american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 99God to be an Englishman. It is not surprising, then, that English tracts andofficial minutes during this time described the "wild Irish" as "naked roguesin woods and bogs [whose] ordinary food is a kind of grass." Lessordinary food for the Irish, some reported, was the flesh of other people,sometimes their own mothers-which, perhaps, was only fair, since stillother tall tales had it that Irish mothers ate their children. The Irish were,in sum, "unreasonable beasts," said William Thomas, beasts who "livedwithout any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of theirgoods, cattle, women, children and every other thing." 9Such brutishness was beyond the English capacity for tolerance. Especiallywhen the vulgarians in question occupied such lovely lands. So, asthey had for centuries, the English waged wars to pacify and civilize theIrish. One of the more successful English soldiers in the Irish wars was theOxford-educated half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, one Humphrey Gilbert-himselflater knighted for his service to the Crown. Gilbert deviseda particularly imaginative way of bringing the Irish to heel. He orderedthatthe heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed inthe daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the placewhere he incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground byeche side of the waie ledyng into his owne tente so that none could comeinto his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane ofheddes which he used ad terrorem. 10Needless to say, this "lane of heddes" leading to Gilbert's tent did indeedcause "greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of theirdedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds" laid out "on thegrounde before their faces." 11 Lest anyone think to quibble over such extrememethods of persuasion, however, the British frequently justified theirtreatment of the Irish by referring to the Spanish precedent for dealingwith unruly natives. 12In the meantime, a few English expeditions had gone forth to explorethe lands of the New World, but they concentrated on areas far to thenorth of where the Spanish were engaged in their exploits. The first seriousattempt by the English to set up a colony in America was on Baffin Island,where they thought they had discovered gold. As it turned out, the mineralthey discovered was fool's gold and the colony was abandoned, but notbefore the leader of the expedition, Martin Frobisher, had captured andkidnapped a handful of the "sundry tokens of people" he found there.On his first trip to the area Frobisher seized a native man who approachedhis ship in a kayak and returned with him and his kayak toEngland. The man soon died, however, so on his next voyage Frobishertook on board an old woman and a young woman with her child-this,