The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  When Griffin returned, his eyes wide, he reported that he had counted 283 Indians, with “every one his bowe and arrows . . . and not any thing to exchange at all.” To Waymouth and Rosier, it smelled like a trap, and a sign that for all their apparent goodwill, the “Salvages” were “very trecherous: never attempting mischiefe, untill by some remisnesse, fit opportunity afoordeth them certaine ability to execute the same.”

  Rather than going ashore, the men rowed back to the ship. Maybe the English were right and the Indians had been planning an attack. Or perhaps Griffin misunderstood their natural caution upon seeing an armed party of strangers rowing toward their village.

  Or maybe Waymouth’s immediate assumption of treachery was a guilty reflection of his own deceit, because the Englishmen had from the start been planning a surprise of their own. “Wherefore . . . we determined so soone as we could to take some of them,” Rosier wrote, “least (being suspitious we had discovered their plots) they should absent themselves from us.”

  ***

  A thick rope tumbled over the side of the huge wigwaol, and two of the Wapánahkis took hold of it and climbed aboard. Ktə̀hαnəto and his brother Amóret, however, stayed in their canoes with their two companions, waiting. The hairy men shouted over the side, holding up a steaming gray metal bowl and miming that they should eat. The youngest of the six Wapánahkis, a boy barely into his manhood, clambered up the side of the ship, the muscles flexing in his long limbs, and carried the bowl back down to the bobbing canoes. It contained the hot green berries and something else like baked cornmeal.

  As they shared the food among themselves, Ktə̀hαnəto asked about the two Wapánahkis on the ship, who had not yet reappeared. The boy said they were inside the wigwaol, warming themselves at a fire built among square stones, where the hairy men cooked for themselves, for there seemed to be no women anywhere.

  Perhaps, Amóret said, these people have no women. Or perhaps they are hidden, Ktə̀hαnəto mused. If the women smelled as bad and looked as ugly as the men, the boy joked, better that they stayed hidden. Then the lad climbed back up the side to return the metal bowl and shouted down that he would stay for a time.

  The three remaining Wapánahkis paddled to the largest island, beaching the canoes. They climbed to the high bluff at the northeastern end of the island, within sight of the nearby ship, and kindled a fire, watching for any sign that their companions were ready to leave. Instead, many more of the hairy men came out of the forest, loaded down with bundles of firewood, which they shuttled to the big ship in a small boat. They were poor paddlers, sitting backward, so they had to crane their heads around to see which way they were going; the Wapánahkis could only shake their heads at the absurdity of it. Then seven or eight of the men, with one who acted like a sὰkəmα, pushed off from the ship and came toward the island, carrying a wooden box and a platter with more food.

  The Wapánahkis stood, realizing they hadn’t seen any sign of their three friends aboard the big wigwaol for some time. Unease was growing within them, and when Ktə̀hαnəto and Amóret started down the hill to meet the hairy men, their companion told them he did not want to go and slipped off into the woods.

  Did Ktə̀hαnəto hang for a moment on his heel, deciding whether to do the same? Was it curiosity that finally won out, or naiveté, or concern for his fellow Wapánahkis, still somewhere inside the unnaturally large ship? Did he, in the long years that followed, regret that he, too, hadn’t fled into the woods?

  Yet as the boatload of backward paddlers approached and Ktə̀hαnəto’s apprehension no doubt grew, he was not making his decision in complete ignorance. It’s very likely, in fact, that the young sagamore knew a great deal more about these strangers than the strangers knew about his people.

  The Wapánahki and their neighbors to the north, along the Maritime coast, knew from experience that such visitors would be short, ugly men, sallow under their disgusting body hair. He knew that their wigwaol, when approached from downwind, would be rank with their unwashed stink. They would jabber incomprehensibly, although the Mi’kmaq had learned to speak a little of their language, and a few words, such as ania for brother and adesquide for friend, had passed down the coast.

  The Wapánahki also knew that they would have goods to trade. For this reason, as word of the giant wigwaol’s arrival had spread among the villages of the wôbanakik coast, anticipation had initially won out over caution. Occasionally, the Wapánahki could barter with the Mi’kmaq for the hard, black pots like stone they had gotten from the visitors; the Mi’kmaq had regular dealings with these beings and had even learned to sail some of the smaller, winged canoes that used the wind instead of paddles to move. No one, even the elders, could say with certainty whether the strangers were human beings like the Wapánahki, apparitions from the spirit world, or a strange kind of intelligent animal. But the Wapánahki women wanted the black pots, and everyone wanted the shiny gray knives, which were far superior to flint or copper, and the wonderfully sharp tomhikon for cutting trees.

  Although no one in Ktə̀hαnəto’s village had ever seen such people themselves, the Indians knew that these odd men had been coming to the edge of wôbanakik for generations. The Mi’kmaq and Maliseet said that some years, there were as many of the seagoing wigwaol as there were birds in the sky—dozens of boats with hundreds of smelly men, coming ashore to smoke their fish and trade for furs or meat. The Mi’kmaq said the visitors were from many different bands, speaking different tongues, but the Innu called them all mistigoches, “builders of big boats.”

  When Ktə̀hαnəto was a boy, runners brought news of hairy men taking hundreds of hides from a camp near pαnáwαhpskek, whose inhabitants had watched from the forest. More reassuringly, just last autumn, during the Moon of the Eels, a great canoe full of the men had come to pαnáwαhpskek, trading with the people there and dealing forthrightly with Ktə̀hαnəto’s brother the Bashabes, to whom they had given gifts.

  But while Ktə̀hαnəto may have heard a great deal about such visitors, there was one thing he could not guess. These particular sallow men had not come for cod, or whales, or even furs. They’d come on behalf of wealthy men seeking riches and a new colony. And with the support of their king, they’d come to stymie their nation’s imperial rivals, the Spanish and French. The English were badly behind the colonial curve, and to catch up, they needed information. Instead of the ignorant near animals they’d expected to find, the men in the giant wigwaol had encountered a race of quick-witted people and immediately grasped that the intelligence and knowledge of a few “Salvages” would be priceless to their venture.

  What the Indians had was worth more than beaver pelts or smooth tobacco. They had information, and the Englishmen would get it by guile if they could and violence if they had to. Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions were about to be hijacked into history.

  By that morning in 1605, the Natives of the Northeast coast had been dealing with Europeans for at least six centuries. Unfortunately, relations had gotten off to the worst possible start, which was perhaps not surprising, given that the first emissaries of European culture we know of were Vikings. Not only that, they were Vikings who had been banished by other Vikings for being too violent—which is really saying something.

  Eirik the Red’s family had been thrown out of Norway for murder and settled in Iceland, where he was banished again for murdering a neighbor. He sailed away in a.d. 985, discovered Greenland, and founded a new colony there. About that time, a Norse trader named Bjarni Herjolfsson set sail for Greenland, but he was beset by storms and blown far off course. Bjarni found himself coasting along a wooded shore that was clearly not Greenland. Farther north, the land became mountainous and barren, the waters choked with ice. Bjarni—a Viking cast from a timid mold—made no attempt to land or explore this new world before turning east, bumping at last into Greenland. You’ll never believe where I’ve been, he told Eirik’s son, Leif.

  Ten years later, Leif Eiriksson bought Bjarni’s boat—pro
bably a knarr, a stable, wide-beamed cargo ship capable of carrying tremendous loads, rather than the slender, more famous snekke warships usually associated with Vikings—and sailed for this unknown place, reversing Bjarni’s journey. Leif came home to Greenland with timber, fruit, and stories of Helluland (flat stone land), Markland (forest land), and the impossibly rich Vinland (wine land).

  Helluland was almost certainly Baffin Island, and Markland was Labrador, with its thick spruce forests. Vinland was somewhere to the south—perhaps Newfoundland, where the remains of a Viking settlement were discovered in the 1960s, perhaps the Gulf of St. Lawrence or even as far south as New England. This new land was also inhabited by a people the sagas call skrælings. Whether these were Inuit from the subarctic, Beothuk on Newfoundland, or more southerly Indians such as the Mi’kmaq, no one knows, but from the get-go the Vikings, starting with Leif’s brother Thorvald, casually murdered them. He caught and then executed eight of the nine skrælings his crew found sleeping under skin boats on the beach one day. The skrælings didn’t take this treatment lying down; Thorvald himself was killed later that day in a bloody counterattack.

  Although the Vikings tried to colonize Vinland, bringing livestock and women there (at least one child was born in the colony), the skræling attacks became more and more frequent. During one assault, Freydis—Leif’s sister, a real battle-ax, who according to one saga personally killed five Icelandic women in a plot to increase her profits from the voyage—snatched up a sword from a fallen Viking, bared one breast, and slapped it with the weapon, terrifying the skrælings into retreat.

  Eventually, though, the skrælings drove the Vikings out of Vinland, although evidence suggests that the Norse continued to make periodic voyages there for perhaps several hundred years more, until cooling climatic conditions drove their Greenland colony into extinction around 1400.%2 By then, other Europeans were coming regularly to what was referred to as Hy-Brasil, the Seven Cities, or the Isles of Antilla, all names for imagined lands west of Ireland. Dreamers assumed Hy-Brasil was a place of great wealth and opulence; doubters scoffed that it was just a myth. But the Basques knew it was a very real place—the land of bakailao, or cod.

  Not that they were telling anyone. Basque fishermen may have been making trips to the northeastern coast of North America as early as the thirteenth or fourteenth century, reaping the unimaginable bounty of the cod-rich fishing banks off Newfoundland and the Maritimes. Certainly by the fifteenth century, they were regularly crossing the North Atlantic for the summer fishing season, landing to salt and dry their catch, then bringing it back to Catholic Europe, required to eat fish half the days of the ecclesiastical year.

  Good businessmen, the Basques kept their mouths shut about their sources, but by the 1480s English fishermen from Bristol were seeking the cod grounds as well, and may have found them. When Giovanni Caboto (better known as John Cabot) “discovered” his “New Found Ile Land” in 1497, it was no doubt to the disgust of the Basques, who’d had a pretty good thing going there for centuries. Jacques Cartier, setting out in 1534 on behalf of France, relied on directions from Breton fishermen who had been going there for years. When Cartier sailed into the mouth of the St. Lawrence, he was greeted by so many Mi’kmaqs and Montagnais (Innu), long accustomed to European visitors and waving furs to trade from the shore, that his nerve deserted him and he fired guns to scare them off.

  Basque whalers came, too. In 1412 a fleet of 20 whaling ships passed Iceland, heading west. Beginning in the 1530s, as many as 600 men a year came to hunt right and bowhead whales, setting up seasonal camps along the Labrador coast. By the summer of 1578, more than 350 European vessels were fishing off the coast of Newfoundland, with another 20 or 30 Spanish whalers working the waters between Newfoundland and Labrador. In all, some 20,000 Europeans were employed seasonally in the cod and whale fisheries there. Within two years, the French fleet had grown from 150 to 500 ships.

  In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert found the harbor at St. John’s, Newfoundland, choked with foreign boats—which did not stop him from striding ashore and cutting the thick turf to ceremonially take possession of the land for England, thus formally establishing the English empire. The Basque, Portuguese, and Breton fishermen—never mind the native Beothuk—were unimpressed.

  If Ktə̀hαnəto had been able to talk to the Indians of the Southeast coast, he’d have gotten an earful about Europeans, none of it good. When the Spaniard Ponce de León explored Florida in 1513, the Calusa Indians tried to cut his anchor lines from shielded canoes, while carefully keeping out of range of his ships’ cannons and crossbows, suggesting they’d already learned the hard way to be careful around European weaponry. The hostile reception and the lack of rich gold and silver mines like those found in Mesoamerica kept Spanish colonization at bay for decades.

  Not that they didn’t try. In 1526, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and six hundred colonists sailed from Hispaniola up the North American coast, founding the colony of San Miguel de Gualdape. Just where they tried to settle has been placed variously on the Pee Dee River in South Carolina and Sapelo Island in Georgia. Whatever the location, within three months the colony went bust, Ayllón was dead, and fewer than a third of the colonists were able to limp back to Hispaniola.

  French Huguenots tried to settle at Fort Caroline (now Jacksonville, Florida) in 1564, and that was enough to prod the Spanish into decisive action. They massacred the French, established St. Augustine the following year, and salted the coasts of Florida and Georgia with forts to protect their treasure fleets and with missions to convert and control the Indians. The Timucua, who had helped the French colonists, dwindled quickly toward extinction. The Guale, who had already tangled with Ayllón, rose up twice against their invaders, as part of a regional revolt in 1576 and again in 1597 in an especially violent insurrection. Both times, the Spanish retaliated by burning Guale towns wholesale. But the microbial assault from the Europeans was far worse. By 1600, diseases introduced by the Spanish had reduced what may have been a pre-contact population of 1.3 million people in the Southeast to less than a sixth that number.

  The centuries of contact between northeastern tribes and Europeans also had left their mark. Three years before Waymouth’s voyage, Bartholomew Gosnold was sailing along the Maine coast. To his shock, he encountered a party of six or eight Indians expertly sailing “a Baske-shallop with mast and sails, an iron grapple, and a kettle of copper . . . one of them apparelled with a waistcoat and breeches of black serge, made after our sea-fashion, hose and shoes on his feet.” Onboard Gosnold’s ship, the Indian commander drew a chalk map of the coast and mentioned the Newfoundland fishing harbor of Placentia, whose name came from plazenta, the Basque word for “pleasantness.”

  “They spoke divers Christian words, and seemed to understand much more than we,” one of Gosnold’s companions wrote. No doubt the Indians, using the trade pidgin long employed with the Basques, were surprised by the newcomers’ obtuseness. By the early 1600s, pidgin Basque was the lingua franca of Northeast trade, and the coastal people of the Maritimes were fluent when meeting their adesquides. Mathieu Da Costa—a free black man whose skills as an interpreter commanded a handsome price among Dutch and French traders—was able to make himself understood to the Mi’kmaq and Montagnais in the first years of the seventeenth century, probably using another form of Basque pidgin that had developed on the slave coast of Africa. One early-seventeenth-century visitor to the Maritimes observed that “the language of the coast tribes is half Basque.”

  Nor were Indian sailors all that rare a sight, manning shallops that might be forty feet long and have two masts. Two Natives joined Samuel de Champlain on one of his voyages, sailing their own shallop from Nova Scotia down the coast of Maine to trade European merchandise they’d acquired from the French. One of them, a Mi’kmaq sachem, informed the explorers that he had already visited France and stayed in the home of the governor of Bayonne some two decades earlier.

  The Parisian lawyer Marc Lescarbot, who
visited New France in 1606, reported seeing a “chaloupe” manned by two Indians who had painted a moose on the ship’s sail, and in 1609 in Penobscot Bay, Henry Hudson encountered “two French Shallops full of the country people” with furs to trade. Hudson, an English sailor in Dutch employ, was not much for niceties. He stormed the Wapánahkis and took one of their shallops by force.

  When Rosier and the rest of his crew landed on the island shore, they handed over the platter of peas to the two remaining Indians. As the men followed the Wapánahkis uphill to their fire, they talked quietly among themselves about how to lure back the third Indian who had disappeared into the woods. Rosier opened the wooden box, which was filled with trade items, “thinking thereby to have banisht feare from the other.”

  When that didn’t work, the Englishmen wasted no time. Without warning, they grabbed the two Wapánahkis—and found themselves in the fight of their lives. Though taken by surprise, the Indians fought back with incredible force and agility as the Englishmen dragged them down the hill and into the boat. “It was as much as five or sixe of us could doe to get them into the light horseman. For they were strong and so naked as our best hold was by their long haire on their heads,” Rosier recounted. The three who had come aboard the ship willingly were already safely stowed below—whether bound or simply confined, Rosier never said. “Thus we shipped five Salvages, two Canoas, with all their bowes and arrowes,” an act that he defended as “being a matter of great importance for the full accomplement of our voyage.”

  The last Indian, the one who slipped away, “being too suspitiously fearefull of his owne good,” was stranded on the island without a canoe, but he managed to stay out of sight for the next three days while Waymouth’s crew finished loading water and wood for the return to England and completed meticulous soundings of Pentecost-harbour. During this whole period, Rosier recorded no visits from any Indians.