1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [26]
The Pilgrims were less sanguine about Indians’ multicolored, multitextured mode of self-presentation. To be sure, the newcomers accepted the practicality of deerskin robes as opposed to, say, fitted British suits. And the colonists understood why natives’ skin and hair shone with bear or eagle fat (it warded off sun, wind, and insects). And they could overlook the Indians’ practice of letting prepubescent children run about without a stitch on. But the Pilgrims, who regarded personal adornment as a species of idolatry, were dismayed by what they saw as the indigenous penchant for foppery. The robes were adorned with animal-head mantles, snakeskin belts, and bird-wing headdresses. Worse, many Dawnlanders tattooed their faces, arms, and legs with elaborate geometric patterns and totemic animal symbols. They wore jewelry made of shell and swans’-down earrings and chignons spiked with eagle feathers. If that weren’t enough, both sexes painted their faces red, white, and black—ending up, Gookin sniffed, with “one part of their face of one color; and another, of another, very deformedly.”
In 1585–86 the artist John White spent fifteen months in what is now North Carolina, returning with more than seventy watercolors of American people, plants, and animals. White’s work, later distributed in a series of romanticized engravings (two of which are shown here), was not of documentary quality by today’s standards—his Indians are posed like Greek statues. But at the same time his intent was clear. To his eye, the people of the Carolinas, cultural cousins to the Wampanoag, were in superb health, especially compared to poorly nourished, smallpox-scarred Europeans. And they lived in what White viewed as well-ordered settlements, with big, flourishing fields of maize.
And the hair! As a rule, young men wore it long on one side, in an equine mane, but cropped the other side short, which prevented it from getting tangled in their bow strings. But sometimes they cut their hair into such wild patterns that attempting to imitate them, Wood sniffed, “would torture the wits of a curious barber.” Tonsures, pigtails, head completely shaved but for a single forelock, long sides drawn into a queue with a raffish short-cut roach in the middle—all of it was prideful and abhorrent to the Pilgrims. (Not everyone in England saw it that way. Inspired by asymmetrical Indian coiffures, seventeenth-century London blades wore long, loose hanks of hair known as “lovelocks.”)
As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans with disdain as soon as they got to know them. The Wendat (Huron) in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?
For fifteen days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s honored guests—though the Indians,