The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  28. Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 156: “The ‘sense of place’ of these peoples seems to have been a good deal stronger than that of modern North Americans, who for the most part show far more tendency to move about from one place to another than did Abenakis prior to the Historic period.” The definition of tribe I have used is that of L. Daniel Mouer, in Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 36 (1981), 1. (Cf. Jennings, Ambiguous Empire, 37.) On tribal names: Herbert C. Kraft, “Settlement Patterns in the Upper Delaware Valley,” in Custer, ed., Late Woodland Cultures, 106; C. A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians (New Brunswick, N.J., 1972), 31, 45–46; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 11; Trigger, ed., Handbook, 137, 235, 236, 478, 489–90, 516; Richter, Ordeal, 1.

  29. Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 62, 63, 80, 87–89, 106, 113; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 114–21 and chap. 6; Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 7, 8, 10–11, 13, 18.

  30. E. Randolph Turner, in Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 92; Lewis R. Binford, Cultural Diversity Among Aboriginal Cultures of Coastal Virginia and North Carolina (New York, 1991), 241–42; Becker, Custer, and Kraft, in Custer, ed., Late Woodland Cultures, 94, 111, 144; Marion F. Ales, “A History of the Indians on Montauk, Long Island,” in Gaynell S. Levine, ed., The History and Archaeology of the Montauk Indians (Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, 3 [1979]), 15, 24; John Strong, “The Evolution of Shinnecock Culture,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., The Shinnecock Indians (Lexington, Mass., 1983), 36–38; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 76–77, 97, 336, 342; Starna, “Pequots in Early Seventeenth Century,” 39–43; Peter A. Thomas, in William Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures in Contact … 1000–1800 (Washington, D.C., 1985), 135, 137–38; Thomas, Maelstrom, 29–44, 96ff.; Ted J. Brasser, “Riding on the Frontier’s Crest: Mahican Indian Culture and Culture Change,” National [Canadian] Museum of Man, Mercury Series, Ethnology Division, Paper no. 13 (Ottawa, 1974); Trigger, ed., Handbook, 137, 156–57.

  31. Richter, Ordeal, 17, 31, 32, 36, 17, 18, 39–43, 46, 44, 40. On the Abenakis’ fear of the Iroquois, see Morrison, “Dawnland Dog-Feast,” 270.

  32. Richter, Ordeal, 42–43, 35; Salisbury, Manitou, 40–42; Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians (Syracuse, N.Y., 1991), 71–72; Starna, “Pequots in Early Seventeenth Century,” 39–43; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 72, 77; Weslager, Delaware Indians, 64–65; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 93, 117, 119–20.

  33. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 217ff.

  34. Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Lanham, Md., 1991), 15–19; Karen O. Kupperman, Settling with the Indians (Totowa, N.J., 1980), 102; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 98; Dennis, Landscape of Peace, 69, 70, with illustrations of Iroquois woven reed armor. Lescarbot reported seeing in 1606–7 Wabanaki warriors with shields that covered their whole bodies: Morrison, “Wabanaki Warfare,” 267.

  35. C. Keith Wilbur, The New England Indians (Chester, Conn., 1978), 63–67; Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 103; Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 32; Haviland, Original Vermonters, 166–67.

  36. Ibid., 167. Illustrations of typical dwellings, in Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North America Indian (New York, 1985), 51.

  37. Wilbur, New England Indians, 60–62; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 34–35; on the whale fishery of Long Island, Strong, “Shinnecock Culture,” 32–34; Ales, “Indians on Montauk,” 82; Weslager, Delaware Indians, 60; Kraft, “Settlement Patterns,” 107; Sarah Clayton, “The Potomac (Patawomeke) Indians,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 27 (1973), 180–81; C.A. Weslager, The Nanticoke Indians—Past and Present (Newark, N.J., 1983), 43.

  38. Rountree, Powhatan Indians, 39–42; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 161–64; Wilbur, New England Indians, 56–57; Clayton, “Potomac Indians,” 180; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 102–4.

  39. Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 157–59; Weslager, Delaware Indians, 51; Kraft, “Settlement Patterns,” 111–12; Ales, “Indians on Montauk,” 16; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 159.

  40. Clayton, “Potomac Indians,” 183; Trigger, ed., Handbook, 306; Hamell, “Iroquois and the World’s Rim,” 459–61; Hamell, “Mythical Realities,” 67; Wilbur, New England Indians, 84–85; Weslager, Nanticoke Indians, 45.

  41. On the Powhatans’ great diversity of resources: Binford, quoted in Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 105; Rountree, Powhatan Foreign Relations, 68–69, 218; Weslager, Delaware Indians, 53–54, 57–58; Martin, Keepers of the Game, 33; Kraft, “Settlement Patterns,” 106–8; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 334; Haviland and Power, Original Vermonters, 156.

  42. E.g., Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 38:

  When Indian people set out to walk along their trails or paddle along the waterways, they traveled fast by European standards. Woodland Indian people of both sexes were physically fit and very proud of being so. When they ran, their speed and endurance seemed almost miraculous.… That sort of endurance helps to explain how the “Tomahitans” could cover 2,200 miles on foot and by canoe in five months, with only short rest stops, and consider such efforts merely to be ordinary.

  43. Ubelaker and Rountree, ibid., 64–65, 207; Fausz, “Powhatan Uprising,” 46; Starna, “Pequots in Early Seventeenth Century,” 44–45; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 24, 85. On infant mortality and life expectancy in Europe, see Louis Henry and Pierre Goubert, in D.V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History (London, 1965), 444, 468; and Pierre Goubert, “Legitimate Fecundity and Infant Mortality in France During the Eighteenth Century,” Daedalus, 97, no. 2 (1968), 599.

  44. Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment,” 38.

  45. Rountree, Powhatan Indians, chap. 1; Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, chap. 1; Turner, “Re-examination of Powhatan Territorial Boundaries,” 47–49.

  46. Dennis, Landscape of Peace, chap. 2; Richter, Ordeal, 50–54; Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, N.M., 1987), 100–2; Hamell, “Iroquois and the World’s Rim,” 459.

  47. T. J. Brasser, “Early Indian-European Contacts,” in Trigger, ed., Handbook, 82–88; Thomas S. Abler and Michael H. Logan, “The Florescence and Demise of Iroquois Cannibalism…,” Man in the Northeast, 35 (1988), 1–17.

  CHAPTER 2

  Death on a Coastal Fringe

  1. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln, Neb., 1997), chap. 2, 40, quotation (Genesis 2: 26) at 63.

  2. D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Later Tudors, 1547–1603, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 1992), 236, 13, 201, 84, 202, 6, 106; Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (London, 1965), 7–9.

  3. R. A. Houston, The Population History of Britain and Ireland, 1500–1750 (London, 1992), 64; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 224–28.

  4. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, Conn., 1934–38), I, chaps. 2, 3; Karen O. Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), chaps. 1, 2, 4, 6, quotations at 43, 44; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, England, 2000), chap. 1; Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan Obsession for an English America (New Haven, Conn., 2007), esp. 137–55; Kupperman, “Controlling Nature and Colonial Projects in Early America,” in Hans-Jüngen Grabbe, ed., Colonial Encounters (Heidelberg, 2003), 69–88.

  5. Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise & Empire … 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 29ff.; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution … 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), chaps. 1, 2, 92.

  6. Ibid., 108.

  7. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 66–67, 72–74; Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “White Conceptions of Indians,” in William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, IV (History of
Indian-White Relations, Washington, D.C., 1988), 523ff.; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indians and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, England, 1982), chap. 4, esp. 75–90; J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, England, 1970), chap. 2; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 240–41.

  8. Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), plates 65–69, fig. 28.

  9. Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” WMQ 30 (1973), 584, 588; David B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), chaps. 7–9.

  10. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), esp. chaps. 21, 22; Edward L. Bond, “Source of Knowledge, Source of Power: The Supernatural World of English Virginia,” VMHB, 108 (2000), quotations at 114, 116, 120; cf. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989).

  11. Palliser, Age of Elizabeth, 7, 18, 20, 32, 55, 57; Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, England, 1985), passim.

  12. Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 3, 44–45, 60.

  13. Palliser, Age of Elizabeth, 360–67, 397–98, 19, 20, 381; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 451; Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence and Martyrdom, trans. Jeremy Scott (New York, 1991), 7, and the illustrations that follow; G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (London, 1955), 220, 308; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982), 202–3.

  14. William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963), 13–14, 194. For the influence of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments in seventeenth-century New England, see Anne G. Myles, “Restoration Declensions … John Foxe in 1664 Massachusetts,” NEQ, 80 (2007), 35–68, and Francis J. Bremer, “Foxe in the Wilderness…,” in David Loades, ed., John Foxe at Home and Abroad (Aldershot, England, 1988), chap. 9.

  15. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 109; Andrews, Colonial Period, I, chap. 4.

  16. Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1700 (rev. ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 19–21; John W. Shirley, “George Percy at Jamestown, 1607–1612,” VMHB, 57 (1949), 227–30; Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 92; James P. C. Southall and Samuel M. Bemiss on John Martin: VMHB, 54 (1946), 21–67; 65 (1957), 209–21; Smith, Works, I, xxix, xxxvi; Warner F. Gookin, “Who Was Bartholomew Gosnold?” WMQ, 6 (1949), 398–415; Warner F. Gookin and Philip L. Barbour, Bartholomew Gosnold (Hamden, Conn., 1963), part I. On Harriot, see John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford, England, 1983), and Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 28–34 passim.

  The laborers, Smith later recalled, “were for the most part footmen, and such as they that were adventurers brought to attend them … that never did know what a dayes work was.” Like the “poore gentlemen, tradsmen, serving-men, libertines, and such like,” the laborers, Smith said, were “ten times more fit to spoyle a common-wealth, then either to begin one, or but helpe to maintaine one. For when neither the feare of God, nor the law, nor shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule them here [in England], there is small hope ever to bring one in twentie of them to be good there.” Smith, Works, II, 225.

  17. Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure,” 92–93; Lyon G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia 1606–1625 (New York, 1907), 281, 286; Kupperman, Jamestown, 64–70, 112, 129, 290; William S. Powell, John Pory, 1572–1636 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), chaps. 1, 2; James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York, 2005) [hereafter: Horn, Jamestown], 251–52; Richard B. Davis, George Sandys, Poet-Adventurer: A Study in Anglo-American Culture in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1955); James Ellison, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism, and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, England, 2002).

  18. Philip L. Barbour, “Captain George Kendall, Mutineer or Intelligencer?” VMHB, 70 (1962), 298–313; Kupperman, Jamestown, 219–20; K. R. Andrews, “Christopher Newport of Limehouse, Mariner,” WMQ, 11 (1954), 28–51, quote at 40; Gookin, “Gosnold,” 413; Smith, Works, I, liii; Gookin and Barbour, Gosnold, 198; Horn, Jamestown, 34–35, 46.

  19. Laura P. Striker, “Captain John Smith’s Hungary and Transylvania,” in Bradford Smith, Captain John Smith: His Life and Legend (Philadelphia, 1953), app. 1; Striker, “The Hungarian Historian, Lewis L. Kropf, on Captain John Smith’s True Travels,” VMHB, 66 (1958), 22–43; Smith, Works, I, lv–lviii; Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston, 1964), 112; Horn, Jamestown, 42–43; George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon…[1609–1612]” (text as transcribed from Mark Nicholls, VMHB, 113, no. 3 [2005]), 246. For an excellent survey of Smith’s early career, based on his jumbled The True Travels … of Captaine John Smith (1630, in Smith, Works, III, 153–241), see Kupperman, Jamestown, 51–60; for the complex relationship between Smith and Newport that later developed, see Daniel K. Richter, “Tsenacommacah and the Atlantic World,” in Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1824 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 47–59.

  20. Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (Cambridge, England, 1969), I, 49–54, quotation at 51. The Don and Dvina rivers were identified in the instructions as the “Tan[a]is and Dwina.”

  21. Philip L. Barbour, “The First Reconnaissance of the James,” Virginia Cavalcade, 17 (1967), 35–41; Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, 133–35.

  22. Ibid., 134, 136, 137, 138; Barbour, Three Worlds, 125; Ivor N. Hume, Martin’s Hundred (New York, 1982), 27.

  23. The narrative that follows is based in part on Barbour, Three Worlds, Part II; in part on Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles… (1624), in Barbour’s edition of Smith’s Complete Works; and in part on the portion of George Percy’s Discourse of … Virginia…in Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, 129–46. I have been guided too by the detailed account in Horn, Jamestown, and by Kupperman, Jamestown, 217–55. For the figures on the living and the dead, see Virginia Bernhard, “ ‘Men, Women and Children’ at Jamestown: Population and Gender in Early Virginia, 1607–1610,” Journal of Southern History, 58 (1992), 599–618 [hereafter, Bernhard, “Population and Gender”].

  24. Dennis B. Blanton, “Drought as a Factor in the Jamestown Colony, 1607–1812,” Historical Archaeology, 34, no. 4 (2000), 74–81; David W. Stahle et al., “The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts,” Science, 280 (April 24, 1998), 564–67.

  25. Carville V. Earle, “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1979), chap. 3.

  26. Percy, Discourse, 144–45; Bernhard, “Population and Gender,” 603.

  27. Smith, Works, II, 160–62; Barbour, Three Worlds, 174; Horn, Jamestown, 75, 76.

  28. Smith, Works, II, 181, 184, 190–91; I, 240–42. Ann Burras, servant to a “Mistress Ferrar,” is known to have married John Laydon, a carpenter who had arrived on the Susan Constant. Their daughter Virginia is recorded as the first child born in the colony of English parents. Annie L. Jester and Martha W. Hiden, comps. and eds., Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1607–1624/5 (3rd ed., revised by Virginia M. Meyer and John F. Dorman, Richmond, Va., 1987), 389.

  29. Barbour, Three Worlds, chaps. 14, 15. For the details of the limits of Smith’s expeditions and the specific Indian villages and rivers he identified, see Works, I, 185–90.

  30. Horn, Jamestown, 14–17.

  31. Kupperman, Jamestown, 223, 225.

  32. Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 11, 36, 51, 57.

  33. Barbour, Three World
s, 141, 223.

  34. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, eds., The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612) by William Strachey, gent. (London, 1953), 56–58.

  35. Smith, Works, I, lix, 47–57, 213; II, 150–51; Gleach, Powatan’s World, 114–22; Horn, Jamestown, 70–71, 78–79. Cf. Everett Emerson, Captain John Smith (rev. ed., New York, 1993), 77; Barbour, Three Worlds, 443–44. Smith’s most elaborate version is in his letter to the Queen, 1616, quoted in Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World…(Boston, 1969), 156. On the ritual and symbolic significance of establishing Smith’s “fictive kinship” with Powhatan and his people: Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford, England, 2008), 74–78.

  36. Smith, Works, I, 237; Horn, Jamestown, 105–8; Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations, 76–81.

  37. Kupperman, Jamestown, 232; Horn, Jamestown, 79.

  38. Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, 95; Smith, Works, I, 175; II, 127; Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 247–48.

  39. Smith, Works, II, 201–2.

  40. Bernhard, “Population and Gender,” 605–6.

  41. Smith, Works, I, 259–60, 263–65; Barbour, Three Worlds, 264, 248, 266.

  42. Percy, “Trewe Relacyon,” 248–49. Of the cannibalized woman, Smith later wrote, rather archly, “whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d [i.e., grilled], I know not, but of such a dish as powdered [i.e., salted] wife I never heard of.” Smith, Works, II, 232–33.

  43. Percy, “Trewe Relacyon,” 250–51; Governor and Council of Virginia to the Virginia Company of London, July 7, 1610, in Alexander Brown, comp. and ed., The Genesis of the United States ([1890], New York, 1964), I, 405–6.

  CHAPTER 3

  The “Hammerours’ ” Regime

  1. George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon…[1609–1612]” (text as transcribed by Mark Nicholls, VMHB, 113, no. 3 [2005]), 251–52.