rarely is there any substantial reason for doubting the honesty of what was reported as the result of actual observation. “What I write, is what I have proved,” remarks one of the frankest of these promoters of a New World settlement in which he hoped to make his fortune, Edward Bland, Merchant. ”

“ The corner of the New-found-land which retained this distinctive name exerted an especial attraction in the earlier days upon the adventurers who felt a longing to express themselves in literary form. Humphrey Gilbert was accompanied thither by the learned Stephen Parmenius of Buda, whose Latin verses "Ad Thamesin" are preserved on Hakluyt's pages. One of the first Englishmen to establish an American residence was William Vaughn, a Welshman and the composer of an amazing volume called The Golden Fleece ... ”

“ Another traveller who did his best to scour the colonists of heretical opinions, his own opinions being as pronounced when he was directed by the Quaker spirit as when he followed the Anglican order, was George Keith. He knew the controversially-minded Americans better than anyone else at the end of the seventeenth century. ”

“ Then travelling became a fad, a profession, a duty, and led to the production of ah extensive literature which may more properly be discussed with the work of men who were no longer colonials but citizens of the new republic. ”

“ She was the wife of the minister at Lancaster, Massachusetts, where the natives seized her when they burned the town during King Philip's War. The record of her subsequent “Removes” has seldom been equalled as a direct appeal for human sympathy. ”

“ Two of these were A Monumental Memorial of A Late Voyage from Boston in New-England To London, Anno 1683. In a Poem. By Richard Steere, and a broadside, A Journal of the Taking of Cape-Breton, Put into Metre By L. G., One of the Soldiers of the Expedition, in 1745.
The eighteenth century brought economic independence and settled social conditions to the older English colonies. With these went the leisure and comfort which prepare a community for the conscious enjoyment of literature. ”

“ The natives of the woods of Maine and those of the everglades of Florida were equally skilful in devising methods of terrifying strangers who were thrown by chance or indiscretion amongst them. The account of God's Protecting Providence In the Remarkable Deliverance of Robert Barrow, Faithfully Related by Jonathan Dickenson (1699) , is in many respects the best of all the captivity tracts. Driven ashore by a storm on the Gulf coast of Florida, late in September, 1696, the survivors, among them Dickenson's wife with their baby at her breast, six weeks later reached St. ”