EDEN AND EMPIRE: THE MERCANTILE MAKING OF AMERICAN COLONIAL HUSBANDRY

1 0 4 Y E D E N A N D E M P I R E T H E M E R C A N T I L E M A K I N G O F A M E R I C A N C O L O N I A L H U S B A N D R Y D A N I E L J . K E V L E S When European conquerors and settlers first arrived in North America, they found an abundant garden. It enabled their immediate survival and promised future sustenance and profit, inspiring colonists like the New Englander Thomas Graves to write in his seventeenth-century script: ‘‘I neuer came in a more goodly Country in all my life . . . it is very beautifull in open Lands, mixed with goodly woods. . . . Euery thing that is here eyther sowne or planted prospereth far better than in old England.’’ Indians, to use the colonists’ name for the natives, grew corn and sweet potatoes as well as peanuts, peppers, tomatoes, and multiple types of squash and beans. The newcomers were wary of some of these foods, notably tomatoes, which had originated in Central America. While the Spanish had taken to them with gusto, finding them, as a Jesuit missionary and naturalist in Peru put it, ‘‘full of juyce,’’ ‘‘good to eat,’’ and giving ‘‘a good taste to sauce,’’ the northern settlers associated them with the poisonous deadly nightshade, called them love apples, and grew them for ornament. There were no reservations about corn, which Indians grew in several varieties, including flint, with its white cobs, hard kernels, and slender stalks of modest height, and a big-eared, 1 0 5 R high-stalk corn that the white settlers called gourdseed after the shape of their soft kernels. Indians processed their corn into meal, mashed it into a paste called pone, or roasted the ears and popped the kernels in their fires. In 1624, by a contemporary account, residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ‘‘began now highly to prise corne more pretious then silver.’’ By the early eighteenth century, ‘‘Indian corn’’ was the dominant field crop in most of the colonies and second only to wheat in the rest. The continent hosted more than two hundred species of trees, bushes, vines, small fruits, and nuts. Walnuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts , and hazelnuts grew prolifically in the wild, free for the taking , and so did black and red raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, strawberries, huckleberries, persimmons, grapes, plums, Jerusalem artichokes, and crab apples. Indians cultivated a few of the small fruits. A Swedish colonist relished their watermelons, reporting that they were very large, each giving up to three tankards of full liquor,‘‘abeautifulfleshcolor’’inside,taste‘‘delightful,anditmelts in the mouth like sugar.’’ Especially impressive were their strawberries : ‘‘the wonder of all the Fruits growing naturally in those parts,’’ a European observer noted of mid-seventeenth-century Delaware; ‘‘it is of itself excellent so that one of the chiefest Doctors of England was wont to say that God could have made, but God never did make a better Berry. In some parts where the Natives have planted, I have many times seen as many as would fill a good ship within a few miles compasse; the Indians bruise them in a Morter, and mixe them with meale and make a strawberry bread.’’ Some of the flora inspired commercial visions. Tobacco, which Indians cultivated and smoked, quickly turned into a cash crop, exported from the southern colonies northward and across the Atlantic. Wild mulberry trees gave rise to hopes for the development of a silk industry, and the hemp growing in Virginia and elsewhere seemed an equal or superior source of fiber for paper, rope, and cloth than the English variety. Europeans imagined the production of satisfying wine from the lush grapevines, heavy with fruit, that twined through the bushes and trees. French vignerons from Languedoc, sent by the Virginia Company to its colony in 1619, reported that the prospects for wine were favorable. Still, the settlers found the new Eden inadequate to their appetites . The continent lacked some of the staple fiber plants, many of 1 0...