Mary C. Fuller

Introduction: Negotiating travel in the Anglo-American Atlantic world, 1550–1747

This special issue draws from work by a group of scholars who were participants in a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities research seminar on early English contacts with North America. Our discussions were organised around case studies from the sixteenth century, including the contextually relevant early voyages to Africa in the 1550s, Martin Frobisher’s voyages to the Canadian Arctic in the 1570s, and Walter Ralegh’s voyage to Guiana in the 1590s. Some of these materials figure in the essays that follow, while others range further afield in space or time – appropriately enough, since the ultimate project of the seminar was to introduce interdisciplinary sources and methods for looking at early modern travel writing. To this end, we engaged with visiting speakers from archaeology, the history of science, and colonial history, as well as with the professional staff at Harvard’s Houghton Library and the public historians at Plimoth Plantation; all were generous with their time and expertise. Ultimately, however, the opportunity for dialogue across disciplinary boundaries was enabled by a group of participants whose specialties ranged from English and early American literature to Atlantic history, the history of science, environmental anthropology, native studies, and political science. These essays, drawing on materials from the 1550s through the beginning of the eighteenth century, reflect the conversations and collaborations that resulted. The first two essays engage with a common set of documents and events. Martin Frobisher’s three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage were extensively documented in print because they were the first voyages with which the English staked a claim, in the wake of Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro, to be ‘discoverers’. The Frobisher voyages were focused on resolving a major question in geography, directed into an unknown and extreme climate, and not only (it was initially believed) found gold – one of the really validating goals of exploration and trade outside Europe – but found it in a location where centuries of European science would have predicted it to be impossible. The idea of Arctic gold was surprising because, both experientially and theoretically, gold had been linked to the torrid zone, where the sun’s persistent and perpendicular rays were believed to generate it. The counterintuitive proposition that gold might be found in a place that appeared, on the surface, most unlike the places it had been found seemed not only lucky but revolutionary in its implications for the systems by which early modern Europeans sought to understand the physical world. Cassander Smith’s essay investigates the ways that systems of understanding relating to the physical earth – and framing Frobisher’s apparent discovery as surprising – interacted with human geography, at both small and large scale. If an English seamen met an Inuit hunter at somewhere around 62 ̊N and 65 ̊W, what did their location suggest to the first about the second? Nicolás Wey Gómez has brought to our attention in the Spanish context the importance attached