ABSTRACT
Countless colonial advertisements and travelogues extolled New World beauties by employing an ancient trope—the comparison of land and woman as interchangeable objects to conquer and cultivate. By describing the New World in this familiar and expected way, travel writers hoped to make the exotic unknown accessible and desirable to their home audience. However, the very interchangeability of woman and land created opportunities for bawdy punning and satire that some apparently found irresistible. One of the most popular of these satires, A New Description of Merryland (1740), an erotic pamphlet written by Thomas Stretzer and published by Edmund Curll, parodies the use of the land-as-woman metaphor in scientific travelogues, exposing the prurient underbelly of scientific inquires into nature’s secrets. This pamphlet mocks geography and current scientific debates on reproduction while imitating the language and style of an American correspondent of the Royal Society; additionally, it surreptitiously educates its readers on methods of contraception. 1
