A Method of War

Smith threatens Opechancanough

The first Anglo-Powhatan war (1609-1614) was a brutal affair. Most British immigrants to the Jamestown Colony perished through the course of the first seven years, a great many in battle or due to conditions create by a siege of the fort (see "Death in Jamestown"). On the other side, entire Powhatan villages were destroyed.

Gun Ownership in Colonial Virginia

While rereading A True Relation (1608) by John Smith, a statement about most guns being packed away caught my eye. I noticed the statement because it provides corroborating evidence for an assertion that I read on the Jamestown Rediscovery website.

On 22 April 1607, according to Smith,* He, Captain Christopher Newport, and twenty others set out upriver to explore and gather food for the nascent colony. While they were away, the fort at Jamestown on which construction had barely begun, was attacked by about 400 Indians. The English colonists were fortunate in their ability to repel the attacks because most of the guns were still packed away in shipping containers. The exceptions were those possessed by "gentlemen". Smith noted, "...their Armes beeing then in drievats and few ready but certain Gentlemen of their own" (35).

The Jamestown Rediscovery website mentions restrictions on ownership and access to firearms in the England of James I.

There had been no major military battles in England since the war against Spain that ended in 1603; so, at the time of Jamestown’s settlement there was a shortage of arms and armor in England for the Virginia Company to supply to its colony. The English government strictly controlled all the military equipment, which was stored in city armories or private households of the rural gentry.
"Arms and Armor," Jamestown Rediscovery (accessed 15 August 2017).

For centuries leading up to this time, men in England had a duty to be trained in the use of arms for service in the militia, as well as for service in the defense of themselves and their neighbors. But, ownership of weapons was not yet articulated as a right. Moreover, there were restrictions, especially on concealable weapons--crossbows and firearms less than a yard in length. Additional restrictions were put into place early in the reign of James I (1603-1625).

In To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (1994), Joyce Lee Malcolm traces how the duty to bear arms became a right as articulated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. She suggests that gun ownership among the common people, as well as by the gentry, was widespread in rural England, and most of England was rural. But, she also notes that James I restricted firearm, crossbows, and hunting dogs through a series game acts in 1604, 1605, and 1609.

These acts altered the property qualification needed to hunt far more materially than any act in the preceding two centuries; made it illegal for unqualified persons to keep coursing dogs, sell game, use guns, crossbows, or other devices to take game; and brought some poaching cases before the kingdom's highest courts.
Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms, 13.

The needs for self defense and for hunting certainly differed in colonial Virginia than in the home country. Although perhaps difficult, the colonists were supplied with firearms. But, it appears that when they first arrived, guns were not individual possessions for the majority. Smith was a soldier and had pistols. Others were armed as needed, such as when on guard duty. Gentlemen possessed their own arms and these were all that were readily available during the first Indian attack.

As the settlement at Jamestown grew and expanded along the James River, those with farms certainly had firearms. That was not inconsistent with the practice in England where land owners ordinarily possessed firearms and other weapons for hunting and for self-defense. Slowly, during the fifteen years from 1607-1622, the English also began to instruct their Indian neighbors in the use of these weapons.

This training was negotiated. The English wished to offer religious training to the Natives. Opechancanough, chief of the Powhatans, agreed to this religious training on the stipulation that firearms training came as part of the package. In 1622, Opechancanough led his people to slaughter one-quarter of the English colonists, most of them in their own homes with their own weapons.

Over the course of the rest of the century, ownership of firearms expanded. As ownership expanded, the duty of Englishmen to be prepared for service in the militia also developed into a right to own and use firearms. It was a long process, and one that is not well-documented.


*21 May 1607, according to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, editor of Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907) 33. My source for Smith's True Relation is this book, 27-71, digitized at American Journeys.

Death in Jamestown

Fyndeinge of fyve hundrethe men we had onely Lefte aboutt sixty, The reste beinge either sterved throwe famin or Cutt of by the salvages.
George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon”

In early 1610, sixty English colonists remained from the previous year’s population of five hundred. After two years, the colony at Jamestown had not yet established itself as a viable settlement. Approximately 90% of the colonists to Virginia had died—killed by Indians, starved, fallen to disease—or run away and disappeared into the wilds of America. Conditions were so grim that the surviving remnant prepared four boats and set out to return to England. Some considered burning the small fort where they had suffered, but were persuaded that it might yet be occupied by others who would follow them. As they sailed downriver, they met Lord De La Ware’s ship loaded with supplies and more than three hundred additional colonists. They returned to Jamestown.

The colonists would continue to die. Each ship that arrived in Virginia brought more colonists and most died within two years. Of the many thousands who arrived year after year, perhaps 900 occupied Jamestown and the surrounding area in 1620 (Gately, 73). So many colonists died that an investigation by the Royal Council in 1624—the year that John Smith published his Generall Historie—asked, “What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?” (Morison, 54).

John Smith described the conditions in 1607. Food consisted of meager rations from the common store.

… halfe a pinte of Wheat, and as much Barly boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fryed some six and twenty weekes in the ships hold, contained as many wormes as graines
Smith, “Description,”

Hunger was aggravated by thirst. The colonists were reduced to drinking water from the river.

… when they [Captain Newport and the ships] departed, there remained neither Taverne, Beere-house, nor place of reliefe but the common kettell. … our drinke was water.
Smith, “Description”

George Percy noted the abysmal conditions of the water.

… our drinke cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.
Percy, “Observations”

Earlier in this paragraph, Percy gives us the earliest diagnosis of the maladies that would continue to devastate the Virginia colony for more than a decade.

Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine.
Percy, “Observations”

Flixes seems most likely a reference to dysentery, but what caused the fevers?


Malaria?

In A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen clearly identify one of the principal causes of death.

Disease also decimated the colony. Jamestown settlers were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance. Malaria, in particular, proved a dreaded killer, and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 17.

The identification of malaria as a principal malady killing the settlers is neither surprising nor original. The textbook I read in my first college course in early American history also identified malaria, which the authors linked to the poor choice of location for the settlement.

The town was located on marshy ground where mosquitoes flourished during the summer, and a hundred of the first settlers died from malaria.
Weinstein and Wilson, Freedom and Crisis, 63.

An article in The Pilgrim Newsletter published in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown continues this common assertion, “Malaria and other mosquito born illnesses were rampant in the colony” (Stacy, 17). School children at Jamestown Elementary School in Virginia incorporated this idea into a Rap song written as part of a school project.

Although the identification of malaria as a killer of colonists is not uncommon, Schweikart and Allen's add a new twist with their assertion that it was a “New World disease” against which the English lacked immunities. In contrast to this original idea, a statement from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reflects the current state of knowledge concerning malaria in the New World.

Plasmodium vivax stowed away with the English going to Jamestown, while P. falciparum rode along with slaves from Africa.
“Background History on Malaria”

P. vivax thrived in northern Europe for centuries, but it killed very few. P. falciparum is far more deadly. Indeed, it is one of the world's leading killers even today. If the English colonists succumbed to malaria, it came with them. But they were unlikely to succumb until a more virulent strain was brought in with imported servants from Africa. The first of these arrived in 1619 by which time the English population at Jamestown was growing and reasonably healthy.


If not Malaria?

The common assertion that malaria killed the Jamestown settlers rests on a weak foundation. In Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (2001), Margaret Humpheys suggests that the English colonists might have brought malaria with them. The strain of malaria they brought—P. vivax—was less virulent than that likely brought sometime after 1619 from Africa—P. falciparum. Humphreys earned a medical degree from Harvard as well as her Ph.D. in the history of science. Her qualifications for assessing the epidemiology of colonial Virginia would seem more than adequate. It thus comes as no surprise that her book is thorough and well argued, and offers only tentative conclusions in recognition of the absence of the sort of medical data required to make a definitive diagnosis.

Humphreys leaves Schweikart and Allen’s novel allegation in shambles: there is no credible reason to believe that malaria was a New World disease. She also offers good reasons to doubt their commonplace assertion that malaria was the cause of the fevers about which Percy and Smith wrote.

The Jamestown settlers came from England, including parts of England where vivax malaria was common. They certainly could have brought it with them. But one would not expect such a nonvirgin population, however malnourished, to experience a major outbreak of vivax malaria with that level of mortality.
Humphreys, Malaria, 24.

Humpreys suggests that the level of mortality is more consistent with typhoid fever than malaria. Typhoid fever had been put forth as an explanation in the work of Wyndham Blanton in the first half of the twentieth century and by Carville Earle in the second half of the century. Earle notes that the parasites Salmonella typhi and Endamoeba histolytica were present in the “slime and filth” that Percy observed in the water.

Ironically, most of them died needlessly, for on at least two occasions, Virginians understood the nexus between site and mortality, and they eliminated that link through the preventative medicine of settlement dispersal only to have their costly insights overturned by company agents freshly arrived in Virginia.
Earle, “Pioneers of Providence,” 482.

Of course, settlement dispersal rendered the colonists more vulnerable to Indian attack. It was bad enough that the English were economically dependent upon the Natives for many of their provisions, whether through trade or abundant theft. The Indians frequently found cause for hostilities—Percy mentions for example an accidental shooting of a Native when a “pistoll suddenly fyered and shotte the salvage” (Nicholls). Moreover, archaeological excavations and “tree-ring analysis of cypress trees” suggest that the Natives were already suffering scarcity of crops due to a severe drought during the years 1606-1612 (Sheler). The additional burden of feeding the helpless English during hard times did not bode well for peaceful relations.


Plausible Deniability

Schweikart and Allen’s statement that malaria killed the Virginia colonists could be true, but more than likely it is false. Their original claim would merit consideration if they offered some evidence in support. The most convincing scholarship available when they were writing their book suggests an alternate hypothesis that seems more likely. They ignore Humpreys' text. Perhaps the belief that malaria killed the colonists should go the way of Smith’s alleged rescue at the hands of an eleven year old Indian child—a useful myth that is probably false but cannot be proven false beyond all doubts.

Their identification of malaria as a New World disease, on the other hand, is absurd. Even so, they do not state unequivocally that it was. The transition from “New World diseases” to “[m]alaria, in particular” in the next sentence certainly implies that malaria was a New World disease, but they do not list it among those “diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe” several pages earlier (Stripes). The relationship between the two sentences could be a misleading non sequitur conferring plausible deniability. It could be clever politics; it could be incompetent editing.


Citations

“Background Information on Malaria.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. http://www.jhsph.edu/Malaria/Malaria_Background.html. Accessed 4 February 2008.

Earle, Carville. “Pioneers of Providence: The Anglo-American Experience, 1492-1792.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992), 478-499.

Gately, Iain. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Humpheys, Margaret. Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Nicholls, Mark. “George Percy's ‘Trewe Relacyon’: A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement.” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 113, no. 3 (2005), 212-275.

Percy, George. “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1685-1690.

Schweikart, Larry. “Why It’s Time for A Patriot’s History of the United States.” History News Network. http://hnn.us/articles/9536.html. 31 January 2005.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror, updated ed. New York: Sentinal, 2007.

Sheler, Jeffrey L. “Rethinking Jamestown.” Smithsonian 35 (October 2005), 48-54.

Stacy, Ann Hooper. “Jamestowne 1607 in Celebration of its 400th Anniversary.” The Pilgrim Newsletter 91, no. 2 (2007), 16-19.

Stripes, James. “Larry Schweikart’s Claim.” Patriots and Peoples. http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/01/larry-schweikarts-claim.html. 30 January 2008.

Smith, John. “The Description of Virginia by Captaine John Smith.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1691-1704.

Weinstein, Allen, and R. Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis: An American History 2nd ed. New York, Random House, 1978.

The True Story of Pocahontas

Smith and Pocahontas

In 1624 Captain John Smith published an account that he was rescued by Pocahontas from a death planned by her father, Wahunsonacock—the Powhatan Chief. The alleged rescue occurred when Smith was a prisoner of the Powhatans in the winter of 1607-1608, and Smith first mentioned it in a letter to Queen Anne in 1616. Smith's story has been embraced and accepted, contextualized, and disputed.

The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves.
Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Electronic Edition
Text also available at Eyewitness to History

The story was generally accepted until challenged in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Deane and Henry Adams; this challenge appeared most prominently in the North American Review, January 1867. More recently, the Powhatan Renape Nation has challenged “The Pocahontas Myth” and its revision in the 1995 Disney film.

Others have accepted the story, but accuse Smith of misunderstanding the nature of a formal ritual in which Pocahontas played a role prescribed for her. This ritual view is advocated by some scholars, such as Michael J. Puglisi, “Capt. John Smith, Pocahontas and a Clash of Cultures: A Case for the Ethnohistorical Perspective,” The History Teacher (November 1991), 97-103. This view was mentioned by David Silverman in December 2006 in an interview for the NOVA program “Pocahontas Revealed.”

Others have suggested plagiarism: Smith’s account bears a strong similarity to an alleged 1528 rescue of Juan Ortiz by Ulele, daughter of the Ucita chief Hirrihugua, a perspective mentioned in Pocahontas film critiques in the New York Times. I have propagated this view in my classrooms, in an article concerned with Russell Means as an actorvist, and previously in Patriots and Peoples.

Others have defended the credibility of Smith’s story, especially J.A. Leo Lemay in Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (1992). A Stanford graduate student in engineering posted a summary of this book, which was also reviewed favorably in The William and Mary Quarterly (October 1995) by Robert S. Tilton. Tilton notes that Lemay fails to address Helen C. Rountree’s argument that “that a young girl would not have had the power to stop an execution and that we have too little knowledge of Powhatan adoption rituals to make a strong case for this popular interpretation of Smith's narrative” (Tilton, 715). Tilton’s Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (1994) examines how stories about Pocahontas have been reframed to fit a variety of agendas.

Oral History

In The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History (2007), Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” dispute Smith’s account from the perspective of oral history. They cite Smith’s statement in A True Relation (1608) of “Weramocomoco … assuring mee his friendship, and my libertie within foure days” (American Journeys Collection, 48).

Why would the Powhatan want to kill a person they were initiating to be a werowance? By Smith’s own admission, Wahunsenaca gave Smith his word that Smith would be released in four days. Smith’s fears were either a figment of his own imagination or an embellishment to dramatize his narrative.
Custalow and Daniel, True Story of Pocahontas, 19.

Children would not have been present in such a ritual conducted by quiakros (priests), they argue. Once Smith was initiated as a werowance, the entire English colony was considered part of the Powhatan society and subordinate to Chief Powhatan Wahunsenaca. The English, of course, quickly came to view the Powhatans as subordinate to their rule, although it would be several years before they were able to survive in the nascent colony.

There are many fresh perspectives and surprising revelations in The True Story of Pocahontas that challenge conventional understanding of colonial Virginia. The authors assert that John Rolfe, the second husband of Pocahontas, likely was not the biological father of Pocahontas’s son Thomas Rolfe. They speculate that Thomas Dale probably was the biological father, and that he raped Pocahontas. They observe inconsistencies in the long-standing belief that Pocahontas died of tuberculosis, offering a plausible scenario in which she was poisoned at the onset of a return journey to Virginia.

In The True Story of Pocahontas, the young Indian girl is presented as a symbol of peace, riding on the front of canoes visiting the English at Jamestown so the English would understand that the Indians had come without hostile intent. Her marriage to John Rolfe aided him and the colony because it motivated the quiakros to share their knowledge of the curing of tobacco with the aspiring planter. Rolfe had planted West Indian tobacco, which was milder (and thus more suitable for recreational smoking) than the native Virginia tobacco, but it was not yet good enough to compete with Spanish leaf. Learning from the Powhatans how to cure and process his tobacco improved the quality. The economic success of his tobacco assured the continuation of the colony’s financial backing, and thus its success. Pocahontas saved the colony, but not the way Smith describes.

Historians traditionally favor written documents as evidence and may have difficulty accepting many parts of the narrative in The True Story of Pocahontas. The authority of the oral stories presented rests in the claim that following the war of 1644-1646, the Mattaponi concealed Powhatan quiakros from the English. Among the Mattaponi, the sacred history was maintained for nearly four centuries. The Mattaponi was one of six principles tribes forming the Powhatan nation.

Note regarding spelling: The name Wahunsenaca / Wahunsonacock is also spelled Wahunsenacawh. I make the effort to preserve the spelling employed in each source in my discussion of that source. John Smith used Wahunsonacock; Custalow and Daniel spell Chief Powhatan’s name Wahunsenaca. The name Powhatan also is used in many historical sources and studies, including by Smith, as the name of Pocahontas's father. It is better understood as a title than as a proper name.

Gone Fishing: Mosquitoes, Malaria

In the summer I eat fewer bananas and catch more fish. I cut down on fruit that seems to make me more attractive to the mosquitoes that inhabit wetlands near my favorite trout streams. It’s folk wisdom, and it may be proven false by science, but as with the flies I tie on the end of my tippet, my belief is the critical factor. I think that fewer bananas (and more garlic) renders me relatively unattractive to blood sucking insects, and so the evidence of my experience bears me out.

In the winter I do more angling in the library than along streams. There I recently netted an article of interest on the introduction of malaria in the New World: Corinne Shear Wood, “New Evidence for a Late Introduction of Malaria into the New World,” Current Anthropology 16 (March 1975), 93-104. Wood’s abstract at the end of the article sums the argument.

The unique, overwhelming group-O frequency present among indigenous American populations is seen as a result of mother-child ABO incompatibility effects operating in the absence of the positive selection pressures by malaria vectors favoring enhanced survival for genes A and B that the investigation findings suggest. It is proposed that had malaria been present to act upon the original gene pool, a balanced ABO polymorphism would be found in the New World Indians today.
Wood, “New Evidence,” 5.

Comment by sixteen scholars follow Wood’s article, taking up more pages than her report. There are several criticisms that urge caution in reasoning from her preliminary results, and most suggest the need for further studies. None of them fault her assessment of the historical literature up to the time of her study. It had been inconclusive, but was leaning toward Old World origins.

There should be no doubt from the responses, and her reply, that her study does more to raise questions than offer answers. As the article was published more than thirty years ago, we might expect to find corroborating or refuting evidence by now.

A much more recent study brought to my attention by John Hawks offers a conclusion supporting at least one aspect of Wood’s contentions, that malaria could have impacted selective pressure regarding blood groups:

This work provides insights into malaria pathogenesis and suggests that the selective pressure imposed by malaria may contribute to the variable global distribution of ABO blood groups in the human population.
J. Alexandra Rowe, et al, “Blood group O protects against severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria through the mechanism of reduced rosetting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (October 2007), 17471-17476.

In addition, some genetic analysis published a few years ago, also inconclusive, leans towards origins of malaria in Africa. See Jennifer C. C. Hume, Emily J. Lyons, and Karen P. Day, “Archaeology of Epidemic and Infectious Disease,” World Archaeology, 35 (October 2003), 180-192.

This kettle of fish increases skepticism regarding Larry Schweikart’s claim, that “considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here,” if this claim applies to malaria.

I’ve addressed this question from another angle near the end of “America was not a disease-free paradise.” Schweikart and Allen name malaria once, as a New World disease that struck down English colonists that “had no resistance” (A Patriot’s History, 17).

“America was not a disease-free paradise”

Ecological Indians

In the chapter “Eden” in his meticulously documented The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999), Shepard Krech III takes issue with the indigenous population figures of Henry Dobyns and those that rely upon his work, especially Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane. He assesses work on demography in the effort to reconcile modern knowledge and colonial observations.

Krech observes the tendency through several centuries of “European and European-Americans discover[ing] the Garden of Eden somewhere in North America” (75). The first Europeans found a bountiful land. Krech cites several descriptions among which George Percy’s first view of Virginia in 1607 easily could find a home:

[W]ee could find nothing worth the speaking of, but faire meddowes and goodly tall Trees, with such Fresh-waters running through the woods, as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof.
Percy, “Observations gathered” In Purchas his Pilgrims, 1686

On the other hand, Native American Indians often had to relocate their villages because they had depleted basic resources—trees, soils, and animals. Descriptions of pristine land “are not easily reconciled” (76), Krech argues, with knowledge produced by archaeologists regarding the frequency with which American Indians were forced to relocate. Citing scholarly monographs and articles in such journals as Ethnohistory, he notes the ecology of slash and burn agricultural practices, depletion of soils and fuel wood, and patterns of village relocation—every ten to twelve years for the Iroquois, for example. In addition, deforestation may hold the key to the disappearance of the Anasazi, on the one hand, and of the residents of Cahokia, on the other. These densely settled urban centers generated needs that outstripped supply.

“Perhaps demography is an important key to solving the paradox of paradisaical plenitude despite human exploitation” (77), Krech offers, noting the ideological stakes: “estimating numbers has become sharply politicized” (83-84). With a few notable exceptions, he suggests, the “few numbers [of indigenous Americans] trod so lightly as to leave bounty for European eyes everywhere” (78).


Impact of Epidemic Disease

Krech finds “no debate over what must have been the sheer terror of each major epidemic” (80). He cites Yanktonai winter counts for descriptions of the effects of smallpox that devastated the upper Missouri River beginning in the summer of 1837. The disease was carried upriver by a deckhand on the St. Peters, an American Fur Company steamer that left St. Louis in April 1837. By the time the symptoms were clear enough for diagnosis, others had been infected and the disease was spreading. Many died from the disease, others from starvation. Mató-Tópe, a Mandan warrior painted four years earlier by Karl Bodmer, became crazy with grief after his entire family died.

On the greater Plains, the tragedy was beyond description. The Mandan practically disappeared. Three-quarters of the Blackfeet, one-half of the Assiniboine and Arikara, and one-quarter of the Pawnee died. In all, perhaps seventeen thousand people perished.
Krech, Ecological Indian, 82.

Krech notes how “desires for trade and beliefs about illness” (83) rendered the Indians prone toward activities that aided the spread of this devastating smallpox outbreak. It seems reasonable to imagine “that the population of North America must have been very large prior to the arrival of virgin-soil epidemics” (83).

Inasmuch as estimates of the North American population have ranged from one-half million to eighteen million, Krech focuses attention on the highest estimates. In 1966, Henry Dobyns estimated that ten to twelve million Indians lived in North America before Columbus arrived, then revised his estimate upwards to eighteen million. He reviews the central points from Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987); David Stannard, American Holocaust (1992); and Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (1992). The endnotes mention all of the standard studies that I listed in “Depopulation and Demography,” plus a few more not included there.


Questioning Dobyns

The core of Krech’s “Eden” details pertinent data from three regions of North America—Northeast, Southwest, and Canadian Subarctic. This data, he argues, contests the highest estimates, which assume:

…that diseases arrived early, spread widely, and were invariably fatal; that populations did not recover between epidemics; and that diseases can actually be identified, a necessary step in order to say anything with confidence about their behavior.
Krech, Ecological Indian, 85.

Krech’s own “The Influence of Disease and the Fur Trade on Arctic Lowlands Dene, 1800-1850,” Journal of Anthropological Research (1983) serves as a principal source for this section of the essay. A table lists thirty-one outbreaks of one or more diseases through a period of sixty years, each affecting one to eight indigenous groups. Some, such as “the pox” and “stomach complaint” are difficult to diagnose from the historical sources, and not all proved equally deadly to subarctic peoples. Some, such as whooping cough—“typically mild and confined to children today”—produced hunger among peoples dependant upon hunters that relied on stealth in hunting (89-90). Measles was one of the most common, and it killed plenty, but the survivors were immune from the next outbreak. Despite abundant reasons to believe that the nearly annual run of illnesses could have plunged “the population in the Mackenzie River region into a free fall” (91), Krech notes that both the first available census (1829) and the second (1858) show the population “virtually unchanged at between two thousand and three thousand people” (91).

Having rejected the highest estimates of Henry Dobyns, Krech suggests that four to seven million are the “most sensible figures” (93). Europe was far more densely populated.

The Old World environment compared to the New World one was also obviously far more heavily changed and depleted of resources, and it was Europe’s transformed landscapes that formed (with attendant demographic pressures) a comparative backdrop for the North American paradise. From the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, powered by demands, designs, and technology, Europeans profoundly altered their landscapes. They transformed entire sections of the countryside. Woodcutters in search of fuel and farmers after arable land assaulted forests on a broad front.
Krech, Ecological Indian, 95.

The immigrant population from overcrowded Europe where lands had been dramatically transformed, Krech tells us, “occupied widowed—not virgin—lands” (99) that they altered to meet their needs as they had done in Europe through the preceding centuries. The term “widowed,” as he acknowledges, was popularized in Francis Jennings’ seminal The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975).


Using The Ecological Indian

Shepard Krech’s The Ecological Indian appears to offer a convenient citation for scholars that find the somewhat popular population estimates of Henry Dobyns incredulous. The book is careful and conservative, and it challenges the assumptions of overly pro-Indian apologetics masquerading as serious scholarship. Hence, it come as no surprise that no less than three citations to Krech appear in Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004).

Their first citation is thematic: “Virginia was hardly a ‘disease-free paradise’ before the arrival of the Jamestown English” (17). This two word quotation, and the only footnote reference in the paragraph in which it appears, refer to a sentence in Krech’s essay, “Eden”: “America was not a disease-free paradise before Europeans landed on its shores” (79).

Preceding this phrase from Krech, Schweikart and Allen emphasize the severe decimation of the original Jamestown colonists by malnutrition and malaria: they “were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance” (17). A minority survived. The authors had emphasized earlier in A Patriot’s History, “not all diseases came from the Old World to the New” (6), mentioning syphilis there and then again in the sidebar about which I’ve written on several occasions already (8). Now, they mention malaria as a New World disease, offer the quote from Krech, and follow with the almost tardy acknowledgment that “microbes transported by the Europeans generated a much higher level of infection than previously experienced by the Indians” (17). This paragraph concludes with the assertion, “warring Indian tribes spread the diseases among one another when they attacked enemy tribes and carried off infected prisoners” (17).


A Patriot’s History versus its Sources

No doubt warfare spread disease in the manner described in A Patriot’s History, but Krech’s The Ecological Indian emphasizes trade rather than war as a primary avenue of transmission from one tribe to another. Indian commerce is an infrequent visitor in the narrative put forth in A Patriot’s History, although the French found “an indigenous population eager to trade” (13). Warring Indians appear more often.

As for the malaria that struck down the helpless Europeans lacking immunities, Krech mentions this disease twice in his essay “Eden”. Malaria appears in a list detailing “a virtual viral, bacterial, and protozoal assault” that “killed not dozens but hundreds and thousands of [Indian] people” (80). Then, in disputing Dobyns’s allegation regarding the extent of the spread of illness that spread outward from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, “far to the south, measles and perhaps dysentary, typhoid, malaria, and typhus ravaged Nayarit and Sinaloa on the Pacific Coast in the 1530s to 1540s” (86). If malaria originated in the New World, Krech does not see fit to mention it.

In the paragraph from which Schweikart and Allen get their phrase from Krech, he mentions two New World illnesses, treponematosis (the source of syphilis) and tuberculosis. Treponematosis “affected many who lived in densely settled farming communities along the mid-Atlantic seaboard and in the south,” while tuberculosis was present “in Peru and perhaps elsewhere” (79). Schweikart and Allen mention syphilis and tuberculosis in their depopulation sidebar:

Some suggest that Indians may have had a nonvenereal form of syphilis, and almost all agree that a variety of infections were widespread. Tuberculosis existed in Central and North America long before the Spanish appeared, as did herpes, polio, tick-borne fevers, giardiasis, and amebic dysentary.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 8.

Thus, we see that the story in A Patriot’s History differs in quite a few particulars from the story in The Ecological Indian, despite their judicious use of Krech’s observation that America was not a “disease-free paradise”. Krech’s text seems to adorn their narrative, rather than informing their facts and analysis.

Indeed, the two other references to The Ecological Indian are little else. Describing common life among eighteenth century Euro-Americans, they write,

British-Americans cleared heavily forested land by girdling trees, then slashing and burning the dead timber—practices picked up from the Indians, despite the myth of the ecologically friendly natives.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 41.

The back cover of The Ecological Indian offers sufficient evidence for that insight, but Krech’s essay “Eden” has more to say regarding the practices of deforestation in Europe before the colonists sailed west.

I fail to comprehend the remaining citation to Krech at the end of the sentence, “[t]heir [Puritans] moral codes in many ways were not far from modern standards” (29). The page there referenced contains Krech’s listing of several Edenic observations of Europeans through the centuries, including one by sixteenth century immigrant Thomas Morton.

Morton was an Anglican in New England that in 1628 suffered an attack from troops led by Myles Standish when he engaged too much in celebrations of the earth’s cycles with the local Indians, as Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836) depicts it. However, Alan Heimart and Andrew Delbanco, editors of The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (1985), assert that the actual provocation was his selling of firewater and firearms to the Indians, disrupting the valued fur trade (48). In any case, this fascinating story of New England’s notorious Wannabe is present neither in Krech nor A Patriot’s History. The footnote hints at ideological underpinnings that are made explicit elsewhere, but it fails to inform readers of the source of the assertion.

Firearms and Bows 1607: The Jamestown Test

The colonists at Jamestown set up a test to compare their weapons to those of the Indians. Less than a month after the colonists arrived in Virginia, and only a few days after they began constructing the defensive fortifications to give them security in a potentially hostile land, they became the recipients of food brought by forty men from the Native village headed by Paspiha. George Percy, who was there, mentions that the British thought the generosity was part of a ruse to disarm them. A weapons test was conducted during this visit of the Powhatans to the English village.

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus mentions this episode:

Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not piece it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”: he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, [Joyce] Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”
Mann, 1491, 64.

I mentioned in “Superior European Technology” Mann’s suggestion that the terms superior and inferior do not readily apply to the differences in the technology of the immigrants and the indigenous inhabitants of the land that was coming to be called Virginia.


George Percy’s Account

Some of the primary sources that aid historians in reconstructing the founding of Virginia are found in an early anthology of travel narratives collected and published by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others , 4 vols (1625). This anthology contains an account of the first months of the Virginia colony, George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606,” in Purchas his Pilgrims, vol. 4 (1625), 1685-1690.

Percy relates the episode that Mann draws upon for evidence supporting his generalizations regarding technology.

The twentieth day [20 May 1607] the Werowance of Paspiha sent fortie of his men with a Deere, to our quarter: but they came more in villanie than any love they bare us: they faine would have layne in our Fort all night, but wee would not suffer them for feare of their treachery. One of our Gentlemen having a Target which hee trusted in, thinking it would beare out a slight shot, he set it up against a tree, willing one of the Savages to shoot; who took from his backe an Arrow of an elle long, drew it strongly in his Bowe, shoots the Target a foote thorow, or better: which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it. Wee seeing the force of his Bowe, afterwards set him up a steel Target; he shot again, and burst his arrow all to pieces, he presently pulled out another Arrow, and bit it in his teeth, and seemed to be in great rage, so he went away in great anger. Their Bowes are made of tough Hasell, their strings of Leather, their Arrowes of Canes or Hasell, headed with very sharpe stones, and are made artificially like a broad Arrow: other some of their Arrowes are headed with the ends of Deeres hornes, and are feathered very artificially. Pasphia was as good as his word; for he sent Venison, but the Sawse came within a few dayes after.
Percy, “Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie,” 1688-1689.

First Battle between Jamestown Colonists and Natives

In late April, before the colonists had selected the location for their fort, their first encounter with the Natives of Virginia was hostile.

At night, when wee were going aboard, there came the Savages creeping upon all foure, from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their mouthes, charged us very desperately in the faces, hurt Captaine Gabrill Archer in both his hands, and a sayler in two places of the body very dangerous. After they had spent their Arrows, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise, and so left us.
Percy, “Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie,” 1686.

After this skirmish, the English resumed their exploration of the terrain. Percy presents lists of the flora and fauna observed; he describes the shores and rivers, the meadows and forests, and other brief experiences with the Natives. They found an area where the Natives of Virginia had been burning the grass, as well as gathering and roasting oysters. Helping themselves to the warm oysters in the recently abandoned camp, the English found the shellfish “large and delicate in taste” (1686). They also found “a Cannow, which was made out of the whole tree, which was five and fortie foot long by the Rule” (1686).


Peaceful Contact

The English set up a cross to claim Chesapeake Bay for the Crown and named a piece of land Cape Henry. On the last day of April they were drawn into a Native village, where they were welcomed with songs, given a meal and smoke, and then entertained with songs and dances. They learned something of the manners of their hosts. In the narrative of the experiences, George Percy (sometimes spelled Percie) reveals quite a bit about the ideological baggage that colored English perceptions of Native American Indians.

When we came over to the other side, there was a many of the Savages which directed us to their Towne, where we were entertained by them very kindly. When we came first a Land they made a dolefull noise, laying their faces to the ground, scatching the earth wth their nailes. We did thinke that they had beene at their Idolatry. When they had ended their Ceremonies, they went into their houses and brought out mats and laid upon the the ground, the chiefest of the sate all in a rank: the meanest sort brought us such dainties as they had, & of their bread which they make of their Maiz or Gennea wheat, they would not suffer us to eat unlesse we sate down, which we did on a Mat right against them. After we were well satisfied they gave us of their Tabacco, which they tooke in a pipe made artificially of earth as ours are, but far bigger, with the bowle fashioned together with a piece of fine copper. After they had feasted us, they shewed us in welcome, their manner of dancing, which was in this fashion: one of the Savages standing in the midst singing, beat one hand against another, all the rest dancing about him, shouting, howling, and stamping against the ground, with many Anticke tricks and faces, making noise like so many Wolves or Devils. One thing of them I observed; when they were in their dance they kept stroke with their feet just one with another, but with their hands, heads, faces, and bodies, every one of them had a severall gesture: so they continued for the space of halfe an houre. When they had ended their dance, the Captaine gave them Beades and other trifling Jewells. They hand through their eares Fowles legs: they shave the right side of their heads with a shell, the left side they weare of an ell long tied up with an artificiall knot, with a many of Foules feathers sticking in it. They goe altogether naked, but their privates are covered with Beasts skinnes beset commonly with little bones, or beasts teeth: some paint their bodies blacke, some red, with artificiall knots of sundry lively colours, very beautiful and pleasing to the eye, in a braver fashion then they in the West Indies.
Percy, “Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie,” 1687

The entire text of Purchas his Pilgrimes is available at the Library of Congress website, where it is part of the Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake. Each page of the four volumes has been photographed, including black pages, and is viewable as an image.

Jamestown Matchlock

Jamestown 1607-1610


The Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project sheds light on aspects of the lives of the Jamestown colonists. Part of the Dale House Exhibit of 1999 was digitized and placed online. This exhibit includes an informative drawing showing how a soldier might have been armed--weapons and armor. Portions of the image can be clicked to bring up an image of an excavated artifact.

The matchlock lockplate is a case in point. The text accompanying the image highlights some of the weaknesses of this aspect of European technology, offering additional support for points I made in the post "Superior European Technology"--an ironic title.