This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 27 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Routledge History of American Foodways Michael D. Wise, Jennifer Jensen Wallach Early America Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315871271.ch2 Rachel B. Herrmann Published online on: 10 Mar 2016 How to cite :- Rachel B. Herrmann. 10 Mar 2016, Early America from: The Routledge History of American Foodways Routledge Accessed on: 27 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315871271.ch2 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 2 EARLY AMERICA Rachel B. Herrmann Emblazoned into the American psyche is Disney’s Captain John Smith scaling Virginia’s mountains while singing enthusiastically about a bountiful new land.1 In Jamestown, new colonists dig for gold. After several meetings, John Smith asks Pocahontas if the Indians possess any of that precious metal substance, which is “yellow, comes out of the ground,” and is “really valuable.” Pocahontas responds confidently, “we have lots of it” while presenting Smith with corn. This exchange echoes the one that occurred in 1607, but historians would paint a darker picture. They would depict Smith slogging through swamps only recently abdicated by Natives while Jamestown colonists died. They would mention that Smith brought no fishing nets on his travels upriver, and would describe his attempts to scoop fish from the water with frying pans – efforts that ended when Smith was stung in the arm by a stingray while using his sword to nail cod to the riv- erbed.2 For the most part Powhatan Indians waited to provide food for colonists until after a ceremony in which they symbolically killed and then adopted John Smith, mak- ing English colonists subservient to the region’s indigenous peoples.3 Jamestown was merely one endeavor by Europeans to colonize the New World. They came in search of spices, expensive fruits, gold, silver, and wealth. They all struggled to feed themselves. The early years of contact were characterized by surprisingly peaceful interactions between newcomers and Indians. The concept of “creative misunderstandings” has long fascinated historians, and has informed new work in food history.4 Richard White, who discussed the term in his 1991 book The Middle Ground, argues that such miscom- munications occurred when a rough balance of power existed within a defined region – in his work, the Pays d’en Haut.5 Michael LaCombe has suggested that a similar power equilibrium enabled seventeenth-century Indians and Englishmen in New England and the Chesapeake to communicate when they exchanged food.6 Most early interactions resulted in one group attempting to use food to exercise power over another group.7 Native Americans withheld food while Europeans tried to control food supply to obtain more authority.8 Throughout the early decades of colonization Native Americans retained the upper hand, though colonial accounts sometimes stated otherwise. The English colonies differed from New Spain and New France, and variations existed between the British Caribbean, New England, the Chesapeake, and the Lowcountry.9 Although the possibility for violence nearly always existed, problems in communication usually prevented protracted outbreaks. 23 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 21:41 27 Sep 2021; For: 9781315871271, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315871271.ch2 Early AMERICA Historians do not agree about when accommodating relationships ceased. LaCombe suggests that after about 1660 writers became more likely to portray Indians as “tragic, hungry, and helpless victims of European conquest.”10 In some ways he is correct; by the 1700s colonists no longer starved; rather, they used food to exert power in ways that occurred alongside wars against Indians and the enslavement of indigenous Africans. Such violence wrought slave revolts, Native American attacks on colonists’ villages, burnt crops, and maimed domesticated animals. Europeans in turn continued to assault noncombatant Indian villages at a time when they began to cease such behavior when fighting other enemies. Increasingly toward the later colonial period, misunderstandings could blossom into overt acts of violence. A closer examination of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, suggests that food continued to remain comprehensible to Natives and non-Natives despite an increasing imbalance of power. By the 1760s colonists and Native Americans had worked together to create a mutually recognizable form of diplomacy – part of which involved customs related to foodstuffs. Fear of hunger and desire for land, merchantable commodities, and wealth motivated migration out of the Old World. By the start of the fourteenth century long winters and crop failures exacerbated northwestern Europe’s land dearth.11 Starvation was rarely a real threat in the following centuries, but inefficient grain management and poor sixteenth-century harvests started to drive future colonists’ desires for new lives.12 In the late 1500s lawyer Richard Hakluyt and his eponymous younger cousin compiled popular stories of voyages.13 They detailed large New World animals, valuable minerals, and edible plants.14 England’s “pestered and filled” prisons, noted the younger Hakluyt, contained “able men” imprisoned for “small robberies” committed in the urban areas that appeared when the enclosure movement reduced land.15 Rising food costs could not sustain a growing population.16 Hakluyt evinced a sense of imminent loss, urging that England start colonizing the New World before nothing remained to claim.17 He argued that prisoners would relieve England of useless mouths. The seventeenth-century New World was neither untouched nor uninhabited. It was also in the midst of an extended drought.18 Territory seemed “virgin” only because it had recently been depopulated of Indians struck by the diseases that preceded colo- nists onto new land. The Patuxet Tisquantum (Squanto), who schooled the Pilgrims at Plymouth in effective planting methods, lost his entire tribe to a mysterious disease – possibly smallpox or leptospirosis.19 Epidemics such as smallpox spread north from New Spain before English colonists arrived.20 Colonists’ lack of preparation, dependence on rotting ship’s provisions, gathered fish, nuts, and berries, and preoccupation with locating inedible commodities meant that they went hungry during their early years. The sixteenth-century Spanish colony of San Miguel de Gualdape in present-day South Carolina lost three-quarters of its colonists after three months.21 Attempts to colonize New France resulted in scurvy.22 Although Michael LaCombe has argued against “a narrative of futility and dysfunc- tion,” for preliminary English efforts, it remains difficult to ignore the challenges that people faced.23 Jamestown colonists disembarked too late in the season to plant corn. Leaders discovered that gentlemen and artisan migrants proved unwilling or unable to farm.24 Incorrect assumptions that the climate in the New World would resemble European locations at the same latitude meant that the following summer they were 24 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 21:41 27 Sep 2021; For: 9781315871271, chapter2, 10.4324/9781315871271.ch2 Rachel B. HERRMANN ill-prepared to grow the right crops for the warmer weather.25 Accusations of food hoarding abounded.26 They died from starvation compounded by typhoid, dysentery, and, probably, salt poisoning.27 Indian aid proved crucial to colonists’ survival. Michael LaCombe has demonstrated that colonists tried to portray their dependency on Indians in a more flattering light. When they found themselves lucky enough to be able to offer food to Indians, they described such offerings as gifts; Indians who gave food to Englishmen provided “trib- ute,” instead.28 Colonists’ painstaking efforts to challenge the terminology of English dependency, however, could not erase the fumbling of Virginia’s colonists. Food aid from nearby Powhatan Indians kept them alive, along with John Smith’s insistence that everyone had to work to receive provisions.29 Natives and newcomers struggled to communicate with each other, and thus misun- derstandings occurred. It remains difficult to know what Indians thought when they encountered Europeans. The best historians can do is observe their actions – filtered through the eyes of non-Native observers – and guess.30 Montagnais in New France, remembering their first encounter with Frenchmen, recalled that when colonists offered ship’s biscuits and wine, the Indians threw these items in the water because they thought the biscuits were wood and the wine, blood.31 One 1589 account admitted that an Indian whom colonists met spoke “of