The Coming of the Colonies:

Transatlantic Ways & "Pilgrim" Departures

     One way or another on the human frontier, we "share ourselves with others," as the late Wampanoag elder Slow Turtle says above. We can't avoid "contact," but we can shape a great deal of how it unfolds. We don't choose the pasts that shape us, but with every new day we choose how to live them out. History is what we leave of ourselves in the world. This gives us much in common with peoples of 500 years ago.

     Perhaps a new generation of scholars will create a Native Northeastern "grammar" of lines and symbols like the ones on this tobacco pipe...and help us understand what these carefully-crafted messages are saying...

     Imagine yourself one of these Native Americans or would-be colonists at the dawn of the 17th century. How does your particular background create your agenda for living here? How much of your behavior (especially in serious situations) is decided by your past? How much of your reception by others is your responsibility? What options do you have? Do you see more than just the choices given you?

     By the time of the extended family-group above, their "seven great confederacies" (Pennacook, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pocumtuck, Nipmuc and Pequot) are established in territories, thoroughly intermarried, and "invested" in the land; from the unique traits born of their local ecologies to their shares of trade-connections; from the arts of fish-fertilized farming to the rhythms of movement with seasons and land-conditions. Most things they "hold in common," their economy one of barter rather than profit.

      Their ways combine Early Pioneer egalitarianism ("Each of us is a sovereign being," in Slow Turtle's words) with new dynamics of Late Woodland life. Sometimes the worst feud-foes are close kinsmen. Native New Englanders quarrel, intermarry, share intense rivalries and yearly "revels." Imagine a game like rugby or football with a mile of beach between the goals that runs day and night for several days. When you're tired (for ex.), Grandmother goes in. The goals are hung with gifts each person brings and the winners give them away.

     Each Sachem does justice "for his own" (see below). With broad family and symbolic ties, individuals in conflict with one group can live with another. Here there are as many "Great Squa Sachems" as men in the office. It derives from the mother's blood-line and the individual's power to persuade people one by one. As in the Aegean, women are raised to understand reproductive issues, and population remains in ecological balance. They may keep to one life-partner, have several children by successive spouses, or none of these. 

The Great Spirit, The Ancestors, and worlds of other "beings" are integral to daily life. "We are almost Beaver's brothers," said one about his clan's totem animal. Stories of the heroic but not-perfect Glooskap/ Maushop and his obnoxious twin Lox keep alive the hint that the world is much of human making---and sometimes things go wrong. (When Maushop tries to build a stone sea-bridge for grabbing tasty whales, for example, Lox in shape of a crab bites his toe and wrecks the project.) That's the way it goes. Life is complicated. There is no "generic evil"; only the sovereign being, each with powers (Manit) for good or ill. And what the people choose, and what they remember. Notice that you can see each phase of the pottery-making process here in David Wagner's conception of a "Late Woodland" ceramics workshop...

     In Europe, both "discoveries" of America and the Renaissance "rebirth of ancient learning" make many people radically reconsider their late-medieval Christian world: why it is as it is, and how it connects and compares with other continents.

      The [Native] people of the country, having espied us, made a lamentable noise, as we thought, with great outcries and screeching: we hearing them thought it had been the howling of wolves....We brought our musicians, purposing by force to rescue us, if need should so require, or with courtesy to allure the people. When they came unto us, we caused our musicians to play, ourselves dancing and making many signs of friendship.... [We] were in so great credit with them upon this single acquaintance that we could have anything they had. We bought five canoes...the clothes [furs] from their backs....They take great care of one another....They are very tractable people, void of craft or double dealing, and easy to be brought to any civility and good order....              (Captain John Davis,1585 First Voyage: rpt. in David ed. Hakluyt 336-38)

     The Renaissance and the Americas together promise that old knowledge and fresh experience (note The Zodiac laid over new geography) can potentially make "The New World" the place where Europeans consciously redefine themselves and "get it right." While, of course, getting rich. When Davis visits The Northeast, Europe and England are already at least 60 years weary of deep and pressing problems. Not for nothing does Sir Thomas More locate his Utopia across The Atlantic (this from Book I):

       Your sheep...that used to be so gentle and eat so little. Now they are becoming so greedy and so fierce that they devour the men themselves, so to speak....For...the nobility and gentlemen...are not content with the old rents which their lands yielded....They leave no land for cultivation, they enclose all the land for pastures....As though forests and game preserves were not already taking up too much land....The tenants are turned out, and by trickery or main force....And if they beg, they are thrown into prison as idle vagabonds....

     People do not miss the violent conflicts and convenient collusions between their governments and churches as the old medieval barter-markets become an economy of cash and profit. Plagues born of overcrowding and ghastly hygiene, as in London shown above, continue to ravage their world. (The last "indoor bathroom" before Queen Elizabeth's was in ancient Crete.) The Muslims have turned back The Crusades and themselves besiege Vienna by the 1600s. "Private" ownership of land and the right to hunt or farm on it, dispensed by "the King" as it serves him, underlie a strictly-enforced class system and a patriarchal social world. Poor harvests and weak international trade bring pressures that sweep away more of old Europe.

     Where nobles and servants once shared the feasting-hall, the upper classes begin to withdraw to themselves. Family, religious, cultural, gender and race differences are sharply defined amid so much uncertainty. There are exceptions, and mobility---an educated woman, a bricklayer risen to court poet, a widow wary of new husbands, a queen like Elizabeth with real effective power. But nobody "moves up" so well as the common soldier who pays his way with service in war. As wars die down, the Americas become a "social safety valve" where political and religious authorities can still profitably place their growing "displaced" and disaffected populations. American writings literally become escape-literature. The American Dream is born from Europe's insoluble quandaries. Transatlantic sailors and the Native peoples who meet them begin to improvise. This is from one Edward Hayes on Sir Humphrey Gilbert's 1583 voyage (reprinted in Quinn ed. Voyages 2:385)

      ...For solace of our people and the allurement of the savages we were provided of music in good variety, not omitting the least toys as Morris-dancers, hobby-horse, and May-like conceits, to delight the savage people, whom we intended to win by all fair means possible....

Some of these early European explorers put poetry into their New World descriptions. Who then is America's First Poet in the English language... and why don't you already know? Click here for a wisecracking scholar's investigation...

We had a youth in our company that could play upon a Gitterne, in whose homely music [New England Natives] took great delight, and would give him many things, as tobacco, tobacco-pipes, snake-skins of six feet long which they use for girdles, fawns' skins and such like; and [they] danced twenty in a ring, and the Gitterne in the middest of them, using many savage gestures; singing Lo, La, Lo, La, La, Lo. He that first broke the ring the rest would knock and cry Out! upon....

       (Martin Pring, 1603: rpt. in Quinn ed., ENEV 220)

     "Cautious coexistence" (in Colin Calloway's phrase) means "aggression and accommodation" by both transatlantic sides. They test each other's mettle, delight in mutual novelties, truly wonder at the other's achievements. America's most profitable trade is in beaver-skins (and many animals' pelts), and for them Native New Englanders want exotic textiles and tools, decorative trifles from beads to mirrors (called "truck"), and manufactured goods. Even more, Native people want an equal say in how these unprecedented relationships evolve on Nittauke, "my land."

     ...The next day, we determined to fortify ourselves in a little plot of ground [here Massachusetts Bay in 1602].... The second day after our coming from the main [ocean], we espied nine canoes or boats with fifty Indians in them, coming toward us...and being loth they should discover our fortification, we went out on the sea-side to meet them. And coming somewhat near them, they all sat down upon the stones, calling aloud to us (as we rightly guessed) to do the like, a little distance from them. Having sat awhile in this order, Captain Gosnold willed me to go unto them...but as soon as I came up unto them, one of them...knew me (whom I also very well remembered). And smiling upon me, [he] spake somewhat unto their lord or captain, who sat in the midst of them. [He] presently rose up and took a large Beaver skin...and gave it unto me, which I requited....While we were thus merry...the rest of the day we spent in trading....                                                                                                     (John Brereton, Relation, rpt. in Levermore 37

Click on the pinnace to enjoy one of the richest new works of early New England history... Karle Schlieff's 1602: Gosnold, a wonderfully-annotated edition of Bartholomew Gosnold and Company's exploration-visit to these shores

     Clearly, "rules" are evolving, norms of conduct, personal relationships and shared improvisations. Short-term profit and quasi-social events weave new practices and relations that in time result in cohabitations and transatlantic children---family relations. With these (as in old Native custom) the different groups have means to address their inevitable grievances. Native peoples have also another strategy in play.

     The Europeans use shipboard cannons and match-lit firearms to impress with the power of their presence; and at first, Native Americans are terrified. But each time that guns enter into an ever-more southerly New England region of transatlantic encounter, Native people are quick to demand them for their fur-trade and inland-access. Why?

Europeans of The Transatlantic used many different kinds of "fair means" for keeping Native relationships conducive to good trade. "New Frenchmen" under Champlain and Marc Lescarbot at Port Royal staged The Theatre of Neptune with poetry and performances in November 1606, and the latter planter wanted it known "that we lived joyously"...

     The Europeans hope (on Macchiavelli's advice) that a few guns will keep Native groups "loyal," help them to dominate less cooperative tribes, and increase their sole-access to more wealth. To some degree this happens. But Native people learn the truth about guns sooner than Europeans (and their historians) do. These early guns fire only at the touch of a fuse-like match. They get damp, break easily, and have no more effective range than a bow. Research shows that an archer can fire six arrows before a matchlock's second shot. Guns are no advantage. As Wood's Prospect says it, they do one "more credit than service."

     Native Americans demand guns because they intimidate these transatlantic strangers. Until the 1630s, there is not one specific record of a Native gun harming a European. But with them, Native Americans are demanding to be heard.

At left you see Richmond Island off Cape Elizabeth in Maine; another old fishing-station and hopeful source of commodities scarce in Europe. At right is ancient hardened volcanic lava that even today breaks into finger-length pieces of rough "whetstone," which colonists like Thomas Morton (below) hoped to export...

The Transatlantic's traffic between continents stranded many a sailor in America and many a Native person in England; where the latter were feted and pumped for information in the homes of investors and put "on show" as public curiosities...

     Religious wars, poor harvests, social divisions and weak economies drive more European competition in America. In the Time Lines here you see the increase of violent incidents as the 17th century dawns. In England, colonial proponent Richard Hakluyt begins his 1580s lectures suggesting that, if Native Americans "remain content" with their own ways and intertribal goods, "then traffic is [for naught]. So then in vain seemeth our voyage; unless this [Native] nature may be altered, as by conquest and other good means... our soldiers trained up in The Netherlands, to square and prepare them for our preachers' hands' ("Inducements" #31, in Pennington 181: emphasis added)

If the elite are to gain increasing profit, they must "reform" American desire. For the good of Europe and England, Native Americans must learn to want things. If necessary, by force of arms.

     The word profit comes from Latin and Old French profit-us, "advance, progress." The Oxford English Dictionary explains it as "The advantage or benefit (of a person, community or thing)"; as "the excess of returns over the outlay of capital." Profit is generically something for nothing: value defined as something not put in. But in a barter relationship, trade produces no "surplus" value or "advantage" to one side. Where does this "surplus value" or "advantage" come from? As transatlantic time passes, Native Americans begin to notice their being disadvantaged.

     Why should Native peoples answer for bad times in Europe? If the deal last season was two beaver-pelts for one gun, why pay three pelts now, four next year? The effects of profit spread through their world. More dependent on manufactured goods, they need to hunt more animals. Ecological effects compound with social strains as Native men spend more time away "on business." Resentments gather. In some places, they seek out new traders for better terms. Europeans dislike such a "free market" option in Native hands as much as guns. Lured by quick-fortune fantasies in their own pamphlets, they grow angry when beads and mirrors no longer suffice. (This is what the anti-gun-trade proclamation below calls "spoiling the trade.") But the fur-trade's profits can't be had without Native help. American "reform" is held in check

     In England by the 1610s, strident leaders of the Protestant Reformation are gaining seats in Parliament. Christian "discipline" will cure the economy and the fraying social order. These "Puritans" attack and outlaw every aspect of old-English culture that displeases them---long "Cavalier" hair and Renaissance attention to "pagan" books, Anglican church-ways resembling Rome's, "idle and promiscuous" Maypole-raisings and Sunday "sports" on the village green. (Within a generation, King Charles' version of holy autocracy will bring on civil war.) The "Virginia" colony is still more burden than profit, and leading investor Sir Ferdinando Gorges has yet to establish a northern one. What is the problem, and the solution? Gorges delivers a speech to Parliament (Narration 38) and plays to the new moralism. To reform America and so increase profits, the English must reform themselves:.

      The enlargement of the King's dominions, with the advancement of [Christian] religion in those desert parts, are matters of highest consequence, and far exceeding a simple and disorderly course of fishing ...for that so goodly a coast could not be long left unpeopled [sic] by the French, Spanish or Dutch....[The] mischief already sustained by those disorderly persons are inhumane and intolerable. For first, in their manners and behavior they are worse than the very savages, impudently and openly lying with their women, teaching their men to drink drunk, to swear and blaspheme the name of God, and in their drunken humor to fall together by the ears [argue], thereby giving them occasion to seek revenge. Besides, they cozen and abuse the savages in trading and trafficking, selling them salt covered with butter instead of so much butter, and the like....[And] they sell unto the savages muskets, fowling pieces, powder, shot, swords, arrowheads and other arms, wherewith the savages slay many of those fishermen, and are grown so able and apt that they become dangerous to the planters...

     Time to clean up the territory. The only "conversions" that matter to these fishermen are short-term. Like England itself, what the "disorderly" Transatlantic world needs is more Christian discipline. Find colonists who have it and they will bring reform to Native America; and from that, richer "revenues."

     The only problem is that capitalism is not a free market filling needs, but a controlled colonization of created needs, to the benefit of a few in a fort. They "need" the fort because what they do destroys human community. And in that predicament, as a recent President of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Thomas B. Adams) observed, "The world cannot afford to bungle its diplomacy."

      It is "The Pilgrims'" historical cue.