Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Indians exported corn, squash, and dried beans to their nonagricultural neighbors farther north and to coastal communities which specialized in exploiting marine resources. Indeed, the earliest English colonists in the valley depended on these surpluses to provision their own poorly planned efforts at settlement. But over time this reliance shifted toward a desire to dispossess the Native communities of the valley. As fur supplies declined, English merchants instead demanded land in exchange for their goods and Native leaders—facing devastating mortality from disease, stiff and sometimes hostile competition from rival nations, and the intimidating power of expanding English settlements—often saw trading away land as the best path forward for their communities. English traditions of agriculture replaced Indian practices. New crops were planted and, in time, the English began exporting the products of their own fields: apple cider to quench the thirst of neighboring New Englanders, flaxseed to supply the linen industries of Ireland and Britain, wheat and other grains to feed the slave plantations of the West Indies. Indeed, by 1660, one knowledgeable merchant was able to declare to the King’s Council for Foreign Plantations that the provisioning trade of New England, of which the produce of the Connecticut Valley made up an important part, was “the key to the Indies, without which Jamaica, Barbadoes and ye Charibby Islands are not able to subsist.”⁶ From a Native American trading nexus supplying the regions all around, to a production site for empire sending its produce into an Atlantic marketplace, the ecology of the valley shaped and was shaped by the economics of trade.

       Native Agriculture

      Maize had spread to the Connecticut Valley around 1000 AD, a relatively short six hundred years prior to the arrival of the first Europeans in the region, and disseminated throughout southern New England at roughly the same time. Indian women adopted this new crop and planted it in their fields alongside earlier arrivals—multiple species of beans and squash.⁷ Throughout the region, Native communities enjoyed broad diets. Native women raised crops and collected wild plant foods like berries, nuts, and tubers, while men hunted for game and fished. Along the coast, plentiful shellfish further expanded Native diets. The arrival of maize roughly paralleled a period of mild climatic warming in the northern hemisphere known as the Medieval Warm Period. Together, warmer temperatures (which in turn produced longer growing seasons for both cultivated and wild food plants) and the arrival of an important new dietary staple led to a gradual increase in the human populations of New England as a whole.⁸

      This period of agricultural plenty proved fleeting. Within four centuries, warmer temperatures gave way to a period of global cooling—the Little Ice Age—that would stretch from roughly the mid-fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. By the end of the fourteenth century, lower average temperatures in the spring and autumn had shortened the agricultural growing season to the point where most communities throughout southern New England were forced to abandon cultivating crops. Even in communities where women continued to plant and tend to their fields of maize, squash, and beans, they cut back significantly on the amount of land planted and on the amount of time and labor spent in tending crops relative to their efforts at collecting wild plants and game. Only in the Connecticut Valley—where the waters of the Connecticut River and its larger tributaries acted to moderate local temperatures and slightly extend the growing season—did communities remain committed to a largely sedentary and agriculturally centered lifestyle. Elsewhere, New England communities returned to cultivating crops only as average temperatures rose (slightly) at the turn of the sixteenth century. As the earliest European explorers pushed into New England in the mid-sixteenth century, then, they encountered many Native communities that had only just recently readopted farming to supplement their continued reliance on hunting and foraging.⁹

      The villages of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Connecticut Valley took advantage of their climatically fortuitous placement to become a breadbasket to the rest of New England, trading their surplus agricultural produce to communities living to their north, east, and west. Native traders traveling amid multiple interregional commercial networks traded agricultural foodstuffs and ceramics from the Connecticut Valley for copper coming from Nova Scotia and the Great Lakes, stone for toolmaking from areas in present-day Pennsylvania, and shells, wampum, and seafood from New England’s coastal communities. Historical sources show that Connecticut Valley communities continued to produce large agricultural surpluses for trade to northern and coastal New England even after the return of (again, slightly) warmer temperatures led to the readoption of crop cultivation elsewhere.¹⁰

      The earliest English colonists in North America invariably relied upon the preexisting Indian provisions trade for the survival of their settlements. For example, the settlers of England’s first permanent American colony, Jamestown, at first proved notoriously bad at feeding themselves. Those who survived the colony’s early years relied on the flow of agricultural surpluses that undergirded Powhatan’s empire, receiving food as gifts, trading for corn, and eventually using violence to extort provisions from the Indians of coastal Virginia. Captain John Smith believed that subsequent colonies could likewise rely on America’s Native communities to supply them with food. In 1616, he assured English readers that settlers in the “New England” which he had recently returned from exploring would be able to purchase corn from neighboring Indians “for a few trifles,” and thus sustain themselves until their own plantations had been firmly established. For Smith, New England agriculture was not an end in itself. Rather, Indian corn, and eventually the provisions that the colonists grew for themselves, would support the production of “merchandable fish” and “other commodities.”¹¹

      Whether intentionally or not, the early settlers of New England followed Jamestown’s lead by relying on local Indians for their initial subsistence. Perhaps taking Smith’s advice too much to heart, the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth four years later relied on Indian corn to get through their first winter—although their decision to ransack abandoned Wampanoag villages and gravesites for grain caches likely alienated their would-be trading partners and contributed to the deaths of about half of the Mayflower’s passengers. Luckily, an improvement in relations with the Wampanoags early in 1621 allowed the foundering colony to trade for seed corn. A decade later, Podunk leader Wahginnacut recognized the potential of appealing to English bellies in his search for a European trading partner, offering the leaders of Massachusetts Bay both land for a new settlement along the Connecticut River and corn to feed its settlers.¹² As John Smith had recommended, the founders of the Connecticut Valley’s first English towns hoped to rely on Indian neighbors for provisions while extracting the region’s “merchandable” furs for sale to Europe.

      Self-sufficiency was not easily achieved by settlers accustomed to an agricultural system developed in a society where labor was plentiful and most fields and meadows had been cleared generations ago and kept plowed, fenced, and manured annually ever since. Even given the great fertility of valley lands, and despite the fact that they were often able to take advantage of abandoned Indian fields for their early crops, there was no chance that the eight hundred English men, women, and children who moved to the banks of the Connecticut in the 1630s would be able to feed themselves without the support of local Indian communities. As at Jamestown, this dependence on the Indian provisioning trade left Connecticut Valley colonists ill at ease when famine threatened, eventually contributing to the outbreak of violence in the Pequot War.

      Imperial competition and the English desire to dominate the fur trade provided the overarching impetus for the war, but hunger and a fear of famine helped to trigger the descent into violence. The two men whose deaths ostensibly sparked the war, John Stone and John Oldham, made for unlikely martyrs. Stone was a drunkard, a blasphemer, a kidnapper, and probably a pirate. Oldham lived in Plymouth only about a year before the colony’s leaders exiled him for his tendencies toward violence and rebellion. Unlike Stone, Oldham did eventually achieve a degree of respectability as a trader in the Bay Colony, but his slaying under unclear circumstances by Niantics on Block Island seems a poor justification for English colonists’ subsequent campaign to eliminate the Pequot as a nation. A number of ulterior motives—land hunger, the lure of fur trade profits, and a desire to wrest regional political hegemony from the Pequots and Dutch—better explain the English rush СКАЧАТЬ