american-holocaust

228 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTAny number of commentators can be summoned to support either ofthese contrasting views of the Indians, and still more can be called uponto provide judgments of the Indians ranging variously between these twoextremes. As had been the case earlier with the Spanish, however, the morenegative views very quickly came to dominate. And they were not infrequentlyexpressed by drawing direct parallels between the experiences ofthe British in Virginia or New England and the Spanish in Mexico and theCaribbean. Thus, in an early treatise on the Virginia Company's progressin the New World, the company's secretary, Edward Waterhouse, discussedat length the Spanish experience with the natives of the Indies andapprovingly quoted the Indian-hating and genocide-supporting conquistadorFernandez de Oviedo to the effect that those Indians were "by naturesloathful and idle, vicious, melancholy, slovenly, of bad conditions, lyers,of small memory, of no constancy or trust .... lesse capable than childrenof sixe or seaven yeares old, and lesse apt and ingenious." Oviedo'sdescription of the Indies' indigenous inhabitants was offered the reader,Waterhouse said, "that you may compare and see in what, and how farre,it agrees with that of the Natives of Virginia." Indeed, so closely did itagree, he contended, that the proper response of the British against this"Viperous brood . . . of Pagan Infidels" should be the same as that metedout by the Spanish: extermination. 92 This conclusion was reached, it shouldbe noted, at a time when there were barely 2000 Englishmen living in allof North America, and nearly a decade before Britain's Massachusetts BayCompany would be sending settlers into New England. .There are other ways in which we now can see, retrospectively, howthe evolution of British racial thought in North America paralleled whathad happened previously among the Spanish and Portuguese. We notedearlier, for instance, how changing Portuguese attitudes toward the Indiansof Brazil were illustrated dramatically in an early sixteenth-century paintingof the Gift of the Magi that used a depiction of a Brazilian Indian inplace of one of the wise men calling on the Christ child, followed by amid-sixteenth-century painting that used a feather-bedecked Indian of thesame region to illustrate a depiction of Satan in his lair of Hell. A similartransformation in the Europeans' moral perceptions of Virginia's Indiansis traceable in the famous illustrations of Theodor de Bry and his sons,throughout the thirty volumes of pictorial representations they publishedbetween 1590 and 1634. From initial imagery suggestive of Virginia as aplace inhabited by people, in Barlowe's words, who "lived after the mannerof the Golden Age," iconographic evolution soon converted that worldinto a place of monstrously deformed and diseased savages. To the Europeanartists, as to Europeans in general, notes Bernadette Bucher in herstructural analysis of the de Brys illustrations, there was from the start acategorical ambiguity surrounding the New World's native peoples. Citingthe work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Bucher notes that