Authors
Thomas Harriot (1560-1621)
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Among the English accounts of the New World, Harriot's Brief and True Report gains distinction from its association with the famous "Lost Colony" at Roanoke Island, a mystery which paradoxically helped to give later colonists, and citizens of the American republic, a way of engaging imaginatively with wilderness. A landscape haunted by English ghosts is, after all, a landscape that ghost-loving English men and women can connect with.
1. Harriot's Brief and True Report may read like a grocery list of cultural traits for the Native Americans near the Roanoke Island fort, but observation of another culture is always an act of selection. What customs, cultural practices, and technologies does he select and emphasize? Why would these especially interest him and his implied audience?
2. Harriot describes a Native American belief which provokes "wonderful admiration" in the European visitors: "There could at no time happen any strange sickness, losses, hurts, or any other cross unto them, but that they would impute to us the cause or means thereof, for offending or not pleasing us." Harriot finds it strange, in other words, that the native peoples would seek supernatural explanations for all sorts of natural misfortunes. Were the European colonists themselves free of such beliefs? Think about historical narratives of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, from Bradford through Rowlandson and Mather, and try some comparisons.