Newfoundland - Bibliography

by R. Wesley Atkinson (January 2004) and Edward J. Gallagher (May 2006)

Andrews, Kenneth.  Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.  183-99.

"Gilbert's own faults certainly helped to make his failure so calamitous, but the circumstances and conditions of the time greatly limited his chances of success."  Gilbert and Raleigh associated colonization with hurting Spain, but not Carleill or Peckham.  Gilbert ignored the Indian, Hayes focused on conversion of the Indian, Carleill concentrated on economic potential, and Peckham described conquering the Indian for Christian purposes, implying economic value.  "Anglo-Saxon attitudes to the natives of North America, whether more or less hopeful, more or less concerned, were as yet rather vague and formless, having little foundation in knowledge and practically none in direct experience."

Cell, Gillian T.  Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610-1630.  London: Hakluyt Society, 1982.

Complementing Quinn on the earlier period, this is "the" place for primary documents on the later period of colonization, with, in addition to a substantial introduction covering the history of the various colonies, sections on John Guy, Richard Whitbourne, Lord Falkland, and George Calvert.

Edwards, Philip.  "Edward Hayes Explains away Sir Humphrey Gilbert."  Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 6.3-4 (1992): 270-86.

The westward movement of Christianity will end in America, bringing about the end of the world.  But in this endeavor "it was God's will that Gilbert should fail.  Hayes's narrative is a grim study in the necessity of failure."  "Hayes's aim is to 'explain away' the disaster as not inherent in the enterprise itself, and to promote further discovery and settlement in" Newfoundland.  "He shows Gilbert as a man sacrificed by God."

Fitzmaurice, Andrew.  "The  Moral Philosophy of Tudor Colonisation" and "Newfoundland and Nova Scotia."  Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.  39-50, 92-97.

"Following a Ciceronian position, promoters [of the Gilbert project] in general insist that all senses of profit or expedience are to be subordinate to virtue and  honour."  Hence the centrality of the Themistocles/Aristide story in Peckham.  Hence the image in Hayes of Gilbert as a "flawed man" who sought gain rather than glory.  After Gilbert's death in 1583, there were several attempts to establish colonies in Newfoundland in the 1620s.  The promoters were often themselves actively involved in establishing the colonies, but they were more successful at publishing than establishing.  Discussions of the works of Eburne, Alexander, Gordon.

Franklin, Wayne.   "A Parting of the Ways."  Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.  143-52.

Detailed analysis of Edward Hayes's optimistic handling of Gilbert's death: "The Gilbert undertaking is not seen as a single enclosed event, mysterious in the suffering which it contains -- a profound symbol of history --but rather as an episode in the eventual success of English intention."

---.  "Profit and Loss."  Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.  87-94.

Detailed analysis of Christopher Carleill's A Brief and Summary Discourse upon the Intended Voyage to the Furthermost Parts of America (1583): "Carleill thus tries to bring America into the English mind -- to make it seem like a reasonable place for new endeavors -- as well as to bring the English mind into America."

Fuller, Mary C.  "Early Ventures: Writing under the Gilbert and Ralegh Patents."  Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1995.  16-54.

Contrasts celebratory works supporting Gilbert's expedition, but written beforehand, with Harriot's first-person account.  "Unlike the poems which argued that Gilbert's voyages brought moral grandeur through suffering, [Harriot's] Report was focused, authoritative, and scientific, setting its information against unhappy colonists who indulged in empty or idle criticisms of the colony."

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. "Sir Humphrey Gilbert." The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1893. 105.

Poem focusing on Gilbert's death: "He sat upon the deck, / The Book was in his hand; / 'Do not fear! Heaven is as near,' / He said, 'by water as by land!'"

 

Mackenthun, Gesa.  "Books for Empire: The Colonial Program of Richard Hakluyt."  Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637.  Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997.  22-70.

"It is [Hakluyt's] almost invisible strategy of tampering that I examine at some length in the following sections.  Precisely because of their infrequency and near invisibility, Hakluyt's interventions into some of the texts he collected can be read as symptomatic passages within the emerging English discourse of colonialism, passages where the texture of the narratives forms knots and flaws that may give us insight into some hidden fears and motives of European colonialism."

Netzloff, Mark.  "Writing Britain from the Margins: Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Projects for American Colonization."  Prose Studies 25.2 (2002): 1-24.

"Through a discussion of figures such as William Alexander, Robert Gordon, Henry Cary, George Calvert, and William Vaughan, this study explores the colonial contexts of early modern formulations of 'British' identity . . . from positions of marginality" not only geographically but also from "efforts to offset London's centralized control."

Porter, H. C.  "The Lure of Norumbega" and "Humphrey Gilbert and the Newfound Lands, 1583."  The Inconstant Savage: England and the North American Indian, 1500-1660.  London: Duckworth, 1979. 192-223.

Detailed sketch of the entire Gilbert project, with special emphasis on describing the works by Peckham and Hayes.

Quinn, David B.  "Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Newfoundland."  Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625.   London: Ronceverte, 1990.  207-23.

Excellent concise account of the history and significance of the place and of the man's role: "Gilbert went further, almost into fantasy we might think, and on feudal precedents formed ideas of a great new state in America, a territory which he would head as Lord Paramount, which worked downward from him through a hierarchy of great and lesser landholders to mere tenants of small holdings at the bottom."

---, ed.   Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.  2 vols.  London, Hakluyt Society, 1940.

"The" place for primary documents by, about, and in relation to Gilbert -- nearly 150 entries, including works by Carleill, Hayes, Peckham.  See Cell for primary works on the later period of colonization.

Seed, Patricia.  "Houses, Gardens, and Fences: Signs of English Possession in the New World."  Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New  World, 1492-1640.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.  16-40.

Seed "explores the array of ceremonies that Europeans performed to enact their  taking possession of the New World."   "Accounts of English occupation of the New World usually begin by describing ordinary house-building activity."  The English constructed their right to occupy the New World on "building houses and fences and planting gardens."  "The action of the colonists in the New World was planting"; the colonies were "plantations."  "Planting the garden was an act of taking possession . . . . It was not a law that entitled Englishmen to possess the New World, it was an action which established their rights."

Sweet, Timothy.  "Economy, Ecology, and Utopia in Early Colonial Promotional Literature."  American Literature 71. 3 (1999): 399-427.

"The sixteenth-century promoters articulated, arguably for the first time, the paradigm of growth that has since become natiralized in political and economic discourse. . . . The early promoters describe the late-sixteenth-century English economy as increasingly entropic, requiring new capacities for input and output to achieve a steady state characterized by full employment and social stability."  Hakluyts, Gilbert, Peckham, Carleill.

Williams, Robert A., Jr.  The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.  New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Ireland, where "Elizabethan Terrorist" Humphrey Gilbert served was a training ground for American colonization.  Gilbert, the first Englishman to receive a patent for America, was a combination of Genghis Khan and Machiavelli's Prince.  His expedition failed but produced important documents in the development of conquest discourse.  Edward Hayes, "the Puritan explorer," viewed "English conquest of America in terms of a covenant between God and the English."  And George Peckham incorporated Victoria's (Vittoria) ideas into what, in essence, is "the first English-language legal treatise on the justice of appropriating the New World from the American Indians."

Wright, Louis B.  "The Preachers' Plea for Newfoundland."  Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558-1625.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1943.  134-49.

Focuses on the second wave of interest in Newfoundland during the 1620s.  Discussion of works by Mason, Whitbourne, Alexander, and Eburne.

---.  "Richard Hakluyt: Preacher and Imperialist."  Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558-1625.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1943.  33-57.

Hakluyt, the Apostle of Empire, "had a vision and a mission.  His life was consecrated to the great task of arousing his countrymen to opportunities overseas and the duty of Englishmen to seize vast sleeping empires for their sovereign and their God. The quiet labors of this man of religion exerted a greater influence on English expansion than the deeds of any other single Englishman in the sixteenth century."