One of our gentlemen having a target [a shield] which he trusted in,
thinking it would bear out a slight shot, he set it up against a tree, willing
one of the savages to shoot, who took from his back an arrow of an ell [45
inches] long, drew it strongly in his bow, shoots the target a foot through
or better; which was strange, being that a pistol could not pierce it.Even toward the end of the seventeenth century, when Indians had
suffered much from the effects of imported disease and alcohol, Robert
Beverley waxed lyrical when he described Indians who, he said, have the
cleanest and most exact Limbs in the World: They are so perfect in their
outward frame, that I never heard of one single Indian,that was either
dwarfish, crooked, bandy-legg’d, or otherwise misshapen.... Their
women are generally beautiful, possessing an uncommon delicacy
of shape and features and wanting no charm but that of a fair com-
plexion.... They are remarkable for having small round Breasts, and so
firm, that they are hardly ever observ’d to hang down, even in old
women.After years of travel among Indians in the Carolinas around 1700, John
Lawson found that women’s “Breaths are as sweet as the Air they breathe
in, and the Woman seems to be of that tender Composition, as if they were
design’d rather for the Bed then Bondage.”
About men, the opinions were less lyrical. When Thomas Jefferson cir-
culated the manuscript of his Notes on the State of Virginia,he received a
comment by a French naturalist, the comte de Buffon, that although the
Indians are generally larger and taller than Englishmen, “their organs of
generation are smaller and weaker than those of Europeans.” (The opposite
belief about black males would later enter the mythology of race believed
by southern whites.) Machismo aside, John Lawson in 1701 and James
Adair in 1765 agreed that “they seldom saw a crippled Indian, never a
blind one.”
It was not only their diet that gave the Indians their health; it was also
the simplicity and economy of their mode of living. We can single out cer-
tain of their advantages. First was cleanliness. Indians, at least those close to
12 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA