The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  The people to whom the colonists deserted in defiance of Dale’s laws were a Tsenacommacah, or loose alliance, of thirty-odd smallish groups of Algonquians. Their paramount chief, Wahunsonacock, a Pamunkey Indian whom the English called Powhatan, was a “tall well proportioned man, with a sower look,” sixty years old and possessed of “a very able and hardy body to endure any labour.” The fourteen thousand allied Algonquians inhabited a rich ecological zone made up of mixed forest and Chesapeake waterways, on which they exercised an economy of collecting and horticulture. They hunted (Virginia white-tailed deer, bear, wild turkey, goose, quail, duck); they fished (herring, shad, sturgeon); they captured eels and shellfish (crabs, clams, oysters, mussels); they gathered (fruits, berries, nuts); and they practiced tillage (maize, beans, squash). They were nourished upon a better all-around diet than the Europeans. The confederation consisted of small-scale societies without ownership of land, without classes, without a state, but with all paying tribute to Wahunsonacock, “the subtell owlde foxe.” They pursued little economic specialization and attempted little trade; they were self-sufficient. Their society was organized around matrilineal descent, and both men and women enjoyed sexual freedom outside marriage. There existed no political/military bureaucracy for their roughly fifteen hundred warriors. Even Wahunsonacock performed the tasks of an ordinary man and was addressed by all not by his title but by his personal name. All the items Gonzalo “would not have” in his utopia were likewise missing in Powhatan society, except one: corn, or Indian maize. In search of food and a way of life that many apparently found congenial, a steady stream of English settlers opted to become “white Indians,” “red Englishmen,” or—since racial categories were as yet unformed—Anglo-Powhatans.40 One such was Robert Markham, a sailor who came to the region with Captain Christopher Newport on the first Virginia voyage (May–June, 1607) and ended up a renegade: he converted to Algonquian culture and took the name Moutapass.41

  The defections continued, especially among soldiers and laborers compelled by harsh discipline to build fortifications to the west, at Henrico, out of which would grow Richmond. In 1611, a few of those who “did Runne Away unto the Indyans” were retaken by a military expedition. Sir Thomas Dale “in A moste severe mannor caused [them] to be executed.” Of these, “Some he apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death.” These “extreme and crewell tortures he used and inflicted upon them” in order “to terrefy the rest for Attemptinge the Lyke.” When he caught a few others pilfering goods from the Virginia Company’s supplies, Dale “cawsed them to be bownd faste unto Trees and so sterved them to deathe.” Terror created boundaries.42

  Thus did popular anticapitalist traditions—a world without work, private property, law, felony, treason, or magistrate—find their perfect antithesis in Thomas Dale’s Virginia, where drumbeats called settlers to labor and the Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial promised terror and death to any who dared to resist. Military men transformed Bermuda and Virginia from places of “liberty and the fullness of sensuality” to places of bondage, war, scarcity, and famine. By 1613 colonists on Bermuda were starving to death as their bodies, bent and blue, spent their vital forces laboring on fortifications that would make of the island a strategic military outpost in the early phase of English colonization. One unnamed man refused to give in to the new reality, preserving the older vision of Bermuda as he “hid himself in the Woods, and lived only on Wilkes [whelks] and land Crabs, fat and lusty many moneths.” The destruction of the Bermudian paradise was signaled by a massive rat infestation and an ominous visitation by “a company of Ravens, which continued amongst them all the time of the mortality and then departed.”43

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water

  All I have to do in this world is to be merry,

  which I shall if the ground be not taken from me.

  —Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607)

  Youth, youth it is better to be starved by thy nurse

  Than live to be hanged for cutting a purse.

  —Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614)

  THE ENEMIES AT COURT OF Sir Walter Raleigh, the archetypal imperialist adventurer, imprisoned him in the Tower after the accession of James I in 1603 on insubstantial evidence that he had intrigued with Spain to kill the king. In prison Raleigh wrote his History of the World and in it mentioned Hercules and “the serpent Hydra, which had nine heads, whereof one being cut off, two grew in the place.” Raleigh, of course, identified with Hercules, and he used the hydra to symbolize the growing disorders of capitalism. “The amorphous laboring class, set loose from the traditional moorings of the peasantry, presented a new phenomenon to contemporaries,” historian Joyce Appleby has noted.1 Combining Greek myth with the Old Testament, Raleigh developed a historical interpretation of Hercules: “That he slew many thieves and tyrants I take to be truly written, without addition of poetical vanity,” he wrote, and “Sure it is that many cities in Greece were greatly bound to him; for that he (bending all his endeavours to the common good) delivered the land from much oppression.” Hercules helped to establish kingship, or political sovereignty, and commerce, under the dominance of a particular ethnic group, the Greeks. He served as a model for the exploration, trade, conquest, and plantation of English mercantilism; indeed, a cult of Hercules suffused English ruling-class culture in the seventeenth century.2 Raleigh noted, “Some by Hercules understand fortitude, prudence, and constancy, interpreting the monsters [as] vices. Others make Hercules the sun, and his travels to be the twelve signs of the zodiac. There are others who apply his works historically to their own conceits.”

  Francis Bacon, who as lord chancellor tried Raleigh in 1618 and was the first to inform him of his death sentence, turned the myth of Hercules and the hydra into a powerful conceit indeed. Born to a leading Elizabethan courtier and educated at Cambridge, Bacon was a philosopher who advocated inductive reasoning and scientific experimentation, and a politician who lost favor with the queen but regained it under James by betraying his erstwhile friends. He connected utopian thought with practical projects, writing New Atlantis, “Of Empire,” and “Of Plantations” while investing in the Virginia Company. He drafted his essay “Of Seditions and Troubles” after the Enslow Hill Rebellion (1596), in which food and antienclosure rioters in Oxfordshire planned to march to London to join rebellious apprentices. Bartholomew Steere, a carpenter and one of the rioters, predicted, “We shall have a merrier world shortly. . . . I will work one day and play the other.” Steere suffered two months of examination and torture in London’s Bridewell Prison at the hands of Bacon and other officials. While Bacon claimed that he sought to enlarge the “bounds of Human Empire to make all things possible,” his will to power violently crushed alternatives such as the one hoped for by Steere.

  Bacon wrote about Hercules in his interpretation of Prometheus, who signified mind and intellect and thereby proved that man might be regarded “as the centre of the world.” The winds sailed the ships and ran the engines just for man; plants and animals furnished food and shelter just for him; even the stars worked for him. The quest for knowledge was always a struggle for power. The voyage of Hercules to set Prometheus free seemed to Bacon to be an image of God’s redeeming the human race.3 The story of Hercules was on Bacon’s mind when he came to write An Advertisement Touching an Holy War, published in 1622, a famine year and shortly after Bacon’s downfall and conviction on charges of bribery. He wrote it to pay his debts and to find his way back into the corridors of power. The treatise addressed the conflict between the king and the members of Parliament over who was to hold the purse strings of government: Bacon advised that the only “chance of healing the growing breach was to engage the country in some popular quarrel abroad.” The recent national quarrel with Catholic Spain would not qualify, since James I favored a Spanish alliance. Hence Bacon looked elsewhere for enemies adequate to his proposed
jihad.

  Frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s The Great Instauration (1620): a ship of discovery returns through the Pillars of Hercules. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

  He began by comparing war to capital punishment. The justification for both must be “full and clear,” in accord with the law of nations, the law of nature, and divine law, lest “our blessed Saviour” become a Moloch (i.e., an idol to whom sacrifices were made). A death sentence was justified against those unavowed by God, those who had defaced natural reason and were neither nations in right nor nations in name, “but multitudes only, and swarms of people.” Elsewhere in the same essay Bacon referred to “shoals” and “routs” of people. By taking his terms from natural history—a “swarm” of bees, a “shoal” of seals or whales, a “rout” of wolves—and applying them to people, Bacon drew on his theory of monstrousness. These people had degenerated from the laws of nature and taken “in their body and frame of estate a monstrosity.” In 1620 Bacon had called for the rigorous study of monsters, “of every thing . . . which is new, rare, and unusual in nature.” To him, monsters were more than a portent, a curiosity, or an exoticism; rather, they comprised one of the major divisions of nature, which were: 1) nature in course; 2) nature wrought; and 3) nature erring. These three realms constituted what was normal, what was artificial, and what was monstrous. The last category bridged the boundaries of the natural and the artificial and was thus essential to the process of experiment and control.4 These divisions are well-known features of Bacon’s thought. His An Advertisement Touching an Holy War, by contrast, is not well known, yet it reveals the form and temper of its age.

  Bacon drew upon classical antiquity, the Bible, and recent history to provide seven examples of such “multitudes” that deserved destruction: West Indians; Canaanites; pirates; land rovers; assassins; Amazons; and Anabaptists. Having listed these, he wrote,

  Of examples enough; except we should add the labours of Hercules; an example which, though it be flourished with much fabulous matter, yet so much it hath, that it doth notably set forth the consent of all nations and ages in the approbation of the extirpating and debellating of giants, monsters, and foreign tyrants, not only as lawful, but as meritorious, even divine honour: and this although the deliverer came from the one end of the world unto the other.

  This is the crux, or crucial thought, where genocide and divinity cross. Bacon’s advertisement for a holy war was thus a call for several types of genocide, which found its sanction in biblical and classical antiquity. Bacon thereby gave form to the formless, as the groups he named embodied a monstrous, many-headed hydra. But who were these groups? And why did he recommend holy war against them?

  THE CURSE OF LABOR

  The answers to these questions may be found by continuing the analysis, begun in the previous chapter, of the processes of expropriation, exploitation, and colonization in the era of Raleigh and Bacon. We argue that the many expropriations of the day—of the commons by enclosure and conquest, of time by the puritanical abolition of holidays, of the body by child stealing and the burning of women, and of knowledge by the destruction of guilds and assaults on paganism—gave rise to new kinds of workers in a new kind of slavery, enforced directly by terror.5 We also suggest that the emergence of cooperation among workers, in new ways and on a new scale, facilitated new forms of self-organization among them, which was alarming to the ruling class of the day. Bacon saw the new combinations of workers as monstrous and used the myth of the many-headed hydra to develop his theory of monstrosity, a subtle, thinly veiled policy of terror and genocide. The idiom of monstrosity would gain special relevance with the emergence of a revolutionary movement in England in the 1640s, in which the proletarian forces opposed by Bacon would play a critical part.

  We will concentrate in this chapter on the making of “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” a phrase adopted in the authorized version of the Bible published in the year The Tempest was written (1611), and one that has flourished in modern social description. The alliteration (wood, water) and the assonance (hewer, drawer) have provided some of the attraction, but since the actual work that the phrase describes is menial, onerous, and dirty, the essential uses have revolved around dissonance and irony. Seventeenth-century London artisans used the phrase in their protests against deskilling, mechanization, cheap labor, and the loss of independence. Swift employed it in 1729 to describe the position of the Irish beneath their English lords, as did Wolfe Tone in 1790 and James Connolly almost two centuries later. In 1736 Bolingbroke, the aristocratic high Tory, added a racial spin: “The herd of mankind” constituted “another species,” “scarce members of the community, though born in the country,” “marked out like the Jews, a distinct race, hewers of wood and drawers of water.”6 In the nineteenth century the British Chartists gave the phrase animal connotations: “The labouring classes—the real ‘people’—[have] been roused in the attempt of making the working classes beasts of burden—hewers of wood and drawers of water.”7 In Emmanuel Appadocca (1854), the first anglophone novel published in the British Caribbean, Maxwell Philip wrote of the Africans, who “gave philosophy, religion, and government to the world, but who must now stoop to cut wood, and to carry water.” Osborne Ward noted in The Ancient Lowly (1888), “They were not only slaves but they formed, as it were, another race. They were the plebeians, the proletariat; ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’”8 The use of the phrase was extended into the twentieth century when Samuel Haynes, a follower of Marcus Garvey and president of the Newark branch of the NAACP, wrote the national anthem of Belize, which culminates, “By the might of truth and the grace of God,/No longer shall we be hewers of wood.” W. E. B. Du Bois explained that the aim of the black artisan was “to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers and drawers of water.” One of the exegetical tasks of pan-Africanism was to show that these biblical terms also applied to white people. The words were crucial to the formation of the African National Congress in South Africa in 1912 and figured again in Nelson Mandela’s speech about the dismantling of apartheid in 1991. George Jackson, the black revolutionary, emphasized the concomitant state of propertylessness: “Has any people ever been independent that owned neither land or tool? . . . more of the same, the hewing of wood and the carrying of water.”9

  While hewing and drawing suggest timeless travails, the phrase in fact originated in the early era of capitalism. William Tyndale coined “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in his translation of the Old Testament in 1530. It appears in two contrasting biblical contexts. The first is in Deuteronomy 29, where Moses makes a covenant at Jahweh’s command. He reminds the people of their deliverance from Egypt, the forty years in the wilderness, the battles of conquest. He calls together the captains of the tribes, the elders, and the officers and commands: “Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water” must enter into a covenant. Jahweh then curses for a dozen or more verses. The covenant is inclusive, constituting a people or nation, under threats and in dread. The second context is in Joshua 9:21: “And the princes said unto them [the Gibeonites], Let them live; but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation.” Two verses later, the punitive nature of the phrase is explained: “Now therefore are ye cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.” The Gibeonites have been punished with enslavement, yet they remain within the covenant.

  For the African, European, and American hewers of wood and drawers of water in the early seventeenth century, work was both a curse and a punishment. These workers were necessary to the growth of capitalism, as they did the work that could not or would not be done by artisans in workshops, manufactories, or guilds. Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that have usually been taken for granted by historians. Expropriation itself, for example, is treated as a given: the field is
there before the plowing starts; the city is there before the laborer begins the working day. Likewise for long-distance trade: the port is there before the ship sets sail from it; the plantation is there before the slave cultivates its land. The commodities of commerce seem to transport themselves. Finally, reproduction is assumed to be the transhistorical function of the family. The result is that the hewers of wood and drawers of water have been invisible, anonymous, and forgotten, even though they transformed the face of the Earth by building the infrastructure of “civilization.”

  THE LABORS OF THE HEWER AND DRAWER

  The hewers of wood and drawers of water had three main functions: they undertook the labors of expropriation; they built the ports and the ships and provided the seafarers for Atlantic commerce; and they daily maintained the households.

  Labors of expropriation included the clear-cutting of woods, the draining of marshes, the reclamation of fens, and the hedging of the arable field—in sum, the obliteration of the commoning habitus. Woodlands contained flourishing economies of forest people in England, Ireland, Jamaica, Virginia, and New England; their destruction was the first step toward agrarian “civilization,” as summarized by Hercules when he gave land to the cultivators in neolithic times. This was and is the language of cultivators and “improvers,” of settlers and imperialists, and even of a money-hungry government, as when the early Stuarts disafforested crown lands in a reckless search for revenues. The felled trees fueled the growing iron, glass, brewing, and shipbuilding industries, resulting in a threefold increase in the price of firewood between 1570 and 1640. In the latter year the “Act for the Limitation of Forests . . . was the signal for the beginning of widespread destruction of forests.”10 In 1649 the Parliamentary Committee for the Preservation of Timber was formed to check the depredations of the “looser and disordered sort of people” who continued to insist upon their common rights in the forests. In the year 1636 it took twenty-four oxen to drag the giant oak that would serve as mainmast to the Sovereign of the Seas; scores of people labored simultaneously, in precise alignment, to lift it onto wheels or wain. By the end of the seventeenth century only an eighth of England remained wooded.