Seventeenth-Century North American Travel Narratives: Nation-ness and Self-Reflectivity

Much critical analysis has been dedicated to exploring the relationship between European and foreign societies to expose the often oppressive aspects of European imperialist expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as these develop into a consciousness of colonialism. For example, Nabil Matar discusses the 'superimposition' of England's American identity upon un-colonizable Muslims. Matar notes, 'Unable to defeat the Muslims, as [the English] had the American Indians, and unable to situate them in a world view convenient to their colonial and millennial goals, as they had done with the Americans, writers and illustrators applied constructions of differentiation from the American Indians to the Muslims.'1 In order to maintain a sense of national superiority, the English would superimpose 'the moral constructions they had devised to legitimate the colonization and ... the destruction of the Indians on the Muslims'. This superimposition of identity serves an important role in the English consciousness of strengthening English people's conception of themselves and figuratively weakening the Muslims. Matar continues, 'Superimposition provided them with a strategy to confront the non-Christian Other, and helped them redress their colonial and cultural inadequacies before other European countries such as Spain and France.'2 The English would overlay a constructed Amerindian identity upon the Muslims as a means of enervating the political, cultural, and colonial power inherent in the spread of Islam.While I agree with Matar's assertion that this superimposition provides a means to orient the English in experiencing Islamic society, I maintain that he neglects an important aspect of this interchange: the reciprocity inherent within one culture's interaction with another. Not only does England's imposition of an identity provide an orienting means to bring the cultures together, to experience one another, it serves concurrently to subvert and alter the home culture's very notion and conception of itself as it experiences the foreign culture.3 I will use Benedict Anderson's concept of nationness and Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to detail how European travel narratives by representative and influential travel writers at chronologically decisive points in the seventeenth century document the alteration of the European consciousness as it experiences the foreign. Specifically, early seventeenth-century travel accounts by Adam Smith and Samuel de Champlain point to the influence of universalism within the mindset of the Europeans as they moved into North-American frontiers: whether in viewing the land or the peoples, Europeans regarded all through the lens of Christian and European virtues. Later seventeenth-century travel narratives by John Josselyn and Baron de Lahontan, however, point towards recognizing and accepting particularism: that is, particular cultural differences validate certain foreign cultural practices in European minds.4As the Europeans first encountered the foreign, they thought of themselves as a people belonging to a loose association of communities that subscribe to one religion and set of values: Christendom. This universalizing notion of Christendom orients Europeans to the experiences of the foreign.5 For example, in 1600 on his journey to the West Indies, James Lancaster carried letters of diplomacy written by Queen Elizabeth. In one letter to the King of Aceh, she writesThe eternal God, of his divine knowledge and providence, hath so disposed His blessings and good things of His creation for the use and nourishment of mankind, in such sort: that notwithstanding they growe in diuers kingdomes and regions of the world, yet, by the industrie of man (stirred up by the inspiration of the said omnipotent Creator) they are dispersed into the most remote places of the universall world; to that end, that euen therin may appeare unto all nations His maruellous workes.6In this letter from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Aceh, the Queen couches her diplomatic rhetoric in very medieval, Christian-universalizing terms. …