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American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega. Edited by EMERSON W. BAKER et al. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1994. Pp. xxxiv, 388, illus. $35.00
American Beginnings grew out of the 'Land of Norumbega' conference held in Portland, Maine, in 1988. Although the book is concerned largely with the sixteenth - and seventeenth - century history of the Maine coast, there is much here of value to the student of the history of Atlantic Canada and of early European exploration. This volume is also convincing evidence of the value of multidisciplinary studies; the contributors include historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers, and most of the essays are interdisciplinary in nature.
In the introduction, Richard D'Abate and Victor Konrad explain that the concept of a 'Land of Norumbega' began in the early sixteenth - century European mind as a fertile land of plenty inhabited by civilized Natives - in contrast to the more forbidding shores to the north familiar to the European fishermen who exploited the waters off Newfoundland. Norumbega, the authors note, had its parallels with the Spanish dream of the Seven Cities of Cibola, in that both images attracted the greedy, the curious, and those with imperial ambitions. As with the Seven Cities of Cibola, the...