In this essay I will discuss the encounter experience of the English colonizer John Lawson with North American Indians, as textualized in A New Voyage to Carolina, published in London in 1709. I will attempt to show how this narrative of encounter pictures a highly ‘unstable zone’, one in which, in the representation of the confrontation of Self and Other we see deployed first and foremost many patterns of domestication of the Other. But at the same time a process of destabilization of the comfortable certainties thereby established comes into play, leading ultimately to some real recognition of the specificity and value of the Other, albeit partial and contradictory.

Next to nothing is known for sure about Lawson before his arrival in Carolina in 1700. His birth date has not been established with certainty, though there is some indication it may have been 1674. The main problem confronted by biographers insofar as his English period is concerned, is the commonness of both his first and last names in England at the time. He probably came from a well-to-do family (though nothing designates it as a noble one), and he seems to have received a university education. Concerning his reasons for going to America, Lawson explains in the introduction to his book that, desiring to travel he spoke with a man ‘who was very well acquainted with the Ways of Living in both Indies; of whom, having made Enquiry concerning them, he assur'd me, that Carolina was the best country I could go to’. Lawson soon thereafter shipped out from London, and arrived in Charles Town (Charleston, SC) after a stopover in New York. He spent several months there, and then set out on an expedition to explore the interior of the country, in regions little known to the English at the time. He may have been commissioned to undertake this trip by the governors of the province, or by an English collector of botanical specimens whom he met in London, though these are only suppositions as there is no sure indication of the motives for Lawson's trip.