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The Physical Environment of Early America: Images and Image Makers in Colonial South Carolina

1969; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/213861

1931-0846

H. Roy Merrens,

American Environmental and Regional History

XIOMATIC in historical geography is the notion that in studying the process of settlement the physical environment per se warrants less attention than the environment as perceived and imagined by contemporaries, attempting to evaluate it in their own terms. But systematic attempts to reconstruct the perceptual environment are few, and no such attempts have been made for the seaboard of colonial America, which has only recently begun to receive the attention of historical geographers.' It is not exactly this lacuna that the present article attempts to fill. For any past colonizing venture there is no one single perceptual environment that warrants exclusive attention. What remains from the past is a congeries of views of the setting in which colonization took place, each with its own distinctive bias reflecting the objectives, values, and interests of the recorder. To piece together a composite appraisal from such divergent sources would be pointless. At best, such a reconstructed monolithic appraisal would be artificial and would mask dissimilar evaluations of the colonial environment. What is needed first is a clear recognition of the different origins and purposes of the contemporary descriptions. A classification of such descriptions is offered here as a start in this direction: it is suggested that when narratives are classed according to the basic intent of their authors, the efforts of promoters, officials, travelers, natural historians, and settlers fall fairly neatly into a fivefold classification. But the classification is not presented for its own sake. Consideration of some samples of each class of description as they are represented in the record of developments in colonial South Carolina contributes to an understanding of facets of both the geography and history