The priests considered dances, feasts, and even athletic competitions
almost as bad as sex: to them all ceremonies except their own were satanic.
Even an outburst of joy when rain fell on the parched desert seemed sinful.
Most of those who could have told us much about the Indians were
simply not interested. Perhaps the longest and most intimate contact
between a group of Europeans and a Native American was at Plymouth.
There, in 1620, William Bradford met a man he called Squanto. This man
had visited England and had, apparently, a considerable command of
English. As Bradford describes it, Squanto had a warm and friendly rela-
tionship with the Pilgrims. By teaching them how to plant corn and how to
survive in cold New England, he quite literally saved their lives; and he
stayed with them for over thirty years—until about 1653. But Bradford, in
his otherwise instructive writings, gives no hint of what Squanto might
have related about his people. Obviously, Bradford did not care.
Remarkably different—indeed, for the late seventeenth century, proba-
bly uniquely different—was the Virginia colonist Robert Beverley. He
wrote, “I have been at several of the Indian towns and conversed with some
of the most sensible of them in that country, but I could learn little from
them, it being reckoned sacrilege to divulge the principles of their religion.”
So Beverley did not sit passively by. He took an opportunity to break into a
quioccasan(shrine) to see what it contained. He found it almost as bare as a
Puritan church, but he examined an ossuary and an idol (variously known
as Okee, Quioccos, or Kiwasa). From other Indians he had learned that
each town had its own shrine. Unsatisfied, Beverley sought out a particu-
larly intelligent Indian, and “seating him close by a large fire, and giving
him plenty of strong cider which I hoped would make him good company
and openhearted,” plied him with questions. The response he got was
remarkable:
[his people] believed God was universally beneficent, that his dwelling
was in the heavens above, and that the influences of his goodness reached
to the earth beneath.... God is the giver of all good things, but they flow
naturally and promiscuously from him; that they are showered down
upon all men indifferently without distinction; that God does not trouble
himself with the impertinent affairs of men, nor is concerned at what they8 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA