Francis Daniel Pastorius and his image of America in the late 17th century

The idea of this work is to analyse Francis Daniel Pastorius’ perception of America in one of his first letters that encourages German people to come to the New World and settle in Pennsylvania. Being the initiator of Germantown, the first province in America founded by German immigrants, he created a special image of America.

For this purpose, I will make use of Rob Kroes’ theory which says that images of America are always influenced by certain metaphorical dimensions. In the second part of the work at hand you may learn about the metaphorical dimensions by the Dutch professor in his book “If you’ve one, you’ve seen the mall”. He is of the conviction that these dimensions have always been used in history when creating America images.

To what extent can Rob Kroes’ theory be applied to Pastorius’ image of America? As a result I can say that Pastorius’ image of America partly confirms Kroes’ metaphors, because two of the metaphorical dimensions, the spatial and the temporal ones, are contained in the analysed letter.