Continental Drift

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re casting off in search of islands with stories to tell about the American past. In the first part of our show, we heard about two island territories that came to be governed under the US flag. We’re going to rewind now to a time well before that flag existed, to a time when a small island to our east held dominion over a significant portion of the globe.

PETER: After word reached Europe of a new world, cartographers immediately begin to map it. And those very first maps reflected, in many ways, the wishful thinking of those who made them.

At least from the late 15th century onwards, there had been hopes of finding islands that could perhaps bring riches to the merchants and sailors that were exploring out there.

ED: This is James Horn, a historian of early English colonization in the new world. He says that those early explorers had their sights set not on the Americas, but on the Far East and India, and so imagined the lands they encountered in the Atlantic as waste stations to those eastern riches.

This fantasy, says Horn, is reflected in those early maps. Like the dragon’s and sea creatures you can see on them, many of the islands they depict are based on legends that dated back centuries.

JAMES HORN: I think this is where it’s interesting how myth gets translated into reality. Islands that are placed on maps– maybe map-makers have more to do with exploration than purely recordingexplorations. They’re actually predicting it– where these islands are placed on maps. Antilia would be another one, which, when Columbus does discover the West Indies, the West Indies become be called the Antillies in direct reference to this imaginary island out there in the mid-Atlantic. The Isle of Brasil would be another one– so a whole number of these mythical islands that you see in these early maps of the Atlantic.ED: Well, one of the things that’s clear from the study of maps and European geography is that it’s not quite clear what a continent is at first.We were talking about land masses. And what they were looking for for a long time after they became aware of the land mass of North Americawas a northwest passage– a way through it. JAMES HORN: Well, that’s right. And these ideas were based on the map from 1529, the Vespucci map, which shows a great arm of the Pacific Ocean way into the land mass that, whereby the Chesapeake region, the mid-Atlantic region, pretty much becomes an isthmus. So talking about islands, the– [LAUGH] the other theme here is the appeal of the isthmus, where you’re on a land bridge between two oceanic systems.

ED: So, Jim, you’re saying that the English didn’t want to discover a great continent? They wanted a bunch of convenient islands, because they were really looking further to the east, or the west. JAMES HORN: Yeah. I think so. And I think, initially, at least, from the point of view of taking advantage of fishing, of whaling, maybe trading with local peoples– islands were ideal for that purpose. It comes as, I think, a little bit of a blow to many Americans to realize that America was, of course, a barrierto where the Europeans really wanted to go, which was beyond the islands to the Far East. But on the way, there was profitable trade from those islands.

ED: So, Jim, when does the continent of North America, that great land mass, being to loom large in the calculations of the English Crown and colonizers?

JAMES HORN: I think early on there certainly isn’t awareness of a large land mass. And there certainly is a great excitement about the potential riches that that promises. But I think the continental viewpoint, both from a strategic and from a profit point of view, is really a vision of the 18th century. And I think that there is a desire to– in the same way that early colonizers used an island as a base. So Britain becomes the base, an island base, for a vast commercial empire.

PETER: So in 1776, Thomas Paine writes Common Sense and makes the famous argument that an island should not give rule to a continent. That must have– it would have sounded strange to the ears of Englishmen in the 17th century, and even Britain’s in the 18th century. JAMES HORN: I think it would have sounded ridiculous, actually [LAUGH]– maybe to Englishmen in the 19th or the earliest 20th century, too.

PETER: [LAUGH] Right. Exactly. Interesting that the Americans of the revolutionary era called themselves continental– the Continental Congress, and the Continental Army. And that was a direct comparison to Britain, the island.

JAMES HORN: Well, curiously, even today English people, British people distinguish themselves from Europe, and sometimes refer to Europeans as Continentals.

PETER: [LAUGH]

JAMES HORN: [LAUGH] So we still have slight wear in us of Continentals.

PETER: Well, Americans overcame their disappointment with not having easy access to the Pacific Ocean, though that took a long time, since that was still a dream in the 19th century, and to decided that they had a great empire of their own on the land. JAMES HORN: Yeah. It’s maybe a little bit unclear as to what point they thought to themselves that having a great territorial mass would be an advantage. When you think about the extent of Europe and into Asia, these are, if you like, continents of countries. They’re not single, continental-wide nations. PETER: Yes.

JAMES HORN: So there needed to be, in the 18th and early 19th century, a shift in thinking that could embrace a continental-sized nation.

PETER: James Horn is the president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. He is also the author of books on the colonies of Jamestownand Roanoke Island.