A slightly different take occurs here from Lewis' cogent remarks that "the wonder and glory of exploration, though sometimes expressed by Hakluyt and the voyages themselves, was seldom the theme of imagination writers (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,16). He did not read Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" as an implicit American voyage nor Donne's "Anniversaries" as attributing the highest aspirations of gaining the new world of Virginia as a spiritual voyage, but when we put these parts of it together with the regular Petrarchan new world lovemaking, the imaginative scope increases. Lewis had earlier said that "the new geography excited much more interest than the new astronomy...but the literary texts suggest that it did not stimulate the imagination so much as we might have expected. The aim of the explorers was mercantile...we became to America what the Huns had been to us (14-15), but perhaps the imaginative effects being more diffuse, sublimate a little above ground as it were.
The Spainish took so many shiploads of gold from the new world that the English were jealous and didn't get near as much, so had to do with selling colonists on markets, trade and of course, land.
Here this is as exactly as written. A retake is progressing to the effect that
The Girl, the Garden and the Golden Age were a transfer of one to the other. We might start at any of these. The process of analogy is just as the heroes of Greece got to the golden age by dying or being translated. The many faceted wits of Elizabethan poets hijacked the Greeks entirely and conceived that the since it was a golden age there must be gold and since America had gold they might go by ship to get it. So 1, they got there by ship, not by death. And 2. It was a literal not a spiritual venture. This first part of the analogy came from the propaganda of Purchas et. al. Since it was gold, it must grow there like plants or be picked up off the ground like walnuts. Those three harvests of the spirit of Hesiod turned bestial. A whole lot of botanical legend fueled this. That was the garden aspect, the gold garden. Never mind the Midas, this is too much fun so while we're at it, what we really want is the girl, the promised flower of the garden, the newfoundland and gold wrapped in one.
It is a simple matter of extrapolation from there, The lover is variously the ship and the explorer, the girl is the newfoundland and the garden and any and every legendary spot so attached like the fortunate islands, Elysium, the blessed isles. and all the aspects of that voyage in the real ocean were attached to her courtship. The rough seas, the weather, the ocean itself to cross, the still winds and storm, landfall and exploration of that continent and its coasts. The girl’s terrain, her topography, her oceanography, her botany, her mining all became major themes of courtship even while at the same time news of the real exploits of Drake, Raleigh. Armadas and Companies were being formed and sailing. It was a new industry. And it involved science, so Herriot sketched, and anthropologists brought back specimens to the Queen. Because it occurs in English all these issues are immediately available for exploration too, not like the same ill ventures of other languages, from China, Japan, India, Syria and Iran. Out of sight out of mind. They were good guys!
This all encompassing venture has been ballyhooed ever since, until the colonial venture was overturned and shorn of all its locks like a French courtesan to the Nazis pilloried by partisans. But enough of that.
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