Oh Our Dear Wabbit . . .
The accounts of the
early explorers of Austrialia, such as Sturt, Flinders, Bass, Eyre, Kennedy and many, many others, when they survived to give the account, report hostility and violent attacks by the aboriginal inhabitants. A similar pattern seems to me to have played itself out in English-speaking North America, and in those portions of the Americas which the Spanish explored. An initial reaction of the aboriginal inhabitants was either pity for or contempt of the starving, newly-arrived people, whose pale countenances often convinced the aboriginals that they were very ill, even thought this was not necessarily true. Many examples can be adduced in North America of the aboriginals feeding and offering other types of assistance to the first settlers.
However, if the reaction were contempt, and the Jamestown settlement in 1607 in what is now Virginia is a sterling example, the newcomers might be subjected to frequent attack and near constant harrassment. In the example of Jamestown, the newcomers unwittingly chose the shore of the Chesapeake which was inhabited by warrior societies--which circumstance was forced upon those tribes by the active, violent aggression of their relatively recently arrived neighbors, the Potomacs and the Susquehannocks. Those tribes, along with the local tribes, were all competing for the limited resources available, and which had been much reduced both by the rapid increase in aboriginal population as "new" tribes moved south, by the wanton, benighted destruction of some of the ecosystems in the earlier, abortive Spanish colonies in this region, and specifically in the first decade of the 17th century, by a prolonged period of drought. For more than a decade, the Jamestown settlement lost about 90% of its population each year. The constant arrival of new settlers was all that kept the colony populated--and it caused a justified alarm among the aboriginal. As time passed and the Virginia company failed, the Royal government took over the enterprise, and, increasingly, the new arrivals were "yoemen" farmers and itinerant agricultural laborers, who were becoming surplus population in England as the pace of enclusure sped up, and more and more of the rural "peasantry" were thrown out into the road. These people were, however, physically heartier stock than the "gentlemen," and "quasi-gentlemen" who had made up the first colonists of the Viriginia Company. Warfare became more deadly for the aboriginal, and they retaliated with more fury. This eventually lead to the 1622 war, which was general throughout the Tidewater, and for which the debacle at
Martin's Hundred has become an archetype. More than 20% of the casualties sustained in that summer of war fell among the roughly 150 settlers there.
Commerce was common among the aboriginals of the North American continent, a kind of pack-what-you-can-on-your-back and go walk-about kind of commerce. There is abundant evidence for this in the records of the Hudson's Bay Company, the correspondence and journals of the Jesuits who went out to Thunder Bay and then spread out among the Huron and the Algonquian tribes, and in the correspondence and journals of the Moravian Missionaries (who filtered west out of eastern Pennsylvania, and often moved unmolested even in the midst of raging war, because the Indians became convinced that they were all infected with lunancy [how else explain their suicidal peregrinations?] and therefore sacred and immune). It took very likely less than a generation for almost every band from Hilton Head to Father of Waters to become at least vaguely aware of the arrival of pale-faced people with terrible and murderous magic at their disposal. I find it hard to imagine why anyone would wonder why there was near constant warfare between a set of tribesmen just arriving in a technological age, and a set of tribesmen relatively recently arrived in a Neolithic state. I stronly suspect that someone cleverer than i could make a case from the dispassionately viewed records of the colonization or attempted-colonization of the planet by Europeans that these wars were inevitable, and that "genocide" was often the, sometimes intended, sometimes unintended consequence thereof.
Samuel de Champlain* is the father of Quebéc, whether one means the city or the "province" (i personally think nation would be a better term). Champlain rather quickly and readily made friends with the Ottawas, and thereby, the more civilized of the Algonquian tribes (Champlain and La Salle both report that there were Algonquian-speaking tribes living on the rocky shores of the lower (northeastern) banks of the St. Laurent who were primitive savages in comparison to the relatively affluent Algonquian tribes of the Lakes). As a result of this diplomacy, Champlain and three companions soon set out with an Ottawa war party, which had news of an Iroquois war band in the upper Lakes region of what is now New York. The Iroquois, being a politic and sanguinary body by nature, took the grossest umbrage to the conduct of the French, and blamed them fully for their defeat, and the consequent indignity of having their captive warriors tortured eaten by the Ottawa. (
*[/color] The site here linked is of rather dubious value--see for example the account it gives of this fight as compared to what one will find in Parkman--for which what i've written above is a
précis . . . more or less.) There was thereafter, war in every generation between the French and the Iroquois. Even the great
Louis de Baude, Comte de Frontenac was never free of the menace of their implacable emnity. In the great age of the exploration of the west--which ought to bear the name of
René-Robert-Cavelier, le Sieur de La Salle--the French spread into what is now the heart of America. People such as
Hennepin and
le Père Jacques Marquette all provide a brief lifting of the curtain on that prehistoric time in the lives of the aboriginals. One of La Salle's loyal officers,
Henri de Tonti, recounted the attempt of the Iroquois to exterminate the
Illiniwek (known to the French as the Illinois). The Iroquois had become so obsessed with the destruction of the French, that they had, in political convocation, determined to engross the fur trade of the Great Lakes through the simple expedient of exterminating the tribes thereof. It was to prove a disaster for all concerned, and for none more than it was for the Iroquois.
I have little doubt that word of the new pale strangers spread very quickly through the last dreamers awakening from the Dream Time in that last decade of the 18th century in Oz. I have little doubt that when Sturt fought aboriginals, the terms of the field and the rules of the game were already in place, with the locals determined to wipe out this new human virus, and virus intent on using just as much gunpowder as it took the make their way across the countryside. Historical truth does not truly exist, but neither is there much truth for us to hang onto in the courses of our lives. We exercise judgment about our contemparies and the human race as it now exists. The evidence of history is no more nor less reliable than the media we now consult, and we all manage to convince ourselves of what we would most fondly care to believe at all events.
"Fadism" in history is about as exciting as, and about as meaningful as, the deepest pyschology of cyclical trends in fashionable clothing. The study of why people come to believe that of which they wished to be convinced, however, is a far more engrossing read than mere shifts and smoking jackets.
(For an enchanting read on the history of the French in North America, see the seven volumes of the 19th century American historian,
Francis Parkman. Modern specialists will have much to carp at--and there is no fuller and no more comprehensive a read on this important and little regarded period in the European history of my native continent. For a grim and rather honest (for aught that i know) account of
The First Fleet (awfully grim when reduced to a list of names and sentences, no?) and it successors until the end of the penal colony, see
The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, and then be sure to finish the job with
Beyond the Fatal Shore[/i]. To begin to learn something about the aboriginals who fell before this relentless human tide, start with
the Dream Time.
This should not be construed as a statement that the French had a superior or an inferior colonial system to the English. Theirs was radically different than the English. The colonies were under control of the
ministre de la Marine, for what was to the French the obvious advantages of having the Navy control enterprises which could only be visited at the end of a long sea voyage. As the centuries long craze in Europe for hats made from beaver felt and the demand for exotic furs deepened, the lure of instant riches through the fur trade was irresistible young officers of the Canadian army (the Marine Ministry maintained a professional force of French troops recruited from the Canadian population--they were largely Basques and Gascognards) and the Royal Navy, and of course the petty officers of government. The corruption eventually became pandemic in society, to the point where the last governor, Vaudreuil, and the last
intendant (roughly, "King's auditor"] Bigot were stealing the province blind, even as
Louis Joseph, Marquis the Montcalm-Gozon marched out to meet his fatal wounds in the same battle which killed his rival
James Wolfe, posthumous conquerer of la Nouvelle France.
Both the French and
the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay however, had a major distinction in common. Their livelihood in the worst years, and their fabulous wealth in the best years, came from
not colonizing the interior. Both the French and the HBC positively discouraged the settlement of the interiors of the continent. People like Cadillac at Detroit, d'Iberville at New Orleans, and "lesser" men along the mid-Mississippi valley were royally-favored exceptions which proved the rule. HBC only gradually penetrated the interior, and then in response to first the French (d'Iberville's claim to fame was to captured all of the posts of Hudson Bay during the Nine Years War in Europe), and then the Franco-English traders from Montréal, and finally the Americans coming up the Missouri. They only began to push their "factories" (company stores) inland to assure that they were always closer to the pelt and fur bearing regions than the competition. The trappers and traders, the
coureurs du bois, don't like to see the settlers come, it spoils their party. By and large, the aboriginals of central and western Canada suffered far less from the advent of the ghost men in the great white birds upon the water. All of the central purpose of this enterprise, however, went bust in a season, when
Albert, Prince and Prince Consort, decided to wear top hats made of silk on pasteboard rather than felt . . . so . . . perhaps mere shifts and smoking jackets might prove an interesting field of investigation as well.)