Williams tallies up at least thirty-seven native gods—the fire god, the house god, the moon god, the sea. He even compares the natives’ polytheism to the habits of “papists,” who pray to such “saint protectors as St. George, St. Patrick, St. Denis, Virgin Mary, etc.”
Some of the vocabulary lists in
A Key
read like transcripts of Williams’s conversations:
How many gods be there?
Many, great many.
Friend, not so.
There is only one God.
You are mistaken.
Apparently, some of Christianity’s more unusual articles of faith prove to be a bit of a hard sell. Williams informs one native about Christ’s resurrection: “When I spoke of the rising again of the body, he cried out, ‘I shall never believe this.’ ”
If anything, though, the New England Indians seem strangely similar to the New England Puritans. In both societies the supernatural seeps into every single facet of life on earth. Just as Massachusetts whipped up a parable of good triumphing over evil thanks to the fluke of a mouse outsmarting a snake, and John Cotton accused Roger Williams of ignoring the divine “shushhh” of his bout of laryngitis, the Narragansett also interpret their own luck as messages from their deities. One phrase in his dictionary that’s equally useful in Boston or the wilderness is: “God is angry with me?”
Williams recalls one Indian man whose child had died gathering his wife and the rest of his children around him. With “an abundance of tears,” the man hollered, “O God thou hast taken away my child! Thou art angry with me. O turn thine anger from me, and spare the rest of my children.” On the other hand, Williams notes, “If they receive any good in hunting, fishing, harvest, etc., they acknowledge God in it.”
The most intriguing Algonquian term Williams tries to explain is
Manitou.
Manitou isn’t a god per se. It’s more of a supernatural force that animates certain people or things. He writes, “There is a general custom amongst them, at the apprehension of any excellency in men, women, birds, beasts, fish, etc., to cry out, ‘Manitou,’ that is, a god.” He continues, “Thus if they see one man excel others in wisdom, valor, strength, activity, etc., they cry out, ‘Manitou.’ ” He notes that natives are in awe of English technology. “Therefore, when they talk amongst themselves of the English ships and great buildings, of the plowings of their fields, and especially books and letters, they will end thus:
Mannittowock,
They are gods.
Cummanitoo,
You are a god.”
A comedian I know, if he hears a joke that perfectly sums up some situation, comments, “You solved that.” Doesn’t the word
Manitou
solve the problem of accurately describing a certain kind of mysterious achievement? There’s no single English word that really gets at that moment in the 1997 NBA Finals when the game was tied and Steve Kerr of the Chicago Bulls scored the winning shot with five seconds left on the clock; or this herd of elk I saw once, appearing out of the mist at twilight on a golf course in Banff; or Elliott Gould’s performance in
The Long Goodbye;
or the catch in Ralph Stanley’s voice when he sings “O Death.”
Obviously, Williams would have his native friends exchange
Manitou
for its Judeo-Christian equivalent, divine providence. He writes of
A Key
that “this book (by God’s good providence) may come into the hand of many fearing God, who may also have many an opportunity of occasional discourse with some of these their wild brethren and sisters.” And so he offers a blow-by-blow translation of how to tell the story of Creation, from the book of Genesis, in Algonquian.
He explains how to insist that “one only God . . . made all things” in six days. “The first day, He made the light,” is followed by the creation of the earth and sea, the sun and the moon, the stars, birds, fish, on down to the sixth day, when “last of all He made one man of red earth and called him Adam.” Then “God took a rib from Adam . . . and of that rib he made one woman.”
Which is to say that Williams teaches white do-gooders how to introduce American Indians to the inheritance of original sin. Williams boasts how he ruined the peace of mind of at least one native; he recalls visiting the deathbed of a Pequot friend named Wequash. Williams had previously witnessed to Wequash about the Bible. The brokenhearted Wequash cried out in broken English, “Me so big naughty heart all one stone!”
Honestly, the idea that all human beings are corrupt vessels of evil is oppressive enough when one is born into that way of thinking. I was exposed, from infancy on, to so much wretch-like-me, original-sin talk that I spent my entire childhood believing I was as depraved as Charles Manson when in reality I might have been the best-behaved nine-year-old of the twentieth century. But how jarring it must have been to be an adult Narragansett and this strange white man shows up out of the blue and shatters his lifelong peace of mind with what the stranger calls the “good news” that the native is in fact a wicked, worthless evildoer and so was his mother. So said native dies terrified by his big, naughty, unchristian heart of stone instead of, say, as the Shawnee Tecumseh would later advise, “Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”
In
A Key,
Williams’s language cushions the blow of making the acquaintance of this new deity by translating “God” as “manit,” as in Manitou. But in 1663, when the Puritan John Eliot publishes his “Indian Bible,” a translation of the Bible into Algonquian, God is called “God.” Which is blunt. This God is different from the native gods, and Eliot does not pretend otherwise.
The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams. The natives “sleep soundly counting it a felicity,” he says, quoting a proverb, “that every man be content with his skin.”
One of the main points of Calvinism is to be absolutely uncomfortable and itchy and sickened in one’s skin. Williams might be a little jealous when he marvels that “Adam’s sons and daughters” in America “should neither have nor desire clothing for their naked souls or bodies.”
The Indians’ clothing-optional lifestyle affords Williams the opportunity to get in one of his jabs at European hypocrisy:
The best clad Englishman,
Not clothed in Christ, more naked is:
Than naked Indian.
Williams makes his living in Providence and its environs as he did, off and on, in Plymouth and Salem, by operating a trading post. Lucky for him, the Europeans are gaga for American fur. In the chapter called “Of Their Trading,” he teaches the Algonquian word for “beaver,” calling it a “beast of wonder.” This part of
A Key
was surely invaluable to his readers engaged in the ever more lucrative fur trade. The reader learns how to ask, “What price?” It must have been so handy for a seventeenth-century English trapper out on the frontier of Connecticut to reach into his knapsack, pull out
A Key,
and confidently inform the Mohegan he’s talking to, “I will give you an otter.”
Williams seems especially amused by the fad among the European smart set for gloves and hats fashioned out of American animal pelts handled by “foul hands in smoky houses . . . which are after worn upon the hands of queens and the heads of princes.”
In fact, the fur of semiaquatic North American rodents is so desirable it’s literally to die for. Power struggles among the English, the Dutch, the Pequot, the Mohegan, and the Narragansett over access to and control of trade in Connecticut provokes a war.
Of all the phrases Williams translates in
A Key,
the one with the most troubling, loaded back story is this one: “The Pequots are slain.”
T
he Pequot War is a pure war. And by pure I don’t mean good. I mean it is war straight up, a war set off by murder and vengeance and fueled by misunderstanding, jealousy, hatred, stupidity, racism, lust for power, lust for land, and, most of all, greed, all of it headed toward a climax of slaughter. The English are diabolical. The Narragansett and the Mohegan are willing accomplices. The Pequot commit distasteful acts of violence and are clueless as to just how vindictive the English can be when provoked. Which is to say that there’s no one to root for. Well, one could root for Pequot babies not to be burned alive, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
As for geography, circa 1630, the Narragansett live in what would become the state of Rhode Island, hence their association with Roger Williams. The Narragansett are ruled by Canonicus and his nephew, Miantonomi. Untangling the Pequot and Mohegan is trickier as the two tribes are blood relatives with a long history of intermarriage and infighting. They control lands in Connecticut—the Mohegan on the Pequot River (now called the Thames), and the Pequot on the Connecticut River, the largest river in New England. The Mohegan have long paid tribute to the more powerful Pequot. The Mohegan sachem, Uncas, is married to the daughter of the assassinated Pequot principal sachem, Tatobem. In fact, after Tatobem’s death, Uncas had thrown his hat in the ring to become Tatobem’s successor but lost to Sassacus, his brother-in-law. This accounts for Uncas’s animosity toward his kin the Pequot—animosity being a polite way of saying Uncas hates the Pequot’s guts. Not that he has much affection for the Narragansett, either. In fact, Uncas will eventually order his brother to assassinate Miantonomi. But for now, the Mohegan and the Narragansett are allies of the English.
Why would the Mohegan and Narragansett gang up on their fellow natives the Pequot? Well, why would France, a monarchy, aid the upstart antimonarchical American colonists against its fellow monarchy England in the Revolutionary War? Simple answer: France hates England. The Pequot, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan are sovereign nations with a long history of resentment that predates European contact. And so the Mohegan and the Narragansett temporarily united in a traditional enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend scenario.
After European contact, each New England tribe’s power partially derives from trading with the Dutch in New Netherland and the English of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Uncas, a brilliant, forward-thinking opportunist, gambles his small, relatively powerless tribe’s fortunes and throws in with the English. Boy does this pay off. For this reason, Uncas is probably the most controversial historical figure in seventeenth-century New England. His brutality toward his brother Pequot comes off as morally sickening. And yet his tiny, dwindling tribe, under the Pequot thumb and decimated by the smallpox epidemic of 1633, is on the verge of extinction. As sachem, his responsibility is to save his people any way he knows how, and becoming an English ally is the most logical course of action. If the sachem’s name is ringing a bell, that’s because James Fenimore Cooper snagged it as the name of a character in
The Last of the Mohi cans,
his novel romanticizing the natives’ disappearing way of life. Real-life Uncas is taking drastic steps to stave off such oblivion, and he more or less succeeds.
By the time the Winthrop fleet arrived in Massachusetts in 1630, the Dutch of New Netherland had already ushered in what Neal Salisbury, author of
Manitou and Providence,
calls “the wampum revolution.” Wampum, strings of white and purple beads made out of clam and conch shells found primarily on Long Island but also in Narragansett Bay, was a form of Indian currency that had originally been more of a sacred object than mere money.
Salisbury writes that “the critical point in the rise of the Narragansett and the Pequot” came about in 1622, when a Dutch trader kidnapped a Pequot sachem “and threatened to behead him if he did not receive ‘a heavy ransom.’ ” The Dutchman received 140 strings of wampum right away and, “as a result . . . the Dutch West India Company discovered both the value to the Indians of wampum and the power and prestige of the Pequot.” Furthermore, Salisbury says, the resulting wampum craze “reinforced the dominant position of the Narragansett and particularly the Pequot, both of whom already had access to the prized shells.” (The two tribes’ power is also a testament to strength in numbers, both groups lucking out and being spared by the smallpox epidemic of 1619 that exterminated so many Indians in Massachusetts, though the epidemic of 1633 would affect them severely.)
The coastal Indians’ wampum could be traded for animal pelts trapped by Indians living in the continent’s interior, which would in turn be exported to Europe. The perfect symbol of this exchange is depicted in the official seal of New Netherland, which depicts a beaver surrounded by a string of wampum.
Put the rather frank Dutch seal next to Massachusetts Bay’s overly optimistic seal with that Indian pleading, “Come Over and Help Us”—and it’s easy to figure out the main concerns of white settlers in the Northeast: trade, God, and “fixing” the Indians.
On October 2, 1633, Winthrop writes in his journal about the return of his personal trading boat,
The Blessing of the Bay,
which he had sent south to Long Island and New Amsterdam. In the latter city, the Massachusetts men presented the Dutch governor with a letter explaining that Connecticut belonged to the king of England. They returned home with a “very courteous and respectful” letter for Winthrop in which the Dutchman countered that he believed Connecticut belonged to the Dutch West India Company but perhaps the company and the king should work it out themselves back in Europe.
That’s a reminder just how new European settlement in the New World still is. In 1633, Connecticut is the frontier.
In the same entry, Winthrop reports that even though the Dutch had already erected a trading post on the Connecticut River—on the site of present-day Hartford—Plymouth built its own spiteful post a mile upriver of the Dutch, thus cutting off much of the Dutch supply of furs. Such territorial spats did not sour Winthrop on Connecticut, though. He reports, erroneously, that the river runs so far north it “comes within a day’s journey of . . . the ‘Great Lake,’ ” presumably Lake Champlain. His lust for it is palpable when he writes, “From this lake, and the hideous swamps about it, come most of the beaver which is traded between Virginia and Canada.” Needless to say, that’s a lot of beaver.