Old World Perceptions of the New World

Any discussion of Old World visitors' accounts of North America that predates the American Revolution must begin with the observation that until the successful completion of the Revolution the measure taken of the new land was not necessarily the measure of America but rather of Europe in America. The priorities of European geopolitics, culture, and economics, specifically Europe's needs that the New World could fill and Europe's values that the New World could receive, were almost always at the forefront of consideration.

The European agenda in the Americas must be understood to have been uppermost in the minds of those who first arrived in the New World. Attitudes regarding America were shaped from the time of the earliest explorations. Columbus's account to Ferdinand and Isabella of his first voyage to what he wrongly expected would be Asia has about it a matter-of-factness and a sense of entitlement; he records that he has "taken possession for their highnesses" the islands and the "people innumerable") that inhabited them. Diaz, a member of the 1520 Cortez expedition to Mexico, reports in his diary that the expediti

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America took hold. As Becker says: Few facts have been more potent in determining the history of America than the steady migration in search of better opportunity. . . . As early as 1633 many people at [Massachusetts] Bay, fired by favorable reports which John Oldham brought back from the Connecticut Valley, began to have "a hankering after it." In the background of Becker's description of the earliest westward movement in America are accounts by Europeans to other Europeans (not yet Americans per se) who had been to uncharted lands and reported on the possibilities there. Physical hardship does not appear to have posed much obstacle, although the 1621 diary of William Bradford, a passenger on the Mayflower who became the first governor of Plymouth and whose journal appears to have found its way to London, reports that "the whole country [Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay] represented a wild and savage hue" to those who had sailed from England. He continues: "If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which . . . separate[d] them from all the civil parts of the world." Bradford's account of the Indians' supplying the Pilgrims with food in the first harsh winter informs the folklore of American Thanksgiving. The consc
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