Drowned pens and shaking hands: Sea providence narratives in seventeenth-century New England

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 743-776

  Sievers, Julie ^a  

^a DENISON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 66949152234     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. Anthony Thacher to Peter Thacher, 1635, in Increase Mather, ed., An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences Wherein an Account is given of many Remarkable and very Memorable Events, which have hapned this last Age; Especially in New-England (Boston, 1684), 13-14.
2. Anthony Thacher to Peter Thacher, in Mather, Essay for Recording of Illustrious Providences, 13-14, 10-11, 12-13.
3. Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 3.
4. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle navigationi et viaggi nel qval si contiene la descrittione dell'Africa, et del paese del Prete Ianni, con nari viaggi, dal mar Rosso a Calicut, e insin all'isole Molucche, doue nascono le spetierie, et la navigatione attorno il mondo ... (Venice, Italy, 1550).
5. The first volume of Ramusio's work, featuring Africa, appeared in 1550. A second volume, on Asia, appeared in 1559. The third, featuring America, appeared in 1556. Other editions appeared in 1554 (2d ed. of the first volume), 1563 (3d ed. of the first volume), 1565 (2d ed. of the third volume), 1574 (2d ed. of the second volume), 1583 (3d ed. of the second volume), and 1588 (4th ed. of the first volume). In 1606 and 1613, the volumes were printed together. Richard Eden, trans., The decades of the newe worlde or west India, conteynyng the nauigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes, with the particular description of the moste ryche and large landes and Ilandes lately founde in the west Ocean perteynyng to the inheritaunce of the hinges of Spayne ... (London, 1555);
6. Richard Willes, The History of Trauayle in the West and East Indies, and other countreys lying eyther way, towardes the fruitfull and ryche Moluccaes. As Moscouia, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Ægypte, Ethiopia, Guinea, China in Cathayo, and Giapan: Wvith a discourse of the Northwest passage ... (London, 1577).
7. Willes repr. Eden's collection and added new translations of travels to Japan, India, China, Persia, and the Arctic. Richard Hakluyt, The principall nauigations, voiages and discoueries of the English nation, made by Sea or ouer Land, to the most remote and farthest distant Quarters of the earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500. yeeres: Deuided into three seuerall parts, according to the positions of the Regions wherunto they were directed ... (London, 1589).
8. A second, rev. ed. appeared in 1598-1600. John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles ... (London, 1624);
9. Samuel Purchas, Haklvytvs Posthumus; Or, Pvrchas His Pilgrimes. Contayning a History of the World, in Sea voyages, and lande-trauells, by Englishmen and others ... In fower Parts, Each containing flue Bookes ... (London, 1625), pt. 4: 1972 (quotation);
10. Melchisedec Thevenot, Relations de divers voyages curieux, qui n'ont point esté publiées, et qu'on a traduit ou tiré des originaux des voyageurs françois, espagnols, allemands, portugais, anglois, hollandois, persans, arabes et autres orientaux, données au public par les soins de feu, 2 vols. (Paris, France, 1696).
11. The parts were first issued as follows: pt. 1, 1663; pt. 2, 1664; pt. 3, 1666; pt. 4, 1672; pt. 5, 1696. "Remainder" sheets of parts already issued were reissued with new title pages in 1664, 1666, 1672, 1683, and 1696. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some now first Printed from Original Manuscripts ..., 6 vols. (1704; repr., London, 1732).
12. On captivity narratives and shipwreck, see Kay Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories (Cambridge, 1995);
13. Margarette Lincoln, "Shipwreck Narratives of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century: Indicators of Culture and Identity," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1997): 155-72;
14. Kun Jong Lee, "Mapping Out the Terrain of Colonial American Literature: The Shipwreck Narrative and the Indian War Narrative," Journal of English Language and Literature 44, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 849-68;
15. Ian J. McNiven, Lynette Russell, and Schaffer, eds., Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser's Shipwreck (London, 1998);
16. James D. Hartman, Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (Baltimore, 1999);
17. Robin Miskolcze, "Transatlantic Touchstone: The Shipwrecked Woman in British and Early American Literature," Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 22, no. 3 (December 1999): 41-56;
18. Miskolcze, "Don't Rock the Boat: Women and Shipwreck Narratives in Early U.S. Culture" (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2000);
19. Schaffer and D'Arcy Randall, "Transglobal Translations: The Eliza Fraser and Rachel Plummer Captivity Narratives," in Captive and Free: Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration, ed. Graeme Harper (London, 2001).
20. For trauma studies of shipwreck narratives, see Julia Frances Burch, "Sink or Swim: Shipwreck Narratives, Survival Tales, and Postcultural Subjectivity" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994);
21. Kathleen Donegan, "'As Dying, Yet Behold We Live': Catastrophe and Interiority in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation," Early American Literature 37, no. 1 (2002): 9-37. See also Donegan's in-progress dissertation, which devotes a chap. to Anthony Thacher's shipwreck narrative.
22. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York, 1988).
23. See esp. Hester Blum's work on nineteenth-century sailor-authored publications, in which she offers a corrective to the previously definitive study by Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1961)
24. (Blum, "The View from the Mast-Head: Antebellum American Sea Narratives and the Maritime Imagination" [Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002]).
25. See also Blum, "Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 133-58.
26. Such work on ordinary seamen's experiences has benefited greatly from historical work by Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, rev. ed. (Cambridge, 1989);
27. Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution, Early American Studies (Philadelphia, 2004).
28. See also Donald P. Wharton, "Providence and the Colonial American Sea-Deliverance Tradition," Essex Institute Historical Collections 119, no. 1 (January 1983): 42-48;
29. Haskell Springer, ed., America and the Sea: A Literary History (Athens, Ga., 1995).
30. A telling example of such neglect of the earlier period is the chronology for Robert Foulke's genre study, which lists only one entry for the entire seventeenth century: William Dampier's 1697 A New Voyage Round the World (Foulke, The Sea Voyage Narrative, Studies in Literary Themes and Genres [New York, 1997], xxi-xxii).
31. A more useful survey of early modern sea travel writing, but one that still omits colonial texts, is William H. Sherman, "Stirrings and Searchings (1500-1720)," in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 17-36.
32. Other works that document early modern sea writing are Keith Huntress, ed., Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters, 1586-1860 (Ames, Iowa, 1974);
33. Huntress, A Checklist of Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea to 1860, with Summaries, Notes, and Comments (Ames, Iowa, 1979);
34. Donald P. Wharton, ed., In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives, 1610-1766 (Westpott, Conn., 1979);
35. Rainer K. Baehre, ed., Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters off Newfoundland, 1583-1893 (Montreal, Quebec, 1999).
36. The Library of America has issued an anthology of narratives (including William Strachey's) from the early seventeenth century through the late twentieth. See Peter Neill, ed., American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology (New York, 2000).
37. Canadian Rainer K. Baehre, for example, has studied and anthologized early sea narratives pertaining to Newfoundland, whereas others have investigated Spanish-American, Indo-Caribbean, or South African writings. See Baehre's introduction to Outrageous Seas. See also Hortensia Calvo-Stevenson, "Sinking Being: Shipwrecks and Colonial Spanish-American Writing" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990);
38. Ian E. Glenn, "The Wreck of the Grosvenor and the Making of South African Literature," English in Africa 22, no. 2 (October 1995): 1-18;
39. Todd Oakley Lutes, "Shipwreck and Deliverance: Modernity and Political Culture in Latin American Literature" (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1995);
40. Jeremy Poynting, "From Shipwreck to Odyssey: One Hundred Years of Indo-Caribbean Writing," Wasafiri, no. 21 (1995): 56-57;
41. Carmen Moreno-Nuño, "Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios in Light of Deleuze and Guattari's Semiotics and Theory of Language," RLA: Romance Languages Annual 8 (1996): 589-95.
42. Of the scholarship on metropolitan British culture, the most notable for sea providence literature is James Peter Conlan, "Marvelous Passages: English Nautical Piety in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1999).
43. See also Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 1995).
44. A powerful example of comparative work on the literatures of Spanish and English America that also investigates both metropolitan and colonial texts is Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2003).
45. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 222.
46. Because I refer to the Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle edition, I use their title for the work: the Journal. Winthrop, however, referred to it as a public "History of N: England." Regarding the different titles, ibid., xi-xvi. Bks. 1 and 2 of Winthtop's Journal were first published in 1790. The third bk. was discovered in 1816. In 1824 James Savage reedited the entire set and published it in two volumes.
47. For contemporary published accounts of the wreck and its effect, see the Council of Virginia's A Trve and Sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia, of the degrees which it hath receiued; and meanes by which it hath beene aduanced: and the resolution and conclusion of his Maiestie's Councel of that Colony, for the constant and patient prosecution thereof, vntill by the mercies of God it shall retribute a fruitful haruest to the kingdome of heauen, and this Common-Wealth ... (London, 1610);
48. Sil[vester] [J]ourdain, A Discovery of the Barmvdas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels: By Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Sommers, and Captayne Newport, with diners others ... (London, 1610);
49. Richard Rich, Newes from Virginia. The lost Flocke Triumphant. With the happy Arriuall of that famous and worthy Knight Sr. Thomas Gates; and the well reputed and valiant Captaine Mr. Christopher Newporte, and others, into England ... (London, 1610);
50. W[illiam] Crashawe, "The Epistle Dedicatorie," in Alexander Whitaker, Good news from Virginia. Sent to the Covnsell and Company of Virginia, resident in England ... (London, 1613);
51. Jourdain, A plaine description of the Barm[v]das, now called Sommer Hands ... (London, 1613).
52. Fifteen years later William Strachey's authoritative manuscript was finally imprinted as "A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas: his comming to Virginia, and the estate of that Colonie then, and after, under the government of the Lord La Warre, July 15 1610 ...," in Purchas, Haklvytvs Posthumus, pt. 4: 1734-58.
53. William Strachey's version of events, written in 1610, did not see print right away. He wrote it first and foremost for a private audience: the Council of Virginia. In 1610 his narrative was carried to England by Gates, who left Virginia after the new governor, Thomas West, Baron De La Watr, arrived. Gates delivered it to the council, and from there the manuscript was passed around in prominent circles. At some point during that time, Shakespeare supposedly saw it. Eventually, it found its way to Samuel Purchas, who featured it in his 1625 edition of Haklvytvs Posthumus. See Strachey, "True reportory," in Purchas, Haklvytvs Posthumus, pt. 4: 1734-35.
54. Regarding the Council of Virginia, Richard L. Morton notes that the 1606 charter for the Virginia Companies of London and Plymouth "placed the government of each colony in the hands of a resident council of thirteen subject to instructions from a joint royal council of thirteen in England" (Morton, Colonial Virginia [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960], 2: 5).
55. Within the first few months of arrival, then-president of the colony Edward Maria Wingfield wrote that of the 105 men and boys that had arrived in the spring, 40 had died from sickness. By August, "Sicknes had not now left us [six] able men in our towne." See Edward Maria Wingfield, "A Discourse of Virginia," 1608, in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (Boston, 1860), 4: 80.
56. My discussion of nautical piety as a component of England's imperialist promotional rhetoric draws significantly from the dissertation and published articles of J. P. Conlan. See Conlan, "Marvelous Passages," esp. 341-81.
57. See also his published articles on nautical piety and empire: Conlan, "Paradise Lost: Milton's Anti-Imperial Epic," Pacific Coast Philology 33, no. 1 (1998): 31-43;
58. Conlan, "The Tempest and the King's Better Knowledge," Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James, and Charles 6 (1999): 161-88;
59. Conlan, "Shakespeare's Edward III: A Consolation for English Recusants," Comparative Drama 35, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 177-207.
60. Council of Virginia, Trve and Sincere declaration, 2-3, 15 (quotations).
61. Jourdain, Discovery of the Barmvdas, 8, 20.
62. See also Cecelia Tichi's analysis of sea rhetoric, particularly Red Sea rhetoric, throughout seventeenth-century New Englanders' discourse: Tichi, "Spiritual Biography and the 'Lords Remembrancers,'" William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28, no. 1 (January 1971): 64-85.
63. Strachey, "True reportory," in Purchas, Haklvytvs Posthumus, pt. 4: 1745, 1756.
64. The report, like Strachey's narrative, sought to shore up support for the plantation by blaming its problems not on its leaders or the dangerous American environment but on the unruliness of the settlers themselves. See Councell of Virginia, A Trve Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia With a confutation of such scandalous reports as haue tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise ... (London, 1610).
65. Ralph Bauer persuasively interprets Strachey's criticisms as evidence for a rhetoric of metropolitan control over colonial peripheries (Bauer, Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures, 105-12). I would add only that Strachey's choice of the shipwreck as the rhetorical figure to evoke this logic makes it all the more poignant when colonial authors began using it to argue for the independence of colonial governments and, ultimately, their superiority.
66. Though Edward Gibbons was no Governor Gates, he was more than a mere sailor. He served as "a selectman for Boston, a deputy to the Massachusetts General Court, and commander in chief of the Plymouth troops fighting the Narragansetts in 1645" (April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century [Philadelphia, 2004], 57).
67. His public importance might have seemed even greater due to the erroneous report, eventually published by the learned colonial traveler John Josselyn, that he had undertaken not one but two voyages (in 1614 and 1616) in search of the Northwest Passage. See John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New-England (London, 1674);
68. Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New-England (Hanover, N.H., 1988), 170-71.
69. In many narratives the protagonist, like Gibbons, is caught between a disaster (starvation at sea, for example) and a feared foreign power (the Spanish). A third leg in this triangle of fear is occupied by the "barbarous" and "cannaball" natives on shore. Equating the Spanish and Indians as threats in these accounts positions the English as striving against the devil in the guise of cannibals, on the one hand, and against the Antichrist in the form of (Catholic) Spaniards, on the other. See, for example, Jonathan Dick[i]nson's combination shipwreck and captivity narrative, Gods Protecting Providence Man's Surest Help and Defence In the times Of the greatest difficulty and most Imminent danger; Evidenced in the Remarkable Deliverance Of divers Persons, From the devouring Waves of the Sea, amongst which they Suffered Shipwrack. And also From the more cruelly devouring jawes of the inhumane Canibals of Florida ... (Philadelphia, 1699), 6, 25.
70. For the rhetoric of miraculous deliverance in Martin Frobisher's voyage, see esp. Dion[y]se Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage into the West and Northwest regions, and c 1577 worthily atchieued by Captaine Frobisher of the sayde voyage the first finder and Generall ... (London, 1577);
71. Thomas Ellis, A true report of the third and last voyage into Metaincognita: atchieued by the worthie Capteine, M. Martine Frobisher, Esquire (London, 1578).
72. Over the Portal of the Lizard in the Cathedral of Seville hung a crocodile, given to King Alfonso X in 1260 by the Sultan of Egypt, and another hung in the sixteenth-century chapel of Oiron. Fifteenth-century natural philosopher Marsilio Ficino included crocodiles with a handful of other exotic objects such as gold and carved gems that possessed "occult and wonderful powers" derived from their sympathy with the sun. Collected in cabinets of curiosities (precursors to the modern-day museum) and in the private hordes of kings, crocodilians were wonders of nature, mysteries, and, as such, objective symbols of power. On crocodiles as natural wonders, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998), 68-88, 144-45 (quotation, 145);
73. Campbell, Witness and the Other World, 84.
74. See also the woodcut of Italian naturalist Ferrante Imperato's cabinet of wonders, featuring a prominent crocodile, in his 1599 work Dell'historia naturale (Naples, Italy, 1599)
75. and repr. in New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700, ed. Rachel Doggett with Monique Hulvey and Julie Ainsworth (Washington, D.C., 1992), 93.
76. Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal, 228.
77. James Janeway, Mr. James Janeway's Legacy to his Friends, Containing Twenty Seven Famous Instances of Gods Providences in and about Sea Dangers and Deliverances, with the Names of Several that were Eye-witnesses to many of them. Whereunto is Added a Sermon on the same Subject (London, 1674), 44, 47. First printed for Dorman Newman in 1674, Janeway's 134-page anthology was printed again in 1675, an almost exact repr. In 1683 Newman printed it again, this time with a page crediting the sermon to "John Ryther, Minister of the Gospel" (see the unnumbered page between 87 and 89). In 1698 a slightly modified version of this text, without the Ryther credit, was printed as A Token for Mariners, containing Many Famous and Wonderful Instances of God's Providence in Sea Dangers and Deliverances ..., by Hugh Newman of London. This text added several new narratives, combined others, and appended a series of prayers to be recited at sea. It was republished at least twice and perhaps again later. Three issues of Essay for Recording of Illustrious Providences appeared in 1684, two in Boston and one in London. Both reissues merely used the original 1684 text with a repr. title page. The 1684 Boston issues were printed by Samuel Green for Joseph Browning. The London 1684 issue was sold by George Calvert. In 1687 an additional London issue was sold by Thomas Parkhurst.
78. Keith Huntress argues that Janeway's anthology was unique not only because it was the first providence anthology exclusively devoted to shipwrecks and disasters at sea but also because many of its narratives were drawn from Janeway's independent research rather than from previously published books. See Huntress, Checklist of Narratives of Shipwrecks, 11.
79. It is possible that one of Burton's editors added the Gibbons story to a later posthumous edition of the Treatises, but I have found no such later edition. In addition to these two sources, Mather also held all the information sent to him by his fellow ministers for the providence collection he was compiling and, prior to receiving any of these text sources, he may have encountered the narrative through oral tradition. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; Or, The ecclesiastical history of New-England, from its first planting in the year 1620. unto the year of our Lord, 1698. In seven books ... (London, 1702), 6: 4.
80. Janeway, Janeway's Legacy to his Friends, 3 ("life being sweet");
81. On the European discourse of cannibalism, see esp. Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris, New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
82. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, eds., Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Cultural Margins (Cambridge, 1998).
83. On general European fears of being transformed by America, see John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn., 1990);
84. Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580-1640 (New York, 2000).
85. Dickinson, Gods Protecting Providence Man's Surest Help, title page ("inhumane Canibals");
86. As with other shipwreck narratives, it is hard to document an exact author for this Jesuit text. It appeared in the second edition of Father Paul Ragueneau, Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Mission des Peres de la Compagnie de Iusvs aux Hurons, pays de la Nouuelle France, és années 1648. et 1649 (Paris, France, 1649).
87. See the editor's brief comments in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791 (Cleveland, Ohio, 1898), 34: 17. The shipwreck narrative itself appears on 229-35.
88. See Alan B. Howard on the fundamental structure of humiliation- deliverance-awakening in William Bradford's history of Plymouth colony, Of Plymouth Plantation (Howard, "Art and History in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation," WMQ 28, no. 2 [April 1971]: 245).
89. See also Parker H. Johnson, "Humiliation Followed by Deliverance: Metaphor and Plot in Cotton Mather's Magnalia," Early American Literature 15, no. 3 (Winter 1980-81): 237-46.
90. Protestant preachers had long sought to amplify their sermons' affective force on audiences, and some of seventeenth-century New England's own star clergy were renowned for their ability to create an aural space in which the congregation might undergo conversion. The peculiar influence John Cotton held over audiences, for example, has been explained by several scholars as emanating from his affective, not merely didactic, use of sermon rhetoric, creating for audiences a realm in which to experience grace and conversion rather than to think intellectually about it. See Eugenia DeLamotte, "John Cotton and the Rhetoric of Grace," Early American Literature 21, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 49-74;
91. Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens, Ga., 1987), 13-45.
92. Campbell here adopts M. M. Bakhtin s distinction between the epic hero, whose capacities and values greatly exceed those of an ordinary reader, and the novelistic protagonist, whose story operates on the same plane as and emerges from the experiences and thoughts of ordinary people (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series [Austin, Tex., 1981], 122-23).
93. Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 1-33.
94. See esp. Shapiro's work on the developments of seventeenth-century historiographical methodology, ibid., 34-62.
95. Historians of science have thoroughly documented how Henry Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society (R.S.), sought to collect information from the widest possible range of informants around the world, even unlearned observers such as Atlantic sailors. Soon the R.S. as a whole adopted and regularized Oldenburg's practice, composing elaborate guidelines instructing travelers on how to make accurate observations and what to observe. They first announced their plans to draw up articles of inquiry for travelers in 1661; a set of "General Inquiries" was written in 1664 and printed in the Philosophical Transactions the following year ("Directions for Sea-men, bound for far Voyages," Philosophical Transactions 1, no. 8 [January 1666]: 140-43.
96. See also [Robert] Boyle "General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small ..., Philosophical Transactions 1, no. 11 [April 1666]: 186-89).
97. In 1681 Robert Hooke sought to make such collections mote accurate by giving seamen more particular instructions. See Hooke's preface to Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, in the East-Indies: Together, With an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and divers other Englishmen now Living there, and of the Author's Miraculous Escape ... (London, 1681).
98. Robert Boyle ultimately produced such guidelines with his General Heads for the Natural History of a Country, Great or Small: Drawn out for the Use of Travellers and Navigators ... (London, 1692).
99. [John Woodward], Brief Instructions For Making Observations in all Parts of the World: as also For Collecting, Preserving, and Sending over Natural Things ... (London, 1696), also instructed travelers.
100. In 1713 the government ordered ambassadors, admirals, and officers to receive directions and instructions from the R. S. for making enquiries relating to the improvement of natural philosophy." For a general discussion of the R.S. and travel reporting, see Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 72-76 (quotation, 74).
101. See also A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, eds. and trans., The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 13 vols. (Madison, Wis., 1965-73, London, 1975-86).
102. At the most basic level, experiential authority depended on the speaker's or writer's credibility, and as travelers were famed for their ability to "lie with authority," as the proverb went, a travel writer's authority was never taken for granted, though such doubts did little to dampen public consumption of even the most fabulous of travel writings, such as the purely imaginary (or plagiarized) accounts of John Mandeville and André Thévet. In the case of Walter Ralegh, credibility problems forced him to defend the veracity of his narrative in a second preface (Ralegh, "To the Reader," in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bevvtifuvl Empire of Gviana, with a relation of the great and Golden Citie of Manoa ... [London, 1596]).
103. On the contested status of travel literature, see Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley, Calif., 1962).
104. Michael McKeon's analysis of the fundamental epistemological shifts that shaped early modern narrative forms and the shifts between naive credulity and extreme skepticism that accompanied them remains one of the richest treatments of this subject (McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 [Baltimore, 1987]).
105. Applying McKeon to the colonial context, James D. Hartman addresses questions of authenticity in Hartman, Providence Tales and Birth of Literature. Jim Egan is particularly wary of taking experience for granted as a source of colonial authority in Egan, Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
106. Such concerns appear, for example, in "His Majesty's Commission for a Council for Foreign Plantations," in which Charles II sought "to drawe those our distant dominions and the several interests and governments thereof into a neater prospect and consultacôn" by aggressively gathering sociopolitical as well as natural-historical information about the colonies - information that colonists would know by experience but metropolitan authorities could only learn secondhand. See John Romeyn Brodhead et al., eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in Holland, England and France ... (Albany, N.Y., 1853), 3: 32-34 (quotations, 32-33).
107. Collecting from the widest range of locales and sources (including ordinary individuals unconnected to any philosophical society) was key to the R.S.'s attempt to become a centralized site for amassing facts about the natural world. Not only would such reports enable the immobile society and Crown to centralize and control information about increasingly independent and mobile commercial classes, but the hierarchical structure of this relationship also imposed order on the potential unruliness of colonial empire. Though the peripheries of the empire could collect natural information, the work of analyzing and synthesizing that information was intended to be the privilege of the center. The relationship thus dictated a posture of deference for the colonial writer conveying information about American nature as well as a form - that of the neutral fact report - for such writings. On the role of travel reports in the collection efforts of scientific societies, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), 245;
108. D. Carey, "Compiling Nature's History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society," Annals of Science 54, no. 3 (May 1997): 279.
109. On the power struggle created by these relationships, see esp. Julie Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry (Baltimore, 1998).
110. More thorough, though not focused on shipwrecks and providences, are the bibliographies of Edward Godfrey Cox, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel, 3 vols. (Seattle, Wash., 1935-49);
111. John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620 (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1965);
112. Dennis Channing Landis, ed., European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1495-1776, vol. 4, 1676-1700 (New Canaan, Conn., 1997).
113. Colonial seventeenth-century texts are harder to trace. Some narratives appeared within large histories such as Edward Johnson, A History of New-England. From the English planting in the Yeere 1628. until the Yeere 1652 ... Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England (London, 1654);
114. Nathaniel Morton, New Englands Memoriall; Or, A brief Relation of the most Memorable and Remarkable Passages of the Providence of God, manifested to the Planters of New England in America (Cambridge, [Mass.], 1669);
115. William Hubbard, "A General History of New England, from The Discovery to MDCLXXX," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d ser., 5 (Boston, 1848).
116. See also Benjamin Bartholomew's poem, "A relation of the Wonderful Mercies of God Extended hunto us the 19 of October 1660 in the Ship Exchang being bound from Newingland to Barbadoes," in In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives, 1610-1766, ed. Donald P. Wharton (Westport, Conn., 1979), 120-26;
117. [Anonymous], The Narrative of The most terrible and dreadful Tempest, Hurricane, or Earthquake in Holland ... With the particulars of the Damages ... (Cambridge, 1674).
118. Many writers employed a theological framework for their materials. In 1675 Increase Mather published The Times of men are in the hand of God; Or, A Sermon Occasioned by that awfull Providence which hapned in Boston in New England, the 4th day of the 3d Moneth 1675. (when part of a Vessel was blown up in the Harbour, and nine men hurt, and three mortally wounded) ... (Boston, 1675).
119. John Wilson reminded New Englanders of the sea providence that smashed the 1588 Spanish armada in Wilson, A Song of Deliverance for the Lasting Remembrance of Gods Wonderful Works never to be Forgotten. Containing in it the wonderful defeat of the Spanish-Armado, Anno, 1588 ... (Boston, 1680).
120. Four years later appeared Richard Steere's poem, A Monumental Memorial of Marine Mercy Being an Acknowledgment of an High Hand of Divine Deliverance on the Deep in the Time of distress, in A Late Voyage from Boston in New-England to London, Anno 1683 ... (Boston, 1684).
121. In a similar vein, Increase Mather's Essay for Recording of Illustrious Providences also appeared in 1684. In 1689 Cotton Mather's many published sermons included one devoted to colonial sea travels, Mather, Work upon the Ark. Meditations upon the Ark As a Type of the Church; Delivered in a Sermon at Boston, And now Dedicated unto the Service of All, but especially of those whose Concerns Lye in Ships (Boston, 1689).
122. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 6: 9;
123. Steere, Monumental Memorial of Marine Mercy, 2-3.
124. "A Description of a Great Sea-Storm, That happened to some Ships in the Gulph of Florida, in September last; Drawn up by one of the Company, and sent to his Friend at London" (London, 1671).
125. In 1646 the commissioners for the recently formed United Colonies of New England officially decreed "that all the Colonies (as they may) would collect and gather vp the many speciall [providences] of God towards them, since their arrivall and selling in these part[es] ... and that memorialls beinge made, they may be duly comunicated and seriously considered, that no thinge be mistaken, but that history may be compiled according to truth with due weight by some able and fitt man appointed therevnto." See David Pulsifer, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England ... (Boston, 1859), 1: 83.
126. John Barnard, Ashton's Memorial, An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances, of Mr. Philip Ashton, Who, after he had made his Escape from the Pirates, liv'd alone on a Desolate Island for about Sixteen Months ..., ed. John Barnard (Boston, 1725).
127. The phrase "infortunate (yet fortunate)" appeared initially in the Virginia Company's True Declaration of the estate and later in Strachey's narrative, which draws from the company's report. See Strachey, "True reportory," in Purchas, Haklvytvs Posthumus, pt. 4: 1756.