11 et ch. 2

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Chapter 2 – American Experiments

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The preceding map, and the next two, are here to illustrate the great complexity, and the impact, of the Columbian Exchange. In the first map we see the trade routes that had been mapped out between 1492 and 1650. Although at this time the Spanish and Portuguese, and to a lesser degree, the Dutch, dominated global trade, this was not to last much longer; soon, the British and the French would supplant Spain and Portugal, joining the Netherlands (the Dutch) in a three-way race for wealth and power, in Europe and abroad.

The next two maps reveal some of the specifics of the Columbian Exchange, but the specifics are not as complete as I would like them to be. They give you a very good sense of the Exchange in terms of agriculture, but they do not “talk” at all about the subsoil, or mineral wealth to be found in the Americas. Gold and silver are just the most obvious discoveries; there was also turquoise, emeralds, jade, onyx, copper, etc. And what of manufactured good, the guns and other weapons, the tools, and every other thing you can name that men could make at this time in history: mirrors, books, dishes, playing cards, clothing, furniture, shoes, alcohol, bolts of cloth…the list goes on…and on…and on…but while I would like a map that showed all of that, I also understand that to clutter up the map with too much writing would render it useless, so – it is what it is.

Perhaps the strangest thing that was found in the Americas (in Nueva Espana, to be exact, or as we like to call it: Mexico) that could be turned into profit was the cochineal, a small beetle that, when crushed, produced a reddish dye called…cochineal. This dye was used in the creation of HIGHLY expensive clothing and furniture, and is still produced today in Mexico. (See the images related to this following the maps, just ahead.)

The Columbian Exchange, Enlarged Upon

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6Harvesting cochineal

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The humble cochineal, in person…

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Pirates, Magicians, and Armadas, Oh My!

Your book talks about pirates, and in particular those of English nationality

called the “sea dogs.” The most famous and successful sea dog of them all was

Sir Francis Drake (right), knighted by Queen Elizabeth I on the deck of his ship

The Golden Hind (which was given to him as a gift at the time of his

knighting). Your text discusses this, making mention of how Drake was

knighted because of one voyage that netted his backers 4,700% profit on their

investment. What it doesn’t tell you is that Elizabeth was one of his main

investors, and that’s the reason she went down to the harbor and knighted him on the deck of his ship – this is not

the normal behavior of queens. Any other time this would be done in

Buckingham Palace, and everyone would come to the queen. But Elizabeth was

so thrilled to hear of the pile of loot she was going to get as a result of Drake’s

piracy that she hiked up her royal skirts and took herself down to the docks just

as fast as she could get there to give the man his due.

But this raises a question – doesn’t it seem a little odd that a queen, and

other similarly wealthy people, should have been the financial backers of

violent, hard-bitten sea-going thieves? Artist Unknown

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So how did this modern piracy thing get started anyway? Well, to begin with, pirates have existed as long as sea-going shipping has existed, and that’s going back several thousand years. But the origins of modern piracy are all about the tremendous wealth that Spain and Portugal were getting out of their American colonies in the 1500s. The Dutch, the French, and mostly the British decided to steal as much of it as they could, and on the British end of it, that meant outfitting great ships, placing them in the hands of a capable captain and crew, financing the cost of their supplies, and letting them loose to wreak havoc on enemy shipping. The pirates were paid out of their plunder, but they also had to compensate their backers to the degree of x-percentage of their investment, as well as the value of the original investment. This then is where the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ began (not so golden if you were Spain and Portugal, clearly), and this is where the idea for the ride at Disneyland came from, and then those wretched movies came from that. Now think about those movies for a minute, and try to remember the pirates themselves…

Statue of Sir Francis Drake

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They looked kinda like this, right? In fact, exactly like this, and looking like this, what do they look like, in the year 2015? They look like homeless people, like guys living on Skid Row, or under a freeway overpass – don’t tell me you haven’t seen guys that look just like this on the street within the last week or so, somewhere in L.A., because I know you have. And the lesser pirates, the average crew members, look even worse, meaning even more like homeless people – bad hair; bad teeth; dirty, ill-fitting and unmatched clothing (and hey, I’m certainly not trying to disparage homeless people here – they deserve all of our assistance and sympathy; it’s the pirates I’m clowning!). Now think about this: in the 1500s and after, a major ship-of-the-line,

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a vessel capable of crossing oceans with possibly hundreds of men aboard, not to mention tremendous amounts of goods, was very nearly the most expensive man-made thing in the world, outside of grand buildings. So imagine today, a couple of dozen homeless people being given control of a 747 Jumbo Jet, or an ocean-going oil tanker – this boggles the imagination, no way it could happen. Did you ever ask yourself, when watching those wretched Pirates of the Caribbean movies (you know you’ve seen them all!), where did these clowns ever get a ship this big, and the money to outfit it, and their weapons, and…? Right, it’s a mystery. But it’s not, not really – wealthy investors paid people like this (of course the guys actually running the ship, the captain and his officers were something else, often men with some degree of education and status in society) to operate as pirates so they could profit off of their thievery. And in order to do it, they invented something unique in the world at that point – the joint-stock company, wherein a group of investors would pool their wealth to finance some sort of venture to create profits for themselves; they greater the investment, the greater the risk as well as the potential for wealth. This my friends, is where modern corporations began – IBN, Walmart, Microsoft, Ford Motors, Disney, Apple, Kodak, you name it – after all, with any modern corporation, can you not buy stock, for whatever cost, and run the risk of losing all or some of your investment, for the chance of increasing the value of your investment to whatever degree -- ? Sure, that’s the whole point of the stock market. So take it to the bank, folks (no pun intended): the genesis of modern corporations can be traced directly back to the birth of modern piracy.

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As I suggested earlier, Spain and Portugal were not thrilled about the activities of these pirates, and their ambassadors at the court of Elizabeth I complained mightily about these goings-on…all to no avail. Elizabeth acted as if she had no idea how such dreadful men could be up to such shenanigans, and all the Spanish and Portuguese could do was grind their teeth in aggravation – until they decided to do more.

The King of Spain and the ruler of the Spanish Empire was Philip II (pictured right), and by the mid-1880s he was well and truly fed up with England, her queen, and her queen’s sea dogs. Elizabeth was an affront to all the Catholic kings of Europe not just because of her pirates, and not just because she was a Protestant (think about what the book has told you about the hostility between Catholic and Protestant in the aftermath of the Reformation), but also because she was a woman and in control of one of the most powerful countries in Europe. The deeply Catholic Philip decided that it was for him to end all of this, and he set upon a plan to launch the mightiest naval invasion the world had ever seen, in order to attack and conquer England, remove Elizabeth from power (and maybe marry her, there is some debate about the legitimacy of this possible motive) and force the people of England back into the embrace of the Catholic Church. To this end he assembled a fleet of

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some 130 ships, loaded with more than 30,00 troops, and sent them north to subdue the English.

Elizabeth was wise to this well in advance due to the good work of her spies, and she summoned all of her ministers to a council of war. One of these men was John Dee (left), adviser to the Queen on matters astronomical and scientific over the course of several decades. In addition to these areas of study, Dee was also known as an alchemist and bibliophile, and an all-around scholar, legendary in his own lifetime. His legend was built upon many things, chief among them: he may or may not (that’s always a fun thing to find mid-sentence, hmm?) have turned lead into gold and interviewed thousands of angels through a scrying stone, all of whose names began with the letter ‘A.’ He also may or may not (there it is again!) have told Queen Elizabeth that he would save England by summoning a “Protestant Wind” from

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the north to come down and hurl the ships of the Armada upon the rocks, defeating the invasion with no Englishmen lost…he then (may or may not have) went to the southern-most tip of England, summoned said wind, and performed the greatest feat of magic in English history…maybe? Or maybe not? But forget maybe or maybe not – it’s a fact that an unseasonable storm DID thunder down from the north, into the English Channel, destroying a third of the Armada, leaving the rest to be defeated by the Royal Navy, forever crushing Philip’s dreams of defeating the English and their pesky sea dogs, not to mention spoiling his (supposed) notion of a hot date with Elizabeth. This epic naval defeat is considered to be the beginning of the end for Spanish supremacy in Europe…as well as the beginning of the beginning (I guess I can say that, right?) of England’s climb to the top of the heap as the greatest power in Europe. But that comes later.

Defeat of the Spanish Armada, artist unknown

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John Dee Performing an Experiment Before Queen Elizabeth IHenry Gillard Glindoni, date unknown

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Early settlement of Virginia, 1600s

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Anonymous portrait of Jacques Cartier, founder of New France; the next image is a statue of him in

Montreal

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OK, a primitive, hand-drawn map for you (by yours truly), because I can’t find anything online to serve my purposes. What do you see here before you? Behold…NEW FRANCE! If you are unfamiliar with the geography of the northeastern part of our country, around and beyond the Great Lakes, this map might be hard for you to make sense of, in which case you can look at the next map and relate it to what I have drawn here.

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A beaver skin, or, as it was more commonly referred to, a pelt.

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The official seal of the colony of New Netherlands, whose main community was New Amsterdam, and is now New York City. New Amsterdam was primarily located on the eastern side of the East River, in what is now Brooklyn, and was the Dutch Breukelen, which means marshland. A myth grew up after the British took over in the 1660s that the name ‘Brooklyn’ was an English bastardization of ‘broken land,’ which was attributed to the fact that the Brooklyn area (at least at that time) was not only marshy, but very uneven in terms of the terrain. Notice on the seal how the Dutch colonists, unlike the British Puritans to the north (coming up later in the slideshare), were entirely unapologetic about their motives in colonizing North America: beavers, or to put it another way, “We’re here for the money!”

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The Protestant Reformation and Its Impact Upon Europe and Surrounding Areas (Most of Christendom at This Time)

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The European Migration to New England. That’s a nice, formal title, but let’s elaborate upon it a bit. First, the overwhelming majority of these immigrants were English. Next, the purple lines below indicate movements of colonists from one colonial area to another. In addition, this map technically covers a bit more than New England, which is all of the states that are east of New York, that is to say: VT, NH, CT, RI, MA, and ME (if you didn’t learn your state abbreviations in grade school like you should’ve, now’s the time for catch-up – I’m short on space here); we also see movement into NJ and NY. I’m using present-day names just to visually orientate you. The main thing we care about is how strong the immigration of Puritans into Massachusetts is – that was their main destination, because it was the only colony that was governed BY Puritans, and mainly FOR Puritans.

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John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony

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King Philip’s War, aka Metacomet’s Rebellion

Your book does a good job of relating the main facts about this conflict between the colonists of New England and many of the Indian tribes of that region. But I’d like to add a few things to the tale. You may wonder why King Philip, or Metacomet, pictured at right, had two names? When the English colonists met Native American leaders who impressed them in some particular way, they tried to find a great figure from history who reminded them of the Indian leader, and when they did, they bestowed an “honorary” name upon the individual as a token of their respect. Metacomet was known for his courage and ability to make good decisions, which reminded the colonial leaders of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father, so they gave him the name. OK, Dave, so what’s the point? I want you to understand that they really respected this man, as they did many of the Indian leaders of the time. No doubt, the English (or all of them except Roger Williams), considered the Indians to be inferior to themselves overall, but they also recognized that they were the superiors of the English in many ways – better farmers and hunters, more skilled at woodcraft, etc.

The map on the following page is the next thing I want to talk about – take a look at it with this in mind: the first European colonists arrived in this region in 1620 (the Pilgrims at Plymouth), and by the early 1670s, so many had followed that they had spread out and filled up the land to an astonishing degree – just look at the

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areas of white settlement, and look at the scale of miles, and think: in only two generations, about fifty years, the colonists had laid claim to/negotiated/or won in war (with the Pequots in 1637) about 30% of the land of New England, or what any of these Indian tribes would have referred to simply as the “world,” as they had no larger frame of reference. Look at tribes like the Pocumtucks or the Pennacooks – they were located in the interior so that by the 1670s they had not yet truly felt the pinch of the land hunger of the colonists; but then look around Plymouth and Rhode Island, at the Narragansetts and Wampanoags; they were amongst the earliest tribes to encounter the colonists, and in one way or another had lost almost all of their lands by the time of King Philip’s War.

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So why didn’t they fight back, Dave? These guys were supposed to be tough, right? Did they just let the colonists take everything from them - ?

Same story as the Aztecs, just a different place and time, folks – disease.

Your book gives you the numbers: in fifty years, 120,000 Native Americans had diminished to 16,000; and some scholars argue the original population was more like 250,000, making the loss of life even more horrific. Think about what happens to a

society when it loses appr. 85% of its population that fast. Who dies first?

The old and the young, the people’s past and memory of who they were, the living repositories of their knowledge of themselves; and the future, the promise of hope and

happiness and survival – they were the first to die. And the colonists are not only taking more land, but they are also NOT dying, which seems to show that their God IS stronger than the supernatural powers worshipped by the Indians – which is what the colonists

had been saying all along.

So when a fiery leader like Metacomet comes along, and rallies the spirits of the warriors in a bid to turn back the clock, to take back what is theirs, to defeat the English and drive them out of their lands…they bought into it, or many of the Indians did, a half

dozen tribes, those mentioned by your text as well as the Podunks, Massachusetts, and Nashaway. Other Indians, like the remaining Pequots, fought on the side of the

colonists.

OK, so what do the English think of this, when the attacks begin? Well, to begin with, you have to understand that the English thought there were FAR more than 16,000

Indians living in their region; they’d have told you that they were GREATLY outnumbered by the Indians because they believed that to be the case. So their initial reaction to the

outbreak of hostilities was to go into a panic, because they believed they’d be overwhelmed by a superior enemy. Once the governments of the various colonies

began to exchange letters and information, they got a clearer picture of what it was they were up against…and that’s when they got mad…and after mad they they got

organized…and after organized, they got even.

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Native Americans and Europeans (all of them, not just the English) had very different ideas about how to make war. Two Indian tribes might have fought on and off for a

month, and if each side lost a dozen men, it would be considered a great and horrifically violent conflict – for the British, this was just a weekend of heavy drinking and

shenanigans in central London. In the European part of the world where, for many centuries, territory and resources had been at a premium, the English had learned the art of total war. Total war meant destroy your enemy, utterly; kill not just the men, but

their women and children if needs be; destroy their crops, burn their homes, poison their water supply. None of this made any sense to the Indians – they never learned to fight

like this because there had never been any reason – killing too many men would, in fact, have been seen by them as a great crime, because it would diminish the people’s ability

to produce enough babies to remain strong. They never set out to destroy an enemy people.

Let one example underline the true difference between the European and the Native American way of making war: let’s say that a conflict between two Indian clans broke

out in late July, and they fought back and forth, with daring raids and counter-attacks for three or four weeks; about that time one of the warriors would have said, ‘Brothers, it is nearly time to harvest the crops – the war is over.’ And both sides would have agreed to

stop fighting, and maybe even agreed to start the hostilities up again the following spring, six-seven months later. So why stop fighting? Because if they didn’t harvest the crops at the right time, they’d all go to waste, and if that happened, there would not be

enough food for the clan during the winter, the women, children, and elderly might hunger, and if it was the men’s job to fight, was it not just as much their responsibility to

do their part to feed their people?

So there was no fighting during the crucial time of the crop harvest.

But the English, and other Europeans had a different rule book for war. They came from MUCH larger societies, where there was much greater competition for resources, and where there were plenty of men to take care of the farms, and do many, many other

things, and lots of men left over to go out and fight…all day…every day…according to the rules of total war.

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So when the colonists got mad after the early attacks in 1675, and they compared information, they decided to form an alliance between the various colonies, the New England Confederacy. They shared information, strategies, and resources, and they

brought the hammer down on the Indians, and before too very much time went by, the Indians were defeated. They were out-numbered, out-gunned, out-diseased, and out-warred; one might consider it a miracle that any of them survived at all, but they did.

Over 2500 colonial lives were lost, but perhaps as many as 13,000+ Indian lives; somewhere between 60-80% of the native population was lost as result of the war. And

20% of the towns of MA and RI were burned to the ground.

Metacomet himself was killed, and once dead, was drawn and quartered, and his limbs and torso were hung in trees; his head was mounted on a pike and was displayed at the

gate of Fort Plymouth for two decades, and his wife and children were captured and sold into slavery in the sugar islands of the Caribbean, to destroy, root and stem, any

possibility of Metacomet’s vengeance coming back on the people of New England.

I have read here and there that Metacomet’s head, before being displayed at Fort Plymouth, was paraded to every town in New England, to show people, in person as it were, that their great nemesis was well and truly dead. That may or may not be true. But whether it is or is not, the whole affair was terrible from start to finish, and doubly so when you consider that the official seal or sigil of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (or

Society) was an image of an Indian, with bow in one hand and arrow in the other, saying with a cartoon art word balloon, ‘Come over and help us.’

Well, the English colonists certainly did help the Indians of New England – they helped nearly all of them straight into the grave.

What? You think I’m making this up? It’s right on the next “page”…

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See? Sometimes truth really IS stranger than fiction…

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Settlements of the Chesapeake Bay Region by 1700

35Governor William Berkeley “baring his chest” to Nathaniel Bacon, daring him to strike

the first blow

36Bacon’s Rebellion: The March on Jamestown,

Howard Pyle, date unknown

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Bacon’s Rebellion: The Burning of Jamestown, 1676, Artist and Date Unknown. The original Jamestown was never rebuilt and the site was only rediscovered in 1994; since then, over 1 million artifacts have been discovered there by archaeologists.