The World of Plymouth Plantation by Carla Gardina Pestana

Author:Carla Gardina Pestana
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

John Smith—best known for his sojourn in Virginia—wrote a detailed description of the region he dubbed “New England.” As part of his project of presenting the area as a great prospect for English colonization, he gave English place names to various locations. He claimed to have gotten Prince Charles (son of James I) to choose new names. Here he lists earlier (usually but not always native) names and the corresponding English terms in A Description of New England, 1616.

Previously—when England founded two charter companies to divide up the North American coast—each company was designated a Virginia company. One, set in London, had responsibility for the southern region, and it would become known as the Virginia Company, founding the colony of Virginia. The other, set in Plymouth, England, had charge of the northern coast (the area Smith renamed New England), but it never accomplished much. In fact, in the same year that the Mayflower sailed, that company was reorganized into the Council for New England, adopting the area’s new name to distinguish it from the southern undertaking. The Council produced a promotional publication that cited Smith’s naming, endorsing his efforts to reshape the northern region into a linguistically new England. Sir William Alexander soon published a different map, one that showed how elite men in England had hypothetically carved up the area, giving each man his own domain.4 According to that way of thinking, English names would be followed by English overlords who owned the land and supplied men to work it. This quasi-feudal view of how to manage expansion did not prosper, as new arrivals paid little attention to Alexander’s elites, who did less for the region’s development than they might have. Smith’s vision had more staying power, as the idea of creating English-style towns bearing the names of English places gradually conquered the landscape. Not all the names offered by Smith and the prince remained, but the project itself proved a success.

Plymouth Plantation may have been so named because of Smith’s map. The planters apparently carried it and the place-name list on the initial voyage, and their town was founded in the general vicinity of the place marked as Plymouth. For those conscious of earlier English claims to the area, Plymouth had another resonance as well. The English investment company known as the Virginia Company of Plymouth theoretically held the territory, so the planters may have meant to reference the company that they hoped to approach for belated permission to set up on Cape Cod Bay. Plymouth chronicler Nathaniel Morton later offered a third explanation for the name’s origins, stating that it honored the city from which they had sailed.5 However Plymouth came to be so named—in a nod to Smith’s map and Prince Charles’s naming exercise, in reference to the company, or in memory of the English port city—the planters supported the effort to rename the landscape with English place names.

The naming scheme, from Smith’s viewpoint, declared that the region was so similar to England itself that its new residents would be easily able to form it into a new England.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.