The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  “Understanding by reason of the Sphere that, if I should saile by the way of Northwest winde, I should by a shorter tract come into India,” Cabot set off with two square-rigged Portuguese caravels. “I began therefore to saile toward the Northwest, not thinking to find any other Land then that of Cathay [China], and from thence to turn toward India, but after certaine dayes, I found the land rann towards the North, which was to me a great displeasure.” Cabot sailed farther and farther north, hoping to find a way around this inconvenient landmass, until “dispairing to find the passage, I turned backe againe.”

  Despite the image of ignorant sailors worried that they would sail off the edge of a flat world, scholars and geographers had guessed since the days of the ancient Greeks that the world was a sphere, and by medieval days, it was widely assumed that one might reach the Orient by sailing west. Columbus and Cabot were merely among the first to actually risk it. And sanguine assumptions about the symmetry of global geography convinced many learned men that there must be a water passage around or through any intervening landmass—the so-called indrawing sea based on classical ideals of geographic harmony. It was the birth of the Northwest Passage, the search for which would consume lives and fortunes for the next three centuries or more.

  For much of the early sixteenth century, America wasn’t a destination; it was an obstacle, a huge and annoying barrier to the riches of Asia. In 1508, Cabot’s son Sebastian probed for a way through, and in 1523 the French—Johnny-come-latelies to American exploration—sent another Italian, Giovanni da Verrazano, to look for the passage. He struck land, probably what is now Cape Fear, North Carolina, and turned north, thinking that he could see the Pacific across a narrow isthmus. (In reality, it was Pamlico Sound, inside the Outer Banks.)

  On the Carolina coast, one of Verrazano’s sailors—swimming through high surf to trade a few bells and small mirrors with some Indians on the shore—was slammed around by the waves and nearly drowned. The Natives hauled him ashore, dried him out by a fire, and then “hugged him with great affection” before sending him back. Sadly, Verrazano didn’t reciprocate the courtesy. Farther north, along the Mid-Atlantic coast, he found a teenage girl and an old woman clutching a boy and two infants, hiding in fear. And with good reason. “We took the little boy from the old woman to carry with us to France,” Verrazano reported, “and would have taken the girl also, who was very beautiful and very tall, but it was impossible because of the loud shrieks she uttered as we attempted to lead her away.”

  At the mouth of the Hudson, in Narragansett Bay, Verrazano kept meeting friendly, welcoming Natives. But this bonhomie gave way as he rounded Cape Cod and headed north into Maine or the Maritimes, where the Indians seem to have grown wise to the ways of Europeans. The Natives shot at Verrazano’s men whenever they tried to land and would trade only by lowering ropes down cliffs to the explorer’s boats. They had no use for baubles, wanting steel knives and fishhooks instead, and when the trading was over, “the men at our departure made the most brutal signs of disdain and contempt possible.”

  No doubt the contempt grew. A few months after Verrazano’s visit, a Portuguese captain named Estevão Gomes, sailing under Spanish colors, explored the East coast, from Cuba and Florida clear up to Newfoundland, looking for the Northwest Passage. To his disgust, the land proved immense and impenetrable, and in a final bid to turn a profit, he kidnapped dozens of Indians on the Maine or Nova Scotia coast and took them back to Spain.

  Spanish maps based on Gomes’s voyage accurately show a landmass with no indrawing sea, but few were ready to give up on the Northwest Passage. Englishman John Rut sailed from Bristol in 1527 in one of Henry VIII’s ships (reassigned from its usual duties hauling royal wine from Bordeaux) and another vessel, subsequently lost at sea, looking for “the land of the Great Khan.” In Newfoundland, they found the usual cod-driven hubbub—“eleven saile of Normans and one Britain [Breton] and two Portugall barkes, and all a-fishing”—and probed well to the north, encountering icebergs before turning back.

  Jacques Cartier, a Breton who grew up in the fishing town of Saint-Malo, where the smell of Newfoundland cod hung heavy, thought he’d discovered the Northwest Passage in August 1535—though, more accurately, he was simply following the directions of two young Stadacona Iroquois brothers, Domagaia and Taignoagny, whom he’d kidnapped the previous year. The sons of the sachem Donnacona, they’d made the best of their ten-month ordeal, learning to wear French clothes and speak enough of the language that Cartier had great hopes for them as interpreters and go-betweens.

  To Cartier’s shock, Domagaia and Taignoagny wanted no part of his scheme. Reunited with their father, they largely held themselves aloof from the Frenchmen—except, having learned the real value of European goods, to serve as a brake on trading, “giving them to understand that what we bartered to them was of no value, and that for what they brought us, they could as easily get hatchets as knives.” Cartier and his men, having barely survived a frighteningly cold winter, kidnapped Domagaia, Taignoagny, and Donnacona, along with a handful of others, all of whom died in France before the Frenchman could make his third and final expedition in 1541. Questioned by the Natives at that time, Cartier explained the absence of the missing Indians by claiming they were happily married in France.

  The Spanish, meanwhile, were looking to expand their newly established empire in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica into the north. Taking his cue from the stories of an Indian boy captured somewhere along the Southeast coast, taught Spanish, and taken back to Spain, the nobleman Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón envisioned the land of “Chicora” to be an earthly paradise, and in 1526 he set out to colonize it, sight unseen. With six ships crammed with livestock, soldiers, women, children, and African and Indian slaves, he sailed to the coast of South Carolina.

  He found Chicora to be much less paradisiacal than he’d imagined. Shifting south to Georgia (possibly Sapelo Island), Ayllón established San Miguel de Gualdape, where the colonists confronted the stark reality of winter along the Southeast coast. Beset by disease, attacks from the Guale (whom they planned to enslave), and starvation, the colony lasted just three months, costing Ayllón and hundreds of his followers their lives.

  No Spaniard, however, plunged as deep into the eastern American frontier as Hernando de Soto. If David Ingram was telling the truth about the unfailing courtesy and generosity of the Indians he encountered on his epic journey, it attests to their forgiving nature, since Ingram must have crossed de Soto’s trail of almost unmatched destruction and cruelty.

  Starting at Tampa Bay in 1539, de Soto and 620 men—armored, mounted, accompanied by surly mastiffs on leashes, and driving herds of pigs before them—moved slowly north and west through what is now Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Alabama, then on to the Mississippi, where de Soto died in 1542, his body consigned to the river. The ever-dwindling number of survivors plunged on into Louisiana and Texas, then backtracked to the Mississippi, built boats, and sailed down the Gulf to Spanish Mexico in 1543, barely alive and most of them grateful to be shed of the place.

  Although de Soto and his men were often welcomed when they arrived in a new chiefdom, the mood quickly soured when the Indians discovered what they were dealing with. The Spaniards demanded vast stores of Indian food, grabbed women and slaves, and searched frantically for gold and riches like those that had made de Soto rich in Peru. If the locals put up a fight, the Spaniards would burn captives, kidnap leaders, and torch entire communities.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that de Soto’s men were also the first Europeans to personally experience that iconically American practice—scalping. The Apalachee Indians, with whom the conquistadors fought running skirmishes through their first winter, regularly ambushed the Spaniards. In one case, a dead soldier’s companion said, “Hardly had he fallen when they cut off his head, or rather I should say all the scalp in a circle, and carried it away as a testimony of what they had done.”

  Taking body parts as war trophies
has been part of virtually every human culture that ever raised a weapon in anger. But scalping—flaying the top of the head and preserving the skin and hair—is somewhat rarer in history. The ancient Scythians scalped their enemies on the steppes of Eurasia, but the practice is most closely associated with North America, where scalping among Natives was a culturally complex means of demonstrating bravery, gaining prestige, and appeasing the dead. In some cultures, scalps could even be ceremoniously “adopted” as a replacement for deceased relatives.

  As with de Soto’s chroniclers, the first Europeans to record scalping struggled with descriptions and terms in ways that make clear it was something new to their experience.%7 During his time with the Iroquois at Stadacona in 1535, Jacques Cartier was shown “the skins of five men’s heads, stretched on hoops, like parchment,” and was told they belonged to Mi’kmaqs, with whom the Stadacona Iroquois fought. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, part of the French force that established Fort Caroline near what is now Jacksonville, Florida, in 1564, saw Timucua warriors using sharp reeds to scalp fallen enemies. And Samuel de Champlain noted scalps and the act of scalping on a number of occasions among the northern Algonquians with whom he was allied.

  By the late sixteenth century, the race for North America appeared to have been won by Spain. Having conquered most of South and Central America and the Caribbean, the Spanish tried to export a proven colonial model to the Southeast. Known as repartimiento, it was a system of forced labor in which Indian communities had to provide a set number of workers—the reparto, or “distribution”—to their overlords. It was not technically slavery, but to the Indians it must have felt like it, as their bones attest.

  Archaeologists excavating remains at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, have found that, compared with the bones of their pre-contact ancestors, the Guale who lived there carried more bulk (probably because they ate less seafood and more carbohydrate-rich corn, a dietary change that also brought on anemia), had longer and heavier leg bones, and bore the marks of more powerful arm muscles from field work and long journeys carrying crushing loads. Most telling, nearly two-thirds of the Indians suffered from osteoarthritis, a disease common in those beaten down by grunt labor but exceedingly rare among the Guale before contact. Little wonder that the Guale and neighboring tribes tried several times to throw off the Spanish yoke, beginning in 1576.

  The other colonial powers, unable to challenge Spain directly, nevertheless tried to slip in through the cracks in La Florida. The French efforts began in earnest in 1562, when Jean Ribault left a garrison at what he grandly named Charles Forte, on what is now Port Royal Sound in South Carolina.

  The woods there were a shipwright’s delight—sprawling live oaks for the knees and timbers, and tall, straight pines for the masts. “We set ourselves fishing,” Ribault wrote, and “two draughts of the net were sufficient to feed all the company of our two ships for a whole day.” Turkeys and quail were everywhere, and the land had a sweetness, a “fragrant odor that only made the place to seem exceeding pleasant.” Food and timber aside, the idea was to harry Spanish shipping, prospect for commodities and riches, and provide a haven for French Protestants. The twenty-seven men erected a three-sided stockade and settled in to wait for Ribault to return with more supplies, something he’d promised to do within six months.

  Ribault, though, found France consumed by religious war. He slipped away to England, where he convinced Elizabeth I to back his colony. She in turn enlisted a genuine rogue, Thomas Stucley, who may have been her own half brother, rumored as he was to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII.

  A soldier and privateer who was a master at playing all possible ends against the middle, Stucley “during his lifetime served England, France, Spain and the Pope, betraying each in turn except the latter.” A contemporary simply described him as “the rakehell.” A confessed double agent, he’d already turned coat several times and been imprisoned in the Tower of London, but Elizabeth saw in him and Ribault an opportunity to needle Spain by taking control of Charles Forte.

  They Reach Port Royal (1591)

  This engraving by Theodor de Bry, based on a watercolor by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, commemorates the 1562 arrival of Le Moyne and other French Huguenots under Jean Ribault at Port Royal in modern South Carolina. With their seagoing ships anchored in the sound, Ribault’s men explore the surrounding rivers in a smaller vessel. On land are fanciful depictions of Indian villages, hunting parties, and local plants and animals. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-380)

  Stucley—feelers secretly extended to Spain—delayed his departure as long as possible, then finally set off in 1563. Instead of sailing for La Florida, however, he turned pirate again (possibly with the queen’s consent; she made a great profit by English buccaneers preying on French shipping) before being captured and clapped in irons.

  The French garrison at Charles Forte, meanwhile, was dying a miserable death. Out of food (their supply house lost in a fire), torn by mutiny, and seemingly forgotten, they gambled on a desperate throw of the dice. They cobbled together a ship from local timber, sewing sails from their remaining clothing, and tried to sail home. Becalmed and reduced to cannibalism, they were eventually rescued by an English vessel.

  When the French tried again at Fort Caroline, the Spanish—fed up with the intrusions into what they considered their colonial realm—simply slaughtered the garrison (including Ribault, who had just arrived with eight hundred men) and took the site. But even the Spanish weren’t having much success with the northern reaches of La Florida. In 1570, they sent a Jesuit mission to Ajacán, at the mouth of Bahía de Santa María—what the English would call Chesapeake Bay. The Spanish considered this the northern edge of their domain and a likely entrance to the Northwest Passage.

  The Jesuits had with them an Algonquian they’d kidnapped as a teenager around 1560 and baptized as Don Luis de Velasco. They assumed he was safely acculturated, since he’d lived for years in Havana and Spain and had even been adopted by the viceroy. Little is known about Don Luis. He was said to be the son of an Algonquian chief and was almost certainly from one of the tribes that would later make up the Powhatan confederacy. After a decade with the Spanish, he told the priests he was eager to return home and help them win souls there. Instead, he shifted almost immediately back to his people and soon led an attack that wiped out the mission in January 1571.

  It’s been suggested that Don Luis, recognizing the cultural danger that European colonialism posed, acted to safeguard his people from it. If so, the danger did not remain at bay for long. The Spanish returned, hanging fourteen captives in revenge (having baptized them first, just to make it right with God). It also seems likely that the Powhatan would have learned of the experiences of other Algonquians to the south, where other tassantassas—strangers—had settled briefly on Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks.

  Thomas Hariot, a mathematician who went on that 1585 expedition to Roanoke as surveyor—and who had spent the preceding two years in England learning the local dialect from the visiting werowance Manteo—admitted that “some of our companie . . . shewed themselves too fierce, in slaying some of the people, in some towns, upon causes that on our own part, might easily enough have been borne withall.” In one such incident, the English burned an entire village and its winter corn supply when a silver cup turned up missing.

  Unlike Don Luis, who knew better, the Roanoke tribes considered the newcomers deities. But whether they were gods or men, the Natives saw trouble in the European arrival. “Some would likewise seeme to prophesie that there were more of our generation yet to come, to kill theirs and take their places,” Hariot wrote.

  The failure of the Roanoke colony was only a speed bump in English colonization. In 1607, it was followed by competing settlements at Jamestown, just south of where the Jesuits had been killed a generation earlier, and the Popham colony at Sagadahoc, Maine. Popham was abandoned a year later, and the Jamestown colonists barely hung on by their fingern
ails, more than half perishing in their first miserable year of starvation and disease.

  The marshy land and brackish tidal water of Jamestown Island were partially to blame. The 104 colonists had ignored pointed instructions from their backers, the Council for Virginia, that they not “plant [the colony] in a low and moist place, because it will prove unhealthful.” But regardless of where they settled, few of the colonists had any skills that lent themselves to a wilderness venture. They were “poore Gentlemen, Tradesmen, Serving-men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoyle a Common-wealth, than . . . begin one,” groused Captain John Smith, the young but experienced soldier who became their leader. The colonists were more interested in hunting for gold than building shelter or digging a well. “Ten good workemen would have done more substantiall worke in a day, than ten of them in a weeke.”

  The council had also warned the colonists to “have great care not to offend the naturals,” but their immediate concern was not the local Indians but the Spanish, lest the settlement suffer the same fate as the French at Fort Caroline. This is one reason the marshy but easily defensible Jamestown Island was ultimately chosen. The Spanish remained a theoretical threat, but relations between the English and Algonquians were strained from the start and took no more than two weeks to explode into open warfare.

  Just upriver from the settlement lived the Paspahegh, who were tributary to Powhatan, the mamanatowick, or primary chief, who controlled the eight-thousand-square-mile confederacy known as Tsenacommacah. (Had the small English outpost realized the name meant “densely inhabited land,” it might have given them pause. Powhatan ruled an estimated fourteen thousand Indians of about thirty tribes, most of whom he’d conquered, but the colonists were blissfully ignorant of these facts.) The Paspahegh’s werowance at first made a show of force, with a hundred armed men, but later sent a gift of a deer and agreed to give the English the island—or at least that’s how the English chose to interpret his signs and gestures.