Materials . . .

Acoma Pueblo, site in Gaspar Pérez de Villagrà's 1610 epic poem of Spanish conquest

Gaspar Pérez de Villagrà describes the massacre of the Acoma in his 1610 epic poem, "The History of New Mexico."

Roanoke Island, Arthur Barlowe, and Thomas Harriot

Here is a Google Earth placemark for the reconstructed fort at the Fort Raleigh National Historical Site. You can read a lot more about the history of this place and this national park at their website.

Arthur Barlowe’s account describes the landing. As they approach the island, they like what they smell. And they like what they see of the land two days later.

The second of July, we found shole water, wher we smelt so sweet, and so strong a smel, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured, that the land could not be farre distant: and keeping good watch, and bearing but slacke saile, the fourth of the same moneth we arrived upon the coast, which we supposed to be a continent and firme lande, and we sayled along the same a hundred and twentie English miles before we could finde any entrance, or river issuing into the Sea. (166)

French Protestant settlements in South Carolina and Florida

Here are two more Google Earth placemarks for locations important to the study of early American literature.

The Jean Ribault expedition landed, in 1562, on present-day Parris Island, South Carolina. They built a fort. Expedition sailors remained there, briefly, before building a small ship, abandoning the fort, and sailing back to France. René Goulaine de Laudonnière, a royal advisor and leader of the French Protestant Huguenots, served Jean Ribault as his second-in-command. Laudonnière describes this landing in his 1587 work, A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certain French Captains Unto Florida, which marvels over the material resources of the location:

Having cast Anker the Captayne with his Souldiers went on shore, and hee himselfe went first on land: where we found the place as pleasant as possible, for it was all covered over with mightie high Okes and infinite store of Cedars, and with Lentisques [gum trees] growing beneath them, smelling so sweetly that the very fragrant odour only made the place to seeme exceeding pleasant. (88)

Politics in American Literature: Readings in Irving

Seminar students getting an early start on the Fall semester will want the readings from the first of our seven books.

Rio de Janeiro, home of the Tupi people described by Jean de Léry in 1563

Jean de Léry, a Protestant from Catholic France, lived among the Tupi people for nearly a year in 1557. His first full report of this experience, written (he claims) in 1563, became what Mulford's headnote describes as "a model for the modern social science of ethnography" (74). Indeed, much of the early part of their excerpt concerns his scholarly rivalries. He places the Tupi people and their world, not surprisingly, in a biblical context, and he expends some energy ranting against secular European athiests (80). He describes and interprets Tupi rituals with religious terms. He sees devils, for example, entering the bodies of Tupi women during one all-woman ceremony (81). The "drinking bouts" of Tupi men appear as rituals of false prophets and false religion (81-82). Jean de Léry struggles to fit these Americans into his view of God's world, writing "this is a people accursed and abandoned by God, if there be any such under the heavens" (85). And perhaps most curiously, he documents Tupi claims to have received knowledge of Europeans from their grandfathers (84), suggesting earlier, undocumented contact between Europe and this part of South America. See Jean de Léry, "from History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America," trans. Janet Whatley, Early American Writings, ed. Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans (New York: Oxford UP, 2002) 75-86. Here is a Google Earth placemark indicating the rough location where Léry stayed. Download 1557JeandeLeryTupi.kmz (1.3K).