Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  As in New England, even this spectacular increase failed to offset the decline of the Native American population. In part, the decrease was deliberate, because the Iroquois were matrilineal and practised ‘inheritance through the female line; female-headed households; pre- and extra-marital sexual relations for women; female-controlled fertility; permissive child-rearing; trial marriages; mother-dictated marriages; divorce on demand; maternal custody of the children in case of divorce; [and] polyandry’. Finally, Iroquois women also sometimes used herbs for abortion (and perhaps also for contraception, since they rarely seem to have had two pregnancies in less than two years). All these practices mitigated the intensity of the mid-seventeenth century crisis by easing the demand for limited or falling food supplies.39 But the Iroquois women could not withstand new European diseases.

  According to Adriaen van der Donck, a Dutchman who spent the 1640s in the Hudson valley and then wrote a detailed ‘Description’ of the region, the Native Americans ‘affirm that, before the arrival of the Christians, and before the small pox broke out among them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are; and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died’.40 ‘The Christians’ began to arrive in 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed a Dutch ship up the river that today bears his name, reaching the site of the future Albany, while a French party led by Samuel de Champlain advanced from Québec (which he had founded the previous year) up the St Lawrence as far as Crown Point. Both Hudson and Champlain hoped to find a ‘northwest passage’ to China and profit from its riches; and although they failed, they did profit from the abundant North American beaver, whose thick pelts made warm, rain-proof hats. In Albany alone, according to van der Donck, ‘80,000 beavers are annually killed’, and he went on to note that ‘There are some persons who imagine that the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but this is unnecessary anxiety. It has already continued many years, and the numbers brought in do not diminish’. But van der Donck, who never went east of the Appalachians, was misinformed. The beaver became ‘prey to one of the longest sustained hunts for a single species in world history’ and the resulting ‘fur rush’ drastically reduced not only the number of beavers but also, in due course, the number of native hunters.41

  Many Native Americans along the St Lawrence died in the wars of the seventeenth century. At Crown Point in July 1609 Champlain and several hundred Huron and Algonquin allies, who farmed and hunted in the woodlands north of Lake Ontario, encountered a war party of Mohawks, members of the Iroquois Confederation, which controlled the woodlands south of the lake. The French used their firearms to kill all three Mohawk chiefs at the outset, as well as several warriors as they fled, leaving the field to the Franco-Huron allies. This victory marked a turning point in the relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the region: ‘the beginning of the long, slow destruction of a culture and a way of life from which neither side has yet recovered’. The defeated Mohawks sought an alliance with other groups of Europeans – but whereas the Hurons exchanged beaver pelts primarily for metal artefacts, above all tools, the Mohawks and other Iroquois groups exchanged them primarily for brandy and firearms. Before long, the Iroquois not only possessed many ‘fowling pieces, muskets, pistols etc.’ but were also ‘far more active in that employment’ – firing guns accurately – ‘than many of the English, by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body’.42

  For a time the Hurons continued to prosper, since the metal tools supplied by the French enabled them to increase their maize crops, and their numbers rose to perhaps 25,000; but the Europeans they encountered exposed Huron traders to measles and smallpox in a form to which they apparently possessed no resistance. After a particularly savage epidemic in 1639–40 the Hurons numbered scarcely 12,000 and they now lacked the strength to resist the attacks by Mohawks and other Iroquois groups. Worse, the acquisition of European firearms and ammunition, and the drunken rages induced by consuming European brandy, gave Iroquois warfare a new ferocity. The ‘design’ of the Iroquois, wrote the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues in 1643, ‘is to take, if they can, all the Hurons; and, having put to death the most considerable ones and a good part of the others, to make of them both but one people and only one land’.43 Jogues failed to perceive that the Iroquois also fought in order to replace their own losses from disease by integrating prisoners captured from other Indian nations, a form of conflict known as ‘mourning-war’ in which the women (especially the widows) of the tribe separated the captives suitable for breeding, whom they saved, before torturing and then killing the rest.

  The Hurons did their best to defend themselves. In 1645 they concluded a peace with the Iroquois; and, lest it should fail, they persuaded the Jesuits and French settlers living among them to provide firearms and teach them how to fortify their villages more effectively. But still the Iroquois burned Huron maize and stole their furs until, during the famine year 1649, they launched an all-out assault. The Hurons had made plans for an orderly withdrawal in case of need, and they now burned their villages and retreated to an island in Lake Huron, accompanied by about 50 French missionaries, artisans and soldiers; but since drought killed the maize planted by the refugees, many of them (especially children) starved to death. An excavation in 1987 of a fort and the adjacent Huron village revealed a grave filled with the tiny skeletons of malnourished children – victims of the Europeans' obsession with firearms and fur hats.44

  Their orderly migration plan enabled enough Hurons to survive the ‘Beaver Wars’ and the ensuing famine winter, and thus to preserve their collective identity after they abandoned their homeland; but, as with all migrations, groups who were intimately familiar with the resources, ecology and natural balance of their ancestral lands found it far harder to survive as malnourished refugees in an unfamiliar environment. For example, the Hurons took with them to their new homes, in what is now northern Illinois and Wisconsin, a lifestyle dependent on the staple crops that had sustained them further east. In the words of Nicholas Perrot, a Frenchman who lived among them for two decades: ‘The kinds of food which the savages like best, and which they make the most efforts to obtain are the Indian corn [maize], the kidney bean, and the squash. If they are without these, they think they are fasting, no matter what abundance of meat and fish they have in their stores, the Indian corn being to them what bread is to Frenchmen.’45 Unfortunately for the refugees, maize requires a 160-day growing season but, even in periods of benign climate, northern Illinois rarely provides more than 140. In years of late or early frost, or if too much rain or drought, the harvest failed. Tree-ring data from Illinois indicate that, as elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, adverse weather occurred more frequently during the mid-seventeenth century, and so no doubt many Hurons starved.

  None of these misfortunes affected Europe's demand for beaver hats, and so in 1665 Nicholas Perrot established a base at Sault Sainte Marie, where Lake Huron joins Lake Superior, and began to exchange furs for guns, alcohol and tools with the Ottawas and other Indian nations around the Great Lakes. From there, together with Louis Joliet, he advanced to what is now Green Bay, and again established a trading post. In 1673 Joliet travelled down the Mississippi to its confluence with the Arkansas river; and a decade later the Chevalier de la Salle canoed all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. On his odyssey, La Salle met a group of Huron exiles who gave vivid testimony concerning the insupportable hardship of life back home. When asked whether they would like to return north with the French they absolutely refused, because ‘being in the most fertile, healthy, and peaceful country in the world, they would be devoid of sense to leave it and expose themselves to be tomahawked by the Illinois or burnt by the Iroquois on their way to another land where the winter was insufferably cold, the summer without game, and ever in war’.46

  Perhaps these refugees exaggerated. In his magisterial study, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World, John Richards assessed ‘t
he effects of the fur trade on those Indian groups caught up in it. Every year,’ he wrote, ‘Europeans enlisted tens of thousands of Indians to serve as hunters, processors, carriers, and traders of huge numbers of furs and skins for export from North America.’ He discerned ‘three intertwined questions’:

  • Did the involvement of Native Americans in the fur trade cause weakness, dependence and cultural disintegration among them?

  • More specifically, did the glut of European manufactured goods cause the Native Americans to abandon their cultural beliefs, institutions and behaviour?

  • Finally, did insatiable European demand also cause the Native Americans to abandon sustainable hunting practices and embark on a policy of indiscriminate slaughter of fur-bearing animals that adversely changed the environment?47

  Richards cautiously rejected each of these claims, at least for the seventeenth century. Although European diseases decimated most Indian groups in North America, the acquisition of metal tools, woollen textiles and accurate firearms ‘enabled them to dispose of surplus goods in exchange for the means to live better and more comfortably’. With the partial exception of alcohol, they were ‘cautious consumers who restrained their wants in both variety and quantity’. And although by the 1660s beavers had been hunted to near extinction in coastal New England and along the lower St Lawrence, Richards noted that the hunters who harvested more than 150,000 pelts every year in the 1690s seemed to have experienced few problems in satisfying European demand.48

  The experience of other indigenous populations in North America during the seventeenth century, however, remains a mystery. Where European visitors to the central Mississippi valley in the mid-sixteenth century had encountered impressive hierarchical chiefdoms, French explorers in the 1670s did not mention them. Instead they reported widespread desolation. Patricia Galloway, a leading historian of the Choctaw of the Mississippi valley, has speculated that, since the area had limited lands capable of feeding large settlements from maize cultivation, ‘a point came when some of the river valleys could no longer support their population, or when populations right at the edge of need experienced a run of bad years or even climatic change, and the people had to disperse or starve’.49 Perhaps the mid-seventeenth century, when tree-ring series from the region show serious drought, formed such a ‘point’? Likewise, dendrochronological data from the Great Plains suggest that a major drought occurred there in the mid-seventeenth century, which may correspond with what some Native American oral histories describe as ‘the dog-less period’ – that is, a time when all livestock, even dogs, perished – but greater precision seems impossible without a more extensive ‘human archive’. Indeed, the entire period 1550–1650 has been dubbed the ‘black hole’ of Native American history beyond the Appalachians.50

  Nevertheless, it is worth recalling that, despite the setbacks in the northeast, in 1700 Native Americans still far outnumbered both Europeans and Africans throughout the northern subcontinent; and that, thanks to their growing proficiency with both firearms and horses, they controlled most of its territory. The number of native inhabitants of the Mississippi and Arkansas river valleys may have been fewer than before, but they still occupied what Kathleen DuVal has called ‘the Native Ground’ of North America, from which they excluded all European settlers, negotiating with them (if at all) from a position of great strength. To the east of this region, lay a ‘Middle Ground’ where Native American peoples formed new relationships both with each other and with the Europeans. Their value as allies enabled them for another century both to impose their diplomatic protocols (such as the ‘Covenant Chain’) on their European neighbours and to avoid dependence on a single European group. Given the ravages of lethal diseases and savage wars, such resilience was a remarkable achievement.51

  ‘This land of Brazil’

  Although European colonists in the Americas sometimes went to war against each other in the seventeenth century as part of broader conflicts – the English against the Dutch in the 1660s, and against the French in the 1670s and 1690s – they seldom fought for long or deliberately destroyed much European property. The viceroyalty of Brazil formed a significant exception. By 1630, the Portuguese ‘captaincies’ of Bahía in the centre, with its capital at Salvador, and of Pernambuco in the north, with its capital at Olinda, each boasted around 12,000 settlers, many of them living on sugar plantations where engenhos (mills) made sugar from cane to sell in Europe; while perhaps 60,000 people inhabited the entire viceroyalty, roughly half of them Portuguese and the rest African slaves and Native Americans. Then two catastrophes occurred. First, sailors aboard two fleets that arrived from Lisbon introduced yellow fever, picked up from African slaves, which swiftly decimated the unprotected indigenous population of the colony. Second, a Dutch expeditionary force captured Pernambuco and, having destroyed Olinda, gradually expanded its control southwards down the coastal plain, until in 1640 Salvador itself came under siege. A young Jesuit in the city now delivered perhaps the most remarkable sermon of the seventeenth century in the form of a tirade against God modelled on those delivered by Moses and Job in the Old Testament. ‘Consider, Lord, from whom You are taking this land of Brazil and to whom You are giving it,’ António Vieira began sternly: ‘You are taking it from those same Portuguese whom You chose from among all the nations of the world to be conquerors for Your faith’.

  How will it look, Supreme Lord and Governor of the Universe, if the sacred ‘five shields’ of Portugal and the insignia and wounds of Christ are replaced by the emblems of the heretics from Holland, rebels to their king and to God? If You had decided to give these lands to the Dutch pirates, why did You not give them when they were wild and uncultivated, instead of now?52

  Perhaps the tirade (like those of Moses and Job) found its mark, because a few days later a relief force arrived and raised the siege, while in 1641 Salvador celebrated the apparently miraculous news of the ‘restoration’ of Portuguese independence (see chapter 9 above). But any hope that shifting their allegiance from Philip IV to John IV would bring peace and prosperity soon evaporated. In 1641–2 smallpox ‘raged so violently among the Indians that entire aldeias [villages] were almost totally extinguished. The survivors retreated into the forests since they no longer dared to remain in their homes.’53

  By contrast, Dutch Brazil prospered until, by 1644, some 15,000 settlers inhabited the fertile coastal plain that stretched from the Amazon delta to the São Francisco river. Almost half the newcomers lived in the handsome new capital Mauritsstad (now the heart of Recife), built with bricks and tiles shipped out from Holland and boasting a fine palace for the governor, numerous churches and the first Jewish synagogue in the New World. Meanwhile, an expeditionary force captured Luanda, the capital of Portuguese Angola and the principal source of slaves required to produce sugar, thus apparently securing the economic future of the new colony. Everything changed in 1645 when the Portuguese settlers mounted a counter-attack that drove the Dutch back into a few coastal fortresses. For the next nine years, civil war between the Dutch and Portuguese colonists and their Native American allies caused widespread devastation. The Dutch seized hundreds of Portuguese ships carrying sugar to Europe, while in 1648 their warships entered the Bay of All Saints, the heart of the Portuguese colony, and torched the engenhos around its shores. The Portuguese retaliated in kind, burning so many engenhos in Pernambuco that the province lost for ever its position as the colony's leading exporter of sugar. Human casualties were also high. ‘The Heavenly Court had decreed,’ wrote the rabbi of Mauritsstad, ‘that the marauding bands should spread out and invade forest and field. Some of them looked for plunder, others hunted human beings, for the enemy came with the intention to destroy everything.’54

  The rabbi had good cause to know: the Portuguese treated captured Jews with especial cruelty, either killing them in cold blood or surrendering them to the Inquisition for trial and eventual execution. In all, at least 20,000 Dutch settlers perished in Brazil, and at the fall of Mauritss
tad in 1654 the survivors – perhaps 6,000 in number, including at least 600 Jews – lost almost all their assets. Some of the Gentiles sailed on the next fleet to Batavia, intending to make their fortunes in Dutch Indonesia, while many of the Jews migrated to England, hoping that the belligerent Republic might provide them with another chance to settle legally in America.55 Meanwhile Portuguese Brazil prospered, especially after the discovery of massive gold deposits in the interior in the 1690s, expanding until it covered (as it does today) almost half of South America.

  ‘Panic in the Indies’

  In the rest of Latin America, news of the revolt of Portugal ignited what Stuart Schwartz has called a ‘panic in the Indies’. According to Don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, bishop of Puebla and inspector general of the viceroyalty of New Spain in July 1641, ‘the whole monarchy trembled and shook, since Portugal, Catalonia, the East Indies, the Azores and Brazil had rebelled’. Rumours spread that rebels had murdered the Spanish garrison in Salvador and that the settlers had made common cause with the Dutch to bring down Spanish power. Both stories proved false, but when an agent from Lisbon arrived in Cartagena and attempted to seize the treasure galleons (which assembled in the port every year), according to Palafox ‘apprehension and hysteria’ gripped the capital, whose 6,000 Portuguese residents were (he claimed) armed to the teeth and likely to enjoy the support of their numerous African slaves in any rebellion.56

  The adverse climate, probably related to the unusually frequent El Niño events, made the situation even more volatile. The valley of Mexico normally receives copious rain from May to August, with little precipitation in the other months; but an intricate irrigation system, the creation of artificial floating horticultural beds (chinampas) in the lakes, and the maintenance of year-round granaries made it possible to sustain a relatively high population density. In 1639, however, the entire valley suffered the first of five years of drought, during which the price of maize quintupled, leaving the granaries without food and the citizens without water.57 Blame for these disasters gradually shifted to the viceroy, the marquis of Escalona – who, although a member of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Castile, was not only married to the duke of Bragança's sister (which might tempt him to transfer New Spain to Portuguese hands) but also had Jewish ancestors (which, some thought, led him to protect the local New Christians).