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A Basket of Fishhooks
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20390 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
1,767 Words |
| Author
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Bil Gilbert
Bil Gilbert is the author of God Gave Us This Country:
Tecumseh and the First American Civil War (1989), Our Nature
(1987), Westering Man (1985), Chulo: a Year Among the
Coatimunidis (1984) and In God's Countries (1984). |
THE EARLY AMERICAN WILDEARNESS AS THE EXPLORERS SAW IT
Bill Lawrence
New York: Paragon House, 1991
245 pp., $ 23.95
As have many others, Bill Lawrence carefully points out that Western Europeans who commenced arriving in the late fifteenth century were in the last wave of travelers from abroad to reach their Western Hemisphere. It was new only to them, since in the previous thirty thousand years or so, many others from elsewhere had found and thoroughly investigated their continents. However, unlike their predecessors, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, English, and their cultural kin made and left written records. Thus, they have come to be commonly thought of as the first explorers of the new world. At the present, there is considerable academic and popular interest in them, basically because the first of these people got here in 1492 and anniversaries with many zeros attached are proved attention-getters.
Lawrence restricts himself to North America and the classical period of European exploration from the time the first sailors made landfall to the Lewis and Clark expedition. He provides sufficient explanatory material to put their enterprises into narrative context but, for the most part, is content to let the participants speak for themselves through journals and reports. This book is not, and is not intended to be, more than a panoramic introduction, but by allowing, without polemical commentary, by the people of the time to describe their own experiences, Lawrence humanizes the early explorers and makes them plausible to the extent it is still possible. This is a useful approach particularly at his time, when many dealing with the same general subject are excessively preoccupied, it seems to me, with what these Europeans should have done and been (by standards of the late twentieth century).
They set off overtly as agents of great patrons and powers, looking for fame and fortune. But, according to their own testimony, they all seem to have been driven by remarkably similar personal motives, which were essentially psychic. The ultimate West was the Great Unknown, and because it was there they sought it. Now, circumstances having so greatly changed, it is very difficult to credit how powerfully there were driven by pure environmental curiosity.
When they finally came to places where they commenced seeing, hearing, and smelling unknown things, they were understandably
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