We must now glance at the various
aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in
their books.
CHAPTER II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE
The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of
records of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters
written from California in 1849 to the "folks back East."
Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they
describe the new world, explain the present situation of the
colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John
Smith's "True Relation," already alluded to, is the typical
production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager
energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant
instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he
cannot help poetizing in his prose. Codfishing is to him a
"sport"; "and what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and
lesse hurt or charge then angling with a hooke, and crossing the
sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, over the silent streams of a calme
Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also capable of very plain
speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes back to
the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When you send
again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters,
husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and
diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of
such as we have.
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