Elizabethans and America

 

The soil is the most plentiful, sweet, and wholesome of all the world.

 

We were entertained with all love and kindness with as much bounty after their manner as they could possibly devise.  We found the people [to be] most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason and such as lived after the manner of the
Golden Age.  The earth bringeth forth all things in abundance as in the first creation, without toil or labor.

                        --Arthur Barlow, A New Land Like unto That of the Golden Age (1584)

 

We have discovered the main [part of the land] to be the goodliest soil under the cope of heaven, so abounding with sweet trees that bring such sundry rich and most pleasant gums, grapes of such greatness, yet wild, as France, Spain, nor Italy hath no greater . . .Besides that, it is the goodliest and most pleasing territory of the world and the climate so wholesome that we have not had one sick since we touched the land here.  To conclude, if Virginia had but horses and kine [cattle] in some reasonable proportion, I dare assure myself, being inhabited with English, no realm in Christendom were comparable to it.

                        --Ralph Lane, Letter to Richard Hakluyt, (1585)

 

Scapethrift: But is there such treasure there, Captain, as I have heard?

Captain Seagull: I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us, and for as much red copper as I can bring, I’ll have thrice the weight in gold.  Why, man, all their dripping-pans and their chamber pots are pure gold, and all their chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold.  All the prisoners are fettered in gold.  And for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather them by the sea-shore to hang on their children’s coats and stick in their caps, as commonly as out children wear saffron gilt brooches and groats with holes in them.

Scapethirft: And is it a pleasant country withal?

Captain Seagull: As ever the sun shined on, temperate and full of all sorts of excellent viands.  Wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon is here, venison as mutton.  And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers . . .

                        --Eastward Ho, a play by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston (1605)

 

                                    To get the pearl and gold

                                    And ours to hold,

                                    Virginia,

                                    Earth’s only Paradise,

 

                                    Where nature hath in store

                                    Fowl, venison, and fish,

                                    And the fruitful’st soil

                                    Without your toil

                                    Three harvest more

                                    All greater than you wish.

                        --Michael Drayton, “Ode to the Virginia Voyage” (1606)