of the Old World. We must
now glance at the various aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it
is revealed in their books.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE

The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records
of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from
California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping
Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the
present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the
future. Captain John Smith's "True Relation," already alluded to, is the
typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager
energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct
for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help
poetizing in his prose. Codfishing is to him a "sport"; "and what
sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then
angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle,
over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also
capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he
writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When
you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters,
husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of
trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have."

America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith,
but he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental
energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the
vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen.
Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of
romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first
teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have
an indulgent audience.

But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
Strachey's "True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon
and from the islands of the Bermudas" may or may not have given a hint
to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in "The Tempest." In either case it
is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker,
the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present
day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of
the savage m