with plenty of game, it was not for the benefit of a few, but of all.
Everything was given in common to the sons of men. Whatever liveth on
the land, whatsoever groweth out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers
and waters flowing through the same, was given jointly to all, and every
one is entitled to his share. From this principle hospitality flows as from
its source. With them it is not a virtue, but a strict duty.It was a dangerous duty.
Had the Arawak Indians not salvaged the cargo of Columbus’s Santa
Maríaand taken in the nearly drowned crew, Spain’s venture in the New
World might have turned out differently or at least been delayed.
Elsewhere, Indians’ hospitality to Europeans would be repeated time after
time, and often with results painfully destructive to the Indians. “Upon the
advent of the European race among them,” Lewis Morgan wrote, “it was
also extended to them.” That certainly was the experience of the early
colonists. Captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe lovingly detail the
generosity of the first Indians they encountered in 1584. A generation later
the settlers at Jamestown would have starved without the Indians’ generos-
ity. No lover of the Indians, Captain John Smith remarks that in 1607,
when the settlers’ fortunes were at a low ebb, “it pleased God (in our
extremity) to move the Indians to bring us Corne, ere it was halfe ripe, to
refresh us, when we rather expected that they would destroy us.” On his
tour of the Virginia hinterland, when he and his little group were virtually
defenseless, Smith remarks on “the people in all places kindely intreating
us, daunsing and feasting us with strawberries, Mulberies, Bread, Fish, and
other of their Countrie provisions.”
Hospitality was universal and enduring. Even Hernando de Soto expe-
rienced it during his rampaging tour through La Florida in 1539; there the
Indians turned inhabitants out to give their houses to the visitors. A cen-
tury later, in Maryland, Lord Baltimore’s incoming colonists benefited from
a similar gesture by the Yoacomaco Indians, who turned over to them what
became St. Mary’s. Accounts everywhere echo comparable acts of generos-
ity right down to the end of the pre-Revolutionary era. During his captivity
by the Indians in the 1750s, James Smith was taught that “when strangers
come to our camp, we ought always to give them the best that we have.”
Not only the English but also some of the French Jesuits saw
The Native Americans 19