Where epidemics did occur, they increased the intensity of other processes that were already underway. Depopulation caused by disease heightened existing rivalries and increased warfare between tribes, as some peoples went to war with their neighbors in order to gain captives and restore their numbers. Population movements probably also increased. For example, historians know that the Huron people responded to population losses by migrating north and west into what is now Ontario in order to join together with kin. Was this population loss spurred by Old World epidemics or by climate change? Historians remain divided, but both forces were probably influential.13
When European ships began to arrive on North American shores during the sixteenth century they also brought trade goods, which they typically traded for fish or furs. As we have seen, gift-giving and trade had long played an important part in Native American cultures, and the Indians themselves understood their establishment of trade ties with Europeans in traditional terms as a mechanism for building friendships with strangers. However the Indians' cultures were not static; they would continue to adapt after Europeans arrived just as they had adapted to other changes in the past. Those Indians who lived along the Canadian coast and took part most frequently in exchanges with Europeans were already, by the end of the sixteenth century, changing their views of trade. While gifts had traditionally been valued for their beauty, some Canadian peoples had come to value certain European goods for their utility instead. Steel could be used to fashion knives and arrowheads that were sharper than similar implements made of flint or bone; brass cooking pots were lighter and often more durable than cooking pots made of clay. Demand for useful goods like these was rising, although gifts of beautiful objects like colorful glass beads were still welcomed.
Thus the impact of contacts between Native Americans and Europeans was beginning to be apparent by the late sixteenth century among a few of the peoples of North America. Epidemics had occurred, leaving some villages weakened and others untouched. Some Native Americans had learned that the newcomers were dangerous and untrustworthy. Others had gained valuable trading partners, thereby elevating their own status within their regions. What is important for us to understand, as we look at the consequences of the increasingly frequent contacts between Native Americans and Europeans during the seventeenth century, is that native peoples dealt with them in ways that made sense within the context of their own experiences and cultures. As we shall see, their decisions would shape the story of the North American colonies from beginning to end.
Document 3
A first meeting with Europeans, printed in Colin G. Calloway, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston 1994), 35–8
This account of Henry Hudson's arrival in 1609 was written down in the mid eighteenth century by a Protestant missionary, John Heckewelder, after talking to some Delaware Indians whose ancestors had inhabited the area of Manhattan. Questions to consider: How and why might the Delaware storytellers have reframed this story for the benefit of their European listener? According to the storytellers, what were the first reactions by the Indians to the arrival of this European ship? Would you characterize them as open or hostile to the Europeans? What might explain their responses?
A long time ago, when there was no such thing known to the Indians as people with a white skin [their expression], some Indians who had been out fishing, and where the sea widens, espied at a great distance something remarkably large swimming, or floating on the water, and such as they had never seen before. They immediately returning to the shore, apprised their countrymen of what they had seen, and pressed them to go out with them and discover what it might be. These together hurried out, and saw to their great surprise the phenomenon, but could not agree what it might be; some concluding it either to be an uncommon large fish, or other animal, while others were of the opinion it must be some very large house. It was at length agreed among those who were spectators, that as this phenomenon moved towards the land, whether or not it was an animal, or anything that had life in it, it would be well to inform all the Indians on the inhabited islands of what they had seen, and put them on their guard. Accordingly, they sent runners and watermen off to carry the news to their scattered chiefs, that these might send off in every direction for the warriors to come in. These arriving in numbers, and themselves viewing the strange appearance, and that it was actually moving towards them (the entrance of the river or bay), concluded it to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Mannitto (great or Supreme Being) himself was, and that he probably was coming to visit them. By this time the chiefs of the different tribes were assembled on York island, and were counselling (or deliberating) on the manner they should receive their Mannitto on his arrival. Every step had been taken to be well provided with plenty of meat for a sacrifice; the women were required to prepare the best victuals; idols or images were examined and put in order; and a grand dance was supposed not only to be an agreeable entertainment for the Mannitto, but it might, with the addition of a sacrifice, contribute towards appeasing him, in case he was angry with them. The conjurers were also set to work, to determine what the meaning of this phenomenon was, and what the result would be. Both to these, and to the chiefs and wise men of the nation, men, women and children were looking up for advice and protection. Between hope and fear, and in confusion, a dance commenced. While in this situation fresh runners arrive declaring it a house of various colours, crowded with living creatures. It now appears to be certain that it is the great Mannitto bringing them some kind of game such as they had not before; but other runners soon after arriving, declare it a large house of various colours, full of people yet of quite a different colour than they [the Indians] are of; that they also dressed in a different manner from them, and one in particular appeared altogether red, which must be the Mannitto himself … Many are for running off into the woods, but are pressed to stay, in order not to give offense to their visitors.
1. The authors will employ the terms “Indian” and “Native American” interchangeably to refer to indigenous American peoples, since the use of both are generally accepted in the United States. A plurality of Americans of indigenous descent identify themselves as Indians or American Indians, but many use the term “Native Americans” instead.
2. The influence of America on the development of English historical thought from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is discussed in David Armitage, “The New World and British Historical Thought: From Richard Hakluyt to William Robertson,” in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 52–75.
3. Until 1945 the study of precontact Indian peoples was left to archaeologists. Postcontact eras were the province of anthropologists and ethnologists. American history proper was considered to begin only with the arrival of Europeans, the Indians thereafter constituting passive and disappearing bystanders. After about 1970 historians began to combine these approaches, as described in Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal, 1985), 1–49, 164–72; and James Axtell, “The Ethnohistory of Early America: A Review Essay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 110–44. More recently they have incorporated the insights of environmental history. One important account that shows the centrality of climate change and other environmental factors to precontact Native American history is James Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Baltimore, 2009).
4. The main North American language groups were Wakashan, Salishan, Penutian, Siouan, Iroquoian, Algonquian, Muskogean, Caddoan, Hokaltecan, Azteco-Tanoan, Athapascan, and Eskimo Aleut.
5. Debates about the size of indigenous American populations before Columbus are longstanding. It suited nineteenth- and many early twentieth-century historians to believe that the Indians were few in number to justify their displacement, and early twentieth-century demographers estimated a precontact population of only around one million people north o
f the Rio Grande and about 10 million throughout the rest of the Americas. The first widespread attempt to reassess the population of the indigenous inhabitants occurred only in the 1960s, when there was greater readiness to acknowledge America's ethnic diversity. Historical anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated in 1966 that before European contact, as many as 12 million people may have lived north of the Rio Grande and another 80 to 90 million in Central and South America. Although more recent estimates are somewhat lower, it is clear that the subsequent impact of European diseases reduced this population dramatically during the first 300 years of contact with Europeans. The early view is well represented by the work of James Mooney, “Population,” in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Washington, 1910), and A. L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley, 1939). For more recent estimates and analyses, see Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemisphere Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7, 395–416; William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison, 1976; rev. edn, 1992); Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, 1983); and Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, 1987). For an account of the historical debate, see John D. Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quarterly, 49 (1992), 298–320.
6. As suggested above, the observations of European artists and writers necessarily have to be treated with caution. John White's figures tend to have European rather than Indian faces, and he may have emphasized the beauty and orderliness of many aspects of Native American life in order to appeal to potential investors in colonial ventures. But the sketches and memoirs of early European observers still provide valuable eyewitness evidence about the culture of the eastern Indian peoples, when used critically.
7. Smith may have been exaggerating here so far as he and his companions were concerned, since it was one thing to describe the game, but another to catch it (see Chapter 3, section 1).
8. These practices caused considerable confusion for Europeans who were accustomed to children taking the name of their father and receiving their inheritance from him. To Europeans, a matrilineal society implied a society without male control or proper order. Ann Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, 2000), provides a comparison between Native American and English marriage practices, and shows how English colonizers in early New England forced the Indians to change their practices.
9. James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, 1989), 20.
10. Although such practices may seem barbarous or cruel, they were no more so than European practices like drawing and quartering people found guilty of crimes, pillaging the villages of enemies, and enslaving prisoners of war, practices which in European state-based societies took place on a much larger scale. Ethnohistorians who have considered the differences between European and Indian warfare include Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1975), ch. 9; James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial America (New York, 1981); Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 40 (1983), 529–37; Trigger, Natives and Newcomers; and Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, 1997), ch. 5. An analysis of the importance of war for Iroquoian, Algonquian, English, and Anglo-American manhood may be found in Ann M. Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, 2007).
11. The argument that trade was an essential aspect of American Indian life before European contact is made by Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500–1722 (Charlottesville, 1993). Several others argue that it was less important before the arrival of Europeans. See Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992), 28, and Trigger, Natives and Newcomers), 104, 183. For the suggestion that increased migration, warfare, trade, and political consolidation all began well before the arrival of Europeans and resulted from climate change see Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country.
12. The concept of virgin soil epidemics is explained in Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976), 289–99. Some scholars have argued that the Americas were not totally isolated after the submerging of the land bridge. For a discussion of possible transoceanic contacts before 1492 with Australasia, China, Japan, India, Africa, and the ancient Mediterranean world, see Jesse D. Jennings, ed., Ancient North Americans (San Francisco, 1978), 557–613. Recently epidemiologist David S. Jones has criticized historians for oversimplifying the idea of virgin soil epidemics in “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (2003), 703–42, observing that resistance to disease is a complex phenomenon not reducible to simple genetic immunity. Very large numbers of Indians eventually died from Old World diseases carried to North America by Europeans. However, the process was more complex than historians once believed.
13. On the contributions of disease as opposed to other factors to intertribal conflict before 1607, see James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York, 1989); Neal Salisbury, “The Indians' Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53 (1996), 435–58; and Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
Chapter 2
The Age of European Exploration
1420 The Portuguese discover and settle Madeira.
1440 The Portuguese settle the Azores.
1464 The Songhay empire emerges in West Africa.
1471 Portuguese mariners reach the Gold Coast.
1487 Bartholomew Díaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope.
1492 Columbus reaches the Americas.
1494 The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the Atlantic between Spain and Portugal.
1497 John Cabot initiates English exploration by searching for a northwest passage around America.
1498 Vasco da Gama reaches India.
circa 1500 The first African slaves are brought to Hispaniola.
1519 Hernando Cortés marches against the Aztec empire.
1531–3 Francisco de Pizarro overthrows the Inca empire.
1539–42 Hernando de Soto explores North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ozarks.
1558 Elizabeth I becomes queen of England.
1565 St. Augustine is founded by Spain in Florida.
1576 Martin Frobisher resumes the English search for a northwest passage.
1585 The first English colony is founded at Roanoke Island.
1588 The Spanish Armada is defeated by England.
1605 Sir George Weymouth explores the New England coast.
1606 The London and Plymouth companies are chartered.
1 Western Europe, 1300–1450
THE NEXT CHAPTER in the story of colonial North America begins in western Europe, the home of the earliest European colonizers and conquerors. This story is easier for historians to piece together than the history of Native Americans, since the Europeans left behind so many traditional sources of historical evidence like first-person memoirs and chronicles of wars. Yet historians explaining the western European antecedents of colonization still face several challenges. Existing records create a misleading impression that the European encounter with the peoples of Africa and the Americas was foreordained. The truth is that the “discovery” of the Americas by western Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century was an accident, far from inevitable. Another problem is that European record keepers often disingenuously sugges
ted that they controlled the terms of their encounter with Africans and Native Americans. In reality all participants played a role in negotiating these encounters. Though Europeans had considerable power, their colonial ventures in the Atlantic world remained contingent and uncertain from the moment that colonies began to be contemplated until those colonies gained their independence.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, western Europe was a backwater on the margins of the world, residing on the periphery of the commercial networks that had integrated the economies and linked together the cultures of the Mediterranean, eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia for 1,000 years. The great trade routes of the world, including the overland trans-Saharan routes from northern to western and central Africa, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, were dominated by Islamic traders, including merchants from the rising Ottoman empire. True, eastern Europeans still had access to the Silk Roads, Italians plied the Mediterranean, and Swedish and Danish merchants thrived along the Baltic corridor. However, western Europeans remained culturally and economically provincial, situated far from the main water corridors to Asia and northern Africa. No one could have foreseen in 1400 that western Europeans in Portugal and Spain were on the verge of crossing the Atlantic and initiating a new set of connections that would link together the Americas, Africa, and Europe and change the direction of world history. The vast Atlantic Ocean, with its difficult, mostly non-navigable currents and winds, remained the “Sea of Darkness,” usable only for local commerce and far too vast to contemplate crossing.1
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