Thomas Harriot, an Oxford-trained scientist, naturalist, and
mathematician, wrote one of the most influential and best known sixteenth-century
English colonial texts. First published in 1588, A Briefe and True Report of
the New Found Land of Virginia, was based on Harriot’s voyage to the New
World in 1585 on the second Roanoke expedition led by Sir Richard Grenville,
Sir Walter Raleigh’s brother-in-law. Two years later, Theodor DeBry published
Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report again, this time with copperplate engravings based on the watercolor drawings of John
White, who had accompanied Harriot on the 1585 expedition. Not only did A
Briefe and True Report offer readers a wealth of information on the flora
and fauna of Virginia, it is widely recognized as one of the most detailed
early English ethnographies of the native populations of North America. Indeed,
its stature as an ethnography would not be surpassed until well into the
seventeenth century with the writings of John Smith, William Wood, Roger
Williams, and others.
Reflecting the highly
decentralized nature of English colonialism, Harriot’s A Briefe and True
Report served as a model for almost all subsequent English colonial
promotional pamphlets. Rather than being funded and controlled centrally by the
monarchy, as was usually the case with the colonies of Spain and Portugal,
England’s colonies were the product of joint-stock companies, whereby a number
of individual investors pooled their resources to purchase the supplies and
equipment necessary for colonial exploration. The promotional pamphlet,
therefore, emerged as one of the most effective vehicles for convincing wary investors
of the significant financial potential of England’s fledgling colonial
enterprises. Although the particular advantages of colonial investment changed
over the next century, the central structural fact of English colonialism did
not: England’s colonies would remain dependent on periodic infusions of capital
from England well into the seventeenth century. And as long as that was the
case, the promotional pamphlet, of which A Briefe and True Report is the
prototype, remained a staple of the English publishing and bookselling trades.
While Harriot devotes
most of his text to the considerable number of “merchantable commodities” to be
found in Virginia—commodities ranging from luxury items, such as furs and
pearls, to strategically significant materials, such as timber and iron—he also
spends a considerable amount of time describing the ease with which the land in
the New World could be farmed. In these parts of his text, Harriot reminds us
that the colonial enterprise was not exclusively an investment opportunity for
the very rich, who would reap profits from the importation of valuable raw
materials. In addition to serving as sources for these materials, the colonies,
in Harriot’s vision, would also be places where the younger sons of the gentry
might live and prosper and where idle English laborers, displaced by
enclosures, might make themselves productive members of a new society. For this
other group of people, who were interested in investing not their capital but
rather their labor in the colonial enterprise, the agricultural potential of
the land was of primary interest. Moreover, Harriot’s depiction of the colonial
geography as conducive to the family-oriented enterprise of farming might have
been intended to allay widespread English fears that colonies might become
sites of licentious and criminal behavior.
One need not be a cynic
to observe that financial gain was probably the single largest incentive for
colonial undertaking. In colonial promotional pamphlets like Harriot’s,
however, readers are almost always reassured that the handsome material gains
will not come at the expense of the salvation of the soul. For the English, the
easiest way to care for their own souls was to look after the souls of the
native inhabitants. It is with this fact in mind that we should read Harriot’s
account of “the nature and maners of the people.” In this part of his text,
Harriot shows himself acutely aware of the antipathy of the English toward the
whole notion of colonial enterprise—an antipathy born largely out of a fear
that English colonizers might commit the same sorts of atrocities as the
Spanish. Harriot, accordingly, attempts to reassure potential investors that
the English settlers will be able to convince the Virginia natives to submit to
their rule. In phrasing that is at once ominous and upbeat, Harriot opines,
they shall “have cause both to feare and love us, that shall inhabite with
them.” The reality, of course, was that the leader of Harriot’s expedition, Sir
Richard Grenville, and his successor, Ralph Lane, relied much more heavily on
fear and coercion than on love and cooperation. It was, in all likelihood, the
harsh treatment of the natives by the English that led to the mysterious
disappearance of the English settlers on Roanoke Island not long after the
initial publication of Harriot’s text. Hence, although Harriot’s pamphlet may
have exerted an enduring influence on colonial writing, its influence was
probably undermined by the immediate perception of colonialism as a risky
activity.
