Aubrey Lauersdorf responds to Chapter 1—World of Empires (Precontact-1740) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Reconstructing Wowinchopunk’s World
When an English boat arrived near Paspahegh town in early May of 1607, its werowance (chief or leader), Wowinchopunk, and a delegation met the visitors at the river. According to one Englishman, “an old Savage made a long Oration, making a foule noise, uttering his speech with a vehement action” to greet them. Perhaps this speaker was town leader Wowinchopunk. The English, who did not speak the Algonquian language of the Paspaheghs, did not understand the orator’s words. Yet non-verbal cues suggested peaceful intentions, and the English followed the delegation to their town, where the Paspaheghs “entertained [them] with much welcom.”[1] After the festivities, the English left Paspahegh to spend the night on their boat. They continued their travels the following day, making numerous visits to similar towns, where they usually received a similar welcome. Within two weeks of this visit to Paspahegh, the English left their ships more permanently to begin construction of a fort they called Jamestown.[2]
Among the English, the meeting at Paspahegh would eventually become known far beyond the riverbank where it occurred. In 1625, an account by colonist George Percy was compiled with other descriptions of encounters and published by English cleric Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus. Taken together, these stories of encounter would go on to shape the ideas and understandings that European people developed of this ‘New World’ and its inhabitants. In this case, the meeting at Paspahegh—marred as it was for George Percy by “foule noise” and “vehement orations”—was evidence of the ‘savagery’ that separated English and Algonquian people.[3] In no small part, English interpretations of difference as “savagery” were born of earlier encounters in Africa and Asia, where European travel writers turned to gendered and racialized descriptions to depict people as not only uncivilized but also monstrous.[4] These early encounters led the English and other Europeans to “rethink their intellectual conventions regarding the natural world, history, and God and his creation,” as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows in The Ideas That Made America.[5] Of course, this encounter would have initiated intellectual reckonings for the Paspaheghs, too.
Ethnohistory Meets Intellectual History in the Colonial Archives
Stories of this encounter indeed circulated among the Paspaheghs and their Algonquian-speaking neighbors in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay. However, these stories were not printed in a volume to enter the written record of cross-cultural interactions. Instead, the Paspaheghs shared these stories orally. Like most other people living on the landmass that Europeans called ‘North America,’ the Paspaheghs were non-literate and recorded information and knowledge through non-written means. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen asks us to believe that this reality makes Indigenous ideas about meetings like the one at Paspahegh inaccessible to modern scholars. Thus, Ratner-Rosenhagen tells us, we can say little about how the Paspaheghs fit encounters with Europeans into their understandings of their world: “Historians lack knowledge not only of the words spoken by millions of indigenous Americans at the time of European contact but also of the ideas and worldviews they once expressed.”[6] Luckily, however, this is not actually the case. Historians have developed methods for uncovering and reconstructing Indigenous ideas, understandings, and beliefs about the world and their place within it using colonial archives.
The field of ethnohistory provides tools for scholars to navigate the challenges posed by a written record that is dominated by European voices. Ethnohistorians learn to read colonial documents against the grain to elucidate the histories of (often traditionally non-literate) Indigenous societies. Their training in historical methods is often supplemented by additional study in fields such as Native American studies, anthropology, archaeology, or geography. Many ethnohistorians also integrate non-documentary sources, including material culture, ethnography, pictographs, language, art, and oral tradition, into their historical analysis.[7] Yet even without these additional sources, Indigenous ideas are often not especially difficult to find in the written record of early contact and colonization itself—if you know where and how to look for them. In this way, ethnohistory has something important to offer intellectual history.
This is certainly the case with the pre-colonial and colonial time period covered by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the first chapter of The Ideas That Made America. She approaches the topic from a European perspective, but one could easily adjust that lens. The first Europeans to explore, exploit, and settle the landmass they called “North America” arrived in what was to them a new world, but of course it was no such thing. They struggled to navigate not only unfamiliar environments, but also the cultural, social, political, and economic norms and expectations of the peoples they met who had been there for millennia. To make sense of this world and sometimes just to survive it, Europeans had to rely on Indigenous knowledge. To Indigenous people who had lived on this landmass since time immemorial, this was not a “new world,” but one with generations of history. When “explorers,” traders, conquistadors, and colonists wrote accounts of their travels for a European readership, they were not inventing new knowledge; often, they were drawing on information initially provided by Indigenous informants. Through their process of sensemaking, then, Europeans preserved Indigenous people’s ideas of their worlds to some extent.
When Indigenous informants described this landmass and its people to Europeans, they revealed their understandings of the places, political formations, and sociocultural norms that shaped their world. Sometimes, these informants even revealed their ideas about Europeans and the roles that they imagined European explorers, seamen, or colonists might come to play in their world. Ratner-Rosenhagen invokes the metaphor of “eavesdropping” on the past to describe the pleasures and the power of intellectual history. The methods of ethnohistory enable scholars to do exactly that. We can use the written record of contact and colonization to “eavesdrop” on the intellectual worlds of non-literate people like the Paspaheghs by way of the Europeans who produced accounts of the supposed “new world.”.[8] In the case of the Paspaheghs, who welcomed an English boat into their town in 1607, we can even ask the same questions that Ratner-Rosenhagen does of English people such as George Percy. We can learn quite a bit about, as she puts it, “how [these] native people made sense of the arrival of Europeans” and “how they made sense of themselves and their worlds prior to contact.”[9]
Paspahegh Intentions
By 1607, news of the impending arrival of a strange watercraft carrying strange visitors no longer shocked Wowinchopunk and the Paspaheghs. Since the early sixteenth century, people living along this landmass’s eastern and southern coasts had encountered a variety of European explorers, traders, fishers, and slavers. The inhabitants of some ships even made landfall for extended periods of time, trying and mostly failing to establish forts and settlements on the continent. As they met Europeans, Indigenous people began to make sense of them. In the region now called Newfoundland, one Innu woman recalled thinking that the first French sailors she saw were “amazing, frightful men who dressed in iron, ate bones, and drank blood.” Soon, Indigenous diplomats invited onto these ships tasted the “blood” and “bones” – and learned what wine and hardtack were.[10]
Through their brief and intermittent encounters with Europeans, then, Indigenous communities began to develop a clearer picture of these visitors. Communities near the coast, such as Paspahegh near Chesapeake Bay, were most likely to meet Europeans directly. Yet even towns without prior direct exposure to Europeans had reason to know of their existence. Both archival and archaeological evidence show the existence of regional exchange networks that stretched along the eastern seaboard. News of Europeans would have accompanied the people and goods that traveled these routes.
When Europeans arrived in their vicinity, some Indigenous people, including the Paspaheghs, saw possibility in fostering relationships with these visitors. On the landmass they called North America, European explorers and seamen came to understand that they could use gift-giving to ingratiate themselves with local Indigenous people, whom they often depended on for food, information, and promise of safe passage. These gifts included both utilitarian items (such as metal axes, hatchets, and knives) and items with aesthetic value (including hats or beads). Indigenous people sometimes found European goods appealing, but they approached English ships not as hopeful recipients of gifts, but as diplomats seeking to negotiate relationships between two peoples. Although stymied by language barriers, Indigenous diplomats were nonetheless often successful at articulating their vision of a mutually beneficial exchange relationship to Europeans.
In other towns whose residents might have traveled the paths and waterways around Paspahegh, Europeans had shown themselves capable of learning regional diplomatic conventions. When two English scouting ships made landfall near an Algonquian-speaking town in modern-day North Carolina in 1584, the town sent a diplomat to meet them. After a brief exchange on the beach, during which the Indigenous diplomat “had spoken of many things not understood by [the English],” he boarded a ship. There, the diplomat received “a shirt, a hat & some other things” from an English captain as well as a “taste of our wine, and our meat, which he liked very wel.”[11] Although the diplomat’s words had been unintelligible to the English, his actions made clear the sort of exchange relationship his town desired. After departing the ship, he stayed on the water for thirty minutes, catching as many fish as his canoe could hold and delivering them to the English (the diplomat’s choice of gift suggests he might not have liked the English’s salted meat quite as ‘wel’ as the captain believed!). This reciprocal exchange was followed by several more days of diplomatic meetings and ceremonies that further clarified the Algonquians’ intentions. Their exchange relationship established, the two parties “fell to trading” more liberally. Algonquian people now arrived at the English ships carrying “Chamoys, Buffe, and Deere skinnes,” which they likely believed the English could sell back home, and exchanged them for hatchets, knives, axes, pots, and other metal items.[12]
Unfortunately for Wowinchopunk and the Paspaheghs, attempts to articulate their vision for a reciprocal exchange relationship were less successful in 1607. According to regional norms, the Paspaheghs inviting the English to feast in their town was a clear sign of friendship. Yet the Virginia Company colonists remained obtuse about Paspahegh intentions, adamant that they “knew little what [the Paspaheghs] meant” during this exchange.[13] Consequently, the English did not know, or did not care, to reciprocate the Paspaheghs’ welcome. In his account, George Percy made no mention of the English offering gifts to their Paspahegh hosts during their meeting at the town. However, Percy did mention giving “trifles” to some of Wowinchopunk’s neighbors during other town visits.[14] And if Wowinchopunk did not already feel snubbed by the English failure to give him gifts during their first meeting, he certainly did after the English hastily left Paspahegh the following morning.
That the English had bungled their first diplomatic encounter was probably not far from Wowinchopunk’s mind when the English boat returned to the vicinity of Paspahegh two weeks later. Alerted by his subjects that the English had made landfall and begun constructing a fort, Wowinchopunk recognized their intentions to stay in the region. Knowing this, Wowinchopunk tried to compel the English to conform to his vision for diplomatic relations. The werowance gave the English every opportunity to correct their earlier missteps. He even sent messengers to announce his impending arrival, who informed the English that Wowinchopunk intended to “be merry with us with a fat Deare.”[15]
Even though Wowinchopunk again articulated his desire for friendly relations, the English refused to consider the werowance and his delegation of one hundred Paspaheghs anything but a threat. The English were anxious that the delegation carried bows and arrows, although they should have expected this, given Wowinchopunk’s promise that the Paspaheghs would hunt and feast upon a deer with the English. So, the English refused to lay down their weapons, even after Wowinchopunk “made great signes to us” to do so and pleaded his peaceful intentions.[16] Apparently frustrated at the continued failure of the English to uphold the basic conventions of diplomacy and gift exchange, one member of the delegation lost his patience and seized a hatchet from a soldier. In response, some Englishmen tried to attack the delegation. Wowinchopunk had had enough. Their second attempt at diplomacy again undermined by the English refusal to listen to their clear articulation of regional expectations, Wowinchopunk and his delegation returned home.
Despite this insult, Wowinchopunk did not give up, and his commitment to forcing the English to follow the regional norms of diplomacy reflects the value werowances placed on relationship-building. As the political leader of the Paspaheghs, Wowinchopunk had the most to gain if his town could also ‘fall to trading’ with the English in 1607, as another Algonquian-speaking town had done in 1584. Across the region, chiefs secured their political status in part by demonstrating an ability to build relations with peoples near and far. And by acquiring rare, distant, or spiritually powerful objects from friends and allies (like European metal goods, beads, and cloth), a chief signaled his success at fostering diplomatic networks.
Consequently, chiefs sought to control and mediate gift exchanges. When English scouting ships visited modern-day North Carolina in 1584, leaders of that Algonquian-speaking town made this expectation clear. During a meeting with the werowance’s brother, Granganimeo, and his delegation, the English gave gifts to everyone present. In response, Granganimeo stood up and collected the gifts, “making signes and tokens, that all things ought to bee delivered unto him, and the rest were but his servants, and followers.”[17] From this intervention, these English sailors quickly learned to respect local hierarchies of gift-giving. After that, when Granganimeo was present, “none durst trade but himselfe” and a few other elites.[18]
Once these rare gifts were in a werowance’s possession, he could utilize them in several ways. Sometimes, werowances and other chiefs wore or displayed gifts as a visual reminder of this success. Aboard one of the English scouting ships in 1584, the werowance’s brother Granganimeo expressed interest in a “bright tinne dish,” which he exchanged for twenty deerskins. To Granganimeo, this was not a bowl to hold things, but an item he might wear to reflect his capacity to mediate access to distant peoples and rare goods. It was also possibly a form of protection in warfare. Thus, he “clapt it before his breast, and after made a hole in the brimme thereof and hung it about his necke, making signs that it would defend him against his enemies’ arrows.”[19] In other cases, leaders such as Wowinchopunk or Granganimeo redistributed gifts to relatives, friends, and allies. According to regional norms, this act made the recipient obligated to the gift-giver, which in turn augmented the former chief’s influence.
With these diplomatic goals in mind, Wowinchopunk made a third and final attempt at diplomacy with the English. Two days after he fled the Jamestown fort, the werowance followed through on his promise to give a deer to the English. This time, however, Wowinchopunk did not accompany the delegation of forty men. Perhaps he was beginning to sense the threat these English could pose. If so, his anxiety was warranted. Once again, the English bungled this exchange with their Paspahegh visitors. This time, the English became concerned when they realized the Paspahegh delegation “faine would have layne in our fort all night” if allowed to do so. To the English, the Paspaheghs’ attempt to stay the night was a sure sign of their “villanie,” and they forced the delegation to leave.[20]
Yet to the Paspaheghs and their neighbors, offering food and lodging to relatives, allies, and prospective friends was customary and expected. In fact, failure to offer a visitor a place to stay could signify that this relationship was on shaky ground. To Wowinchopunk, the English message was clear: These colonists still did not see them as friends. Following this offense, Wowinchopunk came to believe that the Paspahegh would never experience the same success with these Englishmen that Granganimeo’s town had in 1584.
Pacquiquineo’s Intellectual Journey
As the English presence near town became more ominous, Wowinchopunk was likely reminded of an earlier interaction that revealed the possibilities of European violence to the Paspaheghs. In 1561, a Spanish ship had arrived in Chesapeake Bay, and a delegation of Paspaheghs met them on the shore. The Paspaheghs approached the Spanish, probably hoping to initiate a gift exchange. Some were convinced to board the ship. However, the interaction quickly went awry for the Paspaheghs. The Spanish seized two young men from the delegation, including Pacquiquineo, the relative of a werowance (if Pacquiquineo’s lineage had been successful at retaining their claim to the role of chief across generations, perhaps the boy was even one of Wowinchopunk’s kin!).[21] To the Spanish, this capture was a strategic move that had the potential to further their colonial goals. To the Paspaheghs, it was an incoherent act: Captivity was reserved for enemies, not prospective allies or exchange partners. In this 1561 meeting, then, earlier generations of Paspahegh people came to understand firsthand that some Europeans did not play by the rules of regional diplomacy.
After years of trying, the captive Pacquiquineo eventually returned to Paspahegh, where townspeople would have learned more about his time with the Spanish. After their capture, Pacquiquineo and his companion were taken to Spain, where they received an audience with the King. Although the Spanish Crown ordered them returned home, the Church had other plans. Priests first took the youths to Mexico City and baptized them as Catholics, renaming Pacquiquineo as ‘don Luis de Velasco.’[22] Then, the priests tried to indoctrinate the young men with Spanish schooling and instruction in Catholicism. After Pacquiquineo’s companion died, the Church was committed to turning the one surviving youth into an intermediary to aid in their conversion efforts.
For his part, Pacquiquineo convinced the priests that his desire to return to Paspahegh was in part driven by a commitment to spreading Catholicism.[23] Indeed, one priest wrote that as an intermediary-in-training, Pacquiquineo “has turned out well as was hoped, [and] he is most obedient to the wishes of Father and shows deep respect for him.”[24] In 1566, Pacquiquineo was permitted to accompany Spanish ships in search of Chesapeake Bay, but the expedition failed to reach its intended destination.[25] In 1570, Pacquiquineo finally returned to the shores of his homeland, although with a dozen Jesuit priests and one Spanish youth in tow. Despite nine years away, Paquiquineo quickly located his town.[26] We can only imagine the shock, joy, and even fear that people experienced at his sudden reappearance with stories of his distant travels.
If Pacquiquineo’s experiences in the Spanish Empire did not convince Paspaheghs of the problems that Europeans could cause, the priests’ failures to follow local diplomatic customs certainly did. Jesuit friars were used to relying on donations, and they expected the same reception in Algonquian territory in 1570. Thus, the Jesuits did not plan to distribute any gifts in exchange for the food they sought. When the Jesuits informed the Paspaheghs of this, the Paspaheghs told the Jesuits that they too had nothing to give, due to a recent famine.[27] Only when the priests finally promised to bring “seeds to the tribes for planting” on their next supply ship did the Paspaheghs yield to their requests for food.[28] However, when one expedition participant (probably Pacquiquineo) informed the Paspaheghs that the Jesuits did have some trade goods in their camp, the Paspaheghs changed their terms: They now became “reluctant when they see they receive no trinkets for their ears of corn.” Some even demanded gifts outright, and they “brought the ears of corn and other foods and asked that they be given something when they handed them over.” If the Jesuits refused this demand, “the Indians took the food away from them.”[29]
As a result of Jesuit refusal to conform to regional norms, Paspahegh relations with the priests quickly deteriorated. Even the “obedient” Pacquiquineo returned to his old life. After spending only a few days at the Spanish camp, he began “living with his brothers” instead.[30] Soon, Pacquiquineo stopped visiting the Spanish camp altogether. After his return to Paspahegh, Pacquiquineo also married. In the mind of the Jesuits, Pacquiquineo was “acting more like a pagan than a Christian in his manners, dress, and habits.”[31] Yet without Pacquiquineo to mediate their relations with the Paspaheghs, the Jesuits faced food shortages and began “going to other villages to barter for maize with copper and tin” to survive.[32]
Perhaps Pacquiquineo would have left the Jesuits to starve to death if they had not made a desperate attempt to capture him and force him to serve as their mediator. Pacquiquineo’s skills with an arrow apparently not dulled by his time with the Spanish, he responded to this attempted capture by “sen[ding] an arrow through the heart of Father Quirós and then murdered the rest who had come to speak with him.”[33] Accompanied by Paspahegh warriors, Pacquiquineo then returned to the Jesuit camp to kill the remaining friars, using as his weapon one of the metal hatchets the Jesuits had recently given the Paspaheghs in exchange for corn.[34] Here, the Paspaheghs forced the Jesuits to face the same sense of desperation and insecurity that they had forced upon Pacquiquineo and his now-deceased companion during their many years held captive in the Spanish empire.
With the Jesuits gone, Pacquiquineo could use their belongings to extend the reach of his influence in other ways. He stripped the deceased Jesuits of their clothing and distributed pieces to powerful relatives and nearby werowances. Among the recipients were his brothers, who began “going around clothed in the Mass vestments and altar cloths.”[35] Pacquiquineo gave the Jesuit’s chalice “to an important chief in the interior” and the paten (eucharist plate) to another elite. Pacquiquineo and his warriors also repurposed the friars’ religious books, tearing them apart to remove the metal clasps on the binding for other uses.[36] Pacquiquineo likely gifted a captive Spanish boy, who was the only member of the Jesuits’ party he allowed to survive the massacre, to his brother. Since the boy was young and considered worthy of adoption into Paspahegh society, he probably received kind treatment. In fact, he was integrated into his captor’s community to the extent that he became “very fluent in the language and had almost forgotten his Spanish.”[37] Like gifts obtained from trade, spoils of war (including human captives) could be distributed by a chief to relatives, friends, and allies. For Pacquiquineo, recently returned home after nine years away, building these relationships and his influence in the region was especially important.
In 1572, the Spanish returned to retaliate for these killings, which added to the growing history of European violence in Paspahegh town. Hearing no news from the Jesuits, the Spanish governor of Florida sent an expedition to the Chesapeake Bay area to find them. From an Algonquian-speaking person they captured along the coast, the Spanish learned that the friars had been killed, but a boy had survived. To force the return of both the Spanish youth and Pacquiquineo, the Spanish decided to take more captives. When an Alonguiqan delegation that included a man wearing the Jesuits’ paten as “as a decoration or trinket” around his neck visited the ship, the Spanish seized them, assuming (correctly) that this man was affiliated with Pacquiquineo.[38]
In response, Paspahegh messengers attempted to return the captive Spanish boy. However, the messengers refused to board the Spanish ship to make the exchange, fearing that they too would be captured. In response, the Spanish pilot ordered “a blast from the arquebuses” into the group of Paspaheghs on the shore. In the chaos, Spanish soldiers recovered the boy.[39] When the surviving Paspaheghs refused to also return Pacquiquineo, the Spaniards killed their captives by “hang[ing] them all from the yardarms of the ship,” but not before a priest baptized them.[40]
Diplomacy and Violence As Ideas in Tsencommacah
Although thirty-five years had passed since this incident, memories of this Spanish violence informed the Paspaheghs’ ideas about these new European arrivals just as much as memories of mutually beneficial gift exchanges did. Motivated by both recent English insults and a deeper history of Spanish violence, Wowinchopunk now turned against the English in 1607. He had come to understand that the colonists did not plan to leave the fort on their own accord, especially after they sent a ship back to England. So, the Paspaheghs tried to force them out with a raid on Jamestown (some neighboring towns were probably convinced to join the Paspaheghs in this attack, too, since there were as many as 400 warriors involved).[41]
Through violence, the Paspaheghs made their intentions clear to the English, just as they had previously attempted to do with diplomacy: The Paspaheghs no longer considered the Virginia Company colonists prospective friends and allies. Wowinchopunk could not envision a place for these English in his world, or, at least, not so close to his town. If the English had any future in the Chesapeake region, Wowinchopunk hoped to ensure that it would not be “in Paspihas Countrey.”[42]
When his raid failed to drive out the Virginia Company colonists, Wowinchopunk turned to his political networks to help him force a diplomatic solution to the problem of the English. The Paspaheghs and many of their neighbors were members of Tsencommacah. This was the name for a place and a political formation that dominated the Chesapeake Bay region in 1607. As a place, Tsenacommacah encompassed thousands of square miles of territory that were home to perhaps 15,000 Algonquian-speaking people. As a political formation, Tsenacommacah has been described by historians alternatively as a chiefdom and a confederacy. It incorporated more than thirty distinct towns and peoples, including the Paspaheghs, led by werowances much like Wowinchopunk. All were subject to the same mamanatowick (or paramount chief), a man named Wahunsenacawh whom the English called Powhatan.[43] Facing trouble from the English that he could not rein in alone, Wowinchopunk likely appealed to his mamanatowick for assistance. In the spring of 1608, the werowance received the intervention he desired.
While Wowinchopunk by now wanted to be rid of the problem of the English, the mananatowick had other ideas for the future of these new arrivals. Wahunsenacawh still believed he could incorporate the English into Tsenacommacah. He had a long history of making these types of arrangements with neighboring towns. As mamanatowick, he had grown Tsenacommacah into a powerful polity by convincing others to offer him tribute and follow his word. Sometimes, he did this through persuasion, but if a town refused his diplomatic overtures, Wahunsenacawh might use violence, harassing them with constant raids until they yielded.
In exchange for recognizing Wahunsenacawh’s authority, subject towns might receive a promise of protection from raids, food in times of shortage, and access to the mamanatowick’s spiritual power. If the English joined his polity, for example, he promised to “make warrs upon” anyone who failed to keep the peace with them.[44] Maintaining authority over these subject towns also required leaders like Wahunsenacawh to constantly reinforce their diplomatic relationships, including with gift-giving. Even so, leadership over towns changed hands, and polities grew and shrank, sometimes rapidly. Wahunsenacawh was unusually successful in growing his polity, bringing perhaps twenty-five more people under his authority than his predecessor.[45] The mananatowick’s earlier success in this regard speaks to his ability to fulfill the promises he made to his subjects.
In 1608, Wahunsenacawh’s offer was specific to the English. With it, he tried to balance both English needs and Paspahegh demands. Over the past months, Wahunsenacawh had received reports of the English going to Paspahegh and other towns under his authority to offer metal goods in exchange for corn. Thus, the mamanatowick knew the English had a shortage of corn. In his role as mamanatowick, Wahunsenacawh received tributes of corn from his subject towns, and he oversaw an agricultural surplus that could be distributed elsewhere within his polity. Wahunsenacawh imagined he might draw the English into an arrangement where he provided them food in exchange for producing metal goods.[46] This would be politically advantageous to the mamanatowick, who would, in turn, control the distribution of English metal goods to his relatives, allies, and subjects.
Yet Wahunsenacawh had to balance this goal with the concerns of Wowinchopunk and the Paspaheghs. In interactions with the English months earlier, the mamanatowick had suggested he did not mind the English remaining near Paspahegh “as long as they hurt [his subjects] not, nor take any thing away by force, [for] they take but a little waste ground.”[47] Now, the mamanatowick instead proposed that the English “forsake Paspahegh, and to live with him upon his River, a Countrie called Capa Howasicke.”[48] This proposal, if Smith would accept it, would not only reinforce the mamanatowick’s relationship with the Paspaheghs by addressing Wowinchopunk’s growing concerns, but also bring the English into his orbit. Through this, the mamanatowick might grow Tsenacommacah even further.It was this proposal that Wahunsenacawh made when he famously had English leader John Smith captured and delivered to his town in 1608.
Here, we glimpse, by way of ethnohistorical approaches to the colonial archives, an intellectual history of Tsenacommacah. We can see how those living in it imagined their worlds politically and culturally, how they thought relationships should function, and what they did to try to fit new developments into existing intellectual constructions. As with Wowinchopunk before him, Wahunsenacawh soon found himself frustrated by the refusal of the Englishmen to comply with local rules of diplomacy. Following his capture, Smith was repeatedly convinced that Wahunsenacawh “would execute me” and was confused when his captors repeatedly “used me with what kindness they could.” This “use” included clear signs of the mamanatowick’s diplomatic intentions: “Each morning 3 women presented me three great platters of fine bread, more venison then ten men could devour I had.”[49] His captivity culminated in a ceremony that was likely a form of ritual adoption (and probably did not involve the young Pocahontas, whose participation in the story was only added in Smith’s retellings years later).[50] As mamanatowick, Wahunsenacawh mediated these rituals, seating himself atop a platform, physically above the others present, as a visual representation of his authority in Tsenacommacah. Yet their meaning was lost on the English, and Smith did not leave Wahunsenacawh’s town with the intention of relocating Jamestown or believing himself to be a member of Tsenacommacah. Smith was not able to grasp the intellectual history he was being asked to enter, much to Wahunsenacawh’s consternation, as one might imagine.
In the fall of 1608, the English made their refusal to recognize Wahunsenacawh’s political authority clear: the English attempted a “coronation” of Wahunsenacawh as a subject of the King of England. They visited the mamanatowick and gave him a variety of presents such as a “Bason and Ewer, Bed and furniture…[a] scarlet Clock and apparell.” The mamanatowick was hesitant to put on the clothes the Englishmen gifted him, and he was even more skeptical of their request that he “kneele to receive his Crowne.” Even after “many perswasion, examples, and instructions,” Wahunsenacawh would not abide. Ultimately, the mamanatowick “stooped” a little so that the English could place a crown upon his head. Smith blamed the leader’s refusal to grant Smith’s request on a lack of understanding, the Algonquian man “neither knowing the majesty nor meaning of a Crowne, nor bending the knee.” [51] Despite Smith’s insistence that mamanatowick was merely confused, Wahunsenacawh’s resistance to this ceremony was clear. He was the leader of Tsenacommacah; he had no interest in being integrated into this English world.
The English continued to run roughshod over local diplomatic customs and expectations for friendship, making it clear to their neighbors that they intended to be enemies rather than friends or members of Tsenacommacah. Englishmen forced the Paspaheghs to give them corn at gunpoint and in 1609 the English escalated their antagonism of their Paspahegh neighbors with a raid. The colonists “burnt their houses, tooke their Boats with all their fishing weares.”[52] This violence was enough to push Wowinchopunk to entreat peace with the English, once again based on his understanding of protocols, but the English refused.
Because they had burned their bridges, quite literally here, the English soon found that neither the Paspahegh nor anyone else in Tsenacommacah was willing to treat them as kin, even though they occupied land within it and were surrounded by towns subject to Wahunsenacawh on all sides. When everyone in the region faced food shortages during the winter of 1609-1610, the people of Tsenacommacah shared what they had with their kin and allies. Not part of this world, the English were excluded, and many starved to death.[53] Here, failing to understand the intellectual history of Tsenacommacah meant suffering the physical consequences.
Some English survivors were forced to eat their horses, and others resorted to cannibalism of the dead. The archaeological record shows evidence of this suffering: English skeletons with intentional cut-marks where flesh and muscle were removed.[54] Although certainly horrifying to the English colonists, there is a bitter irony to this. Europeans accused North and South America’s Indigenous people of cannibalism, an accusation often meant to reflect their “savagery.” Yet in 1610, it was the English who were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive in a place that they claimed as their dominion.
Rather than reconsider the possibility of integrating themselves into Wowinchopunk’s world after this brutal winter, the English doubled down on their refusal. By the summer of 1610, the English were engaged in a war of annihilation against Wowinchopunk and the Paspaheghs, during which they decided to “burne their howses and to Cutt downe their Corne groweing aboutt the Towne.” During one raid, the English colonists captured Wowinchopunk’s wife and children. After English soldiers “cawsed … heade to be cutt of” of another male prisoner, the colonists considered sparing the lives of Wowinchopunk’s wife and children.
However, they ultimately changed their minds. The English threw Wowinchopunk’s children overboard, “shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water.”[55] Although they discussed burning Wowinchopunk’s wife to death, “haveinge seene so mutche Bloodshedd thatt day,” they decided against it. So, they instead ran her through with a sword.[56] In 1611, Wowinchopunk would also die by English violence. After that, his people abandoned their town and retreated deeper into Tsenacommacah. By now, it had long been clear that the English would never agree to become part of Wowinchopunk’s world.
A Pivotal Moment in a Long Intellectual History
Colonial archives allow us to reconstruct far more than just European understandings of the encounter, conflict, and exchange that defined this period. The same written records that speak to the intellectual origins of an “English America” also speak to ideas, beliefs, and values that had a much deeper history on the continent. Using George Percy’s and other English accounts of the first interactions between the Paspaheghs and English, we can see that as Algonquian people tried to integrate the newly-arrived English into Tsenacommacah, they simultaneously articulated their understandings of this world, even though the English often refused to listen.
Just like Europeans, Indigenous people entered the colonial era with well-developed understandings of the world and their place within it. These had emerged from generations of interactions and exchanges. Faced with the arrival of strange people from across the ocean, Indigenous people drew upon experiences and ideas gained from cross-cultural encounters, just like Europeans. Reconstructing Wowinchopunk’s intellectual world rather than the better-known stories of Wahunsenacawh or Pocahontas helps us understand the intellectual history Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen believes to be beyond our reach. His appearances in English accounts are brief and intermittent. When the English do mention him, he is considered at best a pest and at worst a threat to Jamestown’s future. In contrast, the Englishmen were much more fascinated with the machinations of powerful Wahunsenacawh, who seemed in many ways like a European king, and the capture and eventual conversion of his precocious daughter Pocahontas. Wowinchopunk was a relatively marginal figure in the story of the founding of Jamestown and the establishment of a permanent English colony in North America, but in Tsenacommacah, his perspective illuminates a rich world of ideas that structured society.
That we can tell a story about Wowinchopunk’s understandings of his world despite his marginality in English accounts illustrates how pervasive Indigenous perspectives really are in the archives of contact and colonization. In this regard, the English records are not unusual: Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese colonial archives also allow scholars to tell similar stories for Indigenous people across the Americas. Reconstructing the intellectual worlds of people like Wowinchopunk also helps transform our narratives of the early American past. By questioning the accounts handed down to us by European authors, we can tell a more accurate story of the development of this cross-cultural world.
This is certainly true of the Paspahegh-English relationship. To George Percy, the first meeting between the English and the Paspaheghs was little more than an example of Algonquian “savagery” in a tale that was ultimately about the founding of Jamestown. To Wowinchopunk and his subjects, this meeting was instead a pivotal moment in setting the tone for Paspahegh-English relations. And because the English were attempting to settle in what was ultimately someone else’s world, this encounter would come to have serious implications for the colonists even if they did not realize it. We can see that the English failure to understand the ideas that made Tsenacommacah permanently undermined their relations with the Paspaheghs, and, for a time, threatened to doom the Jamestown settlement.
Reconstructing Indigenous people’s understandings of their worlds helps us tell a richer and more complex story of the ideas that made America. It allows us to tell a more accurate story, too. As of December 2024, the United States was home to 574 federally recognized tribes and nations (as well as many more with state-level recognition). These nations have persisted despite attempts by European colonists and their descendants to exterminate or acculturate them over 500 years. Today, many tribes and nations maintain kinship, ceremonial, and political practices that are deeply rooted in a precolonial past. Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents teach their children values and understandings that have been shared across many generations. Elders and knowledge keepers tell stories that speak to a history stretching back much more than five hundred years. Indigenous ideas about the world are not an artifact of “pre-history.” They are certainly not lost. They continue to make America to this day.
About the Author
Aubrey Lauersdorf is an Assistant Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Florida State University. Her research and teaching focus on Indigenous-settler relations in imperial borderlands, particularly in the early American South.
Notes
[1] George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606,” in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Vol. 18, ed. Samuel Purchas (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906), 410. When possible, the primary sources cited in this piece come from published accounts that are available online, usually at archive.org. In some cases, the author has used and cited reliable English translations of Spanish or French documents so that any American instructors or students can examine for themselves the primary source used to reconstruct Wowinchopunk and the Paspahegh’s understandings of this 1607 encounter.
[2] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 411-412.
[3] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 410.
[4] Jennifer L. Morgan, “’Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1550-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 54, 1 (1997): 167-192.
[5] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 12.
[6] Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America, 10.
[7] Increasingly, ethnohistorians are also working in collaboration with Indigenous tribes and nations – although there remains much to be done to address the colonial roots of ethnohistory and the continued exclusion of Indigenous perspectives from much historical scholarship and training.
[8] Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America, 2.
[9] Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America, 11.
[10] Paul le Jeune, “Relation de ce qui c’est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’annee, 1633” in Interpreting a Continent:Voices from Colonial America, ed. Kathleen DuVal, trans. John DuVal (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2009), 67-8.
[11] Arthur Barlowe, “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America, with Two Barks…Who Discovered Part of the Country Now Called Virginia Anno 1584,” Old South Leaflets 92, 1898: 3.
[12] Barlowe, “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America,” 5.
[13] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 410.
[14] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 411.
[15] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 413.
[16] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 413.
[17] Barlowe, “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America,” 4-5.
[18] Barlowe, “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America,” 6.
[19] Barlowe, “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America,” 5.
[20] Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 414.
[21] Luis Gerónimo de Ore, “The Discovery of Jacan, and the Martyrdom of Twelve Religious of the Society of Jesus,” in Martyrs of Florida, Maynard Geiger, trans. (New York: American News Co, 1881), 20. Historians continue to debate the exact origins of Pacquiquineo, although many believe he was a Paspahegh. For examples, see: Carmen C. Tesser and Charles Hudson, The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 6.
[22] This is the name that Spanish authors mostly used to refer to the captive man. In fact, Pacquiquineo’s name is preserved in a 1561 Spanish document. As of the date of publication, readers can view a photocopy of this document online at: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/don-luis-de-velasco-paquiquineo-fl-1561-1571/.
[23] Fray Pedro de Feria, “Letter to the Spanish Crown, 1 March 1563,” in American Indian History: A Documentary Reader. Camilla Townsend, ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 31-33.
[24] Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista Segura, “Letter to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570,” in The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, eds. Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie (Chapel Hill: Virginia Historical Society Press, 1953), 92.
[25] Antonio Abalia, “Letter to the Council of the Indies, 23 October 1566,” in L.A. Vigneras, “The Spanish Discovery of North Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review 46, 4 (1969): 414.
[26] Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista Segura, “Letter to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570,” 89.
[27] Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista Segura, “Letter to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570,” 89.
[28] Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista Segura, “Letter to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570,” 90.
[29] Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista Segura, “Letter to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570,” 92.
[30] Quotation #1: Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista Segura, “Letter to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570,” 92; Quotation #2: Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” in The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, eds. (Chapel Hill: Virginia Historical Society Press, 1953), 109.
[31] Juan de la Carrera, “Relation, 1 March 1600,” in The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, eds. (Chapel Hill: Virginia Historical Society Press, 1953), 134.
[32] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 109.
[33] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 110.
[34] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 110.
[35] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 110.
[36] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 111.
[37] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 111.
[38] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 108.
[39] Juan Rogel, “Letter to Francis Borgia, 28 August 28 1572,” 109.
[40] Juan de la Carrera, “Relation, 1 March 1600,” 139.
[41] John Smith, A true relation of such occurences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that collony, which is now resident in the south part thereof till the laste returne from thence (London : Printed by (Edward Allde] for Iohn Tappe, and are to bee solde at the Greyhound in Paules-Church-yard, by W[illiam] W[elby], 1608).
[42] George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 412.
[43] Readers who want to learn more about the world of Tsenacommacah can do so in: Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).
[44] Edward Maria Wingfield, A Discourse of Virginia (Boston: Privately Printed, 1860), 14.
[45] This calculation comes from Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures.
[46] John Smith, A true relation of such occurences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia.
[47] George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia,” 415.
[48] John Smith, A true relation of such occurences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia.
[49] John Smith, A true relation of such occurences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia.
[50] For some examples of these interpretation, see: Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 69-78; Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004).
[51] John Smith, A map of Virginia with a description of the countrey, the commodities, people, government and religion. Written by Captaine Smith, sometimes governour of the country (Oxford: Printed by Joseph Barnes, 1612), 46.
[52] John Smith, A map of Virginia with a description of the country, 82.
[53] George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon of the precedeings and ocurrentes of Momente which have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sir Thomas Gates was Shippwrackte uppon the Bermudes Anno 1609 untill my departure owtt of the Cowntry which was in Anno Domini 1612,” in Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America, James Horn, ed. (New York: Library of America, 2007), 1099-1102.
[54] Readers can learn more about these findings online: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/starving-settlers-in-jamestown-colony-resorted-to-cannibalism-46000815/
[55] George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 1104.
[56] George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 1105.