Where once was solid land, Seas have I seene,
And solid land, where once deepe Seas have beene.
Shels, far from Seas, like quarries in the ground;
And anchors have on mountaine tops been found.
In the margin, Sandys adds, ‘Such have I seene in America.’ 22 The personal note is a reminder of Virginia’s capacity to fire the imagination; the bigger picture is, tellingly, less frank.
The agricultural and intellectual opportunities the colony afforded were not the only motives for emigrating there. The religious conflict at home prompted many Puritans to seek a better life abroad. The New World would become a safe harbour for religious malcontents; among the many who thought about relocating there was Oliver Cromwell. The most famous of these migrants were the Pilgrim Fathers, who mostly came from Nottinghamshire and left Plymouth in September 1620 aboard the Mayflower. The party consisted of families, a number of servants, a few hired hands – 104 people in all, two of them born en route – plus a mastiff and a springer spaniel. Sixty-five days after setting sail they made landfall at Cape Cod, although it was several more weeks before they were able to leave their cramped berths. It is an indication of the religious temperament of the passengers that one of them, William Brewster, had with him a son called Wrestling, whose name was short for ‘Wrestling with God’, while a second, William White, had a son called Resolved.
It was yet another William, a polyglot Yorkshireman surnamed Bradford, who dubbed the emigrants Pilgrims – more often at the time they called themselves Strangers. Their mission was to introduce the Christian gospel to the Native Americans, and they made a promising start. Soon after their arrival the Strangers had been greeted by an Indian, Samoset, with the single word ‘Welcome!’ which he had learnt from English fishermen he had come across up the coast in Maine. The snippets of English he had picked up were a small yet significant help to the newcomers, enabling basic communication.
In his account of the Plymouth plantation, Bradford could refer to a native chief by his traditional title of sachem – his use of the word casual and comfortable. In dealing with the tribal leaders, the Strangers had as their intermediary a Patuxet tribesman called Tisquantum, who had twice been kidnapped by the English and had experience of working for the London merchant John Slany. Tisquantum served as both interpreter and guide. Seen as a traitor by his people, he proved invaluable to the colonists, showing them where to find good fish and where best to plant their corn. Although he died in the winter of 1622, the contact he facilitated between the Strangers and the native inhabitants was close. It grew through gift-giving and polite mimicry, and was reflected in treaties between them and the exchange of key elements of their languages.
The mood is captured by Edward Winslow, one of the settlers who travelled aboard the Mayflower. His Good Newes from New England (1624), ostensibly promotional, contains gruffly delivered advice for anyone contemplating the trip to America, yet also refers to the ‘ingenious and observative’ natives, their ‘very copious’ language and the ‘friendly entertainment’ offered by an Indian chief’s Squa-sachim. This word became squaw, which is now most often found in place names (almost 800 of them). It has increasingly been demonized, partly on account of a spurious claim that its Algonquian meaning is ‘vagina’, and there have been moves by activists to efface it from maps: for instance, Minnesota’s Lone Squaw Island has become Nokomis Island, while Oregon, South Dakota and Maine are among the other states that have passed laws to sanitize their toponyms.23 Naming is a means of imposing yourself on others – one of the more immediate ways of exercising power. Winslow also alludes to the ‘office and dutie of the Powah’ – an individual ‘eager and free in speech’ whose services are enlisted in extreme circumstances.24 Here is the first sighting of the Narragansett word that heads this chapter, powwow, which was at first understood to mean a medicine man rather than the conference where he officiated, and which came to be used in a less ceremonial sense in the nineteenth century.
For the Strangers, there were hazards aplenty: the hostile natives, errant livestock, wolves, and, from 1630, John Winthrop’s rival Massachusetts Bay Colony. It hardly seems a coincidence that Bradford may well have been the first person ever to commit to the page the phrase ‘out of kilter’. The Strangers saw themselves as counterparts to the Israelites making their exodus out of Egypt, menaced by a race of free-livers who threatened to pollute them with their degeneracy.25 Meanwhile, the pious Winthrop told the members of the Massachusetts colony that ‘the eyes of all people are upon us,’ and assured them, ‘we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.’ (Alert to the importance of commerce, Winthrop is also the first author to mention the beads known as wampum – an abbreviation of the Massachusett wampumpeag – which were used as currency.) Far from their roots, which tended to be in the east of England, his followers had the opportunity to forge a new paradise. Profanity had no place there, and it is the old Puritan prohibition of swearing that lies behind the enduring American repertoire of muted profanities: doggone, gee whiz, drat and the like.
In all, 21,000 English migrants moved to Massachusetts between 1629 and 1640. By 1700 their numbers had swollen to 100,000; by 1800 to over a million, and by 1900 to around 6 million. Later, as they spread far beyond the Massachusetts borders, they laid the foundations of Chicago (the name of which comes from an Algonquian word for a field of garlic), Cleveland, Denver and Seattle. Starting in 1634, Roman Catholics emigrated to Maryland. Three other groups followed: a party of distressed Cavaliers and their servants moved to Virginia in the middle of the seventeenth century; the Delaware valley absorbed many Quaker immigrants from the north Midlands and Wales between 1675 and 1725; and in the eighteenth century there was a significant influx of Irish, as well as of borderers from Scotland and the north of England, into the Appalachian backcountry of the Shawnee and the Cherokee.26 From the Shawnee they would learn wapiti, the name of the white-rumped elk; from the Cherokee, sequoia – the word a tribute to a native man who developed a type of spelling-book for his language. The effects of the huge influx were profound. The native culture of the eastern seaboard had existed, largely undisturbed, for half a millennium. Yet within fifty years of the English settlers’ arrival – with guns and disease – the indigenous culture had been devastated.
This happened despite repeated attempts at enriching links between the settlers and the natives. One of the key players here was the missionary John Eliot, who arrived in Boston in the winter of 1631, accompanied by twenty-three barrels of books. Convinced that the natives were the descendants of the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Eliot sought to return them to the fold. During the 1640s, ‘the absorption of the English in their own affairs … gave the colonies even more scope than they had previously enjoyed to go their own way.’27 For Eliot, this freedom was invaluable. His Indian Dialogues, published in 1671, fictionalize his sustained efforts to convert the local people, which included making a Massachusett translation of the New Testament and later a Massachusett version of the whole Bible – the first Bible to be printed in North America.
Another passionate attempt to understand Native American culture from the inside was A Key into the Language of America, published in 1643 by Roger Williams, who was the founder of Providence, Rhode Island. The volume’s subtitle was ‘An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America, called New England’, and it included ‘briefe Observations of the Customes, Manners and Worships … of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death’. Williams was a sympathetic observer and enjoyed amicable relations with his Native American neighbours, partly thanks to his sensitivity to their property rights. Looking over the Key, it’s hard not to notice the onomatopoeic quality of words like honckock (geese) or quequecum-mauog (ducks), and hard not to be impressed by the sharp fruits known as wuchipoquameneash (of which a noted English doctor exclaimed, ‘God never did make a better Berry’).28 But the words that Williams recorded have made little impression
on English, even if on Rhode Island menus – and in the animated comedy Family Guy – you can still find the quahog, a type of clam for which, Williams reported, ‘the Indians wade deepe and dive.’ Williams hoped his book would ‘open a Doore; yea, Doors of unknowne Mercies to Us and Them’.29 His valuable connections with the Narragansett tribal leaders were overshadowed, however, by disputes over land within the Rhode Island community.
Many Europeans, most of whom had neither Williams’s patience nor his ear, used pidgin languages to communicate with the Native Americans. One example was Pidgin Delaware, a form of Unami, which originated through contact between Dutch traders and Unami-speakers on the Delaware River in the 1620s. It came to be used by English and Swedish settlers, too, in their dealings with the natives of Delaware.30 These languages helped develop links between communities; their reduced, transparent vocabulary bridged divides. Yet the overall effect was one of massive acoustic and lexical confluence. As Edward Finegan observes, ‘colonial English swam in the polyglot tides around it, not only local Indians, but Dutch in New Amsterdam, French in Louisiana and Canada, and Spanish in New Spain’. In the Delaware valley the English settlers encountered Swedes and Finns. By 1644 there were speakers of sixteen languages in Manhattan, and the Native Americans the settlers met spoke as many as 221 different tongues.31
Exploration of other frontiers would lead to contact with still other languages. Thus Micmac, spoken in eastern Canada, provided toboggan, and the Eskimo-Aleut languages spoken by Inuit at America’s Arctic fringes would also supply a small number of words, the best-known of these being kayak and igloo. Mukluk, the name of a high winter boot that has recently enjoyed unexpected cult status, derives from the central-Alaskan Yupik name for a bearded seal: traditionally, the boot’s sole has been made from the skin of seal or caribou. A further recent addition is tiktaalik, the Inuktitut given name of the creature which is considered the vital evolutionary link between fish life and land animals. Anorak is from Greenland Eskimo, although it is fair to say the word is now used more often of studious people than of the garment they were once reckoned to hold so dear. (Its friend parka is of Russian origin, learnt from the nomadic Nenets herdsmen of Siberia.) The culture of the Inuit has frequently been misunderstood. In a pamphlet published in 1825, we read, ‘The Esquimaux dwell in caves under ground, and do not seem sensible of their desolate existence.’32 The accompanying list of vocabulary includes what is certainly the first sighting in an English-language publication of Inuk, the name for an Inuit man. We are likely to find this picture risibly limited, but then a brief encounter with Inuit legend may suggest why so little has been learnt from and about the Inuit culture. In translation, this sample sentence is perhaps mildly disturbing: ‘In the old days when the aged were too old to travel, they were left alone in a snowhouse to perish.’ But what of the original? ‘Akunialuk ningiungunitsait aulagunnasiangimut KimatauKattalauttut illuvigammi.’33
It seems fair to say, overall, that very little of the cultures upon which the Europeans intruded has survived to the present. Certainly there is not much outside the tribal reservations that persists in pristine form. As the historian Francis Jennings commented more than thirty years ago,
The identifiably Indian cultural traits still with us have been assimilated into Euramerican culture and adapted and conformed to structures of European institutions and ideas. Our culture has consumed Indian traits the way our language has gobbled up words: … canoes have been adopted without displacing sails or oceanic navigation.34
The main image this conjures is of the language’s insouciance: of English as a machine, hammering through anything that looks like an obstacle, and harvesting anything that could be an asset.
Today, the controversy surrounding the terminology we should use of these peoples is the thing most widely known about them. Are they Native Americans, American Indians, Amerindians, Aboriginal Americans or Original Americans, the First Nations, the Indigenous Peoples of America, or the Peoples of Abya Yala? The debate, which shows little sign of letting up, treats them as a single unit, rather than a complex group. Furthermore, it is an expedient way of sidestepping the real issue: the obliteration of the culture of the New World by immigrants from the Old.
8. Bonsai
A small Japanese tree, intentionally dwarfed; the philosophy or aesthetics of miniaturization
From the Japanese word for a potted plant, which is related to the Chinese penjing, meaning ‘tray landscape’
At the same time as ambitious and sometimes desperate migrants were venturing west, a small number were heading in the opposite direction. One destination, about which I shall say more in due course, was India. Another was Japan, and it is there, like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, that we now briefly venture.
There is a long-standing, clichéd image of Japan as an insular, impenetrably exotic land. To a contemporary audience, it is a place where modernity and tradition awkwardly coexist – Hello Kitty and manga alongside tea ceremonies and Kabuki theatre – and where you can buy schoolgirls’ soiled knickers out of vending machines. From the beginning of the fourteenth century it was known to Europeans from the writings of Marco Polo, who claimed its earth was sown with gold. There could be few greater seductions for adventurers, and it was with the object of finding a sea route to this ore-rich land and its equally fabled neighbour China that Columbus set off from the Spanish port of Palos in 1492. As we know, Columbus ended up elsewhere, and the first Europeans to establish trade with the Japanese were the Portuguese. Their missionaries began to proselytize in Japan in 1549, and sixty years later a group of Jesuits produced the first Japanese-Portuguese dictionary. This volume attempted to unravel the mysteries of a tongue that, notwithstanding the large cultural influence of Chinese, had no link to any other known language. Four hundred years later, and despite attempts to find a connection with that contested group the Altaic family of languages, the genetic affiliations of Japanese are still a puzzle.
Convincing insights into Japanese life were rare. Sixteenth-century maps represented Japan as an edible-looking little squiggle, remote and prawn-like. Only tiny slivers of the Japanese language found their way back to Europe. In the 1550s Richard Eden translated some travel narratives, and in 1577 a fresh edition of these appeared, jazzily entitled The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies, and other countreys lying eyther way, towardes the fruitfull and ryche Moluccaes … with a discourse of the Northwest passage. The text was augmented by Richard Willes, who had until recently been a professor of rhetoric at Perugia, and who now tried to give coherent shape to Eden’s sometimes chaotic words. In the revised work, readers were treated to the information that Japan was often snowbound; its inhabitants were melancholy and violent, yet also courteous. Here, too, were the first appearances of Mogul and – perhaps more impressively – Chinese, and the text described hara-kiri, albeit without giving it that name. There was also a reference to the Bonzii who gave sermons, resided in abbeys and were ‘chast[e] by commaundement’. 1 This term for a Buddhist cleric, the singular of which is bonze, is generally reckoned the first Japanese word borrowed by English.
The earliest English accounts of Japan are in letters and diaries written by travellers in the early part of the seventeenth century. In the summer of 1598 the shipbuilder William Adams set sail for the East Indies, with the goal of procuring spices. After nineteen months of arduous misadventure, he and his sickly crew of twenty-four landed in Japan, hoping to be able to sell their cargo of cloth there. Adams was the hardiest of Elizabethan seafarers, prepared to gnaw on a raw penguin when there was nothing else to eat. He was also a skilled pilot and, once settled, a perceptive observer, who became a counsellor to the first shogun. This is one of the unfamiliar words contained in his logbook; another is miso.
One of Adams’s deputies was a Coventry man, Richard Cocks, who kept a diary of his experiences in Japan between 1615 and 1622. Cocks meticulously recorded his daily life, noting the details of every transaction in which he w
as involved. Sometimes his diary is tedious, but there are moments of startling freshness: he echoes Richard Eden’s description of hara-kiri, again without giving it that name, indicates the brutality of Japanese law (a teenage boy is cut to pieces for stealing a small boat), notes the Japanese people’s pleasure in drinking and gift-giving, and observes the rapidity with which they acquire the habit of smoking tobacco. Cocks also provides first sightings of the word furo for a bathhouse, along with Korean, watermelon and the Chinese boat called a sampan. In November 1616 he provides a savoury image of his time in Japan, as he writes, in his usual tangled script, of being given ‘a present of a bento or box for 5 persons to eate in’.2 That same year he also mentions seeing a cummerbund; the word is Persian, and would become better known in British India.
Overall, the impression Cocks affords of Anglo-Japanese relations is one of slightly stiff cordiality. Despite sustained efforts, the English were unable to persuade the Japanese to grant them trading rights, and this led them in 1623 to abandon their base on the island of Hirado. Not long afterwards the entire Spanish community was deported, and in 1638, appalled by the continuing and successful intrusions of the Christian missionaries, the Japanese chose to break off contact with all outsiders save the Dutch, whose sole focus was trade. Japanese nationals were forbidden to venture abroad. Moreover, foreign books were banned – an interdiction that was lifted only in 1720.
Thereafter information was for a long time scarce. Soy is first mentioned in a travel book published in 1679; the alcoholic rice drink sake appears in another travelogue eight years later. But for an illuminating insight into the culture of the region English-speaking readers had to wait for Engelbert Kaempfer’s History of Japan, the manuscript of which was acquired by Sir Hans Sloane and published in an English translation by John Gasper Scheuchzer in 1727. Kaempfer, who had worked as a doctor near Nagasaki, was the first Western writer to describe Ginkgo biloba, and the History contains a wealth of other such words that would have looked gleamingly new to contemporary readers. Among these are samurai, the festival known as matsuri, Zen, the Shinto religion and mikado, the archaic name for the emperor, literally meaning ‘exalted gate’.
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