The Beginners of a Nation. Eggleston Edward
had not been found in all the years preceding a particle of tangible evidence that gold existed in Virginia. But on the James, as on the Hudson, the glistering pigment with which the Indians besmeared their faces on occasions of display was believed to contain gold, and the places of its procurement were sought with ludicrous secrecy. 7
Fact and fable about America. The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. Ingram's story. Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by relapse, it may be; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the account of what he had seen legends common in the folklore about America that had grown up in Europe; or perchance he only falls into an old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without provocation. The American women are described as "wearing great plates of gold covering their whole bodies like armor… In every cottage pearls are to be found, and in some houses a peck" – an assertion that had a grain of truth in it, since the sailor no doubt mistook wampum beads for pearls. Fireflies, in this old tar's exalted memory, are "fire dragons, which make the air very red as they fly," while the buffalo appears as an animal "as big as two of our oxen." The streets in one "city" are broader than London streets, which we may readily believe. The banqueting houses are built of crystal, "with pillars of massie silver, some of gold." This is a fine example of the manner of a mind afflicted with the vice of exaggeration; crystal becomes silver in the next breath, and silver is as instantly transmuted to gold. All that optimistic projectors sought in America – gold, silver, pearls by the peck, and great abundance of silkworms – are obligingly supplied in Ingram's narrative. Such tales impressed the imagination in a romantic and uncritical age. 8
VI
Indian devil-worship. The interest in America was heightened by popular curiosity regarding the Indians. The American savages were sometimes treated as sun-worshipers, but they were more commonly thought to be worshipers of devils. The prevailing belief in witchcraft, divination, and abounding evil spirits rendered it easy for Europeans to accept the Indian deities as supernatural beings, and to credit the pretensions of the powwows, or Indian priests, to give knowledge of distant or future events, to heal the sick, and even to bring rain in time of drought. But it was observed at Plymouth that when the Pilgrims prayed for rain it fell gently, and that the rain procured by the Indian conjurers was violent and destructive – a rain with something devilish about it. According to writers of the time, the demons worshiped by the savages were able to materialize themselves on great occasions, appearing to their votaries in some beastly form. This belief in Indian devil-worship fitted well with the religious faith of the period, which can hardly be described as anything but a sort of Manichæism dividing the government of the universe almost equally between good and evil powers. Religionists of all schools desired to convert these subjects of Satan, not from those philanthropic motives that are main considerations in modern propagandism, but because their conversion would glorify God, and yet more because it would despite the devil. Sometimes the religious motive was incongruously supported by hopes of commercial advantage. The navigator Davis wrote to Secretary Walsingham that if the Indians "were once brought over to the Christian faith they might soon be brought to relish a more civilized kind of life and be thereby induced to take off great quantities of our coarser woolen manufactures."
Indians exhibited. The early explorers made a practice of kidnapping Indians and transporting them to England, where the sight of barbarians without doublet or hose quickened the interest in projects for colonization and adventure. In our age of commercial activity and extended geographical knowledge one can form but a weak conception of the excitement produced by the sight of "the Indian man and woman," no doubt Esquimaux, brought by Frobisher. Portraits of these rarities were made for the king and queen and others. In 1605 Weymouth brought from the coast of Maine five kidnapped Indians, "with all their bows and arrows" and two beautiful birch-bark canoes. Rosier's True Relation. "This accident," exclaimed Sir Ferdinando Gorges, "hath been the means of putting life into all our plantations." Some of the savages captured at various times were exhibited for money, and one perhaps was shown after he was dead; at least we may venture to conjecture so much from Shakespeare's jeer in The Tempest at the idle curiosity of the crowd. In England, says Trinculo, "any strange beast makes a man. Tempest, ii, 2. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." This interest in outlandish savages no doubt suggested to the poet the creation of the monster Caliban, who probably seemed a realistic figure to the imagination of that age.
VII
Notions about animals. The animals of the new continent excited the wonder of the people of Europe and increased the interest in America. Regarding them, also, the most extravagant stories were easily credited. It was recorded in the sober Latin of Peter Martyr that the advance of Cabot's ships was retarded by the multitude of codfish on the Newfoundland coast, and that the bears were accustomed to catch these fish in their claws. Note 9. It is hard to recognize the familiar opossum in the description by Purchas: "A monstrous deformed beast, whose fore part resembleth a fox, the hinder part an ape, excepting the feet, which are like a man's; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, where she bestows her young until they can shift for themselves." The humming bird was believed to be a cross between a fly and a bird. The Hudson River Dutch settlers went further, and named it simply "the West Indian bee." These dainty creatures were prepared for exportation to Europe in New Amsterdam by drying them, in Barbadoes by filling them with sand. Evelyn's Diary, i, 277. They were accounted "pretty delicacies for ladies, who wore them at their breasts and girdles." Evelyn saw two preserved as great rarities at Oxford, in 1564. A New England versifier extols
The humbird for some queen's rich cage more fit
Than in the vacant wilderness to sit.
Wood's New Eng. Prospect, p. 23. Flying squirrels, when brought into English parks in 1608, were the occasion of much wondering excitement. King James begged for one of them, like a spoiled child. The skins of muskrats were esteemed for their odor and were brought to England "as rich presents." It was thought that musk might be extracted from this animal. Hariot, the learned man of Ralegh's first colony, fancied that the civet cat would prove profitable to settlers in America, but his words indicate that he had been misled by traces of the skunk, whose perfume has never yet come into request. De Bry's Hariot, p. 10. Speaking of the "civet catte," he says, "in our travails there was found one to have been killed by a salvage or inhabitant; and in many places the smell where one had lately beene before."
The raccoon, the "aroughcun" of the Virginia Indians, being a plantigrade, was esteemed a monkey; the peccaries were called the wild hogs of America, and were thought to have "their navels on the ridge of their backs." 9 Somewhere in the region of the Hudson River a beast is described as having a horn in the middle of his forehead, from which it would appear that the unicorn on the royal coat of arms may have been found running at large. It is not easy to account for the "camel mare," reported to have been seen about three hundred miles west from the coast of New Jersey, unless it belonged to the genus Incubus. The bewildering number of new creatures found in America troubled the European scholars of that day, who were ever theological. They were puzzled to get so many four-footed beasts and creeping things into the compass of Noah's ark. Mercator,
So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New Haven in 1645. The ship was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth or sky.
I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment in the British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by Ingram was inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It was omitted in the later edition as too incredible even for Hakluyt. See also a paper by Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883, on the copy of Ingram's Statement preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's story, and others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of Eastward, Ho! by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The assertion of Seagull, in the play, that "they have in their houses scowpes, buckets, and diverse other vessels of massie silver," would seem at first sight to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of Ingram's narrative. But in the second edition of Bullein's A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one Mendax, describing an unknown land, declares that "their pottes, panns, and all vessells are cleane gold garnished with diamondes." This shows that Ingram's story had probably absorbed certain traits from what I have ventured to call European folklore tales about America – folk tales originally applied to the Orient, no doubt; echoes of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but not probable, that Bullein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had returned three years or more before he printed his second edition. The authors of Eastward, Ho! probably enlarged on Bullein.
Note 9, page 18. "Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. These details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian Cabot, whose veracity is not above suspicion.