Voyagers to the East, Part XIII

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

In discussing Christopher Columbus's shipment of 550 Indian slaves to Europe (Voyagers to the East, Part II, 2/21/06), I neglected to mention that his contemporary, Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, also engaged in the Indian slave trade, and from a very early date. In 1499 Vespucci undertook a reconnaissance voyage to the eastern coast of South America on behalf of the Spanish Crown. In a subsequent letter to Lorenzo de Medici (18 July 1500), Vespucci reported on the many wondrous things he and his companions had seen: new species of serpents and songbirds, new stars and constellations (Vespucci was the first modern European to see Alpha Centauri, which is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere), and many different nations of Indians, speaking at least 40 different languages. Some of the Native Americans whom Vespucci encountered were friendly and gave gifts, some the explorers fought. He opined that the lands he explored had to belong to an entirely new continent, owing to the many varieties of land animals he had encountered – an observation that had eluded his predecessor Columbus, even though Columbus had also explored the South American coast.

After thirteen months of voyaging, around May 1500, Vespucci observed that his men were exhausted and short of food, and so he determined to return home. Before doing so, he resolved to bring back one last treasure: 232 human slaves, procured from "certain islands" off the Atlantic coast of North America. Vespucci did not identify these islands, but he and his followers had just sailed 600 miles north of Hispaniola, through "a shoal of islands, more than a thousand in number" that were probably the Bahamas. These may have been the "certain islands" to which Vespucci refers.

In any event, Vespucci reported that he and his companions made the voyage back to Cadiz in 67 days, during which time about thirty of the captives died. The explorers sold the surviving 200 Indians as slaves, but apparently the transaction wasn't very profitable: Vespucci wrote that "After deducting the expense of transportation we gained only about five hundred ducats, which, having to be divided into fifty-five parts, made the share of each very small." (Frederick Ober, Amerigo Vespucci [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907], pp. 109-124, quote 122.)

It's worth mentioning that one needs to take all of Vespucci's travel accounts with a large grain of salt, as he tended to embellish his stories with exaggerated or entirely fictional details. (For instance, he claimed that he and his men had encountered a tribe of giant female warriors in the South American interior, and that some of the other Indian peoples he encountered showered the explorers with gold and precious gems.) It is quite possible that Vespucci also invented his story of bringing Indian slaves back to Spain. But it seems unlikely that he would have lied about this particular incident. When Vespucci embellished or bent the truth, he usually did so to glorify himself or add color to his story. There was nothing particularly colorful or glorious about slave trading, an enterprise regarding which Ferdinand and Isabela had already expressed their displeasure. On the contrary, Vespucci's report on his slave-trading is quite mundane and bare-boned: he tells us nothing about the slaves except their numbers, how many survived the voyage, and how little money he obtained for them. One might find Vespucci's inability to identify the precise provenance of his Indian prisoners a little suspicious, but then, such vagueness was common in early narratives of exploration, and to be expected given the absence of good maps. Vespucci appears to have had no motive for lying about his enslavement of Native Americans, and so one may assume that he was telling the truth, and that he did indeed destroy the lives of over 200 people in the interest of making his second exploratory voyage a "success."

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation

Today is the 300th anniversary of the effective date of the Act of Union, whereby the English and Scottish Parliaments merged into one national legislature and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Under the act Scotland was allowed to retain its court system and its national church (known in the United States as the Presbyterian Church). But Scotland's independence effectively ended with Union, which liquidated the Scottish government and incorporated the country into the English economy as well.

The two kingdoms had shared a sovereign since 1603, when Elizabeth I died childless and James VI of Scotland accepted the English Crown, becoming England's King James I . Eighty-five years later, however, a small group of English Protestant aristocrats and generals, in league with Prince William of Orange, deposed James I's Catholic grandson, James II, in a bloodless coup d'etat. James II's daughter Mary and William of Orange, her husband and cousin, became co-monarchs of England and Scotland, and the English Parliament legalized their rule on the condition that they accepted a Parliamentary bill of rights. Among other provisions, the English Bill of Rights stipulated that no Catholic could ever again be King or Queen of England, and that the Crown would henceforth pass only to James II's Protestant heirs: either Mary's children, William's children by a later marriage, Mary's younger sister Anne, or Anne's children.

However, Mary died childless in 1694, and William did not remarry prior to his death. Anne, who reigned as Queen Anne from 1702 to 1714, made a concerted but unsuccessful effort to produce an heir: she had eighteen pregnancies, of which thirteen ended in miscarriages. None of her five children lived past the age of ten. The author of The Sickly Stuarts makes a convincing argument that Anne probably had lupus, a disease which in pregnant women often leads to late-term miscarriages. In any event, by 1700 (when Anne's only surviving son, pictured above with his mother, died) it was clear there would be no Protestant Stuarts to succeed Anne. It was also clear that her nearest Protestant male relative was, in fact, German: specifically, the Elector of Hanover (future King George I). Determined to keep England Protestant, Parliament passed a law in 1701 settling the English and Scottish Crowns on the House of Hanover after Anne's death. Scotland's Parliament balked at accepting a German King, and England's aristocrats and gentry worried that Scotland might proclaim its loyalty to the Catholic Stuart heir, the soi-disant James III. To head off this possibility, England's Parliament imposed full legislative and economic union on Scotland in 1707, bribing Scotland's MPs into accepting the settlement and granting them 45 seats in the English House of Commons and sixteen in the House of Lords.

The union eventually brought considerable economic benefits to Scotland's gentry and aristocracy, in the form of a free-trade agreement with England and access to England's overseas empire. Many Scotsmen became prominent traders and officials in the American colonies, while others grew rich marketing American staple crops and loaning money to Virginia tobacco planters. Yet there was always a subcurrent of nationalism in Scotland, expressed by Robert Burns in a 1791 poem and, closer to our own time, by one of George Orwell's correspondents, who wrote in 1947 that "Scotland experienced her Yalta in 1707 when English gold achieved what English guns could not do. But we will never accept defeat." (Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters [Boston, 2000 (orig. pub. 1968), 4: 284]) Scottish nationalists finally won a symbolic victory in 1999, when Tony Blair's Labor government rewarded them for their help in the 1997 general election by creating a separate Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. As far as I can tell, though, it wields about as much power as the average American high-school student government. I suspect there are still many Scottish nationalists who would agree with Mark Renton's assessment of Scottish identity.

The Printed World

Library Thing, the site that brought us the "Unsuggester," contains a link to a fascinating, if less interactive, book-related Web page: Matthew Gray's Earth Viewed from Books. As most of my readers know, Google is in the midst of a multi-year project to digitize every printed book in the world. As part of that project, the digitizers are generating maps of all the place names mentioned in each volume. Matt Gray, a software engineer and Google employee, has taken this a step further: he has plotted all of these place-name references onto a map of the world. Furthermore, he has prepared several historical maps showing the gradual spread of place-name references from books published between 1800 and 1900, graphically demonstrating the growing Western awareness of North America, India, Japan, and Australasia. He also shows that Patagonia, the Sahara, most of Australia, and most of the former Soviet Union still lie outside of the world's literary consciousness, either because they are lightly populated or because they are too isolated to draw writers' attention. True "globalization" is apparently still years away.

It would be interesting to extend Mr. Gray's historical maps back into the eighteenth, or even the sixteenth century, and to watch as Europeans gradually learned about (and wrote about) the Americas and East Asia. For now, though, he has produced some food for thought - or at least a few intellectual hors d'oeuvres.

You Probably Won't Like...

Amazon's book-recommendation service now has an opposite number: LibraryThing's "UnSuggester," which you can use to find out which books you probably don't want to read. Examples:

If you liked The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami,
you probably won't like Basics of Biblical Greek by William D. Mounce

If you liked Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke,
you probably won't like A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks

If you liked Knitting Rules! by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee,
you probably won't like V by Thomas Pynchon

If you liked Phenomenology of Mind by Georg Hegel (and who doesn't?),
you probably won't like Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

And so forth. The program is based on the personal libraries of the site's registered members; after you type in the title of a book, it scans the collections of LibraryThing members who own the same book, then calculates which other books those members are least likely to own. Of course, the same program can also determine which books you might actually like to read, but that's not nearly as entertaining.

Enter, To Grow in Wisdom

The March 30th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains an article by Fred R. Shapiro, co-editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, on the origins of the most famous quotations from the academic world (e.g. "Publish or perish," "You can always tell a Harvard man..."). One of these quotes caught my fancy, perhaps because I'd never heard it before, but also because it too often reflects reality. Asked why universities were such great repositories of learning and wisdom, A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University (1909-1933), replied "The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, so it accumulates through the years."

And in Other War News...

Military historians may long debate which conflict deserves the title "Most Obscure War in History," but a couple of weeks ago Europe submitted a strong contender. On March 1st, 2007, Switzerland invaded Liechtenstein.

To be honest, the invasion was accidental, and the 170 Swiss soldiers involved weren't very well armed - they were carrying unloaded rifles and (of course) Swiss Army knives. Nor did the good people of Liechtenstein seem particularly worried about Switzerland's act of aggression. Markus Amman, an employee of Liechtenstein's ministry of the interior, remarked that "nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers. 'It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something.'"

Commentators on world politics rarely use the words "war" and "Liechtenstein" in the same sentence, because the tiny nation's military history has been both brief and inglorious. The principality last sent troops into battle in 1866, dispatching an 80-man contingent to Italy to assist the Austrians in the Third War of Italian Unification. However, the expeditionaries saw no fighting and sustained no casualties. "In fact," wrote Bill Bryson, "they came back with 81 men, because they had made a friend on the way." (Neither Here Nor There [New York, 1992], p. 194.) In 1868, Liechtenstein dissolved its army and went about its other business, which currently consists of three enterprises: printing postage stamps, serving as a corporate tax shelter, and manufacturing false teeth.

Why I'm Not a Political Forecaster

This weblog passed its one-year anniversary last week, and by way of celebration I thought I would post one of the blog entries I wrote last year but decided, for one reason or another, not to publish. The essay, which I completed in early October, was entitled "Electoral Predictions," and used a simple but persuasive (or so I thought) statistical model to determine the likely outcome of the 2006 U.S. Congressional elections. How accurate was my prediction? Take a look:

It's never wise to make predictions in American politics, and historians are traditionally the worst political prognosticators. Nonetheless, with 5 1/2 weeks to go before the fall Congressional elections, let me briefly observe that history does not appear to be on the Democrats' side.

In the 1930s, Congressional elections sometimes led to quite dramatic swings in the partisan composition of the House of Representatives. There were several elections in which one party picked up 80 or more seats, followed by elections in which the other party recaptured 60 or more seats. These oscillations, however, have become much smaller in recent decades, as redistricting has made more House districts "safe" for either Democrats or Republicans, and as the realignments caused by the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement have reached completion. There have been only a few dramatic midterm elections in the last forty years, and only one in the last twenty: the 1994 "revolution," in which a wave of Democratic retirements in Republican-trending districts helped give the Republican Party control of the House.

The chart above demonstrates just how anomalous the 1994 election was. The X-axis identifies each of the last ten House elections, and the Y axis indicates the net change in House seats from one party to the other. Since 1986, this figure has usually been less than 10 seats, sometimes less than 5. The average change (factoring in 1994) has been 10-11 seats. If this twenty-year trend continues in 2006, the minority party -- the Democrats -- will probably pick up some seats in the House of Representatives. The historical odds, however, indicate that they'll only win 10-11 seats, leaving the Republicans with a 219-216 (or so) majority. It's a thin margin, but enough to keep Dennis Hastert ensconced in the Speaker's office.

The Senate race is more interesting because it's more personal -- and thus harder to predict. I will guess that Democratic challengers will win Republican seats in Pennsylvania, Montana, and Ohio, but Republican Thomas Kean is polling ahead of his Democratic challenger in New Jersey, and name recognition may be enough to get him the seat. The McCaskill-Talent race in Missouri is rated a tossup by Slate Magazine. George Allen is unlikely to lose in Virginia, "macaca" reference or no, because his opponent is weak and inexperienced. Lincoln Chafee has run far enough away from the president to keep his seat in Rhode Island. Tennessee will not vote for a black Democrat, no matter how conservative he is or how much name recognition he enjoys.

So the Democrats will pick up 2-3 seats in the Senate, giving the Republicans a 52-46 majority -- still larger than their majority in the 109th Congress. The other two seats will almost certainly be held by Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Socialist who will caucus with the Democrats, and Joe Lieberman, the newly-independent Connecticut Senator who will probably caucus with the Democrats.

Well, I was right about a few of the Senate races. Otherwise, my predictions were wrong. The Democrats picked up 31 seats in the House of Representatives, and Kean, Talent, and Chafee all lost their races; moreover, George Allen's "macaca" gaffe ("macacalypse," if you prefer) helped the "weak and inexperienced" Jim Webb defeat him, thus giving the Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Perhaps historians really do make bad "political prognosticators."

There's another way to look at my lousy prediction, though. A Republican economist friend of mine, whom I now owe a pizza (we made a bet about the outcome of the House race), says that I should have used the 1966 House race as my model for the 2006 race. In that year, voters punished an increasingly unpopular president who had mired the nation in an foreign war by "shellacking" the president's party in the midterm elections. (Republicans picked up 47 House seats in 1966.) What's interesting is that my economist friend used a historical model to predict the outcome of the election, and was proven right, whereas I, a historian, used a statistical model to predict the election and was dead wrong. Sometimes it pays to stick with what you know.

Donnaconna's Entourage: Voyagers to the East VI (addendum)

Here is an addendum to my earlier account of Donnaconna, the Huron chief whom Jacques Cartier took back to France in the 1530s: James Axtell reports that in May 1536 Cartier invited Donnaconna, two other chiefs, and two Indian interpreters - Donnaconna's sons Domagaya and Taignoagny - to meet him at the French camp near the town of Stadacona, then abducted all five men. According to Axtell, Canadian Indians (Hurons or Iroquois) had previously given the explorers five boys as "tokens of alliance" and, presumably, for training in the French language, so when Cartier sailed for France later that year he had ten Indians on his ship.

When in 1541 Cartier returned to Quebec to establish a (short-lived) mining colony, he told the Stadaconans that his Indian companions had all married and become "great lords" in Europe, and no longer wished to return home. This may have been partially true, and (as I mentioned in a previous post) the Huron travelers may have enjoyed very good living conditions in France. For diplomatic reasons, however, Cartier declined to mention that nine of the ten travelers (including Donnaconna) had in fact died during the preceding half decade, and so could not be consulted on their future travel plans. (Axtell, The Invasion Within [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 27.)

Voyagers to the East, Part XII

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

Hoping to recoup his fortunes in the wake of the Roanoke fiasco, Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1590s decided to embark on a new American venture: searching for El Dorado. The Spanish had undertaken two unsuccessful expeditions to find the fabled city (more precisely, man) of gold – one of which is chronicled in this film – but Raleigh, who probably heard of El Dorado from Spaniards captured by English privateers, thought he could succeed where Pizarro and Aguirre had failed.

Raleigh believed that El Dorado could most likely be found on the Orinoco River in present-day Guiana, and in 1594 he sent a ship to explore the Guianan coast and gather intelligence. The vessel returned the following year with its logs, charts, and four Indian passengers, two from Guiana and two from Trinidad. Thomas Hariot set to work teaching the new visitors the English language and interrogating them about Guiana's geography, wildlife, and people. At least one of these translators accompanied Raleigh when he embarked for Guiana later that year.

Raleigh's 1595 Guiana expedition was short but (from our standpoint) consequential. After pausing to defeat the Spanish garrison on Trinidad, the adventurer and his 100 or so companions ascended the Orinoco River into present-day Venezuela, and made an alliance with Topiawari, the cacique (chief) of the Arromaia Indians. To seal the pact, Raleigh left behind two Englishmen to learn the Arromaian language, and took with him to England Topiawari's 19-year-old son, Cayowaroco, and 3-4 other South American Indians (from Guiana and Trinidad), to instruct them in the English language.

Two of the Native Americans from the 1594-95 expeditions, whom Raleigh and his associates renamed John Prevost and Henry, returned to Guiana in 1596 and 1597 with the English navigators Lawrence Keymis and Leonard Berry. These translators helped their captains establish diplomatic relations with other Guianan caciques, and by the early 17th century England had established a commercial presence on the northeast coast of South America. (Source: Alden Vaughan, "Sir Walter Raleigh's Indian Interpreters," pp. 358-365; see also Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.)

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Returning to His Plow

The recent death of Gerald Ford has caused me to reflect on the awkwardness of presidential retirement in the United States. Monarchies, or nations whose chiefs of state serve for life, don't have to consider how they will treat former chief executives. Other republics (like ancient Rome or modern Chile) provided ex-consuls or ex-presidents with lifetime appointment to their senate, thus giving them a place of honor and influence commensurate with their former power. Americans, however, expect their presidents to go home and die quietly after they finish their terms of office.

This is largely the fault of George Washington, who, following the example of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (fl. 5th century BCE), voluntarily relinquished supreme command not once but twice. In 1783 General Washington, then commander-in-chief of a victorious revolutionary army, surrendered his sword to the Continental Congress - then a rather scruffy and fugitive assembly - and retired to his plantation in Virginia. This first retirement so impressed American electors that they unanimously chose Washington to be the first president of the national government, knowing he could be trusted to walk away from power. Moreover, as president Washington refused to serve more than two terms, even though he could have served as many as he wanted (the Constitution did not impose presidential term limits prior to the 22nd Amendment). He thereby established a precedent that only a few of his successors had the nerve to try to break.

Washington retired from the presidency in 1797, went back to Mount Vernon, and died less than three years later. His successors, however, were only rarely able to contrive so fitting an end to their public service. Of 41 past American presidents, 8 died in office (W.H. Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, F.D. Roosevelt, and Kennedy) and 6 lived less than five years after retiring (Washington, Polk, Arthur, Wilson, Coolidge, and L.B. Johnson). The remaining 27 lived for an embarrassingly long time, which most spent writing their very dull memoirs and making money.

Has anyone had a memorable post-presidential career in the United States? Only a few examples come to mind:

* Thomas Jefferson, who helped found the University of Virginia;
* John Quincy Adams, who served in the House of Representatives for 17 years, fought against slavery, and played a major role in the founding of the Smithsonian Institution;
* William Howard Taft, who served as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1921-30), the only position in the federal government co-equal to the presidency;
* Herbert Hoover, who served as a government commissioner in Germany after World War Two and helped set up emergency food programs there;
* Jimmy Carter, who served as an international election monitor, helped (and still helps) raise millions of dollars to fight tropical diseases, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ford, by contrast, appears to have done approximately nothing in retirement, except make money, go to church, and play golf. In his defense, one can merely say that he was following Washington's example, in his own humble way. And one can also say that Ford's retirement years were not an embarrassment to the nation - unlike those of Franklin Pierce, who after leaving the White House became a supporter of the Confederacy, ran over an old woman with his carriage, and purportedly said "there's nothing left to do but get drunk."

Voyagers to the East, Part XI

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

The first Native Americans to visit England were brought over by English mariners for display as curiosities. There was no shortage of Englishmen interested in viewing see Brazilian "princes" or Inuit hunters, even if it meant paying for the privilege. Shakespeare observed that men who "will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar...will lay out ten to see a dead Indian" (The Tempest, Act II, Scene ii.)

A change occurred in the 1580s, after Queen Elizabeth I chartered the first English colonial venture to North America, the Virginia Company. In 1584 the company's chief proprietor, Sir Walter Raleigh, dispatched a vessel to survey the North American coast, look for settlement sites, and procure local Indians who could be trained as interpreters. The ship returned later that year with two Algonquian werowances (or petty chiefs), Manteo and Wanchese, from Croatan and Roanoke Islands off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The chiefs had come voluntarily, probably because they and their kinsmen had heard of other European incursions in the area (like the Spanish Jesuit mission in present-day Virginia) and wanted to gather intelligence on these new intruders.

The two chiefs resided for several months in London, more specifically at Durham House, the royal mansion that Elizabeth I had loaned to Walter Raleigh. There Raleigh's friend Thomas Hariot learned some of the visitors' language and prepared a rudimentary Algonquian syllabary for future colonists, along with a 36-letter alphabet for spelling Algonquian words. Hariot also taught the Indians a fair amount of English.

In the spring of 1585 Manteo and Wanchese returned home on one of the ships that the Virginia Company sent to Roanoke to establish its first settlement. Manteo subsequently became a close ally of the Roanoke colonists, probably because he regarded them as useful trading partners - and because his continued relationship with the English strangers provided him with political prestige. Wanchese, by contrast, turned his back on the English, probably because his people had to leave Roanoke Island after the colonists proved quarrelsome and warlike.

In 1586 Manteo returned to England with a Croatan companion, Towaye. The two men lived in London for nearly a year, and returned to Roanoke in 1587 with the second major party of Virginia Company colonists. Meanwhile, another Algonquian captured by Virginia Company officer Richard Grenville arrived in England in the fall of 1586. Grenville brought the captive to Devonshire, where he was baptized (March 1588) as "Rawly, a Wynganditoan." Perhaps Grenville intended to train Rawly as a translator, but he soon died and was buried in Bideford Parish, Devonshire, in April 1589.

Back in the Roanoke colony, Manteo remained a strong English ally and was baptized by colonial officials in August 1587. His subsequent fate is unknown, but Alden Vaughan speculates that his kinsmen, or other coastal Algonquians, may have killed him after one of many skirmishes between the trigger-happy English settlers and their Indian neighbors. As for the Roanoke colonists, it seems likely that they left their island early in 1588 and (as they had been planning to do) relocated to the shores of Chesapeake Bay. The Virginia Company lost contact with the colony during the Armada crisis of 1588 and the long Anglo-Spanish war that followed; relief expeditions in 1590 and 1603 found no trace of the colonists but were probably looking in the wrong place. There is documentary evidence that the relocated colonists were killed or captured by warriors of the Powhatan confederacy in 1607, just as another English expedition arrived in the Chesapeake to establish the colony of Jamestown. (Alden Vaughan, "Sir Walter Ralegh and His Indian Interpreters," William and Mary Quarterly 59 [April 2002]), 346-357.)

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Pine Trees and Penobscots

In my post of June 9th, I discussed Mark Peterson's article on the Pine Tree shilling, the first coin minted by an American colonial government, and its significance as a symbol of Massachusetts's imperial ambitions. A couple of weeks ago I discovered another historical use of the Pine Tree shilling: as an ad hoc medal given to Indians to display (and to secure) their friendship to the colony.

In January 1714 General Francis Nicholson held a peace conference (most likely in Nova Scotia, of which he was the governor) with 5 sachems of the Penobscot, Norridgewock, and Kennetuck divisions of Abenakis. The general presented each man with two Pine Tree shillings, placing one in the recipient's hand and the other in his mouth, that he might never act or speak against the English Crown or its subjects. He declared that the pine tree on the coins symbolized the unity of the English and Abenakis - "they and the English should be like that tree - but one root tho' several branches" - and noted that it was always green, symbolizing truth. (James Baxter, ed., Documentary History of the State of Maine [23 volumes; Portland, ME, 1869-1916], Vol. 23, pp. 53-54.)

Nicholson did not record the Abenakis' reaction, but it's likely that they understood what they were receiving - the Woodland Indians were sufficiently familiar with coins by the early 18th century that some were learning how to counterfeit them. (Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All [Baltimore, 1997], pp. 47-48.) It also seems likely that the sachems were unimpressed with the display: shillings were not valuable coins and Nicholson's metaphors were ersatz.

Voyagers to the East, Part X

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

From the sixteenth-century Spanish viewpoint, North America was a backwater. Explorers like De Soto and Coronado had found no mines of gold and silver, and the indigenous population was too decentralized and too hostile (thanks to Soto and Coronado's tender mercies) for Spain to exploit. The southern Atlantic coast of the continent, however, was very familiar to home-bound Spanish mariners, who generally followed that coast after they left the Gulf of Mexico and picked up the Gulf Stream. In the 1550s King Phillip II of Spain supported the establishment of Spanish outposts in Florida to guard the treasure fleets and provide aid to shipwrecked sailors. In 1565, Spanish officer Pedro Menendez de Aviles finally accepted the king's commission and built a string of settlements on the Florida and South Carolina coast, anchored by the garrison town of Saint Augustine. Menendez didn't think small: he hoped one day to establish Spanish colonies in the Chesapeake Bay region, and so he encouraged Jesuit missionaries to open a mission for the Algonquian Indians living there.

Eight Jesuits did set out for the Chesapeake in 1570, accompanied by an Indian translator who was very familiar with the area and its native population. This man, the son of an Algonquian chief, had been captured by Spanish sailors in present-day Virginia in 1561. The mariners had brought him to Mexico City, where he learned Spanish, became a Christian, and adopted the name of his godfather, Viceroy Luis de Velasco. On at least two occasions during the next five years, Velasco traveled to Spain and was presented to Phillip II. By 1570 he was one of the most well-connected people in Spanish Florida, and not surprisingly the Jesuits named their new home on Virginia's York River after him: "Don Luis's Land." (David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America [Yale, 1992], 64-71.)

Unfortunately for the Jesuits, they established their mission during a time of prolonged famine, and the Algonquians declined to provide them with food. Moreover, "Don Luis" soon abandoned the missionaries and moved to a Native American village, where he proceeded to marry several women and live like the chief's son that he actually was. Facing mounting criticism and hostility from the Jesuits, Velasco soon decided to terminate their mission with extreme prejudice. In early 1571 he organized a war party which killed the eight missionaries and burned their chapel. (ibid, 71-72.)

Nor was that Luis de Velasco's last act of defiance toward Europeans. He later took the name Opechancanough, "He whose soul is white," and became an adviser to his brother, paramount chief Powhatan. When Powhatan died in 1617, Opechancanough became the military leader of Powhatan's confederacy, and in 1622 organized the military strike that killed over 300 English colonists and nearly destroyed the colony of Virginia. Opechancanough somehow survived the bloody ten-year war that followed, and was reportedly around 100 years old when, in 1646, an English settler finally shot him in the back near Jamestown. So ended the life of one of the first inhabitants of Virginia to have visited Europe.

For the next entry in this series, click here.

The End of History

In addition to other important historical anniversaries (Happy Birthday, Mom!), today is the 200th anniversary of the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, at which Napoleon's Grande Armee (particularly its cavalry) destroyed the Prussian army and drove Prussia out of the Third Coalition. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel later described the battles as "The End of History," which should warn all of us not to read too much into current events.

Arresting the Lollypop Guild

Many adjectives can be used to describe the American misadventure in Iraq, but "funny" has never really been one of them. Military occupation and counter-insurgency don't lend themselves to humor. There are always exceptional moments, however, like the one described by an anonymous Marine in this unclassified September 14th letter:

"[My] Most Surreal Moment [in Iraq] - Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. I had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels."

The letter deserves to be read in full -- it's a great primary source, filled with telling details ("Favorite Iraqi TV Show - Oprah. I have no idea. They all have satellite TV") and laced with dry wit. One hopes that the author makes it home safely.

The Cows, and Coming Home

This week (Saturday the 23rd) marks the 200th anniversary of the return of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Earlier in the month the Corps of Discovery passed several traders' pirogues heading up the Missouri River, but on September 20th, 1806 -- two centuries ago today -- they encountered their first definite sign of European settlement in two years: cattle. "We saw some cows on the bank," William Clark reported, "which was a joyful sight to the party and caused a shout to be raised for joy." (William Bakeless, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 382.)

It may seem a comical episode, but it also helps affirm Alfred Crosby's observation that the most important feature of early modern European expansion was the "portmanteau biota" Europeans brought with them: cattle, sheep, horses, swine, rabbits, wheat, grapes, peaches, various weed species, and epidemic diseases like smallpox. These plants, animals, and microbes provided European colonists with larger and more reliable supplies of food, fiber, and animal energy than their indigenous competitors, not to mention a biological arsenal (however inadvertantly used) that was far more lethal than Europeans' muskets and artillery. William Clark didn't mention all this in his journal entry, of course, but he did suggest that the most characteristic sound of Euro-American civilization in 1806 was not the pealing of church bells or the clanking of steam engines, but rather the mooing of American settlers' bovine vanguard.

The Latest Craze with All the Kids Today

In last week's post I mentioned that one of the Inuit who sojourned in Europe in the 1560s had facial tattoos, which were quite common among 16th-century Eskimo men and women. Such tattoos fell out of fashion by the early 20th century, but appear to be making a partial comeback, according to a story in the September 17, 2006 issue of the Anchorage Daily News. Author Alex Demarban reports that several women from the Inupiat community of Barrow, Alaska are reviving the practice of tattooing their chins (usually with blue stripes or circular patterns of dots), as a way of honoring their ancestors and cultural heritage. One man, a whaler, is planning to tattoo a whale-tail necklace on his chest to record his kills.

"Tattoos were common throughout Alaska for hundreds of years," Demarban reports. "Some elder seamstresses used bird-bone needles...sinew, thread, and soot to decorate human canvasses, said Lars Krutak, an anthropologist who studied the custom in Alaska and elsewhere. For women who bore elaborate designs across faces and necks to enhance beauty or fertility, it was a painful rite of passage...For hunters, the etchings - usually dark blue - boosted bravery and could ward off evil spirits."

According to Demarban and Krutak, Christian missionaries and boarding schools were responsible for "stamping out" Inuit facial and chest tattoos, though the indigenous inhabitants of St. Lawrence Island continued the practice into the 1920s. It remains to be seen whether the current revival of facial tattoos is just a quirky decision by a few isolated people, or whether it becomes a larger cultural trend. If the latter is the case, we will at last be able to use the words "major cultural trend" and "Barrow, Alaska" in the same sentence.

New Prey: Voyagers to the East Part IX (redux)

For the previous entry in this series, click here. For the original Part IX, click here.

In their essay "This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577" (in Christian Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays [Nebraska, 1999], 61-140), William Sturtevant and David Quinn provide some additional information on these involuntary travelers. The Inuit who came to Europe in 1567 were a woman and her 7-year-old daughter, captured by French or Basque sailors in Labrador the previous year, and put on display in Antwerp and the Hague. A contemporary woodcut portrays the two captives wearing hooded sealskin parkas and shows the unidentified woman's facial tattoos; a German handbill describes them as "wild people and man-eaters" and expresses the hope that mother and daughter were both converted to Christianity (130-131). Sturtevant and Quinn assert, however, that "they cannot have survived long and certainly never saw their homeland again" (68).

It's a fair guess, because none of the four Inuit whom Frobisher took to England in 1576 and '77 survived for more than a few weeks. The unnamed Inuit man captured in 1576 caught cold while at sea and "died about 15 days after arriving in London" (72). Frobisher and his partners bought medicine and bedding for the man, and paid for his coffin and burial in Saint Olave churchyard, at a total cost of 8 pounds sterling. The three Inuit captured in 1577 -- a man named Kalicho, a woman named Arnaq, and a baby named Nutaaq -- lived only slightly longer. Kalicho was well enough to display his canoeing and duck-hunting skills on the Avon River in October 1577, but he soon sickened and died, probably of an infected lung. Arnaq and Nutaaq died of unspecified causes in early November. Kalicho and Arnaq were interred at St. Stephen's Church in Bristol and Nutaaq at Saint Olave Church in London. (84).

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Plus ca Change...

While reading Georges Lefebvre's 1939 history of The Coming of the French Revolution , I was struck by the uncanny similarities between the French monarchy's fiscal crisis -- the same crisis that destroyed Louis XVI's government -- and the financial problems of the modern United States government. The Bourbons ran regular budget deficits for most of the 18th century, and by 1788 the annual French deficit had grown to one-fifth of the size of total government outlays. Lefebvre quotes a 1788 budget forecast projecting public expenditures of 629 million livres and revenues of 503 million livres, resulting in a nominal deficit of 126 million livres. The actual deficit, however, was ultimately higher because a poor harvest throttled tax revenues.

Meanwhile, decades of borrowing had created a mammoth national debt and interest payments that crowded out other forms of public spending. In 1788 the French government spent 25% of its money on royal and civil expenses, another 25% on its army and navy -- and a crippling 50% on debt service. France's creditors had reached the end of their patience and would no longer loan money without huge concessions: the national Bank of Discount, for instance, only agreed to float a 100-million-livre loan if the King allowed its notes to circulate as legal tender. (Lefebvre, pp. 21-22)

The regime could not raise existing taxes to cover the shortfall because the commoners, who paid most taxes, had no more money to give. Between 1741 and 1785 "prices had risen 65 per cent and wages only 22 per cent" (p. 23); meanwhile, rents rose by 98%. As in the modern United States, the earnings of ordinary workers -- laborers and tenant farmers, in this case -- were stagnating or declining relative to inflation, while a few landlords and merchants were getting quite rich. Moreover, the wealthiest Frenchmen -- bishops, aristocrats, and rich bourgeois -- were partially or totally exempt from paying taxes. Sound familiar?

The French monarchy had only two ways out of its bind: it could inflate its debt out of existence, which in practice it was beginning to do (by monetizing the Bank of Discount's notes), or require the privileged orders to pay their fair share of taxes. When the King and his councillors chose the latter course, they caused the Breton nobility to rise in rebellion, and other nobles and jurists to demand the calling of the Estates-General, a concession which Louis XVI finally granted and which led to the end of the Old Regime.

The early 21st-century United States hasn't reached the same crisis point, but the comparable data are not reassuring. In FY 2006 U.S. tax receipts equalled $2.18 trillion, over 80% of which came from income and FICA taxes, while outlays equalled $2.57 trillion. 11% of last year's outlays ($390 billion) were financed with deficit spending. Interest payments on the national debt ($210 billion) equalled 8.2% of federal expenditures -- well below the French level, but greater than annual federal spending on Medicaid or combined annual federal spending on education, the environment, and foreign aid, and close to half of the United States' current defense spending (17%).* Finally, median household income in the United States has been stagnant since 1973 and has dropped an average of 2.8% since 2000, while prices have risen 17.5% during the past six years and 365% since 1973. (Sources: Concord Coalition, Washington Monthly [citing U.S. Census Bureau figures], Inflation Calculator.)

Is the United States on the verge of its own Bastille Day? Not exactly -- but we've been headed in that direction for thirty years (the late 1990s excepted), and some of our leaders seem determined to speed up the parade.

* The largest federal expenditures remain Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which collectively account for 45% of the budget; Paul Krugman isn't exaggerating when he calls the U.S. government "a mammoth insurance company with an incorporated army."

Voyagers to the East: A Preliminary Head Count

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

How many Native Americans visited Europe, willingly or unwillingly, during the first few centuries of European contact? My essay series on these early voyagers is far from complete, but the first nine entries provide enough information to support a preliminary headcount and some early observations.

1493: 17 Tainos brought to Spain by Columbus
1494: (See below)
1495: 350 Tainos and Caribs brought to Spain as slaves
1496: 30 more Tainos taken by Columbus
1501: 50 Micmacs, brought to Portugal as slaves by the Corte-Real expedition
1502: 3 Micmacs (or Inuit) brought to England by Fernandes and Gonsalves
1508: 7 Micmacs brought to France by Aubert
1523: 1 Florida Indian (Francisco de Chicora) brought to Spain
1524: 1 southern Algonquian boy brought to France by Verrazzano
1525: 58 Penobscots taken to Spain as slaves by Gomez
1531: 1 Brazilian chief taken to England by Hawkins
1535-36: 3 Hurons (Donnaconna et al.) brought to France by Cartier
1550: 50 Tupi-Guarani brought to France
1567-77: 5-8 Inuit brought to France and England

In my earlier posts on Columbus I failed to note that the explorer sent over two dozen Carib and Taino captives back to Spain in 1494. Giovanni de'Bardi wrote that several Spanish caravels had returned from the West Indies carrying spices, gold, sandalwood, and "twenty-six Indians of diverse islands and languages." ("Letter from Seville," 19 April 1494, in Geoffrey Symcox and Blair Sullivan, Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies [Boston: St. Martin's, 2005], p. 100.) Adding these 26 men and women to those listed above makes a total of 603-605 Native Americans brought to western Europe between 1493 and 1577.

Of these about 420, or 70%, were Tainos and Caribs brought to Spain by Columbus and his associates between 1493 and 1496. Another 130 were Inuit or Indians from the northeastern edge of North America (Micmacs, Penobscots, and Hurons). Nearly all of the rest were Tupi-Guarani villagers from Brazil. Apart from the aforementioned Hurons, none came from the North American interior.

At least 460 (75%) of these travelers were kidnapped o Spain and Portugal and sold as slaves. The rest accompanied European explorers as trophies, translators, or living advertisements for colonization (as with the 50 Tupi-Guaranis displayed at Rouen in 1550). We may speculate that as Europeans stopped bringing Indians to Europe as slaves -- due to legal prohibitions and the greater demand for slave labor in the Caribbean -- the total number of Indians brought to Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries also fell. Forthcoming entries in this series will determine whether or not this is an accurate guess.

For the next entry in this series, click here.