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The first English settlement in the New World was in Virginia, the ancestral homeland of some fourteen thousand Powhatans. An agricultural people, they cultivated corn - the mainstay of their subsistence. Their cleared fields were as large as one hundred acres, and they lived in palisaded towns, with forts, storehouses, temples, and framed houses covered with bark and reed mats. They cooked their food in ceramic pots and used woven baskets for storing corn; some of their baskets were constructed so skillfully they could carry water in them. The Powhatans had a sophisticated numbering system for evaluating their harvests. According to John Smith, they had numbers from one to ten, after which counting was done by tens to one hundred. There was also a word for "one thousand." The Powhatan calendar had five seasons: "Their winter some call Popanow, the spring Cattaapeuk, the sommer Cohattayough, the earing of their Corne Nepinough, the harvest and fall of the leafe Taquitock. From September until the midst of November are the chief Feasts and sacrifice."²² In Virginia, the initial encounters between the English and the Indians opened possibilities for friendship and interdependency. After arriving in 1607, the first one hundred twenty colonizers set up camp. Then, John Smith reported, came "the starving time." A year later, only thirty-eight of them were still alive, hanging precariously on the very edge of survival. The reality of America did not match the imagery of the New World as a garden; the descriptions of its natural abundance turned out to be exaggerated. Many

of the English were not prepared for survival in the wilderness. "Now was all our provision spent ... all help abandoned, each hour expecting the fury of the savages," Smith wrote. Fortunately, in that moment of "desperate extremity," the Powhatans brought food and rescued the starving strangers. ²³ A year later, several hundred more settlers arrived, and again they quickly ran out of provisions. They were forced to eat "dogs, cats, rats, and mice," even "corpses" dug from graves. "Some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows," a survivor reported. "One [member] of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food, the same not being discovered before he had eaten part thereof." "So great was our famine," John Smith stated, "that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; and so did diverse one another boiled and stewed with roots and herbs."²⁴

Hostilities soon broke out, however, as the English tried to extort food supplies by attacking the Indians and destroying their villages. In 1608, an Indian declared: "We hear you are come from under the World to take our World from us." A year later, Governor Thomas Gates arrived in Virginia with instructions that the Indians be forced to labor for the colonizers and also make annual payments of corn and skins. The orders were brutally carried out. During one of the raids, the English soldiers attacked an Indian town, killing fifteen people and forcing many others to flee. Then they burned the houses and destroyed the cornfields. According to a report by commander George Percy, they marched the captured queen and her children to the river where they "put the Children to death ... by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water."²⁵ Indians were beginning to doubt that the two peoples could live together in peace. One young Indian told Captain John Smith: "[We] are here to intreat and desire your friendship and to enjoy our houses and plant our fields, of whose fruits you shall participate." But he did not trust the strangers: "We perceive and well know you intend to 9-estroy us." Chief Powhatan had come to the same conclusion, and he told Smith that the English were not in Virginia to trade but to "invade" and "possess" Indian lands. ²⁶

island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple." Prospero declared that he had been thrust forth from Milan and "most strangely" landed on this shore "to be the lord on't." Projecting his personal plans and dreams onto the wilderness, he colonized the island and dispossessed Caliban. Feeling robbed, Caliban protested: "As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island." But the English in Virginia did not see their taking of land as robbery. In 1609, Robert Gray declared that "the greater part" of the earth was "possessed and wrongfully usurped by wild beasts ... or by brutish savages." A Virginia pamphlet argued that it was "not unlawful" for the English to possess "part" of the Indians' land. ²⁷ The English colonizers soon wanted more than just a "part" of Indian territory. Their need for land was suddenly intensified by a new development after 1613-the cultivation of tobacco as an export crop. The settlers increasingly coveted Indian lands, especially the already cleared fields. Tobacco agriculture stimulated not only territorial expansion but also immigration. During the "Great Migration" of 1618-23, the colony grew from 400 to 4,500 people. In 1622, the natives tried to drive out the intruders, killing some three hundred colonizers. John Smith denounced the "massacre" and described the "savages" as "cruel beasts," who possessed "a more unnatural brutishness" than wild animals. The English deaths, Samuel Purchas argued, established the colonizers' right to the land: "Their carcasses, the dispersed bones of their countrymen ... speak, proclaim and cry, This our earth is truly English, and therefore this Land is justly yours O English." English blood had watered the soil, entitling them to the land. In retaliation, the English waged total war. "Now by right of war," the colonizers declared, they would "invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us." They felt they could sweep away their enemies and take even their developed lands. "We shall enjoy their cultivated places .... Now their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situated in the fruitfulest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us." Their tactics of warfare were vicious and treacherous, even sadistic. "Victory may be gained in many ways," a colonizer declared: "by force, by surprise, by famine in burning their Corn, by destroying and burning their Boats, Canoes, and Houses ... by pursuing and chasing them with our horses, and bloodhounds to draw after them, and mastives to tear them." In 1623, Captain William Tucker led his soldiers to a

Powhatan village, presumably to negotiate a peace treaty. After concluding the treaty, he persuaded the Indians to drink a toast, but he served them poisoned wine. An estimated two hundred Indians died instantly, and Tucker's soldiers then killed another fifty and "brought home parts of their heads." In 1629, a colonizer reported, the English forced a hostile Indian leader to seek peace by "continual incursions" and by "yearly cutting down, and spoiling their corn." The goal of the war was to "root out [the Indians] from being any longer a people."²⁸

What occurred in New England was a different story, however; here again, the play was preview. The theatergoers were told that Caliban was "a devil, a born devil" and that he belonged to a "vile race." On the stage, they saw Caliban, with long, shaggy hair and with distinct racial markers-"freckled" and dark in complexion. His distinctive physical characteristics signified intellectual incapacity. Caliban was "a thing of darkness" whose "nature nurture [could] never stick." In other words, he had natural qualities that precluded the possibility of becoming civilized through "nurture," or education. The racial distance between Caliban and Prospero was inscribed geographically. The native was forced to live on a reservation located in a barren region. "Here you sty [to lodge, to place in a pigpen or sty] me in this hard rock," he complained, "whiles you do keep from me the rest o' the island." Prospero justified this segregation, charging that the "savage" possessed distasteful qualities "which good natures could not abide to be with. Therefore wast thou deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst deserved more than a prison." The theatergoers saw Caliban's "sty" located emblematically at the back of the stage, behind Prospero's "study," signifying a hierarchy of white over dark and cerebral over carnal. ²⁹ Prospero believed he could dispossess Caliban of his island because the "savage" was simply living there. The English colonizers in New England, however, found the Indians already farming the land. In 1616, Captain John Smith sailed north from Virginia to explore the 'New England coast, where he found not wild men but farmers. The "paradise" of Massachusetts, he reported, was "all planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens." "The sea Coast as you pass shews you all along large Corne fields." Indeed, the tribes in New England were horticultural. For

example, the Wampanoags, whom the Pilgrims encountered in 1620, were a farming people, with a representative political system as well as a division of labor, with workers specializing in arrow making, woodwork, and leathercrafts. ³⁰

The Wampanoags as well as the Pequots, Massachusetts, Nausets, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts cultivated corn. As the main source of life for these tribes, corn was the focus of many legends. A Narragansett legend told how a crow had brought this grain to New England: "These Birds, although they do the corn also some hurt, yet scarce one Native amongst a hundred will kill them, because they have a tradition, that the Crow brought them at first an Indian Grain of Corn in one Ear, and an Indian or French bean in another, from the Great God Kautantouwits field in the Southwest from whence ... came all their Corn and Beans." A Penobscot account celebrated the gift of Corn Mother: during a time of famine, an Indian woman fell in love with a snake in the forest. Her secret was discovered one day by her husband, and she told him that she had been chosen to save the tribe. She instructed him to kill her with a stone ax and then drag her body through a clearing. "After seven days he went to the clearing and found the corn plant rising above the ground .... When the corn had born fruit and the silk of the corn ear had turned yellow he recognized in it the resemblance of his dead wife. Thus originated the cultivation of corn."³¹ These Indians had a highly developed agricultural system. Samuel de Champlain found that "all along the shore" there was "a great deal of land cleared up and planted with Indian corn." Describing their agricultural practices, he wrote: "They put in each hill three or four Brazilian beans [kidney beans] .... When they grow up, they interlace with the corn ... and they keep the ground very free from weeds. We saw there many squashes, and pumkins, and tobacco, which they likewise cultivate." According to Thomas Morton, Indians "dung[ed] their ground" with fish to fertilize the soil and increase the harvest. After visiting the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, John Winthrop, Jr., noted that although the soil in that region was "sandy & rocky," the people were able to raise "good corn without fish" by rotating their crops. "They have every one 2 fields," he observed, "which after the first 2 years they let one field rest each year, & that keeps their ground continually [productive]." According to Roger Williams, when the Indians were ready to harvest the corn, "all the neighbours men and women, forty, fifty, a hundred," joined in the work and

came "to help freely." During their green corn festival, the Narragansetts erected a long house, "sometimes a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet long upon a plain near the Court ... where many thousands, men and women," gathered. Inside, dancers gave money, coats, and knives to the poor. After the harvest, the Indians stored their corn for the winter. "In the sand on the slope of hills," according to Champlain, "they dig holes, some five or six feet, more or less, and place their corn and other grains in large grass sacks, which they throw into the said holes, and cover them with sand to a depth of three or four feet above the surface of the ground. They take away their grain according to their need, and it is preserved as well as it be in our granaries." Contrary to the stereotype of Indians as hunters and therefore savages, these Indians were farmers. ³² This reality led to antagonistic competition over resources between the original inhabitants and the English strangers. Within ten years after the arrival of Winthrop's group, twenty thousand more settlers came to New England. This growing English population had to be squeezed into a limited area of arable land. Less than 20 percent of the region was useful for agriculture, and the Indians had already established themselves on the prime lands. ³³

What opened the way for the English appropriation of Indian lands was the massive deaths of the indigenous people due to unseen pathogens. When the colonizers began arriving in New England, they found that the Indian population was already being reduced by European diseases. By 1616, epidemics had been ravaging Indian villages. Victims of "virgin soil epidemics," the Indians lacked immunological defenses against the diseases that had been introduced by European explorers. After he arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, William Bradford reported that the Indians living near the trading house "fell sick of the smallpox, and died most miserably." The condition of those still alive was "lamentable." Their bodies were covered with "the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving" to the mats beneath them. When they turned their bodies, they found "whole sides" of their skin flaying off. In this terrible way, they died "like· rotten sheep." After one epidemic, William Bradford recorded in his diary: "For it pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness and such a mortality that of a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above ground for want of burial."³⁴

The colonizers interpreted these Indian deaths as divinely sanctioned opportunities to take the land. John Winthrop declared that the decimation of Indians by smallpox manifested a Puritan destiny: God was "making room" for the settlers and "hath hereby cleared our title to this place." After an epidemic had swept through Indian villages, John Cotton claimed that the destruction was a sign from God: when the Lord decided to transplant his people, he made the country vacant for them to settle. Edward Johnson pointed out that epidemics had desolated "those places, where the English afterward planted."³⁵ Indeed, many New England towns were founded on the very lands the Indians had been living on before the epidemics. The Plymouth colony itself was located on the site of the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet. The Pilgrims had noticed the village was empty and the cornfields overgrown with weeds. "There is a great deal of Land cleared," one of them reported, "and hath beene planted with Corne three or foure yeares agoe." "Thousands of men have lived there, which died in a great plague not long since," another Pilgrim wrote; "and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same." During their first spring, the Pilgrims went out into those fields to weed and manure them. Fortunately, they had some corn seed to plant. Earlier, when they landed on Cape Cod, they had come across some Indian graves and found caches of corn. They considered this find, wrote Bradford, as "a special providence of God, and a great mercy to this poor people, that here they got seed to plant them corn the next year, or else they might have starved." The survival of these pallid strangers was so precarious that they probably would have perished had it not been for the seeds they found stored in the Indian burial grounds. Ironically, Indian death came to mean life for the Pilgrims. ³⁶

idleness," William Wood of Boston complained in 1634, Indians would rather starve than work. Indians were sinfully squandering America's resources. Under their irresponsible guardianship, the land had become "all spoils, rots," and was "marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc." Like the "foxes and wild beasts," Indians did nothing "but run over the grass." Ignoring the presence of Indian farms in New England and claiming the Indians were lazy and unproductive, the English colonizers were determined to transform Indian lands into Puritan farms. ³⁷ Over the years, the expansion of English settlements led to wars. During the Pequot War of 1637, some seven hundred Pequots were killed by the English and their Indian allies. Describing the massacre at Fort Mystic, an English officer wrote: "Many were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children .... There were about four hundred souls in this fort, and not above five of them escaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight." Commander John Mason explained that God had pushed the Pequots into a "fiery oven," "filling the place with dead bodies." During King Philip's War of 1675-76, the Wampanoag leader Metacom, also known as King Philip, united several tribes in a widespread attack on the English settlements. "By August 1676," wrote historian Jill Lepore, "when Philip was shot to death near his home in Mount Hope, twenty-five English towns, more than half of all the colonists' settlements in New England, had been ruined and the line of English habitation had been pushed back almost to the coast. The struggling colonists had nearly been forced to abandon New England entirely, and their losses left them desperately dependent on England for support." With support from their home country, however, the colonizers fought back and defeated King Philip's forces. In the end, some six thousand Indians died from combat and disease, and thousands more were shipped out of New England as slaves. Victorious, the English soldiers decapitated King Philip and staked his head for public viewing in Plymouth. ³⁸ Ministers led the way in justifying the English violence and atrocities aimed at the original inhabitants. Warfare against the Indians, Reverend Cotton Mather explained, was a conflict between the Devil ~nd God: "The Devil decoyed those miserable savages [to New England] in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb His absolute empire over them." Indian deaths were viewed as the destruction of devil worshippers. The Indians, Reverend Increase

Mather observed, were "so Devil-driven as to begin an unjust and bloody war upon the English, which issued in their speedy and utter extirpation from the face of God's earth." What was forged in the violent dispossession of the original inhabitants was an ideology that demonized the "savages."³⁹ This demonization of Indians served complicated ends. The enemy was not only external but also internal. To the Puritans, the Indians were like Caliban, a "born devil": they had failed to control their appetites, to create boundaries separating mind from body. They represented what English men and women in America thought they were not, and, more important-what they must not become. As exiles living in the wilderness far from "civilization," the Puritans used their negative images of Indians to delineate the moral requirements they had set up for themselves. As sociologist Kai Erikson explained, "Deviant forms of behavior, by marking the outer edges of group life, give the inner structure its special character and thus supply the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own cultural identity .... One of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities as well as for individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not." By depicting Indians as demonic and savage, the Puritans, like Prospero, were able to define more precisely what they perceived as the danger of becoming Calibanized.⁴⁰ The Indians represented a threat to the Puritan errand in America. "The wilderness through which we are passing to the Promised Land is all over fill'd with fiery flying serpents. Our Indian wars are not over yet," warned Reverend Cotton Mather. "We have too far degenerated into Indian vices. The vices of the Indians are these: They are very lying wretches, and they are very lazy wretches; and they are out of measure indulgent unto their children; there is no family government among them. We have [become] shamefully Indianized in all those abominable things." The wars were now within the Puritan self and society; the dangers were internal. Vigilance against sin was required, or else the English would become like the Indians.⁴¹ To be "Indianized" meant to serve the Devil. Cotton Mather thought this was what had happened to Mercy Short, a young girl who had been a captive of the Indians and who was suffering from tormenting fits. According to Mather, Short had seen the Devil. "Hee was not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour," she said; "he wore an high-crowned Hat, with straight Hair; and had one Cloven-foot." During a witchcraft trial, Mather reported,

George Burroughs had lifted an extremely heavy object with the help of the Devil, who resembled an Indian. Puritan authorities hanged an English woman for worshipping Indian "gods" and for taking the Indian devil-god Hobbamock for a husband. ⁴² For the Puritans, to become Indian was the ultimate horror, for they believed Indians were "in very great subjection" of the Devil who "kept them in a continual slavish fear of him." Governor Bradford harshly condemned Thomas Morton and his fellow prodigals of the Merrymount settlement for their promiscuous partying with Indians: "They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies." Interracial cavorting threatened to fracture a cultural and moral border-the frontier of Puritan identity. Congress of bodies, white and "tawney," signified defilement, a frightful boundlessness. If the Puritans were to become wayward like the Indians, it would mean that they had succumbed to savagery and failed to shrivel the sensuous parts of the self. To be "Indianized" meant to be decivilized, to be "Devil-driven."⁴³ Indians came to personify the Devil and everything the Puritans feared- the body, sexuality, laziness, sin, and the loss of self-control. They had no place in a "new England." This was the Puritan triumph trumpeted by Edward Johnson in his Wonder- Working Providence. Where there had originally been "hideous Thickets" for wolves and bears, he proudly exclaimed in 1654, there were now streets "full of Girls and Boys sporting up and down, with a continued concourse of people." Initially, the colonizers themselves had lived in "wigwams" like Indians, but now they had "orderly, fair, and well-built houses ... together with Orchards filled with goodly fruit trees, and gardens with variety of flowers." The settlers had also expanded the market, making New England a center of production and trade. The settlers had turned "this Wilderness" into "a mart." Merchants from Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal were coming here. "Thus," proclaimed Johnson, "hath the Lord been pleased to turn one of the most hideous, boundless, and unknown Wildernesses in the world in an instant ... to a well-ordered Commonwealth."⁴⁴ Within the English settlements, however, some misgivings about the violent English advance of "civilization" against "savagery" surfaced in a widely read book, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, published in 1682. Retaliating for English attacks on their villages during King Philip's War

in 1676, a band of Narragansetts raided a small town, capturing several settlers, including Rowlandson. In her captivity story, she described living with_ the Indians for eleven weeks. Although her account reflected and reinforced English stereotypes of Indians as "barbarous creatures," "merciless and cruel heathens," and "hellhounds," it also contained stories that challenged these negative images. Rowlandson related, for example, how some of the Indians had noticed that she lacked the strength to carry her wounded six-year-old daughter, so they put her on a horse with the child on her lap. One cold day, an Indian woman welcomed Rowlandson into her wigwam to give her warmth and some ground nuts. Afterward, she told the English woman to come back again sometime. Commenting on this hospitality, Rowlandson wrote: "Yet these were strangers to me that I never saw before." On another occasion, the Indian leader, King Philip, asked her to knit a shirt for his son and paid her a shilling for it. She also knitted a cap for the boy, and King Philip invited her to eat dinner with his family. Rowlandson contrasted the Indians in retreat with the English in pursuit. In the dead of winter, the Indians were able to survive by eating nuts, roots, and weeds as well as wild animals; whereas the English soldiers ran out of provisions and were forced to return to the settlements. Indian resourcefulness impressed Rowlandson: "I did not see (all the time I was among them) one man, woman, or child, dy with hunger."⁴⁵ Rowlandson's observations, acknowledging the humanity of the Indians, offered possibilities for the English to understand, even empathize with, the people they were dispossessing. But the Prosperos in power would not allow such possibilities to be pursued. Instead, like Frederick Jackon Turner's frontiersman, they would continue their relentless conquest of the continent.