'Letter: The First Voyage' By Nathaniel Hawthorne

As students, we may find the stories of the American writers and artists to be confusing and hard to read. However, they have built our country’s history and there are prominent underlying meanings to these historic stories. When reading through the large yellow course packet it is hard to imagine the significance of the stories or find connections between them. This assignment has helped me discover the instances and similarity in the writings “Letter: the first voyage” (1493) by Columbus and “Young Goodman Brown” (New England magazine,1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Even though the stories were written in different centuries and different context they form together to exemplify the connecting theme of discovery. Whether it is the discovery
Woven into the writings of “Letter: the first voyage” there is an abundance amount of instances that illustrate the overriding theme of discovery and how it has been called to question at times throughout the journey. The writing begins with an optimistic tone when Columbus addresses God and a hope for a successful voyage, “The eternal God who has given your highnesses so many victories now gave you the greatest one that to this day he has ever given any prince” (page 1). Columbus is ready for his conquest and is in high hopes for success with his journey. However, as we read along we find that Columbus encounters more setbacks and discouragement, “I traveled thirty-three days after departing from your kingdoms; after fourteen of the thirty-three days there were light winds in which I discovered no ground” (Page 1). Columbus goes through many different stages of feelings and the first page seems to represent it from the beginning. There has already been times of optimism and times of failure when he fails to find land. All these situations are also sentences after one another representing Columbus’s roller coaster of a journey with hope and failure intertwined, “ I found innumerable people and very many islands… to the first [island] I gave the name San Salvador, to the second Santa Maria de la Concepción, to the third Fernandina, to the fourth Isabela, to the fifth Juana…” (Page 1). The constant success in Columbus voyage at the moment is soon going to be followed by questionable events that result in the uncertainty of successfully completing his voyage. Columbus discovered more than just land, he came across new people and new customs, “Nowhere in these islands have I known the inhabitants to have a religion, or idolatry, or much diversity of language among them, but rather they all understand each other” (page 4). With his conquests he not only learns new