I picked up, this past week, a history of King Philip's War - that little-known, much misremembered rising in New England in the 1670's - a scant half century after the arrivals of the Pilgrims, and their supposedly idyllic relations with the Whampoags, learning how to survive in the very different climate of new England. The result of this rising, and the police action of the New England settlers was to virtually eliminate all the local natives, and do much to set the tone for the actions of New Englanders, and all Americans since then, when faced with opposition by outsiders.
Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, (Viking/Penguin, 2006) writes, as any good historian does, from a slant. Why? Simply because all historians MUST have an angle, an outlook, a reason to write, to tell this particular tale, whether it be, like the late Sir Winston Churchill, at least in part, to validate his own decisions made in the politics of the time, to advance a particular political agenda, or to attempt to make internal sense of the events on the author's lifetime, in light of older history. I first became aware of this, back in the early 1960's, when I devoured CV Wedgewood's opus The Thirty Years War while away from home on a summer job. It was quite apparent that the horrors suffered throughout the Germanies (remember, there was no such unified state, then) over those three decades resonated with her own experiences in England, up to the outbreak of the second World War.
If anything, the horrors in that war, particularly the Holocaust, Hitler's "Final Solution" of the Jewish Problem, find deep antecedents in that time.
She claimed, in her preface to the post-war edition, that any serious historian MUST be a moralist, as well as a relater of facts. I tend to agree - if we do not have a reason, all we have is a dry list of "facts', which may, or may not have relevance or coherence. nor is it enough to tell the reader to draw his own conclusions - for if MY bias is not the same as the writer's, my conclusions, my understanding, will be quite at variance with his, and I will not be compelled to think, however shallowly, about why his, or my, bias should be right - or that we might, just possibly, both be wrong. No, the writer must have his own interpretation, and must not be shy about drawing the conclusions that the facts, and his understanding, lead him to.
So - what has this to do with Philbrick's Mayflower? Quite simply, it is this: that the Pilgrims, and the Puritans, harried out of England in their objection to the policies of King Charles I, and his spiritual advisor, William Laud (both of them, by the bye, far closer in spirituality to the Dissenters they tried to compel into conforming to the uses of the Church of England, than either side would admit was so) were so closed-minded, so God-stricken, that it took great hardship - starvation, freezing, and the loss of many of their companies, to make them aware that things were NOT as they'd left behind, that this climate required a real change of living habits, of diet. At the same time, their motives for planting themselves out here, far from home (A west-bound crossing of six weeks was fast! Many were far longer, if they made it at all.) was not just the chance to live a Godly life (as they thought) far from the interference of Laud and the King, but also a chance to better themselves, to get rich, in the only form of wealth that really counted - land. In part, this was aided by circumstance. In the first decades of the 17th century, New England was swept by disease, am plague, accidentally brought by the European fishermen who'd found the rich resources of this coast, where Arctic and Gulf currents mix foods, and fish, long untouched, throve mightily. These visitors, Cornish, Breton, French, Basque, Portuguese, were all of them immune to the stock illnesses of Europe, including its latest acquisition, the Plague. The American natives, however, had never been exposed before, and the results were disastrous. In the three years just before the arrival of the Pilgrims, up to 90% of the native population were wiped out.
It looked, seemed, as if there were no people here, yet there was evidence that they had been, not long before, and that they'd cultivated land for crops. When the arriving English did meet the remnants of the natives, neither quite knew what to do, how to act. It took a decision of courage from one native leader, Massasoit, to start a process of accommodation.
Yet still, as the record bares out, the English engaged in distinctly sharp practice in getting their way - title to lands - for as chap a price as they could. A generation or so later, by the 1670's, this near-theft, and the unconscionable harrying of natives had not stopped, but rather increased (Families were large, and America, in general, far healthier than Europe) Even attempts by the natives to learn the ways of these settlers (and learn, they did, and soon discovered that they could use the white man's technology as well as the English) brought them no peace. They were distrusted as different, foreign (this, by newcomers!) and inherently deceitful - and this mainly from the intolerable pressure put upon them by the English to sell off their land, and get out.
The notion that the only good Indian (or rebel, or gook, or Arab - strange how the syllogism persists, even when the object changes) was a dead one, took firm root in this time. Consequently, when a rising of one small people - King Philip's Pocassets (Philip was a younger son of Massasoit, of fifty years previously) - erupted, the settlers all believed that this was a general rising of ALL Indians, and if it wasn't, it would be better to deport, or kill, even those who were not involved. This, of course, virtually guaranteed that even the least willing to revolt would do so - if only in an attempt to save their lives, their homes and families, their livelihood. The result was virtually a foregone conclusion - there were too few warriors, too many settlers for anything else to occur.
It was a sad start to the founding of America, but it helps to explain, I think, the obsession with weapons in the United States. This visceral fear of weakness, of Indian attack, must lie buried deep at the roots of their need to be armed at all times, even if it is quite forgotten, and overlain with misunderstood shibboleths about the "right to bear arms". The other thing I draw from this tale is that, over the last - virtually four hundred years, now - Americans - particularly their military leadership, have learned nothing about how to relate to smaller peoples, even those we profess to wish to aid.
The attitude then, as now, is: "Do it MY way - if not, I'll make you do it." When attempts at coercion fail (as the English should have learned in Scotland and France in the 13th to 15th centuries, and never did learn in Ireland) then other ways of getting co-operation must be tried, and one of the first must be real respect and acceptance. The typical response, though, is coercion until somebody kicks, at which point our historic paranoia kicks in, and the only thing we can do is attempt to wipe out everyone, even those we came to assist.
This is not to say that Americans are evil. They are merely human, like everyone else on this planet. Not can I possibly claim that all others have done better. We have only to look at the mess that is Ireland, or Palestine/Israel, at the recurring genocides in Africa. In fact, anywhere we look, we see that we do not treat our neighbours well - least of all those whose goods (resources?) or land we covet. I come away from this volume, not with disgust - there were, even then, fair, honest, just men and women, on both sides - but with a better appreciation of why my neighbours are what they are.
Understanding is central to seeing both sides of the person looked at.
