Invading America. David Childs

      These comely figures, drawn by John White, reflect the positive opinion of the natives during most of the months that Ralph Lane’s expedition was ashore on Roanoke. Later, disillusionment would transform them into the Caliban-like creatures of Shakespeare’s imagination. (National Maritime Museum)

      Alexander’s view was much in keeping with the earlier opinion of the priest Richard Hakluyt, and most other Protestant Englishmen: that the business that they were going about was that of their heavenly Father. Thus, as the true inheritors of God’s word, they were called upon to enter the new, promised land, where they were, paradoxically, to spread the gospel of truth while being able to treat the native population as did the ancient Israelites. Thus they preached conversion and practised cant, with the result that many of the people who walked in darkness would see, not a great light but the shades of the valley of the shadow of death.

      Before this ambiguity took hold, Thomas Harriot, in his account of the 1585 Roanoke settlement, seemed genuinely to believe that the Amerindians were thirsty for living water when he wrote:

      Many times and in every town where I came, according as I was able, I made declaration of the contents of the Bible, that therein was set forth the true and only God, and his mighty works, that therein was contained the true doctrine of salvation through Christ, with many particularities of miracles and chief points of religion, as I was able then to utter, and thought fit at the time. And although I told them the book materially and of itself was not of any such virtue, as I thought they did conceive, but only the doctrine therein contained: yet would many be glad to touch it . . . to show their hungry desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.

      They also, according to Harriot, liked to take part in psalmody and asked for the English to pray to their God for a good harvest and for the cure of their sick.

      The Harriot school of thought, with its belief that the natives, ‘by means of good government . . . may in short time be brought to civility and the embracing of true religion’, persisted throughout the period, with many preachers and even the Virginia Company emphasizing the need to treat the natives with converting kindness. Set against this were the pragmatic views of Catholics such as Sir George Peckham, who used his grounding in the same faith as Harriot to sanction the taking of the Amerindians’ lands, ‘to plant, possess and subdue’ the inhabitants by force. This contradictory view reflected the difference between the Old and New Testaments.

      The conquer-by-force school based their argument on texts such as Deuteronomy 7: ‘When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it and hath cast out many nations before thee . . . the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee: thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them nor shew mercy unto them.’ Pragmatically, the English delayed applying this stern directive until the Amerindian nations had succoured the English strangers that they had found outside their gates. It was only once the possession was advanced far enough to create a feeling of self-sufficiency that the native peoples would be subject to the wrath of the English God.

      The convert-through-kindness school quoted Christ who, in sending out the twelve apostles to preach, told them that, although they would be as sheep in the midst of wolves, yet they had to be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves, treating all with respect. Sadly, many of the adherents to this kinder course of action were better preachers than practitioners, while missionaries, as such, were not sent to help convert the people.

      However, conversion from pagan rituals was a useful propaganda aim for the Virginia Company, and many a text could be appropriated to support this cause. Thus the opening lines of Genesis 12: ‘Now the Lord said unto Abraham, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing’ were used to support a moral as well as commercial crusade to Virginia, where the English were being called to minister to ‘a nation that never heard of Christ’. In time the Church would move from seeing these people, in 1584, as the most ‘kind and loving people’ in the world, to the view held in 1609 by the Reverend Richard Crakanthorpe, that they were ‘heathen barbarians and brutish people’ in desperate need of conversion. John Smith shared the sentiment but not the vitriol, writing in his 1608 A True Relation, that the aim remained: ‘to the high Glory of God, to the erecting of true religion among infidels, to the overthrow of superstition and idolatry, to the winning of many thousands of wandering sheep unto Christ’s fold, who now, and until now, have strayed in the unknown paths of Paganism, Idolatry and superstition’.

      In response to this call, lip-service missionary work was employed to the advantage of investors. In 1616, following the arrival of Pocahontas in England, travelling under her converted name of Rebecca, the alien wife of Abraham, King James ordered the archbishops of Canterbury and York to organize a collection throughout the kingdom to raise money for an initiative to educate ‘the children of the barbarians’. This aim was manifest through the setting aside of 10,000 acres of ‘College Lands’ near Henricus, on the upper James River, where a school for instruction in English and Christianity would be built. A priest, the Reverend George Thorpe, a highly connected Company investor, was sent out to take charge of this project, for which, by 1620, over £3,000 had been raised. Progress was slow, in part due to the fact that Amerindian mums did not want to send their children to boarding school, but mainly because the by now almost bankrupt Virginia Company was reluctant to part with its windfall delivered from the collection plates of English congregations. The list of Amerindians converted by 1630 would not take long to recite. As well as Princess Rebecca Rolfe they included Manteo, who had been persuaded to go to England with Amadas in 1584 and had returned, twice, as an interpreter and go-between, earning an elevated status which was confirmed by his baptism at Croatoan in August 1586, at which time he was invested as Lord of Roanoke. No such conversion or award was made of Squanto, who played a similar role to that of Manteo, with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Indeed, so distrustful of Christianity was the local sachem, (tribal leader) Massasoit, that he stipulated that future land sales would only be agreed if the English ceased attempting to convert his people.

      Scripture was not only available to justify belligerence and to Bible-bash the natives; it could also be used to punish one’s own people. The most notable example of this, during the period of invasion, was when John Smith, having been released from captivity by the Powhatans, because of Pocahontas’s dramatic intervention to prevent his execution, returned to Jamestown on 2 January 1608, but without his companions, Thomas Emery and Jehu Robinson, whom the Amerindians had killed. He was immediately seized by his enemies on the council, tried, and sentenced to death for allowing their slaughter, with the words from Leviticus 24:17, ‘he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death’, providing a justification for this crass illegal act that was not possible under English law. Smith, who seemed to have made a lifetime habit of being timely ripped from the jaws of death was, on this occasion, saved by the arrival of Captain Newport, who saw through the folly and vindictiveness of the council’s behaviour.

      Smith himself, who does not give the appearance of being a biblical scholar, was well able to resort to scripture when it was apposite so to do. Thus his most famous adage, ‘He that will not work shall not eat’, was a direct transposition from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, with the added advantage that it conferred upon Smith the enormous and unquestionable authority of Saint Paul: ‘For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.’

      Biblical teaching had a major influence on what was a most important aspect of colonial life: the settlers’ relationship with the native women. Naturally, for the sake of good neighbourliness casual liaisons with these ladies was forbidden, while rape was punishable by death. However, on occasions the English, such as Amadas and Smith, were entertained lovingly, and in the case of the latter