The long-term prehistory of the Iroquois peoples is a remarkable tale of scattered, autonomous villages and camps in west-central New York and northern Pennsylvania coalescing, after centuries of bitter, violent feuding, into a cooperating confederation of Five Nations. By 1600 they had long been acquainted with certain European goods, which had reached them indirectly, through successive relays—in part from the fishermen of many nations working off the shores of Newfoundland and Cape Breton, and in part from a succession of explorers and traders visiting the Chesapeake-Susquehanna watershed. Continuing imports from European traders in the later sixteenth century, negotiated through traditional trade contacts with coastal tribes, had stimulated a passionate desire for the glass beads on offer, which they identified with wampum and its spiritual power, and for copper and brass pendants, bracelets, and necklaces, “non-‘utilitarian’ in form and function … which were perceived and received as analogous to traditional, indigenous substantial metaphors of cultural value.” Even the first practical commodities to reach them—kettles, metal ax-heads, and cloth in various forms—also “had a cultural or ideational efficacy, vastly disproportionate to whatever utilitarian function to which they were initially put.” By 1600 they had learned how to pay for such goods, and they were beginning to develop “adaptive strategies” to cope with the first evidences of epidemic diseases and demographic decline that resulted from these early, indirect contacts. But their main effort was to overcome their isolation from the initial transactions and their exclusion from the best routes of trade. At the turn of the seventeenth century they were engaged in a massive, and massively disruptive, campaign to control the developing, still poorly understood, commerce.46
They were at war with a succession of Algonquian, Montagnais, and Huron peoples who dominated the St. Lawrence waterway route, with its increasingly important French trading stations. And at the same time they were driving the Susquehannocks, who had left Iroquois territory for a new location in Pennsylvania directly athwart the Chesapeake trade corridor, farther and farther to the south. And as they pressed, with deeply unsettling effect, southeast against the Susquehannocks and northeast against the St. Lawrence tribes, they mounted lesser campaigns for similar reasons against the Western Abenakis in Vermont, against the Algonquians in western Connecticut, and in scattered forays far to the south, against some of the backcountry tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas.
The spread of tribal warfare in the Iroquois’ world was the clearest manifestation of something general and profound that was developing on the eve of English settlement in North America. Emerging slowly at a latent level were the beginnings of fundamental alterations in native culture that, within a single generation after 1600, would prove to be destructive beyond any contemporary imagining. In most places, the cultural malignancy was as yet scarcely visible; where it was visible, its force was not fully revealed; and among those who saw the symptoms clearly, there was hope for recovery. But this was a deadly disease.
The specific virus, unmistakable in the case of the Iroquois, was the fur trade. Where, in scattered places, its effects were beginning to be felt, it led to strange cultural inversions. In Newfoundland first, then in Nova Scotia, in Maine, on the shores of the St. Lawrence waterway, and south along the east coast, the market for furs, initiated randomly by the first European traders, grew with increasing velocity at the end of the sixteenth century, in ways that could not be accommodated within the natives’ traditional culture. No new skills were required to collect furs, but the trapping of large numbers of small fur-bearing animals whose pelts brought the best return took much time and effort, especially when the most obvious sources were exhausted, and it did not produce the nutrition provided by larger game. Concentration on fur hunts upset the ancient pattern of shifting seasonal activities, led to the neglect of horticulture, and since women were increasingly involved in the preparation of pelts, disturbed the traditional division of labor between the sexes. Further, a new and disruptive sense of territoriality was engendered in those who competed for both control of the richest trapping grounds and exclusive relationships with trading stations, where rivalries meant lower prices. Competition led to bickering, then to skirmishes, then to warfare among peoples otherwise peaceful. Here and there along the coast and at the mouths of the interior river systems, wherever the early fur traders were active, local groups were beginning to organize into hitherto unknown combinations to control the trade, and sought to become monopolists and middlemen to the inland fur-producing tribes. So certain groups among the Eastern Abenakis joined to control the trade of the Penobscot drainage, the Narragansetts took control in Rhode Island, the Pequots in Connecticut, the Mahicans on the Hudson, and the Susquehannocks in the Delaware Valley. The wars that erupted between these middlemen and their inland suppliers led to population concentrations in fewer but larger palisaded villages; and the conflicts were self-intensifying. Loss of warriors and the captivity of women and children touched off retributive “mourning wars” and gradually, among the Iroquois, an increase in the incidence and savagery of cannibalism. A religious as well as a military ritual, practiced with ever more horrifying cruelty, cannibalism served to propitiate the dominant spirits, ostensibly to gain military success, latently to help stabilize the social disruptions and uncertainties of severe and unpredictable economic competition.47
It was the start of a degenerative spiral. As more and more effort was devoted to hunting for furs, and horticulture was less strenuously pursued, the traditional dietary balances were increasingly upset. So the health of whole regions was placed at risk, and when the first, still peripatetic Europeans brought with them unfamiliar diseases, the result was the first wave of massive epidemics. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, in the years just preceding the first English settlements, measles, smallpox, and other virulent diseases were beginning to sweep through the most exposed groups and were carried by them into the interior. Shamans, medicine men, witch doctors were brought in to cure the sick and protect the tribes against further illness, but the traditional remedies proved futile, and the authority of those leaders, always dependent on success, was alarmingly and increasingly undermined.
Yet however disturbing these signs of decay, change, and social pathology, they were only scattered through the fringes of an immense territory that was still largely traditional, still familiar. The question for the leaders of the native American peoples on the eve of the English settlements—still confident, still hopeful for the future—was not how to destroy the invaders and wipe out the pathologies they brought with them, but how to use the strangers and their goods within the traditional culture, how to absorb the apparent benefits of European civilization, which they had so far found merely attractive but which would soon become useful, and ultimately indispensable.
CHAPTER 2
Death on a Coastal Fringe
1
IT WAS INTO this still-traditional though changing, animist, violently competitive, and delicately poised world, constantly beset by disbalancing shocks, that a small contingent of Englishmen arrived in 1607. They were people whose way of life, sensibilities, assumptions, skills, knowledge, social relations, and aspirations—their entire experience and view of the world and the universe—could scarcely have been more different from those of the people who watched their arrival from the shores of Chesapeake Bay.
Though contentious in religious doctrine and organization, the English were monotheists, devoted to the belief that there was a hierarchy of being—that though touched by God, civilized mankind existed below the divine order but above and apart from crude nature and “natural” people, whom they were destined to convert and to rule, as they were to have “dominion over … all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Spirit existed, mind existed, not as a part of the shared physical world but apart from it; these were unique attributes of humanity.1 Patriarchalist in social and political organization, they were sophisticated in the advanced
technologies of warfare and in economic production and distribution, and they lived in a literate culture, within complex, highly articulated systems of law, dominated by monarchical authority. They enjoyed relative security, protected as they were by the sea from major disruptions from abroad, a temperate climate, and a physical environment that they had anciently learned, in some degree, to control. Since transportation and communication were still largely unchanged from what they had been for centuries, there were deep regional differences in subcultures and the economy, and there were enclaves of semiprivate political jurisdictions.
They were people who lived on the land—only an estimated 8 percent lived in communities of over five thousand, and many of the town dwellers were partly involved in agriculture. Their relation to the land was the heart of their world. It shaped the structure of social and political relations; it was the basis of the economy; and it was “the chief measure of wealth, prestige, and political influence.” While most people were manorial tenants, others “held land by a bewildering variety of tenures” ranging from freehold, which was close to outright ownership, through copyhold and leasehold, to villeinage, the last a fast-disappearing status that tied people to the land in perpetuity without claim of any sort to the property itself. But beneath all the tenurial variations lay the concept and the experience, direct or indirect, of land as a possession, a commodity to be personally owned, leased, loaned, sold, or otherwise disposed of.2
They were a mobile people. Though most lived out their lives in their native parishes, there were short-distance movements everywhere, as marginal and ambitious people in the countryside sought security and stability. Young people commonly circulated as servants among households of higher or equal status, while unattached farmworkers and vagrants—propelled by population growth (35 percent in Elizabeth’s reign, 1558–1603), by decline in real wages, and by the extension of commercial farming—roamed the local countrysides seeking employment. Some went longer distances—eight to twenty miles, distances short enough to allow easy return—to reach provincial towns and cities, which grew steadily in these years. And beyond all of those local and regional movements there was a growing drift of people moving long distances, mainly south and east, into the great catch basin of London. While the total population of the seventeen leading provincial towns grew to about 160,000 in 1640, London continued its explosive growth. Its population rose to 200,000 in 1600; it would reach 350,000 by 1650 and 575,000 by the end of the century. In 1600, 5 percent of England’s population (roughly equivalent to the entire native population of the North American eastern woodlands) lived within London’s conurbation; it would rise to 10 percent by 1700. The city devoured people. Disease devastated its slums—almost a quarter of the city’s population died in the last year of Elizabeth’s reign—but newcomers from all over the realm restored the losses. It has been estimated that about an eighth of all those who survived infancy outside London migrated to London in the early seventeenth century, rising to a sixth later in the century. Plague deaths of some 15 percent of the total would be made up within two years.3
Above all, there were energetic, enterprising, and ambitious elements within the English population. The nation’s horizons in recent years had widened out into the broad Atlantic world, dominated by Spain and Portugal, and its capacities and aspirations were developing quickly. In Elizabeth’s long reign the English had rarely entered formally and officially into adventures abroad, but informally—in privateering, coastal raids on Spanish-American towns, and the release of English troops to serve under European commanders—they were adventurous, eager, and fiercely competitive. Their boldest outreach, driven by deep-lying forces within the domestic economy, stimulated and directed by the skill and vigor of suddenly enriching entrepreneurs, lay in the field of international commerce. It had been expanding for half a century. While agriculture and domestic trade and industry rose and fell within a generally ascending curve, the growth and increasing concentration of capital accruing from agricultural surpluses and textile sales fed a sudden spurt in investments in overseas enterprise, and a greater awareness of possibilities abroad. But more was involved than commercial exuberance. England’s expansionist tendencies were driven too by its sense of responsibility for the survival of Protestantism abroad, by the dawning of a “British ideology of empire” based on the “composite monarchy” of England, Scotland, and Ireland, by the promotional skills of the geographer Richard Hakluyt and publicists like Samuel Purchas, and by the ambitions of “projectors” for whom colonization was “a project among projects”—all of whom had visions of England’s future as a colonial power that radiated through the higher echelons of government.4
The dominant energizing force in the early seventeenth century, however, was the newly empowered commercial organizations: the provincial trading associations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton, Chester, and Hull, the Merchant Adventurers of London, the Muscovy or Russia Company, the Eastland Company, the Levant Company, and finally, the great East India Company (1600). At their head, directing the expansion of these sophisticated, Crown-chartered monopoly companies—overseas trading guilds, in effect—was a small circle of financial magnates, who controlled large sums of capital, sat in various combinations on numerous corporate boards, and were close to the key figures in the government. Though not alien from the great landed interests, these merchants were a distinct force in English life, secure in their control of large-scale commerce, eager to expand their operations.5
Though the companies they owned and managed were conservative organizations within which individual investment groups operated in monopolized trading areas, they were well aware of the risky, experimental exploration and colonizing efforts that certain landed interests had launched before the outbreak of the Spanish war: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s failed attempt to establish England’s claim to Newfoundland and plant a colony in the area of New England and Sir Walter Raleigh and his friends’ short-lived colony at Roanoke on the coast of North Carolina. The merchants understood the financial demands such ventures made and the disastrous consequences of the failure to quickly locate commodities that would yield returns on investments.6 And they shared the strangely mingled visions of the native peoples of the Caribbean and North America that had been forming for over a century.
THE IMAGE THAT informed Englishmen had of the American Indian population on the eve of permanent settlement in America was an inconsistent blend of notions derived from scattered sources, all of which reinforced an assumption of immense European superiority in religion, culture, power, and capacity. From some of the many Spanish accounts that reached English readers in the course of the sixteenth century came a view of an original population of prosperous, even wealthy natives, gifted in mechanical arts, sophisticated in speech and manners, rich in precious metals and agricultural production, living in well-designed and well-appointed cities built, in jungle clearings, of stone, and managed by well-organized political systems. Yet they were clearly barbarians: some were said to be cannibals, and all of them worshipped satanic gods whose priestly agents, frightening in themselves, imposed merciless, bloodthirsty demands on an obsequious populace. Though valiant warriors, the native Americans, the Spanish had discovered, could be defeated by small contingents of European soldiers and thereafter reduced to servility and forced to serve in the exploitation of American wealth.7
But from other sources—mainly English adventurers who had made contact with the North American Indians in the 1570s and 1580s—came a different picture: of barbarous people, natural, uncorrupted, and simple; unsophisticated people who had not yet emerged from the early stages of human development into the later phases that might lead, ultimately, to the fully evolved civilization of Elizabethan England. So John White added to his eyewitness paintings of the placid, agreeable-looking North Carolina natives he encountered at Roanoke in 1585 a set of vivid, wildly imaginative depictions of pre-historic Picts, ferocious, naked, blue-painted head-hunters. These s
tartling images of monstrous savages were reproduced in popular engravings “for to showe,” the legend explained, “how that the inhabitants of the great Brettanie have bin in times past as savvage as those of Virginia.” The message was clear: if the naked, murderous Picts, shown holding aloft their enemies’ dripping heads, were the ancestors of Elizabethan gentlefolk, what could not the homey Algonquians become? And since the Roanoke natives were pagans, they were undoubtedly susceptible to the tutelage of Christian missionaries, who could promise them advancement through salvation, if they accepted the Word.8
The most immediate, vivid, and best-known image of native peoples came, however, from neither of these sources but from the transfer, the extrapolation, of England’s grim experiences with the Irish. The English had been actively struggling and failing to conquer or otherwise control Ireland for over half a century, and had found there a people whose apparent baseness set a universal standard for savagery. The “wild Irish” were said by would-be colonizers in the 1560s to be godless. They “blaspheme, thei murder, commit whoredom, hold no wedlocke, ravish, steal, and commit all abomination without scruple … matrimonie emongs them is no more regarded … than conjunction betwene unreasonable beasts, perjurie, robberie and murder [are] counted alloweable.” For such people—“more uncivill, more uncleanly, more barbarous and more brutish in their customs … then in any other part of the world”—no treatment could be too severe; any brutality would be justified if it resulted in “the suppressing and reforming of the loose, barbarous and most wicked life of that savage nation.” To reform “so barbarous a nation,” by whatever forceful means, could only be “a goodly and commendable deede,” but until that reformation might happen, they could be dealt with best by expulsion beyond a pale around the English settlements, which would at least protect the English settlers from succumbing to Ireland’s barbarous ways. And there was for Elizabethans a natural conflation of the “wild Irish” and the American natives because many of the leaders of the first settlements in North America were also landowners and military officers in Ireland and could themselves see the ostensible similarities between the two native peoples—in social practices, and pagan rituals, “bestial” feeding habits, flimsy housing, and sexual promiscuity. The similarities were unmistakable.9
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 5
