Bill bryson made in america
Bill bryson made in america
Bill bryson made in america
MADE IN AMERICA
Illustrations by Bruce McCall
About The Author
List of Illustrations
1 The Mayflower and Before
2 Becoming Americans
3 A ‘Democratic Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
4 Making a Nation
5 By the Dawn’s Early Light: Forging a National Identity
6 We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
8 ‘Manifest Destiny’: Taming the West
9 The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
10 When the Going was Good: Travel in America
11 What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
12 Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America
13 Domestic Matters
14 The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
16 The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
17 Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
19 The Road from Kitty Hawk
20 Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond
21 American English Today
Also by Bill Bryson
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN 9781409095699
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
MADE IN AMERICA
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552998055
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
Minerva edition published 1995
Black Swan edition published 1998
Copyright © Bill Bryson 1994
Illustrations copyright © by Bruce McCall
Bill Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009
The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment
Typeset in 10.5/13pt Giovanni by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd.
Printed in the UK by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX.
About the Author
Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. A Short History of Nearly Everything was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. His latest book is his bestselling childhood memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
To David, Felicity, Catherine and Sam
List of Illustrations
Founding Fathers’ Day, Plymouth Rock
Dame Railway and Her Choo-Choo Court, Cincinnati Ironmongery Fair, 1852
Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series
Wing dining, somewhere over France, 1929
New as nuclear fission and twice as powerful – that’s the new, newer, newest, all-new Bulgemobile!!
Among the many people to whom I am indebted for assistance and encouragement during the preparation of this book, I would like especially to thank Maria Guarnaschelli, Geoff Mulligan, Max Eilenberg, Carol Heaton, Dan Franklin, Andrew Franklin, John Price, Erla Zwingle, Karen Voelkening, Oliver Salzmann, Hobie and Lois Morris, Heidi Du Belt, James Mansley, Samuel H. Beamesderfer, Bonita Lousie Billman, Dr John L. Sommer, Allan M. Siegal, Bruce Corson, and the staffs of the Drake University Library in Des Moines and the National Geographic Society Library in Washington. Above all, and as ever, my infinite, heartfelt thanks and admiration to my wife, Cynthia.
In the 1940s, a British traveller to Anholt, a small island fifty miles out in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden, noticed that the island children sang a piece of doggerel that was clearly nonsense to them. It went:
Vent op de hill
Og Jell kom tombling after.
The ditty, it turned out, had been brought to the island by occupying British soldiers during the Napoleonic wars, and had been handed down from generation to generation of children for 130 years, even though the words meant nothing to them.
In London, this small discovery was received with interest by a couple named Peter and lona Opie. The Opies had dedicated their lives to the scholarly pursuit of nursery rhymes. No one had put more effort into investigating the history and distribution of these durable but largely uncelebrated components of childhood life. Something that had long puzzled the Opies was the curious fate of a rhyme called ‘Brow Bender’. Once as popular as ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, it was routinely included in children’s nursery books up until the late eighteenth century, but then it quietly and mysteriously vanished. It had not been recorded in print anywhere since 1788. Then one night as the Opies’ nanny was tucking their children in to bed, they overheard her reciting a nursery rhyme to them. It was, as you will have guessed, ‘Brow Bender’, exactly as set down in the 1788 version and with five lines never before recorded.
Now what, you may reasonably ask,
does any of this have to do with a book on the history and development of the English language in America? I bring it up for two reasons. First, to make the point that it is often the little, unnoticed things that are most revealing about the history and nature of language. Nursery rhymes, for example, are fastidiously resistant to change. Even when they make no sense, as in the case of ‘Jack and Jill’ with children on an isolated Danish isle, they are generally passed from generation to generation with solemn precision, like a treasured incantation. Because of this, they are often among the longest-surviving features of any language. ‘Eenie, meenie, minie, mo’ is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, and that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is one of our few surviving links with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time that Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech. Little things, in short, are worth looking at.
The second point is that songs, words, phrases, ditties – any feature of language at all – can survive for long periods without anyone particularly noticing, as the Opies discovered with ‘Brow Bender’. That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred years, and why did it so abruptly return to prominence in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in a country two thousand miles away?
Why, come to that, did the Americans save such good old English words as skedaddle and chitterlings and chore, but not fortnight or heath? Why did they keep the irregular British pronunciations in words like colonel and hearth, but go our own way with lieutenant and schedule and clerk? Why in short is American English the way it is?
This is, it seems to me, a profoundly worthwhile and fascinating question, and yet until relatively recent times it is one that hardly anyone thought to ask. Until well into this century serious studies of American speech were left almost entirely to amateurs – people like the heroic Richard Harwood Thornton, an English-born lawyer who devoted years of his spare time to poring through books, journals and manuscripts from the earliest colonial period in search of the first appearances of hundreds of American terms. In 1912 he produced the two-volume American Glossary. It was a work of invaluable scholarship, yet he could not find a single American publisher prepared to take it on. Eventually, to the shame of American scholarship, it was published in London.
Not until the 1920s and ’30s, with the successive publications of H. L. Mencken’s incomparable The American Language, George Philip Krapp’s The English Language in America and Sir William Craigie and James R. Hulbert’s Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, did America at last get books that seriously addressed the question of its language. But by then the inspiration behind many hundreds of American expressions had passed into the realms of the unknowable, so that now no one can say why Americans paint the town red, talk turkey, take a powder or hit practice flies with a fungo bat.
This book is a modest attempt to examine how and why American speech came to be the way it is. It is not, I hope, a conventional history of the American language. Much of it is unashamedly discursive. You could be excused for wondering what Mrs Stuyvesant Fish’s running over her servant three times in succession with her car has to do with the history and development of the English language in the United States, or how James Gordon Bennett’s lifelong habit of yanking the cloths from every table he passed in a restaurant connects to the linguistic development of the American people. I would argue that unless we understand the social context in which words were formed – unless we can appreciate what a bewildering novelty the car was to those who first encountered it, or how dangerously extravagant and out of touch with the masses a turn-of-the-century business person could be – we cannot begin to appreciate the richness and vitality of the words that make American speech.
Oh, and I’ve included them for a third reason: because I thought they were interesting and hoped you might enjoy them. One of the small agonies of researching a book like this is that you come across stories that have no pressing relevance to the topic and must be let lie. I call them Ray Buduick stories. I came across Ray Buduick when I was thumbing through a 1941 volume of Time magazines looking for something else altogether. It happened that one day in that year Buduick decided, as he often did, to take his light aircraft up for an early Sunday morning spin. Nothing remarkable in that, except that Buduick lived in Honolulu and that this panicular morning happened to be 7 December 1941. As he headed out over Pearl Harbour, Buduick was taken aback, to say the least, to find the western skies dense with Japanese Zeros, all bearing down on him. The Japanese raked his plane with fire and Buduick, presumably issuing utterances along the lines of ‘Golly Moses!’, banked sharply and cleared off. Miraculously he managed to land his plane safely in the midst of the greatest airborne attack yet seen in history, and lived to tell the tale, and in so doing became the first American to engage the Japanese in combat, however inadvertently.
Of course, this has nothing at all to do with the American language. But everything else that follows does. Honestly.
Founding Fathers’ Day, Plymouth Rock
The Mayflower and Before
The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in north Wales wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Massachusetts, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders’ day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the Mayflower or the Pilgrims, but inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, ‘The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England)’ which begins:
The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches toss’d
And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and water o’er,
When a band of exiles moor’d their bark
and continues in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors – the Mayflower was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not ‘where first they trod’ but in fact their fourth landing site – it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day.*1
The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn’t do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from near by. Indeed, it is doubtful that the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and it doesn’t make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.1 Not until about the time Ms Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly associated with the landing of the Pilgrims.
Wherever they first trod, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims st
epped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief. They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel about the size of a modern double-decker bus. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors, referred to them as puke stockings, on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.2 Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom revelled ever after in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).
They called themselves Saints. Those members of the party who were not Saints they called Strangers. Pilgrims, in reference to these early voyagers, would not become common for another two hundred years. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They would not arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.
It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter – occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.3 Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as ’Captain Shrimpe’4 – hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.
Bill bryson made in america
MADE IN AMERICA
Illustrations by Bruce McCall
About The Author
List of Illustrations
1 The Mayflower and Before
2 Becoming Americans
3 A ‘Democratic Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
4 Making a Nation
5 By the Dawn’s Early Light: Forging a National Identity
6 We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
8 ‘Manifest Destiny’: Taming the West
9 The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
10 When the Going was Good: Travel in America
11 What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
12 Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America
13 Domestic Matters
14 The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
16 The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
17 Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
19 The Road from Kitty Hawk
20 Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond
21 American English Today
Also by Bill Bryson
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN 9781409095699
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
MADE IN AMERICA
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552998055
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
Minerva edition published 1995
Black Swan edition published 1998
Copyright © Bill Bryson 1994
Illustrations copyright © by Bruce McCall
Bill Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009
The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment
Typeset in 10.5/13pt Giovanni by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd.
Printed in the UK by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX.
About the Author
Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. A Short History of Nearly Everything was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. His latest book is his bestselling childhood memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
To David, Felicity, Catherine and Sam
List of Illustrations
Founding Fathers’ Day, Plymouth Rock
Dame Railway and Her Choo-Choo Court, Cincinnati Ironmongery Fair, 1852
Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series
Wing dining, somewhere over France, 1929
New as nuclear fission and twice as powerful – that’s the new, newer, newest, all-new Bulgemobile!!
Among the many people to whom I am indebted for assistance and encouragement during the preparation of this book, I would like especially to thank Maria Guarnaschelli, Geoff Mulligan, Max Eilenberg, Carol Heaton, Dan Franklin, Andrew Franklin, John Price, Erla Zwingle, Karen Voelkening, Oliver Salzmann, Hobie and Lois Morris, Heidi Du Belt, James Mansley, Samuel H. Beamesderfer, Bonita Lousie Billman, Dr John L. Sommer, Allan M. Siegal, Bruce Corson, and the staffs of the Drake University Library in Des Moines and the National Geographic Society Library in Washington. Above all, and as ever, my infinite, heartfelt thanks and admiration to my wife, Cynthia.
In the 1940s, a British traveller to Anholt, a small island fifty miles out in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden, noticed that the island children sang a piece of doggerel that was clearly nonsense to them. It went:
Vent op de hill
Og Jell kom tombling after.
The ditty, it turned out, had been brought to the island by occupying British soldiers during the Napoleonic wars, and had been handed down from generation to generation of children for 130 years, even though the words meant nothing to them.
In London, this small discovery was received with interest by a couple named Peter and lona Opie. The Opies had dedicated their lives to the scholarly pursuit of nursery rhymes. No one had put more effort into investigating the history and distribution of these durable but largely uncelebrated components of childhood life. Something that had long puzzled the Opies was the curious fate of a rhyme called ‘Brow Bender’. Once as popular as ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, it was routinely included in children’s nursery books up until the late eighteenth century, but then it quietly and mysteriously vanished. It had not been recorded in print anywhere since 1788. Then one night as the Opies’ nanny was tucking their children in to bed, they overheard her reciting a nursery rhyme to them. It was, as you will have guessed, ‘Brow Bender’, exactly as set down in the 1788 version and with five lines never before recorded.
Now what, you may reasonably ask,
does any of this have to do with a book on the history and development of the English language in America? I bring it up for two reasons. First, to make the point that it is often the little, unnoticed things that are most revealing about the history and nature of language. Nursery rhymes, for example, are fastidiously resistant to change. Even when they make no sense, as in the case of ‘Jack and Jill’ with children on an isolated Danish isle, they are generally passed from generation to generation with solemn precision, like a treasured incantation. Because of this, they are often among the longest-surviving features of any language. ‘Eenie, meenie, minie, mo’ is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, and that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is one of our few surviving links with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time that Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech. Little things, in short, are worth looking at.
The second point is that songs, words, phrases, ditties – any feature of language at all – can survive for long periods without anyone particularly noticing, as the Opies discovered with ‘Brow Bender’. That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred years, and why did it so abruptly return to prominence in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in a country two thousand miles away?
Why, come to that, did the Americans save such good old English words as skedaddle and chitterlings and chore, but not fortnight or heath? Why did they keep the irregular British pronunciations in words like colonel and hearth, but go our own way with lieutenant and schedule and clerk? Why in short is American English the way it is?
This is, it seems to me, a profoundly worthwhile and fascinating question, and yet until relatively recent times it is one that hardly anyone thought to ask. Until well into this century serious studies of American speech were left almost entirely to amateurs – people like the heroic Richard Harwood Thornton, an English-born lawyer who devoted years of his spare time to poring through books, journals and manuscripts from the earliest colonial period in search of the first appearances of hundreds of American terms. In 1912 he produced the two-volume American Glossary. It was a work of invaluable scholarship, yet he could not find a single American publisher prepared to take it on. Eventually, to the shame of American scholarship, it was published in London.
Not until the 1920s and ’30s, with the successive publications of H. L. Mencken’s incomparable The American Language, George Philip Krapp’s The English Language in America and Sir William Craigie and James R. Hulbert’s Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, did America at last get books that seriously addressed the question of its language. But by then the inspiration behind many hundreds of American expressions had passed into the realms of the unknowable, so that now no one can say why Americans paint the town red, talk turkey, take a powder or hit practice flies with a fungo bat.
This book is a modest attempt to examine how and why American speech came to be the way it is. It is not, I hope, a conventional history of the American language. Much of it is unashamedly discursive. You could be excused for wondering what Mrs Stuyvesant Fish’s running over her servant three times in succession with her car has to do with the history and development of the English language in the United States, or how James Gordon Bennett’s lifelong habit of yanking the cloths from every table he passed in a restaurant connects to the linguistic development of the American people. I would argue that unless we understand the social context in which words were formed – unless we can appreciate what a bewildering novelty the car was to those who first encountered it, or how dangerously extravagant and out of touch with the masses a turn-of-the-century business person could be – we cannot begin to appreciate the richness and vitality of the words that make American speech.
Oh, and I’ve included them for a third reason: because I thought they were interesting and hoped you might enjoy them. One of the small agonies of researching a book like this is that you come across stories that have no pressing relevance to the topic and must be let lie. I call them Ray Buduick stories. I came across Ray Buduick when I was thumbing through a 1941 volume of Time magazines looking for something else altogether. It happened that one day in that year Buduick decided, as he often did, to take his light aircraft up for an early Sunday morning spin. Nothing remarkable in that, except that Buduick lived in Honolulu and that this panicular morning happened to be 7 December 1941. As he headed out over Pearl Harbour, Buduick was taken aback, to say the least, to find the western skies dense with Japanese Zeros, all bearing down on him. The Japanese raked his plane with fire and Buduick, presumably issuing utterances along the lines of ‘Golly Moses!’, banked sharply and cleared off. Miraculously he managed to land his plane safely in the midst of the greatest airborne attack yet seen in history, and lived to tell the tale, and in so doing became the first American to engage the Japanese in combat, however inadvertently.
Of course, this has nothing at all to do with the American language. But everything else that follows does. Honestly.
Founding Fathers’ Day, Plymouth Rock
The Mayflower and Before
The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in north Wales wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Massachusetts, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders’ day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the Mayflower or the Pilgrims, but inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, ‘The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England)’ which begins:
The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches toss’d
And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and water o’er,
When a band of exiles moor’d their bark
and continues in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors – the Mayflower was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not ‘where first they trod’ but in fact their fourth landing site – it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day.*1
The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn’t do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from near by. Indeed, it is doubtful that the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and it doesn’t make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.1 Not until about the time Ms Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly associated with the landing of the Pilgrims.
Wherever they first trod, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims st
epped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief. They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel about the size of a modern double-decker bus. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors, referred to them as puke stockings, on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.2 Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom revelled ever after in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).
They called themselves Saints. Those members of the party who were not Saints they called Strangers. Pilgrims, in reference to these early voyagers, would not become common for another two hundred years. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They would not arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.
It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter – occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.3 Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as ’Captain Shrimpe’4 – hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.
Bill bryson made in america
Willet, William (i)
Williams, Chief Inspector Alexander (i)
Williams, Roger (i), (ii)
Williamsburg (Virginia) (i)
Willkie, Wendell (i)
Wills, Garry (i), (ii), (iii)
Wilson, Charles E (i)
Wilson, Kemmons (i)
Wilson, Samuel (i)
Wilson, Woodrow (i), (ii), (iii)
Winthrop, John (i), (ii)
Witherspoon, John (i), (ii)
women (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
bias-free language (i)
prostitution (i), (ii), (iii)
Woodhull, Victoria Claflin (i), (ii)
Woolworth, Frank W (i)
Wordsworth, William (i)
World War I (i), (ii), (iii)
World War II (i), (ii), (iii)
Wright, Frances (Fanny) (i), (ii)
Wright, Orville (i)
Wright, Wilbur (i), (ii)
Wyler, William (i)
Yorkshire (England) (i)
Zanesville (Ohio) (i)
Zangwill, Israel (i)
Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von (i)
Zinnemann, Fred (i)
The Mayflower and Before
*1 Mrs Hemans’ other principal contribution to posterity was the poem ‘Casabianca’, now remembered chiefly for its opening line; ‘The boy stood on the burning deck.’
*2 The Mayflower, like Plymouth Rock, appears to have made no sentimental impression on the colonists. Not once in Of Plimouth Plantation, William Bradford’s history of the colony, did he mention the ship by name. Just three years after its epochal crossing, the Mayflower was unceremoniously broken up and sold for salvage. According to several accounts, it ended up being made into a barn that still stands in the village of Jordans, Buckinghamshire, about twenty miles from London. Coincidentally, almost in its shadow is the grave of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.
*3 Founded in 1610, this small colony was abandoned in the 1630s, though it was soon replaced by other British settlements on the island. Because of their isolation, Newfoundlanders created a peculiarly colourful patois blending new coinages and old English dialectal words that now exist nowhere else: diddies for a nightmare, nunny-bag for a kind of knapsack, cocksiddle for a somersault, rushing the waddock for the game of rugby. They continue to employ many odd pronunciations. Chitterlings, for instance, is pronounced ‘chistlings’. The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.
*4 Spain was preyed on not only by sailors from rival nations, but also by mutineer sailors of her own. These latter were called buccaneers because after fleeing their Spanish masters they would sustain themselves by smoking the flesh of wild hogs on a wooden frame called a boucan, until they could capture a becalmed ship and make it their own.
*5 And that, incidentally, is all ye ever was – another way of writing the. It was a convenience for scribes and printers, a device that made it easier to justify lines. It was not pronounced ‘yee’.
*6 Why the – s termination rose to prominence is something of a mystery. It came from northern England, a region that had, and still has, many dialectal differences from the more populous south, none other of which has ever had the slightest influence on the speech of London and its environs. Why the inhabitants of southern England suddenly began to show a special regard for the form in the late sixteenth century is unknown.
*7 This ye, it should be noted, is etymologically distinct from the ye used as an alternative for the. As a pronoun ye was used for one person and you for more than one. Gradually this useful distinction fell out of use and you became the invariable form. But we kept the odd practice of associating it with a plural verb, which is why we address a single person with ‘you are’ when logically we ought to say ‘you is’. In fact, until about 1760 ‘you is’ and ‘you was’ were wholly unexceptionable.
*8 Noon is a small oddity. It comes from the Old English word nones, meaning the ninth hour of daylight, or 3 p.m., when prayers were commonly said. It changed to 12 p.m. in the Middle Ages when the time of prayers changed to midday. But in Britain for a time it represented either of the twelfth hours, which explains references in older texts to ‘the noon of midnight’ and the like.
*9 At least the English colonists made some attempt to honour the Indian names. The French and Spanish appeared scarcely to notice what names the tribes used. The French ignored the name Chopunnish, the name used by a tribe of the Pacific northwest, and instead called the people the Nez Percé, ’pierced nose’, for their habit of wearing sea-shells in their nostrils. They performed a similar disservice with Siwash, which is actually just a modified form of the French sauvage, or savage, and with Gros Ventre (French for ‘big belly’). The Spanish, meanwhile, ignored the comely, lilting name Ha-no-o-shatch (’children of the sun’) and called this south-western tribe the Pueblos, ‘people’.
*10 Not all of them made it. In the late seventeenth century one Thomas Benson secured a contract to transport convicts to the southern colonies of America, but quickly realized it was far simpler and more lucrative to dump them on Lundy, just off the north Devon coast. When he was at last caught, he claimed to have fulfilled his contract because he had taken them ‘overseas’. The magistrates were not persuaded and fined him £7,872. The fate of the stranded convicts is unknown.
A ‘Democratic Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
*11 Among the inaccuracies, Revere didn’t hang the lanterns in the old North Church, because it wasn’t called that until later; at the time of the Revolution it was Christchurch; he made two rides, not one; and he never made it to Concord, as Longfellow has it, but in fact was arrested along the way. As a historian Longfellow was decidedly hopeless, but as a creator of catch phrases he was in the first rank. Among those that live with us yet: ‘Footprints on the sands of time’, ‘This is the forest primeval’, ‘Into each life some rain must fall’, ‘ships that pass in the night’, and ‘I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, 1 know not where.’
*12 It is, of course, no more than a tendency. Many Americans rhyme grovel with novel, and all of them say mercantile, infantile and servile in contradiction of the usual pattern.
*13 Among the words he lower-cased were nature, creator and even God. Most were later capitalized by the printer.38
*14 Though John Hancock became immediately famous for his cockily outsize signature on the Declaration, the expression ‘Put your John Hancock here’ for a signature didn’t apparently occur to anyone until 1903.40
Making a Nation
*15 ‘Peaceably to assemble’ is an interesting and early example of the ginger avoidance of a split infinitive. The curious conviction that infinitives should not be split had only recently come into fashion.
*16 Here, for instance, is Kingsley Amis: ‘An early Congress of the United States debated what language the new nation was to speak. English symbolized the vanquished colonial oppressor, its sole virtue being that everyone used it. As so many of us know, it won the contest, narrowly beating German. There were also votes – not many – for Ancient Greek, as the language of the first democracy, and for a Red Indian language, perhaps Massachusetts or Cree, because it was American.’ (The Amis Collection, p. 17.)
*17 It was renamed the Smithsonian in honour of a shadowy Englishman named James Smith
son. The bastard son of a Duke of Northumberland, Smithson had never been to America and had no known American friends or connections, but he agreed to leave his considerable fortune of £100,000 to the government of the United States if it would name an institution of learning after him.33
We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
*18 It is a myth, incidentally, that SOS stands for save our ship or save our souls. It stands for nothing. It was chosen as a distress signal at an international conference in 1906 not because it had any meaning but because its nine keystrokes (three dots, three dashes, three dots) were simple to transmit.24
*19 Though Westinghouse is associated in the popular mind with electricity, his initial fame came from the invention of air-brakes for trains. Before this useful development trains could only stop in one of two ways: by having brakemen manually turn a hand-wheel on each car, a laborious process, or by crashing into something solid, like another train.
*20 Curiously, although everyone refers to the object as a light bulb, few dictionaries do. The American Heritage (first edition) has lighthouse, light-headed, light meter and many others in similar vein, but no light bulb. If you wish to know what that object is, you must look under incandescent light, electric light or electric lamp. Funk & Wagnalls Revised Standard Dictionary devotes 6,500 words to light and its derivatives, but again makes no mention of light bulb. Webster’s Second New International similarly makes no mention of light bulb. The third edition does although it has just this to say: ‘light bulb n: incandescent lamp’. For full details you still have to turn to incandescent lamp. In my experience, most dictionaries are the same. I can’t explain it.
*21 Nearly all the spellings suggest, incidentally, that the modem American pronunciation of his name, ‘rawly’, is more faithful to the original than the modern British pronunciation, ‘rally’.
The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
*22 It should be pointed out, however, that the closeness of German, Dutch and Yiddish often makes it impossible to ascribe a term positively to one camp. Spook and dumb could be either Dutch or German in origin, and nosh, schlemiel and phooey, among others, are as likely to have entered American English from German sources as Yiddish. More often than not, the influence most probably came from two directions simultaneously.
When the Going was Good: Travel in America
*23 This was nothing compared with the speeds achIeved by steam-powered cars. The great Stanley Steamer reached l27 m.p.h. in 1906. Unfortunately steam cars also tended to be unreliable and to blow up.28
*24 Not until the 1940s did Sanders pretend to be anything other than the Indiana farm boy fate had made him. But upon being made an honorary colonel by the cherishably named Governor Ruby Laffoon of Kentucky, he took the role to heart. He grew a goatee and ever after affected the manner and attire of a southern gentleman.
What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
*25 And compared with later cereals they certainly were. Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, introduced in 1953, were 56 per cent sugar.
Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America
*26 Or so most books of retailing history say, though it seems an awfully large number. Many modern shopping centres can’t take that many cars.
The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
*28 And yes, there really was a Dr Scholl. His name was William Scholl, he was a real doctor, genuinely dedicated to the well-being of feet, and they are still very proud of him in his hometown of LaPorte, Indiana.
*29 For purposes of research, I wrote to Procter & Gamble, Gleem’s manufacturer, asking what GL-70 was, but the public relations department evidently thought it eccentric of me to wonder what I had been putting in my mouth all through childhood and declined to reply.
The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
*30 Cricket derives its curious name from an old French word, criquet, describing the sound made by a ball striking wood. The insect the cricket also gets its name from criquet.
Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
*31 The boot in freebooter has nothing to do with footwear. It comes from an old German word, bu¯te, ‘exchange’, which also gave us booty.
*32 It is curious how often we have lost track of the inspiration behind our eponymous words. We have already seen that no one knows who the real McCoy was. Equally, most authorities agree that there must have been a Mr Lynch who provided the inspiration for the word describing the abrupt termination of life without the inconvenience of a fair trial, and candidates almost without number have been suggested for this dubious honour. Indeed, it can appear that almost anyone named Lynch who had a position of authority anywhere in America between 1780 and 1850 has been mentioned as a candidate at one time or another. In fact no one knows who he was or what he did to earn his morbid immortality. It has even been suggested that Lynch may not be a person at all, but a creek in South Carolina favoured by locals for impromptu executions.
Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond
*33 Brown had gained his reputation in the company by designing a stunning concept car called the Lincoln Futura. It never went into production, but it did eventually find greater glory – as television’s Batmobile.
*34 In case you have ever wondered, the following are the derivations of the more popular Japanese car names: Honda, named for the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda; Isuzu, named for the Isuzu River; Mitsubishi, Japanese for ‘three stones,’ which feature on the family crest of the founder; Nissan, Japanese for ‘Japan Industry’; Suzuki, named for the founder, Suzuki Michio; Toyota, named for the founder, Sakicki Toyoda, and not, as many stories have it. because the early models looked like ‘toy autos’.21
*35 In fact like most other people in America. The leading food writer of the age, Duncan Hines, author of the hugely successful Adventures in Eating, was himself a cautious eater and declared with pride that he never ate food with French names if he could possibly help it. Hines’s other proud boast was that he did not venture out of America until he was seventy years old, when he made a trip to Europe. He disliked much of what he found there, especially the food.
Bill Bryson turns away form the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture.
Bill bryson made in america
Perhaps not coincidentally, the boom years of the 1950s saw the development of another great electrical breakthrough: the home air-conditioner. Air-conditioning had been around for a long time. It was developed in 1902 by a twenty-year-old fresh out of Cornell University named Willis Carrier. As we have seen elsewhere, Carrier didn’t call it an air-conditioner but an apparatus for cooling air. Air-conditioner was coined four years later by a North Carolina textile engineer named Stuart Cramer, who invented a device designed not to cool textile mills but to humidify them.39
Three years after the window air-conditioner made its début, another durable household appliance entered the world: the microwave oven. The first was called the Radarange. It was large and bulky – it weighed over 700 lb. – required a lot of complicated cooling apparatus and didn’t cook food very well. Renamed the microwave oven, the first consumer unit was produced in 1955 by Tappan, but the product and word didn’t become familiar to most Americans until the late 1960s when further improvements and advanced miniaturization of components – not to mention the increasing busyness of American women – made it at last a realistic proposition for home use.40
Such was the proliferation of gadgets and appliances that by the 1960s it was possible to perform almost any daily household task while scarcely rippling a muscle – from opening cans to brushing one’s teeth to juicing an orange to carving a turkey. Instead of becoming more versatile and innovative, household appliances mostly just became more complex. Blenders accumulated a dazzling array of buttons. One had no fewer than sixteen buttons that the user could activate in an almost infinite selection of permutations, though, in the candid words of one executive, it still ‘couldn’t do much more than whip cream’. Labelling the buttons presented a linguistic as well as marketing challenge. A manufacturer, quoted in Susan Strasser’s history of domesticity, Never Done, recalled that ‘eight of us sat up two nights straight, trying to get words with five letters, each one sounding a bit higher than the other’.41
Perversely, this plethora of labour-saving devices didn’t translate into greater leisure. The average ‘non-working mother’, as they are so inaccurately called, spends as much time doing housework now as fifty years ago – about fifty-two hours a week.42 Although she has the benefits of countless appliances, the increased productivity they have brought her has been effectively offset by the larger size of modern houses, more wide-ranging lifestyles (her great-grandmother didn’t run children everywhere in the family station wagon and her groceries were probably delivered) and more scrupulous standards of household cleanliness.
Leisure in any meaningful sense is actually quite a modern concept. Sightseeing didn’t enter the language until 1847 and vacation not until 1878, and even then both were diversions for the well-off few. For millions of people a vacation was a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence that they experienced only on their honeymoon, or bridal tour, as it was often called until about 1900. Honeymoon has existed in English since 1546, but originally signified only the first month of marriage. It didn’t become associated with a trip away from home until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
Weekend is an even more recent concept. The word was coined in 1879 in England, but didn’t become part of the average American’s vocabulary until as recently as the 1930s. Well into the 1900s most people worked a sixty-hour, six-day week and thus terms like Monday-to-Friday and weekend had no particular significance for them. The five-day, forty-hour week is often attributed to Henry Ford, but in fact it was introduced by the steel industry in 1923. Ford followed in 1926. Most of the rest of the nation didn’t catch up until the Great Depression, when a shorter working week became a convenient way of dealing with falling demand.43 Though nine-to-five had become the standard working day for most Americans by the early 1940s, the term nine-to-fiver isn’t recorded before 1959.
Today, according to some studies, Americans work harder – or at least longer – than at any time since the forty-hour week became standard. According to Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American, the amount of leisure time has fallen by almost 40 per cent since 197344 as people have been driven to seek overtime, take second jobs or simply show a zealous commitment to the workplace lest they find themselves the victims of restructuring, premature retirement, coerced transition, constructive dismissal, skill mix redeployment or any of the other forty or so euphemisms for being laid off that the managing editor of Executive Recruiter News reported in 1991.45 (Of which Digital Equipment Corporation’s involuntary methodologies was perhaps the most chillingly recondite.)
Across the economy as a whole, it has been estimated, the average American works 163 hours more per year today than two decades ago. Men are working 98 hours more, and women no less than 305 extra hours.46 The burden is particularly heavy on working mothers who put in, on, average, an eighty-hour week when cleaning, cooking and child care are included. Not surprisingly, nearly all the recent neologisms relating to work and the workplace are negative: workaholic (1968), three o’clock syndrome (i.e., the tendency to grow drowsy in mid-afternoon, 1980), information overload (1985), sick building syndrome (a feeling of general malaise generated by a poorly designed environment, first noted in Industry Week in 1983), time squeeze (1990), and so on.
What is certain is that Americans work longer hours and more days than their counterparts in almost any other nation in the developed world. Principally as a result of shorter vacations and fewer national holidays, the average manufacturing employee in America puts in the equivalent of eight weeks a year more at the workplace than a manufacturing employee in France or Germany.47
Thanks to all that hard work, America as a nation produces twice the goods and services per person that it produced in 1948. Everyone in the country could, in principle at least, work a four-hour day or a six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by our parents. Almost uniquely among the developed nations, America took none of its productivity gains in additional leisure. It bought consumer items instead.48
The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
Eastman worked tirelessly for three years to perfect his invention, supporting himself in the mean time
by making dry plates for commercial photographers, and in June 1888 he produced a camera that was positively dazzling in its simplicity: a plain black box just 6½inches long by 3¼ inches wide, with a button on the side and a key for advancing the film. Eastman called his device the ‘Detective Camera’. Detectives were all the thing – Sherlock Holmes had been born the year before – and the name implied that it was so small and simple that it could be used unnoticed, as a detective might.2
The camera had no viewfinder and no way of focusing. The photographer or photographist (it took a while for the first word to become the established one) simply held the camera in front of him, pressed a button on the side and hoped for the best. Each roll took a hundred pictures. When the roll was fully exposed, the anxious owner sent the entire camera to Rochester for developing. Eventually he received the camera back, freshly loaded with film, and – assuming all had gone well – 100 small circular pictures, 2½inches in diameter.
In 1888 Eastman changed the name of the camera to ‘Kodak’ – an odd choice since it was meaningless, and in 1888 no one gave meaningless names to products, especially successful products. Since British patent applications at the time demanded a full explanation of trade and brand names, we know how Eastman arrived at his inspired name. As he crisply summarized it in his patent application: ‘First. It is short. Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except the Kodak.’3 Four years later the whole enterprise was renamed the Eastman Kodak Company.
Kodak’s success did not escape other businessmen. In Detroit, Henry Ford carried the idea of mass marketing to the automobile industry, creating in the Model T a car that was within the purchasing power of almost everyone. He failed to follow Eastman’s second precept, however, and milked his Model T for years longer than he should have, a mistake Ford’s successors would spend decades rectifying. Others, however, saw the virtue in the idea of steady refinement and improvement. AT&T and Westinghouse, among others, set up research laboratories with the idea of creating a stream of new products, even at the risk of displacing old ones. Above all, everyone everywhere began to advertise.
Advertising was already a well-established phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. American newspapers had begun carrying ads as far back as the early 1700s and magazines had soon followed. (Benjamin Franklin has the distinction of having run the first magazine ad, seeking the whereabouts of a runaway slave, in 1741.)6 By 1850 the country had its first advertising agency, the American Newspaper Advertising Agency, though its function was to buy advertising space rather than come up with creative campaigns. The first advertising agency in the modern sense was N. W. Ayer & Sons of Philadelphia, established in 1869. To advertise originally carried the sense of to broadcast or disseminate news. Thus a nineteenth-century newspaper that called itself The Advertiser meant that it had lots of news, not lots of ads. By the early 1800s the term had been stretched to accommodate the idea of spreading the news of the availability of certain goods or services. A newspaper notice that read, ‘Jos. Parker, Hatter’, was essentially announcing that if anyone was in the market for a hat, Jos. Parker had them. In the sense of persuading members of the public to acquire items they might not otherwise think of buying – items they didn’t know they needed – advertising is a phenomenon of the modern age.
By the 1890s advertising was appearing everywhere – in newspapers and magazines, on billboards (an Americanism dating from 1850), on the sides of buildings, on passing streetcars, on paper bags, even on books of matches, which were invented in 1892 and being extensively used as an advertising medium within three years.
Very early on, advertisers discovered the importance of a good slogan. Ivory Soap’s ‘99 44/100 per cent pure’ dates from 1879. Schlitz has been calling itself ‘the beer that made Milwaukee famous’ since 1895, and Heinz’s ‘57 varieties’ followed a year later. Morton Salt’s ‘when it rains, it pours’ dates from 1911, the American Florist Association’s ‘say it with flowers’ was first used in 1912 and the ‘good to the last drop’ of Maxwell House coffee, named for the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, where it was first served, has been with us since 1907. (The slogan is said to have originated with Teddy Roosevelt, who pronounced that the coffee was ‘good to the last drop’, prompting one wit to ask, ‘So what’s wrong with the last drop?’)
Sometimes slogans took a little working on. Coca-Cola described itself as ‘the drink that makes a pause refreshing’ before realizing, in 1929, that ‘the pause that refreshes’ was rather more succinct and memorable. A slogan could make all the difference to a product’s success. After advertising its soap as an efficacious way of dealing with ‘conspicuous nose pores’, Woodbury’s Facial Soap came up with the slogan ‘The skin you love to touch’ and won the hearts of millions.7 The great thing about a slogan was that it didn’t have to be accurate to be effective. Heinz never actually had ‘57 varieties’ of anything. The catch-phrase arose simply because H. J. Heinz, the company’s founder, decided he liked the sound of the number. Undeterred by considerations of verity, he had the slogan slapped on every one of the produc
ts he produced, which in 1896 was already far more than fifty-seven. For a time the company tried to arrange its products into fifty-seven arbitrary clusters, but in 1969 it gave up the ruse altogether and abandoned the slogan.
Early in the 1900s, advertisers discovered another perennial feature of marketing – the giveaway as it was called almost from the start. Consumers soon became acquainted with the irresistibly tempting notion that if they bought a particular product they could expect a reward – the chance to win prizes, to receive a free book (almost always ostensibly dedicated to the general improvement of one’s well-being but invariably a thinly disguised plug for the manufacturer’s range of products), receive a free sample, or a rebate in the form of a shiny dime. Typical of the genre was a turn-of-the-century tome called The Vital Question Cook Book, which was promoted as an aid to livelier meals, but which proved upon receipt to contain 112 pages of recipes all involving the use of Shredded Wheat. Many of these had a certain air of desperation about them, notably the ‘Shredded Wheat Biscuit Jellied Apple Sandwich’ and the ‘Creamed Spinach on Shredded Wheat Biscuit Toast’. Almost all in fact involved nothing more than spooning some everyday food on to a piece of shredded wheat and giving it an inflated name. None the less, the company distributed no fewer than four million copies of The Vital Question Cook Book to eager consumers.
Bill bryson made in america
They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England*2 just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.5
At this remove, it is difficult to conceive just how alone this small, hapless band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbours – at Jamestown in Virginia and at a small and now all but forgotten colony at Cupers (now Cupids) Cove in Newfoundland*3 – were five hundred miles off in opposite directions. At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of ‘wild and savage hue’, in William Bradford’s uneasy words. They were about as far from the comforts of civilization as anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).
For two months they tried to make contact with the natives, but every time they spotted any, the Indians ran off. Then one day in February a young brave of friendly mien approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name was Samoset and he was a stranger in the region himself, but he had a friend named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe, to whom he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims’ fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local sachem, or chief. Before long, as every schoolchild knows, the Pilgrims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cordial Thanksgiving feast. Life was grand.
A question that naturally arises is how they managed this. Algonquian, the language of the eastern tribes, is an extraordinarily complex and agglomerative tongue (or more accurately family of tongues), full of formidable consonant clusters that are all but unpronounceable to the untutored, as we can see from the first primer of Algonquian speech prepared some twenty years later by Roger Williams in Connecticut (a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame, incidentally). Try saying the following and you may get some idea of the challenge:
Nquitpausuckowashâwmen – There are a hundred of us.
Chénock wonck cuppee-yeâumen? – When will you return?
Tashúckqunne cummauchenaûmis – How long have you been sick?
Ntannetéimmin – I will be going.6
Clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend, and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they called him Squanto. The answer, surprisingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English. Samoset spoke it only a little, but Squanto spoke English with total assurance (and Spanish into the bargain).
That a straggly band of English settlers could in 1620 cross a vast ocean and find a pair of Indians able to welcome them in their own tongue seems little short of miraculous. It was certainly lucky – the Pilgrims would very probably have perished or been slaughtered without them – but not as wildly improbable as it at first seems. The fact is that in 1620 the New World wasn’t really so new at all.
No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. The credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about AD 1000, but there are grounds to suppose that others may have been there even earlier. An ancient Latin text, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to the New World made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Vikings – and this on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.
Vinland is one of history’s more tantalizing posers. No one knows where it was. By careful readings of the sagas and calculations of Viking sailing times, various scholars have put Vinland all over the place – on Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, in Massachusetts or even as far south as Virginia. A Norwegian scholar named Helge Ingstad claimed in 1964 to have found Vinland at a place called L’Anse au Meadow in Newfoundland. Others suggest that the artefacts Ingstad found were not of Viking origin at all, but merely the detritus of later French colonists.9 No one knows. The name is no help. According to the sagas, the Vikings called it Vinland because of the grape-vines they found growing in profusion there. The problem is that no place within a thousand miles of where they must have been could possibly have supported grapes. One possible explanation is that Vinland was a mistranslation. Vinber, the Viking word for grapes, could be used to describe many other fruits – cranberries, gooseberries and red currants, among them – that might have been found at these northern latitudes. Another possibility is that Vinland was merely a bit of deft propaganda, designed to encourage settlement. These were after all the people who thought up the name Greenland.
The Vikings made at least three attempts to build permanent settlements in Vinland, the last in 1013, before finally giving up. Or possibly not. What is known beyond doubt is that sometime after 1408 the Vikings abruptly disappeared from Greenland. Where they went or what became of them is unknown.10 The tempting presumption is that they found a more congenial life in North America.
There is certainly an abundance of inexplicable clues. Consider the matter of lacrosse, a game long popular with Indians across wide tracts of North America. Interestingly, the rules of lacrosse are uncannily like those of a game played by the Vikings, including one feature – the use of paired teammates who may not be helped or impeded by other players – so unusual, in the words of one anthropologist, ‘as to make the probability of independent origin vanishingly small’. Then there were the Haneragmiuts, a tribe of Inuits living high
above the Arctic Circle on Victoria Island in northern Canada, a place so remote that its inhabitants were not known to the outside world until early this century. Yet several members of the tribe not only looked unsettlingly European but were found to be carrying indubitably European genes.11 No one has ever provided a remotely satisfactory explanation of how this could be. Or consider the case of Olof and Edward Ohman, father and son respectively, who in 1888 were digging up tree stumps on their farm near Kensington, Minnesota, when they came upon a large stone slab covered with runic inscriptions, which appear to describe how a party of thirty Vikings had returned to that spot after an exploratory survey to find the ten men they had left behind ‘red with blood and dead’. The inscriptions have been dated to 1363. The one problem is how to explain why a party of weary explorers, facing the prospect of renewed attack by hostile natives, would take the time to make elaborate carvings on a rock deep in the American wilderness, thousands of miles from where anyone they knew would be able to read it. Still, if a hoax, it was executed with unusual skill and verisimilitude.
All this is by way of making the point that word of the existence of a land beyond the Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic was then known, was filtering back to Europeans long before Columbus made his epic voyage. The Vikings did not operate in isolation. They settled all over Europe and their exploits were widely known. They even left a map – the famous Vinland map – which is known to have been circulating in Europe by the fourteenth century. We don’t positively know that Columbus was aware of this map, but we do know that the course he set appeared to be making a beeline for the mythical island of Antilla, which featured on it.
Columbus never found Antilla or anything else he was looking for. His epochal voyage of 1492 was almost the last thing – indeed almost the only thing – that went right in his life. Within eight years, he would find himself summarily relieved of his post as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, returned to Spain in chains and allowed to sink into such profound obscurity that even now we don’t know for sure where he is buried. To achieve such a precipitous fall in less than a decade required an unusual measure of incompetence and arrogance. Columbus had both.
He spent most of those eight years bouncing around the islands of the Caribbean and coasts of South America without ever having any real idea of where he was or what he was doing. He always thought that Cipangu, or Japan, was somewhere near by and never divined that Cuba was an island. To his dying day he insisted that it was part of the Asian mainland (though there is some indication that he may have had his own doubts since he made his men swear under oath that it was Asia or have their tongues cut out). His geographic imprecision is most enduringly preserved in the name he gave to the natives: Indios, which of course has come down to us as Indians. He cost the Spanish crown a fortune and gave in return little but broken promises. And throughout he behaved with the kind of impudence – demanding to be made hereditary Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as well as Viceroy and Governor of the lands that he conquered, and to be granted one-tenth of whatever wealth his enterprises generated – that all but invited his eventual downfall.
In this he was not alone. Many other New World explorers met misfortune in one way or another. Juan Díaz de Solís and Giovanni da Verrazano were eaten by natives. Balboa, after discovering the Pacific, was executed on trumped-up charges, betrayed by his colleague Francisco Pizarro, who in his turn ended up murdered by rivals. Hernando de Soto marched an army pointlessly all over the south-western US for four years until he caught a fever and died. Scores of adventurers, enticed by tales of fabulous cities – Quivira, Bimini, the City of the Caesars and Eldorado (’the gilded one’) went looking for wealth, eternal youth, or a shortcut to the Orient and mostly found misery. Their fruitless searches live on, sometimes unexpectedly, in the names on the landscape. California commemorates a Queen Califía, unspeakably rich but unfortunately non-existent. The Amazon is named for a tribe of one-breasted women. Brazil and the Antilles recall fabulous, but also fictitious, islands.
Further north the English fared little better. Sir Humphrey Gilbert perished in a storm off the Azores in 1583 after trying unsuccessfully to found a colony on Newfoundland. His half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to establish a settlement in Virginia and lost a fortune, and eventually his head, in the effort. Henry Hudson pushed his crew a little too far while looking for a north-west passage and found himself, Bligh-like, being put to sea in a little boat, never to be seen again. The endearingly hopeless Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic region of Canada, found what he thought was gold and carried 1,500 tons of it home on a dangerously overloaded boat only to be informed that it was worthless iron pyrite. Undaunted, Frobisher returned to Canada, found another source of gold, carted 1,300 tons of it back and was informed, no doubt with a certain weariness on the part of the royal assayer, that it was the same stuff. After that, we hear no more of Martin Frobisher.
It is interesting to speculate what these daring adventurers would think if they knew how whimsically we commemorate them today. Would Giovanni da Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? I suspect not. De Soto found transient fame in the name of an automobile, Frobisher in a distant icy bay, Raleigh in a city in North Carolina, a brand of cigarettes and a type of bicycle, Hudson in several waterways and a chain of department stores. On balance, Columbus, with a university, two state capitals, a country in South America, a province in Canada and high schools almost without number, among a great deal else, came out of it pretty well. But in terms of linguistic immortality no one got more mileage from less activity than a shadowy Italian-born businessman named Amerigo Vespucci.
A Florentine who had moved to Seville where he ran a ship supply business (one of his customers was his compatriot Christopher Columbus), Vespucci seemed destined for obscurity. How two continents came to be named in his honour required an unlikely measure of coincidence and error. Vespucci did make some voyages to the New World (authorities differ on whether it was three or four), but always as a passenger or lowly officer. He was not, by any means, an accomplished seaman. Yet in 1504-5, there began circulating in Florence letters of unknown authorship, collected under the title Nuovo Mundo (New World), which stated that Vespucci had not only been captain of these voyages but had discovered the New World.
The mistake would probably have gone no further except that an instructor at a small college in eastern France named Martin Waldseemüller was working on a revised edition of Ptolemy and decided to freshen it up with a new map of the world. In the course of his research he came upon the Florentine letters and, impressed with their spurious account of Vespucci’s exploits, named the continent in his honour. (It wasn’t quite as straightforward as that: first he translated Amerigo into the Latin Americus and then transformed that into its feminine form, America, on the ground that Asia and Europe were feminine. He also considered the name Amerige.) Even so it wasn’t until forty years later that people began to refer to the New World as America, and then they meant by it only South America.
Vespucci did have one possible, if slightly marginal, claim to fame. He is thought to have been the brother of Simonetta Vespucci, the model for Venus in the famous painting by Botticelli.12
Since neither Columbus nor Vespucci ever set foot on the land mass that became the United States, it would be more aptly named for Giovanni Caboto, an Italian mariner better known to history by his Anglicized name of John Cabot. Sailing from Bristol in 1495, Cabot ‘discovered’ Newfoundland and possibly Nova Scotia and a number of smaller islands, and in the process became the first known European to visit North America, though in fact he more probably was merely following fishing fleets that were trawling the Grand Banks already. What is certain is that in 1475, because of war in Europe, British fisherman lost access to the traditional fishing grounds off Iceland. Yet British cod stocks did not fall, and in 1490 (two years before Columbus sailed) when Icelan
d offered the British fishermen the chance to come back, they declined. The presumption is that they had discovered the cod-rich waters off Newfoundland and didn’t want anyone else to know about them.13
To give the claim weight, and to provide a supply base for privateers, Queen Elizabeth I decided it might be an idea to establish a colony. She gave the task to Sir Walter Raleigh. The result was the ill-fated ‘lost colony’ of Roanoke, whose 114 members were put ashore just south of Albemarle Sound in what is now North Carolina in 1587. From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse rivers, Chesapeake and Virginia.16 (Previously Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning ‘what gay clothes you wear’ – apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitring party had asked them what they called the place.) But that alas was about all the colony achieved. Because of the war with Spain, no English ship was able to return for three years. When at last a relief ship called, it found the colony deserted. For years afterwards, visitors would occasionally spot a blond-haired Indian child, and the neighbouring Croatoan tribe was eventually discovered to have incorporated several words of Elizabethan English into its own tongue, but no firmer evidence of the colony’s fate was ever found.