Pestilence and Genocide - 2

II

During the latter half of the sixteenth century, while the Spanish and Portuguese were busy "pacifying" the indigenous peoples in Mexico and on to the south (with additional forays up into Florida and Virginia), the English were preoccupied with their own pacification of the Irish. From the vantage point of the present it may seem absurd that the English of this time were accusing anyone of savagery or barbarism. After all, this was a society in which a third of the people lived at the bare margin of subsistence, a society in which conditions of health and sanitation were so appalling that it was rare for an individual to survive into his or her midthirties.⁷ As for the superior qualities of the English cast of mind, in the closing years of the sixteenth century (the era that British historians of philosophy call the dawn of the Age of Reason) the courts of Essex County alone brought in about 650 indictments for more than 1500 witchcraft-related crimes. And this, says the historian who has studied the subject most closely, "was only the projecting surface of far more widespread suspicions."⁸

Still, Britain's people considered themselves the most civilized on earth, and before long they would nod approvingly as Oliver Cromwell declared God to be an Englishman. It is not surprising, then, that English tracts and official minutes during this time described the "wild Irish" as "naked rogues in woods and bogs [whose] ordinary food is a kind of grass." Less ordinary food for the Irish, some reported, was the flesh of other people, sometimes their own mothers — which, perhaps, was only fair, since still other tall tales had it that Irish mothers ate their children. The Irish were, in sum, "unreasonable beasts," said William Thomas, beasts who "lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing."⁹

Such brutishness was beyond the English capacity for tolerance. Especially when the vulgarians in question occupied such lovely lands. So, as they had for centuries, the English waged wars to pacify and civilize the Irish. One of the more successful English soldiers in the Irish wars was the Oxford-educated half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, one Humphrey Gilbert-himself later knighted for his service to the Crown. Gilbert devised a particularly imaginative way of bringing the Irish to heel. He ordered that

the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledyng into his owne tente so that none could come into his rente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem.¹⁰

Needless to say, this "lane of heddes" leading to Gilbert's tent did indeed cause "greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds" laid out "on the grounde before their faces."¹¹ Lest anyone think to quibble over such extreme methods of persuasion, however, the British frequently justified their treatment of the Irish by referring to the Spanish precedent for dealing with unruly natives.¹²

In the meantime, a few English expeditions had gone forth to explore the lands of the New World, but they concentrated on areas far to the north of where the Spanish were engaged in their exploits. The first serious attempt by the English to set up a colony in America was on Baffin Island, where they thought they had discovered gold. As it turned out, the mineral they discovered was fool's gold and the colony was abandoned, but not before the leader of the expedition, Martin Frobisher, had captured and kidnapped a handful of the "sundry tokens of people" he found there.

On his first trip to the area Frobisher seized a native man who approached his ship in a kayak and returned with him and his kayak to England. The man soon died, however, so on his next voyage Frobisher took on board an old woman and a young woman with her child — this, after he and his men had "disposed ourselves, contrary to our inclination, something to be cruel," and destroyed an entire native village. After stripping the old woman naked "to see if she were cloven footed," they sent her on her way, but kept the young woman and child, along with a man they also had captured in a separate raid. 13 They then brought the man and woman together, with the crew assembled "to beholde the manner of their meeting and entertainment," as though they were two animals. The crew was disappointed, however, for instead of behaving in bestial fashion, the captive Indians showed themselves to be more restrained and dignified and sensitive than their captors.

At theyr first encountering, they behelde eache the other very wistly a good space, withoute speeche or worde uttered, with greate change of coloure and countenance, as though it seemed the greefe and disdeyne of their captivitie had taken away the use of their tongues and utterance: the woman of the first verie suddaynely, as though she disdeyned or regarded not the man, turned away and beganne to sing, as though she minded another matter: but being agayne broughte togyther, the man brake up the silence first, and with sterne and stayed countenance beganne to tell a long solemne tale to the woman, whereunto she gave good hearing, and interrupted him nothing till he had finished, and, afterwards being growen into more familiar acquaintance by speech, were turned togither, so that (I think) the one would hardly have lived without the comfort of the other.¹⁴

Much to the surprise of the inquiring English, however, the captive Indians maintained their sexual distance. Although they frequently comforted one another, reported a member of the crew, "only I thinke it worth the noting the continencie of them both; for the man would never shifte himselfe, except he had first caused the woman to depart out of his cabin, and they both were most shamefast least anye of their privie parts should be discovered, eyther of themselves or any other body."¹⁵

Upon their arrival in England the kidnapped man unsurprisingly displayed "an Anglophobia," reported one observer who disapproved. And when it was discovered that he was seriously ill from broken ribs that had punctured a lung, the presiding physician recommended blood-letting, but "the foolish, and only too uncivilised, timidity of this uncivilised man forbade it." He died soon thereafter, as had the man they captured on their previous expedition. This was very upsetting to all concerned. As the physician in charge recalled: "I was bitterly grieved and saddened, not so much by the death of the man himself as because the great hope of seeing him which our most gracious Queen had entertained had now slipped through her fingers, as it were, for a second time."¹⁶ His body was dissected and buried, by which time the native woman had also fallen ill. Before long, she was dead as well, and her child followed soon thereafter.

If the fate of Indians captured by the English for display and viewing in London was routinely the same as that suffered by natives in Spanish captivity, there also was a similarity in the fate of those Indians, north and south, who remained at home. By the time the English announced the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia (marking their dominion, as did the Spanish, with a cross), the lands the Spanish and Portuguese had conquered already were an immense and bone-strewn graveyard. Indians in the many tens of millions had died horribly from the blades and germs of their Iberian invaders. As far north as Florida and southern Georgia, for every ten Timucuan Indians who were alive in 1515 only one was alive in 1607. And by 1617, a short decade later, that number was halved again. According to the most detailed population analysis of this region that ever has been done, in 1520 the number of Timucuan people in the area totaled over 720,000; following a century of European contact they numbered barely 36,000. Two-thirds of a million native people-95 percent of the enormous and ancient Timucuan society-had been obliterated by the violence of sword and plague.¹⁷

But the Spanish didn't stop at Florida and Georgia. As early as the summer of 1521, while Cortes and his army were still completing the destruction of Tenochtitlan, Spanish ships under the command of Pedro de Quejo and Francisco Gordillo landed on the coast of what is now South Carolina, near Winyah Bay, north of Charleston. Each man independently claimed possession of the land for his particular employer — and each one also denounced the other for doing so. But on one thing, at least, they agreed. Their mission was to find and capture as many Indians as possible and to bring them back to labor in the Bahamas, whose millions of native people by then-less than 30 years after Columbus's first voyage — had largely been exterminated. They did their job well. After two weeks of friendly contact with the Indians living around Winyah Bay, Quejo and Gordillo invited them to visit their ships. Once the natives were on board, however, the two captains raised anchor and set sail for Santo Domingo.

There is some dispute as to how many Indians were captured that day by the Spanish — somewhere between 60 and 130 — but there is no disagreement about what happened next. Upon their arrival in Santo Domingo the natives were enslaved and put to work on plantations, though for food they had to fend for themselves. They were reduced to scavenging through decaying garbage and eating dead and decomposing dogs and donkeys. By 1526, four years after their capture, only one of them was still alive.¹⁸

It was a fitting start for all that was to follow. For the next half-century and beyond, the Spanish and French and English plied the waters off the coast of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia — with raiding parties marching inland to capture slaves and spread disease and depredation. Before the last of the slaves from the Quejo-Gordillo expedition had been killed, Giovanni de Verrazzano was leading a fleet of French ships into the area, followed by Jacques Cartier in 1534, and numerous others after him. Their impact on the lives of the native peoples they encountered varied, as did their specific intentions. But for most, their intentions were clear in what they brought with them. Thus, in 1539, Hernando de Soto landed with a force of 600 armed men, more than 200 horses, hundreds of wolfhounds, mastiffs, and greyhounds, a huge supply of neck chains for the slaves they planned to capture, and a portable forge in case that supply proved inadequate.¹⁹

By the 1560s and 1570s European militiamen were traveling throughout the southeast, spreading disease and bloody massacre everywhere they went. Still, in the early 1570s — even after a series of devastating European diseases had attacked the Virginia Indians for more than half a decadethe Jesuit Juan Rogel, generally regarded as the most reliable of all the early Spanish commentators on this region, wrote of coastal Virginia: "There are more people here than in any of the other lands I have seen so far along the coast explored. It seemed to me that the natives are more settled than in other regions I have been."²⁰ And Father Rogel previously had lived in densely populated Florida. Twenty-five years later, when the British colonizing troops arrived at Jamestown, they found "a Iande," wrote one of them, "that promises more than the Lande of promisse: In steed of mylke we fynde pearl. I & golde Inn steede of honye." But by now the people they found were greatly reduced in number from what they had been before the coming of the earlier Europeans. The signs of the previous invaders' calling cards could not be missed, "for the great diseaze reignes in the [native] men generally," noted an anonymous correspondent, "full fraught with noodes botches and pulpable appearances in their forheades."²¹

A decade earlier, in 1596, an epidemic of measles — or possibly bubonic plague — had swept through Florida, killing many native people. It may have made its way to Virginia as well, since on previous occasions the two locales had been nearly simultaneous recipients of European pestilence: in 1586, for instance, Thomas Hariot's English troops left disease and death throughout Virginia at the same time that Francis Drake had loosed some "very foul and frightful diseases" (at least one of which appears to have been typhus) among the Indians at St. Augustine; and in 1564, a six-year siege of disease and starvation began that reduced Virginia's population drastically, at the same time that a devastating plague of some sort was killing large numbers of Florida's Timucuan people.²²

Invariably, in the New World as in the Old, massive epidemics brought starvation in their wake, because the reduced and debilitated populations were unable to tend their crops. As one Jesuit wrote of Virginia in the fall of 1570:

We find the land of Don Luis [the Spanish name given an Indian aboard ship who had been taken from Virginia to Spain some years earlier] in quite another condition than expected, not because he was at fault in his description of it, but because Our Lord has chastised it with six years of famine and death, which has brought it about that there is much less population than usual. Since many have died and many also have moved to other regions to ease their hunger [and unwittingly spread disease inland] there remain but few of the tribe, whose leaders say that they wish to die where their fathers have died. . . . They seemed to think that Don Luis had risen from the dead and come down from heaven, and since all who remained are his relatives, they are gready consoled in him .... Thus we have felt the good will which this tribe is showing. On the other hand, as I have said, they are so famished that all believe they will perish of hunger and cold this winter.²³

It was not likely an exaggeration, then, when the British settlers in Jamestown were told in 1608, by the elderly leader of the Indians whose land they were there to take, that he had witnessed "the death of all my people thrice, and not one living of those 3 generations, but my selfe."²⁴ England's formal contribution to this holocaust was next.

Despite the horrors they had endured in recent decades, the Indians' continuing abilities to produce enormous amounts of food impressed and even awed many of the earliest British explorers. Beans, pumpkins, and many other vegetables, especially corn, which was greatly superior in its yield (about double that of wheat) and in its variety of uses to anything Europeans had ever seen, were grown in fields tended with such care that they looked more like huge gardens, it was said, than farmlands. So too did at least some British, despite their general disdain for the Indians, initially praise their technological ingenuity, marveling as well at their smoothfunctioning but complex machineries of government — government that was commonly under the control of democratic councils, but that also produced individual leaders of dignity and civility. As one historian has noted, the contrast especially in regal manner between the Indian and British leaders was extreme at the time of the British settlement of Virginia, because England was then ruled by King James I who was notorious for his personal filthiness, his excessive and slobbering ways of eating and drinking, and his vulgar and boorish style of speech and overall behavior.²⁵

Admiration of Indian ways of living — particularly their peacefulness, generosity, trustworthiness, and egalitarianism, all of which were conspicuously absent from English social relations of the time — led to some eloquent early praise of Virginia's native people, albeit from a distinct minority of British observers. But if those who spoke with their pens are sometimes regarded skeptically, those who voted with their feet cannot be. And it is especially telling that throughout the seventeenth and on into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while almost no Indians voluntarily lived among the colonists, the number of whites who ran off to live with the Indians was a problem often remarked upon. After a century and a half of permanent British settlement in North America, Benjamin Franklin joined numerous earlier commentators in lamenting that

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Shon time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to suppon it, and take the first good Opponunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.²⁶

Children brought up among the Indians were not the only problem. Adult men and women also turned their backs on Western culture, leading J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur to exclaim: "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!"²⁷ After surveying and analyzing this literature and the narratives of those Europeans who wrote about their experiences with the Indians, James Axtell has concluded that the whites who chose to remain among the natives

stayed because they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity — values that the European colonists also honored, if less successfully. But Indian life was attractive for other values — for social equality, mobility, adventure, and, as two adult converts acknowledged, "the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us."²⁸

The first colonial leaders, however, would have none of this. Most of them were military men, trained in the Irish wars. Whatever they thought of the Indian way of life, they never failed to regard the Indians themselves as peoples fated for conquest. As a counterweight to that relative handful of writers who were praising the native peoples and their governments, these British equivalents of the conquistadors viewed the Indians as, in John Smith's words, "craftie, timerous, quicke of apprehension, and very ingenuous. Some," he added, "are of disposition fearefull, some bold, most cautelous [deceitful], all Savage ... Their chiefe God they worship is the Divell"²⁹ For men like Smith, having learned how to deal with what they regarded as the savage people of Ireland was a lesson of importance when they turned their attention to the Indians; as Howard Mumford Jones once put it, the "English experience with one wild race conditioned their expectation of experience with another."³⁰

And so, based on that experience, founding colonial leaders like Smith and Ralph Lane routinely carried out a policy of intimidation as the best means of garnering their hosts' cooperation. Observing the closeness of Indian parents and children, for example, and the extraordinary grief suffered by Indian mothers and fathers when separated from their offspring, Smith and Lane made it a practice to kidnap and hold hostage Indian children whenever they approached a native town.³¹ As for those Englishmen among them who might be tempted to run off and live with the Indians, the colonial governors made it clear that such behavior would not be tolerated. For example, when in the spring of 1612, some young English settlers in Jamestown "being idell ... did runne away unto the Indyans," Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed: "Some he apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to deathe."³²

This was the treatment for those who wished to act like Indians. For those who had no choice in the matter, because they were the native people of Virginia, the tone had been set decades earlier in the "lost colony" of Roanoke. There, when an Indian was accused by an Englishman of stealing a cup and failing to return it, the English response was to attack the natives in force, burning the entire community and the fields of corn surrounding it.³³

Such disproportionate responses to supposed affronts was to mark English dealings with the Indians throughout the seventeenth century. Thus, in Jamestown in the summer of 1610, Governor Thomas West De la Warr requested of the Indian chief Powhatan (Wahunsonacock) that he return some runaway Englishmen — presumably to be hanged, burned, "broken upon wheles," staked, and shot to death — whom De la Warr thought Powhatan was harboring. Powhatan responded in a way that De la Warr considered unsatisfactory, giving "noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers." So De la Warr launched a military campaign against Powhatan headed by George Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland and De la Warr's second in command. Here is Percy's own description of what he did:

Draweinge my sowldiers into Battalio placeinge a Capteyne or Leftenante att every fyle we marched towards the [Indians'] Towne .... And then we fell in upon them putt some fiftene or sixtene to the Sworde and Almost all the reste to flyghte. . . . My Lieftenantt bringeinge with him the Quene and her Children and one Indyann prisoners for the Which I taxed him becawse he had Spared them his Answer was thatt haveinge them now in my Custodie I might doe with them whatt I pleased. Upon the same I cawsed the Indians head to be cutt of. And then dispersed my fyles Apointeinge my Sowldiers to bume their howses and to cutt downe their Come groweinge aboutt the Towne.³⁴

With the Indians thus dead or dispersed, their village destroyed, and their food supplies laid waste, Percy sent out another raiding party to do the same to another Indian town and then marched back to his boats with the Indian "queen" and her children in tow. There, however, his soldiers "did begin to murmur becawse the quene and her Children weare spared." This seemed a reasonable complaint to Percy, so he called a council together and "it was Agreed upon to putt the Children to deathe the which was effected by Throweinge them overboard shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water." Upon his return to Jamestown, however, Percy was informed that Governor De Ia Warr was unhappy with him because he had not yet killed the queen. Advised by his chief lieutenant that it would be best to burn her alive, Percy decided instead to end his day of "so mutche Bloodshedd" with a final act of mercy: instead of burning her, he had the queen quickly killed by stabbing her to death.³⁵

From this point on there would be no peace in Virginia. Indians who came to the English settlements with food for the British (who seemed never able to feed themselves) were captured, accused of being spies, and executed. On other occasions Indians were enticed into visiting the settlements on the pretence of peace and the sharing of entertainment, whereupon they were attacked by the English and killed. Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them: when the Indians "grow secure uppon the treatie," advised the Council of State in Virginia, "we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, & cutt downe theire Corne." And when at last the Indians retaliated strongly, killing more than three hundred settlers, the attack, writes Edmund S. Morgan, "released all restraints that the company had hitherto imposed on those who thirsted for the destruction or enslavement of the Indians." 36 Not that the restraints had ever been particularly confining, but from now on the only controversy was over whether it was preferable to kill all the native peoples or to enslave them. Either way, the point was to seize upon the "right of Warre [and] invade the Country and destroy them who sought to destroy us," wrote a rejoicing Edward Waterhouse at the time, "whereby wee shall enjoy their cultivated places . . . [and] their· cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situate in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us."³⁷

Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in suCcessful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, "blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seaze them." Their canoes and fishing weirs were smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground. Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners were returned; then, having lulled the natives into false security, the colonists returned to the attack. It was the colonists' expressed desire that the Indians be exterminated, rooted "out from being longer a people uppon the face of the earth." In a single raid the settlers destroyed corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year. Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives. By the end of the winter of 1623 the Indians acknowledged that in the past year alone as many of their number had been killed as had died since the first arrival of the British a decade and a half earlier.³⁸

The slaughter continued. In 1624 — in a single battle — sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenseless Indian men, women, and children in their own village. And, of course, as elsewhere, British diseases were helping to thin out whatever resistance the Indians could hope to muster. Long before the middle of the century was reached the region's largest and most powerful Indian confederation, known to historians retrospectively as Powhatan's Empire, was "so rowted, slayne and dispersed," wrote one British colonist, "that they are no longer a nation." At the end, Powhatan's successor chief, Opechancanough, was captured. An old man now, "grown so decrepit that he was not able to walk alone . . . his Flesh all macerated, his Sinews slacken'd, and his Eye-lids become so heavy that he could not see," Opechancanough was thrown into a cell in Jamestown and displayed like the captive beast that the colonists thought he was. But not for long. Within two weeks a British soldier shot him in the back and killed him.³⁹

When the first 104 English settlers arrived at Jamestown in April of 1607, the number of Indians under Powhatan's control was probably upwards of 14,000 — a fraction of what it had been just a few decades earlier, because of English, French, and Spanish depredations and disease. (Estimates of the region's native population prior to European contact extend upwards of 100,000.) By the time the seventeenth century had passed, those 104 settlers had grown to more than 60,000 English men and women who were living in and harvesting Virginia's bounty, while Powhatan's people had been reduced to about 600, maybe less.⁴⁰ More than 95 percent of Powhatan's people had been exterminated — beginning from a population base in 1607 that already had been drastically reduced, perhaps by 75 percent or more, as a result of prior European incursions in the region.

Powhatan's Empire was not the only Indian nation in Virginia, of course, but his people's fate was representative of that of the area's other indigenous societies. In 1697 Virginia's Lieutenant Governor Andros put the number of Indian warriors in the entire colony at just over 360, which suggests a total Indian population of less than 1500, while John Lawson, in his New Voyage to Carolina, claimed that more than 80 percent of the colony's native people had been killed off during the previous fifty years alone. In time, a combination plan of genocide and enslavement, as initially proposed by the colony's Governor William Berkeley, appeared to quiet what had become a lingering controversy over whether it was best to kill all the Indians or to capture them and put them to forced labor: Berkeley's plan was to slaughter all the adult Indian males in a particular locale, "but to spare the women and children and sell them," says Edmund Morgan. This way the war of extermination "would pay for itself," since it was likely that a sufficient number of female and child slaves would be captured "to defray the whole cost."⁴¹

By the time this clever enterprise was under way in Virginia, the British had opened colonies in New England as well. As usual, earlier visits by Europeans already had spread among the Indians a host of deadly plagues. The Patuxet peoples, for example, were effectively exterminated by some of these diseases, while other tribes disappeared before they were even seen by any white men. Others were more fortunate, suffering death rates of 50 and 60 percent — a good deal greater than the proportion of Europeans killed by the Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century, but still far short of total liquidation. These were rates, however, for any given single epidemic, and in New England's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries few epidemics traveled by themselves.⁴² The extant descriptions of what life and death were like at times like these are rare, but the accounts we do have of the viral and bacteriological assaults are sobering indeed, reminiscent of the earlier Spanish and Portuguese accounts from Mesoamerica and Brazil. Wrote Plymouth Colony's Governor William Bradford, for instance, of a smallpox epidemic from which huge numbers of Indians "died most miserably":

For want of bedding and linen and ocher helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof co the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful co behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep. The condition of chis people was so lamentable and they fell down so generally of chis disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor to fetch a litcle water co drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours co get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not be able to get in again.⁴³

While "very few" of the Indians escaped this scourge, including "the chief sachem . . . and almost all his friends and kindred," Bradford reported, "by the marvelous goodness and providence of God, not one of the English was so much as sick or in the least measure tainted with this disease." Time and again Old World epidemics such as this coursed through the veins of the native peoples of the North Atlantic coast, even before the arrival of the first great waves of British settlers, leaving in their wake so many dead that they could not be buried, so many piles of skeletal remains that one early colonist referred to the land as "a new found Golgotha." 44 But it was a Golgotha the Puritans delighted in discovering, not only because the diseases they brought with them from England left the Puritans themselves virtually unaffected, but because the destruction of the Indians by these plagues was considered an unambiguous sign of divine approval for the colonial endeavor. As the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, the Puritan settlers, numbering at the time "in all about four thousand souls and upward," were in remarkably good health: "through the Lord's special providence ... there hath not died above two or three grown persons and about so many children all the last year, it being very rare to hear of any sick of agues or other diseases." But, he noted in passing, as "for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess."⁴⁵

God, however, was not enough. At some point the settlers would have to take things into their own hands. For, terribly destructive though the Old World diseases were, some Indians remained alive. The danger posed by these straggling few natives was greatly exaggerated by the English (as it remains exaggerated in most history textbooks today), not only because their numbers had been so drastically reduced, but because their attitudes toward the colonists and their very means of warfare were so comparatively benign.

We have seen in an earlier chapter that the native peoples of this region (as elsewhere) combined in their everyday lives a sense of individual autonomy and communal generosity that the earliest Europeans commented on continuously. This was a great cultural strength, so long as the people they were dealing with shared those values and accepted the array of culturally correct reciprocal responses to them. However, just as their isolation from Old World diseases made the Indians an exceptionally healthy people as long as they were not contacted by disease-bearing outsiders, once Europeans invaded their lands with nothing but disdain for the native regime of mutual respect and reciprocity, the end result was doomed to spell disaster.

This probably is seen most dramatically in the comparative Indian and European attitudes toward warfare. We already have observed one consequence of the differing rituals that were conventional to Europe and the Americas in Montezuma's welcoming Cortes into Tenochtitlan in part because Cortes claimed he was on a mission of peace; and one inviolable code of Mesoamerican warfare was that it was announced, with its causes enumerated, in advance. Cortes's declared intentions of peace, therefore, were supposed by Montezuma to be his true intentions. A similar attitude held among Indians in much of what is now the United States. Thus, as a seventeenth-century Lenape Indian explained in a discussion with a British colonist:

We are minded to live at Peace: If we intend at any time to make War upon you, we will let you know of it, and the Reasons why we make War with you; and if you make us satisfaction for the Injury done us, for which the War is intended, then we will not make War on you. And if you intend at any time to make War on us, we would have you let us know of it, and the Reasons for which you make War on us, and then if we do not make satisfaction for the Injury done unto you, then you may make War on us, otherwise you ought not to do it.⁴⁶

The simplicity of this seems naive and even quaint to modern observers, as it did to seventeenth-century Britishers, but it made perfect sense to native peoples who simply did not wage war for the same reasons that Europeans did. "Given ample land and a system of values by and large indifferent to material accumulation," writes a scholar of military law, "the New England tribes rarely harbored the economic and political ambitions that fueled European warfare." Instead, an Indian war usually was a response to personal insults or to individual acts of inter-tribal violence. As such, it could be avoided by "making satisfaction for the injury done" (as noted in the quotation above), but even when carried out "native hostilities generally aimed at symbolic ascendancy, a status conveyed by small payments of tribute to the victors, rather than the dominion normally associated with European-style conquest." Moreover, given the relative lack of power that Indian leaders had over their highly autonomous followers, Indian warriors might choose not to join in battle for this or that cause, and it was even common for an Indian war party on the march to "melt away as individual warriors had second thoughts and returned home."⁴⁷

Prior to the European assaults on their lands, Indians throughout the continent held similar attitudes toward the proper conduct of war. The idea of large-scale battle, wrote Ruth Benedict more than half a century ago, was "alien" to all these peoples. Of the California Indians, even long after they had almost been exterminated by white malevolence, Benedict wrote: "Their misunderstanding of warfare was abysmal. They did not have the basis in their own culture upon which the idea could exist." 48 As for the Indians of the Plains, who have been turned into the very portrait of aggression and ferocity by purveyors of American popular culture (and by far too many serious historians as well), wrote George Bird Grinnell:

Among the plains tribes with which I am well acquainted — and the same is true of all the others of which I know anything at all — coming in actual personal contact with the enemy by touching him with something held in the hand or with a part of the person was the bravest act that could be performed ... [This was known as] to count coup on — to touch or strike — a living unhurt man and to leave him alive, and this was frequently done. . . . It was regarded as an evidence of bravery for a man to go into battle carrying no weapon that would do any harm at a distance. It was more creditable to carry a lance than a bow and arrows; more creditable to carry a hatchet or war dub than a lance; and the bravest thing of all was to go into a fight with nothing more than a whip, or a long twig — sometimes called a coup stick. I have never heard a stone-headed war dub called coup stick.⁴⁹

Commenting on this passage, and on the generality of its application to indigenous warfare, anthropologist Stanley Diamond has noted that to people such as the American Indians "taking a life was an occasion," whereas warfare of the type described "is a kind of play. No matter what the occasion for hostility, it is particularized, personalized, ritualized." In contrast, by the time of the invasion of the Americas, European warfare had long since been made over into what Diamond describes as "an abstract, ideological compulsion" resulting in "indiscriminate, casual, unceremonious killing."⁵⁰

Not surprisingly, then, the highly disciplined and ideologically motivated British expressed contempt for what Captain John Mason called the Indians' "feeble manner ... [that] did hardly deserve the name of fighting." Warfare among the native peoples had no "dissipline" about it, complained Captain Henry Spelman, so that when Indians fought there was no great "slawter of nether side"; instead, once "having shott away most of their arrows," both sides commonly "weare glad to retier." Indeed, so comparatively harmless was inter-tribal fighting, noted John Underhill, that "they might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men."⁵¹ Added Roger Williams: "Their Warres are farre !esse bloudy, and devouring than the cruel! Warres of Europe; and seldome twenty slain in a pitcht field .... When they fight in a plaine, they fight with leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits, and when a man is wounded, unlesse he that shot followes upon the wounded, they soone retire and save the wounded." In addition, the Indians' code of honor "ordinarily spared the women and children of their adversaries."⁵²

In contrast, needless to say, the British did very little in the way of "leaping and dancing" on the field of battle, and more often than not Indian women and children were consumed along with everyone and everything else in the conflagrations that routinely accompanied the colonists' assaults. Their purpose, after all, was rarely to avenge an insult to honor — although that might be the stipulated rationale for a battle — but rather, when the war was over, to be able to say what John Mason declared at the conclusion of one especially bloody combat: that "the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance."⁵³ Because of his readers' assumed knowledge of the Old Testament, it was unnecessary for Mason to remind them that this last phrase is derived from Deuteronomy, nor did he need to quote the words that immediately follow in that biblical passage: "Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth .... But thou shalt utterly destroy them."

The brutish and genocidal encounter to which Mason was referring was the Pequot War. Its first rumblings began to be heard in July of 1636 — two years after a smallpox epidemic had devastated the New England natives "as far as any Indian plantation was known to the west," said John Winthrop — when the body of a man named John Oldham was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast.⁵⁴ Although he held positions of some importance, Oldham was not held in high regard by many of the English settlers — he had been banished from Plymouth Colony and described by its Governor Bradford as "more like a furious beast than a man" — and those whites who found his body had proceeded to murder more than a dozen Indians who were found at the scene of the crime, whether or not they were individually responsible.⁵⁵ Even in light of the colonists' grossly disproportionate sense of retribution when one of their own had been killed by Indians, this should have been sufficient revenge, but it was not. The colonists simply wanted to kill Indians. Despite the pledge of the Narragansetts' chief to mete out punishment to Oldham's murderers — a pledge he began to fulfill by sending 200 warriors to Block Island in search of the culprits — New England's Puritan leaders wanted more.

Led by Captain John Endicott, a heavily armed and armored party of about a hundred Massachusetts militiamen soon attacked the Block Island Indians. Their plan was to kill the island's adult males and make off with the women and children; as with Governor Berkeley's later scheme in Virginia, the venture would pay for itself since, as Francis Jennings puts it, "the captured women and children of Block Island would fetch a tidy sum in the West Indies slave markets."⁵⁶ The Indians scattered, however, realizing they had no hope against the colonists' weapons and armor, so the frustrated soldiers, able to kill only an odd few Narragansetts here and there, had to content themselves with the destruction of deserted villages. "We burnt and spoiled both houses and corn in great abundance," recalled one participant.⁵⁷

From Block Island the troops headed back to the mainland where, following the directions of their colony's governor, they sought out a confrontation with some Pequot Indians. The Pequots, of course, had nothing to do with Oldham's death (the excuse for going after them was the allegation that, two years earlier, some among them may have killed two quarrelsome Englishmen, one of whom had himself tried to murder the Governor of Plymouth Colony), so when the soldiers first appeared along the Pequots' coastline the Indians ran out to greet them. As Underhill recalled: "The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, what cheere, Englishmen, what cheere, what doe you come for: They not thinking we intended warre, went on cheerefully untill they come to Pequeat river."⁵⁸ It soon became evident to the Pequots what the soldiers had come for, even if the cause of their coming remained a mystery, so after some protracted efforts at negotiation, the Pequots melted back into the forest to avoid a battle. As they had on Block Island, the troops then went on a destructive rampage, looting and burning the Indians' villages and fields of corn.

Once the Massachusetts troops left the field and returned to Boston, the Pequots came out of the woods, made a few retaliatory raids in the countryside, and then attacked nearby Fort Saybrook. Casualties were minimal in all of this, as was normal in Indian warfare, and at one pointpresumably feeling that their honor had been restored — the Pequots fell back and asked the fort's commander if he felt he had "fought enough." The commander, Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, made an evasive reply, but its meaning was clear: from that day forward there would be no peace. Next, the Pequots asked if the English planned to kill Indian women and children. Gardiner's reply was that "they should see that hereafter."⁵⁹

For a time small troubles continued in the field, while in Hartford the Connecticut General Court met and declared war against the Pequots. John Mason was appointed commander of the Connecticut troops. Rather than attack frontally, as the Massachusetts militia had, Mason led his forces and some accompanying Narragansetts (who long had been at odds with the Pequots) in a clandestine assault on the main Pequot village just before dawn. Upon realizing that Mason was planning nothing less than a wholesale massacre, the Narragansetts dissented and withdrew to the rear. Mason regarded them with contempt, saying that they could "stand at what distance they pleased, and see whether English Men would now fight 'or not." Dividing his forces in half, Mason at the head of one party, Underhill leading the other, under cover of darkness they attacked the unsuspecting Indians from two directions at once. The Pequots, Mason said, were taken entirely by surprise, their "being in a dead indeed their last Sleep."⁶⁰

The British swarmed into the Indian encampment, slashing and shooting at anything that moved. Caught off guard, and with apparently few warriors in the village at the time, some of the Pequots fled, "others crept under their Beds," while still others fought back "most courageously," but this only drove Mason and his men to greater heights of fury. "We must burn them," Mason later recalled himself shouting, whereupon he "brought out a Fire Brand, and putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire."⁶¹ At this, Mason says, "the Indians ran as Men most dreadfully Amazed":

And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished. . . . [And] God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven: Thus were the Stout Hearted spoiled, having slept their last Sleep, and none of their Men could find their Hands: Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies!⁶²

It was a ghastly sight — especially since we now know, as Francis Jennings reminds us, that most of those who were dying in the fires, and who were "crawling under beds and fleeing from Mason's dripping sword were women, children, and feeble old men."⁶³ Underhill, who had set fire to the other side of the village "with a traine of Powder" intended to meet Mason's blaze in the center, recalled how "great and doleful was the bloudy sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along." Yet, distressing though it may have been for the youthful murderers to carry out their task, Underhill reassured his readers that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents."⁶⁴ Just because they were weak and helpless and unarmed, in short, did not make their deaths any less a delight to the Puritan's God. For as William Bradford described the British reaction to the scene:

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.⁶⁵

Added the Puritan divine Cotton Mather, as he celebrated the event many years later in his Magnalia Christi Americana: "In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them." Mason himself counted the Pequot dead at six or seven hundred, with only seven taken captive and seven escaped. It was, he said joyfully, "the just Judgment of God."⁶⁶

The Narragansetts who had accompanied the Puritans on their march did not share the Englishmen's joy. This indiscriminate carnage was not the way warfare was to be carried out. "Mach it, mach it," Underhill reports their shouting; "that is," he translates, "It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men."⁶⁷ Too many Indians, that was. Only two of the English died in the slaughter.

From then on the surviving Pequots were hunted into near-extermination. Other villages were found and burned. Small groups of warriors were intercepted and killed. Pockets of starving women and children were located, captured, and sold into slavery. If they were fortunate. Others were bound hand and foot and thrown into the ocean just beyond the harbor. And still more were buried where they were found, such as one group of three hundred or so who tried to escape through a swampland, but could make "little haste, by reason of their Children, and want of Provision," said Mason. When caught, as Richard Drinnon puts it, they "were literally run to ground," murdered, and then "tramped into the mud or buried in swamp mire."⁶⁸

The comparative handful of Pequots who were left, once this series of massacres finally ended, were parceled out to live in servitude. John Endicott and his pastor, for example, wrote to the governor asking for "a share" of the captives, specifically "a yong woman or girle and a boy if you thinke good."⁶⁹ The last of them, fifteen boys and two women, were shipped to the West Indies for sale as slaves, the ship captain who carried them there returning the next year with what he had received in exchange: some cotton, some salt, some tobacco, "and Negroes, etc." The word "Pequot" was then removed from New England's maps: the river of that name was changed to the Thames and the town of that name became New London.⁷⁰ Having virtually eradicated an entire people, it now was necessary to expunge from historical memory any recollection of their past existence.⁷¹

Some, however, remembered all too well. John Mason rode the honor of his butchery to the position of Major General of Connecticut's armed forces. And Underhill, as Drinnon notes, "put his experience to good use" in selling his military prowess to the Dutch. On one subsequent occasion "with his company of Dutch troops Underhill surrounded an Indian village outside Stamford, set fire to the wigwams, drove back in with saber thrusts and shots those who sought to escape, and in all burned and shot five hundred with relative ease, allowing only about eight to escape — statistics comparable to those from the Pequot fort."⁷²

Meanwhile, the Narragansetts, who had been the Pequots' rivals, but who were horrified at this inhuman carnage, quietly acknowledged the English domination of the Pequots' lands — their "widowed lands," to borrow a phrase from Jennings. That would not, however, prove sufficient. The English towns continued to multiply, the colonists continued to press out into the surrounding fields and valleys. The Narragansetts' land, and that of other tribes, was next.

To recount in detail the story of the destruction of the Narragansetts and such others as the Wampanoags, in what has come to be known as King Philip's War of 1675 and 1676, is unnecessary here. Thousands of native people were killed, their villages and crops burned to the ground. In a single early massacre 600 Indians were destroyed. It was, says the recent account of two historians, "a seventeenth-century My Lai" in which the English soldiers "ran amok, killing the wounded men, women, and children indiscriminately, firing the camp, burning the Indians alive or dead in their huts." A delighted Cotton Mather, revered pastor of the Second Church in Boston, later referred to the slaughter as a "barbeque."⁷³ More butchery was to follow. Of these, one bloodbath alongside the Connecticut River was typical. It is described by an eyewitness:

Our souldiers got thither after an hard March just about break of day, took most of the Indians fast asleep, and put their guns even into their Wigwams, and poured in their shot among them, whereupon the Indians that durst and were able did get out of their Wigwams and did fight a little (in which fight one Englishman only was slain) others of the Indians did enter the River to swim over from the English, but many of them were shot dead in the waters, others wounded were therein drowned, many got into Canoes to paddle away, but the paddlers being shot, the Canoes over-set with all therein, and the stream of the River being very violent and swift in the place near the great Falls, most that fell over board were born by the strong current of that River, and carryed upon the Falls of Water from those exceeding high and steep Rocks, and from thence tumbling down were broken in pieces; the English did afterwards find of their bodies, some in the River and some cast a-shore, above two hundred.⁷⁴

The pattern was familiar, the only exception being that by the latter seventeenth century the Indians had learned that self-defense required an understanding of some English ideas about war, namely, in Francis Jennings's words: "that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart," so for once the casualties were high on both sides.⁷⁵ There was no doubt who would win, however, and when raging epidemics swept the countryside during the peak months of confrontation it only hastened the end.

Once the leader of the Indian forces, "a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast," the English called him, was caprured — and cut in pieces — the rest was just a mop-up operation. As one modern celebrant of the English puts it: "Hunting redskins became for the time being a popular sport in New England, especially since prisoners were worth good money, and the personal danger to the hunters was now very slight."⁷⁶ Report after report came in of the killing of hundreds of Indians, "with the losse only of one man of ours," to quote a common refrain. Equally common were accounts such as that of the capture of "about 26 Indians, most Women and Children brought in by our Scouts, as they were ranging the Woods about Dedham, almost starved." All this, of course, was "God's Will," says the British reporter of these events, "which will at last give us cause to say, How Great is his Goodness ! and how great is his Beauty!"⁷⁷ As another writer of the time expressed the shared refrain, "thus doth the Lord Jesus make them to bow before him, and to lick the Dust."⁷⁸

Typical of those being made to bow and lick the dust by this time was "a very decrepit and harmless Indian," too old and too weak to walk, who was captured by the Puritan troops. For a time, says the eyewitness account of John Easton, the soldiers contented themselves with merely "tormenting" the old man. Finally, however, they decided to kill him: "some would have had him devoured by dogs," wrote Easton, "but the tenderness of some of them prevailed to cut off his head."⁷⁹

The only major question remaining as King Philip's war drew to its inevitable close was how to deal with the few natives who still were alive. So many Indians had been "consumed . . . by the Sword & by Famine and by Sickness," wrote Cotton Mather's father Increase, "it being no unusual thing for those that traverse the woods to find dead Indians up and down ... there hath been none to bury them," that there now were "not above an hundred men left of them who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England."⁸⁰ As to what to do with that handful of survivors, only two choices — as always — enjoyed any support among the English colonists: annihilation or enslavement. Both approaches were tried. Allegedly dangerous Indians (that is, adult males) were systematically executed, while women and children were either shipped off to the slave markets of Spain or the West Indies, or were kept as servants of the colonists themselves. The terms of captured child slaves within Connecticut were to end once they reached the age of twenty-six. But few saw their day of liberation. Either they died before reaching their twenty-sixth birthday, or they escaped. And those who escaped and were caught usually then were sold into foreign slavery, with the blessing of the Connecticut General Court that had passed specific postwar legislation with this end in mind.

One final bit of business that required dearing up concerned the fates of those scattered Indians who had been able to hide out on islands in Narragansett Bay that were under the colonial jurisdiction of Rhode Island. Rhode Island had remained neutral during the war, and both the Indians and the leaders of the other colonies knew there was less likelihood of homicidal or other barbarous treatment for native refugees found in Rhode Island's domain. This infuriated the colonists in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth, not only because of their continuing blood lust, but because the Rhode Islanders were themselves reducing escaped Indians to servitude, even if they were not methodically executing them. The other colonies, "mindful of the cash value of prisoners," writes Douglas Edward Leach, felt that the Rhode Islanders were thus unfairly "now reaping the benefits which others had sowed in blood and treasure." Rhode Island's response was that the number of Indians within their territory was greatly exaggerated. And it appears that they were right, so successful had been the extermination campaign against the native people.⁸¹

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the indigenous inhabitants of New England, and of most other northeastern Indian lands, had been reduced to a small fraction of their former number and were living in isolated, squalid enclaves. Cotton Mather called these defeated and scattered people "tawny pagans" whose "inaccessible" homes were now nothing more than "kennels."⁸² And Mather's views, on this at least, were widely shared among the colonists. The once-proud native peoples, who had shown the English how to plant and live in the difficult environs of New England, were now regarded as animals, or at most, to quote one Englishwoman who traveled from Boston to New York in 1704, as "the most salvage of all the salvages of that kind that I have ever Seen."⁸³

It had started with the English plagues and ended with the sword and musket. The culmination, throughout the larger region, has been called the Great Dispersal. Before the arrival of the English — to choose an example further north from the area we have been discussing — the population of the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had stood at about 12,000. Less than half a century later approximately 250 of these people remained alive, a destruction rate of 98 percent. Other examples from this area tell the same dreary tale: by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Mahican people — 92 percent destroyed; the Mohawk people — 75 percent destroyed; the eastern Abenaki people — 78 percent destroyed; the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy people — 67 percent destroyed. And on, and on. Prior to European contact the Pocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000; fifty years later they were down to 920-95 percent destroyed. The Quiripi-Unquachog people had numbered about 30,000; fifty years later they were down to 1500-95 percent destroyed. The Massachusett people had numbered at least 44,000; fifty years later they were down to barely 6000-81 percent destroyed.⁸⁴

This was by mid-century. King Philip's War had not yet begun. Neither had the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678 occurred yet. The devastation had only started. Other wars and other scourges followed. By 1690, according to one count, the population of Norridgewock men was down to about 100; by 1726 it was down to 25. The same count showed the number of Androscoggin men in 1690 reduced to 160; by 1726 they were down to 10. And finally, the Pigwacket people: by 1690 only 100 men were left; by 1726 there were 7. These were the last ones, those who had fled to Canada to escape the English terrors. Once hostilities died down they were allowed to return to the fragments of their homelands that they still could say were theirs. But they hesitated "and expressed concern," reports a recent history of the region, "lest the English fall upon them while they were hunting near the Connecticut and Kennebec Rivers."⁸⁵ The English — who earlier had decorated the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with an image of a naked Indian plaintively urging the colonists to "Come over and help us" — had taught the natives well.