The Dawn of a New Era

and the death of an old one

THE WEST COUNTRY MEN

The English were late bloomers when it came to the colonization of the Americas; almost a century passed between Spains colonization of South and Central America and Englands failed attempt at colonization at Roanoke. The focus in the Americas centered on the far northern regions where furs, fish, and whales were in plentiful supply; and on the southern tropics, where gold and silver was abundant, and where profitable staples such as tobacco, molasses, and sugarcane could be harvested. By the settling of Roanoke, the Spanish had subdued by force (and with more than a little help from European pathogens) Peru and Central America. The French had set up small trading posts throughout Canada and Newfoundland, but Europe ignored most of North America, since much of the land was too cool for subtropical crops (the big moneymakers in Europe, since Europe herself was too cool to grow them), and because the land was already occupied by lots of natives, and these natives werent particularly friendly. The Spanish, who had exercised their military might in Central and South America, were forced to attempt peaceful colonization of Florida through Franciscan missionaries, and attempts to colonize the Chesapeake were abandoned after 1572 because the local Indians were too powerful and hostile. Thus the French dominated the fur trade to the north and the Spanish, with only one permanent settlement in Florida (San Agustin), dominated to the south; that left England a narrow strip of land along the eastern seaboard to work with, and it was land the French saw as useless and the Spanish saw as too much a burden to try to colonize. During the mid-1500s, when Spain and France were setting their sights on the New World, England found herself embroiled in colonization efforts much closer to home in Ireland. Success in Ireland late in the century inspired English leaders to look across the Atlantic in their colonial ambitions. Their sights narrowed on the Chesapeake, a region they called Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth, a supposed virgin (Virginia was the name given to the entire mid-Atlantic coast between Spanish Florida and French Acadia). When war with Spain erupted in 1585, Englands finances and manpower were directed not towards overseas expansion but to the war effort. The crown subcontracted colonization to entrepreneurs, issuing licenses and monopolies to those eager to risk life and limb to land massive profits in the New World. The prominent takers of the Queens offer were known as the West Country Men, who had led the conquest and colonization of Ireland. These men had also designed the English attack on the Spanish Empire, recognizing colonial trade as the key to imperial prowess. They summarized their goals in three concise points: first, they

would plant Christian religion; second, they would traffic; and third, they would conquer. Such men as Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Sir Richard Grenville took advantage of the national anxiety over the rampant poverty, crime, and vagrancy in 16th-century England to promote their agendas. Englands social structure concentrated wealth at the miniscule tip of the social pyramid, and power centered on the monarch, the aristocracy, and the lesser aristocracy known as the gentry. Executive power focused on the monarch, usually a king but, at times and for want of a male heir, a queen, such as Queen Elizabeth. The monarch shared power with the aristocracy and gentry, who composed the bicameral legislatures in Parliament. The aristocracy, by birthright rather than election, filled the House of Lords. The gentry took seats in the House of Commons, and their seats came not by birth but by election. Elections were regulated to men who owned a certain amount of property, and these gentry constituted about a quarter of the population. Regulating the government itself was the English Constitution, a rolling constitution in the sense that there was no single document (the framers of the United States Constitution took lessons from the failures of the rolling sort of constit ution and set about creating a concrete constitution). The top five percent of Englands population paraded their wealth in mesmerizing palaces and sweeping country estates; they rode in gilded carriages, wore fine silk clothing, and surrounded themselves with servants. Directly beneath them were the common people. A few had property, and these ranged from wealthy urban merchants to the middling folk: farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans. The vast majority, however, didnt own property and were considered the lower sort: the working poor, such as urban laborers and rural peasants, and the beggars without work. The gulf between the rich and poor only widened over the years, since economic growth failed to keep up with the population. Overpopulation became a legitimate threat, as England leapt from three million inhabitants in 1500 to four million in 1600 and five million by 1650. Around eighty percent of the English lived in country villages, making a living by cultivating grains or raising livestock. When the aristocracy developed the enclosure program (enclosing large tracts of land and fencing out those who lived on the land to increase their profits by rationalizing the estates), the rural people began to suffer far more than their fair share. These common lands became the property of the aristocracy, and those who used the lands to pasture livestock or hunt game found themselves sidelined. Though the program did increase national wealth, it did so at the aggravation and displacement of the rural folk. Finding themselves evicted and

unemployed, these sturdy beggars became vagrants, roaming the land in search of work and handouts. Many reached the brink of starvation and were forced to steal just to survive; and because theft was a capital crime, those caught were led to the gallows. The poor gravitated towards the market towns and seaport cities, and Londons population swelled from 120,000 in 1550 to 375,000 a century later. London became notorious for her filth, poverty, plagues, crime, fires, and not least of all, her executions. Parliament sought to curb the problem through taxes, and when that didnt work, Parliament authorized the local authorities to whip, brand, and even execute beggars when they returned to where they were unwanted. The West Country Men promised that they had the answer to the dilemma of the vagrants infesting the seaport cities and market towns: export them to a new colony in Virginia. Those who were such a burden on the streets of London could be put to work raising cash crops to bolster the wealth of England in international trade. They promised to kill two birds with one stone: not only would their program lighten Englands burden of the poor, but Englands standing in international trade would skyrocket. The promoters were confident that their plan would work (much to their own profit), but first they had to convince the crown that the natives currently living in Virginia all up and down her coast were not to be feared. The promoters preached that the natives were used to the legendary (if inaccurate) brutalities of the Spanish colonizers, and that upon seeing the English, they would welcome them as liberators. And if that werent the case, if the natives were indeed hostile, the promoters promised to make quick work of them. All they had to do was point to the conquest of Ireland. Ireland served as a sort of warm up for English colonization across the Atlantic. The English conquerors treated the Irish as if they were savages, and they waged a war of terror and intimidation, massacring prisoners by the hundreds, even women and children. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, one of the West Country Men, served as a commander during the conquest, and he lined the path leading to his tent with impaled human heads. Emptying Ireland of its savages, the English colonized Ireland with their own estates, peoples, and religion. The English experience in Ireland would be mimicked in their treatment of the native Americans, and the West Country promoters were adamant: if they could do it to Ireland, how much more difficult would it be to do it to half-naked savages who lacked European technology?

THE MYSTERY OF ROANOKE

The first English attempt at the colonization of Virginia took place in 1585 in modernday North Carolina. Sir Walter Ralegh sent about 100 colonists, all men, across the Atlantic, and they chose to land on a small island buffered by dangerous shoals and long sandbanks, hoping these would prevent them from being discovered by the Spanish in Florida and help prevent attack in the event that they were discovered. The shoals made it difficult for English ships to land supplies or load commodities, and the sandy earth could only produce scanty crops. The poor location, chosen because of the assumed threat of the Spanish, doomed Roanoke to failure. The colonists, led by Ralph Lane, a veteran of the conquest of Ireland, expected to be fed by the local Algonquian Indians. The Indians were initially hospitable, but they ran out of patience as the English kept demanding more and more food as th e natives supply ran dangerously low. Wingina, the local chieftain, refused to provide anymore food, and Ralph Lane responded by killing him and his deputy chiefs. He hoped to secure food by terrifying the survivors, but the Indians simply moved deeper into the interior, abandoning their crops and refusing to harvest near the English colony. Starving and absent food, the colonists abandoned Roanoke that spring when English ships stopped by en route to England from raiding the Spanish Caribbean. The next year, Ralegh dispatched a second set of colonists led by a man named John White. The colonists included women and children, and thus they were the first English families to settle in the Americas. Ralegh and White planned on relocating the colony to Chesapeake Bay, where the land would be more fruitful, and where the natives wouldnt be as hostile as those near Roanoke. The ships transporting the colonists, however, were too impatient to sail as far north as the Chesapeake before raiding Spanish shipping, so they dropped the colonists off at Roanoke. White soon returned to England, hoping to procure supplies for the struggling colony, but the threat of the roving Spanish Armada forced England to turn her merchant ships into warships. White couldnt secure a transport until 1590, and when he returned to Roanoke, he found the colony abandoned. He found no sign of any Indian or Spanish attacks, the lone clue being the word Croatoan carved into a tree. Croatoan Island (modern-day Hatteras Island) was nearby, and White wanted to investigate, but the mariners were too eager to head south to raid Spanish shipping, so they refused to take White to the island. In 1604 a peace treaty with Spain greatly reduced the danger of Spanish attack on a new colony, and the peace freed up capital, shipping, and sailors previously relegated to attacking the Spanish. The great merchants of London had used the war

years to invest in privateers against the Spanish, but with the newfound peace, they had to look elsewhere for profits. Their eyes went across the Atlantic to Virginia. Queen Elizabeth had been succeeded by King James I in 1603, and with her passing also passed the influence of the West Country Men. James I favored the Virginia Company, and in 1606 he granted them a charter to colonize and govern Virginia. The Virginia Company of London was a joint-stock company that gathered the money of the rich to finance a journey for the poor to rake in money for the Virginia Company and her stockholders. The Adventurers were the wealthy artisans, lords, and merchants who financed the expeditions, though (ironically) they themselves generally didnt board the ships. The Planters were the poorer folk who decided to make the journey, and their task was simple: to plant crops to turn profits for the backers of the expeditions. The journey to, and subsequent life in, the New World would be risky, but the planters had a decent incentive: property. By order of the King, all planters would be granted English rights and would also be given a plot of land somewhere between the 34th and 41st parallels, stretching west all the way to the Pacific (noting, of course, that mapmakers at the time had no idea how many miles that actually was; they thought the Pacific to be relatively close to the Atlantic, much like it is in Central America). The Undertakers were those who orchestrated the expeditions, and the name was fitting, considering how many planters actually died on the expeditions. In December of 1606, three vessels left England for Virginia, and they reached the Chesapeake in late April of 1607. The colonists ascended the broad James River, hoping to avoid being detected by any rogue Spanish ships. Sixty miles upriver they came ashore and established a little settlement beside a marsh on the north bank. They named the river and the town to flatter King James I, and they surrounded their wooden shelters with a triangular stockade mounted with cannon at the corners. The high walls, it was hoped, would prevent the natives from seeing any English die, for the orchestrators of the expedition didnt want the Indians to be clued into the fact that the English werent immortal. Jamestown thus came into existence, and the Chesapeake became home for transplanted Englishmen. Chesapeake Bay, about 200 miles long and twenty miles wide, was a meeting place for tidewater estuaries and freshwater rivers that abounded in fish, shellfish, and game. Four major rivers with their own snaking tributaries began at the western shore, dividing the land into a series of long and fertile peninsulas. From north to south, the English named these rivers the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, and the James. The rivers offered easy navigation about 100

miles into the interior before meeting with waterfalls, where the coastal plain gave way to the rolling hills of the piedmont stretching to the mist-shrouded Alleghenies. Natives told the Jamestown colonists that white people had recently lived nearby as refugees in a native village. Unfortunately the village had run afoul of a powerful chieftain, Powhatan, who commanded a confederation of Indians, and Powhatans warriors had slaughtered all the refugees. A leading theory regard ing the Mystery of Roanoke is that the settlers assimilated into the nearby friendly Indian populations, not because they were forced to but because they wanted to. Such assimilation wasnt uncommon by Europeans: Benjamin Franklin, who dressed simply and out-of-fashion for civilized Europe, and who wore a beaver-pelt fur cap, at one time spoke of the seduction of Indian cultures and mode-of-living because of its preference against its European counterpart. Its quite reasonable to theorize that the starving white settlers at Roanoke had found a short-lived redemption with the friendly natives of Croatoan Island; short-lived because Powhatan of Pocahontas lore ruled with an iron fist, and his fist would soon be seen by the settlers of Jamestown.

PRIMITIVE NORTH AMERICA

Early American histories tend to begin with the failed settling of Roanoke, as if this were the opening scene to a grandiose story of the New World being opened up to true civilization. The U.S. historian George Bancroft, writing in 1834, argued this point, and his point-of-view remains cemented in popular historical thought: the New World was an unproductive waste Its only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection. Samuel Eliot Morison insisted that Indians had been chained in a changeless wilderness, that they were pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of any hope for the future. As recently as 1987, an edition of American History: A Survey, used throughout high schools and edited by three prominent historians, succinctly summed up the accomplishments of the New Worlds inhabitants: For thousands of centuriescenturies in which human races were evolving, forming communities, and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europethe continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works. These arrogant preconceived notions have been radically altered as new technologies have opened up alternate windows into the past. Demography, epidemiology, botany, and climatology are but a few of the recent disciplines to bring

under scrutiny these long-held assumptions of the Indians as backwards, struggling, primitive peoples. Evolutionary and molecular biology; genetic microsatellite analysis and virtual 3D fly-throughs; ice core sampling, satellite photography, soil assays and carbon-14 dating These, too, have shed new light on the Americas prior to the European invasion. It is becoming apparent that the Americas before 1492 thrived with civilizations and languages, intercontinental trade networks, and millions of people not so different from you and I inhabited the land. This world all but vanished overnight, brought to ruins by disease and European subjugation. This decimation was so total that within a couple hundred years, neither the conquerors nor the vanquished remembered that this world even existed. The prevailing theory regarding Indian origins is that people from Eurasia (the continent of Europe and Asia) migrated to the Americas across the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia; at this time, a land bridge dubbed Beringia, now erased by rising sea levels, stretched across the Bering Strait. This migration didnt happen all at once but over thousands of years, the latest being around 13,000 years ago, at the tailend of the Ice Age. Because the sheets of polar ice locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels around the world were about 300 feet lower than they are now. Beringia thus opened up, but at the conclusion of the Ice Age, the water level rose and washed Beringia away. Those Indians who had reached Alaska wouldve been able to migrate south to the more habitable regions of North America around 13,000 years ago, when two great glacial ice sheets in northwest Canada parted. Much like the Israelites crossing of the Red Sea, a warm and ice-free corridor opened between the sheets, and down this channel the paleo-Indians couldve headed south without having to endure the arduous trek across vast sheets of ice. This conception of Indian origins went all but unchallenged until a recent archaeological dig in southern Chile revealed evidence of human habitation more than 12,000 years ago. The dig sits 7000 miles south of the Bering Strait, a distance that wouldve obviously taken a long time to traverse by those paleo-Indians crossing Beringia and then marching south through the Canadian ice tunnel. This discovery sent historians back to the drawing board, trying to ascertain just how this was possible in lieu of the prevailing concepts. One theory put forward is that the first Americans arrived 20,000 years ago, when the Ice Age wasnt as intense as it had been in its later stages, allowing the Indians time to cut across the ice sheets and pass through North America, through Central America, and into modern-day Chile. However, because some artifacts at the Chilean site could be up to 30,000 years old, other historians place their

arrival far earlier than 20,000 years ago. Another theory is that this ancient Chilean culture didnt use Beringia at all but traveled by boat to the western coast of South America; some speculate that they may have arrived by boat via Australia, passing the South Pole. The Chilean discovery certainly serves as a chink in the armor in the prevailing ideas of Indian origins, and though there are no clear-cut answers, many scientists theorize that up to five different major waves of settlement thrust peoples into the Americas, with the earliest occurring as much as 50,000 years ago. Regardless of their precise origins, what is known is that these paleo-Indians spread throughout the Americas over thousands upon thousands of years, diversifying into hundreds of culturally distinct tribes, countries, and nations. Christopher Columbus called the natives Indians in 1492, because he originally thought hed reached the East Indies in his search for Asia. Even when it became apparent that Columbus had not reached the East Indies, his designation for the natives stuck, cemented because the New World was often called the West Indies. The Indians werent seen as the natives of India proper but as natives of the West Indies. Lumping all the distinct cultures and nations of North, South, and Central America into one name does them quite an injustice, in the same way that a native American of the Shawnee tribe would call all white people British, ignoring the fact that Europe herself was divided into many culturally and socially distinct tribes and nations. The Indians of the New World lived off the land, sustaining their populations by hunting, gathering, and in some cases agriculture. Despite Morisons accusations, the Indians were far from primitive: some cultures created monumental architecture that rendered Europeans speechless. The natives of Mesoamerica built massive organized cities the size of London and even Paris, and they had chiefdoms, states, and even empires. There werent few of them, either. Scholars in the 19th century put the indigenous population of the New World prior to Columbus at around 10 million; by the 20th century, scholars were placing their estimates to an average of 50 million, with some high estimates at 100 million. For comparisons sake, Europe had a population of 70 million around the discovery of the New World. So far as geography is concerned, the popular consensus among scholars puts the numbers around 50 million people in the New World, with only about five million living north of Mexico. This isnt to say that it couldnt be higher: taking into account new sciences and technology that can be used to study the past, and factoring in epidemiology, the numbers have been put as high as 90 to 112 million for the New World. If this is the case, then when Columbus set sail for the New World, more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. The United Nations

in 1999 put the earths population at the beginning of the 16th century at about 500 million; if there were indeed 90 to 112 million natives in the Americas at the beginning of the 1500s, and if disease killed 80-100 million of them (which is in no way out of the question according to our modern understanding of epidemiology), then the epidemicscalled here the Great Dyingwould have killed one out of every five people on the planet. Such calculations led George Lovell, of Queens University in Ontario, to declare that the rampage of disease in the New World following the arrival of Europeans was the greatest destruction of lives in human history. But more on this anon. Deducing the numbers of New World inhabitants prior to Columbus is difficulty, not least due to the lack of written records prior to the European invasion, and because of the fact that colonial estimates failed to take into account the effects of European diseases on the native populations. Colonial estimates of indigenous numbers were put together just after the epidemics, or even in the midst of them, and thus represented population nadirs rather than pre-contact numbers. Adding to the difficulty of deducing numbers by historical and scientific means is the fact that this discussion isnt made absent emotion. Many modern native Americans loathe low numbers, believing they dismiss the impact of disease; they often see low numbers as attempting to reduce the original population of the Americas so that the European invasion isnt seen as a hostile takeover but simply as a group of people taking over land that was vacant and thus up for grabs. Conversely, many historians see large numbers arising out of prejudice against Western civilization and colonization in name of Christianity. Historian Charles Mann points out that high number projections have been seen by some as politically motivatedself-flagellation by guilty white liberals or, worse, a push to inflate the toll of imperialism from the hate-America crowd. Precise numbers withstanding, all scholars agree that the vast majority of native Americans lived in Mesoamerica and South America, with as few as five million living north of the deserts of Mexico. The reason for this is straightforward: the Ice Age. The thousands of years preceding the European invasion of the New World saw much of North America covered in ice. Although the ice began receding around 10,000 years ago, the land was quite cold and hostile, and so native Americans didnt seem to want to develop it (and who can blame them? we wouldnt like it either!). This isnt to say that North America was empty; archaeological remains in northern Louisiana date back to around 3500 B.C. Archaeologists uncovered a ring of eleven irregularly shaped mounts, most of them connected by a ridge overlooking the Ouachita River. It was assumed that the native Americans of this time period were primitive in the sense of being nomadic

hunter-gatherers, wandering about in tribes and bands. The Louisiana mounds implied that at least some native Americans in southern North America werent nomads: building mounds required lots of time, coordination, and labor. Mound projects demanded a hierarchical society, since someone had to be at the top, making the project run smoothly. This went against the grain of preconceived notions of Indians being primitive caveman-like nomads. Another discovery in Louisiana, this one dated to about 2000 years after the previous, sported a structure looking a lot like an amphitheater, with six concentric C-shaped ridges on a bluff facing the river. A third discovery, this one hundreds of miles north in the Ohio Valley, dates to about seven hundred years after that of the Louisianan amphitheater, and this people group has become known as the Adena. Because the Adena built countless mounds, theyre known as The MoundBuilders. Based around the Mississippi River and its off-branching rivers, the MoundBuilding societies (of which the Adena were preeminent) scattered tens of thousands of mounds all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic coast, west to the Great Plains and north to southern Canada. Most of the mounds, however, were concentrated in the Ohio Valley. The majority of the earthworks were shaped like pyramids and cones, but more elaborate ones in the shape of animals also developed: birds, lizards, long-tailed alligators, lizards, and in Ohio, a 1330-foot long serpent. Most have, unfortunately, been destroyed by modern civilization (highways, farms, strip malls and subdivisions are the biggest culprits), but archaeological digs and preserved sites have offered a wealth of information, giving us a snapshot into a world of numerous nations and confederacies, vast trade networks, and empires risingeither by influence or conquestto dominate the other nations and tribes in their region. So sophisticated were the Adena that their first discoverers couldnt imagine primitive peoples being capable of such beauties, such civilization and so they attributed the mounds to the Chinese, the Welsh, the Phoenicians, even the lost nation of Atlantis! European bias against the nativesseeing them as primitive, backwards, and unsophisticatedblinded the discoverers to the reality behind the mounds: the Adena were, to put it quite simply, awesome. Their mounds served as tombs, and the noble dead were buried with copper beads and bracelets, textiles and clothing, stone tablets, and sometimes with stone pipes in the shapes of weird-looking animals. These pipes were used to smoke tobacco, but its believed that the tobacco used by the Adena may have been psychoactive; the effect would have been quite different from smoking a Marlboro. The Adena were

agriculturalists, embracing their own form of the Neolithic Revolution. Their crops included knotweed, maygrass, and little barley (though none of these are really grown today). Early forms of agriculture have been detected from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 AD, but agriculture boomed with the resourceful and adept Adena. That the Adena were major power-players in the New World can be seen in customs and artifacts that spread from them in the Ohio Valley to Kentucky and all the way north to Vermont and even New Brunswick. Included in the dissemination of their artifacts across much of North America may have been agriculture itself, and not least the Algonquian language (scholars put the origin of the various Algonquian languages back to a common language that emerged a few centuries before the crucifixion of Christ; this common ancestor may well have been the Adena). Traditional scholars assumed that the spread of Adena customs and artifacts came by conquest, but recently a new theory has developed: the Adena were the popular kids on the block, and the surrounding tribes and nations embraced many of their ideals in the same way that kids who want to be cool start dressing and acting like the cool kids two grades above. The sociological word for this is an interaction sphere, a region in which one societys symbols, values, and inventions are disseminated into the spheres in which they hold influence. This sphere lasted about 700 years, from 800 B.C. to 100 B.C. The Adena Empire came to a close, replaced by the Hopewell. Archaeologists are divided: Are the Hopewell a later stage of Adena culture? Or are they an entirely different culture altogether, rising above the Adena? The Hopewell were mound-builders like the Adena, and they seem to have spoken the same language (Algonquian). The Hopewell were based in southern Ohio, and their dominance lasted about 300 years, until 400 A.D. Although their reign was shorter than that of the Adena, their sphere of influence was far greater, extending across 2/3 of the modern United States. The trade routes of the Hopewell introduced Ontario silver into the Midwest, along with seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, sharks teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone. The Hopewell saturated North America with the bow and arrow, mound-building, and fired pottery (the Hopewell, unlike the Adena, utilized kilns). The Hopewell artifact that spread most, however, wasnt pottery, nor even mounds, but their religion. The rise of the Hopewell against the Adena has often been assumed to be due to conquest; another theory is that they became the new cool kids on the block by virtue of their psychoactive religion. Not unlike the rise of Islam and the spread of Arabic throughout the Middle East, the Hopewell may have been the ones (rather than the Adena) to have spread Algonquian

far-and-large as their intoxicating religion gripped the nations. The Hopewell, aided perhaps by psychoactive tobacco, sought with vigor spiritual ecstasy. In this psychoactive ecstasy, the soul found itself journeying to other worlds. Hopewell ceremonies were intricate, and their mounds served as great cathedrals, meeting-places for the euphoric practice of their religion. The Hopewell faith spread like wildfire throughout eastern North America, and many scholars see the Hopewell faith connected to the rise of the great city of Cahokia in modern-day Illinois. The Hopewell declined around 400 A.D., though their trade networks remained intact, giving birth to the rise of the Mississippians. The decline of the Hopewell empire opened the door for fragmented societies, and these fragmented societies, sharing common traits and evolving along common lines, have come to be known as the Mississippians, though it wasnt so much an empire as it was a conglomeration of various cultures which remained in communication and influence via the trade routes instituted by the Adena, strengthened by the Hopewell, and left running by the Mississippians. The Mississippians coagulated in the American Bottom, a land ripe for agriculture, and they utilized the fertile ground to grow maize (though the Hopewell knew of maize, they didnt really plant it all that much). The Mississippians planted large plots of land and communal granaries; the need to supervise the granaries opened the door for centralized power. The Mississippian culture accelerated, perhaps aided by some forgotten charismatic leader. At the heart of Mississippian culture was the powerful city of Cahokia, located on the confluence of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri rivers. The area around Cahokia had been lightly settled until about 600 A.D., when people began trickling into the area. Small villages of about a few hundred people sprouted up around the rivers confluence, and these villagers planted gardens in the rich soil and traveled up and down the three rivers in canoes, conducting trade with other towns and villages along the waterways. As 1000 A.D. drew near, the American Bottom had a population of several thousand, and many of these were concentrated in what was becoming a sprawling city known by us as Cahokia. Cahokias prominence lasted from about 950 to 1250 A.D., and its importance, size, and duration is comparable to our own experience of New York City. The rise of Cahokia came suddenly, without warning, in what has been called its own Big Bang, which took place over a handful of chaotic decades. Two theories have arisen to explain this Big Bang; the first is that an ambitious politician seized power in Cahokia, and his reign turned the city into an autocracy. Those loyal to him forced the citys immigrants to join labor squads, reiterating control in

ritualistic massacres: burial grounds show the power of the elite, in that their remains are often interred along with hundreds of sacrificed retainers. One such elitist was buried with about fifty young women. Other scholars dont think the Big Bang was so violent, but that the Cahokians started construction projects, such as the citys dominating feature, Monks Mound, simply because they felt like it. These great construction feats may have served as symbols to the surrounding nations of Cahokias power. Other scholars, along the same lines, believe the mounds to be religious in nature, perhaps a holdout from the ecstasies of Hopewell religion. Whatever the reason for Cahokias rise to prominence, the end result was breathtaking in scope. Monks Mound (as its called now) was bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, and scattered around it were over one hundred smaller mounds, many of these topped with towering wooden palisades. These smaller mounds encircling Monks Mound were ringed by a network of canals serving as irrigation and transportation. There were carefully allocated plots of maize, and scattered among all of this were hundreds of wooden homes with deeply-thatched roofs reminiscent of traditional Japanese homes. Canoes would have coated the rivers, and the trade networks brought in artifacts and bounties from all across North America. The city was nearly five square miles large with around 15,000 people. Cahokias agonizing death began when an earthquake shook down her buildings around 1200 A.D. Fires wouldve spread from fallen torches and cooking fires. The earthquake seems to have been of such magnitude that the rivers waters wouldve acted like a tsunami, tearing through the city. Monks Mound itself was damaged, and though the rulers tried to restore order and bring the city back to its feet, Cahokia never rose off its knees before plunging forward to its death. Civil war erupted among the terrified and frantic survivors, and they literally pulled the city apart at the seams. By 1350 A.D. Cahokia was all but empty and forgotten until relatively recently. The death of Cahokia and the subsequent demise of the Mississippians isnt the end of the story: far to the east, beyond the Alleghenies and along the eastern seaboard, the cold and frigid land left in the wake of the last Ice Age had slowly been evolving into something more amenable to life: a land of wet maple forests, thick highland woods, bogs full of cranberries and orchids, fire-blackened stands of pitch pine, and tidal estuaries resplendent with shellfish. This stretch of coastline soon became home to thousands upon thousands of people, and the Abenaki knew it as The Dawnland. Along the east coast, upper New England was a beautiful land filled with lakes, ponds, and cold swamps; the river valleys housed permanent villages encircled by

suburban hamlets and hunting camps. These villages in turn were cloaked by fields of maize, squash, and beans. Up and down the Connecticut and Charles rivers, Indian villages teemed with life, stretching for miles upon miles, each village and its fields thrust against the one beside it. Villages along the Atlantic coastline may have been smaller and more scattered, but they werent nomadic villages in the least. The natives tended to live in the smaller coastline communities during the shorter, warmer months, and then fall back inland come winter to escape winter storms and freezing tides. The Indian homes were constructed of arched poles lashed together into a dome; in the summer, the dome was covered by sheets of chestnut bark, and in the winter the Indians replaced the thin bark with firmer tightly-woven rush mats. Day and night a fire burned in the center of the home, the smoke venting through a hole in the roof. These werent primitive homes; later Europeans commented often on how their homes were warmer in winter than the ones built in England! More than one European, well acquainted with leaky roofs, found it mesmerizing that the thickly-thatched roofs of these native houses never leaked! These Indians houses were sparse: a low, platform-style bed (sometimes large enough for an entire family) piled high with mats and furs for comfort. Their diet consisted of beanand-corn mash, meat, vegetables and fish, as well as dried maize. Their diets averaged about 2500 calories a day, far better than the standard European diet. These New England Indians were noted by later colonists to be more loving and familial than their European counterparts. Men and women both praised the virtues of braveness, honesty, hardiness, and a stoic acceptance of lifes difficulties. The Indian towns were ruled by a sachem, who served as a sort of Governor, and they were dependent on treating their subjects well, for those in the village could move away and join another sachem anytime they chose. Sachems were tasked with upholding the laws, controlling foreign contracts, negotiating treaties, providing for widows and orphans, dealing with land disputes, and declaring war. Indian warfare stands in stark contrast to that practiced by the Europeans, and by the time Europeans began settling New England, warfare itself had rapidly increased. Much of this is because of the societal fragmentation due to episodic diseases ripping through New England as European disease came on the heelsor, rather, the hooves of the Spanish. The infamous conquistador Hernando de Soto played a major role in the spread of disease in North America when he led an expedition from Cuba, into Florida, and through the American southeast. In 1539, de Soto and his 600 soldiers went on a bloodletting rampage through the heartland of Mississippian culture. From modern-day Florida they marched through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee,

Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and eastern Texas. He crossed the Mississippi River in 1541, and he traveled as far as the Great Plains. De Sotos ruthlessness caught up with him, and in 1542 he died of sickness on the banks of the Mississippi. His soldiers sank him in the Mississippi to hide his death from the natives, fearing that they would be emboldened to rise up against the Spaniards; and de Sotos men knew the natives werent to be trifled with. When they were building barges to cross the Mississippi a few miles downstream from modern-day Memphis, every afternoon they would be greeted by thousands of Indian soldiers in canoes, mocking them as they worked on the transports. All across eastern Arkansas, the soldiers reported, towns were so common that two to three could be seen from any point, and each city protected itself with earthen walls, moats, and marksmen archers. De Sotos expedition wreaked its own direct havoc on the natives, but the real destruction came after the Spaniards had departed. European disease ransacked the Mississippian culture. With the advent of disease, the great Mississippian towns and cities were abandoned, the survivors fleeing into the countryside to avoid death and misery. French explorers coming to the same territory as de Soto a little over a century later found few Indians, the land all but empty; archaeologists have found numerous Mississippian towns from the early 1500s, but only one from the end of the 16th century. In 1682, Frenchmen sailed the Mississippi River in canoes, noting that the rivers shorelines were empty of inhabitants, a stark contrast to the river teeming with Indian villages and canoes reported by the Spaniards over a century prior. Its been estimated that four out of every five Mississippian Indians perished in de Sotos wake; historian Alan Taylor notes, Soto had created an illusion of a perpetual wilderness where once there had been a populous and complex civilization. By the cusp of the 18th century, the Mississippian cultures had all but disintegrated, the survivors of the vast network of cities and trade routes reduced to confederations of loosely-knit tribes and clans. The biggest confederacies were known by the 18th century colonists as the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee. The rampage of disease in the American Bottom traveled up into New England, and though not striking with such force, the New England Indians certainly felt itand the fragmentation of their own societies, with some Indian nations being weakened while others grew stronger, fostered a radical increase in warfare. On top of this new element introduced into native New England life, the New England coastline was getting significantly crowded. At the turn of the 17th century, its estimated that around a quarter of a million native Americans lived along the Atlantic seaboard. As the population increased, and as croplands of one town butted up against

the others, boundaries became more formal, and thus more easily pushedand transgressed. Most conflict arose due to one tribe being insulted by the actions of another, and thus desiring to balance the scales. Indian battles were practiced with guerrilla tactics, hit-and-run attacks that were over as quickly as they began. Women and children were rarely killed, though sometimes they were captured and forced to join the captors tribe. Captured men were usually tortured, and the greatest honor a captive male Indian could show was enduring the torture stoically, and for that he would be admired and applauded by his tormentors. On some occasions, though not nearly as frequently as one might think, victors would scalp their foes. The British did something similar in their conquest of Ireland, displaying their victory by impaling Irish heads on stakes. Very rarely large-scale battles between tribes would take place, the enemies meeting one another head-on in the open; but these battles were never as bloody as their European counterparts. Modern lore embellishes the warfare of the native Americans, making them seem like savages who knew nothing but bloodletting. It is wise to remember that the native Americans went to war far less often than Europeans did, and the brutality of the natives shown against the white settlers was a brutality against invaders, and it was often tit-for-tat: the white settlers were often far more savage in their treatment of the natives, and it only makes sense for the Indians to respond in kind. All this aside, the Dawnland was a rich and beautiful land, filled with a people who loved their culture, loved their nations, and who loved their land. And the point cant be made enough: there were a lot of them. One European sailor who sailed up the east coast prior to the plagues that wiped out the vast majority of Indian life noted that the shorelines were densely populated and smoky with Indian fires, the smoke of which could be detected hundreds of miles out to sea. Its estimated that by the 1600s (well into the epidemics that ravaged the Indian countryside) there were around 100,000 or more natives living along the eastern seaboard. Coastal towns boasted enormous croplands stretching over a mile or so inland. Beyond these fields were forests rich with oak, chestnut, and hickory; early settlers reported that the woods were wide open, almost park-like, and the Indians cultivated such woodlands through ritualistic annual burning (the untamed wilderness thick with weeds is a recent North American phenomenon, due to hardy European plants brought into the New World, either by accident or on purpose, and which quickly overtook the land). In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Europeans had been making regular trips to the east coast, but not with the intention of settling (these early navigators reported that the land was densely populated and well defended by the native Americans). These early visitors sought trade with the Indians or

fished in the rich waters off the coast; by 1610 (right after the settling of Jamestown) England alone had a couple hundred vessels trading and fishing off the coast of Newfoundland and New England. Portugal, Spain, France, and even Italy also traded with the natives and took advantage of the rich fisheries. The settlers at Roanoke and Jamestown werent at all surprised by the presence of the native Americans; indeed, they even counted on them to provide for their needs. The idea that the Indians were a surprise is born of ignorance: all of Europe knew North America was densely settled, and thats one of the key reasons it took over a century after the discovery of the New World for a real effort at colonization to take place. Another irony of history is that it is often assumed that the Europeans saw the native Americans as dumb brutes. The opposite is true. Europeans found the inhabitants of the Dawnland to be some of the most beautiful human beings they had ever seen: the men seemed to be chiseled from stone, and the women sported the shapeliest curves European men had ever laid eyes on. Indian women were a flesh-and-blood fantasy for many European settlers. John Lawson, a surveyor, wrote of Indian women in modernday North Carolina, proclaiming that they were as fine shaped Creatures as any in the Universe. They are of a tawny Complexion, their eyes very brisk and amorous, their Smiles afford the finest Composure a Face can possess, their Hands are of the finest Make, with small, long Fingers, and as soft as their Cheeks, and their whole Bodies of a smooth nature. They are not so uncouth or unlikely as we suppose them, nor are they not Proficients in the soft Passion. William Penn described with far less poetry the native Americans in his colony of Pennsylvania: For their persons, they are generally tall, straight, well-built and of singular proportion. They tread strong, and clever, and mostly walk with a lofty chin. Of complexion black, but by design gypsies in England. They grease themselves with bears-fat clarified, and using no defence against sun or weather, their skins must need be swarthy. Their eye is little and black, not unlike a straight-lookt Jew. The thick lip and flat nose so frequent with East-Indians and blacks are not common among them; for I have seen as comley European-like faces among them of both sexes, as on your side by the sea. He didnt hesitate to praise their language as lofty, yet narrow, but like the Hebrew one word serves in the place of three I must say that I know not a language spoken in Europe that hatch words of more sweetness or greatness, in accept and emphasis than theirs; for instance Octorockon, Rancoros, Ozicton, Shakamacon As for the Indians perception of Europeans, they were far less eager to lavish praise: they saw the white settlers as weak, sexually untrustworthy, and horrendously ugly (not to mention stupid). The natives of

the Dawnland were a ferocious and beautiful people, and if it werent for the great plagues sweeping through the western hemisphere, theres no reason to assume the Europeans would have been successful in settling North America.

THE GREAT DYING

The settlers at Roanoke werent the only ones to encounter hostility from the natives. The Vikings may have been the first Europeans to settle in the west, and they set up a colony in Greenland that lasted from 800 A.D. to 1500 A.D. The Viking colony on Greenland lasted close to 700 years; English presence in the New World still has three hundred more years to match that. Viking durability proves their prowess at colonization: Greenlands resources were scarce to begin with! To counter the scarceness of provisions, the Vikings began sending expeditions down Vinland (what was probably the east coast of North America, stretching, perhaps, as far south as North Carolina). They called it Vinland because, according to legend, they found wild grape vines along the shores. The Vikings would quickly land their boats, raid the towering lumber on the shore, and with much haste transport it back to their colony in Greenland. Around 1005 A.D., the Vikings attempted to make a permanent settlement in Vinland. They transported loads of supplies, livestock, and up to a couple hundred settlers on the expedition. The Vikings, so skilled at colonization in the cold reaches of Greenland, lasted only two years in this land rich with plenty. The Vikings knew of the natives, and they called them weaklings, but they proved to be anything but. The natives were far more powerful and numerous than the Vikings had thought, and the land they attempted to settle had already been claimed. The Vikings, renowned in lore for their fighting skills, were quickly dispatched. The native Americans were too skilled and numerous, and the head Viking was shot through the heart with an arrow. The Vikings hoofed it back to Greenland, and having learned their lesson, they never attempted to settle America again. Their colony on Greenland lasted only another half a millennia: an outbreak of bubonic plague crippled the colony, and an increasingly cold climate curtailed their agriculture and livestock. To make matters worse, they had to deal with the Inuit, who turned out to be vicious fighters themselves. The English would succeed 600 years later where the Vikings had failed, but this would have nothing to do with English abilities over against the natives. American histories treat the natives almost as a byline, a peripheral people group. The American wilderness is pictured as vast and untamed, the natives roaming the expanses in nomadic

bands. When the English settled, they found the natives quite numerous, but they were nowhere near as numerous as they had been. European vessels prowling the coast decades before the English arrived reported that even from miles out at sea, the entire shoreline seemed to glow with Indian campfires stretching north to south. By the time the English finally arrived, the natives were present, but they had been significantly weakened and were in no shape to combat the European threat. The reason goes all the way back to Columbus and the Spanish conquistadores. When European microbes arrived in the western hemisphere, they probably swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans and then traveled inland to areas populated by Indians who had never even seen a white man. The epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from limited areas, touching every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never even appeared in the European historical records. The Black Plague that scoured Europe at the end of the late Medieval era has nothing on The Great Dying, what historian Alfred Crosby, Jr. calls the greatest tragedy in the history of the human species. Between Columbus discovery of the New World in 1492 and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, the most devastating plague in human history raced up Mesoamerica and the east coast of North America. Just two years prior to the Mayflowers landing, the plague had decimated somewhere between ninety to ninetysix percent of the native American population. This probably wasnt just one plague but several as European contact increased up and down the east coast of the Americas. Between 1510 and 1535, Spanish soldiers exported diseases to conquered Central America, Mexico, and Peru. In the middle of the 16th century, their excursions north into the American southwest and southeast carried the same epidemics. These epidemics afflicted the natives of New England and eastern Canada during the early decades of the 1500s as they encountered European fishermen and traders. The Great Dying had been underway for close to one hundred years before the English settled at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, and during the intervening decades, the land once teeming with beautiful cultures turned into a graveyard. The Great Dying was still underway when the English settlers came onto the scene; in 1793, an English explorer in the Pacific northwest found beaches littered with human skulls and bones, and he met natives whose faces were pocked by smallpox scars. The Mandan Indians of the northern Missouri Valley (modern North Dakota) escaped the worst until 1837, when, in the course of a few weeks, smallpox destroyed all but forty of their 2000 people.

The numbers themselves betray our ignorance. One historian estimates that the population of central Mexico alone was reduced from 25 million in 1519 to 3 million by 1568, with only 75,000 survivors by the early 1600s, a mere three percent of the entire population prior to the arrival of the Europeans. For comparison, the Black Plague in Europe wiped out only thirty to sixty percent of Europes population. Smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles; all of these European microbes killed far more natives than any musket, crossbow, or sword. The process of Indian depopulation took nearly 400 years to exhaust itself, and at the expense of ninety-six percent of native American life across the hemisphere. An equivalent loss today would be a reduction of the population of New York City to 56,000, not even enough to fill Yankee Stadium. Anthropologist Russell Thornton observes, Thats one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters. Everything elseall the heavily populated urbanized societieswas wiped out. The first wave of epidemics affected almost every Indian. Within a decade of contact, about half the natives had died from the diseases. Because the epidemics returned with such swiftness, the natives had little opportunity to replace the dead through reproduction. After about fifty years of successive epidemics, native groups were reduced to about a tenth of their numbers. Many ravaged groups lost their autonomous identity, and the few survivors sought refuge with other neighboring groups, often carrying diseases into their new tribes. Consequently, Indian nations (or tribes) of colonial history represent a subset of the many groups that had existed prior to the great epidemics. The Great Dying promoted colonial ethnogenesis, the emergence of new ethnic groups and identities from the consolidation of many peoples dismantled by the European invasion. By the 18th century, most North American tribes were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees struggling to survive the debilitating epidemics and violence at the hands of white Europeans who sought to take advantage of the natives weakened state by gaining footholds on their disease-ravaged lands. Indeed, the effects of the rampaging epidemics enabled the European conquest of the New World. The Vikings failed because the natives were too strong; in their weakened state, the European powers (the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, and the English) were able to get a toehold on the continent and spread themselves like gangrene. When the English arrived in Virginia, they found great swathes of cultivated land waiting for them. They called it the providence of God, not realizing it was really the emptying of the land due to the greatest plague the world has ever known. Yes, there

were still thousands upon thousands of natives along the east coast of North America, but their numbers were incomparable to what they had before. Their societal structures had all but disintegrated as the enormous people groups were fractured; the Indians had been forced by necessity into a semi-nomadic lifestyle, living in smaller groups and constantly trying to survive among the other remnants. Native American histories of this time are resplendent with the forging and breaking of treaties, of violent clashes between Indian tribes and weak confederacies; we fail, because of our cultural conditioning, to see this as their attempts at survival in a post-apocalyptic world in need of rebuilding. This cultural conditioning is evident in the statement by the 19th century historian George Bancroft, who called the land an unproductive waste its only inhabitants a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians. Historian Francis Jennings was closer to the mark; instead of an unproductive waste, it was a widowed land. European success didnt come because of superior weapons, as high school history textbooks will lead you to believe; the Europeans had superior weapons when they tried to colonize China, India, and Asia, but they failed, because the lands were already full. The story with North America is different, thanks to the Great Dying. This isnt to say that Europeans had an easy going with the natives. The Europeans were at war with them all the time, and they lost battles more often than they won despite superior weapons. If the Europeans had tried to colonize when the Vikings did, it wouldve been a bloodbath. Had the Great Dying never happened, theres no reason to suspect that Europe wouldve failed to colonize North America. Its feasible indeed that the natives themselves wouldve risen to be one of the greatest world powers. The reason the pilgrims chose Plymouth Rock wasnt because it was pretty but because it was an abandoned Indian town, complete with cleared fields, recently planted corn, and a harbor. The Europeans took over the town, and expeditions inland discovered Indian ghost towns, the dead thrust about in their own homes. Thomas Morton in the 1620s elaborated (and I paraphrase), The Indians died in heaps, as they lay in their houses; and the living, that were able to fend for themselves, would run away and let them die, and let their carcasses lie above ground without burial The bones and skulls in their abandoned villages made such a spectacle that it seemed to me a newfound Golgotha. This development was relatively new: years before, a French vessel had crashed onshore, and the survivors were imprisoned by the numerous and bold Patuxet Indians. Legend has it that one of the survivors learned enough of their language to tell them God would destroy them for how they treated the survivors. The survivors answered their own prophecy: they carried a disease, probably some sort of

viral hepatitis, and this may have killed off up to ninety percent of the indigenous coastal population. By the time the Plymouth Rock settlers arrived, the land was ripe and ready for the plucking. More on this anon. Interestingly enough, the Great Dying served as a catalyst for the African slave trade. The Spaniards werent against turning the natives into slaves, but when the local populations began dying out, slavery had to find a new sweet spot, and Africa became the golden ticket. The Spanish hated the fact that the natives were dying, but not because of any humanitarian slant. The natives served as their manpower, and the escalation of native deaths literally dealt such a financial blow to the Spanish colonies that an economic depression started and lasted more than one hundred years. To resupply their labor and wiggle free of the depression, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa. The Europeans didnt come out of the Great Dying unscathed: the new trade corridors with the New World didnt just introduce European diseases into the Americas; it worked the opposite way as well. Syphilis, original to the Americas, began scouring Europe. American diseases ravaged European settlements in the New World, as Jamestown can well attest. European deaths escalated when they attempted to colonize sub-Saharan Africa, where they came into contact with malaria and yellow fever. The Europeans imported these African diseases into the American tropics and subtropics through the slave trade, and those African diseases only added to the epidemics devastating both the native Americans and the European colonizers. The spread of disease in the 16th and 17th centuries was in no way intentional on the part of the Europeans; science hadnt yet reached the point of knowing anything about disease communicability and trajectory. Absent proper knowledge of how diseases work, the colonists interpreted the diseases as sent by God to punish the natives who resisted conversion to Christianity, and the Indians blamed the epidemics on sorcery practiced by the European newcomers.

THE JAMESTOWN SETTLEMENT

The Planters putting down roots at Jamestown werent settling on unoccupied land. The fertile river valleys and the abundant fish, fowl, and game hadnt escaped the natives, and the Englishmen erected their fort in the midst of a land already claimed and thickly inhabited by around 24,000 Indians divided into thirty different tribes united both by an Algonquian language and the overbearing rule of a ferocious and manipulative chieftain

by the name of Powhatan. By a stroke of bad luck, the settlers at Jamestown found themselves right in the middle of the strongest and most brazen chiefdom along the eastern seaboard in the 17th century. Powhatan in 1607 had already established his power over the numerous tribes in the Chesapeake; in the 1500s his kingdom began as he inherited authority over six tribes. By wiles and force, over the duration of his lifetime he extended his chiefdom to include twenty-four additional tribes. By the time the English settled in the Chesapeake, he was in his sixties, and he ruled from the village of Werowocomoco on the York River. He lived in no Quonset hut: he called home a vast lodge, and he surrounded himself with countless servants, forty bodyguards, and he indulged his sexual appetite with one hundred wives. He lived in luxury, supported by the tributes of maize and deerskins paid him by the tribes under his control. His advisors included a council of shamans and veteran warriors. His kingdom relied on a kinship network that gathered and redistributed tributes. When he and his warriors defeated a tribe and brought them into subordination, he would either take the conquered chiefs daughters as wives or replace the chiefs with his own blood relatives, even, at times, with his own sisters. Most of the time, after securing the allegiance of the conquered chief by taking his daughter in marriage, he let the chiefs continue to govern their villages as they saw fit, so long as they paid their tributes and cooperated with Powhatans war efforts. The tributes collected went to supporting his lavish lifestyle (along with his wives), paying the shamans, staging feasts, rewarding his bravest warriors, and trading with outsiders; all of these outlets of tribute served to solidify his power. He further consolidated his kingdom by organizing large-scale hunts in the Piedmont of the mountains to collect deer, during which his lead warriors would provoke to war the Piedmont Indians (Siouan-speaking tribes by the names of the Monacan and Manahoac). These bloody clashes forged bonds of brotherhood between the warriors from various conquered tribes, and the wars also distracted them from the old feuds that had arisen between the conquered tribes prior to them being part of Powhatans kingdom. These Algonquian Indians sustained themselves by a balance of horticulture, gathering, fishing, and hunting. During the winter months they lived in their villages, made up of around 100-200 inhabitants living in 20-30 houses. Come spring, the natives dispersed into smaller, less permanent sites to fish and gather shellfish and tubers from the rivers, marshes, and Chesapeake Bay proper. As summer quickly came, they returned to their permanent villages to cultivate vast fields of beans, maize, and squash. The advent of fall saw them scattering again, the men to hunt for waterfowl in the wetlands

and for deer in the sweeping forests, and the women and children to scavenge for nuts, berries, and roots. Because the Indians paid tribute to Powhatan, much of what they were able to harvest, catch, and kill left their own tribes, and this in turn meant they were often living by the bone. The Indians used dugout canoes which they paddled or poled up and down the various rivers to conduct long-distance trade with the Indians of the interior, exchanging maize and seashells for freshwater pearls and copper. One of the most interesting facets of Algonquian life was that of the shamans, who were a combination of healer, priest, and conjurer. They tended the templesbuilt like regular Indian houses (the Algonquians didnt live in huts but in wooden houses), they were twenty feet wide and up to one hundred feet long, ornately decorated with carved wooden posts. Each temple sported the tribute paid to the living chief, the bundled bones of the dead chiefs, and a wooden statue in the image of Okeus, a powerful and vengeful spirit whom the Algonquians sought to placate to preserve their health and prosperity. When the Europeans arrived, Powhatan was quickly informed. He and the other natives were mesmerized by European technology: their metal tools and weapons were far more efficient and deadly than the Indians stone counterparts. Powhatan knew much of Europeans, and their history of trading with them over the years had sown great distrust in the hearts of the Indians, for Spanish and English mariners were known to kidnap or even kill natives, if only for sport. Powhatan didnt fear the weapons of the English; he was quite certain his warriors could overwhelm the English colonists and wipe them off the map (this wasnt arrogance; he really could have). The colonists saving grace didnt come in Powhatans benevolence but his own hatched plan to use the Europeans to his advantage: he wondered if they could be used as allies against the Monacan and Manahoac of the Piedmont. He and his advisors constructed a welldetailed plan: contain the Jamestown colonists in their flimsy settlement, force them to bow before the well-placed weight of his confederation, and use them as allies against their enemies and secure metal tools and weapons from them by trade. Powhatans plan made sense, but he failed to take into account the fact (a fact which he could not have possibly known) that these transplanted Englishmen werent the End Goal, but a foothold by which thousands more would swarm into the Chesapeake. Had he been privy to such information, he probably would have erased Jamestown on the spot. Instead he let them survive, but as bad luck would have it, disease itself almost wiped Jamestown off the map before Powhatan could fully utilize their potential for his confederation.

An English critic of Jamestown quipped, Instead of a plantation, Virginia will shortly get the name of a slaughterhouse. As the years would progress, his criticism would find its vindication: for fifteen years following the establishment of Jamestown, the Virginia Company ferried close to 10,000 colonists to Virginia, but only twenty percent were alive by 1622. The first nine months of Jamestown set precedent for the coming years: of the original 204 colonists to set foot in the Chesapeake, only 38 were alive nine months later. Jamestown almost fell apart, bolstered by a new influx of colonists two years later, bringing the total to 220. By next spring, only 60 were breathing. The deaths came as the end result of a vicious cycle of disease and starvation. The sweltering hot and muggy summers bred malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and the shallow wells were contaminated by brackish water, so that when the rivers ran low in the summer months, colonists were subjected to salt poisoning. Because the colonists lacked knowledge of proper waste disposal and threw their garbage and feces into stagnant waters, typhoid fever and dysentery ran rampant. These diseases killed most and left the survivors too weak and apathetic to work, and thus they didnt harvest enough corn in the summer, and their sickness coupled with emaciated hunger in the winter and spring. The starvation forced many colonists to the brink of insanity and beyond; one man killed and ate his wife, for which he was burned at the stake; another stole two pints of oatmeal and had a long needle thrust through his tongue to prevent him from eating, and they chained him to a tree and left him to slowly starve to death, an example to subjugate other likeminded colonists. In 1610 the starvation became too much, and the colonists put off downriver to leave Jamestown behind forever; but at the rivers mouth they ran into three ships from England bearing 300 new colonists and provisions. The survivors returned to Jamestown with the new arrivals, but disease and hunger continued to pay their toll. The Virginia Company hoped to make profits not primarily by planting crops for export to England (Virginia hadnt yet become the tobacco realm its known as today) but by panning for gold. Most of the colonists planned on spending their time searching for gold, and they expected the natives to support them off their own crops. Between 1608 and 1609, Captain John Smith (a short, stocky man with a rotund red beard; the Indians thought he looked more like an animal than a man) governed the colony, and much to their chagrin, he forced them to work six hours a day in the fields. The colonists were embittered by having to work so hard, and they kicked him out by fall of 1609. The coming winter was known as the Great Starving Winter, and when the new governor arrived in May 1611, he was mortified to discover that the colonists had

yet again refused to work hard and plant crops. Instead they spent their time searching for gold. No gold was found, but they did find mica, convinced it was some sort of rich ore, but when the ship carrying their rich bounty reached England, the mica was deduced to be worthless. All the while the colonists expected the natives to feed them, not realizing that the Indians themselves were hard-pressed for food because of the exacting tributes paid to Powhatan. When the settlers pressed the Indians too hard, the Indians lashed out: in one early instance, seventeen settlers marched to an Indian village and violently demanded to be fed. The Indians killed them, stuffed their mouths with maize, and abandoned their bodies to be discovered by other colonists, hoping the point would be adequately received. Well-versed in the stories of the Spanish conquistadores conquering Indians by capturing their lead chiefs, the Jamestown settlers hoped to exact revenge by tricking and capturing Powhatan. Powhatan knew what was afoot, and he refused all their invitations to visit Jamestown. Captain John Smith kept up the ruse, and Powhatan decided to play along with their game and throw in his own little twist. When Smith came out to capture Powhatan, he found himself in the middle of an ambush and he became the prisoner. According to the native custom, Powhatan put together a mock execution in which, as Smith faced his impending doom, Powhatans daughter and princess-in-training Mataoka stepped in and prevented Smiths death. (Mataokas nickname, Pocahontas, meant little hellion, and it was teasing more than enduring) By this staged execution, Powhatan ritually adopted Smith as a subordinate chief, and thus Smith and his tribe at Jamestown were rendered tributary to Powhatan, incorporated into his confederation. Smith didnt understand any of this, and he fled back to Jamestown convinced the sparing of his life was nothing but dumb luck at the hands of a little (albeit beautiful) Indian girl. Smith didnt accept the tributary status of Jamestown (indeed, he knew nothing of it), and the whole incident only inflamed his hatred of Powhatan and the Indians under his thumb. Powhatans coy plan had failed, and though he couldve wiped Jamestown off the map, he decided not to: the English still had valuable goods that could be used to strengthen his confederation and to wage war against the Piedmont Indians in the shadow of the mountains. Powhatan thus sought to contain the colonists behind the settlements towering walls; he secretly turned to the Paspahegh, a tributary tribe, and ordered them to harass the colonists from beyond the walls. This would allow Powhatan to keep up his trade while keeping them confined in Jamestown. Thus confined, the colonists found themselves trapped in a cesspool of disease, and they died

in droves. Powhatan kept trading with them, promising that the Paspahegh were nothing but renegades and rascals outside his control. In August of 1610, fed up with the Paspahegh, the colonists fought back. Captain George Percy and a band of soldiers surprised and assaulted a Paspahegh village. Sixty-five Indians were killed, and the English set their cornfields afire, hoping that by destroying the Paspaheghs winter subsistence, the other nearby tribes would be more willing to give Jamestown some of their crops. The Paspahegh chieftains wife and children were taken prisoner, and the colonists retreated back to Jamestown by boat. To pass the time, they threw the native children overboard and shot them in the water as they tried to swim ashore. When they reached Jamestown, the governor rebuked Percy not for his treatment of the children but for not treating the chieftains wife in the same manner. To make up for Percys failure, the governor had her ran through with a sword. Life in Jamestown didnt ease up, and the colonists continued to die by disease and starvation. Many fled to the Indians to seek a better life; those who presented the Indians with steel weapons or guns were welcomed by the natives, but those who showed up at the tribes empty-handed were put to death. In the spring of 1612, the governor of Jamestown, fearing that Powhatans strength would exponentially increase with a surplus of steel weapons, guns, and colonial brains, captured most of the fugitives and made a public display of them: the lucky were hung or shot, and those not so fortunate were burned at the stake or had their backs broken on the wheel. Tensions between the colonists and Powhatan flared up again in 1613, when the English captured Powhatans prized daughter, Mataoka. She was imprisoned in Jamestown and brainwashed by the colonys leaders. She embraced Christian conversion, took the name Rebecca, and in 1614 she married an English colonist named John Rolfe. Powhatans love for Mataoka knew no bounds, and with her in the hands of his despised enemy, he made peace with the colonists of Jamestown. The Virginia Company ordered Rolfe and Rebecca to England as a public spectacle to woo crown support for Jamestown. They dressed the converted Mataoka in elegant English clothing, hoping to show how easily natives could be assimilated into English culture. Mataokas immune system, however, couldnt handle the plethora of diseases runni ng rampant, and she died in England in March 1617 around the age of 21. Powhatan died the next year across the Atlantic, and his brother Opechancanough assumed power; he loathed the English, and would stop at nothing to exact revenge. John Rolfe, now a widower, wouldnt be known only for his marriage to Powhatans hellion daughter. Before he and Mataoka crossed the Atlantic to England,

Rolfe revolutionized the planting of a burgeoning cash crop. Colonists had begun building plantations within the confines of the Virginia Companys territory, and they harvested Virginian tobacco, which was far too harsh to make good profits in England. Rolfe introduced a new strain of tobacco, brought from the Caribbean, and this tobacco began making landfall in England. Its pleasant taste and aroma opened the monetary floodgates for the Virginia Company, and the fledgling Jamestown settlement found herself reestablished. The Virginia Company shipped thousands of more colonists across the Atlantic to farm this delicious tobacco, and Jamestown began to boom. Meanwhile, Opechancanough vowed to do what his brother had failed to do. He and his Indian warriors would wipe Jamestown off the map.

THE COLONY AT PLYMOUTH ROCK

As Jamestown secured itself through the planting of the Mediterranean strain of tobacco, the infamous Mayflower made its voyage across the Atlantic to the frigid waters off Cape Cod. Funded by the Virginia Company (of Plymouth) and led by William Bradford, the Mayflower carried just over a hundred colonists intent on forming a new religious colony freed from the constraints of the Church of England. These radical Puritans were staunch Calvinists who believed that the Anglican Church was corrupt beyond hope and that true Christians had to separate themselves from her. They were known as Brownists (after their leader, Robert Brown) or Separatists (because of their adamancy about separating from the Church of England). These Separatists first moved to Holland to escape the Anglican Church, but fearful that their youth would be waylaid by the enticements of the flesh even in Holland of all places, they decided to remove themselves completely from the temptations of the world and stake out a new society on the fringes of the American frontier. Composed mostly of farmers and artisans, these Separatists lacked the prerequisite common sense when it came to life in America. For instance, they set out to arrive in New England absent food or shelter six weeks before winter; in their defense, England hadnt yet come to terms with how the climate in New England was colder than that of England, despite her being farther south. Not only were they arriving in New England on the cusp of winter, but they had refused the help of John Smith of Jamestown as a guide, determined instead to use the published maps in one of his books. The colonists expected to live off the land, but they had failed to bring any livestock or horses; they thought they could live off fishing, but all the gear they brought

was suitable for England but worthless in Cape Cod. Their situation went from bad to worse when the Mayflower spent weeks moving back and forth around Cape Cod, searching for a suitable place to land. During these weeks, many of the colonists aboard became sick in the cramped conditions and died. With the advent of winter, a lack of supplies, an absence of frontier know-how, and disease ravaging the colonists aboard the Mayflower, by the time the pilgrims landed in 1620, they were too weak and ill-supplied to fare well come winter. By the first blossoms of spring, half of the 102 radical Puritans lay in the ground underneath wooden markers painted with deaths heads. Those who did survive the winter thanked divine providence, but divine providence came at a cost for the natives: the landing site was chosen because it was the site of an abandoned Indian town, replete with houses, maize fields, and even a workable dock. The natives had been wiped out by plague (more on that in a moment), and the settlers were freed from having to erect their own village as they pulled skeletons from homes and took over residency. Two days after landing, the weakened pilgrims who had survived the Mayflowers voyage had hauled ten bushels of maize back to the ship, carrying most of it in a giant metal kettle they had ransacked from an abandoned Indian structure. Maize had been genetically engineered by native Americans sometime around 1000 A.D., a feat of engineering that modern-day scientists still dont understand (hinting again at the brilliance of the native Americans). Prior to the use of maize, the natives had employed whats been called Indian Fire to shape their landscape to suit their tastes. By the use of fire, they shaped the ecosystem to their advantage, using the cleansing properties of fire not only to develop large plots of farmland but also to herd animals. The burned undergrowth was replaced by large swathes of woodland as a habitat for game animals, and with the development of agriculture, they started transforming burned woodlands into orchards for fruit and nut trees; as a result, by colonial times, one out of every four trees between Canada and Georgia was a chestnut! Indian Fire reconfigured the ecosystem to promote the population of elk, deer, and bear. Bison roamed from New York to Georgia, imported to the east by native Americans as a food source. Native Americans set the large forests in the east afire, replacing woodlands with grazing grounds, so that the imported bison could thrive. Indeed, native Americans probably created much of the Great Plains and the Midwest prairies, creating savanna where there had only been forest. Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Texas had been reconfigured by the natives into plains lands, but after colonization, as the Indians were shrunk by disease, warfare, and European

manipulation, forest began overthrowing the brilliant and meticulous work of the natives. Prior to European colonization in North America, the natives of the east had retooled the ecosystem from the game park system of Indian Fire to a mix of farmland and orchards, leaving a good amount of forest for hunting but making much room for agriculture. The colonists at Plymouth set foot in a world of nature orchestrated by the natives. Agriculture had swept across the western hemisphere, so much so that as much as two-thirds of the modern continental United States practiced agriculture, and the American Bottom had been terraced and irrigated. Along the Atlantic coast, the forests had been pushed back miles from the coasts, and the shorelines were lined with farms and Indian villages. Salmon nets were stretched across ocean-bound rivers in the Northeast. The vast numbers of bison, deer, and elk that were encountered by European colonists hadnt been there prior to European discovery of the New World; the plagues that rippled northward from Mesoamerica killed off so many Indians that the native species, formerly kept in check by the natives, were enabled to boom. Settling the land in the aftermath of the Great Dying, the colonists at Plymouth were shocked by how the land seemed to contain garden plots, blackberry brambles, spacious groves of nut trees, and pine barrens. A far cry from the picture of savages painted in American history textbooks, the natives had simply gone a different route than the Europeans when it came to civilization: instead of seeking to dominate nature, the Indians grafted themselves into it and used it to their advantage. The use of Indian Fire created pastures for buffalo and turned woodlands into forests that looked more like English parks than untamed wilderness. The early colonists reported that the towering trees formed canopies over the ground through which people could travel on horseback or in carriages without having to hack their way through gnarled undergrowth. The Indians were the first real Hobbits of the Shire. A simple walk through wooded New England today shows that this is no longer the case. As Europeans crowded New England, they began tearing down trees left and right, to the point that within a few centuries, the meticulously-rendered landscape of the native Americans had been filled in with thistles and weeds. By the turn of the 19 th century, the entire landscape had been altered by European colonization into the scene we know today: woodlands resplendent with trees and mangled underbrush. Perhaps most devastating to the native American ecosystem were hardy weeds brought over from Europe; these weeds had evolved to survive the most violent of mans attempts to kill them off, and they thrived in the New World. Dandelions, thistles, nettles,

nightshade, sedge; these weeds spread like wildfire and destroyed the park-like woodlands the Indians had created; half of the weed species in the United States came from the Old World. Historian Stephen Pyne notes, The virgin forest [of American lore] was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [It] was invented in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alan Taylor, another noted historian, writes, When in the most isolated and least developed pockets of North America today, we like to think that we have rediscovered a timeless wilderness and that we experience there the nature known by Native American before 1492. In fact, everywhere we see an altered nature profoundly affected by all the plants and animals that tagged along with the colonists to remake this continent. Taylors referring to the Columbian Exchange: European settlers, determined to farm in their European manner, brought domesticated livestock and plants to the New World. Pigs, horses, sheep, and cattle; wheat, barley, rye, oats, grasses and grapevines; these are all animals and plants not original to the New World, introduced at colonization. The Plymouth colonists, of course, had failed to bring their own livestock, and so werent culpable for that part of the Columbian Exchange. During that first awful winter, the Plymouth colony hardly saw any native Americans, though they knew they were there: occasionally they would find themselves privy to a shower of brass- or clawtipped arrows. Come the second month of 1621, sightings became frequent, and the weak colonists hastily constructed a fort-like structure and dragged five small cannons from the docked Mayflower and emplaced them in the structure. Tensions about an impending Indian attack reached a head when a native American by the name of Samoset proudly walked into the English encampment on March 17th. He wore only a loincloth, and his straight black hair was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. The colonists gawked at him as he walked around, and then he disappeared as quickly as he had come. The next day he returned, accompanied by five tall Indians, each with three-inch black stripes painted down the middle of their faces. Several settlers and the Indians talked for several hours; Samoset, much to the shock of the colonists, spoke broken English. The Indians departed, and on the 22nd they returned, with a newcomer named Tisquantum (who would be known as Squanto by the pilgrims) in tow. They spoke with the colonists for about an hour, and then on the crest of a hill on the south bank of the creek running through the settlement, a party of Indians appeared. Frightened by their sudden appearance and fearing that Samoset and Tisquantum had duped them into letting down their guard, the Europeans fled to their stockade, taking shelter behind their cannons. Governor Winslow, donning a full suit of armor and

carrying a sword, defiantly splashed through the stream and offered himself as a hostage to the newly-gathered natives. An Indian by the name of Massasoit took charge, and Tisquantum interpreted, and then Massasoit and his fellow unarmed Indians walked across the creek and joined the colonists. Both sides shared some of the colonists homemade moonshine, and they got to talking. A sort of alliance was reached: the colonists would enjoy the support of the Indians in their survival so long as the settlers promised to help the Wampanoag (of whom Massasoit was the sachem) in case of an attack by the Narragansett. The colonists were pleased, finding themselves face-to-face with brighter fortunes. The Indians were pleased, too; like Powhatan far to the south, they had decided to use the Plymouth colonists to their advantage rather than easily killing them off. The Wampanoag Indians were part of a triple alliance with two other Indian confederations: the Nauset (thirty groups on Cape Cod) and the Massachusett (several dozen villages around Massachusetts Bay). All of these Indians spoke Massachusett, a variant of Algonquian. In Massachusett the name of the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. And thus the inhabitants of the Dawnland proudly called themselves the People of the First Light. These Indians were taller and healthier than the European settlers, and they wore deerskin robes and rubbed bear or eagle fat on their skin and hair to ward off sun, wind, and insects. Their animal robes were adorned with animal-head mantles, snakeskin belts, and bird-wing headdresses. Many of the Indians tattooed their faces, arms, and legs with geometric patterns or totemic animal symbols. They wore earrings made of seashells and swans down; they wore chignons spiked with eagle feathers. Both the men and the women painted their faces red, white, and black. The young men wore their hair long on one side and cropped the other side short, so that their hair wouldnt get in the way of their bowstrings. These Indians wore moccasins which were far more comfortable and waterproof than English boots; when colonists had miles to walk, they would eagerly barter with Indians to acquire a pair of moccasins. The People of the First Light rode the shoreline and the countless rivers in birch-bark canoes that were faster and more maneuverable than anything of European make. The inhabitants of the Dawnland werent unfamiliar with the Europeans and had been trading with them for many years prior to the settlement at Plymouth Rock. The People of the First Light would allow European visitors to stay for brief periods of time during which they would engage in trade, and when the Europeans pressed their stay, the Indians made sure they knew just how much they were risking by pressing Indian hospitality. As the People of the First

Light engaged in European trade, they also fended off Indians of the interior from accessing the trade, and in such a manner the coastal groups secured their place in the fur trade and subsequently bolstered their prominence in Indian affairs by serving as middle-men between the Europeans and the Indians of the interior. Massasoits decision to allow the Plymouth colonists to remain instead of forcefully ousting them as was the pattern speaks to the dire straits in which the Wampanoag found themselves. Four years before the Mayflower vomited her weakened and sickly colonists ashore, a virulent plagueprobably hepatitis A spread via contaminated foodravaged the Wampanoag Confederation. Indians started getting sick and dying en masse. Those who were infected didnt show symptoms immediately, and many Indians who thought they were healthy (but who were really infected) fled into neighboring communities to escape the plague, serving only to spread the sickness farther. The disease rippled through New England along the trade routes, and in a matter of three years it killed as much as ninety percent of the inhabitants of the Dawnland. By the time the Plymouth colonists arrived, the Dawnland had been significantly altered. Most of Massasoits tribe had been killed, and entire villages had been emptied by the disease (the pilgrims settled on one such ghost town, and more than fifty of the first towns settled in New England were settled on similar Indian ghost towns). Prior to the disease, Massasoit ruled over upwards of 20,000 subjects; by the time of Plymouth, his core group had been reduced to sixty, and he had a meager 1000 subjects under his rule and protection. The disaster, much to the Massasoits concern, hadnt touched their age-old enemies known as the Narragansett. Massasoit feared the Narragansett would take advantage of the Wampanoags paralyzed state and easily overthrow them; and if the Narragansett didnt take such actions, Massasoit had made enemies with many other tribes as well, such as the Pequots to the west and groups of the Abenaki to the north. Massasoit, facing the destruction of the Wampanoag Confederation, decided to use these Plymouth settlers to his advantage; and to do that, he couldnt expel them as the Wampanoag did with traders who dallied too long in their territory. Massasoits alliance would prove successful for the Wampanoag, but the survival of the Plymouth Colony would spearhead British immigration to New England, thus bringing a greater death to the People of the First Light than Massasoit ever imagined. Massasoit promised he and his Indians would leave the pilgrims in peace insofar as the colonists helped him with the Narragansett. The pilgrims assumed that the Indians simply wanted guns, but contemporary research has revealed that Indian weapons were not technologically inferior to the British. The People of the First Light

were at first disturbed by guns (the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile, and the gaping wounds that would suddenly appear did indeed make guns appear to use elements of sorcery), the natives quickly learned that the English were awful shots. The Indians with their primitive bows and arrows were far better marksmen, and they could reload far quicker. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan Indians with a target they thought would be impervious to an arrow shot; in reply, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, deeper than a pistol ball could go! Massasoits greatest desire probably wasnt English weaponry but, simply, an English alliance: the Narragansett were skilled warriors with the bow and arrow, and Massasoit knew that European guns wouldnt stand up against them. His hope probably lied in the alliance itself, since the Narragansett traded with the English, and thus to go to war against the Wampanoag would be to go to war with the English, thus stifling their trade arrangements. The Narragansett, like the Wampanoag, werent simply interested in trade itself but in the lucrative trade business with Indians of the interior. Massasoit thus sealed an alliance with the English that would make the Narragansett unwilling to attack their long-time enemies out of fear of cutting the cord to their profitable European trade. And so, though the success of the Plymouth Colony has been attributed to divine providence by the colonists themselves, or to technological superiority by high school text books, the real linchpin in Plymouths success is owed to Massasoits clever alliance. Having agreed to the alliance with the Wampanoag, the colonists at Plymouth found themselves fighting starvation with the help of Tisquantum. Tisquantum taught them how to plant maize by thrusting the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later entwine themselves up the maize stalks. He showed them how to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the seeds. Although this has often been taught as a native American technique, in reality it was a European technique of which the pilgrims were ignorant because few of them were agriculturalists. How, precisely, Tisquantum came across such knowledge is another story in and of itself, and it sheds deeper light onto the hidden drama in which the Plymouth colonists found themselves enfolded. The Plymouth colonists were dumbstruck at Tisquantums ability to speak English; they could hardly fathom that this ability came from many years spent living in Europe (both France and England)! Seven years prior to his shocking Hello to the colonists, Tisquantums familiarity with the English as traders took an abrupt plunge as he found himself kidnapped by British sailors. In 1614, a small ship anchored off Cape Cod, and the Indians of Patuxet (Tisquantums hometown) got in their canoes and

paddled out to the boat, assuming that the British meant to trade as they always had. The British let them aboard the ship, and the British captaina stocky man with a thick red beard covering most of his facestruck the Indians as being more beast than human. Here stood Captain John Smith of Pocahontas Fame. The widower Smith had spent months far to the north chasing whales but having caught none; determined not to return to England without any gain, he sent one of the ships under his command on a fishing expedition, and with his flagship he sailed down the eastern seaboard, bartering for furs with the coastal Indians. When he reached Patuxet, the sachem who had boarded the ship (with Tisquantum likely in tow) offered to give Smith a guided tour. Smith agreed, and he and some of his men got into one of their canoes, and they were paddled back to shore. Smith found himself astonished at their gardens and orchards, their vast maize field, the vast number of robust, tall, and powerful peoples. A quarrel broke out between the British and the natives, and forty or fifty Patuxet Indians surrounded him, bows drawn. They escorted him back to his ship, and he hurriedly drew a map of all that he had seen. Back in England, he showed Prince Charles his map and asked permission to name all the Indian settlements he discovered, Patuxet included. Prince Charles agreed, and Smith named Patuxet Plymouth after the English city (though back then it was spelled Plimoth). As Smith was wooing Prince Charles and making a name for himself, Thomas Hunt, commanding the ship tasked with fishing, remained along the east coast of North America. When the two ships had rendezvoused before Smiths journey to England, Smith had told Hunt of his wondrous amazement at the Indians of Patuxet. With Smith gone in England, Hunt decided to check out Patuxet for himself. He anchored off Cape Cod and invited the Indians to come aboard. Because the Indians were familiar with how trading with the British went down, they canoed out to meet the British and boarded the ship, Tisquantum among them, in anticipation of bartering. As they gathered aboard the boat, the British soldiers surrounded them and tried shoving them into the hold. The Indians fought back (understandably), and Hunts men began firing small-arms, killing and wounding several Indians. At gunpoint Hunts men forced the survivors into the hold, and thus Tisquantum and at least nineteen others (along with some Nauset Indians captured later) were bound and taken to Europe. The trip probably took about a month and a half, and Hunt took his ship first to the port of Malaga of Spain, off the Mediterranean coast. Hunt hurried to sell off his captives before the authorities were alerted to his schemes, but it wasnt long before the Roman Catholic Church was tipped off, and several priests threw together an armed

posse to secure the rest of the captives, since the Catholic Church opposed brutality towards Indians (in general, the Catholic treated native Americans with far more dignity and respect than Protestants). Tisquantum was taken into the Catholic Church where he supposedly converted to Christianity, though its likely he just did so to play the part. Tisquantum probably learned Spanish and somehow convinced the Church to let him return home. Having been released by the Church, Tisquantum made his way to London and took up lodging with John Slany, a shipbuilder, who taught Tisquantum English and peddled Tisquantum as a living museum. Tisquantum put up with all of this, slowly convincing the wealthy Slany to arrange for his return to America on a fishing vessel. Slany finally set everything up, and Tisquantum found himself in a remote British fishing camp in Newfoundland. The journey across the Atlantic had been helpful, but he still faced a daunting journey: over a thousand miles of coastline separated him from his hometown, his family, his friends; and in the midst of all those miles were the Micmac and Abenaki Indians who were at war with one another. Tisquantum moved around the fishing camp, searching for passage south by boat; he made a deal with a fishing captain, but the deal fell apart after they had set off, and the captain sailed for England. Tisquantum, dejected, wandered around London for some time, and after managing to procure passage on a British fishing boat, for the fourth time he was crossing the Atlantic. After about six weeks, the American coastline came into view. Tisquantum clutched the railings, his heart hammering behind his ribs; but there was something differentno scent of burning fires, no smoke rising above the trees, no movement along the rocky shorelines. The British fishing boat sailed from southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the whole while finding that the entire coast was empty of Indians. All had been rendered a ghost town; and Tisquantum, stuck in Europe and on fruitless crossings of the Atlantic, had survived the greatest plague the eastern Indians had ever experienced. Following Tisquantums capture by Hunt in 1614 (or 1615), the Patuxet Indians had been enraged by the British kidnapping of at least twenty of their inhabitants. The sachems of the Wampanoag and Nauset confederacies vowed that foreigners would never again rest on their shores or see their villages. The wound Hunt thrust into these communities found a taste of vengeance two years later when a French ship took anchor in what would become known as Boston Harbor. Massachusett Indians swarmed aboard, slaughtered every last sailor, and set the boat afire. About the same time, a French ship wrecked off Cape Cod. The French crew used poles to build a ramshackle shelter. The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the sailors one-by-one with perfectlyplaced arrows, until only five remained. These five frantically surrendered, and the

Nauset seized them and sent them bound to those communities directly victimized by Hunts kidnapping to suffer their well-deserved fates (regardless of the fact that these were French sailors rather than British ones). This act of native vengeance would turn on the natives, for the French sailors carried some sort of virus (probably hepatitis A) that razed the Dawnland, emptying entire villages, killing off whole populations, fragmenting the coastal society. Tisquantum and his British sailors thus found themselves sailing along a vast Indian graveyard hundreds of miles long. They anchored off Patuxet, and Tisquantum made his way ashore to discover that in his hometown of Patuxet, not a single person remained. The village had been one hundred percent emptied. Tisquantum and the British sailors headed inland, passing village after village that had been widowed. Tisquantum wept and the British raided the homes, searching for loot; Tisquantum hadnt the mind to stop them. A few ghost towns inland they came across several families in a shattered village, and seeing the British party led by an Indian, the natives sent for Massasoit. Massasoit arrived with fifty armed warriors and one of the surviving French sailors in tow. Tisquantum and the British turned on their heels and headed back the way they came, not wanting to risk confrontation; as they made their way back towards Patuxet, a separate British expedition had attacked the weakened Wampanoag, killing twenty absent cause. Massasoit, hearing the news, sought revenge, and sent an armed party towards Patuxet to overtake Tisquantum and his British entourage. The British made it to their boats, but Patuxet found himself surrounded by Massasoits men, and he was taken hostage because of his association with the British. Leaving the graveyard of Patuxet behind, Tisquantum was bound and led to Massasoit, where he told him of the giant English cities, their vast numbers and remarkable technologies. Tisquantum, aware of the hostility between the Wampanoag and the Narragansett, insisted that if Massasoit were to make the British allies and trade for their technology, the Wampanoag would be far too powerful to be overcome by the Narragansett. Massasoit liked what he heard, and he kept Tisquantum as a captive to use as a bargaining tool if an opportunity came to use the British to his advantage. The opportunity came within a few months when a ship called the Mayflower began rebuilding Patuxet and turning it into their own colony by the name of Plymouth. Massasoit built upon what Tisquantum had told him about a technological alliance with the British, and seeing an even greater value in the alliance due to how it would keep the Narragansett at bay due to their trading interests, Massasoit, with Tisquantum as his translator, faced the English and struck the deal.

And thus Tisquantum found himself living in his old hometown now ruled by English colonists. He taught them how to sustain themselves off the land, and over time he found a few more survivors of the old Patuxet community. He and his fellow Patuxet established a new Patuxet on the outskirts of Plymouth, hoping to use his proximity to the English colony as well as his relationship with the colonists to make the new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation. By doing this, Tisquantum would be exacting revenge on Massasoit, who had held him captive for several months. Massasoit knew he couldnt trust Tisquantum, so he sent someone to Plymouth to monitor him. Hobamuk became Tisquantums sidekick and aide, and in Tisquantums shadow, he helped negotiate treaties with the Massachusett to the north and the Nauset off Cape Cod. Tisquantums ambitions for power got the best of him, and he openly tried persuading the Wampanoag that he, rather than Massasoit, was a better choice to protect them against the Narragansett. Tisquantums biggest push for such a change in power came during the first harvest festival between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag. This has been called the first Thanksgiving, but this is a misunderstanding. The Puritans had no concept of our modern version of Thanksgiving, which came about in 1863 by proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the American Civil War. The Plymouth colonists and members of the Wampanoag celebrated a harvest festival, celebrating autumn, the time of reaping and harvesting; such celebrations took place around the Sundays of the Harvest Moon. On the cusp of the celebration, Massasoit and ninety armed warriors showed up. The Plymouth militia marched back and forth, firing their guns in a show of bravado and power. Then the two sides came together, grabbed some food, and complained about the nasty Narragansett and how they would destroy them. The colonists were vastly outnumbered( only 53 had survived the 120 who had set out on the Mayflower) but they werent too concerned: they knew politics as well as Massasoit, and they knew how badly the Wampanoag needed them in alliance. Tisquantum didnt understand politics; under the cover of his friendship with the gathered colonists, he spoke crudely of Massasoit and praised his own superior virtues. He insisted that he could rally just as many warriors as Massasoit, and that he could also win the aid of the Plymouth militia who might intimidate the Narragansett (the Indians knew the Narragansett were far better warriors than the piss-poor shots in the Plymouth militia, but European guns could be scary). Tisquantum went as far as to tell the Wampanoag that the English had cases of the agent that had caused the plague that

decimated the eastern seaboard in the years prior, and that he could procure them to be released against the Narragansett. To the Plymouth colonists, he insisted that Massasoit was secretly planning to lead a joint attack on the colony with the Narragansett as his allies. Tisquantums claims grew bolder and wilder, and both the colonists and the Indians came to see through the smokescreen. So as they celebrated the harvest festival for three days with wild turkeys, fish, waterfowl, and five deer provided by the Indians, Massasoit vowed in his heart to take care of Tisquantum, but he had to wait to do so in the midst of the festival would be to bring a plague on his own house. Following the festival, Massasoit demanded that the colonists hand over Tisquantum for a speedy execution, offering a cache of furs to make the demand look more like a trade. The colonists, many of whom loved Tisquantum despite his shameful rhetoric, refused. Massasoit then sent a messenger to Bradford, and this messenger brandished a knife and held it before the governor, demanding that he cut off Tisquantums head and hands. Bradford refused to do such a thing, and Massasoit turned his back on the colonists. The colonists began nervously building fortifications, and when a drought struck, they found themselves facing a grueling winter. Because trade with the Wampanoag had been severed, Bradford knew he needed a replacement if his colony wished to survive the coming winter. Taking Tisquantum with him (and surrounding the Indian with a large bodyguard to prevent him from being taken by any Wampanoag they might come across), Bradford and several pilgrims headed to southeast Cape Cod to negotiate with another group of Indians. As fate would have it, Tisquantum fell ill on the journey back to Plymouth and died. News of Tisquantums death reached Massasoits ears, and he eagerly set aside his bitterness and renewed his pact with the Plymouth colonists, hoping to use them again to his advantage. The colonists, still in dire straits with the coming winter, just as eagerly accepted Massasoits offer. Massasoit helped Plymouth survive that winter, but it came at a price: the surviving colony brought tens of thousands of colonists to Massachusetts, and the Indians quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. A fragile peace lasted until 1675, when one of Massasoits sons, angered by being pushed this way and that by the colonists laws, launched an attack. Many other disgruntled Indian groups joined in, and the conflict tore open colonial New England. As fate would have it, the Europeans won. Why did the Europeans win? Many factors come into play. The colonists were willing to massacre entire Indian villages during the conflict, but the Indians didnt do such things to British settlements in the area (the same could not be said of

Jamestown in earlier decades). Perhaps the biggest factors werent superior technology or colonial barbarism but (a) the fact that the Europeans vastly outnumbered the natives by 1675, and (b) by this time more epidemics, brought to New England by the swelling numbers of colonists, had further weakened the native populations. What had been a robust Indian civilization in 1615 had become an emaciated shadow of its former self by 1622; and by 1675, these emaciated shadows had become but skeletons due to the constant winnowing and weathering of their communities by European disease. Thus England had wedged her foot in the door, and the door swung wide open. Hundreds upon hundreds of wooden ships laden with colonists and supplies traversed the Atlantic bound for the New World. A new era was dawning, but it would come with a price. An old era was coming to an endbut it would not go quickly, nor quietly.