ABSTRACT
Modern readers tend to suppose that crossing the Atlantic was a sharp break with the past, a new beginning. But the settlers themselves rarely saw their transit as final. In the texts of this chapter, English emigrants to new colonies work out the meaning of migration. Diaspora literally means dispersion, or scattering; its association with the dispersion of the Jews gives it the connotation of being away from a homeland. Not all the authors in this chapter would have compared themselves to the jews as readily as the New England Puritans did, but all saw themselves as Englishmen away from England. None imagined that migration had made him American. Many, including John Smith and Edward Winslow, returned to England before they died, like Hariot before them.
