not genocide. Of course, they did not reach Cathay or Chipango, so it was
the Guanche model they applied to Hispaniola, Mexico, La Florida, and,
eventually, the North American West.
Meanwhile, the northern Europeans, particularly the English and those
people who were to play such a crucial role in their colonies, the so-called
Scotch-Irish, were learning the craft of colonialism in fighting the Irish. Since
shortly after the Norman invasion of England in the eleventh century, the
English had been trying to subdue, segregate, or exterminate the Irish. At
the beginning of the seventeenth century, James I encouraged a large-scale
migration of Scots to assist them. The Scots took to that task with ruthless
vigor. Then, toward the end of the century, when many of them were ejected
or frightened into moving across the Atlantic, the Scotch-Irish found the
Native Americans much like the Irish in dress, housing, and lifestyle and
began to treat them as they, and the English, had treated the Irish.
In these and many other ways, the habits of the Old World were forma-
tive in the New World. It follows that understanding them is crucial to an
appreciation of early American history; so I begin my account of the
“birth” of America at conception rather than delivery. What I particularly
want to emphasize is that this book attempts to appreciate what came
“before” in Europe and Africa; what role the Spaniards, French, and Dutch
played before the “British” became the dominant white Americans; and,
insofar as it is now possible to understand, how all these groups impacted
upon and interacted with the Native Americans.
What of the Native Americans? Were they really comparable to the
Guanche or the Irish? The answer is both obscure and complex: complex
because the Native Americans were divided into hundreds of societies at
various levels of cultural florescence, and obscure because none of those
living in the areas that ultimately became the United States left written
records. Consequently, we must derive what we can know of them from the
observations of Europeans who were usually ignorant of their languages
and hostile to their beliefs. Two exceptions are the Virginia planter Robert
Beverley in the late seventeenth century and the surveyor-general of North
Carolina, John Lawson, who visited Indians, saw how they lived, inquired
about their beliefs, and then recorded them. Other than they, the most
observant of the European reporters visited the native societies after their
Introduction vii