american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 103other condition than expected, not because he was at fault in his descriptionof it, but because Our Lord has chastised it with six years of famine anddeath, which has brought it about that there is much less population thanusual. Since many have died and many also have moved to other regions toease their hunger [and unwittingly spread disease inland] there remain butfew of the tribe, whose leaders say that they wish to die where their fathershave died. . . . They seemed to think that Don Luis had risen from the deadand come down from heaven, and since all who remained are his relatives,they are greatly consoled in him. . . . Thus we have felt the good will whichthis tribe is showing. On the other hand, as I have said, they are so famishedthat all believe they will perish of hunger and cold this winter. 23It was not likely an exaggeration, then, when the British settlers in Jamestownwere told in 1608, by the elderly leader of the Indians whose landthey were there to take, that he had witnessed "the death of all my peoplethrice, and not one living of those 3 generations, but my selfe." 24 England'sformal contribution to this holocaust was next.Despite the horrors they had endured in recent decades, the Indians'continuing abilities to produce enormous amounts of food impressed andeven awed many of the earliest British explorers. Beans, pumpkins, andmany other vegetables, especially corn, which was greatly superior in itsyield (about double that of wheat) and in its variety of uses to anythingEuropeans had ever seen, were grown in fields tended with such care thatthey looked more like huge gardens, it was said, than farmlands. So toodid at least some British, despite their general disdain for the Indians, initiallypraise their technological ingenuity, marveling as well at their smoothfunctioningbut complex machineries of government--government that wascommonly under the control of democratic councils, but that also producedindividual leaders of dignity and civility. As one historian has noted,the contrast in regal manner between the Indian and British leaders wasespecially extreme at the time of the British settlement of Virginia, becauseEngland was then ruled by King James I who was notorious for his personalfilthiness, his excessive and slobbering ways of eating and drinking,and his vulgar and boorish style of speech and overall behavior. 25Admiration of Indian ways of living-particularly their peacefulness,generosity, trustworthiness, and egalitarianism, all of which were conspicuouslyabsent from English social relations of the time-led to some eloquentearly praise of Virginia's native people, albeit from a distinct minorityof British observers. But if those who spoke with their pens are sometimesregarded skeptically, those who voted with their feet cannot be. And it isespecially telling that throughout the seventeenth and on into the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, while almost no Indians voluntarily livedamong the colonists, the number of whites who ran off to live with theIndians was a problem often remarked upon. After a century and a half ofpermanent British settlement in North America, Benjamin Franklin joinednumerous earlier commentators in lamenting that