The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  Other, more immediately commercial, openings were targeted. In 1603 a consortium of Bristol merchants, excited by the possibilities of importing the bark and roots of the sassafras tree, sent two ships to trade with the Native Americans. Sassafras was a Spanish word, possibly adopted from an American language. It had first been mentioned in Frampton’s translation of Monardes, and it was there that its powers as a cure for syphilis were first vaunted. The enterprise was risky, calling for the audacity of youth, and the two ships were commanded by Martin Pring, a man of just twenty-three. Pring took with him merchandise including pickaxes, shovels, thimbles, mirrors, scissors, shoes and fish-hooks. He also took two vicious-looking mastiffs and – a delightful contrast – a boy skilled in playing a stringed instrument called the gittern. One way or the other, Pring meant to subdue the Native Americans. He sampled the cherries of Martha’s Vineyard, assembled a sizeable cargo of sassafras, and returned with an optimistic view of the possibilities for trade and settlement.

  More such missions followed. In the course of two voyages, George Waymouth reached Baffin Island, as Frobisher had done before him, and explored the coast of Maine. An account of the second of these trips, James Rosier’s A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage, attracted a good deal of attention. It mentions ‘many fruit trees, which we knew not’ together with unfamiliar dogs (‘some like Wolves, some like Spaniels’) and, unsurprisingly, the abundance of tobacco – ‘excellent sweet and strong’.13 Rosier was much concerned with the ‘profits’ the land afforded, and he was alert to its diversity. He was intrigued by the different kinds of woodland he saw, and made notes about these and other findings. Samuel Purchas abridged Rosier’s short book, and usefully appended a list of Eastern Abenaki vocabulary collected but not published by Rosier. The list mentions coribo (caribou), moosurr (moose) and a kind of axe called a tomaheegon (tomahawk).14

  The next voyage would be a more enduring success, for it established what was to prove to be the first permanent English settlement in North America. In the winter of 1606 the London Company’s three ships set sail. The flagship, Susan Constant, was a vessel of 120 tons, and was accompanied by the 40-ton Godspeed and the 20-ton Discovery. These were small craft: the biggest was less than 80 feet and the smallest just 38 feet at the waterline. There were about a hundred would-be settlers on board. Inevitably, the party was heavily male. While it included a number of ‘gentlemen’, the hard practicalities of planting a colony had been recognized, and with the gentlemen there travelled an assortment of labourers, as well as a blacksmith, a tailor, a couple of bricklayers and a barber. They sailed via Martinique and Nevis – in the latter they caught and ate an alligator – and made landfall in April the following year, naming the site Jamestown after their king. Soon after, they were joined by two further parties, many of them craftsmen with skills valuable to the settlers. Among them was Robert Cotton, a maker of tobacco pipes, and archaeologists have found well-preserved examples of his distinctive squared-off pipes, made of red Virginia clay. Other archaeological discoveries are a mix of the expected, including daggers and armour, and oddities such as a finely tooled silver device for excavating wax from ears.

  The London Company’s shareholders expected to get rich. They hoped that gold and diamonds would be found. But fresh waters and tall trees could be guaranteed, and these helped ensure the agricultural basis of the new colony. Swathes of land were granted to all who signed up for the voyage. Unlike at home, they could have good houses, orchards and vegetable gardens. The response was optimistic. There has long been an enthusiasm among the English for securing individual holdings and investing each with its own character and family culture. Those who settled abroad would always glance nostalgically back to the mother country, especially as they struggled with the many unadvertised hardships of life in Virginia. But the choice between a small patch of territory within the British Isles and a more substantial holding abroad was straightforward. In England, food supplies were erratic and shortages were a common problem: in Virginia they were not. Reassuringly, contemporary illustrations showed the natives as tall, broad people, healthy and well nourished. They had clearly reaped the benefits of their land’s bounty, as the English were to now.

  The encounter between two communities who speak different languages can have fatal implications. Indeed, the different languages of the colonists and natives were keys into their different sensory worlds. The Native Americans experienced all the senses together, fully integrated; the settlers trusted sight above all other senses.15 The two peoples’ systems of judgement and perception were fundamentally at odds. Yet relations with the native people were friendly at first. The English were allowed into their villages, where they made presents of beads and glass. They found mulberries, raisins and sugar canes, vines, olives, hemp and crabs. The progress of English was informal, as it has been generally. A teenage boy, Thomas Savage, was chosen to serve the chief of the Powhatans, in order to learn how to channel information between the two mutually unintelligible groups. Not for the settlers a systematic programme of linguistic re-education: theirs was a more pragmatic and spontaneous approach. Only in time, as increasing volumes of settlers outnumbered the comparatively static indigenous population, did European languages become dominant.

  Soon, however, differences in the ways the Native Americans and Europeans used their senses caused friction. To the Native Americans their encounters felt unequal, and the equilibrium of their culture was disturbed by the newcomers’ insensitivity and their fussiness about boundaries and borders. As the settlers developed policies regarding contact, so exchanges became increasingly restricted. Encounters were supervised and sterile. The native people who were endued with English ‘godliness’ got haircuts, cobbled shoes, solid-framed houses and written laws, as well as new words.16 But the settlers’ property titles usurped the natives’ long-established sense of ownership as a divine gift. In The Tempest Shakespeare offers an imaginative portrait of the indigenous peoples’ response, as Caliban complains:

  This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,

  Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first

  Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me

  Water with berries in’t, and teach me how

  To name the bigger light, and how the less,

  That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee,

  And showed thee all the qualities o’th’ isle,

  The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile –

  Cursed be I that did so! …

  For I am all the subjects that you have,

  Which first was mine own king.

  In the same play, Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth – a place without traffic, letters, vineyards, sovereignty – is the reverse image of the same situation. We see here the discrepancy between two sets of ideals, two understandings of ownership, two ways of knowing the world.

  Assessing conventional accounts of the relationship, Richard White has written that ‘Indians are the rock, European peoples are the sea’ and ‘The sea wears down and dissolves the rock; or the sea erodes the rock but cannot finally absorb its battered remnant, which endures.’ As White explains, in the Great Lakes region that the French called the pays d’en haut, the Indians and the Europeans reached an accommodation – a middle ground between the two inimical cultures. The reason was simple: ‘whites could neither dictate to Indians nor ignore them,’ and needed them ‘as allies, as partners in exchange, as sexual partners, as friendly neighbours’.17 Eventually, the American republic would succeed where the English and the French failed – in dictating the perimeters, both literal and metaphorical, of this middle ground. But, before this could be achieved, there were to be many traumas and misunderstandings.

  This clash of cultures is epitomized in the experience of the adventurer Captain John Smith, who was critical in establishing the English presence. A man of action, he had fought in France and the Netherlands, and in his youth he had travelled to Mor
occo to serve as a mercenary. Memorably, during the siege of a Turkish stronghold in Transylvania he beheaded three men he had defeated in duels. Smith’s first attempt to grapple with the alien zone of America was his True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia (1608). There he refers to the chieftain of the Powhatans as having a rich coverlet made of ‘Rahaughcums’.18 This is a racoon, although our modern spelling did not appear until more than sixty years later. In the local Algonquian language the word was equivalent to ‘he scratches with his hands’: raccoons like to dig for crabs and eggs with their clawed yet sensitive front paws. The spelling must have unnerved Smith’s readers; his London printer apologized to them for what were doubtless faults in the names of places and objects, so many of them ‘somewhat strange’.

  Smith travelled with the first fleet bound for Virginia in 1607. Famously, during a winter foray up the Chickahominy River he was seized by Native Americans and brought before the area’s tribal overlord. He was – at least as far as he could make out – saved from death only through the intervention of Matoaka, the 11-year-old daughter of a powerful chieftain called Wahunsenacawh. To posterity this remarkable young woman is known as Pocahontas (her childhood nickname, meaning ‘little wanton’). Vigorous and free-spirited, she would turn cartwheels naked for the delight of the male colonists. Her efforts on Smith’s behalf may have been theatre more than a real and spontaneous act; read literally, though, they can be seen as a defining moment in the ‘Englishing’ of America. Without her stepping in, Smith would very likely have been killed, and would not have had the opportunity to become a promoter of colonization – or of a theory of where settlements should be planted and how they should be underpinned. Smith described Pocahontas as a ‘nonpareil’, and claimed that her help was second only to that of God in preserving the colony from ‘utter confusion’. Her marriage to John Rolfe at Jamestown in 1614, her renunciation of idolatry and embrace of Christianity, and her subsequent life at Brentford in Middlesex – where she was plain Rebecca Rolfe – were interpreted as symbols of a promising Anglo-Indian entente. Such interpretation now seems hyperbolic, but visitors to the United States Capitol are treated to John Gadsby Chapman’s painting of her baptism and Antonio Capellano’s bas-relief of her saving Smith from execution – seminal episodes in the nation’s myth of its identity.

  In the autumn of 1609 Smith returned to England. Having already been paralysed by a stingray’s venom, he was burnt when a spark from a flintlock ignited the pouch of gunpowder he kept fastened to his waist. He sailed to London for treatment, never to return. But his time in Virginia resulted in significant publications; he took pains to document what he had encountered on his travels, and communicated a fantasy of a land where people of ‘great spirits and small meanes’ could become rich. As his biographers Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler put it, ‘Smith founded more than a colony. He gave birth to the American dream.’19 First, he drew a map of Virginia, which was published in 1612 and promised a description ‘of the Country, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion’. It symbolized, as maps so often do, the colonist’s control over the landscape, but it also reflected his passion for cataloguing and collecting, on top of an instinctive desire to index his experiences. In the accompanying text he refers to putchamins, which are persimmons, and tomahacks, which are a little easier to recognize. He mentions mockasins, too, and various kinds of root useful in medicine, as well as the maracock, a passion flower deemed good to eat.

  A Description of New England followed four years later, its title a badge of Smith’s proprietorial attitude. Its pages are luxuriant with descriptions of the local trees and fruit, birds and fish; he mentions seeing moose, whales and wildcats. His writings contain what may be the first references to the rattlesnake, the stingray and the cockroach; the last of these, from the Spanish cucaracha, is in his version a cacarootch, a spelling that takes us into the insect’s dung-rootling world. Mainly, though, the land’s bounty is his theme. When he travelled up the Potomac, he found sand glistening with golden flecks. Once assayed, it turned out to be little more than gilded dirt. But there were other resources that seemed as precious as the ones for which Smith had originally hoped. He records eating an assortment of ‘fat’ wild beasts; there were beavers, otters, martins, mink and bears. The rivers were a particularly rich source of food, covered as they were with swans, ducks, geese and cranes, and the water was so glutted with fish that it seemed possible to scoop them out with a frying pan.

  As a writer, Smith was intent on promoting the idea that England should have colonies, and his language conveys the excitement of the New World. The first English author to talk of terra incognita, he peppers his pages with a host of other new words: prickly pear, awning, adrift, roomy, plus some real oddities, like jubartes, the name of the New England fin whale, and, from the Dutch, lopeskonce, an ‘entrenchment’. These terms reveal the spacious wonder of encounter. Smith’s surroundings bristled with oddity. Even now, the Native American language of the natural world can sound stunningly seductive. There are the flora: mockernut hickories and chinquapin oaks, or pipsissewa and blue cohosh and hoary puccoon. And then there are the fierce-sounding fauna: the Catahoula hog dog, the tautog, the muskellunge and the squeteague. Of the words heard by the settlers, the ones that caught on were those for which there was no immediate alternative. For a time, netop, a word for a close friend, enjoyed some use among English-speakers in America, but it died away. On the other hand hickory, which could be expressed no other way, lived on.

  Hickory was in fact a shortened and adapted form of pawcohiccora, the native Virginian name for that particular species of tree, known for its tough, flexible wood. Hickory is an excellent material for burning, as well as for bows and tool handles; John Wesley may have complained that it bore ‘a bad kind of walnut’-a pecan – but the settlers valued it highly. The Indian world view is reflected in calques such as happy hunting ground, peace pipe and the expression bury the hatchet. Firewater is another likely calque, based on the Algonquian scoutiouabou. In time, terms reckoned (not always correctly) to show Indian influence were sometimes known as wigwam words.

  The more evocative of them captivated a succession of settlers. In 1613 Alexander Whitaker, a 28-year-old minister at the settlement of Henrico on the James River, writes of catching pike, carp, eels, crayfish and terrapins (from the Abenaki, turepe). He is astonished by the flying squirrel and ‘the female Possowne, which will let forth her yong out of her belly, and take them up into her belly againe at her pleasure without hurt to her selfe’.20 This is the opossum – Smith says it ‘hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bignes of a Cat’.21 It sounds like an image out of Marco Polo or Mandeville. The creature’s local name literally meant ‘white dog’; it is easy enough to see why, as the Virginia opossum has a thin-lipped white face, but it is best known for its distinctly un-doggy habit of feigning death when threatened by predators.

  Papoose, from the Algonquian, makes its first appearance in William Wood’s New England’s Prospect (1634)-a book later devoured by Henry David Thoreau, who could not fail to be impressed by how ‘emasculated’ his country seemed alongside the one Wood had described. New England’s Prospect was the fruit of four years spent in Massachusetts, which Wood insisted was preferable to Surrey and Middlesex. As if to undermine his claim, he introduces skunk, which he spells ‘squunck’; it derives from the Abenaki segongw, which approximates to ‘one who squirts’.

  The corruption of these words as they have been absorbed means that their origins are obscured. Take, for example, the noun woodchuck. If you have ever been caught up in the well-known tongue-twister about this burrowing rodent, you may casually assume that its name is no more than a cute description of its favourite activities. But actually it is a corruption of the Cree wuchak, meaning ‘a fisher’-odd, since the woodchuck’s diet consists mainly of grasses and grubs.

  The Eastern Abenaki wigwam first appears in 1628, whereas the
tepee favoured by tribes such as the Cheyenne and the Lakota makes no appearance until 1743. Totem comes from Ojibwa, and appears in French as early as 1609, though it cannot be found in an English text until the eighteenth century. Squash is a shortened form of the Narragansett askutasquash, which literally means ‘vegetables eaten while green’. Later accessions include pecan from one of the Algonquian languages, pemmican from Cree, and, from Massachusett, that appealingly strange word mugwump, which was a term of respect before it became a jocular word for a political independent or someone swollen with self-importance.

  The more intellectually curious settlers, like Alexander Whitaker, were intrigued by the indigenous culture. Native phenomena and customs were observed with minute curiosity. And, understandably, they omitted the more brutal moments of conquest and mastery from their accounts. A significant document for our understanding of the settlers’ programme of change is the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by George Sandys, who in 1621 had sailed to Virginia with his relative Edwin Wyatt. Sandys’s translation, crafted during the long evenings, frequently sanitizes the violence of Ovid’s original. His vision of imperial Rome and its cultural fruits was not so much an evasion of his own imperial experience as a corollary to it. The revised, annotated and illustrated second edition of 1632, complete with ornate homage to Charles I, hints at his sense of the work’s relevance to the colonial project. For instance, his translation at one point reads: