Parallel Water Journeys into the American Eden in John Davis's "The First Settlers ofVirginia" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"Author(s): Jan BakkerSource: Early American Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 50-53Published by: University of North Carolina PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25056399 .

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Parallel Water Journeys into the American Eden in John Davis's The First

Settlers of Virginia AND F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Jan Bakker UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY

Near the conclusion of a little-known early nineteenth-century American novel, there occurs a poignant upriver journey that is signifi

cantly parallel to F. Scott Fitzgerald's familiar passage ending The Great

Gatsby (1925). In Gatsby, Henry Hudson's Dutch sailors on the Half Moon in 1609 look in silent wonder into the passing green, idyllic land

that someday will be called New York. Structurally and thematically

parallel to this Half Moon episode is the description of the historical

Captain Argall's British ship on Virginia's James River in 1607 near the end of John Davis's The First Settlers of Virginia (1805). This short novel contains a percursor to Fitzgerald's elegiac water journey. Furthermore,

Davis's description is the previously unrecognized first direct statement

in American fiction of a major national theme: the loss of a second Eden

in the New World. An expatriate English traveler, tutor, novelist, poet, and diarist in

New York, Virginia, and South Carolina at the turn of the eighteenth

century, John Davis might almost be claimed as the first Southern nov

elist. He is, as Richard Beale Davis points out, the "earliest writer who

presented a real Virginia setting in a novel," and the writer who started

the Virginia novel genre.l John Davis's First Settlers of Virginia describes

the Jamestown settlement and develops the tragic theme of lost inno

cence, of a lost hope for a renewal of mankind in the New World's

Southern garden. This is the theme James Fenimore Cooper develops for

the North in his Leatherstocking Tales two decades later. And it is the theme of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Like Davis's John Smith, Fitz

gerald's Jay Gatsby makes a futile grasp for a fresh start. Both characters

have a dream of regaining an earthly paradise that was lost irretrievably in some mythic past.

In First Settlers and in Gatsby, the crucial water passages show an

alien world encroaching into a seemingly innocent, unblemished Amer

ican garden. Ironically, however, the stories preceding each water jour

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Davis and Fitzgerald 51

ney reveal this garden's doom, and so adumbrate the Smith-Gatsby dream. First Settlers, for instance, is a tale of disloyalty among dissatis

fied, bickering settlers in Jamestown, of Indian warfare and treachery between white and red men, and of the inexorable destruction of the

beautiful virgin wilderness with the start of settlement. Likewise, be

hind Nick Carraway's recollection of the Half Moon in Gatsby lies an

unpleasant tale of infidelity, organized crime, a marred landscape, mur

der, and Jay Gatsby's futile dream of going back in time and recaptur ing Daisy Buchanan's love.

While the details in each passage differ to some extent, their dra

matic perspective and nostalgic mood are the same: awed and quiet Eur

opeans looking from outside into what seems like an earthly paradise on

the shore. The intention of each passage is unmistakably similar: to con

trast a pastoral, Edenic hope of regeneration with a grim, tragic reality of

postlapsarian loss and death. With its greater nautical and landscape de

tail, Davis's upriver journey provides a historical supplement to Fitzger ald's picture of the Half-Moon.

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway sits on the lawn of Gatsby's deserted mansion and thinks:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until grad

ually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes?a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for

Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human

dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the pres ence of this continent, compelled into aesthetic contemplation he neither understood

nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his

capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's won

der when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a

long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hard

ly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that base obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes be fore us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter?tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out

our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning? So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.2

John Davis describes another American water journey and the same

dream passing away before the eyes of other sailors farther South:

They now weighed their anchor and stood up the river. The sun was approaching the meridian. A light breeze distending the canvas, enabled the tall ship to sail gently along the shore, covered with awful forests. . . .

"Steady!" was called by the captain, and repeated by the helmsman, while the echoes multiplied the sound on land. Every person had come on deck. The Indian princess was reclining against the quarter-rail, surrounded by Sir Thomas, and the captains West, Percy, Holcroft, Rolfe, &c. Captain

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52 Early American Literature, Volume XVI, 1981

Argall was pacing the deck, conning the ship by some point of land and either repeating

"Steady so! Steady a-long!" or calling "Starboard a little! Mind your starboard helm!"

Here and there the magnificent pine forests opening their vistas, discovered to the

ravished eye meadows purpled with strawberries, flocks of turkies strolling about, and herds of deer wantonly prancing. Companies of young Indian girls were also seen, some

busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, and others, having already filled their baskets, re

clining under the shade of the weeping willow. The nimble cat-fish sometimes jumped above the water, while the fish hawk hovered over the surface watching its prey.3

As in Fitzgerald's concluding scene in The Great Gatsby, the inno

cence, peace, and beauty still glimpsed on Davis's riverbank are only sad

reminders of what already has been lost for man in the New World, and

before. Pocahontas, the Indian princess at the quarter-rail, is a hostage of the Englishmen. Powhatan's noble son, Nantaguas, has discovered

rum, and he looks foolish now in the soiled cast-off European shirt and

hat that he wears along with his Indian dress. Beyond the passing idyll ashore, Indian villages have been sacked and their inhabitants slaugh tered. Some strawberry fields already have given way to the earth-de

stroying tobacco plantations. The fish hawk hovering for prey at the end of the passage is identified with the quietly sailing ship.

The juxtaposition in the river scene of real and ideal near the con

clusion of The First Settlers of Virginia shows an early and heretofore un

recognized statement of a major tragic theme in American fiction. It

lends to Davis's tale a significance that so far has not been attributed to

it: the author's sad awareness of an America that has since been called "an archetypal Paradise Lost"4 where mankind's desire for renewal, for

that chance to have again the contentment and peace squandered in

Eden were glimpsed and lost for a second time. Two American water

journeys, South and North, in novels written well over one hundred

years apart make and remake this tragic point.

NOTES

1 Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Durham, N.C.,

1954), p. 196. And see Davis's "epic" poem, The American Mariners: or, The Atlantic

Voyage (Salisbury, Md., 1822). A less ambitious and more satisfactory volume of his verse is Poems, Written at Coosahatchie, in South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1799). And also see his Travels of Pour Years anda Half in the United States of America; Dur

ing 1798, 1799, 1800, and 1802 (London, 1803). Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson's Virginia, i790-i53(/(Knoxvillc, Tenn., 1972), p. 300. For additional dis cussion of John Davis and his work, also see R. B. Davis's Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840 (Baton Rouge, La., 1973), pp. 237-41.

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York, 1953), p. 182. 3 John Davis, The Pirst Settlers of Virginia (New York, 1805), pp. 218-19. Despite

its rather declamatory nature, the actual concluding paragraph in First Settlers is both

elegiac and poignant in its own right. Although it has nothing to do with a water jour

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Davis and Fitzgerald 5 3

ney, it, too, foresees the nostalgic evocation of hope and loss that occurs in the last lines

of The Great Gatsby. At the end of his story, Davis writes:

But alas! how changed is now the scene on the parent river of the Indian princess! No longer does the moon shed her silver light over the wigwams of the Indians sunk

in profound repose. No more is the cry of arrival uttered by the young red warrior ap

proaching the hamlet. No longer are the ebon tresses of the Indian nymph fanned by the evening gale, as she reclines her head upon the bosom, and listens to the vows of

her roving lover. The race of Indians has been destroyed by the inroads of the whites!

Surveyors with long chains have measured the wilderness, and lawyers contended for

the right of possession. Beneath those forests once the favoured seat of freedom, the

swarthy slave groans under the scourges of an imperious task-master; and the echoes

multiply the strokes of the cleaving axe as he fells the proud tree of the melancholy waste. All alas! is changed. The cry of the hawk only is heard where the mock bird

poured his melody; and no vestige is left behind of a powerful nation, who once un conscious of the existence of another people, dreamt not of invasions from foreign en

emies, or inroads from colonists, but believed their strength invincible, and their race eternal! (pp. 272-73)

4 Stanley Bank, American Romanticism: A Shape for Fiction (New York, 1969), p.

13. For some further observations on the American myth of a new beginning, see R. W. B.

Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Cen tury (Chicago, 1955), pp. 5-6, 103, 129.

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