Introduction

The history of America is very much a history of a nation connected to the sea. It was via the Atlantic that the continent was “discovered,” and it was across this same ocean that North America was settled by Europeans. Many of these settlers wrote revealing accounts of their travels in journals and notebooks. In March 1630, Englishman John Winthrop and a collection of his compatriots sailed from Southampton for America aboard the Arbella. Winthrop had been chosen Governor by the Massachusetts Bay Company, and he used this leadership role as a motivation for composing his famous “Model of Christian Charity” onboard the ship. Here, Winthrop delineates his vision for “a City upon a Hill” and warns his subjects: “Now the onely way to avoyde…shipwracke and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah; to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.”1 Fearful of a shipwreck on this perilous journey, Winthrop believes that adherence to religious principles will assure the safe arrival of his party. His concerns about the dangers of ocean travel were not unique among early American sea travelers, however. Reliant on successful ocean journeys to reach the New World, the Puritan mission was invariably tied to the sea. Donald Wharton explains: “For immigrants in the colonial period (and later times as well), the transatlantic crossing was both the trial by which one began a new life and a metaphor for the transition into a life of grace.”2 However, after arriving at this new place, a settler’s life was full of difficulties. As Philip Fisher argues, foremost was the need for “a ‘clear land’ where a ‘new world’ might be built.”3 Only when the continent was “clear” of natives, settlers believed, could “superior” Anglo-Saxons assert their political, religious, and economic control over the new territory. Hence, for European voyagers, the sea journey was just the beginning of a Western imperial mission that saw its culmination in the colonization of America.