America's first coastal community: A cis- and circumatlantic reading of John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia

Abstract

Beginning with the recognition that early British settlements were, by necessity, coastal and therefore inextricably linked to the maritime world, this article reconciles the often problematic ethnocentric and hyperbolic aspects of John Smith's accounts of the Jamestown settlement by reading them as being influenced by maritime culture and the storytelling tradition developed by sailors in the forecastle. Applying cisatlantic and circumatlantic methodologies to Smith's representation of the coastal world of Jamestown elucidates the liminality of a settlement caught physically between land and sea and metaphorically between terrestrial and maritime culture. This transitory space is inherently contradictory, providing Jamestown with its greatest asset and greatest drawback; a complication that permeates the way John Smith understands and later writes about the settlement. Ultimately, Smith describes Jamestown as a maritime world onshore, combining aspects of British terrestrial and maritime social and literary culture to explain everything from Jamestown's physical location, to the settlers' mindset, to the horrific conditions they encountered in order to present the information to the British public in a way that would deal with the realities while minimizing public outcry. Such an understanding places The Generall Historie of Virginia as an early Atlanticist text, granting modern readers a useful avenue for approaching this often problematic work.