SOURCE: Jennings, Francis. “Savage Form for Peasant Function.” In The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, pp. 58-84. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

[In the following essay, originally presented in 1971, Jennings argues that the English conception of the natives of North America continually changed to better fit the purposes of the colonists, whewther as trading allies or military enemies.]

In his book on the Canadian fur trade, Harold A. Innis has conceived of the contact between Europe and the Americas, not as a collision of civilization and savagery, but as a meeting of two civilizations, one relatively more complex than the other, but both extremely responsive to each other.¹ Innis's comment referred particularly to economic relations, which will be discussed at length hereafter, but it is also applicable in other contexts. If the two societies were comparable as civilizations, then their member persons were comparable as human beings.

To the persons involved in contact situations there was at first some doubt on this score. For a brief while Columbus's crew were “persons from the sky” to the West Indians, and the Mexicans debated too long for their own good whether Cortés's troops were gods.² Indian disillusionment was not long postponed.

Europeans, however, have had a longer struggle with their primitive conceptions. Deluded by successes, they have preserved assumptions that “worked,” selecting and perceiving phenomena in accordance with the assumptions. The very name Indian bears witness to Columbus's resistance to a novel idea. The modern Mexican scholar Edmundo O'Gorman has argued that America had to be invented because of its explorers' reluctance to discover it.³

This study focuses on the conceptions of Englishmen rather than Spaniards, more particularly the varied shapes in which Englishmen conceived the savages of America. A basic rule was that any given Englishman at any given time formed his views in accordance with his purposes. Those who came for quick plunder saw plots and malignancy on every side; in a mirror image of their own intent, their savages were sinister and treacherous—envisioned much as the English saw Turks and Spaniards who were likewise fit objects of prey and likewise intransigent about accepting their role. When Indians were regarded as partners in profitable trade, they appeared less threatening, and their vices were excused. When they resisted eviction from lands wanted by the colonizers, they acquired demonic dimensions. When they were wanted as soldiers for war against the French, the martial abilities of these demons were appreciated rather than decried. In short, like the most modern of architects, the Englishman devised the savage's form to fit his function.⁴

The word savage thus underwent considerable alteration of meaning as different colonists pursued their varied ends. One aspect of the term remained constant, however: the savage was always inferior to civilized men. Ethnocentric historians have been quite correct in asserting that English colonizers never adopted the conception of the Noble Savage (although they sometimes looked for noble classes in Indian society). Even William Penn advocated justice for Indians on the grounds that “we make profession of things so far transcending” the conscience of the “poor Indian.”⁵ The constant of Indian inferiority implied the rejection of his humanity and determined the limits permitted for his participation in the mixing of cultures. The savage was prey, cattle, pet, or vermin—he was never citizen. As the myth of the Ignoble Savage gathered momentum, it came to deny the Indian citizenship even in his own community. Upholders of the myth denied that either savage tyranny or savage anarchy could rightfully be called government, and therefore there could be no justification for Indian resistance to European invasion. Even Helen Hunt Jackson, that staunch champion of “fair” treatment for Indians, rejected “feeble sentimentalism” to declare, “Of the fairness of holding that ultimate sovereignty belonged to the civilized discoverer as against the savage barbarian, there is no manner nor ground of doubt.”⁶

This comment hints of one reason for inventing savagery, a reason that was stated more explicitly by Chief Justice John Marshall when he argued with impeccable logic from a false assumption to a conclusion that he admitted would be criminal if not for the assumption. “The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages,” wrote Marshall in a landmark decision in 1823, “whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. … That law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to a people under such circumstances.”⁷

To invade and dispossess the people of an unoffending civilized country would violate morality and transgress the principles of international law, but savages were exceptional. Being uncivilized by definition, they were outside the sanctions of both morality and law. The condition of savagery therefore involved more than aesthetic sensibilities, and the chief justice of a country espousing separation of church and state could show no official concern about Indians' lack of Christianity as criterion of legal status. For Justice Marshall the fundamental criteria of legal savagery were two: subsistence “from the forest” and the “occupation” of war. Since it could hardly be argued that civilized societies eschewed war or withheld honor from professional soldiers, the critical factor in being savage reduced to a mode of subsistence. In that mode both the kind and place of activity were important. Insofar as the difference between civilized and uncivilized men is concerned, the theorists of international law, whom Marshall followed, have held consistently that civilized people stay in place and thus acquire such right in their inhabited lands as uncivilized wanderers cannot rightfully claim. Emmerich de Vattel, a noted eighteenth-century expounder of international law whose views were influential among American statesmen, used comparison to make the issue precise: “While the conquest of the civilized Empires of Peru and Mexico was a notorious usurpation, the establishment of various colonies upon the continent of North America might, if done within just limits, have been entirely lawful. The peoples of those vast tracts of land rather roamed over them than inhabited them.”⁸

The premises of these legal philosophers corresponded not at all with the actual state of Indian societies at about the time of French and English invasions. The natives of the Atlantic coast and the Saint Lawrence-Great Lakes inland coasts supported themselves by hunting and fishing alone or by hunting, fishing, and agriculture. Since the character of hunter was ascribed to all Indians, it is essential to notice that among the east coast tribes south of present-day Maine hunting was a supplementary activity in a predominately agricultural or, to be precise, horticultural economy.⁹

The quality of both the hunting and the horticulture has been much misunderstood. Even in a land lush with wild life, a hunter has to know the habits of his prey in that locality; he has to know the salt licks and water holes and breeding places, the peculiarities of local climate and weather. Without such specialized information, even the most skillfully trained user of weapons can go hungry in the woods or lose himself and die of exposure.¹⁰ Indian hunters, whether full-time or part-time, worked in well-defined territories in which they claimed varieties of property right.¹¹ Sometimes they maintained trap lines along fixed routes. Sometimes they preserved particular areas as subsistence hunting territories. Among the agricultural Indians a custom widely prevailed of maintaining large parks for hunting to supplement the produce of tillage. Once or twice each year the men of a village gathered to burn away the brush. Much labor obviously went into these burnings, a purpose of which was to provide pasture land for deer as well as to ease the passage of the hunters.¹² No distinction is here made between communal property, family property, and personal property. All three kinds seem to have existed and evolved. The point is merely that given localities belonged to particular persons or groups who confined themselves to those territories and excluded outsiders from using them.

Fishing also involved knowledge and craft. Compilers Harold E. Driver and William C. Massey have concluded that “fish were obtained by Indians in every major manner known to modern commercial fishermen.” Again knowledge of specific localities was important to the fisherman. Like trap lines, weirs were maintained more or less permanently; one, in Boston, has been dated by carbon 14 analysis as four thousand years old. Shellfish beds were visited regularly by whole villages for harvesting. Need it be argued that oyster beds are not portable?¹³

Indians lacked plows, but their horticulture was both intensive and productive. Their maize complex of crops and cultivation techniques was as productive at their own hands as it is today among the people to whom they taught it, and they grew a great variety of plants besides maize. A student of Indian farming practices makes the interesting suggestion that European “improvements” in cultivation methods “provided the chief requisite for soil erosion by stirring the soil over the entire field. … For this reason it appears that the Indians were able to grow corn on the same field longer than the white settlers.”¹⁴ A Smithsonian scholar estimated in 1929 that “about four-sevenths of the agricultural production of the United States (farm values) are in economic plants domesticated by the American Indian and taken over by the white man.”¹⁵

Labor was divided on the Indian farm. Men girdled and felled trees to open up crop land and then broke the sod. Women sowed and weeded, “wherein they exceeded our English husband-men,” according to William Wood in 1634, “keeping it so cleare with their Clamme shell-hooes, as if it were a garden rather than a corne-field, not suffering a choaking weede to advance his audacious head above their infant corne.” Weeding was so constant an activity among Indians that cessation of it drew alarmed attention from the English. In 1644 New Englanders suspected warlike intentions because their Indian neighbors had “left their Corne unweeded.” In Virginia shiftless colonists who neglected their weeding were ridiculed by the painstaking Indian women¹⁶. … Before European invasion most eastern Indians subsisted largely on the products of their farms and fishing. A nutritionist has concluded that the Indians of southern New England ate only about half as much meat per capita as Americans do today. A Dutch colonist reported that the Indians “do not eat a satisfactory meal” without cornmeal mush.”¹⁷

The basic difference between Indian and English subsistence economies was not farming but herding. So far as meat products were concerned, this difference was minor, but herding has other implications. Indians had no dairy products in their diet. Although they wove reeds into mats and baskets and practiced finger weaving, they failed to develop looms, and their shortage of textiles was felt so keenly that woolen blankets and garments became the great counter-staple of the “fur” trade.¹⁸

As regards animal management, the English kept herds of domesticated livestock—often letting them run free, however, to forage as they might. (To call swine domesticated, when raised in such circumstances, may be stretching a point.) The Indians' livestock had never been domesticated, except for the dog; but, as has been noticed, Indians created pasture land that attracted grazing animals. After contact with Europeans some Indians came to speak of the deer as their “sheep.”¹⁹ In the eighteenth century an Oneida chief rationalized the difference between European and Indian management thus: “The Cattle you raise are your own; but those which are Wild are still ours.”²⁰ Indian pasture was made by communal effort, English by private. Actually the colonists of the early contact period avoided the heavy labor of clearing woods whenever possible, bending their chief efforts instead to acquiring the lands already cleared by Indians.²¹

In respect to herding, Englishmen introduced not only livestock but also the forage crops necessary to the European method of maintaining animals in a narrowly restricted habitat. Forage grasses were unknown in aboriginal America, and the browse that sufficed for deer at scattered intervals was inadequate for the concentrated herding of the colonists. The introduction of “English” grass—blue grasses, rye grasses, bents, and white clover—made large herds of grazing animals possible, manageable, and profitable.²² The herdsman transformed the browse pasture into the forage pasture, and, in New England particularly, he raised meat for the market as well as for subsistence.²³ Some of our earliest cowboys worked in Harvard Yard.

Contrary to assumptions of inadequate yields from Indian cultivation, there is considerable evidence of production and storage of surpluses.²⁴ Uniformly the early European colonists depended on such surpluses for survival. On this point Jamestown's John Smith thought that the “worthie discourse” of a stout young Indian deserved to be remembered, and he gave it thus: “We perceive and well know you intend to destroy us, that are here to intreat and desire your friendship and to enjoy our houses and plant our fields, of whose fruits you shall participate, otherwise you will have the worst by our absence, for we can plant any where, though with more labour, and we know you cannot live if you want our harvest, and that reliefe wee bring you; if you promise us peace we will beleeve you, if you proceed in revenge, we will abandon the Countrie.” Smith promised peace.²⁵ At this stage of colonization, notably, the colonists preferred the company of competent farmers to the land that would be free for the taking if the farmers removed themselves. As Arthur C. Parker so eloquently has said, the cultivated maize of the Indians “was the bridge over which English civilization crept, tremblingly and uncertainly, at first, then boldly and surely to a foothold and a permanent occupation of America.”²⁶

Apart from the desperate situations of the “starving times” of the colonists, Indian surplus crops often became a commodity in trade.²⁷ In aboriginal times the Hurons of the Great Lakes region had laid the foundations for a “trading empire” by carrying their surplus corn as a commodity to the hunting Indians of northern Canada.²⁸ In Virginia there were communal storage houses; in New England families kept individual storage bins underground.²⁹ The Narragansett tribe of New England cleared twice as much ground as was planted each year, in order to let fields lie alternately fallow.³⁰ They gave and sold large quantities of corn to the colonists of Massachusetts Bay.³¹ In another respect also the English farmer and herdsman depended upon their Indian neighbors; namely, to keep down the numbers of wolves and other predators that otherwise would have “oppressed” the colonists.³²

Indians were as much tied to particular localities as were Europeans. John Smith carefully itemized the territories of Virginia's natives.³³ Edward Winslow, in 1624, noted that every sachem in New England knew “how far the bounds and limits of his own country extendeth; and that is his own proper inheritance.”³⁴ Whether hunters or farmers, all Indian bands or other organized community groups lived in territories marked by specific natural boundaries such as mountains or streams. Their lives were governed by cycles of movement within their territories. When fish shoaled, plants fruited, and animals seasonally migrated, Indians revisited familiar spots. Both hunters and farmers gathered at certain seasons in tribal centers or villages for the performance of unifying rituals and public business as well as for simple sociability.³⁵ Agricultural villages had permanent buildings and were occupied during the entire planting season. When the ground became infertile through constant replanting, those Indians who did not fertilize their lands—some of the coastal peoples did—removed their villages to new sites; ordinarily, however, even this movement was cyclical, since the old sites were likely to be reoccupied after a lapse of some years.³⁶ An Indian who “wandered” into the territory of an alien tribe, or who poached on the hunting grounds of a fellow tribesman without permission, committed thereby an offense that might be punished by death.³⁷ Farmers planted in tracts assigned to them by their chiefs.³⁸ In the most literal sense every Indian knew his place on the land and was kept in it by enforced custom.³⁹ The Indian did not wander; he commuted.⁴⁰

In this discussion care has been taken to limit the remarks to subsistence hunting. There was another kind that served as a basis for the far-ranging Indian of the hunter stereotype, but it had not been a feature of aboriginal society. This was the commercial hunting produced by the impact of European colonization, and it was dictated by the combined pressures of the international market in furs and the Indian dependence on European products that occurred after native crafts fell into disuse. An early Dutch observer noted that Indians hunting at a great distance had to take food with them. He clearly distinguished between the subsistence hunting for deer “near the sea-shore and rivers where the Christians mostly reside” and the commercial hunting for beaver that were “mostly taken far inland, there being few of them near the settlements.”⁴¹ Whether searching for food or for commodity, the Indian hunter always returned after the chase to his native village.

It is clear enough that there was a difference in quality between the cultures of Indians and those of the colonizing Europeans. What is being argued here is only that the difference was relative rather than absolute. Without the shadow of a doubt it was of a nature that permitted and even encouraged interaction between the cultures and was thus contradictory to John Marshall's edict that Indians were “a people with whom it was impossible to mix, and who could not be governed as a distinct society.”⁴²

Defined by technological standards, Indian culture has been called neolithic or primitive. By sociopolitical criteria, however, recent theory suggests that Europe's intrusion transformed Indian communities into peasant societies. What has been lacking to make recognition explicit is the realization that invasion-era Indians made up what A. L. Kroeber has called “part-societies.” Expounding on Kroeber's concept, Robert Redfield held that “a peasant's community is only a part-community; his society is incomplete without the town or city. … To the extent that the trade of the tribesman with the town becomes necessary to him and requires him to enter into some relationships of personal and moral dependence on the townsman, that tribesman, to that extent and incompletely, is less of a tribesman than he was and more of a peasant.”⁴³

If such distinctions between primitives and peasants have validity, then the Indians who traded and treated with Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had departed absolutely from their precontact primitive state. It is impossible not to fit the facts of their lives into Redfield's economic criteria for peasantry: “It is the market, in one form or another, that pulls out from the compact social relations of self-contained primitive communities some parts of men's doings and puts people into fields of economic activity that are increasingly independent of the rest of what goes on in the local life. The local traditional and moral world and the wider and more impersonal world of the market are in principle distinct, opposed to each other, as Weber and others have emphasized. In peasant society the two are maintained in some balance; the market is held at arm's length, so to speak.”⁴⁴

Eric R. Wolf has substituted political criteria for Redfield's economic standards, but his model fits Indian contact communities just as closely as Redfield's: “It is the crystallization of executive power which serves to distinguish the primitive from the civilized, rather than whether or not such power controls are located in one kind of place or another. Not the city, but the state is the decisive criterion of civilization and it is the appearance of the state which marks the threshold of transition between food cultivators in general and peasants. Thus, it is only when a cultivator is integrated into a society with a state—that is, when the cultivator becomes subject to the demands and sanctions of power-holders outside his social stratum—that we can appropriately speak of peasantry.”⁴⁵

The first thing that European invaders did was to claim the Indians as their subjects and to enforce the claim where feasible. Those Indians who escaped full subjection in fact did so only by becoming clients of one European polity or another, and the acceptance of protection invariably implied acceptance, to greater or lesser degree, of the demands and sanctions of the European power-holders.

By either economic or political criteria, therefore, American Indians departed from the primitive state—the only condition to which the term savage has any conceivably objective reference—when European traders and governors appeared on the tribal doorstep.

How, then, did the observed data of the Indian peasant turn into the myth of the roaming savage? Part of the answer is found in the deliberate intent of propagandists to create opinion in England favorable to aggressive policies in America, but another part is contained in the development of connotations that became incorporated in the term and acquired a life of their own. This development was long peculiar to English. In Dutch, Swedish, and German, the Romance word savage failed to find a welcome. Colonizers from the Netherlands used wilden for the Indians, and German translates “savage people” into wildes Volk. In Swedish the Indians were wildar.⁴⁶ In French sauvage was used ambiguously with connotations of noble primitivism or of bestiality according to the outlook and mood of the writer. Marc Lescarbot, who used sauvage consistently in his own writing, objected to its use in a pejorative sense: “If we commonly call them Savages, the word is abusive and unmerited, for they are anything but that, as will be proved in the course of this history.” Throughout the eighteenth century French colonials seem to have used the term as a mere synonym for Indian, and their meanings vacillated with their attitudes. Not until the nineteenth century did French usage harden into the pattern already long established in English.⁴⁷

The Latin root silva, meaning woods, took two directions in English to make “sylvan” and “savage.” “Sylvan” now portrays woodland serenity and beauty. Through French sauvage, however, the idea of ferocious wild beasts came as one of the word's meanings into English. The term did not gain general currency as a substantive denoting a human person of the wilderness until late in the sixteenth century. At that time it was used as an adjective applying indifferently to plant, animal, or person.⁴⁸ An early Jamestown narrative refers to “wild and savage people, that live and lie up and downe in troupes like heards of Deare in a Forrest”; these people were “very loving and gentle.”⁴⁹ The special development of “savage” in English was a stress on beastly ferocity that displaced simple wildness as the dominant meaning of the word. Thus savage persons came to be wild like wolves instead of wild like deer. This development was long and uneven, and only its first phase can be shown here.

As late as 1563 Jean Ribaut's narrative of Florida referred only to “people” and “Indians,” who are unfailingly described as gentle; “savage” is not to be seen.⁵⁰ In 1566, after the destruction of the Huguenot colony on the Carolina coast, Nicolas Le Challeux survived to take refuge in England. In his account of the colony there were savages, but they were “kind and gentle”; the human beings described as more cruel than wild beasts were the Spanish exterminators of the colony.⁵¹ The simple meaning of wild person continued in the extensive use of “savage” by the two Richard Hakluyts, lawyer and geographer, who kept in touch with the explorers and colonizers of their day. In his “Notes on Colonization” (written in 1578, printed in 1582), Hakluyt the lawyer used “savage” more or less synonymously with “inland people.”⁵²

In 1580 the geographer Hakluyt probably wrote the dedication to the first English translation of Jacques Cartier's travels. It asked pointedly why no effort had been made to send colonies “to reduce this savage nation to some civilitie,” and it also described the people, “though simple and rude in manners, and destitute of the knowledge of God or any good lawes, yet of nature gentle and tractable, and most apt to receive the Christian Religion, and to subject themselves to some good government.” The translation of Cartier thus introduced was curious in more than one respect. It was a translation of a translation, and it showed a definite feeling by translator John Florio about the use of “savage.” Cartier's manuscript had not yet been published in France, so Florio had to work from a version published in Italian by a Venetian geographer. In this the word salvatichi—the Italian cognate of “savages”—appeared frequently, but Florio nowhere translated it as “savage persons.” In one passage where detti Salvatichi appeared three times, Florio Englished it twice as “said wild men” and the third time simply as “said men.” On the other hand, Florio translated le bestie as “savage beastes.” Clearly Florio, who was an Oxford scholar, identified “savage” with wilderness and animals, but distinguished human beings by other words.⁵³

In 1583 another member of the Hakluyt circle, Sir George Peckham, emphatically and repeatedly stressed the heathenism of the Indians, arguing “that it is lawfull and necessarie to trade and traffike with the Savages: And to plant in their Countries,” his justification being the obligation to save savage souls, and in 1584 the geographer Hakluyt picked up this theme in his highly influential Discourse of Western Planting, in which he continued to refer to Indians as “these simple people that are in errour into the righte and perfecte waye of their salvacion.”⁵⁴

Generally it appears that the Hakluyts and their friends wanted to present Indians in an attractive light because of their desire to interest backers for their colonization schemes. In 1585 the elder Hakluyt (lawyer) set forth his “Inducements to the liking of the voyage intended towards Virginia” in admirably clear and succinct language: “The ends of this voyage are these: 1, to plant Christian religion; 2, To trafficke; 3, To conquer; Or, to doe all three.”⁵⁵ For such purposes mild and tractable Indians would be best. In the same year colonist Ralph Lane, though apparently brutal in his treatment of the Indians, wrote home from Roanoke to say that “the soil is of an huge and unknowen greatnesse, and very wel peopled and towned, though savagelie.” Lane added, “Savages … possesse the land.”⁵⁶

An interested friend of the Hakluyts was William Shakespeare, whose omnivorous appetite for colorful words did not neglect “savage.” Bartlett's Concordance quotes forty-two phrases from Shakespeare using “savage,” “savagely,” “savageness,” and “savagery” to express attributes of wildness, rudeness, bestiality, and cruelty; and the words were sometimes applied to persons. But Shakespeare was a wild-eyed poet; the solid, steady scholars who produced the King James Bible in 1611 avoided “savage.”⁵⁷

The term gradually gained form and acceptance through its use by the people engaged in colonizing, and they continued to use it uncertainly for a couple of decades. They obviously regarded it as a slur associated with heathenism, nakedness, and general contemptibility, but equally obviously they saw exciting possibilities in the savages for easy exploitation. Although the savages were wild people, and therefore an inferior sort, they were still people.

In 1606 the Virginia Company of London instructed its colonists to buy a stock of corn from the “naturals” before the English intention to settle permanently should become evident. The company's chiefs were sure that “you cannot carry yourselves so towards them but they will grow discontented with your habitation.” Nevertheless, the colonists were to offend the natives as little as possible, consistent with their mission of trade and plantation, because the presence of the natives was essential to the mission's fulfilment. So long as trade with the natives remained a dominant purpose, this logic prevailed. “Savages,” when so named, were discussed in relatively mild and tolerant terms, and no one tried to exterminate the Indians either factually or metaphorically. The official instructions of the Virginia Company were careful to refer to the Indians as “native people,” “naturals,” and “country people.”⁵⁸ In an oddly mixed official publication of a slightly later date, the natives are “Indians” when mentioned in trading contexts, “savages” when the necessity for defense is mentioned. At one point this tract cautions that “there is no trust to the fidelitie of humane beasts, except a man will make league with Lions, Beares, and Crocodiles,” but the only specific use of “savages” is distant in the text from this beast imagery.⁵⁹ Even tough John Smith, for all his swagger and bluster, was ready to regard Indians as peers when the price was right. Certainly no Christian Englishman should have tolerated the thought of another Englishman in savage servitude, but Smith carried young Henry Spelman off to a nearby chief, and as Spelman later complained, “unknowne to me” Smith “sould me to him for a town caled Powhatan.”⁶⁰

Change came with the Indian uprising of 1622.⁶¹ Before that war the Hakluyt tradition had been continued in London by the Reverend Samuel Purchas, who boasted of how carefully the Virginians had conciliated the “salvages” and of how the English paid in valuable commodities for all their newly occupied land—“a thing of no small consequence to the conscience, where the milde Law of Nature, not that violent law of Armes, layes the foundation of their possession.”⁶² But contention over the land was exactly what had precipitated the war. The discovery of tobacco's profitability had altered the Virginians' attitudes toward native neighbors. So long as the colony depended heavily on trade for skins and furs, nearby trading partners were an asset. They changed into a liability when trade became secondary. The colonists could and did raise tobacco by themselves—the Indians had taught them well—and they now coveted their neighbors' cleared lands more than their company. The lucrative weed stimulated a reorganization of Virginian society involving large “grants” of lands, accompanied by rapid growth and scattering of the English population. How Indians were persuaded to part with lands during this period is not clear; despite boasts of purchase, there are no deeds to show for it such as appeared later in New England. Between 1618 and 1622 English numbers appear to have doubled, and Indian hostility grew with them. Finally the alarmed Indians rose in a desperate effort to drive away or exterminate the intruders.

It was then that John Smith and Samuel Purchas gave a sharp twist to the meaning of “savage” that originated its present ugliness. Smith was moved by the Virginia war to dilate upon his habitually uncomplimentary references to Indians. Where formerly he had dwelt on their supposed treachery and other evil qualities in terms that he might have used interchangeably for Turk or Spaniard, he now adopted the beast imagery latent in “savage” and fastened it explicitly upon savage persons. In his Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624, the “perfidious and inhumane people” became “cruell beasts” with “a more unnaturall brutishness then beasts.” Throughout Smith's account of the Indian massacre, “savage” appears prominently. This is the more notable because eight years earlier Smith had railed against a personal enemy for “trecherie among the Salvages” whom he had identified at that time as “poore innocent soules.”⁶³

Smith's admiring friend Purchas joined him in the turnabout. Purchas contributed complimentary verses to the Generall Historie, remarking that “Smiths Forge mends all, makes chaines for Savage Nation / Frees, feeds the rest.”⁶⁴ A year later Purchas published his own magnum opus, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, in part of which, contrary to his usual practice of presenting edited versions of others' writings, he spoke at length in his own voice to formulate an elaborate and seminal rationalization for colonization by conquest.⁶⁵

Smith and Purchas presumably were familiar with the circumstances of Virginia related by one Captain Butler “in the winter” of 1622. Butler “unmasked” the colony in a denunciation of its managers for their neglect and exploitation of the settlers. “There haveinge been, as itt is thought, not fewer than Tenn thousand soules transported thether, there are not, through the aforenamed abuses and neglects, above Two thousand of them att the present to be found alive … in steed of a Plantacion, itt will shortly gett the name of a slaughter house.” Of the 8,000 dead immigrants, 347 had been killed in the Indian massacre. If Indians deserved a bad name because of the 347, what might the Virginia Company's gentlemen deserve to be called for the other 7,600?⁶⁶

But Smith and Purchas were not interested in evenhanded distribution of blame.⁶⁷ Both wrote under great pressure to counteract the bad effect on public opinion of the company's bankruptcy and dissolution in 1624.⁶⁸ There can be little doubt that the company had been looted by its organizers. If the public were to become generally conscious of its bad management and scandalous peculation, investors would withhold funds from the future colonization to which Smith and Purchas were committed. A scapegoat was needed—a manageable scapegoat that could be heaped with blame for past disasters, then safely got out of the way to remove fears of the future. Smith's book provided the goat. Purchas sacrificed it.⁶⁹

Purchas's unique distinction was the invention of the nonpersonnonland qualities of savages and the world they lived in—the depersonalization of persons who were “wild.” Turning away from his prewar boasts of how Englishmen had conciliated the savages, Purchas justified (in 1625) the Virginians' retaliatory massacres of the Indians. He argued that Christian Englishmen might rightfully seize Indian lands because God had intended his land to be cultivated and not to be left in the condition of “that unmanned wild Countrey, which they [the savages] range rather than inhabite.”⁷⁰

It is instructive to dwell for a moment on that last phrase. Purchas may have picked it up from the Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard, who had described the Indians living farther north: “Thus four thousand Indians at most roam through, rather than occupy, these vast stretches of inland territory and sea-shore. For they are a nomadic people, living in the forests and scattered over wide spaces as is natural for those who live by hunting and fishing only.”⁷¹ But Purchas knew perfectly well that the Virginia Indians were sedentary and agricultural and that the Jamestown colonists had been preserved from total starvation by Indian farm produce.

Before Purchas wrote, a Jamestown colonist had actually gloated over the occurrence of the Indian uprising, for reasons that make stark comment on Purchas's trustworthiness.

We, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground then their waste, and our purchase … may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby wee shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious Mattocke into the victorious Sword (wherein there is more both ease, benefit, and glory) and possessing the fruits of others labours. Now their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situate in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us, whereas heretofore the grubbing of woods was the greatest labour.”⁷²

Although Purchas's “range rather than inhabite” phrase was contrary to known fact, it held the magic of a strong incantation and the utility of a magician's smokescreen. It became an axiom of international law (although it does not appear in the works of Hugo Grotius, the socalled founder of international law),⁷³ and its capacity to smother fact was still so highly valued as late as 1830 that Secretary of War Lewis Cass synonymized it elegantly (“traversed but not occupied”) to justify the expropriation of the sedentary and agricultural Cherokees.⁷⁴

Purchas's chief pronouncement was that the Indians had become “Outlawes of Humanity.” He fumed against “the unnaturall Naturalls” who had forfeited by “disloyal treason” their “remainders of right.” He verbally abolished their personal existences along with the rights natural to persons. They became “like Cain, both Murtherers and Vagabonds in their whatsoever and howsoever owne,” and therefore “I can scarcely call [them] Inhabitants.” Having committed their monstrous crime against English humanity, they had “lost their owne Naturall, and given us another Nationall right … so that England may both by Law of Nature and Nations challenge Virginia for her owne peculiar propriety.”⁷⁵

Having laid claim to Virginia, Purchas prescribed the righteous duty of its colonists “not to make Savages and wild degenerate men of Christians, but Christians of those Savage, wild, degenerate men.” Even the land was transformed with wordplay characteristic of the then fashionable literary style: “All the rich endowments of Virginia,” he declared, “her Virgin-portion from the creation nothing lessened,” were “wages” for converting the “Savage Countries.”⁷⁶

It is all true and it is all false—true as metaphor in a system of ideas designed for a conqueror's needs, and false as representation of fact. Certainly Purchas understood what he was doing, and he was never foolish enough to believe that Virginia was really virgin land devoid of natives. Pursuing a constant practical objective, he advocated that the metaphorical noninhabitants “be servilely used; that future dangers be prevented by the extirpation of the more dangerous, and commodities also raised out of the servileness and serviceableness of the rest.”⁷⁷

Before Purchas, his mentor Richard Hakluyt had also waxed euphuistic about metaphorical virginity and his patroness queen,⁷⁸ but Elizabeth had been two decades dead when Purchas wrote. Hakluyt had been very much interested in savages as persons to be traded with and ruled over; rhetorical virginity in the land waited for Purchas to define it as nonhabitation.

The process of reifying metaphor into purported actuality developed further in New England, where Purchas's logic was refined into the practical form of a legal fiction—an abstract idea accepted by courts as though it were a fact—akin in factuality and function to the fiction that General Motors or the Standard Oil companies are persons. This development was contributed by a Puritan lawyer, Governor John Winthrop, Sr., of Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop was not interested in fanciful plays on the idea of virginity in the land, but he seized on the equivalent conception that it had never been used. Responding to scrupulous objections against seizing Indian property, Winthrop declared in 1629 that most land in America fell under the legal rubric of vacuum domicilium because the Indians had not “subdued” it and therefore had only a “natural” and not a “civil” right to it.⁷⁹ Such natural right need not be respected in the same way as civil right; only the latter imposed the obligations of true legal property. Morally (and pragmatically) Winthrop's Puritans were obliged to leave individual Indians in possession of tracts actually under tillage, because such small plots of cultivated land obviously qualified as “subdued” according to English cultural assumptions, but hunting territories were regarded as “waste” available for seizure, no matter what status they held in native custom. Inherent in this doctrine was the notion that no Indian government could be recognized as sovereign over any domain, and therefore no legal sanction could exist for Indian tenure of real estate.

Seizure of open lands was nothing new to Englishmen. Since the Statute of Merton in 1235 A.D., English manorial lords had been enclosing lands—sometimes “waste,” sometimes commons, and sometimes cropland—with little regard for the welfare or customary rights of local peasants.⁸⁰ Massachusetts's Puritans carried on this ancient practice with only a slight change of rationalization. To meet moral criticism on this issue (as on others also) they relied on their status as the Elect of God.

For their ultimate authority the Puritans scorned matters of mundane fact to appeal to Holy Writ in a neat selection of texts. They quoted Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” For enforcement of this large donation they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the Power, resisteth the Ordinance of God, and they that resist, receive to themselves damnation.”⁸¹ References to such biblical texts were incorporated into the laws that ostensibly guaranteed Indians a title to land, so that once the scriptural citations were included, they too became an integral part of the law.⁸²

For convenience the Puritans reinforced Scripture with the temporal authority of their patent from the king of England. Difficult subjects though they were, they recognized his sovereignty (as they recognized Indian property) for the single purpose of conveying the recognized right to themselves.⁸³ An anonymous humorist has summarized all this authority in a syllogism that he attributed—apparently apocryphally—to a Puritan town meeting: “Voted, that the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.”⁸⁴ Whether or not any town was ever indiscreet enough to commit such a resolution to record, that was the Puritans' logic. People possessed of such marvelously self-serving doctrine had no difficulty in classifying land as vacant or virgin when it actually held inhabitants with aboriginal rights of tenure. In the Puritans' rationalization the land had never been made property by English law—or, more properly, by provincial law—and it was therefore vacant in fact.

The deductive imperatives of authority were reinforced in the nineteenth century with developed conceptions of inequality and Social Darwinism. Francis Parkman pronounced the Indian to be “a true child of the forest and the desert. The wastes and solitudes of nature are his congenial home.”⁸⁵ George E. Ellis echoed that “the Indians simply wasted everything within their reach. … They required enormous spaces of wilderness for their mode of existence.”⁸⁶ Frederick Jackson Turner conceived this wilderness as “free land,” and Walter Prescott Webb brought the whole process back to its beginnings, upside down. He took the myth that had formed from a legal fiction and converted it into the “fact” that made an action legal: this free land, as he saw it, was “land free to be taken.”⁸⁷

Notes

1. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, rev. by S. D. Clark and W. T. Easterbrook (Toronto, 1964), 16.

2. Columbus to sovereigns, Feb. 15, 1493, Morison, trans. and ed., Journals of Columbus, 184; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 12: The Conquest of Mexico, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, Part XIII (Santa Fe, N.M., 1955), 5-18.

3. Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington, Ind., 1961).

4. My method of inquiry differs from that of Roy Harvey Pearce, whose excellent studies center on the literature of morals and ideas. I have attempted to see ideas as one factor in a more comprehensive acculturation process. Cf. Pearce, Savages of America, and see also his article “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating,” Ethnohistory, IV (1957), 27-40.

5. “Penn to Free Society of Traders, 1683,” Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, 236.

6. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (New York, 1881), 10.

7. Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. William McIntosh, 21 U.S. Reports 240, 260-261 (1823). Marshall also wrote that “discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.” Ibid., 259. His use of “right” here seems like nothing more than a legal-sounding noise, for its objective referent cannot be found in either moral philosophy or law. See also Washburn, Red Man's Land/White Man's Law, Pt. III, chap. 2.

8. Emmerich de Vattel, Le Droit des Gens; ou, Principes de la Loi Naturelle (1758), trans. Charles G. Fenwick, Carnegie Institution Classics of International Law (Washington, D.C., 1916), III, 38.

9. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Indian Heritage of America (New York, 1968), 82; G. K. Holmes, “Aboriginal Agriculture—The American Indians,” in L. H. Bailey, ed., Cyclopedia of American Agriculture: A Popular Survey of Agricultural Conditions, Practices, and Ideals in the United States and Canada (New York, 1907-1909), IV, 24-39.

10. A nonhunter, I owe this insight to Dr. Jacques Rousseau, who remarked on the matter at the First Conference on Algonquian Studies, Sept. 13-15, 1968. Cf. Innis, Fur Trade in Canada, 13.

11. See John M. Cooper, “Land Tenure among the Indians of Eastern and Northern North America,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist, VIII (1938), 58-59, and also his “Is the Algonquian Family Hunting Ground System Pre-Columbian?” Am. Anthro., N.S., XLI (1939), 66-90; Frank G. Speck, Family Hunting Territories and Social Life of Various Algonkian Bands of the Ottawa Valley, Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 70 (Ottawa, 1915); Frank G. Speck and Loren C. Eiseley, “Significance of Hunting Territory Systems of the Algonkian in Social Theory,” Am. Anthro., N.S., XLI (1939), 269-280; William Christie MacLeod, “The Family Hunting Territory and Lenápe Political Organization,” ibid., XXIV (1922), 448-463; and Anthony F. C. Wallace, “Political Organization and Land Tenure among the Northeastern Indians, 1600-1830,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XIII (1957), 318.

12. Morton, New English Canaan, 36-37, in Force, comp., Tracts, II; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 16-17; John Cotton, A Reply to Mr. Williams his Examination … (1647), ed. J. Lewis Diman, in Narragansett Club, Pubs., II (Providence, R.I., 1867), 46-47; John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Smith, II, 427. The best discussion is Gordon M. Day, “The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeastern Forest,” Ecology, XXXIV (1953), 334-339. For the effects on the land of certain group hunting methods using fire, see Lindeström, Geographia Americae, 161, 213-214, and Lawson, New Voyage to Carolina, 79, 206-207.

13. Driver and Massey, North American Indians, Am. Phil. Soc., Trans., N.S., XLVII, pt. ii (1957), 201, 203; Frank G. Speck and Ralph W. Dexter, “Utilization of Marine Life by the Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, XXXVIII (1948), 257-265; Charles Rau, “Prehistoric Fishing in Europe and North America,” in Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, XXV (Washington, D.C., 1885), 261-318.

14. G. Melvin Herndon, “Indian Agriculture in the Southern Colonies,” North Carolina Historical Review, XLIV (1967), 283-297, quote on 287; Guy N. Collins, “Notes on the Agricultural History of Maize,” American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1919 (Washington, D.C., 1923), I, 423; Holmes, “Aboriginal Agriculture,” in Bailey, ed., Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, IV, 25-26, 31. See also Arthur C. Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants (1910), in William N. Fenton, ed., Parker on the Iroquois (Syracuse, N.Y., 1968).

15. Spinden, “Population of Ancient America,” Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report (1929), 465n.

16. Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize, in Fenton, ed., Parker on the Iroquois, 21-24; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 106; Herndon, “Indian Agriculture,” N.C. Hist. Rev., XLIV (1967), 287-290; minutes, Sept. 1644, David Pulsifer, ed., Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England (Nathaniel E. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, IX-X [Boston, 1859]), I, 26, hereafter cited as Pulsifer, ed., Acts of United Colonies. See also Howard S. Russell, “New England Indian Agriculture,” Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, XXII (Apr.-July 1961), 58-61.

17. M. K. Bennett, “The Food Economy of the New England Indians, 1607-75,” Journal of Political Economy, LXIII (1955), 394; Van der Donck, Description of New Netherlands, N.-Y. Hist. Soc., Colls., 2d Ser., I, 193.

18. Carol King Rachlin, “The Historic Position of the Proto-Cree Textiles in the Eastern Fabric Complex: An Ethnological-Archaeological Correlation,” in Contributions to Anthropology, 1958, National Museum of Canada, Bulletin 167, Anthropological Series, No. 48 (Ottawa, 1960), 82. Driver and Massey, North American Indians, Am. Phil. Soc., Trans., N.S., XLVII, pt. ii (1957), 320; chap. 6 below.

19. Swanton, Indians of Southeastern U.S., 312.

20. Treaty minutes, Oct. 18, 1758, Samuel Hazard, ed., Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania … (Harrisburg, Pa., 1838-1853), VIII, 199, hereafter cited as Pa. Council Minutes.

    A bibliographical note: When the first three volumes of this set were reprinted, the type was reset with pagination different from that of the original edition. My notes have been taken from various sets, so the page numbers will reflect the discrepancies. Date references provide correction where needed.

21. Edward Waterhouse, “A Declaration of the State of the Colony,” in Kingsbury, ed., Recs. of Va. Co., III, 556-557; Amandus Johnson, trans. and ed., The Instruction for Johan Printz, Governor of New Sweden (Philadelphia, 1930), 117; History of the Town of Dorchester, Massachusetts (Boston, 1859), 23; Herndon, “Indian Agriculture,” N.C. Hist. Rev., XLIV (1967), 297; Henry E. Chase, “Notes on the Wampanoag Indians,” Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1883), 879-880; Russell, “New England Indian Agriculture,” Bulletin of Mass. Archaeol. Soc., XXII (Apr.-July 1961), 60.

22. Lyman Carrier, The Beginning of Agriculture in America (New York, 1923), 239-245.

23. Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 180-185.

24. Regina Flannery, An Analysis of Coastal Algonquian Culture, Catholic University of America Anthropological Series, VII (Washington, D.C., 1939), 27-30.

25. John Smith, Map of Virginia, in Barbour, ed., Jamestown Voyages, II, 443-444.

26. Parker's “bridge” had traffic in both directions. Maize was taken by the Portuguese to Africa, where it was first grown to provision slave ships. With expanded use, it supported a great increase of population simultaneously with the slave trade's depletion of the people. Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize, in Fenton, ed., Parker on the Iroquois, 15; Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York, 1973), 244-267, esp. 248.

27. Johnson, ed., Instruction for Johan Printz, 111, 117; Van der Donck, Description of New Netherlands, in N.-Y. Hist. Soc., Colls., 2d Ser., I, 209; Lawson, New Voyage to Carolina, 86; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 114-115; Nov. 5, 1634, Winthrop, History, ed. Savage, I, 146.

28. Bruce Graham Trigger, “The Jesuits and the Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory, XII (1965), 35, and Trigger, “Destruction of Huronia,” Royal Can. Inst., Trans., XXXIII (1960), 42; George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois (Madison, Wis., 1940), chap. 5.

29. The South: Swanton, Indians of Southeastern U.S., 308-309, and de Bry's engraving in figure 2. New England: Morton, New English Canaan, 30, in Force, comp., Tracts, II; Howard S. Russell, “How Aboriginal Planters Stored Food,” Bulletin of Mass. Archaeol. Soc., XXIII (Apr.-July 1962), 47-49.

30. John Winthrop, Jr., to Winthrop, Sr., Apr. 7, 1636, Winthrop Papers, III, 246.

31. William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789 (Boston, 1890), I, 37-38.

32. John Martin, “The manner howe to bringe in the Indians into subjection without making an utter exterpation of them together with the reasons,” in Kingsbury, ed., Recs. of Va. Co., III, 705-706.

33. John Smith, Map of Virginia, in Barbour, ed., Jamestown Voyages, II, 339-344, 371, and map of 1612 facing p. 374.

34. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England … (1624), in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, from 1602 to 1625 (Boston, 1841), 361.

35. Williams, Key, ed. Trumbull, Narragansett Club, Pubs., I, 74-75; Ralph Lane, “Discourse on the First Colony” (ca. 1586), in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, I, 283; Van der Donck, Description of New Netherlands, in N.-Y. Hist. Soc., Colls., 2d Ser., I, 197-198; A. F. C. Wallace, “Political Organization and Land Tenure,” Southwest. Jour. Anthro., XIII (1957), 304, 311.

36. Day, “Indian as an Ecological Factor,” Ecology, XXXIV (1953), 340-341; William N. Fenton, “Locality as a Basic Factor in the Development of Iroquois Social Structure,” in Fenton, ed., Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 149 (Washington, D.C., 1951), 42.

37. A. F. C. Wallace, “Political Organization and Land Tenure,” Southwest. Jour. Anthro., XIII (1957), 316-318.

38. Winslow, Good Newes, in Young, ed., Chronicles of Pilgrims, 361; Wisquannowas's petition, ca. 1675, in Hugh Hastings, ed., Third Annual Report of the State Historian of the State of New York, 1897 (New York and Albany, 1898), 308-309.

    A bibliographic note: Appendix L of Hastings's Report (pp. 157-435) prints manuscript volumes XXIII and XXIV of the New York Colonial Manuscripts, N.Y. State Lib., for the years 1673 to 1675 inclusive. This transcript is especially valuable because it was made before the manuscripts were damaged by fire.

39. See Fenton's detailed discussion in “Locality as a Basic Factor,” in Fenton, ed., Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois Culture, 35-53.

40. The practice of cyclical migration was perfectly well understood by the English colonizers in America. As early as 1634 William Wood noted dispersion of Indian villages “sometimes to fishing places, other times to hunting places, after that to a planting place where it abides the longest.” When colonists pretended that the Indians were mere nomads, the reason was to invoke international law doctrines applicable to vacant lands; such lands were available for seizure. I have elsewhere documented such a case in 18th-century Pennsylvania. Nicholas Canny observes interestingly that English colonizers in Ireland “took the Irish practice of transhumance as proof that the Irish were nomads, hence barbarians”; I presume that possession of land was also at issue there. Irish transhumance—removing with herds of domesticated animals from one pasture to another—had the same cyclical effect as Amerindian removal from planting sites to hunting and fishing sites. Wood, New Englands Prospect, 106; Francis Paul Jennings, “Miquon's Passing: Indian-European Relations in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1674 to 1755” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1965), 108-111, 238-239; Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization,” WMQ, 3d Ser., XXX (1973), 587.

41. Van der Donck, Description of New Netherlands, in N.-Y. Hist. Soc., Colls., 2d Ser., I, 209.

42. Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. William McIntosh, 21 U.S. Reports 260 (1823).

43. Kroeber, Anthropology, 284; Robert Redfield, “Tribe, Peasant, and City,” in Margaret Park Redfield, ed., Human Nature and the Study of Society: The Papers of Robert Redfield (Chicago, 1962-1963), I, 287.

44. Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization (Chicago, 1956), 45-46. See also Manning Nash, Primitive and Peasant Economic Systems (San Francisco, 1966), 59.

45. Eric R. Wolf, Peasants, Foundations of Modern Anthropology Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), 11 (quotation by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc.). Wolf's contradiction of Redfield's emphasis on the city is more apparent than real, for Redfield modified his view to accept a manorial elite in some circumstances to fulfill the city's role. Redfield, Peasant Society, 160. See also the definitions of Cyril S. Belshaw, Traditional Exchange and Modern Markets, Modernization of Traditional Societies Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 53-54.

46. Van der Donck, Description of New Netherlands, in N.-Y. Hist. Soc., Colls., 2d Ser., I, 190-191; Lindeström, Geographia Americae, 191 and n. Lindeström's translator was addicted to “savage,” but he gives the original in his note; cf. his rendition of the title page with the photograph of the original following p. xliv. See also Tobias E. Biorck, “The Planting of the Swedish Church in America” (ca. 1725), quoted in C. A. Weslager, “Susquehannock Indian Religion from an Old Document,” Jour. of Washington Academy of Sciences, XXXVI (1946), 7.

47. For the 17th and 18th centuries: Kennedy, Jesuit and Savage in New France, chap. 10; Marc Lescarbot, The History of New France (1618), trans. W. L. Grant, introduction by H. P. Biggar, Champlain Society Publications, I, VII, XI (Toronto, 1907-1914), I, 33. For the 19th century: Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX^e Siecle (Paris, [1865-1890?]), s.v. “sauvage.”

48. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “savage.”

49. [George Johnson], Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia. Exciting all such as be well affected to further the same (1609), 11, in Force, comp., Tracts, I.

50. H. P. Biggar, ed., “Jean Ribaut's Discoverye of Terra Florida,” English Historical Review, XXXII (1917), 253-270.

51. [Le Challeux], A true and perfect description, of the last voyage or Navigation, attempted by Capitaine John Rybaut, deputie and generall for the French men, into Terra Florida … (1566), in Stefan Lorant, ed., The New World: The First Pictures of America (New York, 1965), 88-116; “savage,” 92; “kind and gentle,” 94; Spaniards, 102 and passim.

52. E. G. R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, Hakluyt Society Publications, 2d Ser., LXXVI-LXXVII (London, 1935), I, 116-122.

53. Jacques Cartier, A Shorte and briefe Narration of the two Navigations and Discoveries to the Northweast partes called Newe Fraunce, trans. John Florio (1580), March of America Facsimile Series, No. 10 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), unpaged preface; Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice, 1550-1559), III, 435-453. For the strange history of Cartier's meandering narrative see Dict. of Can. Biog., I, s.v. “Cartier, Jacques.” I have used the copy of Ramusio's rare work at the Linderman Library of Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., to whose staff I wish to express gratitude for this favor and many others.

54. “A true Report of the late discoveries …,” in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, II, 705; Taylor, ed., Writings of the Two Richard Hakluyts, I, 31, II, 214.

55. In John Brereton, A Briefe and true Relation of the Discoverie of the North part of Virginia (1602), March of America Facsimile Series, No. 16 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), 30.

56. Ralph Lane to R. Hakluyt, lawyer, Sept. 3, 1585, Taylor, ed., Writings of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 346.

57. John Bartlett, A Complete Concordance … [to the] Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (New York, 1966), 1321; James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (New York, 1894), 879.

58. Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Smith, I, xxxiv-xxxv.

59. A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), 6, 20, in Force, comp., Tracts, III.

60. Henry Spelman, “Relation of Virginia,” in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Smith, I, cii.

61. Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 20-22.

62. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, 4th ed. (London, 1626), 836. Although I have used the fourth edition, I have inspected it carefully to make sure that it was not revised to take account of events that occurred after the issuance of the last preceding edition of 1615. There is no doubt that the quoted remark was written before the war of 1622.

    A bibliographic note: Purchas wrote two books, the first of which was made physically uniform in its last edition with the first edition of the other book. Thus Purchas his Pilgrimage, 4th ed., came erroneously to be viewed as Vol. V of Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4 vols. (London, 1625). I have used the copies of both works at Linderman Library, Lehigh University. See Sir William Foster, “Samuel Purchas,” in Edward Lynam, ed., Richard Hakluyt and His Successors, Hakluyt Society Publications, 2d Ser., XCIII (London, 1946), 49-61.

63. Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Smith, II, 574; A Description of New England (1616), ibid., I, 219-220.

64. Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Smith, I, 283.

65. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, IV, Bk. 9, chap. 20: “Virginia's Verger, Or a Discourse shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdome from American English Plantations, and specially those of Virginia and Summer Ilands,” 1809-1826.

66. Captain Butler, “The unmasked face of our Colony in Virginia as it was in the winter of the yeare 1622,” C.O. 1/3, 36-37, P.R.O.; Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), chap. 6; Alf J. Mapp, Jr., The Virginia Experiment (Richmond, Va., 1957), 61.

    Butler's manuscript was published in 1906 in Kingsbury, ed., Recs. of Va. Co., II, 374-376, apparently from a different copy than that in P.R.O., but only spelling and punctuation vary; the words are identical. Oddly this extremely important document was merely listed in the Calendar of State Papers without being abstracted by editor Sainsbury; it is listed as an enclosure to another document purportedly refuting it. The contents of the “refutation” really add to the power of Butler's indictment. At most the “refutation” insists that “only” 6,000 persons, instead of 10,000, had been transported to Virginia, and it does not dispute Butler's charge that only 2,000 of these remained alive. Blame for the others' deaths was laid upon the previous administration of Sir Thomas Smythe (1607-1619), during which time, as the “refutation” affirmed, there were “wants and miseries of the colony under most cruel laws sent over in print, contrary to the charter. The allowance of food in those times for a man was loathsome and not fit for beasts; many fled for relief to the savages but were taken again, and hung, shot, or broken upon the wheel: one man for stealing meal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue, and was chained to a tree until he starved. Many dug holes in the earth and hid themselves till they famished. So great was the scarcity that they were constrained to eat dogs, cats, rats, snakes, etc. and one man killed his wife and powdered her up to eat, for which he was burned. Many fed on corpses. …” Let it be repeated: this is the defense against Captain Butler's charge of maladministration. “The Governor, Council, and Assembly of Virginia to the King” [Feb. 1623], W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574-1660 (London, 1860), 38-40.

67. Purchas disingenuously tried to make the Indians responsible for casualties that had occurred before they fought. Hakluytus Posthumus, IV, 1816.

68. Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Smith, I, 274.

69. The interpretation is mine. Smith's most recent biographer, whose scholarship is exemplary, distinguishes sharply between the two men while describing their cooperation in publishing matters. Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (London, 1964), 297, 364-367, and passim.

70. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, IV, 1814.

71. “Roam through, rather than occupy,” is a translation of Biard's Latin “non tenentur, sed percurruntur.” Letter from Port Royal in Acadia … (1612), in Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, II, 72-73.

72. Waterhouse, “State of the Colony,” in Kingsbury, ed., Recs. of Va. Co., III, 556-557. Emphasis added.

73. Grotius's modern translator turned Latin ferina into “savages” at one point although the translator of the 17th-century English edition had rendered it “brutish.” The versions: original, “Bella quae utroque causarum genera carent, ferina esse”; 1682, “The War that hath neither of these, is brutish”; 1925, “Wars which lack causes of either sort are wars of savages.” Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres (1646), Vol. II, trans. Francis W. Kelsey, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Classics of International Law, III (Oxford, 1925), I, 384, II, 547; Hugo Grotius, His Three Books Treating of the Rights of War and Peace, trans. William Evats (London, 1682), 404.

74. Lewis Cass, “Removal of the Indians,” North American Review, XXX (1830), 77.

75. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, IV, 1811, 1813.

76. Ibid., 1811.

77. Ibid., 1819.

78. Taylor, ed., Writings of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 367.

79. John Winthrop, Sr., “General considerations for the plantation in New England, with an answer to several objections,” Winthrop Papers, II, 120. Winthrop apparently was indebted to Purchas's “Virginia's Verger” chapter for many specific formulations, but he made a concise selection instead of taking over the entire battery of Purchas's arguments.

80. See W. E. Tate, The Enclosure Movement (New York, 1967), chaps. 2, 3, 4, 7.

81. These texts appeared on the title pages of, respectively, Gookin, “Historical Collections,” Mass. Hist. Soc., Colls., 1st Ser., I, 141, The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts (1648), reprinted with an introduction by Max Farrand (Cambridge, Mass., 1929).

82. Minutes, Oct. 19, 1652, in Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853-1854), III, 281-282, hereafter cited as Recs. of Mass.

83. See the oath required of all freemen of Massachusetts and the associated declarations of the General Court, May 14, 1634, Recs. of Mass., I, 117; cf. the wrangle in 1664 between the General Court and the royal commissioners, ibid., IV, pt. ii, 157-273. Although the latter is a self-serving and often false document prepared as a brief by the General Court, it is useful for its exposition of the Puritan viewpoint. The student will do best to consult the primary sources in this matter; the secondary studies are often unreliable.

84. George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers … (New York, 1945), 392; Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558-1625 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1943), 158.

85. Parkman, Conspiracy of Pontiac, I, 3.

86. George Edward Ellis, “The Indians of Eastern Massachusetts,” in Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880 (Boston, 1880-1881), I, 248.

87. Turner, Frontier in American History, 3; Webb, Great Frontier, 3.

This chapter is slightly modified from a paper read at the 11th annual meeting of the Northeastern Anthropological Association, Apr. 9, 1971, State University of New York at Albany.