Consequently, the frontier regions were often regions of withdrawal and retreat, and not only for Indians desperate to escape the scourge of European-born diseases. The settlers, too, might be forced to pull back in the face of Indian attacks, as in New England during King Philip's War, or in the Spanish mission provinces of Guale and East Texas. The advance of the European frontier may have been inexorable, but it was never irreversible. Yet even as frontiers, whether British or Spanish, shifted to and fro, new human relationships were all the time being forged, as a consequence of coercion, mutual necessity, or a combination of the two.
Coercion was obviously at its highest in areas with a military presence, like New Mexico. Here Spanish soldiers, who were in effect soldier-settlers, were dominant figures in an evolving and highly stratified society, consisting of missionaries, a sparse settler population living in three or four towns and a number of farming villages, and large numbers of subjugated Pueblo Indians. The `Kingdom of New Mexico', as it was officially styled, possessed a small landowning nobility of fifteen to twenty families, some of them descended from the conquistadores and settlers of the late sixteenth century. Priding themselves on their Spanish ancestry, which was much less pure than they liked to boast, they lorded it over a population of mestizo landed peasants, and the so-called genizaros - janissaries. These were either detribalized Indians taken in `just wars' and pressed into domestic and military service, or captive Indians acquired from other tribes. New Mexico's was a rough, callous and highly status-conscious society of conquerors and conquered, dependent for its survival on coerced Indian labour, and constantly oscillating between barter and warfare with the surrounding Indian peoples.106
But it was also a society in which whites and Indians, even if nominally in the ranks of the excluded, found themselves in daily contact, and in which such Spanish blood as existed was being constantly diluted as a consequence of marriage and concubinage, so that by the end of the seventeenth century almost the entire population was racially mixed.107 In New Mexico, as in all the borderlands of empire in the Americas, exploitation and interdependence threw together peoples of very different background and traditions to create a world, if not necessarily of shared blood, at least of shared experience. A fort protecting the Spanish or English `frontier' might be a symbol of oppression to some and of protection to others, but at the same time it was likely to be a meetingpoint for the exchange of goods and services and for human intercourse. In this way, each party learnt something of the customs and characteristics of the other, and began adapting to new contacts and conditions, and to an environment that itself was being transformed as it was brought within the ambiguous category of `frontier' territory.
Propinquity and mutual need served as an encouragement to move towards a `middle ground' in which the actions and behaviour of both parties would become mutually comprehensible. 10' Some trod this middle ground with greater ease than others - traders, for instance, who were liable to take an Indian `wife'; interpreters, whether European or Indian, who had learnt the other's language; men and women who had once been captives, and had acquired some understanding of the ways of an alien society during the years of their captivity.109 Trade was among the strongest of inducements to search out a middle ground; and trade, which came to occupy a central place in the lives of the Indian societies of North America as they were drawn into contact with Europeans, became a prime instrument for securing the Indian alliances that were indispensable for the Europeans as they fought among themselves for hegemony. Colonial officials, therefore, in pursuit of such alliances were also liable to become denizens of the middle ground, like the trader and army contractor William Johnson (1715-74), who negotiated with the Six Nations on behalf of New York, took a Mohawk common-law wife, and in 1755 was appointed superintendent of Northern Indian affairs. 110
The middle ground, however, was treacherous territory, where a false step could prove fatal. Violence, after all, was a permanent fact of life over large stretches of the borderlands of empire. The individualism that featured so prominently in Frederick Jackson Turner's vision of the frontier and its impact on the evolution of the United States was therefore tempered by a powerful urge towards mutual assistance and co-operation among European settlers who were seeking to carve out new lives for themselves in the isolation of an unfamiliar and frequently intimidating environment.11' Many settlers must have seen themselves living, in the words of William Byrd in 1690, at `the end of the world', although not many of them did so in the relative comfort of a Virginia plantation."- In Pennsylvania and the Appalachian borderlands, home was more likely to be a cabin of roughhewn logs, the type of housing favoured by Scandinavian and German settlers in the region, and later adopted by the Scots-Irish immigrants."' Not surprisingly, these settlers handed together for help. Almost within earshot of their settlements and clearings lay `Indian Country', whose inhabitants they contemplated with a mixture of unease, contempt and fear. How many of them, like the Massachusetts minister, Stephen Williams, taken captive as a child, must have passed restless nights filled with `disquieting dreams, about Indians'?14
If all frontiers in America shared certain common features, they were also very different. William Byrd's frontier in Virginia was not that of Stephen Williams in Massachusetts, and neither was it the frontier of New Mexico or Brazil. While their very remoteness from the major centres of settlement made them laws unto themselves, this does not mean to say that they shared a common lawlessness. Garrisons and missions imposed their own forms of discipline. There was, too, the communal discipline that was all too often needed for survival, and a selfdiscipline that might be instilled by religion or prompted by the desire to maintain standards of gentility in regions that looked out over a `barbarian' world. At the same time, there was a widespread perception in the more settled parts of the colonies that it was the dregs of humanity who moved into the frontier regions, ,the Scum of the Earth, and Refuse of Mankind', as the settlers of the Carolina Backcountry were described by a contemporary 115 Scots-Irish immigrants were regarded in Pennsylvania as turbulent and disorderly people, squatting on land to which they had no legal right, and `hard neighbours to the Indians'."6 Many of these frontiersmen lived in conditions of abject poverty. As happened in Spanish New Mexico or in those parts of North America where the land speculators were the first to arrive, a frontier region could just as easily be a setting for the most acute inequality as for the equality later hailed as the defining characteristic of frontier life.'17
Over time, the ethos of the settled regions of the colonial world in America was more likely to impress itself on the borderlands than was the ethos of the borderlands to impress itself on the heartlands of colonial societies. This became all the more true as colonies were consolidated, elites emerged, and eighteenth-century European concepts of refinement spread to the Americas. By the middle of the eighteenth century country stores were making European commodities available even in remote frontier areas of North America.11' The very fact that frontiers were advancing into territory formerly occupied by heathen and `barbarians' itself represented a gain for European notions of civility.
The contrast between these claimed or reclaimed regions and the `Indian Country' lying beyond them was, to white settlers, both obvious and painful, and created a genre of literature which was to enjoy vast popularity in British North America - the narratives of captivity among the Indians. While accounts of the Indian wars, like Increase Mather's A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England (1676), could always be assured of a wide readership,'" their popularity would be eclipsed by that of personal narratives recounting the experiences of those who had been held prisoner by the Indians. The number of such captives ran into the thousands - 750 are recorded as having been taken by Indians to French Canada alone between 1677 and 1750.12220 Many captives were in due course redeemed, but others never returned, either because they died in captivity, or, more alarmingly, because they had assumed the life-style of their captors, and, fo
r one reason or another, were unwilling to abandon it. These were the `White Indians', many of them taken captive as children, and so successfully assimilated into Indian societies that they forgot their European ways and even their native tongue.''
To white settlers imbued with fears of cultural degeneration brought about by contact with the Indian122 it was deeply disturbing that their own kith and kin should go so far as to choose barbarism over civilization. Yet this appeared to be happening with unnerving frequency as men, women and children were taken captive during the French and Indian wars of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For Puritan New England in particular, voluntary defections to the Indians raised fundamental questions about the character and the efficacy of the errand into the wilderness of their forebears and themselves. 12' To some extent they found their answer in captivity narratives - morality tales, evoking in vivid detail the dangers and ambiguities of a frontier existence, offering solemn warnings, and providing the spiritual consolation that came from seeing the dangers overcome.
Captives might well face torture and death, but they also faced the more subtle danger represented by the temptation of turning their backs on a Christian way of life. The most popular and famous of all the captivity narratives was The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson's graphic account of her life among the Indians.124 Running through three editions in Massachusetts and another in London in 1682, the year of its publication, it conveyed an appropriately inspiring message of how the grace of God enabled a lone but pious woman in the clutches of `atheisticall proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, bruitish (in one word diabolical) creatures', to survive the many adversities and dangers that beset her. Many other such accounts would follow, containing elevating stories of redeemed captives to set against the distressing news that some, like Eunice Williams (renamed A'ongote by her Mohawk captors), obstinately chose to remain unredeemed.125
In 1673, nine years before the publication of The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, a Chilean soldier, Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascufian, put the final touches to a manuscript recounting his six months' captivity among the Araucanian Indians over forty years earlier. Entitled `Happy Captivity' - Cautiverio feliz - it would not find its way into print for another two centuries. It was not only in its publishing history that it differed from Mary Rowlandson's account. The two writers responded in very different ways to the ordeal of their captivity.126
The differences cannot simply be put down to the differences between the Nipmuck Indians and the Araucanians. Both writers, indeed, depicted the Indians as cruel, and Nunez de Pineda had to watch while his captors `sacrificed' one of his companions and devoured his heart. But where Mary Rowlandson misses no opportunity to express her revulsion for her captors' way of life, Nunez de Pineda gives every impression of bonding with the people into whose hands he had fallen. He would sup with them `with great pleasure', and was treated as if he were the cacique's adopted son, a status that could have been his for the asking. The temptation to remain among his captors was clearly strong, and it was with regret that he eventually parted from them and returned to `Christian country' and his elderly father. 127 For all the cruelty of the Indians, they were - unlike the Spaniards - men of their word, true descendants of the noble and heroic people portrayed a century earlier in Alonso de Ercilla's epic poem, La Araucana. Happy the captive of such a race!
Mary Rowlandson, too, was well treated by her captors, not one of whom `ever offered me the least abuse or unchastity to me, in word or action' .121 The Algonquians, like the Araucanians, were keen to adopt captives to replenish their numbers, and Rowlandson, like Nunez, could easily have done what many others of her compatriots did in a similar situation, and remained. But if ever the temptation to do so came upon her, she went to enormous pains to conceal the fact, and was keen to express her revulsion for the way of life of the `diabolical' Indians, and her nostalgia for the English world she had lost. Hers was an unhappy captivity, although at the same time a truly redeeming experience, in that her afflictions made her wonderfully aware of the overwhelming power of God.
It was on the point of religion that the Calvinist Rowlandson and the Catholic Nunez, so different in their responses to life among the Indians, were most closely united, at least when it came to addressing themselves to their readers. To emphasize his spiritual steadfastness when among the heathen, Nunez makes much play of how he resisted the temptation to sleep with the women offered him by his hosts, and how he seized such opportunities as he could to teach his captors Christian prayers. At the end, both the redeemed captives joined in offering up thanks to God for their safe return. But if one of them on returning left the frontier wide open, the other did her best to ensure that it remained tight shut.
`Happy Captivity' - for so long unpublished - represents the captivity literature that Spanish America otherwise lacks, with the exception of the famous sixteenth-century narrative, Los naufragios, by Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.129 One reason for this may be that until the eighteenth century there were few places on the fringes of Spain's empire of the Indies, other than Chile, where it is possible to speak of military borderlines and a more or less permanent state of `war'. As the eighteenth century proceeded, the situation would change, and the number of captives would increase as the frontiers of the empire were pushed forward into hostile country. The accounts of their sufferings, however, were to be found in petitions to the monarch rather than, as in British America, in narratives that made their way into print.l3o
The unwillingness of Spaniards who had been taken prisoner to go public with an account of their experiences may well reflect a feeling of shame at the sheer fact of captivity among `barbarous' Indians. A stigma was now attached to them, although Nunez de Pineda went some way to expunging it by presenting his captors in a favourable light, especially when their behaviour was set against that of corrupt and self-serving royal officials sent out from Madrid. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that his manuscript had to wait two centuries before seeing the light of day. The authorities were unlikely to license publication of any work that would draw attention to failings and deficiencies in a great imperial enterprise whose rationale was to bring Christianity to pagan peoples and incorporate them into a civilized Hispanic polity. Readers, both in Spain and the Indies, may well have shared these inhibitions. It was unpleasant to be reminded of the barbarians still at the gates. For readers in Britain and colonial America, on the other hand, captivity narratives like that of Mary Rowlandson served a useful didactic purpose, reminding them of the need for fortitude in the face of adversity, and the wonderful workings of Providence.
The different responses to the ordeal of captivity among the Indians, however, are also likely to reflect different attitudes to `the frontier' in the two colonial societies. The northern borderlands of New Spain were remote and thinly populated regions, far removed from the densely settled heartland of Mexico, and neither before nor after the coming of independence did they carry the kind of emotional charge associated with `the frontier' in the minds of British colonists, for whom it conjured up visions of hard labour and heroic enterprise in hostile Indian territory. The psychological frontiers separating the colonial societies from `Indian country' were also less sharply drawn in Spanish than in British America, and the deep concerns about the temptations of `Indianization' that so troubled English settlers were apparently not shared by Spanish settlers, many of whom already had Indian blood in their veins. The elite of New Mexico might be concerned to preserve the already suspect purity of their blood-lines, and uphold their status by ostentatiously sporting Spanish dress,13' but mestizaje nevertheless proceeded more or less unchecked. Secure in their value-systems and beliefs, the settlers on the borderlands, while boasting of their Spanish descent, could allow themselves some latitude in the way they lived their daily lives.
The colonists of British North America, and especially those of Puritan New England, where the Indian wars were most intense and prolonged, seem to
have been less well equipped to deal with the psychological consequences of life on the borders of `Indian country'. The Indian had been demonized for too long, and ambiguities are hard to accept in a world where mental polarization is the order of the day. In the face of the insecurities generated by defections to the way of life of the enemy, the narratives of redeemed captives offered some assurance of the ultimate triumph of religion and civility.
Yet the creation and expansion of new frontiers in the Middle and Southern Colonies, and the acquaintance of growing numbers of settlers with the life on the borderlands, gradually began to prompt a change of attitude.132 There was to be an increasing sense of affinity with the American landscape, no longer as much of a `wilderness' as it had originally seemed. With this came the beginnings of a reassessment of the Indian, as his way of life, apparently so well attuned to American nature, came to be better known and understood. The eighteenth century was rediscovering `natural man' in the forests of America, Indians who possessed the primitive virtues of an uncorrupted people. The Iroquois, as described by Cadwallader Colden in his History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), were like the early Romans in their devotion to the ideals of republican liberty. `Indeed', he wrote, `I think our Indians have outdone the Romans' - a comparison already made in the sixteenth century, and also to the advantage of the Indians, in Ercilla's La Araucana.133
In this mid-eighteenth-century world of changing sensibilities, the frontier was becoming broad enough to accommodate two ideal types - Indians still uncorrupted by the vices that civilization brought in its train, and settlers who were not ,the Scum of the Earth', but upright and hard-working farmers, living close to God and nature as they cleared spaces in the forests and met the challenge of the wild. The two races inhabited a bountiful land of rugged beauty, a land whose savagery would in due course be tamed by the honest toil of a people no longer European but `American', at one with an American environment they had made their own. The myth of the frontier was in process of creation.
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 47