american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 109that one early colonist referred to the land as "a new found Golgotha." 44But it was a Golgotha the Puritans delighted in discovering, not only becausethe diseases they brought with them from England left the Puritansthemselves virtually unaffected, but because the destruction of the Indiansby these plagues was considered an unambiguous sign of divine approvalfor the colonial endeavor. As the first governor of the Massachusetts BayColony wrote in 1634, the Puritan settlers, numbering at the time "in allabout four thousand souls and upward," were in remarkably good health:"through the Lord's special providence . . . there hath not died above twoor three grown persons and about so many children all the last year, itbeing very rare to hear of any sick of agues or other diseases." But, henoted in passing, as "for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox,so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess." 45God, however, was not enough. At some point the settlers would haveto take things into their own hands. For, terribly destructive though theOld World diseases were, some Indians remained alive. The danger posedby these straggling few natives was greatly exaggerated by the English (asit remains exaggerated in most history textbooks today), not only becausetheir numbers had been so drastically reduced, but because their attitudestoward the colonists and their very means of warfare were so comparativelybenign.We have seen in an earlier chapter that the native peoples of this region(as elsewhere) combined in their everyday lives a sense of individual autonomyand communal generosity that the earliest Europeans commented oncontinuously. This was a great cultural strength, so long as the people theywere dealing with shared those values and accepted the array of culturallycorrect reciprocal responses to them. However, just as their isolation fromOld World diseases made the Indians an exceptionally healthy people aslong as they were not contacted by disease-bearing outsiders, once Europeansinvaded their lands with nothing but disdain for the native regimeof mutual respect and reciprocity, the end result was doomed to spell disaster.This probably is seen most dramatically in the comparative Indian andEuropean attitudes toward warfare. We already have observed one consequenceof the differing rituals that were conventional to Europe and theAmericas in Montezuma's welcoming Cortes into Tenochtitlan in part becauseCortes claimed he was on a mission of peace; and one inviolablecode of Mesoamerican warfare was that it was announced, with its causesenumerated, in advance. Cortes's declared intentions of peace, therefore,were supposed by Montezuma to be his true intentions. A similar attitudeheld among Indians in much of what is now the United States. Thus, as aseventeenth-century Lenape Indian explained in a discussion with a Britishcolonist: