What Shakespeare thought if the American Indian

[Frances Bolton (PHI)]

Louis, 

Actually, the evidence that Shakespeare did not set The Tempest in Bermuda
is overwhelming. I did a bit of research--he read the Bermmuda accounts
but the play is more based on continental north America.

First I looked at the foods Caliban mentions:
Filbert is another name for both the hazel and the hazelnut.  The
American Heritage Dictionary cites both European and American species
(Corylus avellana and Corylus americana, respectively).

Pignut, again according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is not the
truffle, but "either of two deciduous trees (Carya glabra or Carya
ovalis) of the eastern United States", or the nut or for that matter the
wood of either of these trees.

Harrison L. Flint's _Landscape Plants for Eastern North America_ (New
York: John Wiley, c1983), cites "useful" ranges for these plants as
follows: Corylus americana (American hazelnut), Zones 3a-8b; Carya
glabra (pignut hickory), Zones 5b-9a+.  To give examples, Zone 8b
(average annual minimum temperature about 15-20 degrees) encompasses
coastal North Carolina, as well as slightly more interior South Carolina
and Georgia, while Zone 9a (average annual minimum temperature about
20-25 degrees) encompasses coastal South Carolina and Georgia, along
with northern Florida.  Bermuda is 580 miles east of North Carolina.

I looked in  Hakluyt's _Voyages_, and
there I found the following passage in the concluding essay "The English
Voyages of the Sixteenth Century" by the editor, Walter Raleigh, which
dates from 1904:

"There is evidence enough, in well-known passages, of Shakespeare's
acquaintance with the discoveries of the voyagers.  The name Caliban is
almost certainly a distortion of Cannibal, and Setebos is a divinity of
the Patagonians, described by Master Francis Fletcher, in his account of
Drake's great voyage, as 'Settaboth, that is, the Divell, whom they name
their great god.'  But it was the reports brought home by the Virginia
adventurers that set Shakespeare's imagination to work.  The colony was
planted in 1609; and the first Governor, Lord Delaware, was diligent in
building towns and forts, and in bringing the Indians under control. 
Sir George Somers, deputy-Governor, was shipwrecked on the Bermudas,
which were in ill repute as the haunt of wicked spirits and foul
weather, but were found by the castaways to be temperate, fruitful, and
pleasant.  The tale of these adventures, brought by word of mouth, or
published in _The Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Isle
of Divels_ (1610), -- a tract by Sylvester Jourdain, one of Sir George
Somers' company, -- gave the finest and subtlest wit in the world a
theme for a play.  The _Tempest_ is a fantasy of the New World.  It is
too full of the ether of poetry, and too many-sided to be called a
satire, yet Shakespeare, almost alone, saw the problem of American
settlement in a detached light; and a spirit of humorous criticism runs
riot in the lighter scenes.  The drunken butler, accepting the worship
and allegiance of Caliban, and swearing him in by making him kiss the
bottle, is a fair representative of the idle and dissolute men who were
shipped to the Virginian colony.  The situation of Miranda was perhaps
suggested by the story of Virginia Dare, grand-daughter of Captain John
White, the first child born in America of English parents.  She was born
in 1587 and christened along with Maneteo, one of the Indians who had
visited England with Captains Amadas and Barlow.  That same year she was
abandoned, along with the other colonists.  In 1607, when the settlement
was next renewed, it was reported that there were still seven of the
English alive among the Indians, 'four men, two boys, and one maid.' 
The strange girlhood of this one maid, if she were Virginia Dare, may
well have set Shakespeare's fancy working.  And the portrait of Caliban,
with his affectionate loyalty to the drunkard, his adoration of valour,
his love of natural beauty and feeling for music and poetry, his hatred
and superstitious fear of his task-master, and the simple cunning and
savagery of his attempts at revenge and escape -- all this is a
composition wrought from fragments of travellers' tale, and shows a
wonderfully accurate and sympathetic understanding of uncivilised man."

Frances