Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [267]
The possession of land, taken for whatever reason, made possible commercial cultivation of exotic crops for the European market. There was no gold or silver in the British possessions, but supplying consumers rather than bankers turned out to be much better business. Cultivating crops also meant that a workforce was needed: if these were indentured workers from Britain (as most were at first, especially in North America), they would of course go on speaking English; if they were purchased slaves from the western coast of Africa, they would learn it when they arrived, since all links with their home communities were lost. The revenues from sugar, and later cocoa, in the Caribbean islands, and from tobacco, and later indigo and cotton, in the North American continent, became the firmest foundations of sustainable English-speaking communities across the Atlantic.
Someone else’s land
They call Old England Acawmenoakit, which is as much as from the land on t’other side. Hardly are they brought to believe that water is three thousand English miles over.
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Chauquock; a knife. Whence they call Englishmen Chauquaquock, that is Knive-men; stone formerly being to them instead of knives, awlblades, hatchets, and hoes.
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Wunnaumwayean; if he says true. Canounicus, the old Sachim of the Narroganset bay, a wise and peaceable prince, once in a solemn oration to myself, in a solemn assembly, using this word, said, ‘I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English, since they landed, nor never will.’ He often repeated this word, ‘Wunnaumwayean Englishman, if the Englishman speak true, if he mean truly then shall I go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posterity will live in love and peace together.’ I replied, that he had no cause, I hoped, to question Englishman’s Wunnaumwauonck, that is, faithfulness, he having had long experience of their friendliness and trustiness. He took a stick, and broke it in ten pieces, and related ten instances, laying down a stick to every instance, which gave him cause thus to fear and say.
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This question they often put to me: ‘Why come the Englishmen hither?’ and measuring others by themselves, they say, ‘It is because you want firing.’ For they, having burnt up the wood in one place, wanting draughts to bring wood to them, are fain to follow the wood, and so remove to a fresh place for the wood’s sake.
Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, 164320
The growth of English in the Caribbean had been achieved with little friction. Very few of the Arawak or Carib population had survived the Spanish takeover of the sixteenth century, and so the English pirates and planters, and the slaves that they imported, were entering an emptied domain. The situation on the North American mainland was very different.
In Virginia and Massachusetts, the first bridgeheads for English settlers, there was still a substantial indigenous population. What with visiting cod fishermen and other scouting voyagers, they were already to some extent familiar with Europeans.* This was lucky for the settlers, since in both places it was only through the active help of these knowledgeable neighbours that they survived those first years. In Virginia, John Rolfe, who founded the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, married in 1612 none other than Pocahontas, the spirited daughter of the Powhatan chief Wahunsonacock.† This kept relations with the Powhatan sweet until 1622; in 1616 the couple had even led a party of Virginians to London, where they were presented to King James I. In Massachusetts, the colonists were helped crucially in the first few years by two bilingual natives, Samoset, who had learnt some English from cod fishermen, and Tisquantum. Tisquantum was quite fluent in English, having crossed the Atlantic already six times, spending nine years in England, four in Spain