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Why Billington Survived

Massasoit, Samoset, and Tisquantum: Bradford 1981:87–88; Winslow 1963b:37, 43–59 (“tall proper men,” 53); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62. In quotations I have modernized the use of “f” and “v.”

 

Negotiations: Bradford 1981:87–89; Winslow 1963b:50–59 (“very lusty,” 57); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62; Kuppermann 2000:7.

 

“A friendly Indian”: Wood et al. 1971:73.

 

Tisquantum’s life: I have relied greatly on Salisbury 1989. See also Adams 1892–93 (vol. 1): 22–44; Foreman 1943:20–21; Humins 1987; Kinnicutt 1914; Shuffelton 1976.

 

Tisquantum, and fish fertilizer: Accounts of Squanto and fish fertilizer include Winslow 1963a:81–82 (“increase,” 82); Bradford 1981:94–95; Morton 1632:89. Skepticism about the aboriginality of fish fertilization dates back to 1939, but the question was first raised forcefully in Rostlund 1957a and then still more strongly in Ceci 1975a, 1975b, 1990b. Ceci’s conclusions were disputed (Nanepashemet 1991; Russell 1975, 1980:166–67; Warden 1975), but much of the critique boiled down to refuting the charge that the Indians were too stupid to figure out the use of fertilizer, an argument Ceci did not make. Instead Ceci suggested that the added productivity would not have been worth the added trouble, given the alternative of fallowing. Because Europeans had much less land per person and less mobility, they had to resort to fertilization. In the early 1990s Stephen A. Mrozowski, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, unearthed evidence on Cape Cod suggesting that fish were used there as fertilizer a few decades before the
Mayflower,
but he has not yet published it (interview, Mrozowski). The fish may have been ordinary household waste, though. Incidentally, fish fertilizer was common in Peru (Denevan 2001:35–36).

 

Pilgrims’ lack of curiosity about Indian motives: The early chroniclers did explore Tisquantum’s motives, especially when they accused him of scheming to better his station. But they did not, in modern terms, try to put themselves in his place, which is what is at issue here. Nor did the colonists puzzle over why they never suffered a sustained attack, to judge by the lack of discussion by Bradford, Winslow et al. Here one cannot charge the colonists with special insensitivity. Compared to later historians, Pilgrim writers were more likely to see Indians as independent actors with their own beliefs and goals (Kuppermann 2000:2–4).

 

“Divine providence”: Gookin 1792:148.

 

Dissatisfied historians: For a survey of ethnohistory’s origins, see Axtell 1978.

 

Explosion of research: Author’s interviews, Axtell, Neal Salisbury; Chaplin 2003:esp. 1445–55 (“No other field,” 1431).

 

Squanto as devil: Shuffelton 1976. Tisquantum, according to a Massachusett dictionary, is a variant of
musquantum,
“he is angry.” When Indians had accidents, according to Roger Williams, the minister and linguist who founded Rhode Island, “they will say, God was angry and did it;
musquantum manit,
God is angry” (cited in Shuffelton 1976:110).

 

Norumbega: D’Abate 1994; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):155. The term referred vaguely to a mythical city, the river that supposedly reached it, and the region around the river, all somewhere in the Northeast.

 

Patuxet population: A vexing question. Tisquantum is said to have claimed it had two thousand souls (James ed. 1963:29). According to the most widely cited colonial observer, Daniel Gookin, the Wampanoag federation, of which Patuxet was a member, “could raise, as the most credible and ancient Indians affirm, about three thousand men” (Gookin 1792:148). If the federation were able to muster three thousand adult males, then typical population estimates for the whole would be on the order of twelve to fifteen thousand. The Wampanoag had about a dozen settlements, which would suggest that Patuxet may have had a thousand inhabitants, or maybe a few more. Countering this, anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon argues the available archaeological evidence suggests that individual coastal settlements like Patuxet held “probably no more than two hundred people” (Bragdon 1996:58). I have accepted Gookin’s figure because it was apparently derived from contemporaneous Indians themselves, and because the archaeological traces, as Bragdon herself notes, are difficult to interpret.

 

Names and distribution of Indian groups: Most historical accounts rely on Gookin (1792:147–49), including the standard reference, Salwen (1978:160–76). See also Bragdon 1996:20–25; Russell 1980:19–29; Salisbury 1982:13–30 passim; Vaughan 1995:50–58.

 

Dawnland: Stewart-Smith 1998:49.

 

Slow movement into New England: Bragdon 1996:57–58 (salt marshes, 1000
B.C.
); Wilkie and Tager eds. 1991:10–11 (maps of distribution through time of known paleo-Indian archaeological sites); Fagan 2000:101–04 (low carrying capacity of postglacial areas); Petersen 2004. On a continental scale, the New England indigenous groups were so small that one conscientious continental survey doesn’t even mention them (Fagan 1991).

 

Patchwork environment: Cronon 1983:19–33 (“tremendous variety,” 31).

 

Glottochronology: Glottochronology was invented in the 1960s by U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh, a controversial figure who spent much of his career in Mexico after his colorful political views cost him his passport during the McCarthy period. The technique was the subject of his posthumously printed magnum opus,
The Origin and Diversification of Language
(Swadesh ed. 1971). Glottochronology tries to ascertain how long ago two languages diverged from a common ancestor language, as French and Italian did from Latin. To accomplish this, Swadesh drew up a list of one hundred basic terms, such as “ear,” “mother,” and “vomit.” When two languages are closely related, Swadesh argued, their words for these terms will resemble each other. For example, the French and Italian for “ear” are
oreille
and
orecchio,
terms similar enough to suggest that these languages split off from each other relatively recently. On average, Swadesh claimed, the words on the Swadesh list change at a rate of 14 percent every one thousand years. Thus if two languages have similar entries for seventy-nine of the hundred words on the Swadesh list, they broke off from a common ancestor about 1,500 years ago. Unsurprisingly, Swadesh’s ideas have been criticized. Especially implausible is the notion that linguistic change occurs at a constant, universal rate. Nonetheless researchers use glottochronology, partly because of the lack of alternatives, and partly because the basic idea intuitively seems correct (Swadesh 1971, 1952; Hymes 1971, 1960:5–6).

 

Glottochronological analysis of Algonquian languages: Fiedel 1987; Goddard 1978; Mulholland 1985.

 

Diverse New England communities: This description relies on the surveys of evidence in Petersen and Cowrie 2002; Bragdon 1996:55–79 (“no name,” 58–59). Bragdon (1996:39) adopts the term “conditional sedentism” for the coastal communities (coined in Dunford 1992). For the growth of coastal communities, see Robinson 1994. In the past, some have argued that coastal Indians practiced little agriculture (Ceci 1990a), but Petersen and Cowrie assemble evidence to refute this.

 

Coastal diet: Little and Schoeninger 1995; Kavasch 1994.

 

Description of Patuxet: Author’s visit; James ed. 1963:7 (“Pleasant for air,” alewives), 75–76; Winslow 1963b:8–43; Anon. ed. 1963:xx–xxi (map of area in 1613 by Champlain). In these years big areas along the coastline had neatly planted maize fields, traces of which survived even into the twentieth century (Delabarre and Wilder 1920:210–14).

 

Wetus,
meals, and domestic style: Morton 1637:24–26; Wood 1977:86–88, 112 (“warmer,” 112); Bragdon 1996:104–07; Gookin 1792:149–51 (“so sweet,” 150–51). “The best sort” of
wetus,
Gookin said, were “covered very neatly, tight, and warm, with barks of trees”—“warm as the best English houses” (150). Clearly, the homes of the wealthy in England were not leaky or drafty, but in that deforested land even the rich could not afford the plentiful fires that kept Indians warm (Higginson 1792:121–22).

 

2,500 calories/day: Bennett 1955:table 1; Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):129–45 (European calorie levels).

 

Indian and European views on children: Kuppermann 2000:153–56; Williams 1936:29 (spoiling); Denys 1908:404; Ariés 1962 (European views).

 

Games: Wood 1977:103–06.

 

Character, training, and
pniese:
Salisbury 1989:229–31; Wood 1977:91–94 (“He that speaks,” 91; “Beat them,” 93 [I have modernized “winch,” an obsolete form of “flinch”]); Winslow 1624:55–56; James ed. 1963:77; Kittredge ed. 1913:151, quoted in Axtell 1981:44.

 

Sachems: Wood 1977:97–99; Winslow 1624:56–60; Gookin 1792:154–55; Salisbury 1982:42–43; Dunford 2001:32–37; Johnson 1993:chap. 3. To the north, sachems were called sagamores, a distinction I am ignoring.

 

Population increase, attendant social change, and rise of political tensions: On the one hand, there is surprisingly little archaeological evidence for coastal agriculture (Ceci 1990a); on the other, there are multiple colonial reports that the seacoast was thick with farms. This scenario is an attempt to reconcile the apparently contradictory evidence (Bragdon 1996:146–53). See also Johnson 1993:chap. 3; Thomas 1979:24–44 (“The political scene,” 30); Metcalf 1974; and esp. Petersen and Cowrie 2002.

 

Indigenous warfare as less bloody: Hariot 1588:36–37; Williams 1936:188 (“farre less”); Hirsch 1988; Kuppermann 2000:106–09; Russell 1980:187–94; Vaughan 1995:37–41. One reason for the low casualties, Williams observed, was that Indians fought “with [so much] leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits.” (Evidently, the games of archery dodgem paid off.) Some activists have claimed that scalping was actually invented by white colonists. But European visitors witnessed the practice in the 1530s and 1540s, before any colonies existed north of Florida. “Hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and drawing and quartering were commonplace” in Europe, James Axtell observed, but not scalping. Each continent had its own forms of mutilation, and “it hardly seems worth arguing” which was worse (Axtell 1980:463).

 

Early European exploration: Some of the vast literature includes Kuppermann 1997a; Bourque and Whitehead 1994; Quinn 1974: chap. 1; Salisbury 1982:51–54; Axtell 1994:154–55 (Corte-Real).

 

Verrazzano as first visitor: In his popular book,
1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America,
Gavin Menzies, a British ex–naval officer, argues that in that year a huge fleet led by warrior eunuchs sailed from China to the Americas. After the fleet lost many ships to Caribbean reefs, it had to leave off “several thousand men and concubines” in Rhode Island. They were supposed to be picked up by subsequent expeditions, but the emperor who sponsored the expedition died, and his successor was not interested in globetrotting. The stranded Chinese melted into the local population. Verrazzano noted that the peoples of Rhode Island were more “beautiful” than other Indians, which to Menzies is evidence that they were not Indians. So enchanting is the image of 500-foot-long Chinese junks in New England that I am sorry to report that few researchers other than Menzies believe it (Menzies 2003:281–96 [“several thousand,” 291]).

 

Verrazzano’s account: Wroth ed. 1970:71–90, 133–43 (“densely populated,” 137; “little bells,” 138; “irksome clamor,” 139; “showing,” “barbarous,” 140); Axtell 1992:156–57.

 

Indians’ physical appearance: Gookin 1792:152–53 (“one part,” 153); Higginson 1792:123; Morton 1632:32 (“as proper”); Wood 1977:82–83 (“more amiable,” 82, “torture,” 83); Russell 1980:30–32. See also the drawings of Algonquians further south by John White (Hulton 1984). Differences between colonial and native ways of treating the body are explored in Kuppermann 2000:chap. 2 (bow string, 55–56), and Axtell 2000:154–58.

 

Popularity of Indian hairstyles: Kuppermann 1997b:225 (“lovelocks”); Higginson 1792:123.

 

Indian views of Europeans: Jaenen 2000 (weak, 76; ugly, 77; sexually untrustworthy, 83; Micmac, 85; dirty, handkerchiefs, 87); Axtell 1988; Stannard 1992:5 (Indian cleanliness). As a rule, only wealthy Europeans bathed—commoners wiped themselves with rags when they could.

 

Two hundred British ships: Cell 1965.

 

Champlain’s exploration: Biggar ed. 1922–36 (vol. 1):349–55, 397–401. See also, Salisbury 1982:62–66, and the enjoyable Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):191–93, 199.

 

Gorges and Maine: Gorges 1890a:204–07; Salisbury 1982:92–94. I have followed Salisbury rather than wholly accept Gorges’s account, which is confused and confusing. Unlike Plymouth colony, the Maine expedition did not land in winter with no food. It lost only two members the first winter, whereas death and illness so beset the Pilgrims that in their first few months ashore they usually had only a few functioning people.

 

Pring: Pring 1905:51–63.

 

Smith and Pocahontas: The best retelling of the Pocahontas story I have come across is Gunn Allen 2003. A similar, briefer account is Richter 2001:70–78. An enjoyable nonscholarly account of Smith and Virginia is Milton 2000.

 

Smith in New England, Hunt kidnaps Tisquantum: Arber and Bradley eds. 1910 (vol. 1):192–205, 256–57 (“great troupes,” “fortie,” 205); (vol. 2):697–99; Bradford 1981:89–90; Winslow 1963b:52; 1963c:70; Gorges 1890a:209–11 (“worthlesse,” 209; “warre,” 211).