Wannabe witnesses, and the smell of America

In the front of A Sense of History: The Best Writing from the Pages of American Heritage (c. 1985, ISBN 0828111758), there is a section of essays solicited by the editors of American Heritage magazine. Public figures, authors, and scholars, were asked this question:

What is the one scene or incident in American history you would like to have witnessed - and why?

(Sounds like a blog tag, doesn't it?)

Anyway, I've just starting dipping into the essays, but so far my favorite is by Annie Dillard, who is identified only as Adjunct Professor of English, Wesleyan University. The essay is titled First Taste of America:

Nothing so attracts and holds my imagination as the fact of the virgin North American continent as the amazed Europeans first saw it. Here was "a plaine wildernes as God first made it," in the words of John Smith. It bespoke Eden itself, a beautiful land already planted, in which all possibilities might be realized.

Most tantalizing was the thought of it all, the very scent of it, from over the horizon at sea. For three centuries, European explorers plying uncertainly in Atlantic waters far from the sight of land repeated a certain moment: they smelled on the west wind the distant flowering forest.

[snip]

The first permanent colonists found that the New World not only smelled good, it was, for the most part, edible...

She goes on to give some wonderful examples, which she says she gets from "John Bakeless's wonderful book The Eyes of Discovery." I see it is still in print, with a revised title.


America as Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery