ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS BEFORE 1580*
AT THE outset I must confess that it was mere whimsy
21 that prompted me to supply this title when the His-
torical Society kindly invited me to give this paper. What
I have actually been up to in the studies of which this essay
presents representative selections is the investigation of the
encounters of Tudor Enghshmen with North and South
American and Caribbean Indians in the course of the voy-
ages of exploration and discovery to the New World. The
idea of what it was Uke to be a man living in a primitive
society underwent some rapid and decisive changes during
the period when these discoveries were being made; and
these changes, in turn, brought about perforce some inter-
esting revisions in antiquaries’ concepts of life in Britain be-
fore the advent of the Romans.
Until the Tudor adventurers brought back reliable and
eyewitness accounts of the nature of primitive man, Enghsh
historians were content to repeat the old legend, given its
greatest currency by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth
century, that Britain had been founded by refugees from the
Trojan War under the leadership of one of the scions of the
house of Priam, Brutus (hence the name Britain). This was a
comfortable tale, of course, implying that civilization had
rather sprung full-blown in Britain from the temple of Zeus,
than climbed painfully upward from savagery to the world
of light. All the countries of western Europe, as the late
Professor George Gordon observed, had “forged Trojan
passports,” but all of them had turned them in for more
official-looking papers before the sixteenth century. It took
the American Indian to show English (or more particularly
° A paper read before the Historical Society of the Rice Institute
on April 12,1956.
55