From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600-1830

2. Natives on the Land

18 Two Natives on the Land The Arrival of Europeans: First Impressions The meetings of Indians and Europeans—Dutch, French, and English, but earlier Basques, Portuguese, and Italians—on the coast and soon thereafter in the interior of northeastern North America, began a long period of a mutual stocktaking. Where appropriate, it is the rare history that does not provide something of these encounters, however clouded by time and inclination the tales might be. Because of the scattered, cursory, and often adumbrated nature of the accounts left by sailors, soldiers, and other enterprising first arrivals, assessments have been broadly regional in scope rather than being directed at a specific locality . At the same time, they tend to incorporate the experiences of many Native peoples rather than a single group, while others have been topical in approach. Until relatively recently most efforts centered on the views Europeans held of Indians, with little attention paid to what Indians might have volunteered about events taking place around them. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, there began a countervailing move to create an “Indian perspective” in writing histories , which some believed might be found in contemporary Native voices. Whatever promise adopting such a point of view has offered, it can easily be argued that no modern-era non-Native or, for that matter, Native has the wherewithal to call up from a past some four centuries deep anything resembling an “Indian perspective.” This is not to say that comparative, carefully parsed, and culturally sensitive readings of the accounts Natives on the Land 19 left by Europeans do not lead to a deeper understanding of Native people, especially for the early years of contact.1 Arguably the most effective methodology to accomplish this task—ethnohistory —is today practiced routinely by many anthropologists and historians.2 Briefly stated, and for present purposes, ethnohistory marries firsthand descriptions that flowed from the pens of early European explorers and colonists with similarly recorded Native oral traditions; for example, stories of the earliest encounters told by Indians to these same Europeans, or sometimes decades later to those who had followed in their footsteps. Information drawn from these sources is then measured and tested against what can be found in the ethnological literature, all of which is fixed firmly in historical context. There exist just a few recorded descriptions of the initial meeting of Europeans—widely assumed to have been Henry Hudson and his mixed Dutch and English crew—and Mahicans that contain within them impressions, if only tenuous, of these Native people. The first two are from Emanuel van Meteren and Robert Juet, the latter, in all probability, the navigator on the Halve Maen.3 Van Meteren, a historian, served for many years as Dutch consul in London. His general history of the Netherlands, published in 1610, contains a short section on Hudson’s third voyage to the “New World,” from April to November 1609, with the Halve Maen entering Sandy Hook Bay on September 2. It is likely that Van Meteren’s information was drawn from Juet’s journal, which lends credibility to his rather brief remarks: “In the lower part of the river they [Hudson’s crew] found strong and warlike people; but in the upper part they found friendly and polite people, who had an abundance of provisions, skins, and furs . . . and many other commodities . . . [that] they traded amicably with the people.”4 It has been suggested that this perceived line of demarcation between the Indians living in the lower and upper valley, which may have been in the vicinity of Germantown and Catskill, corresponded roughly to the geographical, cultural, and linguistic 20 Natives on the Land boundaries that separated the Mahicans from the Munsees.5 As Juet reported, it was on upper New York Bay that one of Hudson ’s crew was killed by an arrow shot to the throat. This followed from a favorable appraisal during the time the ship was at anchor in Sandy Hook. There, Juet wrote, “the people of the Countrey came aboard of us, seeming very glad of our comming, and brought greene Tabacco, and gave us of it for Knives and Beads. . . . They desire Clothes, and are very civill.” The next day the Indians again boarded the ship. At nightfall “they went on Land againe, so wee rode very quiet,” adding, with some foreboding , “but durst not trust them.”6 But the question arises as to...