[In the following excerpt, Jones argues that in the first three centuries after discovery of the New World the Spanish and English generally regarded American Indians as monsters and devils, and he examines the ways they used descriptions of how natives engaged in cannibalism, torture, and deceit to justify European warfare.]

If the discoverers, in Peter Martyr's words, “ruined and exhausted themselves by their own folly and civil strife, failing absolutely to rise to the greatness expected of men who accomplish such wonderful things”—a judgment at once understandable and premature—the natives of the New World proved to be something less than pastoral inhabitants of an Earthly Paradise. The contrast between the two sides of the shield was sometimes merely puzzling and sometimes horrifying. When Verrazano made his voyage along the Atlantic seaboard in 1524 he found the Indians of the Carolina coast friendly and good-looking. They showed, he said, “the greatest delight on beholding us, wondering at our dress, countenances, and complexion”; they were “of good proportions, of middle stature, a little above our own, broad across the breast, strong in the arms and well formed in the legs and other parts of the body.” They lived in a plentiful and lovely country where “the air is salubrious, pure and temperate, and free from the extremes of both hot and cold” and the sea is “calm, not boisterous, and its waves are gentle.” But when he got to Cape Cod or its vicinity all was changed. The vegetation was “indicative of a cold climate,” and the people were “entirely different from the others we had seen … so rude and barbarous that we were unable by any signs we could make, to hold communication with them.” Clad in skins, living by hunting and fishing, and raising no crops, the Indians were hostile. “No regard was paid to our courtesies; when we had nothing left to exchange with them, the men at our departure made the most brutal signs of disdain and contempt possible.” And when the expedition tried to enter the interior, the Indians shot the white men with arrows and raised the most horrible cries.¹

But this contrast was comparatively mild. The Europeans also discovered cannibals. In the West Indies Columbus's men came across “a great quantity of men's bones and skulls hung up about the houses like vessels to hold things” and reported bestial habits of the Caribs that were far, far different from the bookish theoric Montaigne was to build on the cannibals. The Caribs raid other islands and treat their captives

with a cruelty which appears to be incredible, for they eat the male children whom they have from [captive women] and only rear those whom they have from their own women. As for the men whom they are able to take, they bring such as are alive to their houses to cut up for meat, and those who are dead they eat at once. They say that the flesh of a man is so good that there is nothing like it in the world, and it certainly seems to be so for, from the bones which we found in their houses, they had gnawed everything that could be gnawed, so that nothing was left on them except what was too tough to be eaten. In one house there was a neck of a man found cooking in a pot. They castrate the boys whom they capture and employ them as servants until they are fully grown, and then when they wish to make a feast, they kill and eat them, for they say that the flesh of boys and women is not good to eat.

The Spaniards captured three such castrati, who had fled from the cannibals;² four more castrati were captured by Vespucci.

Vespucci's men, if his letters are to be believed, were compelled to witness a practical demonstration in cannibalism. On his third voyage the mainland natives seemed to want to parley, and the voyagers in good faith set on shore a “very agile and valiant youth” to treat with them. Thereupon an Indian woman ran from the hill toward the shore, felled the young Christian with a club, and dragged his body up the hillside while the Indian warriors sent such a shower of arrows at the Europeans they could not rescue their shipmate. Other Indian women appeared, tore the young man to pieces, roasted him in the fire, and ate him before the eyes of his horrified companions.³² Vespucci also dwells upon the libidinousness of the Indian females, Indian promiscuity, treachery, and cannibalism—qualities scarcely offset by his belief that they live for 150 years and are rarely sick.³ All this was in South America. In the far north Dionysius Settle concluded that the inhabitants were “Anthropophagi, or devourers of mans flesh,” “for that there is no flesh or fish which they find dead (smell it never so filthily) but they will eate it, as they finde it without any other dressing. A loathsome thing, either to the beholders or hearers.”⁴³³ Loathsome, indeed, for as Peter Martyr is made to say in Richard Eden's colorful English, “There is no man able to behowlde them, but he shall feele his bowelles grate with a certen horroure, nature hath endewed them with soo terrible menacynge, and cruell aspecte.”⁵ Ritualistic cannibalism was imitated by the cimarróns, escaped Negro slaves, who, when they could, “to feede their insatiable revenges,” were “accustomed to rost and eate the hearts of all those Spaniards, whom at any time they could lay hand upon,”⁶ and on occasion starving Spaniards also ate the flesh of the dead.⁷

Equally appalling was human sacrifice, for example, that practiced by the Aztecs. There are many accounts, one of the most graphic being that by Gómara in his Historia General de las Indias (1552), which, despite attempts to suppress it, was widely disseminated in Spanish, Italian, French, and English, especially Part II, the Conquista de México, translated into English by Thomas Nichols as The Conquest of the VVeast India (1578). The Nichols translation carries an even more authentic repulsion than does the Spanish original. Elizabethans read of the great temple in Tenochtitlán with its two great altars, its twin hideous idols, its gutters of blood; and of

other darke houses full of idols, greate & small, wrought of sundry mettals, they are all bathed and washed with bloud, and do shewe very blacke through theyr dayly sprinklyng and anoynting them with the same, when any man is sacrificed: yea and the walles are an inche thicke with bloud, and the grounde is a foote thicke of bloud, so that there is a diuelish stench. The Priests or Ministers goe dayly into those Oratories, and suffer none others but great personages to enter in. Yea and when any such goeth in, they are bounde to offer some man to be sacrificed, that those bloudy hangmen and ministers of the Diuell may washe their handes in bloud of those so sacrificed, and to sprinkle their house therewith.

The priest bound the victim face upward on a large sacrificial stone with convenient runnels, opened his living breast with a flint knife, tore out the heart, and, offering it to the idol, smeared the god with fresh blood. “This done, they pluckt of the skinnes of a certeine number of them, the which skinnes so many auntient persons put incontinent upon their naked bodies, al fresh & bloudy, as they wer fleane from the deade carcasses. … In Mexico the king him selfe did put on one of these skinnes, being of a principall captiue, and daunced among the other disguised persons, to exalte and honor the feast.”⁸ I spare the reader other gory details but I must add that according to Gómara and Bernal Díaz del Castillo the victim was then cut up and eaten.

The torture of prisoners taken in Indian warfare was, Montaigne to the contrary notwithstanding, common practice before the Portuguese or any other Europeans taught torture to the aborigines. A single episode of such torture, drawn from the Jesuit Relations, ought to suffice:

There is no cruelty comparable to that which they practice on their enemies. As soon as the captives are taken, they brutally tear off their nails with their teeth; I saw the fingers of these poor creatures, and was filled with pity, also I saw a large hole in the arm of one of them; I was told that it was a bite of the Savage who had captured him; the other had a part of a finger torn off, and I asked him if the fire had done that, as I thought it was a burn. He made a sign to show me that it had been taken off by the teeth. I noticed the same cruelty among the girls and women, when these poor prisoners were dancing; for, as they passed before the fire, the women blew and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them. When the hour comes to kill their captives, they are fastened to a stake; then the girls, as well as the men, apply hot and flaming brands to those portions of the body which are the most sensitive, to the ribs, thighs, chest, and several other places. They raise the scalp from the head, and then throw burning sand upon the skull, or uncovered place. They pierce the arms at the wrists with sharp sticks, and pull the nerves out through these holes. In short, they make them suffer all that cruelty and the Devil can suggest. At last, as a final horror, they eat and devour them almost raw.

This, says one of the Jesuits cheerfully, is what some of us may look forward to.

So much for a Catholic martyr. In May 1782, near Muddy Creek, Pennsylvania, the Reverend John Corbley started to church with his wife and five children, suspecting no danger and, apparently, walking ahead of his family while he meditated deeply on his sermon. He was suddenly aroused by frightful shrieks as the Indians leaped on his family.

My dear wife had a sucking child in her arms; this little infant they killed and scalped. They then struck my wife sundry times, but not getting her down, the Indian who had aimed to shoot me ran to her, shot her through the body, and scalped her. My little boy, an only son, about six years old, they sunk the hatchet into his brains, and thus dispatched him. A daughter, besides the infant, they also killed and scalped. My eldest daughter who is yet alive, was hid in a tree about twenty yards from the place where the rest were killed, and saw the whole proceedings. She, seeing the Indians all go off, as she thought, got up and deliberately crept out of the hollow trunk; but one of them espying her, ran hastily up, knocked her down and scalped her; also her only surviving sister, on whose head they did not leave more than one inch round, either of flesh or skin, besides taking a piece out of her skull. She and the before-mentioned one are still miraculously preserved.

The whole ghastly operation took, he says, about ten minutes.³⁴ The father fainted and was found and borne off by a friend who arrived after the massacre.⁹

Not inexpert in torture, Europeans nevertheless felt there was something hellish and obscene about these animals that looked like men. Anything wicked could be postulated of them—lying, treachery, filthiness, greed, brutality, laziness, lasciviousness. Peter Martyr solemnly chronicles the tradition of a country called “Inzignanin,” the original inhabitants of which had been visited by men who had tails a meter long.¹⁰ In the Arctic, Frobisher's crew captured a female “whom divers of our Saylers supposed to be eyther a devill, or a witch,” so they plucked off her “buskins,” found she was not cloven-footed, and “for her ougly hew and deformity we let her goe.”¹¹ One native of that region, being captured by a stratagem, “for very choler and disdaine he bit his tongue in twaine,” whereas others, to avoid being taken, committed suicide by jumping into the sea.¹² At the other end of the globe Lopez Vaz, a Portuguese, reported that the natives of Tierra del Fuego were ten or eleven feet high. There were rumours of headless men with eyes in their breasts and of fierce Amazonian women. Obviously such creatures worshiped the devil, practiced every diabolical art, and were witches and wizards. Frobisher's crew were sure the Eskimos “are great inchanters, and use many charmes of witchcraft.”¹³ John Davis found them filled with a “devilish nature.”¹⁴ Henry Hawks wrote that the witchcraft of the Indians was such that when Europeans come near the seven golden cities of Cíbola, “they cast a mist upon them, so that they cannot see them.”¹⁵ John Hawkins found them “no such kinde of people as wee tooke them to bee, but more devilish a thousand partes and are eaters and devourers of any man they can catch.”¹⁶ Francis Drake, when he coasted along Brazil, watched the Indians making fires, “a sacrifice (as we learned) to the devils, about which they use conjurations, making heapes of sande and other ceremonies, that when any ship shall goe about to stay upon their coast … stormes and tempests may arise, to the casting away of ships and men.”¹⁷ The chief god they worship, reported Captain John Smith, is the devil: “They say that they haue conference with him, and fashion themselves as neare to his shape as they can imagine.”¹⁸ In this Protestant judgment Catholicism concurred. Wrote Father Joseph Jouvency: “They call some divinity, who is the author of evil, ‘Manitou,’ and fear him exceedingly. Beyond doubt it is the enemy of the human race, who extorts from some people divine honors and sacrifices.”¹⁹ And Father Pierre Biard agreed:

… all this region, though capable of the same prosperity as ours, nevertheless through Satan's malevolence, which reigns there, is only a horrible wilderness. …²⁰

They are, I say, savage, haunting the woods, ignorant, lawless and rude: they are wanderers, with nothing to attach them to a place, neither homes nor relationship, neither possessions nor love of country; as a people they have bad habits, are extremely lazy, gluttonous, profane, treacherous, cruel in their revenge, and given up to all kinds of lewdness, men and women alike. …²¹

The conflict of cultures was inevitable. When the white man tried to kidnap the Indian with the intent either of exhibiting him as a trophy, learning his language, or turning him into an interpreter, the Indian naturally grew suspicious and retaliated with whatever weapons he could command. When the Indian first roasted and ate a captured white man in order to acquire his knowledge or for ritualistic purposes sensible enough to the aborigine, the white man interpreted the act as the quintessence of diabolism. Against the superior military power and technological skill of the Europeans, the Indian could oppose only cunning and his knowledge of the land. Renaissance man—and this is particularly true of the Renaissance Englishman—found it difficult to understand how human beings (if they were human) could live without visible government, religion, or morality, and he therefore tended to assume that Indian culture, like all the rest of the world, was somehow organized under a king or an emperor with whom one could deal legally in matters of war and peace and the sale of land. Obviously the Indian had no concept of what to the Europeans were the elements of civil society; and he could fight the white man only by what the white man thought of as the basest treachery. The Machiavellian qualities in the European power struggle in some degree prepared the discoverers and the early colonists for some amount of bad faith, but not for the Indian usage of bad faith. Neither party to a treaty could understand what the word meant to the other.

What could the Indians be, except children of the devil?²² On De Soto's expedition one Indian, visibly possessed by the devil, was subjected to exorcism by the friars.²³ As late as 1666 George Alsop in A Character of the Province of Maryland not only seriously advanced the proposition that the “Susquehanok” Indians had no other deity but alleged that every four years a child was sacrificed to the devil, who in return permitted the Indians to talk to him by raising a great tempest;²⁴ and Edward Johnson described their deity in some detail:

It hath been a thing very frequent before the English came, for the Divell to appear unto them in a bodily shape, sometimes very ugly and terrible, and sometimes like a white boy, and chiefly in the most hideous woods and swamps … and since we came hither, they tell us of a very terrible beast for shape and bigness, that came into a wigwam toward the Northeast parts, remote from any English plantations, and took away six men at a time, who were never seen afterward.²⁵

Who but the offspring of Satan, theologians to the contrary notwithstanding, would destroy even their male children because of their dreams, or cast away their daughters at birth and cause them to be eaten by dogs?²⁶ Or dispossess old women of such clothing as they had and shoot arrows at the pudenda? Or seize small children by the leg, throw them high in the air, and shoot them full of arrows before they reached the ground?²⁷ Or kill a trusting New Englander, his Bible in his hand, rip him open, and put his Bible in his belly?²⁸

Cruelty begat cruelty, deceit was countered by deceit, and bad faith on the one side excused bad faith on the other. Although De Soto's expedition was, within reason, pacific in intention, the kidnaping of Indians by De Ayllón's expedition in 1521 had led to the massacre of some two hundred Spaniards by the Indians, and De Soto found himself the heir of a hostile attitude he could do nothing to overcome. The story of his expedition is one long tale of ambush, treachery, and revenge.²⁹ Thus, perhaps imitating Cortés and warned of the intention of the Chief Vitachuco to assassinate the Spanish leader, De Soto seized that Indian and thus set off a series of reprisals. Vitachuco and his fellow captives plotted against the Spaniards, and the chief attempted to strangle De Soto at high table, whereupon the captive Indians were massacred by the whites. The long struggle to overcome the Apalachee Indians, “gigantic in stature” and “very valiant and spirited” is a second chapter in the story, and the slaughter of both Indians and Spaniards at the burning of the Indian town of Mavila is a third—an episode that started an incipient mutiny in the remnants of De Soto's army. The Spaniards, working their way through difficult terrain, had to kidnap Indians for guides, the Indians retaliated by ambushing and assassinating the Spaniards, and the Spaniards countered on occasion by cutting off the hands and noses of Indians and sending them back to their villages as a warning. In the Pequot War of 1637, the burning and massacre of some hundreds of Indian men, women, and children trapped in the “fort” at Mystic, Connecticut—a massacre that continued until the English “grew weary”—drew no reproof from contemporary chroniclers but was on the contrary regarded as a signal proof of divine intervention. “The Lord,” wrote Edward Johnson in his Wonder-Working Providence (1653), the first published history of Massachusetts, “was pleased to assist his people in this warre, and deliver them out of the Indians hands.” As for the famous King Philip's War, which lasted two years, cost the lives of one-tenth of the adult males in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and exposed two-thirds of the towns and villages to Indian raids, the contest was illustrated on the side of the Indians by the raping and scalping of women, the cutting off of fingers and feet of men, the skinning of white captives, the ripping open of the bellies of pregnant women, the cutting off of the penises of the males, and the wearing of the fingers of white men as bracelets or necklaces. Naturally the whites retaliated. When King Philip was finally shot, his head and hands were cut off and his body was quartered and hung on four trees. “The Providence of God wonderfully appeared” in this, wrote “R. H.” in The Warr in New-England Visibly Ended (1677).³⁰

The discovery that the Earthly Paradise was inhabited by the offspring of Satan compelled Europeans to choose between two alternatives, neither of which proved successful. Either you converted the Indians into children of Christ or you exterminated them in a holy war.³⁵ The Mediterranean peoples made more progress in converting the children of Satan, the British in exterminating them. The long history of American injustice to the red man springs from a profound and brutal misunderstanding that passed into literary tradition, for, as Roy Harvey Pearce has shown,³¹ the so-called Indian captivity narratives understandably passed from fact to fiction. They became exercises in emotion, not historical records. The Indian long remained a figure of terror, a child of hell, the evil being of The Jibbenainosay of Robert Montgomery Bird, the reason why Custer's massacre occurred and why Kentucky was known as a dark and bloody ground. If we put aside a few humanitarian successes like those of John Eliot and the Quakers, a handful of documents like Eleazar Wheelock's Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon (Boston, 1763) or William Smith's Indian Songs of Peace: with a Proposal in a Prefatory Epistle, for Erecting Indian Schools (New York, 1752)—and of course Ramona and A Century of Dishonor—it is clear that the Indian was not sentimentalized until he became relatively harmless.³⁶ For most of North America throughout most of its history the Indian has been, like the rattlesnake, the alligator, and poison ivy, an inexplicable curse on Utopia. His tawny presence darkened the landscape, and his war whoop chilled the blood.

Notes

1. The quotation is from the revised translation of the Italian appearing in George Parker Winship, ed., Sailors' Narratives of Voyages along the New England Coast, 1524-1624, Boston, 1905, pp. 5-7, 21-22. The sentence quoted from Peter Martyr is in the De Orbe Novo, Vol. I, p. 217.

2. Jane, Select Documents, Vol. I, pp. 30, 32. See also Edward Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, Birmingham, 1885, “A Treatyse of the Newe India,” pp. 29-30.

3. Markham, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, pp. 37-47.

4. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Vol. VII, p. 227.

5. Arber, First Three English Books, p. 70.

6. Clements R. Markham, ed., The Hawkins' Voyages during the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, London, Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1878, p. 323.

7. At Porto Bello on Darien the wretched group of Spaniards led by Nicuesa ate their dogs, toads, the dead bodies of Indians they had massacred, and buried corpses already putrefying. Out of 700 men only 40 survived. Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, Vol. I, pp. 275-76. On cannibalism among the wretched members of Narváez's men see the narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeça de Vaca in Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, p. 63. Dried human flesh preserved Esquivel.

8. Francisco López de Gómara, The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the VVeast India, now called new Spayne, translated by Thomas Nichols, New York (Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints), 1940, pp. 203, 393.

9. The first quotation is from Father Le Jeune's “Brief Relation of the Journey to New France,” The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols., Cleveland, 1896-1901, Vol. V, pp. 29-31. The original is in Latin. For more horrors see pp. 51-55. The letter of the Reverend John Corbley can be read in Samuel G. Drake, ed., Indian Captivities or Life in the Wigwam, New York, 1857, pp. 336-37. The Drake collection comprises 31 narratives running from the captivity of Juan Ortiz in 1528 to that of J. W. B. Thompson in 1836.

10. Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, Vol. II, p. 261.

11. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Vol. VII, p. 220.

12. Ibid., pp. 220, 282, 305.

13. Ibid., p. 373.

14. Ibid., p. 400.

15. Ibid., Vol. IX, p. 382.

16. Ibid., Vol. X, p. 29.

17. Ibid., Vol. XI, p. 107.

18. Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1910, Vol. I, p. 75. A new edition of Smith's writings is promised.

19. “An Account of the Canadian Mission,” Jesuit Relations, Vol. I, p. 287.

20. Ibid., Vol. III, p. 33. And compare p. 131.

21. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 173.

22. There is of course an enormous literature. For an extensive bibliography on the theory that the Indians were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel see Appendix A of Lewis Hanke, The First Social Experiments in America, Cambridge (Mass.), 1935. On some of the novel problems in theology, ehics, and law created by the discovery of “savages” in the New World see Rosario Romeo, “Le Scoperte Americane nella Conscienza Italiana del Cinquecento,” Revista Storica Italiana, 65(2): 222-57; (3): 326-79 (Naples, 1953). Still excellent on the problem of Indian origins is Justin Winsor's great Narrative and Critical History, Vol. I in general and Chapter V of Volume II, though of course the anthropological lore has to be updated. The pioneer study of the treatment of the Indian in American literature (still a good one) is Herman F. C. ten Kate, “The Indian in Literature,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1921, Washington, 1922, pp. 507-28; writing as an ethnologist, ten Kate found most of the literary treatments of limited value. His essay is a condensation of work published in Dutch in 1919 and 1920. A full-length “literary” treatment is that of Albert Keiser, The Indian in American Literature, New York, 1933. A far more penetrating analysis of the problem of the conflict of cultures is Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization, Baltimore, 1953.

23. Varner, The Florida of the Inca, p. 281.

24. George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland (1666), Chapter II, passim. There are various editions.

25. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, p. 263.

26. Cabeça de Vaca, narrative, in Hodge and Lewis, Spanish Explorers, pp. 64-65.

27. Varner, The Florida of the Inca, pp. 493-94.

28. Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699, New York, 1913, p. 86.

29. I draw my incidents from the two standard accounts: Varner, The Florida of the Inca, passim, and the “Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando De Soto, By the Gentleman of Elvas,” translated by Buckingham Smith (rev.), in Hodge and Lewis, Spanish Explorers.

30. For the observation by “R. H.,” see Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, p. 105; for Johnson's, see Wonder-Working Providence, p. 169. On the Indian wars, see also John Underhill, Neuues from America (1638), John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War (1670?), Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England, With the Eastern Indians, Boston, 1726, and (more favorable to the Indians) Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (1677), in which Gookin, not unaware of Indian wiliness, nevertheless stoutly defends the Christian Indians. The praying Indians were sometimes treacherous, and the whites massacred thirty of them on one occasion.

31. See Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narratives,” American Literature, 19 (I): 1-20 (March 1947), and “The ‘Ruines of Mankind’: The Indian and the Puritan Mind,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XIII(2): 200-217 (January 1952).

32. The English experienced something similar, as may be just made out by putting together the details in “The Voyage of the Barbara to Brazil, 1540,” R. G. Maarsden, ed., The Naval Miscellany, II, London, Publications of the Navy Records Society, Vol. XL, 1912. See pp. 9, 29, 50, 57, 59.

33. The expectation of being eaten if captured lingered until the end of the seventeenth century. Thus Jonathan Dickinson, with a group of fellow Quakers, shipwrecked on the Florida coast near Cape Canaveral, was roughly treated by the Indians, whom they feared as “‘man-eaters,” but the Indians murdered no one, looted only what they thought was their due, and eventually got the shipwrecked Europeans into the hands of friendly Spaniards. See Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews, eds., Jonathan Dickinson's Journal or, God's Protecting Providence, New Haven, 1945, p. 29.

34. The unpredictable conduct of the Indians from the white point of view is evident to anybody who will read through Samuel G. Drake, ed., Indian Captivities or Life in the Wigwam, New York, 1857, the woodcuts in which are themselves revelatory. In New England the Tarrantine Indians tied captives to trees and gnawed their flesh piecemeal from the bones. See J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, New York, 1910, p. 149. After an unsuccessful attempt to hang a captive Indian, another made a hole in him and sucked out his blood. Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, New York, 1913, p. 41.

35. There is much truth in the assumption that, given the white man's superiority in weapons, surprise, ambush, cunning, and deceit were the only possible weapons left to the aborigines. But the Indian prowess with bow and arrow (at least among certain tribes) made him a match for the European armed with crossbow and arquebus. Despite their armor the Spanish under Coronado were kept out of the village of Tiguez by a great shower of arrows. (F. W. Hodge, ed., Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, New York, 1907, p. 321.) The “Narrative of the Gentleman of Elvas” concerning De Soto's expedition says flatly that “Before a Christian can make a single shot with either [crossbow or arquebus], an Indian will discharge three or four arrows; and he seldom misses of his object. When the arrow meets with no armor, it pierces as deeply as the shaft from a crossbow” (same, p. 148); and according to the Inca the Spaniards more or less abandoned armor for quilted cloaks (i.e. cloaks lined with blankets) as the only viable protection against Indians who “fired so skillfully and close together that they had hardly released one arrow before they had placed another in the bow.” (Varner, The Florida of the Inca, pp. 180, 236.)

36. The tendency to think that James Fenimore Cooper wrote about the noble savage arises from the obsession readers seem to have with that Byronic young man, Uncas, in The Last of the Mohicans. This is to overlook not merely Magua, and Indian John in The Pioneers, but also the disillusioned Indian portraits in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Wyandotté, The Oak Openings, and other “Indian” novels by Cooper.