Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  To see the Indians as the continent’s “first environmentalists,” living in harmony with the natural world until the Europeans set foot on the land and destroyed it, is a view that is at best inaccurate. At worst, it is demeaning to Native Americans. It turns them into savages incapable of making aggressive use of the environment and thus unworthy of any rights to the land in the first place.25 In this sense, it is misleading, if not downright wrong, to term most of what the European colonists encountered when they stepped ashore a wilderness.

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  A TRULY NEW WORLD

  It was perhaps the most ill-timed expedition in the history of exploration. In 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English courtier and navigator, recruited 117 people—men, women, and children—to venture to the New World under the command of John White. Their destination: a spot of land roughly ten miles long and two miles wide off the coast of North Carolina now named Roanoke Island. White put the settlers ashore and a few weeks later returned to England to find supplies and additional recruits for the venture. War with Spain, however, delayed his return. In 1590, when he finally managed to make his way back to Roanoke, he found not a bustling plantation, as he had hoped, but utter desolation. Not a trace of the colonists could be found. No one can say definitively what happened to the “Lost Colony.” Some suspect an Indian attack; others, that the settlers decided, on their own, to go off to live with the Native Americans. One thing, however, seems certain: Scientific analysis of tree rings reveals that the colonists at Roanoke lived through the worst drought in 800 years (1185 to 1984). Even the most foresighted and resourceful of explorers would have found the task of survival on the island a monumental challenge.1 Raleigh could not have picked a worse time to launch his undertaking.

  Until the voyages of the Vikings beginning in the eleventh century, North America remained isolated from Europe, two worlds going their own separate ecological ways. With the expeditions of the Norse and the subsequent ventures of Spain, Portugal, and Britain, however, the human will to unite the continents triumphed over age-old geologic forces.

  As Raleigh’s misadventure shows, the colonists encountered a new and potentially life-threatening world on the other side of the Atlantic. North America is a place of climatic extremes, the product of the continent’s unique physical configuration. It is the only landmass in the world with both a wide base in the sub-Arctic and mountain ranges running in a north-south direction. Cold air from the Arctic can thus plunge south, where it often meets warm, moist air surging north from the Gulf of Mexico.2 The result is a turbulent set of climatic conditions that make the land prone to weather extremes such as tornadoes, droughts, and floods. How did the colonists adjust to life in a brand new physical environment? What dilemmas did living in a truly new world impose on them? How did they revamp it to conform to the landscape and customs that prevailed in their European homeland?

  CLIMATE SHOCK

  One of the hardest problems the colonists confronted was the gap between their preconceived ideas about the natural environment and the reality that faced them on the ground. European views on climate and latitude are a case in point. The colonists believed, mistakenly, that latitude determined climate. They thus expected that Virginia, which has the same latitude as Spain, would also have conditions suitable for growing such crops as oranges, lemons, sugarcane, and grapes. European settlers persisted in this fantasy into the mid-seventeenth century. A pamphlet promoting the virtues of settlement in Maryland from the early 1630s assured newcomers of the likelihood “that the soil will prove to be adapted to all the fruits of Italy, figs, pomegranates, oranges, olives, etc.”3

  It took the colonists until the late eighteenth century to learn that their ideas about climate in America bore little relationship to reality. South Carolina was positioned “in the same latitude with some of the most fertile countries on the globe,” wrote historian Alexander Hewit in 1779. “Yet he is in danger of error who forms his judgement of its climate from the latitude in which it lies.”4 As Hewit correctly surmised, latitude, although a factor in determining climate, is not all there is to the story. How a landmass is oriented with respect to the ocean also figures prominently in a region’s weather. Because weather comes from the west, the Atlantic Ocean plays a major role in determining the climate of Western Europe. By heating up and cooling down more slowly than land, the Atlantic has had a moderating effect on the region’s climate. Marked by relatively small variations in temperature and with adequate rainfall spread throughout the seasons, the humid environment found between 35 and 45 degrees north favors the production of citrus fruits and olives. The eastern part of North America, at that same latitude, does not benefit from the moderating effect of a huge ocean. Instead, a continental climate dominates, one subject to temperature extremes and with rainfall mainly concentrated in the summer, when the hot weather aids evaporation. Growing olives in Virginia is all but impossible.

  Despite such misunderstandings, climate figured prominently in the thoughts of the Europeans, especially the British. Climate mattered to them not simply because of its connection to agricultural production and survival but also because the British identified climate as a key element in the character of their people. The English thrived, it was believed, in a moderate climate. They feared tropical heat, holding that such an environment was more suited to the French and Spanish. Travel to the southern part of America was thus perceived as carrying a great risk to life and health.5

  MAP OF COMPARATIVE LATITUDES

  In this last respect at least, the perceptions of British colonists matched up well with reality. The hotter the climate, the higher, generally speaking, the death rate. The settlement of the American South is a case in point. Jamestown, Virginia, was the first area in North America to be permanently settled by the English, although all the attention devoted to the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock might easily lead one to think otherwise. The colony of Jamestown is easily overlooked because its checkered history serves as a poor starting point for a great nation. Late in 1606, three ships carrying 144 people left Britain and by the following spring had entered Chesapeake Bay, establishing a colony on the James River, roughly 50 miles from where it empties into the bay. This was a prime agricultural area, with a growing season roughly two months longer than New England’s. Although the colony got off to a fine start, its prospects had turned sour by the summer when, according to one observer, “our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine.”6

  MAP OF AMERICAN COLONIES

  By January of the following year, the colony edged toward the brink of extinction, with only 35 of the original settlers still alive. Indeed, between 1607 and 1625, some 4,800 out of 6,000 colonists perished at Jamestown. “Meere famine,” however, does not do justice to the complex set of environmental factors that may have played a role in the staggering death toll. It seems, based again on tree ring analysis, that like their predecessors on Roanoke Island, the colonists at Jamestown confronted extraordinary drought conditions. Drought stalked the Virginia landscape between 1606 and 1612, the worst seven-year dry spell in 770 years (from 1215 to 1984). Malnutrition may well have been the cause of the high death rate, but it would be remarkable if such a severe drought did not bear on the colonists’ inability to find an adequate amount of food.7

  Poor water quality—a situation made worse by the drought—also contributed to the settlers’ woes. The colonists relied heavily on the James River, a supply that proved safe for most of the year. But when the summer arrived, the flow of the river lessened considerably. Pools of stagnant water contaminated with human waste created conditions favorable for the spread of typhoid fever and amoebic dysentery. Worse still, the decline in the flow of freshwater allowed saltwater from the bay to intrude further upstream. As a result, the colonists found themselves drinking water laden with salt in concentrations five times the amount recommended for drinking today.
Salt poisoning was what plagued them. By sticking close to the river’s estuary (the zone where freshwater and saltwater meet) during the summer, the colonists were killing themselves, yet they continued this suicidal behavior until Captain John Smith intervened. Smith noticed that the Indians left the estuarine zone in July, heading for high ground where freshwater springs could be found. Mobility thus ensured the Indians’ good health. In the spring of 1609, Smith urged his comrades to scatter into the countryside, and the summertime death toll declined. Unfortunately, Smith soon left the colony to return to Britain and when he did so the colonists again congregated like sitting ducks in Jamestown—victimized by their failure to understand their surroundings in anything approaching the detail of their Indian neighbors.8

  Malaria also flourished in the warmer southern climate. Once again, the colonists found themselves caught between their erroneous landscape perception and the tragic reality. Europeans first introduced malaria into North America; later a more lethal form of the disease arrived from Africa. High mortality rates plagued the South, but particularly the colony of South Carolina, where some parishes failed to see a natural increase in population until the American Revolution. A common proverb circulating in Britain in the revolutionary period went: “They who want to die quickly, go to Carolina.”9 It was an apt prophecy, in part because the colonists wrongly believed until well into the eighteenth century that swampy areas were relatively healthful. They preferred swamps to cities, where, they believed, arriving ships brought diseased passengers ashore. In fact, the swampy Low Country was precisely the best breeding ground for mosquitoes, explaining the recurrent summer and fall malaria problem.

  While colonists in the South faced the problem of heat and its implications for disease, settlers in the North struggled with the reverse situation: persistent cold. If few remember Jamestown in the rush to glorify the success at Plymouth Rock, virtually no one recalls the colony of Sagadahoc in Maine, founded the very same year (1607) that Virginia Company ships landed in the Chesapeake. Bad management, in part, led to the settlement’s demise within less than a year. But a bitterly cold winter also played a part. The prospects for settlement, wrote one observer some years later, were literally “frozen to death.”10 It would be more than a decade before the Pilgrims—perhaps discouraged by this miserable initial effort—again tried to establish a beachhead in the region. Focusing only on the successful efforts of the colonists has thus obscured the very real struggle they faced in coming to terms with the environment in the northern reaches of this new world.

  Larger climatic forces also may have contributed to some of the problems the New England colonists encountered. History in North America has thus far unfolded, as noted earlier, during an interglacial period. But the ice and cold have already made one major return visit. A Little Ice Age intervened from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (although some scientists believe the trend began as early as 1300). Although dubbed an ice age, the period is best viewed as one made up of a series of intense climatic shifts—cold winters, giving way to more mild ones with heavy rains in the spring and summer, switching to droughts and summer heat waves. The exact cause of the schizophrenic climate is still not completely understood. But a change in the relationship between the ocean and atmosphere may be to blame.11 Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the most severe cold was felt in the northern hemisphere between 1550 and 1700. During the seventeenth century, the temperature of the water off the coast of New England rivaled that found in the Labrador Sea today.

  During the most severe part of the Little Ice Age, the New England colonists experienced one of the most significant early challenges to their survival: severe food shortages in the years 1696, 1697, and 1698, precisely the years when the cold was at its worst. The winter of 1697–1698 was probably the coldest winter on record in the seventeenth century. Near winter’s end, the Puritan Samuel Sewall lamented the consequences of the extreme cold:

  To Horses, Swine, Net-Cattell, Sheep and Deer

  Ninety and Seven prov’d a Mortal yeer.

  By this time, New England’s population—which may have increased as much as four times between 1640 and the end of the century—had already strained the available resource base, turning the region into a net importer of corn, wheat, rye, and other grains. The severe cold in the latter part of the 1690s raised the even worse possibility of famine. In 1696, prices for wheat and maize were one and a half to two times what they were normally. There were reports of people in Boston having to do without bread for weeks at a time.12

  Focusing on the darker underside of early American history—the famine, disease, and failure—does much to challenge the view that the past has been one direct march onward and upward. But more than undermining the triumphalism that has so marred our understanding of this nation, these examples demonstrate that, like the Indians, the Europeans needed to figure out a way to survive in a literally new world that was as unforgiving as it was unfamiliar.

  BIOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

  Just as long-term climatic forces such as glaciations shaped agricultural prospects in the New World, so too did ecological changes. The Pleistocene extinctions some 13,000 years ago might seem barely relevant to the European arrival. But without those extinctions the colonists probably never would have succeeded to the degree that they did in dominating North America.

  In the first place, the Pleistocene mass death, by eliminating most of the big mammals in the Americas, helped to remove a major source of disease. Unlike Eurasia, the New World’s lack of cows, pigs, horses, and other domesticated species (capable of transmitting disease to human beings) insulated it from epidemics. And if the first human settlers, the Paleoindians, did indeed journey to the continent by passing across the Bering land bridge, the cold environment would have filtered out diseases and killed off the sick, preventing illness from being passed along to descendants. Prior to the end of the fifteenth century, the Native Americans had acquired no immunity from a variety of illnesses that Europeans had lived with since they were children. Smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever, influenza, and amoebic dysentery were all unknown to the Indian immune system and would have remained foreign to them had not the European Age of Discovery reunited what geological forces had rent asunder hundreds of millions of years before.

  The epidemiological upheaval created by European contact with the New World is difficult to fathom. Precisely how many Indians lived on the continent before the arrival of the colonists is, as we have seen, the point of some contention. But whatever the exact population figure, no one disputes that the Native American population loss by 1900 was truly monstrous. Even assuming that a million people inhabited the continent—an implausibly low number—some two-thirds of them were gone after four centuries of European contact. The higher initial population figures, which seem more likely, yield a rate of attrition between 95 and 99 percent, one of the most dramatic population reductions in the history of the world.13

  Smallpox, a horrific disease once described by British historian Thomas Macaulay as “the most terrible of all the ministers of death,” was one of the greatest killers. Merely breathing air contaminated by a smallpox victim who had coughed or sneezed could result in infection. Since the virus often survived in dried-up bodily secretions that clung to bedclothes or blankets, an activity as mundane as sweeping the floor could cause contaminated particles to float through the air and be inhaled. And with a 10- to 14-day incubation period, smallpox was easily spread, as seemingly healthy people exposed to the disease infected others in their travels.14

  The Spanish first introduced the disease into Hispaniola in 1519. Eventually, the deadly virus worked its way across Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico before landing in what is today the United States. The first recorded epidemic occurred in the 1630s among the Algonquians of Massachusetts. “Whole towns of them were swept away, in some not so much as one soul escaping Destruction.” The disease wreake
d havoc in New England and ultimately spread west to the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes region, devastating the Huron and Iroquois of New York in the 1630s and 1640s. Mortality rates ranged as high as 95 percent. When a sailor suffering from the disease set foot in Northhampton County, Virginia, in 1667, smallpox began its march through the South. According to one report, Indians in Virginia “died by the hundred.”15

  Some colonists did not regret the demographic collapse, using it as a pretext to assert their claims of sovereignty over the land. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, observed in 1634, “For the natives, they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.” Others, realizing their dependence on the native people and their knowledge of the land, extended help in times of sickness. When the Plymouth colonists learned of the Indian Massasoit’s illness, they “sente him such comfortable things as gave him great contente, and was a means of his recovery.”16

  Seeing the enormous advantages that accrued from the decimation of the Indians by disease, some colonists may have taken matters upon themselves. During Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, British soldiers, under the command of Gen. Jeffrey Amherst, distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians. Whether Amherst ordered his subordinates to employ the virus against the Indians surrounding Fort Pitt or not (and the evidence suggests that he was not the first person to dream up the plan), the move coincided with a major epidemic in the spring and summer. Although the blanket affair has gone down as one of the most notorious efforts to employ disease as a weapon, biological warfare was by no means uncommon in the eighteenth century. At the time, such behavior even conformed to customary codes of conduct during European wars.17 Still, most of the smallpox epidemics spread mainly without design.