Lost and Found in the Americas

Lost and Found in the AmericasSusan Field

Amerigo Vespucci’s predicament as a Europeanexploring the coast of Brazil—‘‘we were wander-ing and uncertain in our course’’ (4)—is the natalAmerican experience and flows through ourliterary history as an inherited anxiety andfascination. Melville’s Ishmael, Twain’s Huckle-berry, and Warner’s Ellen illustrate the nineteenthcentury codification of the problem in our iconicliterary orphan, and Emerson’s essay ‘‘Experi-ence,’’ written in the aftermath of his young son’sdeath, is still another formulation of the lostexplorer and how and what he might find andfound. In 1841, nearly 350 years after Vespucci’sletter, Emerson, adrift in private loss, posed hisown version of Vespucci’s uncertainties: ‘‘Wheredo we find ourselves?’’ (3: 27). This question hasmultiple valences for Americans in personal,political, and philosophical spheres. We attemptall sorts of findings and foundings by exploring,claiming, and settling lands unknown to us, bycreating and sustaining political and economicinfrastructures, by seeking and publishing our-selves, and by having children. We often think offinding as acquiring and consolidating, but findingis predicated on or necessitated by certain losses;it proceeds by abandonment. Founding, because itis entwined with losing, entails foundering,wandering about uncertain of our location anddirection. The exploration narratives examinedhere record and facilitate the process of losing andfinding in ways that are specific and formative toAmerican identity.1

The question of where we find ourselves—individually, collectively, or intellectually—hastwo distinct formulations, each based on aparticular assessment of the predicament, andeach generating a particular response. One for-

mulation authorizes answers such as foundingtowns, countries, dynasties, and so on, whereasthe second creates a playing field for continuousfinding and questioning. In the first way of askingwhere we find ourselves, one asks, as the earlyEuropean explorers and their backers did, ‘‘Wheredo we go and what do we get to found newexpansions of ourselves?’’ The object of the questis external to the seeker who thus, at leasttemporarily, avoids extensive self-explorationand internal change. Similarly, because themethod of the quest is acquisition, the seeker canalso avoid yielding or losing himself to newregions. Exploration is thus conducted as rela-tively unexamined penetration and self-projection,and finding is conflated with settlement, economicprofit, and ownership. Cabeza de Vaca reports thatPanfilo de Narvaez, for example, claimed that heand his men ‘‘were going to fight and conquermany and very strange peoples and lands’’ (275).In his account of Bartholomew Gosnold’s 1602voyage to New England, Gabriel Archer desiredMaine because he thought it capable of fulfilling‘‘the hopes men so greedily doe thirst after’’ (132).Annette Kolodny has connected the thrust of thisfounding and thirsting with desire in The Lay ofthe Land, her well-known study of the metaphorof land as female in the European exploration andsettlement of America.

In contrast, the second approach to consider-ing where we find ourselves begins in noticingthat we are somewhere utterly different, and leadsto the question, ‘‘What is this place in which wefind ourselves?’’ Bewilderment is the predicamentEmerson claims, for example, so orientation is histask. In this formulation, exploration proceeds byreceptive attention to both the surroundings and

Susan Field is assistant professor of English and philosophy in the Humanities Department of New Mexico Tech, where she teachescourses in writing, philosophy, and American literature. She is the author of The Romance of Desire: Emerson’s Commitment to

Incompletion (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997), a study of Ralph Waldo Emerson and contemporary philosophy and feminism.

133Lost and Found in the Americas � Susan Field

to one’s own assumptions; the journey entailsadjusting, even yielding, rather than possessing.When Emerson considers where we in fact findourselves, he discovers ‘‘a series of which we donot know the extremes . . . there are stairs belowus, which we seem to have ascended; there arestairs above us, many a one, which go upward andout of sight’’ (3: 27). Whereas Archer uncriticallyobserves in third person (the rhetoric of ‘‘fact’’)that men greedily hope, Emerson questions ourcollective grounds for those hopes. Desire plays arole here too, but the desire is to have whatfeminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin hastermed an ‘‘intersubjective’’ relationship with theworld (19) rather than to dominate it.

These two explorative impulses—to go findsomething new out there and to find out where(and who) one is now—have parallels in narrativeform, the characteristics of which herald the stuffand style of the American literary fascination withorphans and our quintessential lost and foundexperience. Narrative, because it represents ex-perience through symbolic language and syntac-tical relationships, allows us to both record andmanipulate. Its elements are abstractions, logic,images, and words, mercurial anchors that we usevariously to orient, attach, and jettison ourselves.This article creates (and it is hoped will provoke)a narrative by casting off certain anchors fromvarious narratives and setting their texts afloat.Narrative also allows for multiple—possiblymutually exclusive—threads of experience to findexpression. The overt intention of exploration, thebravado of being lost and then triumphantlyfinding, is narrated in tandem with the lessexamined cognitive and psychological bewilder-ment of chronically being lost and finding.Additionally, narrative, like exploration, proceedsby abandonment. What makes a story especiallyuseful is its ability to prompt or even necessitatenew stories ranging from repetitions—whichinevitably exhibit alterity as Jacques Derrida hasargued (119)—to radically new tales.

Narrating is also clearly a form of power thatmay be as attractive as the power commanded bythe leader of an expedition. Tzvetan Todorov’scomment that ‘‘Columbus has undertaken it all in

order to be able to tell unheard-of stories, likeUlysses’’ (13) suggests that narrative creation isvitally connected to exploration, both motivatingand marking it. Further, the narrative that makessense of an experience is what can be expressed,interpreted, and altered in order to determine nextsteps. Todorov goes on to say that ‘‘a travelnarrative [is] itself the point of departure . . . of anew voyage’’ (13). That new voyage may beundertaken either by the writer or the reader. Thesea journeys that washed up Europeans on newsoil flooded European minds with thoughts ofterritories and resources for the taking. Theexplorers’ narratives meticulously chart, plot,and allocate the land and its bounties. However,they also document the beginning of a secondflood of exploratory energy, a rarer one thatwaters the often neglected fields of self-criticismand self-questioning where Emerson, for example,wished to tend a garden. This second explorationseems particularly appropriate for contemporaryreaders as a way of considering our grounds.These narratives are rightfully a part of contem-porary American experience and the literaryrelations of our own narratives.

Often these exploration texts are grouped andstudied chronologically or nationally, reflectingrelationships that are useful but perhaps notsufficient. Certainly these narratives and theirauthors ‘‘are called into existence by relationship’’(Shabatay 144), and I am interested in theirrelationship to us now. Increasingly they appearin American literature anthologies and in popularversions such as Nicolas Echevarrıa’s 1992 featurefilm Cabeza de Vaca. (Echevarrıa’s film is a clearexample of Derrida’s argument that iterationincludes alteration.) They were written by menwho conceived of exploration largely in terms offounding. The writers, like most of us, only rarelyquestion their landmark assumptions, values, and‘‘rights’’ despite the reality that their explorations,in many cases, entailed abandoning home groundand also being abandoned in unknown regions.But there are serious speculative moments even inVespucci’s admission to ‘‘wandering . . . uncertainin our course,’’ and certainly in Alvar NunezCabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, that open the

134 The Journal of American Culture � Theme Issue � Volume 27, Number 2 � June 2004

possibility of radically new orientations andrelations, and their evolving narration. The riskof entering this opening with contemporaryassumptions, problems, and values is, of course,producing an ahistorical, myopic reading, which istantamount to wandering without course. The riskof ignoring this opening is far greater in my view:the possibility of missing our direct relationship tothese writers in literary and cultural terms.

Imagine once upon a time for a moment. Hereis a story I see in the exploration literature,the story that this article attempts to document.A European man sets forth. Perhaps he is gallantand intelligently curious; perhaps he is smart andopportunistic. In either case, he sets forth think-ing that it is a good day to go and discover acountry, and in so doing, he begins a process thatfar outlives his own propensities. In the headyprocess of finding a new land, of determining thelay of it, of naming and marking its features andits inhabitants, he unintentionally experiencesstrangeness in profound and unanticipated ways.Of course, the land and the people who live therestrike him as strange; he conceives of himself,after all, as an emissary of normalcy and civiliza-tion. But he also finds himself being treated as astranger and finds himself becoming stranger witheach step he takes deeper into this new world. Ifhe is curious and compassionate, he finds out agreat deal about his surroundings and exchangesinformation with the people he meets. If he isclever and ambitious, he strikes to acquire bountyto take home, things that will increase his powerand wealth there, and over time, he takes own-ership of the sources of these things. Regardless ofwhether he reflects on his own strangeness orpersists in seeing strangeness only in others, he isin fact a stranger and experiences the vulnerabilityand power that mark strangers.

Perhaps he is unluckily lost and wandersblindly, perhaps he meets with success in pursuinghis quests. In either case, he stays longer and goesfarther than he knew was possible, and the moretime and distance between him and Europe, themore alone he finds himself. This solitude is thenatural consequence of his burgeoning abandon-ment of European bulwarks and of his mother/

fatherland’s abandonment of him as he roamsfarther and farther. He pushes forward to capturethis new land, and perhaps some of its aboriginalinhabitants, for his own ancestral coffers. But thefarther he pushes, the more captivated he becomesby his surroundings and by the people amongwhom he finds himself. He shakes his head inconfusion as he finds himself the captive, he whohad planned to take captives. The distinctionbetween owning and belonging becomes murkyas he struggles to understand where exactly hebelongs and who he is becoming. Eventually, heconsigns his fate to this new land, finding that hislife and home have undergone sea changes of suchmagnitude that returning to his origins is notfeasible. He is now an orphan in search of a home,and we live in the space that he left.

Being One of ‘‘them that goo todiscover cuntryes’’ (Ribault 294)

Amerigo Vespucci’s letter of 1503 to LorenzoPietro di Medici describes his third journey to theSouth American coast. He was utterly convincedof the importance of his discovery, excited andempowered by being the first to report what ‘‘wemay rightly call a new world . . . a matterwholly new to all those who hear about [it]’’ (1).Any deference to God or nature suggested byVespucci’s brief warning about ‘‘the audacity ofthose who seek to . . . know more than it is licitto know’’ (13) is secondary to his exuberant claimto have discovered that of which ‘‘our ancestorshad no knowledge’’ (1). In recording this newworld as a fact, he is not amending ancestralaccounts; he is abandoning them. But even thoughVespucci boldly claims narrative authority toname and describe as he rushes forward in hisdesire to discover, he never considers the ways heis abandoning ancestral knowledge. This untra-veled path of inquiry creates a tension in hisnarrative that spills over into American knowl-edge of its own history and identity.

When Vespucci records his fascination with thenatives, especially noting their ‘‘well formed and


proportioned’’ and quite ‘‘naked’’ bodies (5), hereiterates his European values by characterizingvarious native customs as ‘‘very shameful andbeyond all human belief’’ (5), judging the women‘‘very libidinous’’ (7), and describing nativeculture as having ‘‘no church, no religion,’’ or‘‘government’’ (6). He seems unaware of thetension so obvious to a contemporary readerbetween his unexamined assumption that Eur-opean values are universal and his minute recordof obvious and extreme difference. In his inabilityto acknowledge the loss of universality, Vespuccibecomes enmeshed in strained claims that appearuntenable to us. The shakiness of these claimsreveals itself in Vespucci’s words if not hisconscious thought. One amazing example isVespucci’s statement that the women, ‘‘when theyhad the opportunity of copulating with Chris-tians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled andprostituted themselves’’ (7). Aside from thestaggering choice of the word ‘‘opportunity,’’ thelocation of the descriptor phrase ‘‘urged byexcessive lust’’ leaves wide open the question ofwhose lust is salient. Further, Vespucci turns theaction of defiling into a reflexive act, performedby the women on themselves. Prostitution isphrased as an attribute of the women rather thanas coercion or a transaction between two people.The men who presumably eagerly admired ‘‘theexcellence of . . . [the women’s] bodily structure,’’to whom ‘‘it was . . . a matter of astonishmentthat none was to be seen among them who had aflabby breast, and those who had borne childrenwere not to be distinguished from virgins by theshape and shrinking of the womb’’ (7), havedisappeared as grammatical agents by the time thewomen defile and prostitute themselves. Withrespect to terra feminea, Vespucci’s narrative andrhetorical strategies embody discovery as the‘‘rightful’’ fulfillment of desire, and exploring astaking. He questions little of himself or hisworldview, which results in a failure to abandonwhat is ethically and factually inappropriate.2

That Vespucci’s words are accessible to mostAmericans only in translation only complicatesthe question: is the source of his blindness in hisown writing, in our translations, or in both?

Though Vespucci heralds much of the violencethat was to characterize European expansion inAmerica, his letter also describes some of theabandonments that Europeans were to experienceand enact in their attempts to find. First of all, therisks and terrors of the voyage itself wereinescapable and unparalleled; the experience‘‘transcends the view held by our ancients’’ (1)and was quite visceral. Vespucci writes that

what we suffered on that vast expanse of sea,what perils of shipwreck, what discomfortsof the body we endured, with what anxietyof mind we toiled, this I leave to thejudgment of those who out of rich experi-ence have well learned what it is to seek theuncertain and to attempt discoveries eventhough ignorant. (2)

This statement shrouds the adventure in mysteryby removing it from his readers’ ken and thusabandons readers to their own ignorance andimagination.3 Vespucci’s statement also suggeststhat finding words for such discomforts is toodifficult, that the writer who has experiencedthese hardships is somehow inaccessibly differentfrom the inexperienced European reader. Further,the explorer finds himself unaided and thusabandoned by conventional wisdom and hisancestors who ‘‘had no knowledge’’ (1) of thisnew truth, of the ‘‘infinite inhabitants . . . innu-merable tribes . . . and species of all manner ofwild beasts . . . never seen by us’’ (3). However,Vespucci’s letter reveals little awareness of theimplications of these various abandonments or ofbeing a fledgling far outside the nest.

This ignorance of abandonment and what itwill mean also appears in Giovanni da Verraz-zano’s 1524 letter to his French backers. LikeVespucci, Verrazzano, who was the first Europeanto chart in detail the east coast of North America,was fully aware that these voyages of discoveryhad shifted from seeking a passage to the Orientto exploring ‘‘a new land which had never beenseen before by any man, either ancient ormodern’’ (133). He provides detailed descriptionsof various tribes and his interactions with them,almost moving from acquisitiveness to inquisi-tiveness. He describes communication with the


natives during which he learns and observescustoms and values, but he resorts to capturing ayoung boy to carry back to France as the mostexpedient and profitable manner in which to learnabout the inhabitants. He mentions that theywould have also taken a young woman, ‘‘but itwas impossible to take her to the sea because ofthe loud cries she uttered’’ (136). For all of theinformation Verrazzano gleaned from the natives’cries and signs, apparently the clear outrage of thewoman seemed merely inconvenient to him,certainly nothing that prompted any self-inter-rogation. Though he often genuinely admires thepeople he encounters, Verrazzano can only seethem with European eyes: ‘‘if they had the skilledworkmen that we have, they would erect greatbuildings’’ (139), and ‘‘they are very easilypersuaded, and they imitated everything that theysaw us Christians do with regard to divineworship’’ (141). He finds and claims the land interms of utility to European endeavors. Repeat-edly his sentences take the form of ‘‘we found’’territory that would ‘‘produce,’’ ‘‘yield,’’ or ‘‘beuseful.’’ Landscapes are seen in terms of potentialcrops and mineral resources, harbors in terms oftheir safeness and defensibility, forests as towhether they ‘‘could be penetrated [a loadedword to a contemporary feminist reader] even bya large army’’ (139). Like Vespucci, Verrazzanoreports that the people ‘‘have no religion and thatthey live in absolute freedom, and that everythingthey do proceeds from Ignorance’’ (141), adescription that conveniently leaves the possibi-lity of Verrazzano’s ignorance as invisible to himas it is visible to us.

The assertion that ‘‘they’’ are ignorant was toevolve into a complex American relationship witha shifting conflation of innocence and ignorance.The Europeans reacted to this perceived inno-cence with both desire and scorn, the bipolarresponse that so often characterizes colonialism.Verrazzano’s description was to become a goaland a mode of operation for Americans, deeplyconnected to the ideas of America as an Eden, ofAmerican ethics as naturally proceeding from aninnocent ignorance, and of Americans ‘‘rightly’’claiming ‘‘new’’ lands and resources. Europeans in

the Americas identified innocence and availabilityas the salient characteristics of the ‘‘New World’’largely out of their own needs and goals, whetherpsychological, religious, or material, and then, intrue imperialist fashion, appropriated that inno-cence for themselves, eventually enshrining it inan American literary canon. To trace this devel-opment is beyond the scope of this article, butconsider briefly, for example, that the truth ofHuckleberry Finn’s narrative and his morality forAmericans are grounded in his rustic naıvete.Huck’s well-known tactic is to ‘‘light out’’ for newterritory (333), never seeing that as he lights out,the past is lost in darkness. What strikes me aboutthe writers of the exploration narratives is theiralmost uniform inability to acknowledge that ingoing forth to discover a country, they sufferedthe loss of one as well. That loss marked them asstrangers, and their strangeness is the aspect oftheir experience that they are generally mostreluctant to explore.

Being the Stranger

Going to find ourselves engenders losing thefamiliar, and eventually that loss is experienced tothe point that it can no longer be put aside infavor of exploring and acquiring: one finds oneselfa stranger. Even Columbus, as European-identi-fied as he was, ‘‘most often refers to himself’’ withthe term ‘‘extranjero, ‘outsider’’’ (Todorov 50).That loss of the familiar, practically in the instantof recognizing that one has become a stranger,becomes the fulcrum of a new relationship to theworld and the seed of a new narrative capable ofnew connections. Writer and psychotherapistEileen Simpson describes the American Revolu-tion as the act of a child rebelling against the‘‘mother country’’ and the ‘‘authoritarian father’’figure of George III (223), a particular rite ofpassage that results in self-made orphans. She citesWilliam Bradford’s record of the Pilgrims, OfPlymouth Plantation, as demonstrating thePilgrims’ ‘‘sense of orphanhood’’ (222). Bradfordhimself describes their utter abandonment by and


of Europe, exclaiming at one point, ‘‘What couldnow sustain them but the Spirit of God and Hisgrace?’’ (62–63). Orphans are often consideredcollectively as a by-product of historical eventsand societal pressures, but it is being alone thatmarks the orphan’s experience, and this singular-ity demands new relations. John Winthrop calledhis fellow Puritans in 1630 into a new relation-ship, saying that ‘‘we shall be as a city upon a hill. . . The eyes of all people are upon us’’ (49). Thisfigurative location signified a literal location thatdefined a new relationship to Europeans. Thoughthe Puritans could not initially be aware of the fullimport of this new relationship that was to identifythem as Americans, as Puritan poet Anne Brad-street wrote when she lost her New England hometo fire in 1666, ‘‘Here’’ in the new world were her‘‘trunk . . . and that chest,’’ and in America ‘‘laythat store I counted best’’ (115, author emphasis).

The stranger’s need for a new relation with theworld differs vastly from the conqueror’s desirefor a new world. With its attendant new identities,narratives, and ways of living, the desire forrelation stems not so much from rebellion andrejection of the old as from acknowledging thatthe old has been lost or abandoned, has perhapsfailed or orphaned one. As Emerson would writeof America in 1836, here and now ‘‘there are newlands, new men, new thoughts’’ requiring one tolend a hand in devising new ‘‘works and laws andworship’’ and narratives (1: 7). The nascence of allof this newness is not the American Renaissance.It stems from the far earlier exploration experi-ence of going to seek strange new lands andinadvertently becoming strangers. This transfor-mation forged by abandonment and narrative wasnot always fully understood by those whoexperienced it, nor is it readily apparent in anyone exploration report. But I am suggesting anarrative account of it across various explorationand literary narratives that, to borrow WaltWhitman’s words, ‘‘fuses’’ itself into our Amer-ican literature and ‘‘pours’’ its meaning into ours(2052). Europeans found themselves in a positionthey had not experienced for some time: thespecial and dangerous position of the stranger.They persistently disowned this position and

instead labeled the new land and its inhabitantsand their customs as ‘‘strange.’’ However, astranger not only encounters an other but alsobecomes an other. If one is willing or forced toconfront one’s otherness, the realization shattersthe view that one can ‘‘rightly call’’ something anew world, or claim a land, or capture an indigeneas an exhibit. Small wonder that Europeans did notembrace the role of stranger and preferred insteadto assign it to others. Inevitably, though, a strangernot only acts, sees, and records but is also actedupon, watched, and described. One (or the other)is only a stranger in relationship, and, as VirginiaShabatay writes of strangers’ stories and narrative,‘‘We are called into existence by relationship’’(144). One’s existence as a stranger is called intobeing by a reciprocal relationship of strangeness.

Strangers in strange lands meet all sorts ofunanticipated fates ranging from freedom andself-authorship to disappearance and death. Thereis the promise of Anthony Parkhurst’s 1578 letterto Richard Hakluyt the elder on Newfoundland:if these places ‘‘be peopled and well fortified (asthere are stones and things meete for it through-out all Newfound land) wee shall bee lordes of thewhole fishing in small time, if it doe so please theQueenes Majestie’’ (9). But there is also the fearexpressed by Hernando de Alarcon in his accountof his mission in the 1540 Coronado mission:‘‘there were so many [natives] surrounding methat I did not consider it safe to remain there, andI asked them by signs to withdraw . . . and notto come to me more than ten at a time’’ (128).There is also a sobering, richly worded account ofJohn Cabot’s death at sea in 1498, written circa1512–1513 by Polydore Vergil. According to thestory, Cabot departed

to go and search for those unknown islands.John set out in this same year and sailed firstto Ireland. Then he set sail towards the west.In the event he is believed to have found thenew lands nowhere but on the very bottomof the ocean, to which he is thought to havedescended together with his boat, the victimhimself of that self-same ocean; since afterthat voyage he was never seen again any-where. (225)


Vergil accurately captures the sense of explora-tion-induced vertigo with his plummet from thepinnacle of finding new land to the depth of theocean’s bottom and through his choice of words,such as ‘‘descending,’’ which suggests at oncefounding in terms of dynastic founding andcataclysmic foundering. The opportunities thatbeckoned to the adventuresome had to beweighed against the possibility of never beingseen again anywhere, a scenario akin to a child’sworst nightmare about being lost forever, alwaysa stranger.

Certain strengths and possibilities emerge onlyin the stranger’s position; strangers commandspecial powers in real life just as they do in fairytales. As Shabatay notes, ‘‘we neither want toredeem strangers out of existence nor abandonthem’’ (141) because they are a mysterious portalto knowledge and power outside our realm. Butone must be willing to acknowledge one’sstrangeness to use such power well. A strangerbelongs in the world precisely by not belonginghere or there. A stranger relates uniquely to theworld by calling the terms of relationships intoquestion. Whether the stranger himself comes tofortunate or disastrous ends, ‘‘the stranger is onewho lives on the edge between’’ two worlds, hisown and the one he has ‘‘just entered’’ (Shabatay136). The edge, like an ocean’s shoreline, shiftsconstantly and continually requires one to notice,question, and adjust. It is where difference revealsitself, whether through exchange or confronta-tion, and it can be quite fruitful. Ultimately,survival and fertility at such an edge lie not instability or fortification, but in permeability andflexibility. The experience of being a stranger isintegral to the American psyche; unfortunately, sois the experience of denying it.

Being Alone, Cut O¡, andAbandoned

European explorers often found themselvesmore profoundly alone than they might have

imagined, often with a consequent insecurity thatcompromised their ability to embrace the condi-tion of being strangers. Gabriel Archer providesone example of the acute and almost paralyzingaloneness experienced by the Europeans:

the tenth [day of the month], CaptaineGosnoll fell downe with the ship to the littleIlet of Cedars, called Hills happe, to take inCedar wood, leauing mee and nine more inthe Fort, onely with three meales meate,vpon promise to returne the next day.

The eleuenth, he came not, neither sent,wherevopn I commanded foure of mycompanie to seeke out for Crabbes,Lobsters, Turtles, &c. for sustayning us tillthe ships returne, which was gone cleane outof sight. (136)

Against Archer’s orders, these four furtherdivided themselves. Two of the men fled blindlywhen ‘‘assaulted by foure Indians’’ and were‘‘driuen to lie all night in the Woods, not knowingthe way home thorow the thicke rubbish, as alsothe weather somewhat stormie’’ (136–37). Archersays, ‘‘the want of these sorrowed vs much, as notable to coniecture any thing of them vnless veryeuill’’ (137). Archer’s captain was only a day latein reappearing, but Archer writes of the ‘‘dumpishterrour’’ at the captain’s failure to appear at theappointed time and of the huge relief when hereturned: ‘‘Wee heard at last, our Captaine tolewre vnto vs, which made such musike as sweeterneuer came vnto poore men’’ (137).

Archer’s group at least managed to sustainthemselves, finding plenty of ‘‘Alexander andSorrell pottage, Ground-nuts, and Tobacco’’(137). Other groups were less fortunate orresourceful despite reportedly abundant fish,animals, and plants. While in the Florida territoryin November 1527, Cabeza de Vaca, for example,describes himself and his companions as ‘‘thefigure of death itself,’’ and ‘‘so thin that with littledifficulty our bones could be counted’’ (99), thesame territory that Jean Ribault described in 1562as ‘‘the fairest, frutefullest, and pleasantest of allthe worlde, habonding in honney, veneson, wild-foule . . . greatest and fairest vynes in all the


wourld with grapes accordingly’’ (289). Of course,Ribault was writing to generate support for asettlement, whereas Cabeza de Vaca wrote as anabandoned survivor of an expedition gone awry.Archer’s men ran blindly through a pathless andstormy wood and, like Cabeza de Vaca, weredriven to an unprecedented insecurity about theirability to survive.

A similar insecurity infected the customs oforganization and authority. Acute conflict oc-curred as leadership was crucial but oftenimpossible, whether through ignorance or insur-rection. In Archer’s case, although he counseledhis men ‘‘to keepe together,’’ they ‘‘diuidedthemselues’’ (136). In his narrative of his 1590voyage to Virginia, M. John White contrasts‘‘carefull styrage of Captaine Cooke’’ with the‘‘rash and undiscreet styrage of Ralph Skinner,’’under whose guidance ‘‘a very dangerous Seabrake into their boate and overset them quite,’’drowning seven of the eleven men. ‘‘This mis-chance did so much discomfort the saylers, thatthey were all of one mind not to goe any further,’’and only ‘‘the commandement & perswasion ofme and Captaine Cooke’’ moved the sailors tocontinue the journey (316). Vespucci cites ‘‘theship-master’s want of knowledge’’ concerning acourse and reports that he had to take over thetask: ‘‘if my companions had not heeded me, whohad knowledge of cosmography, there would havebeen no ship-master, nay not the leader of ourexpedition himself’’ (3–4). Panfilo de Narvaez sobungled his duties as leader of the 1527 expeditionto Florida that less than a handful of his hundredsof men survived. Early in his Relacion, Cabeza deVaca describes his disagreement with Narvaez’sdecision to leave some men on the ships and tolead others inland (43–45). Narvaez accusesCabeza de Vaca of being afraid to hazard theland exploration and orders him to ‘‘stay andtake charge of the ships’’ (43). Cabeza de Vacarefuses to comply, preferring ‘‘risking my life[on the land] to placing my honor in jeopardy’’by remaining aboard the ship (45). After thisinitial rift and under far more life-threateningcircumstances, the officers of the land expeditioncommit to solidarity, ‘‘affirming that what would

be the fate of one would be the fate of all withoutany one abandoning the others’’ no matter whatmight happen (69). Still later, Narvaez utterlybetrays this loyalty. He declares to Cabeza deVaca that ‘‘it was no longer time for one man torule another, that each one should do whateverseemed best to him in order to save his own life,[and] that he intended so to do it’’ (91). Cabezade Vaca and Vespucci are less implicated in abreakdown of European political structuresand assumptions than they are orphaned bythose erstwhile buttresses and desperately ontheir own.

Being alone and cut off from supplies andguidance affords the opportunity to find resourcesand direction independently. To be successful, onemust yield to the circumstances at hand; import-ing circumstances from afar, however familiar andcomforting they may be, is impossible. MostEuropean explorers were either highly motivatedor forced to learn to be resourceful takers andrecipients of the land’s offerings, including itsintellectual and philosophical lessons and itsphysical resources, and these lessons were learnedin the aura of the ‘‘absolute freedom’’ that seemedto characterize the new world for Verrazzano(141). What Emerson wrote of the Americanlandscape’s intellectual and spiritual offerings—‘‘the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new andcontinental element into the national mind, andwe shall yet have an American genius’’ (1: 229)—Europeans such as Cabeza de Vaca had learnedviscerally centuries before. The destabilization ofEuropean authority so far from ‘‘home,’’ thefrequent mutiny and opportunism, and theeventual settlement and alleged independenceof America can all be explained as rebelliousresponses to European political structures andintellectual habits. But something more personaloccurred in the exploration and discovery experi-ence. The individual experience of exploration,the psychological essence of which is being anorphan who has questions about belonging,is lost in considering it collectively or inmetaphorically describing the nascence of Amer-ica as an adolescent reaction to fatherland ormotherland.


Owning, Belonging, and theCaptivity Narrative

I take up my narrative at this point with theexplorer, a lost stranger who refuses to see himselfas strange, stumbling toward a new, as yet unseenand inconceivable relation with the world. Hestill thinks the world is to own even as heis increasingly disowning his mother/fatherland,as he is being left alone by that mother/fatherto wander and survive on his own, and as heis starting to belong (to) here. The captivitynarratives illustrate the unanticipated and forma-tive blurring of their writers’ simplistic distinctionbetween owning and belonging. Initial Europeanfeelings about natives, ranging from mistrust toadmiration, were grounded in a sense of Europeanimperviousness to influence or control and in theassumption that natives rightfully belonged toEuropean Christiandom. The captivity narrativesassume that ownership is unilateral, with Euro-peans owning the new world and its inhabitants.This assumption blinded them to their ownvulnerability to being ‘‘owned’’ or ‘‘had,’’ even asit rationalized their practice of capturing nativesto use as hostages, guides, exhibits, and slaves. Forexample, the writer of ‘‘The Captivity of JuanOrtiz’’ reports that Chief Castellan Baltasar deGallegos and Captain Juan Rodrigues Lobillowere sent ‘‘to procure an Indian if possible,’’ and‘‘four women were secured’’ but at the cost of sixmen wounded (Portuguese Gentleman 148)—sixthus had by the Indians and only four by theEuropeans.

The possibility that Europeans might in anyway belong to this new land or its inhabitantsremained as inconceivable as the thought thatEuropeans might find themselves becomingAmericans. But even the most atavistic Europeanways of relating to natives were permeated byunforeseen complexities and ambiguities of reci-procity and personal change. For example, JeanRibault reported in 1562 that he ‘‘was willing,according to your comaundment and memoriall,to bring away withe us some of that people’’ butthat he ‘‘forbare to do so for many considera-

tions,’’ primarily the welfare of the FrenchHugenots he planned to leave behind to settle inthe territory. He suggests waiting until the natives‘‘have better acquaintance of us’’ (293). Ribault’scaution demonstrates some awareness that know-ing is best accomplished with some reciprocity.The waiting he decided upon, while promptedby self-interest, created a space for interestingpossibilities of a more reciprocal nature. If theexplorers did not pursue those possibilities, surelywe might. It is simplistic to think that one canknow another without also becoming knownto that other, a fact that has been with thephilosophy of science since the Romantics pulledback the curtain and revealed that the observer isnot detached. It is similarly naıve to think thatsomething can belong to one without one alsobelonging to it. Contemporary philosopher Stan-ley Cavell describes the complex relationshipbetween founding, belonging, and owning: ‘‘forsomething to belong to me I must, whatever menthink, found it, belong to it’’ (104).

Some captivity narratives, such as MaryRowlandson’s, primarily register shock and hor-ror. Rowlandson, a New Englander captured byMetacomet in 1676 during ‘‘King Phillip’s War,’’writes of being herded by ‘‘those . . . ravenousbeasts’’ (141) while carrying her fatally woundedinfant. She herself was also wounded and recordsher despair and fear with ‘‘my children gone, myrelations and friends gone, our house and homeand all our comforts . . . all was gone’’ (142).However, in cases where Europeans remainedlonger and under more peaceful circumstanceswith their captors, as did Cabeza de Vaca and JuanOrtiz, complex relationships evolved. Both mencame to the southeastern American coast in 1527with Panfilo de Narvaez, whose expedition wascharged with ‘‘the conquest of Florida, a territorywhich at that time was conceived as extendingindefinitely westward’’ (Covey 9). Juan Ortiz wascaptured by natives in Florida and spent twelveyears traveling not ‘‘ten leagues in any directionfrom where he lived’’ (Portuguese Gentleman152), while Cabeza de Vaca wandered frompresent-day Florida to New Mexico over thecourse of nine years, living sometimes as a slave


and other times as an honored guest and respectedhealer of great powers. Both men insisted thattheir captor-escorts be treated with the utmostrespect, and that they would not be alive if not forthe care the natives had given them.

Ironically, Juan Ortiz was liberated by theSpanish when Baltasar de Gallegos was sent out‘‘to procure an Indian.’’ The captivity of JuanOrtiz is a story told within an account ofHernando de Soto’s expeditions by The Portu-guese Gentleman of Elvas some fourteen yearsafter the expedition, a tale within a tale fromwithin a memory cellar fourteen years deep.Gallegos ‘‘came into the open field’’ and stumbledupon Ortiz, who was ‘‘naked and sun-burnt, hisarms tattooed after their manner, and he in norespect differing from them’’ (Portuguese 148). Infact, Ortiz apparently knew he would not berecognized by his countrymen at all and imme-diately cried out, ‘‘Do not kill me, cavalier; I am aChristian!’’ (148). In diametric contrast to Row-landson, Ortiz next sought to protect the Indiansaccompanying him: ‘‘Do not slay these people;they have given me my life!’’ (148). Ortiz’s storyreads almost like a fairytale at times. He had beenseized immediately by Indians upon landing withPanfilo de Narvaez’s expedition, ‘‘bound handand foot to four stakes, and laid upon scaffolding,beneath which a fire was kindled, that he might beburned; but a daughter of the Chief entreated thathe might be spared’’ (149). Eventually Ortizpassed the proverbial test by protecting thebody of a child from a marauding wolf. As aresult, ‘‘the Chief became well pleased with theChristian’’ (149). Several years later, when Ortizagain fell out of favor with her father, the samedaughter of the chief helped him escape toanother tribe.

The Relacion of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vacarecounts his transformative experiences as awanderer traveling some 6,000 miles from theFlorida coast, stumbling into the hands of Diegode Alcaraz in northern New Spain nearly a decadelater (Covey 7). Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative wasfirst published in 1542. The second edition, in1555, added a subtitle, Naufragios (shipwrecks;Covey 15), an apt metaphor for Cabeza de Vaca’s

immersion and survival in American land andcultures; it was indeed a castaway who washed upon the desert sands. Cabeza de Vaca suffered theconsequences of his sea change. So altered werehis European priorities that when he argued withAlcaraz, who wished to enslave the Indians athand, Alcaraz arrested him. Later, when hereturned in 1540 to the Americas as adelantadoof the South American regions of the Rio de laPlata, his prohibitions against enslaving, raping,and looting the Indians antagonized his men tomutiny, and he was returned to Spain as a prisonerin 1545 to await trial (Adorno and Pautz 1:381–93).

Cabeza de Vaca tells of ‘‘the nine years that Iwalked lost and naked through many and verystrange lands’’ (19) and, almost like Melville’sorphan Ishmael, offers his Relacion to the readeras the sole thing ‘‘a man who came away nakedcould carry out with him’’ (21). Initially Cabezade Vaca moves through the interior with thewonderment of a novitiate, noting the ‘‘land verydifficult to maneuver and glorious to see,’’ full of‘‘very great forests, and the trees wonderfully tall’’(53). The farther from the familiar he and hiscomrades range, the more painful their lack ofpreparation and knowledge becomes in ‘‘a land sostrange . . . that it seemed impossible either to bein it or to escape from it’’ (67–69). As the mensicken and threaten desertion, the land seemsincreasingly hellish to him: it is ‘‘the land in whichour sins had placed us’’ (73). They becomeseparated, and Cabeza de Vaca later learns thatin one group, ‘‘the flesh of those who died wasjerked by the others’’ and eaten (135), Europeanmotives and values literally brought to self-consumption. Starvation threatens Cabeza deVaca continually throughout the narrative evenas he passes through ‘‘many and very beautifulgrazing lands and good pastures for cattle’’ (151).For many miles, his main purpose was ‘‘to seekout the way by which I would go forward’’ (121)out of captivity ‘‘to where the Christians were’’(127).

Quite literally stripped of European protec-tions (‘‘I went naked as I was born’’ [157]),Cabeza de Vaca develops remarkable skills


important to his survival. He describes himself aseventually ‘‘so hardened to the task’’ of thejourney that he could travel tirelessly ‘‘the entireday without eating until night’’ (233). The lessonof this hardship offered up by the land inscribesitself on Cabeza de Vaca’s very flesh. As heworked his way westward, losing Europeancompanions until only three remained with him,Cabeza de Vaca transformed from an exile andslave to a healer. By making the sign of the crossover ailing natives and commending them to God,he was apparently able to relieve symptoms suchas ‘‘malady of the head’’ (155) and even to revivean ostensibly dead man (163). Demonstratingenough security about himself to show genuinehumility, he gives thanks for the reputation thatgrew from cures he attributes to God, which‘‘were truly great, opening roads for us through aland so deserted, bringing us people where manytimes there were none, and liberating us from somany dangers . . . sustaining us through so muchhunger’’ (153–55). In one of his more spectacularcures, he surgically removes an arrowhead, a‘‘cure [which] gave us a very great reputa-tion . . . throughout the whole land’’ (209). Theseapparent powers gave him and his fellow Eur-opean survivors ‘‘a great deal of authority andinfluence over them [the natives]’’ (233). Theyacquired leadership and status, attracting entour-ages of sometimes thousands of natives (213), notas Europeans, but as strangers.

Being a stranger turned out to be Cabeza deVaca’s lot beyond his time of being lost inAmerica; he also became a stranger to his fellowSpaniards, a strangeness he valiantly refused todisown. In the course of his narrative, Cabeza deVaca begins to imagine that living in this landamong these people will entail a radical departurefrom Europe. About two thirds of the waythrough the narrative, his motivation to relatehis experience changes from the conventionalduties of reporting on the natives (for ‘‘all mendesire to know the customs and practices ofothers’’) and advising those ‘‘who sometime mightcome to confront’’ these natives (185–87) tocelebrating their difference. He wants to describethe way a particular tribe prepares frijoles and

squash because it is ‘‘so novel’’ that ‘‘I wanted toput it here so that the extraordinary ingenuity andindustry of humankind might be seen and knownin all its diversity’’ (227). He also begins to revealthe changes in his own thinking about Europeansin this world. His European imperative toconquer and settle without changing becomesdiverted by his shared experiences with thenatives; increasingly he sees Europeans as mis-guided, even as strangers. Nearing the southwestpart of North America, he begins to find ‘‘moresigns of Christians’’ (239), but instead of raisinghis hopes of deliverance from captivity, thesereports call up protective feelings toward hisnewfound community: he ‘‘said to the Indiansthat we were going to look for them [theChristians] to tell them that they should not killthem [the Indians] or take them as slaves . . . andwith this they were greatly pleased’’ (239). Hisalignment with the Indians suggests a newcommunity and a new sense of belonging thatare radically different from his origins. Findinghimself a stranger, he ‘‘rightly’’ (to borrowVespucci’s word) understands his position as asite of transformation.

They travel ‘‘through much land and we foundall of it deserted, because the inhabitants of itwent fleeing . . . for fear of the Christians’’ (239).Cabeza de Vaca describes his ‘‘great sorrow’’ (239)as he sees the ‘‘very fertile and very beautifulland’’ now ‘‘deserted and burned and the peopleso emaciated and sick, all of them . . . in hiding’’(239). He shares this famine and flight with thepeople ‘‘along this entire road’’ (239). He commitsconsiderable time and feeling to relate how he‘‘saw them so terrorized that they dared not stopin any place’’ (239), preferring ‘‘to let themselvesdie’’ (241) rather than be ‘‘treated with as muchcruelty as they had been’’ by the Christians (241).He is not traveling as a lost castaway to rejoin aEuropean community, but as a member of anemerging community that is distinctly at oddswith the European thrust. At the same time, he isstill aware that he is also a stranger in this land andmay well be received and attacked as such: ‘‘wefeared that when we arrived at the ones who heldthe frontier against the Christians and were at war


with them, they would treat us cruelly and makeus pay for what the Christians were doing tothem’’ (241), a fear that turns out to be unwar-ranted.

After seeing ‘‘clear signs of Christians’’ in theimmediate area, Cabeza de Vaca writes of givingthanks ‘‘to God our Lord for wanting to take usout of so sad and wretched a captivity’’ (245).However, by the time he meets Diego deAlcaraz’s men, he has become fully a stranger tohis former community just as Juan Ortiz had. TheChristians ‘‘experienced great shock upon seeingme so strangely dressed and in the company ofIndians. They remained looking at me for a longtime, so astonished that they neither spoke to menor managed to ask me anything’’ (245). Alcaraz’sattitude toward the Indians, once familiar toCabeza de Vaca, is now foreign to him in thecontext of the new community he has helpedcreate. When Alcaraz asks him to order thevillagers to bring food, Cabeza de Vaca arguesthat ‘‘this was not necessary because they alwaystook care to bring us all they could’’ (247).Further, after ‘‘many annoyances and greatdisputes’’ with Alcaraz, who wanted to enslavethe Indians Cabeza de Vaca had traveled with, heleaves in hot anger (249). He suggests that aEuropean presence unaltered by and insensitive tothe indigenous presence is a blight that hasrendered ‘‘the most fertile and abundant’’ land(251) ‘‘greatly destroyed’’ (255) by causing peopleto abandon their homes.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Cabeza deVaca’s transformation is his inability to convincehis Indian companions that he is indeed aChristian: ‘‘it was not possible to convince theIndians that we were the same as the otherChristians’’ (251). Only ‘‘with much effort andinsistence’’ could he make ‘‘them return to theirhomes’’ (251). After he is finally alone with theChristians, he discovers the cruel end his expecta-tions have met: ‘‘we went to them [the Christians]seeking liberty and when we thought we had it, itturned out to be so much to the contrary’’ (253).They find themselves arrested and marchedtoward Mexico ‘‘under the guard of an alcal-de . . . named Cebreros’’ (253) who chooses a

route through ‘‘areas depopulated and overgrownso that we would not see what they were doingnor their conduct, because they had conspired togo and attack the Indians whom we had sent awayreassured and in peace’’ (253). With dizzyingrapidity, Cabeza de Vaca’s captivity narrativetakes a bitter turn as he becomes a captive of hisChristian liberators who lead him ‘‘through densethickets for two days without water, lost andwithout a path’’ (253). Once returned to Spanishsettlements in Mexico, despite a warmer and morecivilized welcome, Cabeza de Vaca writes that he‘‘was unable to wear [clothes] for many days’’ norto ‘‘sleep but on the ground’’ (265), much asseveral hundred years later, Twain’s Huckleberrychafes at the itchy clothes required for civilizedlife in town. Cabeza de Vaca was unwittinglycaptivated by this new land and then understoodthat fact. His consciousness of his own strange-ness and of the strangeness of his culture held himfatally—or, from our perspective as culturaldescendents, fetally—between two worlds andorphaned in each.

Finding and founding ourselves

We are the descendents of that fetal world andits inhabitants. They are ours and ourselves,through the genealogical labyrinth of narrative.Where do we find ourselves at this juncture in thenarrative? What are we to make of our inheritancefrom explorer-orphans who either refused or wereunable to take on the questions of their motivesand assumptions that so readily occur to us? Thecoastlines are charted, but the question of wherewe find ourselves remains open, and there are stilltwo ways to ask and answer it. One is teleologicalin thrust and entails acquiring and accumulatingexternal territory in the name of fulfilling our(manifest) destiny. In this approach, new groundis gained by taking. The other is ontological andrequires internal acquisition and accumulation,self-possession and wisdom we could say, throughthe inlets of reception and sympathy. It results infinding (or orienting) ourselves in a new land by


being taken in. Taking keeps an orphan orphanedbecause it separates him, as taker, from hisacquisitions, but being taken in can end orphan-hood: one is taken in at home. These are thelessons Cabeza de Vaca, for instance, suggests tous. (Of course, the other way of being taken in,that is, being duped, may also happen; there areno guarantees in exploration.)

Founding a new land requires gaining ground;finding one’s self requires examining one’sgrounds for being. Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacionreflects a search for the grounds of his being inAmerica, but many of the early explorers’ reportsdo not engage in such a search. Much of ourintellectual history obscures such a search. Howwould American history and culture have differedif we had initially known or acknowledged thatwe were (also) finding ourselves? How wouldAmerican history and people have differed if wehad concentrated on finding ourselves rather thanon founding an empire, on the internal rather thanthe external discoveries to be made in the ‘‘newworld?’’ Today we exhibit similar reluctance andinability to search for the grounds of our being,refusal and lack of expertise that are bothdangerous and irresponsible. How might ourfuture differ if we were to chart and mark our ex-perience and our assumptions rather than our ter-ritory and our possessions? In The Conquest ofAmerica: The Question of the Other, TzvetanTodorov critiques European ideas about andapproaches to difference, and describes Europeanpatriarchal and Christian doctrine as twice blindto difference, erasing it either through love orphysical violence. He ends his discussion with thehopeful remark that ‘‘the representatives ofWestern civilization no longer believe so naivelyin its superiority’’ and that, ideologically at least,‘‘we want equality without its compelling us toaccept identity; but also difference without itsdegenerating into superiority/inferiority’’ (249).Imagine a productive acknowledgment and aban-donment of cultural blindnesses (not differences),an act that would leave us strangers even toourselves and prompt, even require, us to buildnew narratives. Now that would be a revolutionworth seeing, a stranger wandering into our midst

and staying to build with an eye to the intrinsicworth of difference, with the self-possession toengage in a mutual exchange rather than a lay ofthe land or its inhabitants.

Notes

1. For many years, exploration and captivity narratives were readprimarily as historical rather than literary documents. As numerousrecent studies of these narratives suggest, they are increasingly beingread and studied in other ways for their literary and culturalsignificance. Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions: The Won-der of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)considers them as travel literature. Margarita Zamora considers thepolitics of interpretation in Reading Columbus (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1993), as does Jose Rabasa in Inventing America:Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). Pauline Strongexplores the poetics of self and identity in the wilderness in CaptiveSelves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of ColonialAmerican Captivity Narratives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).

2. Todorov comments on a similarly disturbing incident recordedin Columbus’s log: ‘‘The European finds the Indian women beautiful;obviously it does not occur to him to ask their consent’’ (49). Theincident was self-reported by Michele de Cuneo, who boasts that hebeat a beautiful native woman to make her submit to his desire (49).Striking the woman is distressingly the same for him as striking ashore. In both cases, striking is an ill-conceived attempt to maintainan inappropriate invulnerability on the part of the striker, aninvulnerability to which he has already, ethically and logically, lostclaim the minute he conceived a desire for an other. In the contextof examining the initial Native/European contacts in terms of‘‘linguistic fantasies’’ (3) and other paradigms, Scott Manning Stevensdiscusses the intricacies of intimacy and betrayal in the story of LaMalinche (6–8) in his essay ‘‘Mother Tongues and Native Voices:Linguistic Fantasies in the Age of the Encounter’’ (Telling the Stories:Essays on American Indian Literature and Cultures. Eds. ElizabethHoffman Nelson and Malcolm A. Nelson. New York: Peter Lang,2001: 3–18).

3. Many of these reports were evasive, citing only theinexpressible nature of the new world. According to Ribault, ‘‘it isa thinge inspeakable, the commodities that be sene there,’’ thepleasures of which are ‘‘not able to be expressed with tonge’’ (289).Similarly, Verrazzano declares that ‘‘the trees have so many colors,and are so beautiful and delightful that they defy description’’ (134).

Works Cited

Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Charles Pautz. Alvar Nunez Cabeza deVaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Panfilo deNarvaez. 3 vols. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.

Alarcon, Hernando de. ‘‘Report of Alarcon’s Expedition.’’ Narra-tives of the Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542. Ed. and trans.George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey. Albuquerque: U of NewMexico P, 1940: 124-55.


Archer, Gabriel. ‘‘Account of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold’sVoyage to ‘North Virginia’ in 1602.’’ The English New EnglandVoyages 1602–1608. Ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn.London: Hakluyt Society, 1983: 112-38.

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, andthe Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647. Ed. SamuelEliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1963.

Bradstreet, Anne. ‘‘Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning ofOur House July 10th, 1666.’’ The Norton Anthology of AmericanLiterature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York:Norton, 1985: 114-16.

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. The 1542 Relacion. Trans. RolenaAdorno. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life,and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez. Vol. 1. Ed. RolenaAdorno and Patrick Charles Pautz. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,1999: 13-279.

Cabeza de Vaca. Dir. Nicolas Echevarrıa. Iguana Productions, 1990.

Cavell, Stanley. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lecturesafter Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, NM: LivingBatch Press, 1989.

Covey, Cyclone, ed. and trans. Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in theUnknown Interior of America. Albuquerque: U of New MexicoP, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,1988.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph WaldoEmerson. 5 vols. to date. Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1971.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience andHistory in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of NorthCarolina P, 1975.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, or, The Whale. Ed. HarrisonHayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1976.

Parkhurst, Anthony. ‘‘Letter to Richard Hakluyt the elder, Novem-ber 13, 1578.’’ New American World: A Documentary History ofNorth America to 1612. Vol. 4. Ed. David B. Quinn. New York:Arno Press, 1979: 7-10.

The Portuguese Gentleman of Elvas. ‘‘The Narrative of theExpedition of Hernando de Soto, by the Gentleman of Elvas.’’Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States 1528–1543. Ed.Theodore H. Lewis. New York: Scribner’s, 1907: 127-272.

Ribault, Jean. ‘‘The true discoverie of Terra Florida, 1563.’’ NewAmerican World: A Documentary History of North America to1612. Vol. 2. Ed. David B. Quinn. New York: Arno Press, 1979:285-94.

Rowlandson, Mary. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration ofMrs. Mary Rowlandson. The Norton Anthology of AmericanLiterature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York:Norton, 1985: 139-76.

Shabatay, Virginia. ‘‘The Stranger’s Story: Who Calls and WhoAnswers?’’ Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue inEducation. Ed. Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings. New York:Teachers College Press, 1991: 136-51.

Simpson, Eileen. Orphans: Real and Imaginary. New York: NewAmerican Library, 1987.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of theOther. Trans. Richard Howard. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,1999.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain:Greenwich Unabridged Library Classics. New York: Crown,1982: 141-333.

Vergil, Polydore. ‘‘Polydore Vergil on John Cabot.’’ The CabotVoyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII, Works Issuedby the Hakluyt Society, second series, No. CXX. London: TheHakluyt Society, 1961: 224-25.

Verrazzano, Giovanni da. ‘‘Translation of the Cellere Codex,’’(Letter, 1524). Trans. Susan Tarrow. The Voyages of Giovannida Verrazzano, 1524–1528. Lawrence C. Wroth. New Haven,CT: Yale UP, 1970: 133-43.

Vespucci, Amerigo. Mundus Novus: Letter to Lorenzo Pietro diMedici. Trans. George Tyler Northup. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUP, 1916.

Warner, Susan. The Wide Wide World. New York: Feminist Press,1987. First published by Putnam in 1850.

White, M. John. ‘‘The Fifth Voyage of M. John White, 1590.’’ EarlyEnglish and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534–1608.Ed. Henry S. Burrage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1934: 305-23.

Whitman, Walt. ‘‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’’ The Norton Anthologyof American Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Baym et al. NewYork: Norton, 1985: 2049-2054.

Winthrop, John. ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity.’’ The NortonAnthology of American Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Baymet al. New York: Norton, 1985: 37-50.


Lost and Found in the Americas

Documents

Transcript of Lost and Found in the Americas