This text is part of:
[10]
But Captain Smith's True Relation impresses us, like Mark Twain's Roughing it, with being somehow true to type.
In each of these books the possible unveracities in detail are a confirmation of their representative American character.
In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of centuries, a general concept of “the pioneer.”
Novelists, poets, and historians have elaborated this conception.
Nothing is more inevitable than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated or even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler.
Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating hither in 1637.
If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics of “my brave Oliver” would today be identified with the “American” qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay?
And what an American settler Cromwell would have made!
If we turn from physical and moral daring to the
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.