"Vile and Clamorous Reports" from New England: The Specter of Indigenous Conspiracy in Early Plymouth

This essay tracks the role of conspiracy and paranoia in Edward Winslow's Good News from New England (1624) and argues that the belief in a conspiracy against the colony is central to the text's representation of native culture and politics. Published in the wake of an early instance of New England settler violence, the so-called Wessagusset Massacre, Winslow's account presents the Plymouth Colony as beset by an amorphous indigenous plot—despite an admitted dearth of direct evidence for such a plot. Approaching the imputed conspiracy as a method of representing the settlement's history (and not merely as a mistaken belief about that history) emphasizes the structuring role of paranoia in Winslow's understanding of native actions and culture. The text employs the notion of a native conspiracy as both an improvised heuristic for interpreting encounters with various indigenous groups and as a means of narrating those complex encounters for an English readership. By tracking the function of conspiracy and paranoia in Good News, this article probes the dynamic relationship between representation, interpretation, and encounter in this early moment of English settler colonialism.