Tales of Misery and Woe

Abstract

Tales of Misery and Woe Matthew Mulcahy (bio) Kathleen Donegan. Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 288pages. Notes and index. $49.95. Amy Mitchell-Cook. A Sea of Misadventures: Shipwreck and Survival in Early America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013. ix + 229 pages. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Almost thirty years ago, John C. Burnham wrote a short essay in Perspectives entitled “A Neglected Field: The History of Natural Disasters.”1 Burnham had become interested in the topic after being invited to serve on a team of academics investigating the impact of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake. He rushed to the library in search of materials on the history of earthquakes, but he found only antiquarian or journalistic (and often sensationalist) accounts with no real analysis. Feeling he had little to contribute as a historian, Burnham stayed home from the trip, but the experience alerted him to the important work on disasters being undertaken by sociologists, political scientists, and others. A few “pioneering” historical studies had appeared by the time Burnham taught a graduate seminar in the mid-1980s, but the field remained relatively underdeveloped. He put out his call for more research in 1988. Burnham’s essay is not cited as frequently as it should be, but his call for greater attention to historical disasters has been more than fulfilled. Far from being neglected, the history of disasters has become a vibrant and innovative subfield. A flood (avalanche?—pick your disaster metaphor) of works has appeared on library shelves in recent years. In some cases, historians have focused on individual events, such as the Great Chicago Fire or the 1927 Mississippi River flood, narrating both the event itself as well as tracing its impact on social relations, political policies, or urban design, among other topics. Others use various disasters as a lens through which to explore larger preexisting social, political, economic, and cultural conditions at a particular time or place. Still others have investigated the place of disasters in American popular consciousness across time. Much of this work is interdisciplinary in the best sense, drawing on diverse sources and literatures in an effort to make [End Page 434] sense of disasters and their effects on past societies. Much of it has also focused on the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries (some variant on “the making of modern America” often appears in subtitles), but scholars increasingly are turning to earlier periods as well, including the colonial era. The books under review here are part of this expanding literature and share several features. Both focus on a select group of texts: in Mitchell-Cook’s case, 100 shipwreck narratives; in Kathleen Donegan’s, a few classic accounts written by colonists detailing the early history of colonial settlements. Both are concerned with issues of identity in one form or other. And both focus on the failure or near-failure of voyages and settlements. Nevertheless, these are quite different books, covering different time periods, asking different questions, and employing different methodologies. They also differ in their approach to the idea of disaster. Mitchell-Cook focuses on a single kind of event—the shipwreck—and traces how survivors (and readers) made sense of such events across several centuries. Donegan offers a more expansive view of disaster in a shorter time frame. For her, catastrophe refers to a variety of events—“mass starvation, sieges, mutinies, desecrated corpses, slaughtered children, shipwrecks, fire, delusional fantasies, and abandonment” (p. 5)—but also to the general state of affairs in the early years of Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, where such events seemed to come one after another. She focuses less on the history of particular events than on how such events created conditions that overwhelmed colonists, overturned their understanding of “settlement,” undermined their links to England, and shaped a distinct colonial identity. It is not a history of disasters so much as an engaging and thought-provoking account of the place of disaster and failure in the colonial origins of the American imagination. Donegan argues that while historians have long highlighted the failure of Roanoke, the litany of troubles and temporary abandonment of Jamestown, and...