And the flow was not only material. The British Americans were informed, though often belatedly and in fragments, about events abroad, about the politics of the great states whose casual permutations could affect them directly, about the clangorous discourse of English political and religious thought in this fraught century, and about the long struggle for the grounds of legitimate authority.
They were provincials, listening for messages from abroad, living in a still barbarous world, struggling to normalize their own way of life, no less civil, they hoped, than what had been known before.
Acknowledgments
HISTORIANS BUILD on the work of their predecessors, and this book rests heavily on the original scholarship of several distinct groups of historians who in recent years have transformed their fields of interest: the Chesapeake historians, led by Lois Green Carr, James Horn, Karen Kupperman, Russell Menard, and Lorena Walsh, who have revealed in their studies a social and economic world of the upper South never seen before; three generations of New England scholars led by Perry Miller, Edmund Morgan, and David Hall, who have found in Puritanism an astonishing richness of life and thought; and the Dutch archival scholars, editors, and translators led by Charles Gehring, Joyce Goodfriend, Jaap Jacobs, Donna Merwick, Oliver Rink, and David Voorhees, who have transcended linguistic barriers to explore the complexity of New Netherland’s multi-ethnic community. None of them bear any responsibility for what I have written, but like so many others I have greatly benefited from their scholarship and that of the other historians who in recent years have helped transform these fields.
On a more personal level, I am enormously indebted to Elizabeth McCormack, whose interest in the Peopling project as an officer in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund led to grants from the Fund and from the National Endowment for the Humanities that have made much of the research possible. I am deeply grateful to her and to the Fund’s and the Endowment’s support.
Jane Garrett, my old friend, early collaborator, and editor at Knopf has been wonderfully patient and encouraging over the years. I have relied on her judgment in many ways, and appreciate all she has done to bring history to a broad audience. In her absence, Leslie Levine took over at Knopf, and did everything she could to help bring the book to completion.
Barbara DeWolfe worked with me in searches through the vast archive of materials, in this country and abroad, bearing on early North American population history, and contributed especially to the complex documentation, literary and electronic, that went into Voyagers to the West. She continues her discerning scholarship in her present position, as curator of manuscripts at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
I am grateful to Ginger S. Hawkins for her ingenious assistance, especially in data collection and analysis, and to C. Scott Walker, cartographer at the Harvard University Map Collection, who generously set aside his other work to devise and adapt, with skill and imagination, the basic maps for this book. Jennifer Nickerson bore with me patiently and cheerfully through long, complex stints of research and revision while keeping track of books, files, and notes. Her assistance was indispensable.
Lotte Bailyn has listened, read, re-read, and corrected endlessly. Her forbearance, encouragement, and blessed optimism have kept the entire project alive, and made this book possible.
B.B.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES
CSPC W. Noël Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574–1660 (London, 1860)
Docs. Rel. E. B. O’Callaghan et al., eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York (Albany, N.Y., 1856–87)
Kingsbury, VC Records Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, D.C., 1906–35)
Md. Archives William H. Browne et al., eds., Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, Md., 1883–1972)
MHM Maryland Historical Magazine
NEQ New England Quarterly
NYHM: Dutch A. J. F. van Laer, trans. and ed., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch (Baltimore, Md., 1974)
Smith, Works Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631) (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986)
VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Winthrop, Journal Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.
CHAPTER 1
The Americans
1. Rosemary R. Finn, “The Belief System of the Powhatan Indians,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 42, no. 3 (1987), 152.
2. Thomas L. Altherr, “ ‘Flesh Is the Paradise of a Man of Flesh’…,” Canadian Historical Review, 64 (1983), 269–71; William A. Haviland and Marjory W. Power, The Original Vermonters (Hanover, N.H., 1981), 178–79.
3. Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 74, 76, 36; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 196, 187–88; Dean R. Snow, in Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, XV: Northeast (Washington, D.C., 1978), 139.
4. Martin, Keepers of the Game, 36; Altherr, “ ‘Flesh Is the Paradise,’ ” 269.
5. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York, 1982), 37–39; Martin, Keepers of the Game, 34, 74.
6. Salisbury, Manitou, 10–11, 35–36, 43–44, 49, 53; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 20–22, 32–38; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 193–94. On “mourning wars”: Jill Lepore, The Name of War (New York, 1998), 117. On the pivotal significance of body parts: Andrew Lipman, “ ‘A meanes to knit them togeather’: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” WMQ, 65 (2008), 3–15. On “bride price”: Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman, Okla., 1989), 90; Trigger, ed., Handbook, 140, 167, 262.
7. William S. Simmons, “Southern New England Shamanism: An Ethnographic Reconstruction,” in William Cowan, ed., Papers of the Seventh Algonquian Conference, 1975 (Ottawa, 1976), 218–56; Martin, Keepers of the Game, 37–38, 73, 92–93; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 184–87; Finn, “Belief System of the Powhatan Indians,” 154–55.
8. Anthony F. C. Wallace, “Dreams and the Wishes of the Soul: A Type of Psychoanalytic Theory Among the Seventeenth Century Iroquois,” American Anthropologist, 60 (1958), 234–48, quotation at 236; Martin, Keepers of the Game, 75–76. For an excellent example of the importance of dreams, even in warfare, see the account of Champlain’s dream revelation in the battle he led between rival Indian groups (1609); Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 71–72.
9. Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 84, 77, and chap. 4 (“Manliness”) generally. On the remarkable significance of color in the inner lives of native Americans, see George R. Hamell, “The Iroquois and the World’s Rim: Speculations on Color, Culture, and Contact,” American Indian Quarterly, 16 (1992), 451–69, and his “Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Man in the Northeast, 33 (1987), 63–87.
10. Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 80–84; Jeffrey P. Blick, “The Huskanaw and Ossuary Rituals of … Southeastern Virginia,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 42, no. 4 (1987), 193–204; J. Frederick Fausz, “The Powhatan Uprising of 1622 … Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1977), 85–86. On the warrior cult in Powhatan culture, see ibid., 115–18; Martin, Keepers of the Game, 74–75; William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1684 (Hanover, N.H., 1986), 47. On the Pokanokets’ ritual abandonment of adolescents through long, bitter winters and their harsh treatment of them thereafter, see
Salisbury, Manitou, 39–40. On the Wabanaki pubescent boys’ search for guiding visions and spirit helpers, see Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 179.
11. Alvin H. Morrison, “Dawnland Dog-Feast: Wabanaki Warfare c. 1600–1760,” in William Cowan, ed., Papers of the Twenty-First Algonquian Conference (Ottawa, 1990), 267–69; William A. Starna and Ralph Watkins, “Northern Iroquoian Slavery,” Ethnohistory, 38, no. 1 (1991), 34–57; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 84; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, chaps. 2, 3. On the rites of prisoner sacrifice among the Hurons, see Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal, 1976), I, 68–75.
12. E.g., Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 96–99.
13. Ibid., 96, 85, 87.
14. Ibid., 80; Philip L. Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World (Boston, 1970), 6; Simmons, New England Tribes, 46.
15. This necessarily loose approximation was developed along two lines wherever alternative figures were available: on the one hand, the average of the range of regional estimates, and on the other, the upper limits of these estimates. Since in my opinion all estimates for the precontact population are likely to be low, I have discarded the estimated lower boundaries. The regional estimates I have used are the following. Southern New England and Long Island: average 135,000; upper limit 144,000, in Salisbury, Manitou, 30. Northern and Western New England (Eastern and Western Abenakis): 21,900, in Dean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (New York, 1980), 31–42, table p. 34. Middle Region: middle and upper Hudson, 5,300; lower Hudson, average 23,800, upper limit 32,300; upper Delaware, average 14,000, upper limit 19,000, in Snow, Archaeology of New England, 33, table 2.1; Susquehannocks, 8,000, in J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds,” in Lois G. Carr et al., eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 60. Chesapeake: Maryland, 12,000, in Trigger, ed., Handbook, 242; Virginia, average 22,500, upper limit 25,000, in Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, Okla., 1987), 68, adopting Mooney’s figure of 1907. (Cf. average 18,300, upper limit 22,300, in Christian F. Feest, “Seventeenth-Century Virginia Algonquin Population Estimates,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 28 [1973], 66–79). North Carolina: 7,000, in Trigger, ed., Handbook, 272. Iroquois: average 25,000, upper limit 30,000, in Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 17. Nova Scotia and Cape Breton: average, 3,750, upper limit 5,000, in R. Cole Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1 (Toronto, 1987), plate 18.
The total of the averages is 278,250; the total of the upper limits is 309,500. Rough as these figures, developed from regional estimates, are, they correspond reasonably well to such large-scale estimates as that of Douglas H. Ubelaker, in John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds., Disease and Demography in the Americas (Washington, D.C., 1992), 173: for the entire northeast, including trans-Appalachia and southeastern Canada—345,700 in 1600.
16. Alfred Cammisa, “A Comparison of Settlement Patterns and General Land Use … in Southern New England…,” Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, 45 (1924), 68; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 17; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 92; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 88, 96, 87 (converting population per km2 to mi2 by a multiplier of 2.6); Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 15; E. Randolph Turner, “A Re-Examination of Powhatan Territorial Boundaries and Population, ca. A.D. 1607,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 37 (1982), 57, table 3; Marshall J. Becker, “A Summary of Lenape Socio-Political Organization and Settlement Pattern…,” Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology, 4 (1988), 82; Becker, “The Boundary Between the Lenape and Munsee…,” Man in the Northeast, 26 (1983), 2; Becker, “Cultural Diversity in the Lower Delaware River Valley,” in Jay F. Custer, ed., Late Woodland Cultures of the Middle Atlantic Region (Newark, Del., 1986), 94.
17. For typical seasonal movements of Indian villagers, see the charts in Snow, Archaeology of New England, 76, 79, 89, 92; Richard W. Wilkie and Jack Tager, eds., Historical Atlas of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass., 1991), 13; Harris, ed., Atlas of Canada, plate 34; Cammisa, “Comparison,” 68, 70; William A. Starna, “Aboriginal Title and Traditional Iroquois Land Use…,” in Christopher Vecsey and William A. Starna, eds., Iroquois Land Claims (Syracuse, N.Y., 1988), 33–34; Peter A. Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change … The Middle Connecticut River Valley, 1635–1665 (New York, 1990), 106–8. For an interesting account of relative stability within the Iroquois League of Peace in the precontact period, see Dennis, Landscape of Peace, chap. 2. But even the more stable Iroquois communities changed locations “at intervals of approximately twelve to twenty years.” Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 23.
18. Starna, “Aboriginal Title,” 42, 31; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 95; Starna, “The Pequots in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Lawrence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots of Southern New England (Norman, Okla., 1990), 35. The abandonment of overworked fields in some cases constituted a regular fallow system: Thomas, Maelstrom of Change, 111–12.
19. Snow, Archaeology of New England, 45, 76, 79.
20. Starna, “Aboriginal Title,” 43–44; Dean R. Snow, “Wabanaki ‘Family Hunting Territories,’ ” American Anthropologist, 70 (1968), 1148.
21. Emerson W. Baker, “… Anglo-Indian Land Deeds in Early Maine,” Ethnohistory, 36 (1989), 239; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (Norman, Okla., 1990), 6, 7; Becker, “Summary,” 79–81; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 155; Snow, “Wabanaki ‘Family Hunting Territories,’ ” 1146–47.
22. Starna, “Aboriginal Title,” 40, 41; Baker, “Anglo-Indian Land Deeds,” 239; William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York, 1983), 60–66. On the strange, numinous places, see George R. Hamell, “Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast…,” Man in the Northeast, 33 (1987), 69:
In the deep gloomy forest far beyond the village clearing and in the dark waters far beyond the village shoreline, the hunter, the fisherman, and the berrypicker are apt to stumble across or into … numinous places [which] include mighty hollow trees and logs, caves and rocky places generally, deep springs, waterfalls and whirlpools, and the foreboding waters surrounding rocky islands, floating or otherwise, and such islands themselves at the world’s rim. These are known thresholds to the other world and to the under(water)world particularly. Those real human man-beings who desired an exchange with the under(water)world … since time immemorial, with (the) grandfathers, sought such places out. All those real human man-beings who encountered such places and these grandfathers offered gifts, the consecrating purposiveness of mind and heart through song (prayer), sacred tobacco, trussed dog man-beings, wampum, and other precious things.
23. Rountree, “The Powhatans as Trackers,” in Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500–1722 (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 29–39; Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, 4; C. G. Holland, “A Northern Neck Indian Path Complex,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 43 (1988), 108–24; Francis Jennings, “ ‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois,” in Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 76; Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (New York, 1984), 74–78; Paul A. W. Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa., 1965), passim, esp. endpaper maps; comparison with Scotland, 1–2; Wilkie and Tager, eds., Historical Atlas of Massachusetts, Native Settlements and Trails, c. 1600-1650, 12.
24. Ibid., 27–30; Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 33–34; Elizabeth A. Little, “Inland Waterways in the Northeast,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, 12 (1987), 55–63. For the “maze of intervillage contacts” in the southeastern regions, and the “trails and canoe routes over distances of several hundred miles, extending in the case of war parties and diplomatic missions to 1,000 or 1,500 miles,” see Helen H. Tanner, in Peter H. Wood et al., eds., Powhatan’s Mantle (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 6–17. For an exhaustive accoun
t of the Indian trail system of the southeast, mainly in the eighteenth century, see William E. Myer, “Indian Trails of the Southeast,” Forty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology … 1924–1925 (Washington, D.C., 1928), 727–854.
25. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 25–26; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 109–10; George R. Hamell, “The Iroquois and the World’s Rim…,” American Indian Quarterly, 16 (1992), 458; Morrison, “Wabanaki Warfare,” 267; Little, “Inland Waterways,” fig. 4.
26. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 21, 50–52.
27. Trigger, ed., Handbook, 70ff., 282, 334ff.; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 27–31, 63–64; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 7, 8; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 64. On the vexed question of the linguistic-ethnic identity of the Piedmont tribes of Virginia, see Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 8; Jeffrey L. Hantman, in Rountree, Powhatan Foreign Relations, 95–96; Nancy O. Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization,” in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 43.
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