With pure hearts and empty heads

From Love & Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price. Page 11.

To understand what the English actually meant, though, one has to set aside the intervening four hundred years of American racial history. Seen through the prism of those four hundred years, the English attitude looks like racism; how could it not be? Improbably enough, though, the English of 1606 were not generally racist in their view of the Virginia natives—not in the conventional sense. The English did not believe that white people like themselves were innately superior and the natives innately inferior; savagery had nothing to do with biology. It also did not signify that the natives were necessarily fierce (some tribes were, some weren’t). For the English, “savagery” instead referred to the cultural condition of primitivity. The opposite of “savage” was not “white”; it was “civilized” or “Christian.”

This may sound, at first, like a distinction without a difference, but its implications were significant. It meant savagery was only the starting point for a people’s progression toward modernity. It was a temporary condition, which did not render those within it less than fully human. Savages could not rightfully be enslaved. Violence could not be unleashed against savages without just cause. Reflecting the spirit of the time, Strachey wrote of the natives, “We are taught to acknowledge every man that beareth the impression of God’s stamp to be not only our neighbor but to be our brother.” John Smith later denounced an English mariner named Thomas Hunt for capturing twenty-seven natives in New England and selling “these poore innocent soules” into slavery in Spain.

The English did not exclude themselves from the progression: in the days of Roman conquest, as the English now saw it, the Britons themselves were the savages. The civilizing influence of the Roman conquerors, and later of the Christian gospel, had lifted the English up from that savagery. Supporters of the colony expected it to bestow the same benefits on the natives through a relationship of benevolent cultural imperialism—peaceable unless the natives struck first—and mutually beneficial trade.

The lack of a racial component to the English attitudes is unsurprising, given that the English in fact regarded the natives as white people (unlike the Moors and black Africans they knew by reputation). The natives were born white, the English believed, and then their skin changed color—from the effects of the dyes that they used to decorate themselves and to ward off mosquitoes. (A colonist aboard the first voyage would recall, “Their skynn is tawny, not so born, but with dying and paynting themselves, in which they delight greatly“.” Another suggested, “They would be of good complexion if they would leave painting, which they use on their face and shoulders.”) After an Englishman named William Parker was captured by the natives and reunited with the colonists several years afterward, an observer marveled that Parker had “grown so like both in complexion and habit to the Indians that I only knew him by his tongue to be an Englishman.”

While English attitudes were enlightened by the standard of the era, they were not totally benign from the natives’ viewpoint. Far from it: the civilizing effect of the Romans’ influence served, in turn, as a justification for the English to settle in Virginia in the first place. “Why, what injury can it be to people of any nation for Christians to come unto their ports, havens, or territories,” William Strachey asked, “when the law of nations, which is the law of God and man, doth privilege all men to do so?”

It was no injury at all, he answered. The English settlers were merely doing for the natives what others had done for the English: “Had not this violence and this injury been offer’d unto us by the Romans “, we might yet have lived overgrown Satyrs, rude and untutor’d, wand’ring in the woods, dwelling in caves, and hunting for our dinners as the wild beasts in the forests for their prey.” Similarly, the Virginia Company argued that it was justifiable to occupy part of the local land, not only because there was plenty of unoccupied territory on the huge continent to go around, but also because “there is no other moderate and mix’d course to bring them to conversion but by daily conversation where they may see the life and learn the language of each other.” In the end, the backers of the colony believed, the natives would be grateful: “Their children when they come to be saved, will blesse the day when first their fathers saw your faces.”12

So it was that the members of the first Jamestown voyage boarded the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery on December 19 and 20 of 1606—most of them with pure hearts and empty heads, expecting to find riches, welcoming natives, and an easy life on the other shore.