Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Chapter 10. ''Collecting Americans'': The Anglo-American Experience from Cabot to NAGPRA

chapter 10 k ‘‘Collecting Americans’’: The Anglo-American Experience from Cabot to NAGPRA Peter C. Mancall ‘‘[The English] will not give a doit to relieve a lame begger, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.’’ —William Shakespeare, The Tempest, II:2 In the early modern era, some European visitors to the Western Hemisphere thought they would take indigenous Americans home with them. Christopher Columbus was the first to do so, but soon after, Sebastian Cabot did the same thing, as did many Europeans who traveled to the Americas before the mideighteenth century. Historians have tended to understand the movement of Americans across the Atlantic Ocean as a portent of incipient slavery, the development of long-distance diplomacy, or the expression of a European craving to understand the ‘‘other.’’1 But this particular population movement can also be understood as a problem in the history of collecting: Europeans were keen to collect American bodies, alive and dead, and that passion continued for five hundred years. Scholars have already paid enormous attention to early modern European understandings of Native American bodies. But questions relating to American bodies long predated modern scholarly inquiries. Why, many early modern Europeans wondered, did natives die in such large numbers from diseases that had little impact on newcomers? One classic early modern expression of this problem came from William Bradford, governor and historian of the English colony at Plymouth in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Observing a devastating epidemic of smallpox among Americans in 1634, Bradford noted that ‘‘by the marvelous goodness and providence of God, not one of the English was so much sick or in the least measure tainted with this disease, though they daily did these offices for them many weeks together.’’2 Other Europeans also recognized that Americans died from a multitude of diseases once invaders arrived. This observation led to speculation about the nature of American bodies and disputes over the causes of mortality. At times, as in Roanoke in the mid-1580s, natives and newcomers offered competing theories about the causes for American fragility.3 Over time these discussions became more elaborate. Americans died because they would not embrace Christianity; they lived in squalor and their residences bred infection; they were culturally inferior and had no effective way to cope with the changes to their lives and the effects of these changes on their bodies.4 By the late twentieth century scholars settled on the theory of so-called virgin soil epidemics: Americans died because they lacked immunities to newly arriving infectious disease agents.5 This antiracist theory, to use the notion of the physiologist Jared Diamond, purportedly explained American deaths without any reference to culture or religious practice and had the added benefit of embracing basic epidemiological principles. Unfortunately, as the psychiatrist/ historian David Jones has revealed, the theory is also wrong. Many Americans could have survived the arrival of these pathogens had they not also suffered from invasion and the resulting breakdown of their economies, including the ability of members of a community to provide care for others. Americans died not only because they lacked immunities but their bodies also succumbed because Europeans’ understanding of them precluded sustained efforts to tend to the afflicted.6 The European (and later Anglo-American) desire to understand Americans’ bodies and especially the widespread mortality continued for centuries. Recent explanations for the steep decline in the number of Americans from 1492 to circa 1900 pivot on changes in diet, for example, as well as the introduction of infectious diseases.7 The growth of the Euro-American population also put stresses on indigenous communities, especially when individuals or groups had to move to new locales, a circumstance that often meant adjusting their economies and rituals to new circumstances (such as the presence or absence of certain animals). Europeans also introduced commodities, notably firearms and alcohol, which invariably contributed to American population decline because of the increase in violence that followed colonization.8 Taken together, the combination of what the historian Alfred Crosby referred to as the ‘‘Columbian Exchange’’ (the movement of biological matter across the early modern world) and Europeans’ inability (or reluctance) to provide even minimal palliative care ‘‘collecting americans’’ 193 194 peter c. mancall led to a crisis in the Americas. That crisis focused on the body of Americans. It unfolded long after Europeans had begun their systematic investigation into the nature...