Made In America - Bill Bryson [18]
If the early American colonists treated the Indians’ languages with respect, they did not always show such scruples with the Indians themselves. From the outset they often treated the natives badly, albeit sometimes unwittingly. One of the first acts of the Mayflower Pilgrims, as we have seen, was to plunder Indian graves. (One wonders how the Pilgrims would have felt had they found Indians picking through the graves in an English churchyard.) Confused and easily frightened, the early colonists often attacked friendly tribes, mistaking them for hostile ones. Even when they knew the tribes to be friendly, they sometimes took hostages in the decidedly perverted belief that this would keep them respectful.
When circumstances were deemed to warrant it, they did not hesitate to impose a quite shocking severity, as a note from soldiers to the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during King Philip’s War reminds us: ‘This aforesaid Indian was ordered to be tourn to peeces by dogs, and she was so dealt with.‘21 Indeed, early accounts of American encounters with Indians tell us as much about colonial violence as about seventeenth-century orthography. Here, for instance, is William Bradford describing a surprise attack on a Pequot village in his History of Plimouth Plantation. The victims, it may be noted, were mostly women and children: Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte ... It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre ... and horrible was the styncke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice.‘22 In 1675 in Virginia, John Washington, an ancestor of George, was involved in a not untypical incident in which the Indians were invited to settle a dispute by sending their leaders to a powwow. They sent five chiefs to parley and when things did not go to the European settlers’ satisfaction, the chiefs were taken away and killed. Even the most faithful Indians were treated as expendable. When John Smith was confronted by hostile savages in Virginia in 1608 his first action was to shield himself behind his native guide.
In the circumstances, it is little wonder that the Indians began to view their new rivals for the land with a certain suspicion and to withdraw their goodwill. This was a particular blow to the Virginia colonists – or ‘planters’, as they were somewhat hopefully called – who were as helpless at fending for themselves as the Mayflower Pilgrims would prove to be a decade later. In the winter of 1609-10, they underwent what came to be known as the ‘starving time’, during which brief period the number of Virginia colonists fell from five hundred to about sixty. When Sir Thomas Gates arrived to take over as the new governor the following spring, he found ‘the portes open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty howses (whose owners untimely death had taken newly from them) rent up and burnt, the living not able, as they pretended, to step into the woodes to gather other fire-wood; and, it is true, the Indian as fast killing without as the famine and pestilence within.23
Fresh colonists were constantly dispatched from England, but between the perils of the Indians without and the famine and pestilence within, they perished almost as fast as they could be replaced. Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. Of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619-21, 3,000 were dead at the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.
For those who survived, life was a succession of terrors and discomforts, from hunger and homesickness to the dread possibility of being tomahawked in one’s bed. As the colonist Richard Frethorne wrote with a touch of forgivable