The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  reported seeing a “chaloupe”: Marc Lescarbot, History of New France, 2:309, quoted in Bourque and Whitehead 1994, 333.

  “two French Shallops”: Henry Hudson, quoted in Robert Juet, “The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson,” in Henry Hudson the Navigator, ed. G. M. Asher (London: Hakluyt Society, 1860), 60.

  [>] “thinking thereby”: Rosier, A true relation, 284.

  “It was as much”: Ibid.

  “Thus we shipped”: Ibid., 285.

  “being a matter”: Ibid., 284.

  “being too suspitiously”: Ibid.

  [>] “he so much esteemed”: Ibid., 287.

  “we had then no will”: Ibid., 288.

  “the most rich, beautifull”: Ibid., 293.

  “I will not prefer”: Ibid., 292.

  “having but little wood”: Ibid., 293.

  “parching hot”: Ibid.

  “notable high timber”: Ibid., 294.

  “many Furres”: Ibid.

  “shot both to deffend”: Ibid., 295.

  [>] “great store”: Ibid., 296.

  “did so ravish”: Ibid.

  “killed five savages”: Champlain, quoted in Grant 1907, 77.

  whose name is also spelled: Linguist Frank Seibert, who worked for years with the Penobscot, has suggested the man’s name was really Ktə̀hαnəto. Tehánedo/Ktə̀hαnəto was not the only one whose name was rendered in confusing variety. Skicowáros was spelled Scikaworrowse, Skettawaroes, or Skitwarres; Maneddo was spelled Maneduck, Maneday, and Manida; and Sassacomit was spelled Satacomoah, Assacomoit, Assecomet, or Assacumet, depending on the writer.

  “a Sagamo or Commander”: Rosier, A true relation, 309.

  “Gentlemen”: Ibid.

  “servant”: Ibid.

  “First, although at the time”: Ibid., 302.

  [>] “a huge, heavy, ugly”: John Aubrey (1813), quoted in Ibbetson 2004.

  “chiefe lord”: The Description of the Countrey of Mawooshen, 472.

  [>] “putrified”: Edward Dodding (1577), quoted in Vaughan 2006, 8.

  “the New Found Island,” “clothed in beast skins,” and “apparelled after Englishmen”: “The Great Chronicle of London,” ca. 1513, rendered in modern spelling from Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner, eds., English Literatures of America, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Routledge, 1996), 42: “Thys yere alsoo were browgth unto the kyng iii men takyn in the Newe Found Ile land . . . clothid In beastis skynnys and ete Rawe Flesh and spak such sech that noo man cowde undyrstand them, and In theyr demeanure lyke to bruyt bestis . . . Of whych upon ii yeris passis afftyr I sawe ii of theym apparaylyd afftyr Inglysh men in Westmynstyr paleys, which at that tyme I cowde not dyscern From Inglysh men tyll I was lernyd what men they were, But as For spech I hard noon of theym uttyr oon word.”

  [>] “he is rich”: Sometimes translated as “he who is wise.” For other views on the translation, see Mook 1943 and Tooker 1905.

  [>] “They wounded Assacomoit”: John Stoneman, “The Voyage of M. Henry Challons Intended for the North Plantation of Virginia, 1606,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1906), 19:288.

  [>] “much welcomme”: William Strachey (ca. 1610–12), “The Narrative of the North Virginia Voyage and Colony, 1607–1608,” in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 404.

  “some Tobacco”: Ibid., 411.

  [>] “as if he would light”: Ibid.

  “ignorant, timorous”: Ferdinando Gorges, quoted in Alfred A. Cave, “Why Was the Sagadahoc Colony Abandoned?” New England Quarterly 68 (December 1995): 627.

  “The maine assistance”: Smith, A Description of New England, 63–64.

  “indifferent good English”: Thomas Dermer, quoted in George Parker Winship, Sailors [sic] Narratives of Voyages Along the New England Coast, 1524–1624 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 255.

  “cut [off] his head”: William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation”: From the Original Manuscript (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1901), 118.

  Chapter 2: Before Contact

  [>] There was only forest: Adapted from “Koluskap and His People,” in Dana et al. 1989, and from Leland 1884. Because Wapánahki traditions were oral, there is no way to know precisely what versions of the stories were told in the early contact period, and those later collected by non-Indian scholars doubtless suffer from varying degrees of cultural ignorance and misunderstanding, from the loss in earlier centuries of oral knowledge, and from a blending of once separate traditions assimilated from neighboring groups during centuries of cultural upheaval. Even versions coming from Native sources underwent inevitable alteration, such as the retelling of Klose-kur-beh (Klooskape or Kəlóskαpe) stories by the nineteenth-century Penobscot elder Joseph Nicholar, who freely mixed Christian and Penobscot elements to such a degree that even other Penobscot storytellers of the period remarked on it (Nicholar 2007).

  [>] “some peopling the lands”: José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. E. Grimston (1604), ed. C. R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1880), 61.

  [>] a wide, formidable deep-water: Humans were thus able to breach one of the most dramatic ecological divisions in the world, separating the fauna of Asia to the west from that of Australasia to the east—tigers, orangutans, and rhinos on one side; tree kangaroos, cassowaries, and birds of paradise on the other. First recognized by Alfred Wallace, codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the division is known today as Wallace’s Line.

  [>] “supporting the hypothesis”: Walter A. Neves and Mark Hubbe, “Cranial Morphology of Early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the Settlement of the New World,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (December 20, 2005): 18309.

  “I didn’t want to get”: Will Thomas, quoted in Anna King, “The Man Who Found Kennewick Man,” Tri-City (WA) Herald, July 25, 2006.

  [>] “biography is written”: Hugh Berryman, quoted in Melanthia Mitchell, “Kennewick Man’s Biography Is Written in His Bones,” Tri-City (WA) Herald, July 10, 2005.

  He was probably: Kennewick Man’s age at death was initially estimated to be forty-five to fifty-five, but later study revised the age down to about thirty-eight.

  “It’s no wonder”: Richard Jantz, quoted in Anna King, “Meet Kennewick Man,” Tri-City (WA) Herald, February 25, 2006.

  [>] “They were from Iberia”: Dennis Stanford, quoted in Mike Lee, “New World Habitation Tricky Issue,” Tri-City (WA) Herald, December 26, 1999.

  “A Solutrean hunter”: Bradley and Stanford 2004, 470.

  [>] most of the East was dominated: Paleoecologists have been able to reconstruct a remarkably detailed picture of past plant communities, thanks to the nearly indestructible nature of windblown pollen grains, which form annual layers in the bottom sediments of ponds, lakes, and bogs, and which allow scientists to infer the local climate and plant cover.

  [>] haunted the barren: The relatively scarce Paleolithic sites excavated in the Northeast are consistently placed above and along valleys, lakeshores, and other landforms that would channel big-game migration, most likely caribou. In the Magalloway Valley in northwestern Maine, a number of Paleo-Indian sites have been uncovered, all hugging the east side of the valley, downwind of game moving through the river corridor. Taking modern caribou-hunting cultures as a model, it is likely that Paleo-Indians covered tremendous distances in their annual movements. The territories of caribou-hunting Inuit, for example, often encompassed more than eight thousand square miles.

  [>] good stone was as critical: Paleo-Indians had extensive trade networks (or themselves traveled very widely), since a single site in Maine or Vermont may have tools made from chert or other types of stone from locations as far away as Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia.

  [>] “Peoples about whom”: Hann 2003, 3.

  [>] gave coffee a run: “One of the puzzles about black drink,” writes anthropologist Charles Hudson, “is why we do not drink it today” (Hudson 2004, 7
). Colonial Spaniards did, calling it té del indio or chocolate del indio. Hudson notes that it also enjoyed favor in England as “South Sea Tea.” Yaupon tea’s demise as a popular drink, he contends, came from its abundance and social stigma. It was so common and so cheap that it was a standard drink of the poor, and after the Civil War, those higher on the economic ladder avoided it.

  [>] skarò·rə̜ʔ, “hemp gatherers”: Etymology of the name is from J. N. B. Hewitt, “Tuscarora,” in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, ed. F. W. Hodge (Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1910), 2:842.

  [>] the Lenape, who occupied: The word lenape, meaning “the real people” or “the original people,” is from the Unami dialect and appears to have been used to describe members of one’s own band or village. Lenni lenape, or “real Lenape,” came into use in the eighteenth century and “is rejected as redundant by twentieth-century speakers” (Goddard, “Delaware,” 1978, 236). Becker 1989 departs from the conventional assumption that the river cultures of the Hudson and Delaware were closely allied. He argues that “Lenape” should apply only to those living along the lower Delaware River, later called Unami, and that the Munsee and what he terms “Jerseys” (Unalachtigo), who migrated from southern New Jersey, were culturally distinct.

  haudenosaunee: The name “Iroquois” was first recorded by Samuel de Champlain in 1603 and is presumably of Algonquian origin, although its source and meaning are unknown. There has been a growing tendency to use Haudenosaunee instead of Iroquois when referring to the Five (later Six) Nations.

  [>] “spread out as far”: Garcilaso de la Vega, quoted in Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 1992, 375.

  [>] not by an absence of paths: “When an Indian lost his way in the woods, as he sometimes did, it was as likely as not because there were too many tracks and he had taken the wrong one” (Wallace 1965, 8).

  “need not be seriously”: James Mooney, quoted in Douglas H. Ubelaker, “The Sources and Methodology for Mooney’s Estimates of North American Indian Populations,” in The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, ed. William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 252.

  [>] precolonial population of North America: Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 1992, suggests a New World population of 43 million to 65 million, with 3.8 million in North America, although he notes that some specialists have estimated as many as 80 million people in South and Central America alone. “In any event, a population of 40–80 million is sufficient to dispel any notion of ‘empty lands.’ Moreover, the native impact on the landscape of 1492 reflected not only the population then but the cumulative effects of a growing population over the previous 15,000 years or more,” he observed (p. 370).

  “open and free”: Giovanni da Verrazano, quoted in Gloria L. Main, Peoples of Spacious Land (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 243.

  “could be penetrated”: Ibid.

  “but little wood”: James Rosier (1605), A true relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Discovery of the land of Virginia, in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 293.

  “the trees growing there”: William Strachey (ca. 1610–12), “The Narrative of the North Virginia Voyage and Colony, 1607–1608,” in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 407.

  “by reason of their burning”: John Smith (1607–09), in Capt. John Smith: Works, 1608–1631, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster, UK: Archibald Constable, 1895), 363.

  [>] “growne over”: Leonard Calvert to Richard Letchford, May 30, 1634, in The Calvert Papers, no. 2, Fund Publication no. 34 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1894), 20.

  “high timbred Oakes”: John Brereton (1602), “A Briefe and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia,” in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 151.

  “in the thickest part”: Ibid.

  “medowes very large”: Ibid., 152.

  “adorn’d with spacious Medows”: Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New-York Formerly Called New-Netherlands (1670; repr., Cleveland: Burrow Brothers, 1902), 54.

  “where is grass as high”: Ibid., 55.

  “The Indian is by nature”: Hu Maxwell, “The Use and Abuse of Forests by the Virginia Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (October 1910): 86.

  [>] “The tribes were burning”: Ibid., 103.

  Given that Indians: In fairness, not all ecologists accept the idea that Indian burning was so ubiquitous that it altered the forests on a landscape level. See especially Foster and Motzkin 2003 for evidence suggesting that southern New England had very limited open-country habitat. Also see Russell 1983, who questions the extent of intentionally set fires in the Northeast.

  [>] “In the year 1153”: Antonio Galvano, Discoveries of the World, ed. C. R. Drinkwater Bethune (1563; repr. London: Hakluyt Society, 1862), 56n1. Bethune’s translation, used here, is at odds with the more smoothly edited 1601 English edition, which he also reprinted: “In the yeere 1153 . . . it is written, there came to Lubec, a citie in Germanie, one canoe with certain Indians, like unto a large barge: which seemed to have come from the coast of Baccalaos, which standeth in the same latitude that Germanie doth.”

  Stories about Indian merchants: One of the more recent books to explore the possibility of Native voyages to Europe is Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), which traces the origins of the Indian voyage to Germany cited here. Although some anthropologists have praised Forbes for shining a light on the neglected subject of pre-Columbian contact between the hemispheres, others have excoriated him for sloppy scholarship and faulty logic.

  “Florida” was a nebulous concept: Turgeon 1998 also notes that French maps and fishermen still referred to the entire North American coast as “Florida” as late as the mid-sixteenth century.

  “The Germans greatly”: Galvano, Discoveries of the World, 56n1.

  “nevertheless it is quite”: Ibid.

  Chapter 3: Stumbling onto a Frontier

  [>] “remote heathen”: Quoted in Rory Rapple, “Gilbert, Sir Humphrey (1537–1583),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10690.

  “never heard nor read”: Walter Raleigh to Francis Walsingham, 1581, quoted in W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers (London: Royal Stationery Office, 1893), vi.

  “a demi-Moor”: Quoted in Ronald Pollitt, “John Hawkins’s Troublesome Voyages: Merchants, Bureaucrats, and the Origin of the Slave Trade,” Journal of British Studies 12 (May 1973): 26.

  [>] “The Judith . . . forsooke us”: John Hawkins (1569), “The Unfortunate Voyage Made with the Jesus, the Minion and Foure Other Shippes,” in Hakluyt 1589, 556.

  “Hides were thought”: Ibid.

  “Our people being forced”: Ibid.

  “It would have caused”: Miles Phillips (1582), “A Discourse Written by One Miles Phillips Englishman,” in Hakluyt 1589, 566–67.

  [>] “about 140 leages west”: David Ingram (1583), “The Relation of David Ingram of Barking, in the Countie of Essex,” in Hakluyt 1589, 557.

  [>] “great pearles”: Ibid., 557. Here Ingram may have been only stretching the truth, not breaking it entirely. The rivers of the southern Appalachians, especially in the Tennessee Valley, have the richest diversity of freshwater mussels in the world. They are the source of abundant (if smallish and low-grade) pearls, and a traveler through the region would undoubtedly have encountered them.

  “the maine sea”: Ibid., 562.

  “which thing especially proveth”: Ibid.

  “this Ingram”: Ibid., 559.

  “the examinate”: Ibid., 560.

  “whitenes of their skins”: Ibid., 557.

  “yet alive, and marryed”: Phillips, “Discourse Written,” 568.

  “buffes”: Ingram, “Relation of David Ingram,” 560.

  “a bird called”: Ibid.

  “most excellent, fertile”: Ib
id., 559.

  [>] “how easily they may”: Ibid., 562.

  “pillers of massie silver”: Ibid., 558.

  “verie beautifull to beholde”: Ibid., 560.

  “the reward for lying”: Samuel Purchas, quoted in Bromber 2002, 124.

  One possibility: Charlton Ogburn, “The Longest Walk: David Ingram’s Amazing Journey,” American Heritage, April/May 1979, www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1979/ 3/1979_3_4.shtml.

  [>] “penguins”: Ingram, “Relation of David Ingram,” 560.

  “the shape and bigness”: Ibid.

  “the end product”: Quinn 1974, 217.

  “Wee are as neere”: Edward Hayes (1589), “The Voyages and Discoveries of Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” in Hakluyt 1589, 695.

  In 1497: Quinn 1974 (pp. 93–94) notes that William Adams’s Pettie Chronicle from 1625 incorrectly gives the date as 1496, a mistake frequently repeated in other sources.

  [>] “Understanding by reason”: John Cabot, quoted in “A Discourse of Sebastian Cabot,” in Hakluyt 1589, 512.

  “I began therefore”: Ibid.

  “dispairing to find”: Ibid.

  [>] “hugged him”: Giovanni da Verrazano (1524), in George Parker Winship, Sailors Narratives of Voyages Along the New England Coast, 1524–1624 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 9.

  “We took the little boy”: Ibid., 10.

  “the men at our departure”: Ibid., 22.

  “the land of the Great Khan”: Ginés Navarro (ca. 1527), quoted in Reginald Poole, ed., The English Historical Review (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), 20:118. Navarro was a Spanish sailor who encountered an English ship, likely Rut’s bound for home, in Santo Domingo.

  “eleven saile of Normans”: Ibid., 20:122.

  [>] “giving them to understand”: Jacques Cartier (1545), in Cook 1993, 70.

  [>] “Hardly had he fallen”: Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca, ed. and trans. John G. Varner and Jeannette J. Varner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), 257.

  [>] ancient and incontrovertible: The best overviews of the subject are Axtell and Sturtevant 1980 and Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, eds., The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2007).