The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 17trade. Samuel de Champlain may not have imagined encountering cities of gold but
he had his own, more easily realizable dream of success, his own way of making
America a site of profit and power. In the course of his Vo y a g e s, Champlain also
reveals how he promoted the French alliance with the Hurons against the Iroquois
and introduced his allies to firearms. During one Iroquois attack, he tells the reader,
he loaded his musket with four balls and, as a result, killed two of the enemy and
fatally wounded a third with one shot. “The Iroquois were greatly astonished that
two men had been so quickly killed,” he reports triumphantly, “although they were
equipped with armor woven from cotton thread, and with wood which was proof
against arrows”; and, as more shots rang out from Champlain and his companions,
they hastily fled. The Iroquois had begun the attack by walking “at a slow pace,”
“with a dignity and assurance which greatly amused me,” Champlain recalls. For the
Native American, warfare was a ceremony, brutal but full of magic. For the European,
however, it was or had become a much more practical, more straightforwardly brutal
affair. A moment like this marks the appearance of a new element in Native American
life: a change that has an immediate, devastating effect on the bodies of Native
Americans and other, subtler and more long-term implications for their beliefs and
customary behavior.
Samuel de Champlain professed himself amused by the strangeness of the
“savages” he encountered. Other early explorers and colonizers claimed simply to
be shocked by their savagery and idolatry. So, the French Huguenot Rene Goulaine
de Laudonniere (fl. 1562–1582) in his A Notable Historie Containing Four Voyages
Made by Certaine French Captaines unto Florida (1587), describes a brutal ritual
witnessed by some of his men – at the time of establishing a colony in 1564 – with a
mixture of incredulity and horror. Invited to a feast, Laudonniere tells us, the white
men saw one of the Native Americans, who sat “alone in one of the corners of the
hall,” being stabbed by some of the others. When “he that had been struken fell down
backwards,” then the son of the chief appeared “apparelled in a long white skin, fel
down at the feet of him that was fallen backward, weeping bitterly half a quarter
of an hour.” Two others “clad in like apparel” joined him and also began to “sigh
pitifully,” after which “a company of young girls” appeared and, “with the saddest
gestures they could devyse,” carried the corpse away to an adjoining house. Asked by
the visitors “for what occasion the Indian was so persecuted in their presence,” the
chief explained “that this was nothing else but kind of ceremony” by which he and
his tribe “would call to mind the death and persecution of ... their ancestors exe-
cuted by their enemy.” The explanation does not, however, satisfy either those who
witnessed the event or Laudonniere who reports it. It remains for all of them just
another example of the pointless brutality of the local inhabitants (Laudonniere, in
fact, follows this example with several others) and their consequent need to be
conquered, converted, and civilized.
While there might be general agreement that, if they were not to be slaughtered,
then the Native Americans needed to be converted as well as subdued, there was
disagreement about what conversion involved. To the king of Spain, the colony
established by Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere represented a violation of the trueGGray_c01.indd 17ray_c 01 .indd 17 8 8/1/2011 7:54:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 54 AM