SOURCE: “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” in The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 3, December, 1992, pp. 892-912.

[In the following essay, Takaki probes The Tempest's relation to the English colonization of America, interpreting Caliban as representative of a “savage” American Indian figure.]

“O brave new world that has such people in’t,” they heard Miranda exclaim. It was 1611 and London theatergoers were attending the first performance of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the early seventeenth century, the English were encountering what they viewed as strange inhabitants in new lands. Those experiences determined the meaning of the utterances they heard. A perspicacious few in the audience could have seen that this play was more than a story about how Prospero was sent into exile with his daughter, Miranda, took possession of an island inhabited by Caliban, and redeemed himself by marrying Miranda to the king's son.¹

Indeed, The Tempest can be approached as a fascinating tale about the creation of a new society in America. Seen in that light, the play invites us to view English expansion not only as imperialism but also as a defining moment in the making of an English-American identity based on race. For the first time in the English theater, an Indian character was being presented. What did Shakespeare and his audience know about the native peoples of America, and what choices were they making when they characterized Caliban? Although they saw him as a “savage,” did they racialize savagery? Was the play a prologue for America?

The Tempest studied in relationship to its context can help us answer those questions. Othello also offers us an opportunity to analyze English racial attitudes, as Winthrop Jordan has demonstrated so brilliantly, but our play is a more important window for understanding American history, for its story is set in the New World. Moreover, the timing of that first performance of The Tempest was crucial: It came after the English invasion of Ireland but before the colonization of New England, after John Smith's arrival in Virginia but before the beginning of the tobacco economy, and after the first contacts with Indians but before full-scale warfare against them. In that historical moment, the English were encountering “other” peoples and delineating the boundary between civilization and savagery. The social constructions of both those terms were dynamically developing in three sites—Ireland, Virginia, and New England.²

One of the places the English were colonizing in 1611 was Ireland, and Caliban seemed to resemble the Irish. Theatergoers were familiar with the “wild Irish” on stage, for such images had been presented in the plays Sir John Oldcastle (1599) and Honest Whore (1605). Seeking to conquer the Irish in 1395, Richard II had condemned them as “savage Irish, our enemies.” In the mid-sixteenth century, the government had decided to bring all of Ireland under its rule, and to that end, it encouraged private colonization projects.³

Like Caliban, the Irish were viewed as “savages,” a people living outside of “civilization.” They had tribal organizations, and their practice of herding seemed nomadic. Even their Christianity was said to be merely the exterior of strongly rooted paganism. “They are all Papists by their profession,” claimed Edmund Spenser in 1596, “but in the same so blindly and brutishly informed for the most part as that you would rather think them atheists or infidels.” To the English colonists, it seemed that the Irish lacked “knowledge of God or good manners.” They had no sense of private property and did not “plant any Gardens or Orchards, Inclose or improve their lands, live together in settled Villages or Townes.” The Irish were described as lazy, “naturally” given to “idleness,” and unwilling to work for “their own bread.” Dominated by “innate sloth,” “loose, barbarous and most wicked,” and living “like beasts,” they were also thought to be criminals, an underclass inclined to steal from the English. The colonists complained that the Irish savages were not satisfied with the “fruit of the natural unlaboured earth” and therefore continually “invaded the fertile possessions” of the “English Pale.”⁴

The English colonizers established a two-tiered social structure. According to sixteenth-century English law, “every Irishman shall be forbidden to wear English apparel or weapon upon pain of death. That no Irishman, born of Irish race and brought up Irish, shall purchase land, bear office, be chosen of any jury or admitted witness in any real or personal action.” To reinforce this social separation, British laws prohibited marriages between the Irish and the colonizers. The new world order was to be one of English over Irish.⁵

The Irish also became targets of English violence. “Nothing but fear and force can teach duty and obedience” to this “rebellious people,” the invaders insisted. The sixteenth-century English were generally brutal in waging war, but they seemed to have been particularly cruel toward the Irish. The colonizers burned the villages and crops of the inhabitants and relocated them on reservations. They slaughtered families, “man, woman and child,” justifying their atrocities by arguing that families provided support for the rebels. After four years of bloody warfare in Munster, according to Edmund Spenser, the Irish had been reduced to wretchedness. “Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.” The death toll was so high that “in short space there were none almost left and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast.” The “void” meant vacant lands for English resettlement.⁶

The invaders took the heads of the slain Irish as trophies. Sir Humphrey Gilbert pursued a campaign of terror: He ordered that “the heads of all those … killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies and brought to the place where he encamped at night, and should there be laid on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent so that none could come into his tent for any cause but commonly he must pass through a lane of heads. … [It brought] great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends.” After seeing the head of his lord impaled on the walls of Dublin, Irish poet Angus O’Daly cried out:

O body which I see without a head,
It is the sight of thee which has withered up my strength.
Divided and impaled in Ath-cliath,
The learned of Banba will feel its loss.
Who will relieve the wants of the poor?
Who will bestow cattle on the learned?
O body, since thou art without a head,
It is not life which we care to choose after thee.(7)

The English claimed that they had a God-given responsibility to “inhabit and reform so barbarous a nation” and to educate the Irish “brutes.” They would teach them to obey English laws and to stop “robbing and stealing and killing” one another. They would uplift this “most filthy people, utterly enveloped in vices, most untutored of all peoples in the rudiments of faith.” Thus, although they saw the Irish as savages and although they sometimes described this savagery as “natural” and “innate,” the English believed that the Irish could be civilized, improved through what Shakespeare called “nurture.” In short, the difference between the Irish and the English was a matter of culture.⁸

As their frontier advanced from Ireland to America, the English began making comparisons between the Irish and the Indian “savages” and wondering whether there might be different kinds of “savagery.”

The parallels between English expansionism in Ireland and that in America were apparent. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Lord De La Warr, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Walter Raleigh—all participated both in invading Ireland and in colonizing the New World. The conquest of Ireland and the settlement of Virginia were bound so closely together that one correspondence, dated March 8, 1610, stated: “It is hoped the plantation of Ireland may shortly be settled. The Lord Delaware [Lord De La Warr] is preparing to depart for the plantation of Virginia.” Commander John Mason conducted military campaigns against the Irish before he sailed for New England, where he led troops against the Pequots of Connecticut. Samuel Gorton wrote a letter to John Winthrop, Jr., connecting the two frontiers: “I remember the time of the wars in Ireland (when I was young, in Queen Elizabeth's days of famous memory) where much English blood was spilt by a people much like unto these [Indians]. … And after these Irish were subdued by force, what treacherous and bloody massacres have they attempted is well known.”⁹

The first English colonizers in the New World found that the Indians reminded them of the Irish. Capt. John Smith observed that the deerskin robes worn by the Indians in Virginia did not differ much “in fashion from the Irish mantels.” Thomas Morton noticed that the “natives of New England [were] accustomed to build themselves houses much like the wild Irish.” Roger Williams reported that the thick woods and swamps of New England gave refuge to the warring Indians “like the bogs to the wild Irish.” Thus, in their early encounters, the English projected the familiar onto the strange, their images of the Irish onto the native people of America. Initially, “savagery” was defined in relationship to the Irish, and Indians were incorporated into this definition.¹⁰

The Tempest, the London audience knew, was not about Ireland but about the New World, for the reference to the “Bermoothes” (Bermuda) revealed the location of the island. What was happening on stage was a metaphor for English expansion into America. The play's title was inspired by a recent incident. Caught in a violent storm in 1609, the Sea Adventure had been separated from a fleet of ships bound for Virginia and had run aground in the Bermudas. Shakespeare knew many of the colonizers, including Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Lord De La Warr. One of his personal friends was the geographer Richard Hakluyt, author of widely read books about the New World. The future of Englishmen lay in America, proclaimed Hakluyt, as he urged them to “conquer a country” and “to man it, to plant it, and to keep it, and to continue the making of Wines and Oils able to serve England.”¹¹

The description of the play's setting evoked the mainland near the “Bermoothes”—Virginia. “The air breathes upon us here most sweetly,” the theatergoers were told. “Here is everything advantageous to life.” “How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!” Impressed by the land's innocence, Gonzalo of The Tempest depicted it as an ideal commonwealth where everything was as yet unformed and unbounded, where letters, laws, metals, and occupations were yet unknown. Both the imagery and the language revealed America as the site of Prospero's landing: It was almost as if Shakespeare had lifted the material from contemporary documents about the New World. Tracts on Virginia had described the air as “most sweet” and as “virgin and temperate,” and its soil as “lusty” with meadows “full of green grass.” In A True Reportory of the Wracke, published in 1609, William Strachey depicted Virginia's abundance: “no Country yieldeth goodlier Corn, nor more manifold increase … we have thousands of goodly Vines.” Here was an opportunity for colonists to enhance the “fertility and pleasure” of Virginia by “cleansing away her woods” and converting her into “goodly meadow.”¹²

Moreover, the play provided a conclusive clue that the story was indeed about America: Caliban, one of the principal characters, was a New World inhabitant. “Carib,” the name of an Indian tribe, had come to mean a savage of America, and the term cannibal was a derivative. Shakespeare sometimes rearranged letters in words (“Amleth,” the name of a prince in a Viking tale, for example, became “Hamlet”), and here he had created another anagram in “Caliban.”¹³

The English had seen or read reports about Indians who had been captured and brought to London. Beginning with Christopher Columbus, European visitors to the New World had brought back Indians. Columbus himself had displayed Indians. During his first voyage, he wrote: “Yesterday came [to] the ship a dugout with six young men, and five came on board; these I ordered to be detained and I am bringing them.” When Columbus was received by the Spanish court after his triumphal return, he presented a collection of things he had brought back, including gold nuggets, parrots in cages, and six Indians. On his second voyage, in 1493, Columbus again sent his men to kidnap Indians. On one occasion, a captive had been “wounded seven times and his entrails were hanging out,” reported Guillermo Coma of Aragon. “Since it was thought that he could not be cured, he was cast into the sea. But keeping above water and raising one foot, he held on to his intenstines with his left hand and swam courageously to the shore. … The wounded Carib was caught again on shore. His hands and feet were bound more tightly and he was once again thrown headlong. But this resolute savage swam more furiously, until he was struck several times by arrows and perished.” When Columbus set sail with his fleet to return to Spain, he took 550 Indian captives with him. “When we reached the waters around Spain,” Michele de Cuneo wrote matter-of-factly, “about 200 of those Indians died, I believe because of the unaccustomed air, colder than theirs. We cast them into the sea.”¹⁴

English explorers also engaged in the practice of kidnapping Indians. When Capt. George Waymouth visited New England in 1605, he lured some Abenakis to his ship; taking three of them hostage, he sailed back to England to display them. An early seventeenth-century pamphlet stated that a voyage to Virginia was expected to bring back its quota of captured Indians: “Thus we shipped five savages, two canoes, with all their bows and arrows.” In 1614 the men on one of Capt. John Smith's ships captured several Indians on Cape Cod. “Thomas Hunt,” Smith wrote, “betrayed four and twenty of these poor savages aboard this ship, and most dishonestly and inhumanely … carried them with him to Maligo [Malaga] and there for a little private gain sold … those savages for Rials of eight.” In 1611, according to a biographer of William Shakespeare, “a native of New England called Epenew was brought to England … and ‘being a man of so great a stature’ was showed up and down London for money as a monster.” In The Tempest Stephano considered capturing Caliban: “If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor.” Such exhibitions of Indians were “profitable investments,” literary scholar Frank Kermode noted, and were “a regular feature of colonial policy under James I. The exhibits rarely survived the experience.”¹⁵

To the spectators of these “exhibits,” Indians personified “savagery.” They were depicted as “cruel, barbarous and most treacherous.” They were thought to be cannibals, “being most furious in their rage and merciless … not being content only to kill and take away life, but delight to torment men in the most bloody manner … flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals, eating the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live.” According to Sir Walter Raleigh, Indians had “their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.” In Nova Brittania, published in 1609, Richard Johnson described the Indians in Virginia as “wild and savage people,” living “like herds of deer in a forest.” One of their striking physical characteristics was their skin color. John Brereton described the New England Indians as “of tall stature, broad and grim visage, of a blacke swart complexion.”¹⁶

Indians seemed to lack everything the English identified as civilized—Christianity, cities, letters, clothing, and swords. “They do not bear arms or know them, for I showed to them swords and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance,” wrote Columbus in his journal, noting that the Indians did not have iron. George Waymouth tried to impress the Abenakis: He magnetized a sword “to cause them to imagine some great power in us; and for that to love and fear us.”¹⁷

Like Caliban, the native people of America were viewed as the other. European culture was delineating the border, the hierarchical division between civilization and wildness. Unlike Europeans, Indians were allegedly dominated by their passions, especially their sexuality. Amerigo Vespucci was struck by how the natives embraced and enjoyed the pleasures of their bodies: “They … are libidinous beyond measure, and the women far more than the men. … When they had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves.” Caliban personified such passions. Prospero saw him as a sexual threat to the nubile Miranda, her “virgin-knot” yet unbroken. “I have used thee (filth as thou art) with humane care,” Prospero scolded Caliban, “and lodged thee in mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate the honor of my child.” And the unruly native snapped: “O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else this isle with Calibans.”¹⁸

To the theatergoers, Caliban represented what Europeans had been when they were lower on the scale of development toward civilization. To be civilized, they believed, required denial of wholeness—the repression of the instinctual forces of human nature. Prospero, personification of civilized man, identified himself as mind rather than body. His epistemology relied on the visual rather than the tactile and on the linear knowledge of books rather than the polymorphous knowledge of experience. With the self fragmented, Prospero was able to split off his rationality and raise it to authority over the other—the sensuous part of himself and everything Caliban represented.¹⁹

But could Caliban, the audience wondered, ever become Christian and civilized? The sixteenth-century Spanish lawyer Juan Gines de Sepulveda had justified the Spanish conquest of Indians by invoking Aristotle's doctrine that some people were “natural slaves.” The condition of slavery, Sepulveda argued, was natural for “persons of both inborn rudeness and of inhuman and barbarous customs.” Thus what counted was an ascriptive quality based on a group's nature, or “descent.”²⁰

On the other hand, Pope Paul III had proclaimed that Indians as well as “all other people” who might later be “discovered” by “Christians” should not be deprived of their liberty and property, even though they were outside the Christian faith. Christopher Columbus had reported that Indians were “very gentle and without knowledge of … evil.” He added: “They love their neighbors as themselves, and have the sweetest talk in the world, and gentle, and always with a smile.” In the play, Gonzalo told theatergoers: “I saw such islanders … who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet, note, their manners are more gentle, kind, than of our human generation you shall find many—nay, almost any.” Thus, Indians were not always viewed as brutish by nature: Already capable of morality and gentleness, they could be acculturated, become civilized through “consent.”²¹

Indeed, Caliban seemed educable. Prospero had taught him a European language: “I … took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour one thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish.” Defiantly, the native retorted: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language.” A Virginia tract stated that the colonists should take Indian children and “train them up with gentleness, teach them our English tongue.” In the contract establishing the Virginia Company in 1606, the king endorsed a plan to propagate the “Christian Religion to such people” who as yet lived in “darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.” Three years later, the Virginia Company instructed the governor of the colony to encourage missionaries to convert Indian children. They should be taken from their parents if necessary, since the parents were “so wrapped up in the fog and misery of their iniquity.” A Virginia promotional tract stated that it was “not the nature of men, but the education of men” that made them “barbarous and uncivil.” Every man in the new colony had a duty to bring the savage Indians to “civil and Christian” government.²²

In 1611 these cultural constructs of Indians were either the fantasy of Shakespeare or the impressions of policy makers and tract writers in London. What would happen to these images on the stage of history?

The first English settlement in the New World was in Virginia, the home of fourteen thousand Powhatans. An agricultural people, they cultivated corn—the mainstay of their subsistence. Their cleared fields were large—one-hundred-acre fields were not uncommon—and they lived in palisaded towns, with forts, storehouses, temples, and framed houses covered with bark and reed mats. They cooked their foods in ceramic pots and used woven baskets for storing corn; some of their baskets were constructed so skillfully they could carry water in them. The Powhatans had a sophisticated numbering system for evaluating their harvests. According to John Smith, they had numbers from one to ten, after which counting was done by tens to one hundred. There was a word for “one thousand.” The Powhatan calendar had five seasons: “Their winter some call Popanow, the spring Cattaapeuk, the sommer Cohattayough, the earing of their Corne Nepinough, the harvest and fall of the leafe Taquitock. From September until the midst of November are the chief Feasts and sacrifice.”²³

In Virginia the initial encounters between the English and the Indians opened possibilities for friendship and interdependency. The first colonists arrived and set up camp in 1607. There were 120 of them. Then, John Smith reported, came “the starving time.” A year later, only 38 still lived, hanging precariously on the very edge of survival. The New World had been depicted as a garden; the reality of America was something else. Descriptions of its natural abundance turned out to have been exaggerated. Many of the English were not prepared for survival in the wilderness. “Now was all our provision spent … all help abandoned, each hour expecting the fury of the savages,” Smith wrote. Fortunately, in that “desperate extremity,” the Powhatans brought food to the starving strangers.²⁴

A year later, several hundred more colonists arrived; again they quickly ran out of provisions. They were forced to eat “dogs, cats, rats, and mice,” even “corpses” dug from graves. “Some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows,” a survivor reported. “One [member] of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food, the same not being discovered before he had eaten part thereof.” “So great was our famine,” John smith stated, “that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; and so did diverse one another boiled and stewed with roots and herbs.”²⁵

Hostilities soon broke out as the English tried to extort food supplies by attacking the Indians and destroying their villages. In 1608 an Indian declared: “We hear you are come from under the World to take our World from us.” A year later Gov. Thomas Gates arrived in Virginia with instructions that the Indians should be forced to labor for the colonists and also make annual payments of corn and skins. The orders were brutally carried out. During one of the raids, the English soldiers attacked an Indian town, killing fifteen people and forcing many others to flee. Then they burned the houses and destroyed the cornfields. According to a report by Commander George Percy, they marched the captured queen and her children to the river where they “put the Children to death … by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water.”²⁶

Indians began to doubt that the two peoples could live together in peace. One young Indian told Capt. John Smith: “[We] are here to intreat and desire your friendship and to enjoy our houses and plant our fields, of whose fruits you shall participate.” But he did not trust the strangers: “We perceive and well know you intend to destroy us.” Chief Powhatan had come to the same conclusion; he told Smith that the English were not in Virginia to trade but to “invade” and “possess” Indian lands.²⁷

Indeed, Smith and his fellow colonists were encouraged by their culture of expansionism to claim entitlement to the land. In The Tempest the theatergoers were told by Sebastian: “I think he [the king of Naples] will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple.” Prospero declared that he had been thrust forth from Milan and “most strangely” landed on this shore “to be the lord on’t.” Projecting his personal plans and dreams onto the wilderness, he colonized the island and dispossessed Caliban. Feeling robbed, Caliban protested: “As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.” But the English did not see their taking of the land as robbery. In Utopia (1516), written almost one hundred years before English colonization of America began in earnest, Sir Thomas More had provided a rationale for the appropriation of Indian lands: Since the natives did not “use” the soil but left it “idle and waste,” the English had “just cause” to drive them from the territory by force. In 1609 Robert Gray declared that “the greater part” of the earth was “possessed and wrongfully usurped by wild beasts … or by brutish savages.” A Virginia pamphlet argued that it was “not unlawful” for the English to possess “part” of the Indians' land.²⁸

But the English soon wanted more than just a “part” of Indian territory. Their need for land was suddenly intensified by a new development—the cultivation of tobacco as an export crop. In 1613 the colony sent its first shipment of tobacco to London, a small but significant four barrels' worth. The exports grew dramatically: 2,300 pounds in 1616, 19,000 the following year, 60,000 by 1620. The colonists increasingly coveted Indian lands, especially already cleared fields. Tobacco agriculture stimulated not only territorial expansion but also immigration. During the “Great Migration” of 1618-1623, the colony grew from 400 to 4,500 people.

In 1622 the natives tried to drive out the intruders, killing some three hundred colonists. John Smith denounced the “massacre” and described the “savages” as “cruel beasts,” who possessed “a more unnatural brutishness” than wild animals. The English deaths, Samuel Purchas argued, established the colonists' right to the land: “Their carcasses, the dispersed bones of their countrymen … speak, proclaim and cry, This our earth is truly English, and therefore this Land is justly yours O English.” Their blood had watered the soil, entitling them to the land. “We, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground than their [Indian] waste, and our purchase … may now by right of War, and law of Nations,” the colonists declared, “invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us.” They felt they could morally sweep away their enemies and even take their developed lands. “We shall enjoy their cultivated places. … Now their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situated in the fruitfulest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us.”²⁹

In their fierce counterattack, the English waged total war. “Victory may be gained in many ways,” a colonist declared: “by force, by surprise, by famine in burning their Corn, by destroying and burning their Boats, Canoes, and Houses … by pursuing and chasing them with our horses, and blood-hounds to draw after them, and mastives to tear them.” In 1623 Capt. William Tucker led his soldiers to a Powhatan village, presumably to negotiate a peace treaty. After he concluded the treaty, he persuaded the Indians to drink a toast, serving them poisoned wine. An estimated two hundred Indians died instantly; Tucker's soldiers then killed another fifty and “brought home part of their heads.” In 1629, a colonist reported, the English forced hostile Indians to seek peace by “continual incursions” and by “yearly cutting down, and spoiling their corn.” The goal of the war was to “root out [the Indians] from being any longer a people.”³⁰

What happened in Virginia, while terrible and brutal, was still based largely on the view that Indian “savagery” was cultural. Like the Irish, Indians were identified as brutal and backward, but they were not yet seen as incapable of becoming civilized because of their race, or “descent.” Their heathenism had not yet been indelibly attached to distinctive physical characteristics such as their skin color. So far at least, “consent” was possible for Indians. What occurred in New England was a different story, however, and here again The Tempest was preview.³¹

Although the theatergoers were given the impression that Caliban could be acculturated, they also received a diametrically opposite construction of his racial character. They were told that Caliban was “a devil, a born devil” and that he belonged to a “vile race.” “Descent” was determinative: his birthmark signified an inherent moral defect. On the stage, they saw Caliban, with long shaggy hair, personifying the Indian. He had distinct racial markers. “Freckled,” covered with brown spots, he was “not honored with human shape.” Called a “fish,” he was mockingly told: “Thy eyes are almost set in thy head.” “Where should they be set else? He were a brave monster indeed if they were set in his tail.” More important, his distinctive physical characteristics signified intellectual incapacity. Caliban was “a thing of darkness” whose “nature nurture [could] never stick.” In other words, he had natural qualities that precluded the possibility of becoming civilized through “nurture,” or education. The racial distance between Caliban and Prospero was inscribed geographically. Prospero forced the native to live on a reservation located in a barren region. “Here you sty me in this hard rock,” he complained, “whiles you do keep from me the rest o’ the island.” Prospero justified this segregation, charging that the “savage” possessed distasteful qualities “which good natures could not abide to be with. Therefore wast thou deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst deserved more than a prison.” The theatergoers saw Caliban's sty located emblematically at the back of the stage, behind Prospero's “study,” signifying a hierarchy of white over dark and cerebral over carnal.³²

This deterministic view of Caliban's racial character would be forged in the crucible of New England. Five years after the first performance of The Tempest, Capt. John Smith sailed north from Virginia to explore the New England coast; again he found not wild men but farmers. The “paradise” of Massachusetts, he reported, was “all planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens.” “The sea Coast as you pass shews you all along large Corne fields.” Indeed, while the Abenakis of Maine were mainly hunters and food gatherers dependent on the natural abundance of the land, the tribes in southern New England were horticultural. For example, the Wampanoags, whom the Pilgrims encountered in 1620, were a farming people, with a political system of governance and representation as well as a division of labor with workers specializing in arrow making, woodwork, and leathercraft.³³

The Wampanoags as well as the Pequots, Massachusets, Nausets, Nipmucks, and Narragansets cultivated corn. As the main source of life for these tribes, corn was the focus of many legends. A Narraganset belief told how a crow had brought this grain to New England: “These Birds, although they do the corn also some hurt, yet scarce one Native amongst a hundred will kill them, because they have a tradition, that the Crow brought them at first an Indian Grain of Corn in one Ear, and an Indian or French bean in another, from the Great God Kautantouwits field in the Southwest from whence … came all their Corn and Beans.” A Penobscot account celebrated the gift of Corn Mother. During a time of famine, an Indian woman fell in love with a snake in the forest. Her secret was discovered one day by her husband, and she told him that she had been chosen to save the tribe. She instructed him to kill her with a stone axe and then drag her body through a clearing. “After seven days he went to the clearing and found the corn plant rising above the ground. … When the corn had born fruit and the silk of the corn ear had turned yellow he recognized in it the resemblance of his dead wife. Thus originated the cultivation of corn.”³⁴

These Indians had a highly developed agricultural system. Samuel de Champlain found that “all along the shore” there was “a great deal of land cleared up and planted with Indian corn.” Describing their agricultural practices, he wrote: “They put in each hill three or four Brazilian beans [kidney beans]. … When they grow up, they interlace with the corn … and they keep the ground very free from weeds. We saw there many squashes, and pumpkins, and tobacco, which they likewise cultivate.” Thomas Morton noted the Indian practice of “dung[ing] their ground” with fish to fertilize the soil and increase the harvest. After visiting the Narragansets in Rhode Island, John Winthrop, Jr., noted that, although the soil in that region was “sandy & rocky,” the people were able to raise “good corn without fish” by rotating their crops. “They have every one 2 fields,” he observed, “which after the first 2 years they let one field rest each year, & that keeps their ground continually [productive].” According to Roger Williams, when the Indians were ready to harvest the corn, “all the neighbours men and women, forty, fifty, a hundred,” joined in the work and came “to help freely.” During their green corn festival, the Narragansets erected a long house, “sometimes a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet long upon a plain near the Court … where many thousands, men and women” gathered. Inside, dancers gave money, coats, and knives to the poor. After the harvest, the Indians stored their corn for the winter. “In the sand on the slope of hills,” according to Champlain, “they dig holes, some five or six feet, more or less, and place their corn and other grains in large grass sacks, which they throw into the said holes, and cover them with sand to a depth of three or four feet above the surface of the ground. They take away their grain according to their need, and it is preserved as well as it be in our granaries.” Contrary to the stereotype of Indians as hunters and therefore savages, these Indians were farmers.³⁵

However, many colonists in New England disregarded this reality and invented their own representations of Indians. What emerged to justify dispossessing them was the racialization of Indian “savagery.” The Indians' heathenism and alleged laziness came to be viewed as inborn group traits that rendered them naturally incapable of civilization. This process of dehumanizing the Indians developed a peculiarly New England dimension as the colonists associated Indians with the devil. Indian identity became then a matter of “descent”: Their racial markers indicated ineradicable qualities of savagery.

This social construction of race occurred within the economic context of competition over land. The colonists argued that only those who used the land were entitled to it. Native men, they claimed, pursued “no kind of labour but hunting, fishing and fowling.” Indians were not producers. “The Indians are not able to make use of the one fourth part of the Land,” argued the Puritan minister Francis Higginson in 1630, “neither have they any settled places, as Towns to dwell in, nor any ground as they challenge for their owne possession, but change their habitation from place to place.” In the Puritan view, Indians were lazy. “Fettered in the chains of idleness,” they would rather starve than work, complained William Wood of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634. Indians were sinfully squandering America's resources. Under their irresponsible guardianship, the land had become “all spoils, rots,” and was “marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.” Like the “foxes and wild beasts,” Indians did nothing “but run over the grass.”³⁶

The Puritan possession of Indian lands was facilitated by the invasion of unseen pathogens. When the colonists began arriving in New England, they found that the Indian population was already being reduced by European diseases. Two significant events had occurred in the early seventeenth century: Infected rats swam to shore from Samuel de Champlain's ships, and some sick French sailors were shipwrecked on the beaches of New England. By 1616 epidemics were ravaging Indian villages. Victims of “virgin soil epidemics,” the Indians lacked immunological defenses against the newly introduced diseases. Between 1610 and 1675, the Indian population declined sharply—from 12,000 to a mere 3,000 for the Abenakis and from 65,000 to 10,000 for the southern tribes.³⁷

Describing the sweep of deadly diseases among the Indians, William Bradford reported that the Indians living near the trading house at Plymouth “fell sick of the small pox, and died most miserably.” The condition of those still alive was “lamentable.” Their bodies were covered with “the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving” to the mats beneath them. When the sick Indians turned over, “whole sides” of their skin flayed off. In this terrible way, they died “like rotten sheep.” After one epidemic, Bradford recorded in his diary: “For it pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness and such a mortality that of a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above ground for want of burial.”³⁸

Leaders of the Massachusetts Bay colony interpreted these Indian deaths as divinely sanctioned opportunities to take the land. John Winthrop declared that the decimation of Indians by smallpox manifested a Puritan destiny: God was “making room” for the colonists and “hath hereby cleared our title to this place.” After an epidemic had swept through Indian villages, John Cotton claimed that the destruction was a sign from God: When the Lord decided to transplant his people, he made the country vacant for them to settle. Edward Johnson pointed out that epidemics had desolated “those places, where the English afterward planted.”³⁹

Indeed, many New England towns were founded on the very lands the Indians had used before the epidemics killed them. The Plymouth colony itself was located on the site of the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet. The Pilgrims had noticed that the village was empty and the cornfields overgrown with weeds. “There is a great deal of Land cleared,” one of them reported, “and hath beene planted with Corne three or foure yeares agoe.” The original inhabitants had been decimated by the epidemic of 1616. “Thousands of men have lived there, which died in a great plague not long since,” another Pilgrim wrote; “and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.” During their first spring, the Pilgrims went out into those fields to weed and manure them. Fortunately, they had some corn seed to plant. Earlier, when they landed on Cape Cod, they had come across some Indian graves and found caches of corn. They considered this find, wrote Bradford, as “a special providence of God, and a great mercy to this poor people, that here they got seed to plant them corn the next year, or else they might have starved.” The pallid strangers probably would have perished had it not been for the seeds they found stored in the Indian burial grounds. Ironically, Indian death came to mean life for the Pilgrims.⁴⁰

However, the Puritans did not see it as irony but as the destruction of devils. They had demonized the native peoples, condemning Indian religious beliefs as “diabolical, and so uncouth, as if … framed and devised by the devil himself.” In 1652 Thomas Mayhew, who was a missionary to the Wampanoags of Martha's Vineyard, wrote that they were “mighty zealous and earnest in the Worship of False gods and Devils.” They were under the influence of “a multitude of Heathen Traditions of their gods … and abounding with sins.”⁴¹

To the colonists, the Indians were not merely a wayward people: They personified something fearful within Puritan society itself. Like Caliban, a “born devil,” Indians failed to control their appetites, to create boundaries separating mind from body. They represented what English men and women in America thought they were not and, more important, what they must not become. As exiles living in the wilderness far from “civilization,” the English used their negative images of Indians to delineate the moral requirements they had set up for themselves. As sociologist Kai Erikson explains, “deviant forms of behavior, by marking the outer edges of group life, give the inner structure its special character and thus supply the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own cultural identity. … One of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities as well as for individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not.” By depicting Indians as demonic and savage, the colonists, like Prospero, were able to define more precisely what they perceived as the danger of becoming Calibanized.⁴²

The Indians presented a frightening threat to the Puritan errand in America. “The wilderness through which we are passing to the Promised Land is all over fill’d with fiery flying serpents,” warned the Puritan minister Cotton Mather in 1692. “Our Indian wars are not over yet.” The wars were now within Puritan society and the self; the dangers were internal. Self-vigilance against sin was required, or else the English would become like Indians. “We have too far degenerated into Indian vices. The vices of the Indians are these: They are very lying wretches, and they are very lazy wretches; and they are out of measure indulgent unto their children; there is no family government among them. We have [become] shamefully Indianized in all those abominable things.”⁴³

To be “Indianized” meant to serve the Devil. Cotton Mather thought this had happened to Mercy Short, a young girl who had been a captive of the Indians and who was suffering from tormenting fits. According to Mather, Short had seen the Devil. “Hee was not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour,” she said; “he wore an high-crowned Hat, with straight Hair; and had one Cloven-foot.” During a witchcraft trial, Mather reported, George Burroughs had lifted an extremely heavy object with the help to the Devil, who resembled an Indian. Puritan authorities hanged an Englishwoman for worshipping Indian “gods” and for taking the Indian devil-god Hobbamock for a husband. Significantly, the Devil was portrayed as dark-complected and Indian.⁴⁴

For the Puritan, to become Indian was the ultimate horror, for they believed Indians were “in very great subjection” to the Devil, who “kept them in a continual slavish fear of him.” Governor Bradford harshly condemned Thomas Morton and his fellow prodigals of the Merrymount settlement for their promiscuous partying with Indians: “They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies.” Interracial cavorting threatened to fracture a cultural and moral border—the frontier of Puritan identity. Congress of bodies, white and “tawney,” signified defilement, a frightful boundlessness. If the Puritans were to become wayward like the Indians, it would mean that they had succumbed to savagery and failed to shrivel the sensuous parts of the self. To be “Indianized” meant to be de-civilized, to become wild men.⁴⁵

But they could not allow this to happen, for they were embarking on an errand to transform the wilderness into civilization. “The whole earth is the Lord's garden and he hath given it to the sons of men [to] increase and multiply and replentish the earth and subdue it,” asserted John Winthrop in 1629 as he prepared to sail for New England. “Why then should we stand starving here for the places of habitation … and in the meantime suffer a whole Continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement.”⁴⁶

Actually, Indians had been farming the land, and this reality led to conflicts over resources. Within ten years after the arrival of Winthrop's group, twenty thousand more colonists came to New England. This growing English population had to be squeezed into a limited area of arable land. Less than twenty percent of New England was useful for agriculture, and the Indians had already established themselves on the prime lands. Consequently, the colonists often settled on or directly next to Indian communities. In the Connecticut Valley, for example, they erected towns such as Springfield (1636), Northhampton (1654), Hadley (1661), Deerfield (1673), and Northfield (1673) adjacent to the Indian agricultural clearings at Agawam, Norwottuck, Pocumtuck, and Squakheag.⁴⁷

Over the years, the expansion of English settlement sometimes led to wars that literally made the land “vacant.” During the Pequot War of 1637, some seven hundred Pequots were killed by the colonists and their Indian allies. Describing the massacre at Fort Mystic, an English officer wrote: “Many were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. … There were about four hundred souls in this fort, and not above five of them escaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight.” Commander John Mason explained that God had pushed the Pequots into a “fiery oven,” “filling the place with dead bodies.” By explaining their atrocities as divinely driven, the English were sharply inscribing the Indians as a race of devils. This was what happened during King Philip's War of 1675-1676. About a thousand English were killed during this conflict, and over six thousand Indians died from combat and disease. Altogether about half of the total Indian population had been destroyed in southern New England. Again, the colonists quickly justified their violence by demonizing their enemies. The Indians, Increase Mather observed, were “so Devil driven as to begin an unjust and bloody war upon the English, which issued in their speedy and utter extirpation from the face of God's earth.” Cotton Mather explained that the war was a conflict between the devil and God: “The Devil decoyed those miserable savages [to New England] in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb His absolute empire over them.”⁴⁸

Indians, “such people” of this “brave new world,” to use Shakespeare's words, personified the devil and everything the Puritans feared—the body, sexuality, laziness, sin, and the loss of self-control. They had no place in a “new England.” This was the view trumpeted by Edward Johnson in his Wonder-Working Providence. Where there had originally been “hideous Thickets” for wolves and bears, he proudly exclaimed in 1654, there were now streets “full of Girls and Boys sporting up and down, with a continued concourse of people.” Initially, the colonists themselves had lived in “wigwams” like Indians, but now they had “orderly, fair, and well-built houses … together with Orchards filled with goodly fruit trees, and gardens with variety of flowers.” The settlers had fought against the devil who had inhabited the bodies of the Indians, Johnson observed, and made it impossible for the soldiers to pierce them with their swords. But the English had violently triumphed. They had also expanded the market, making New England a center of production and trade. The settlers had turned “this Wilderness” into “a mart.” Merchants from Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal were coming to it. “Thus,” proclaimed Johnson, “hath the Lord been pleased to turn one of the most hideous, boundless, and unknown Wildernesses in the world in an instant … to a well-ordered Commonwealth.”⁴⁹

But all of these developments had already been acted out in The Tempest. Like Prospero, the English colonists had sailed to a new land, and like him, many of them felt they were exiles. They viewed the native peoples as savages, as Calibans. The strangers occupied the land, believing they were entitled to be “the lord on’t.”⁵⁰

The English possessed tremendous power to define the places and peoples they were conquering. As they made their way westward, they developed an ideology of “savagery,” which was given form and content by the political and economic circumstances of the specific sites of colonization. Initially, in Ireland, the English had viewed savagery as something cultural, or a matter of “consent.” They assumed that the distance between themselves and the Irish, or between civilization and savagery, was quantitative rather than qualitative. The Irish as “other” were educable: They were capable of acquiring the traits of civilization. But later as colonization reached across the Atlantic and as the English encountered a new group of people, many of them believed that savagery for the Indians might be inherent. Perhaps the Indians might be different from the English in kind rather than degree; if so, then the native people of America might be incapable of improvement because of their race. To use Shakespeare's language, they might have a “nature” that “nurture” would never be able to “stick” to or change. Race or “descent” might be destiny.⁵¹

What happened in America in the actual encounters between the Indians and the English strangers was not uniform. In Virginia, Indian savagery was viewed largely as cultural: Indians were ignorant heathens. In New England, on the other hand, Indian savagery was racialized: Indians came to be condemned as a demonic race, their dark complexions signifying an indelible and inherent evil. Why was there such a difference between the two regions? Possibly the competition between the English and the Indians over resources was more intense in New England than in Virginia where there was more arable land. More important, the colonists in New England had brought with them a greater sense of religious mission than the Virginia settlers. For the Puritans, theirs was an “errand into the wilderness”—a mission to create what John Winthrop had proclaimed as “a city upon a hill” with the eyes of the world upon them. In this economic and cultural framework, a “discovery” occurred: the Indian other became a manifest devil. Thus savagery was racialized as the Indians were demonized, doomed to what Increase Mather called “utter extirpation.” That process of cultural construction contributed to the making of a national identity.⁵²

Over the centuries, the significance of this cultural construction of race grew even broader, more dynamic, and more inclusive. The play could harbor broader constructions, too, for Caliban's racial identity was ambiguous. Caliban could also have been African. “Freckled,” dark-complected, a “thing of darkness,” Caliban was the son of Sycorax, a witch who had lived in Africa. “Have we devils here?” declared Stephano in The Tempest. “Do you put tricks upon's with savages and men of Inde, ha?” As this reference to India suggests, Caliban could also have been Asian.⁵³

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. Lamar (New York, 1971), 81. The Tempest has recently been swept into the storm over “political correctness.” George Will issued a scathing attack on “left” scholars and their “perverse liberation” of literature, especially their interpretation of The Tempest as a reflection of “the imperialist rape of the Third World.” Shakespeare specialist Stephen Greenblatt responded: “This is a curious example—since it is very difficult to argue that The Tempest is not about imperialism.” Such an authoritative counterstatement clears the way for a study of the play in relationship to its historical setting. See George Will, “Literary Politics: ‘The Tempest’? It’s ‘really’ about imperialism. Emily Dickinson's poetry? Masturbation,” Newsweek, April 22, 1991, p. 72; and Stephen Greenblatt, “The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance Is to Turn It into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 1991, pp. B1, B3. As Adam Begley has recently noted, Stanley Fish reminds us that “the circumstances of an utterance determine its meaning.” See Adam Begley, “Souped-Up Scholar,” New York Times Magazine, May 3, 1992, p. 52. The ideas on race and ethnicity presented in this article are further developed in Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multi-Cultural America (Boston, forthcoming).

2. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 37-40. Othello was first performed in 1604, before the founding of Jamestown. Jordan overlooked the rich possibility of studying The Tempest.

3. Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 30 (Oct. 1973), 585; David B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966), 161; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1976), 7. George Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1971), 13, describes the conquest of Ireland as a “rehearsal.”

4. Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization,” 585, 588; Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture, the Formative Years (New York, 1965), 169; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York, 1983), 42; Jennings, Invasion of America, 46, 49; James Muldoon, “The Indian as Irishman,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 111 (Oct. 1975), 269; Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 76.

5. Muldoon, “Indian as Irishman,” 284; Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 108.

6. Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization,” 593, 582; Jennings, Invasion of America, 153; Frederickson, White Supremacy, 15; Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 132-33.

7. Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization,” 582; Jennings, Invasion of America, 168; Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 44.

8. Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization,” 588; Jennings, Invasion of America, 46, 49; Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 76; Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 70.

9. Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 121; William Christie MacLeod, “Celt and Indian: Britain's Old World Frontier in Relation to the New,” in Beyond the Frontier: Social Process and Cultural Change, ed. Paul Bohannan and Fred Plog (Garden City, 1967), 38-39; Jennings, Invasion of America, 312.

10. Quinn, Elizabethans and the Irish, 121; Muldoon, “Indian as Irishman,” 270; MacLeod, “Celt and Indian,” 26. See also Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization,” 576.

11. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 13, 81; Frank Kermode, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare. The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1969), xxvii; Robert R. Cawley, “Shakespeare's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” PMLA, 41 (Sept. 1926), 699-700, 689; Frederickson, White Supremacy, 22; Shakespeare, Tempest, 13. See also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), 34-75.

12. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 27-28, 31; Cawley, “Shakespeare's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” 702-4; Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York, 1990), 102. For analysis of America imaged as a woman, see Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, 1989), 101; and Annette Kolodny. The Lay of the Land Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, 1975).

13. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, xxxviii; Kermode, “Introduction,” xxiv. For the anagram of Hamlet, see dedication to William Shakespeare at Kronborg Castle, Denmark.

14. Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1963), 126; Sale, Conquest of Paradise, 126; Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, 238, 226-27.

15. Kenneth M. Morrison, The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations (Berkeley, 1984), 22-23; Leonard A. Adolf, “Squanto's Role in Pilgrim Diplomacy,” Ethnohistory, 11 (Fall 1964), 247-48; Cawley, “Shakespeare's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” 720, 721; Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 41, 40; Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Kermode, 62.

16. William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647 (New York, 1967), 26; Frederickson, White Supremacy, 11; Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore, 1967), 12; Colin G. Calloway, ed., Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover, 1991), 33.

17. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 70; Wilcomb Washburn, ed., Indian and White Man (New York, 1964), 4-5; Morrison, Embattled Northeast, 22-23. On the significance of the sword, see Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New York, 1988).

18. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 85; Washburn, ed., Indian and White Man, 4, 5, 7.

19. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 62, 18, 19.

20. Frederickson, White Supremacy, 9. The terms “descent” and “consent” are from Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity; Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986), 6. Sollors minimizes the significance of race, arguing that it is “merely one aspect of ethnicity.” Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 36. I take the opposite position here as well as in Ronald Takaki, “Reflections on Racial Patterns in America,” in From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, ed. Ronald Takaki (New York, 1987), 26-38; and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1979).

21. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 36-37; Frederickson, White Supremacy, 8; Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, 92, 136; Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 57.

22. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 19; Cawley, “Shakespeare's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” 715; Frederickson, White Supremacy, 12; Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 9, 10.

23. James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1988), 190; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman, 1990), 44, 45, 46, 49, 60, 63.

24. Mortimer J. Adler, ed., Annals of America, vol. I: Discovering a New World (Chicago, 1968), 21, 26, 22.

25. Gary Nash. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, 1974), 58; Adler, ed., Annals of America. 1, 26.

26. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, books I and II (Cambridge, 1977), 116; Frederickson, White Supremacy, 24; Sale, Conquest of Paradise. 277.

27. Jennings, Invasion of America, 66; Nash. Red, White, and Black, 57.

28. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 22; Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 29, 80, 52; Thomas More, Utopia (New Haven, 1964), 76; Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 42; Cawley, “Shakespeare's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” 715.

29. Jennings, Invasion of America, 78, 80; Sale, Conquest of Paradise, 295.

30. Nash, Red, White, and Black, 62, 63; Sale, Conquest of Paradise, 293, 294; Jennings, Invasion of America, 153.

31. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 6, 36, 37.

32. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 70, 15-16, 18, 19, 29, 50. For the location of Caliban's sty, see Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Kermode, 63.

33. Howard S. Russell, Indian New England before the Mayflower (Hanover, 1980), 11; Adler, ed., Annals of America, 1, 39.

34. Eva L. Butler, “Algonkian Culture and the Use of Maize in Southern New England,” Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Connecticut (no. 22, Dec. 1948), 6; Speck, “Penobscot Tales and Religious Beliefs,” Journal of American Folk-lore, 48 (Jan.-March 1915), 75; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 72.

35. Russell, Indian New England, 10, 11, 166; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 80; Peter A. Thomas, “Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use as Factors for Understanding Indian-White Relations in New England,” Ethnohistory, 23 (Winter 1976), 10; Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Detroit, 1973), 170; Butler, “Algonkian Culture and the Use of Maize,” 15, 17. For a study of the Abenakis as hunters, see Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 29-68.

36. Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, 262; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 55, 56; William Wood, New England's Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughn (Amherst, 1977), 96.

37. Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (April 1976), 289; Dean R. Snow, “Abenaki Fur Trade in the Sixteenth Century,” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, 6 (no. 1, 1976), 8; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 90.

38. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 270-71.

39. Roy Harvey Pearce, “The ‘Ruines of Mankind’: The Indian and the Puritan Mind,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1952), 201; Peter Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the Frontier, 1629-1700 (New York, 1969), 13; Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, 40.

40. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 90; Alfred W. Crosby, “God … Would Destroy Them, and Give Their Country to Another People,” American Heritage, 29 (Oct./Nov. 1978), 40; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 65-66.

41. William S. Simmons, “Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception of Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 38 (Jan. 1981), 70, 62.

42. Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966), 13, 64. See also Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 8.

43. Cotton Mather, On Witchcraft: Being, the Wonders of the Invisible World (New York, n.d.), 53. This treatise was originally published in 1692. Simmons, “Cultural Bias,” 71.

44. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, 1973), 132, 142, 65.

45. Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, 263; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 205.

46. John Winthrop, Winthrop Papers, vol. II: 1623-1630 (Boston, 1931), 139.

47. Thomas, “Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use,” 4.

48. Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback, eds., Puritans, Indians & Manifest Destiny (New York, 1977), 136-37, 111; Sherburne F. Cook, “Interracial Warfare and Population Decline among the New England Indians,” Ethnohistory, 20 (Winter 1973), 19-21; Simmons, “Cultural Bias,” 67; Segal and Stineback, eds., Puritans, Indians & Manifest Destiny, 182.

49. Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, 71, 168, 211, 247-48; see Cronon, Changes in the Land, 166-67.

50. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 76.

51. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 70; Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 6-7, 36-37.

52. Perry Miller, in Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York, 1964), 1-15; John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (New York, 1956), 79-84; Simmons, “Cultural Bias,” 67. Miller's metaphor and theme originally came from Samuel Danforth's sermon, delivered on May 11, 1670, “A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness.”

53. Shakespeare, Tempest, ed. Wright and Lamar, 15, 41.