[Moran:] My critical method is based on Ernest G. Bormann's theory of symbolic convergence and his method of fantasy-theme analysis. This communication theory has rarely been used in technical communication (see, however, Moran, "Fantasy Theme"), but it seems appropriate to do so given the interdisciplinary nature of research methodologies in the area. The approach holds great promise by offering a method for shaping and interpreting the results of research into historical documents and therefore has significance beyond this particular essay. While the method has not been widely used in technical communication, it is well-established in speech communication, where it has been used to analyze both spoken and written discourse. [...]
Among the earliest examples of English commercial communication produced with first-hand, systematic knowledge about any region in North America are the three major reports written by explorers and colonists sent in the 1580's by Sir Walter Raleigh to settle the area now known as the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
In 1584 Raleigh received from Queen Elizabeth a letter of patent to settle any region of North America not inhabited by a Christian prince, and Raleigh immediately sponsored a reconnaissance voyage to the Outer Banks under the command of Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas to explore the region. This expedition stayed for about five months. It contacted the Roanoke Indians there, and conducted a superficial economic survey. Barlowe, a member of Raleigh's household, wrote a short narrative report of the findings, concluding that the land was rich and the Roanokes were friendly and anxious to trade for English finished goods.
Soon after the expedition's return to England, Raleigh dispatched his first real colony in 1585 under the leadership of one of his distant relations, Sir Richard Grenville. Upon making land on the Outer Banks, Grenville explored parts of the region and then returned home, leaving the colony of 107 Englishmen, mostly soldiers, under the command of Governor Ralph Lane. This colony remained almost a year and produced two conflicting reports.
In his Discourse, which served as an apologia to justify his own failed governorship (see Moran, "Lane's"), Lane concluded that little of value existed in Virginia itself.
This conclusion, which brought into doubt the commercial potential of Raleigh's colony, was answered by Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report on the New Found Land of Virginia, which responded to Lane's criticism point by point by arguing for the commercial potential of the region to planters willing to settle in Virginia, merchants willing to trade there, and industrialists willing to make use of its many commodities valuable to English industries. [...]
When the Ralph Lane colony returned to England in 1586, exhausted and demoralized after a disheartening year in Virginia, Raleigh faced a number of problems that threatened his colonization movement. Perhaps most importantly, he found that a group, including Lane, had formed around Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's Principall Secretary, that was hostile to Raleigh's plans to colonize the region.
This group expressed its hostility in two ways. First, soon after returning, Lane produced his Discourse, which presented three major arguments that threatened Raleigh's interests in North America. The first argument presented the natives of the region as largely hostile and treacherous, a far different portrayal than was found in the Barlowe report of the previous year (Barlowe; Moran, "Fantasy Theme"). Lane's second argument was even more striking: the governor concluded that the region itself offered little potential for future economic development.
Further colonization of Virginia was worth pursuing, Lane argued, only if something more valuable than the land and its agricultural commodities were discovered: he mentions a passage to Cathay, a productive mine, or a deep water port to support English privateering against Spanish interests in the New World.
The third argument was potentially the most devastating. Lane claimed that God removed the colony from Virginia and returned to England aboard Sir Francis Drake's fleet, strongly implying that God did not support Raleigh's efforts. The report's conclusions were damaging enough, but these criticisms were supplemented by complaints of disgruntled colonists, some of them scions of noble families, who returned to England to spin additional grievances about their experiences in Virginia. These men apparently complained about not finding appropriate foods to eat, being mistreated by superiors, and not discovering sources of wealth.
If he hoped to keep his colonization plans alive, Raleigh recognized that he and his group of supporters had to deflect the negative themes of Walsingham's group with another, more positive view of Virginia. To produce a report that expressed his group's themes and rhetorical vision, he turned to Thomas Hariot to produce, with the help of others in the group, a countervailing report. This rejoinder needed to appear quickly, because Raleigh had already sent his 1587 colony to Virginia under the governorship of White, Hariot's associate in 1585.
Raleigh needed to shore up support for his colony among the government officials, merchants, adventurers, Anglican divines, explorers, industrialists, military leaders, privateers, and colonists who potentially shared an interest in the English colonization movement. Colonization offered access to great wealth and power, Raleigh believed, and he had to convince the English nation that planting a colony in Virginia would benefit England commercially.
THOMAS HARIOT
Raleigh assigned Hariot, his primary assistant in the colonization projects, the task of arguing the benefits of colonizing Virginia. Hariot was as well prepared as anyone in England to make this argument. He had been educated at Oxford, where he matriculated in 1577 when he was 17. While studying there until 1580, Hariot associated with the few English scholars at the time interested in the intersection of mathematics, navigation, geography, and colonization.
I will emphasize two of the most significant academic connections he nurtured. Evidence suggests that at Oxford Hariot met Hakluyt, who was eight years Hariot's senior and one of England's foremost advocates of colonization in the following decades. Hakluyt enjoyed a brilliant career as a geographer, publicist, and editor of reports on voyages and explorations by the English nation, producing the first edition in 1589 of his Principall Navigations. Hariot, John W. Shirley argues, gravitated towards the older man because of common interests in colonization (Thomas Harriot 58-60), and Hakluyt probably steered Hariot in Raleigh's direction. Hariot also studied mathematics and astronomy at Oxford, even though these subjects were in intellectual decline at the time.
Hariot probably also associated with Thomas Allen, one of Oxford's few faculty members interested in the period's new science (Shirley 61). Allen collected the latest manuscripts, books, and instruments connected with mathematics and astronomy and played a central role in Hariot's becoming one of the England's important mathematicians.
It was Hariot's interests in applying mathematics and astronomy to questions of navigation that made him valuable to Raleigh. Once Hariot entered Raleigh's service, he assisted his master in many ways, especially as Raleigh began in earnest his efforts to colonize Virginia.
Certainly one of Hariot's primary responsibilities was to teach English sea captains the principles of open sea navigation. England had fallen behind Spain and Portugal in these arts. While Portuguese seamen were sailing around the Horn of Africa to Asia and while Spanish ships were hauling home the treasures of South America and the West Indies, English seamen, with some notable exceptions, continued hugging the coasts in small vessels to trade and fish and therefore had not gained the experience needed for transatlantic voyages.
Navigating across the Atlantic to the New World required knowledge of mathematics, trigonometry, and astronomy that was not well understood in England. If Raleigh hoped to be more successful than his older half brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who died at sea on his return voyage from Northumbria (near today's Massachusetts) in 1583, the younger brother would have to develop a better understanding of navigation. Sir Francis Drake, who had completed his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580, recognized the need for better knowledge of navigation and called for schools to teach English sea captains the art.
Raleigh turned to Hariot to develop this body of knowledge, and by the spring of 1584, Hariot was teaching a course in navigation to sea captains at Raleigh's residence, Durham House.
To be able to teach the subject effectively, Hariot had to move beyond what he had learned at Oxford by studying a range of subjects connected with navigation. These subjects included learning to use standard navigational instruments, including the astrolabe, cross staff, and sextant; mastering the mathematics necessary to determine one's position on the open sea; creating sea charts and maps; and learning the basics of astronomy so that pilots could navigate by the stars and sun.
Hariot systematized this body of knowledge in his Arcticon, a now-lost book of navigational principles designed to train Raleigh's sea captains.
While Hariot's contributions to navigation were seminal, Raleigh used Hariot to support other aspects of the colonization efforts. One of the young assistant's most significant contributions was his skills as a cartographer, which required the knowledge of various angle-measuring devices, such as the sextant and cross staff, and surveying instruments, including the plane table. In 1585-1586, Hariot and White conducted the first thorough survey of the region now known as the Outer Banks of North Carolina from about Secotan north to the southern shore of the Chesapeake Bay and produced a series of maps that set the standard for accuracy in North American cartography for almost a century.
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While it is possible that Hariot sailed to the Outer Banks in 1584 with Barlowe and Amadas, there is no clear evidence that he did so. He did, however, play a central role in the Lane colony of 1585, for which he served as a leader and as Raleigh's colonial representative. Since he and White had surveyed the region, Hariot was prepared upon his return to write authoritatively about Virginia's land, natives, and commodities. The report was first published in 1588 in a now rare quarto edition but was later published in two more widely circulated versions.
HARIOT'S REPORT
Hariot's Report resulted from interactions among the members of the Raleigh Circle, some of whom had been in Virginia, and from these discussions, spoken and written, came a series of fantasy themes designed to answer Lane's criticisms of settling Virginia.
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Hariot's Report achieved its immediate purposes: it answered Lane's criticisms of Virginia as a potential colony, and helped keep the English colonization movement alive. By presenting a series of scenic fantasy themes that outlined the potential of the region to support a colony by exploiting various commodities useful both to future colonists and to English merchants and industrialists, Hariot asserted the views on colonization held by the Raleigh group. These views were not all reliable, however, because Hariot's promises of an easy settlement among docile, friendly natives were contributing factors that led to the twin tragedies of the Lost Colony of 1587 and the early years of Jamestown with its starvation and moral decay.
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