Perceptions of the New World

The earliest voyages to America had a dual mission: gold and God, more or less(prenominal) in that order. When Cortez lectures Montezuma on idolatry and human sacrifice and suggests that he and his men replace the (gold-plated) god figurines from the temple with a cross, the demo is the ace of European entitlement. Ironically, as Diaz says, the autochthonal peoples entertained a myth of prophecy that conquerors "would come from the direction of the sunrise to sway over these lands." The first accounts of the Americas came from adventurers and opportunists associated with the most profoundly hierarchical European power. The accounts established a pattern of dominance that persisted as the indigenous peoples were pushed aside to accommodate the Europeans

Sir Walter Raleigh's first voyage to America, more exactly Virginia, took place in 1584, and he made several voyages in that location until on his last return in 1618 he expend victim to court intrigue on the part of the Spanish ambassador and was beheaded for treason. By and large, Raleigh's accounts of Virginia focus on the abundance of the land that could furnish permanent settlements. He cites flaxe, hempe, furres, deers skinnes dressed by and by the maner of Chamoes, or undressed, wine, cedar, oile, iron, copper, pearle, sweet gummes of divers kinds, and many other apothecary drugges, and so on. Raleigh even reports the abundance of silkworms and predicts "but if arte be added in planting of Mulberie trees . . . for the

European accounts of America that emerged as the land became more settled and as a distinctive American character was shaped attempt to give an adequate account of that distinctiveness. The both most famed commentators were French, J. Hector St. John de CrFvecoeur (1735-1790), and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). CrFvecoeur's earns from an American Farmer appeared in print in 1782, in the waning period of the American Revolution. The back story of the Letters is that CrFvecoeur, who had come to Canada in 1755 as a French soldier and later married a colonial woman and settled on a put forward in parvenu York colony. When the Revolution did come to the American colonies, CrFvecoeur appears to cast been struck by the revolution's extremism; he favored the Loyalists.

He became a French consul in New York in 1783, effectively abandoning American citizenship. He returned to France, where he died. Mazlish says that CrFvecoeur never quite settled on a national identity. This did not prevent him, however, from trying to potpourri out the identity of his fellow Americans, particularly in Letter III:

Wilentz, Sean. "Striving for Democracy." Wilson Quarterly 23 (Spring 1999): 47-54.

_______. "The Discovery of Virginia." Travellers' Tales. Ed. Jay Du Bois. New York: Everybody's Vacation Publishing Co., 1940. 167-81.

Smith then proceeds to rationalize that the Jamestown colonists sent a gift to Powhatan consisting of a millstone and two small cannons. A demonstration of cannon fire, "being stiff with stone, among the boughs of a great tree loaded with cicles, the ice and branches came so tumbling down, that the poor savages ran away half dead with fear." The sense of adventure, combined wth the evidence of goodwill toward the primitive people and with the situation of Smith's return to England from Jamestown, appears to have fostered a perception that the New area could be experienced in the expectation of some safety. In that regard, the Pilgrims bound for Plymouth under the leadersh
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