The year 2020 was intended to be a great year for pilgrims.
Dozens of occasions were planned, from art exhibitions and festivals to meetings and a maritime regatta with the Mayflower II, a large-scale reproduction redesigned over 3 years at a cost of more than $11 million, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the religious. of the separatists we now call Plymouth, Massachusetts.
But many of these activities have been postponed or cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, and historian Elizabeth Fenn discourages safe and perverse poetry.
“The irony is pretty deep,” says Fenn, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studied the disease in colonial America. “The new infections have made MORE of the dirty paintings of colonization. “
The disease brought through merchants and settlers, either by possibility or by objective, played a role in the “conquest” of indigenous peoples. And this shameful fact, well known to the descendants of the natives, is contrary to the classic narrative of the “New World”.
This history has come under attack in recent months, while statues of the pilgrim predecessors Christopher Columbus, the Spanish conqueror Don Juan de O’ate and other “colonizers” have been overthrown and degraded. physically powerful pioneers and adventurers, but as a component of a slow-motion genocide.
“The Mayflowers came here and the settlers came here, and it’s BACKGROUND,” says historian and journalist Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. “But in fact, they were takers. “
Plymouth is neither the first nor the largest nor the most disgustingly rich of the English colonies, but it has taken a disproportionate position in American history.
Regardless of everything that happened before or after, Plymouth is ‘once upon a time’ the history of the United States, the symbolic, if not literal, cradle of our nation, says that of Plimoth Plantation, a reconstructed pilgrim. and living history.
But the 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower, in equivalent numbers of “holy” and “foreigners,” did not cross the Atlantic to identify a democratic society. When they left Plymouth, England, on 16 September 1620, they fled a devout persecution. and for a position where they simply thrive.
After more than two months at sea, pilgrims landed at the place the Wampanoags called Patuxet, “small waterfalls”. When they landed from the fetid and leaky caracas, they walked through land already cleared by the falsehood of death.
In the years leading up to the arrival of pilgrims, Aboriginal citizens in southern New England had been devastated by what some scientists call a “virgin soil” epidemic. The unidentified disease, transmitted through European fishermen who crossed maine waters to Narragansett Bay, burned village after village, killing up to 90% of some tribes.
“I passed by the coast where I discovered ancient (indigenous) plantations sparsely populated, now absolutely empty; elsewhere there is a remnant, but no disease,” Captain Thomas Dermer wrote in a 1619 letter to a friend in London.
Tsquantum, consultant to Dermer, the Aboriginal interpreter better known as Squanto, who had been among the 20 Wampanoags kidnapped by English explorers in 1614 and sold into slavery.
Dermer wrote that “the land of my savage” housed some 2,000 souls.
“All dead, ” he said.
“Portions of the New England coast that were once as densely populated as Western Europe were crowded, and only the bleached bones of the dead implied that there once was a dirty, rich net along those shores,” Nathaniel Philbrick wrote in his 2006 bestseller, “Mayflower. “
Most young Americans grow up with the beneficial history of pilgrims: how Pokanoket sachem Massasoit approached English settlers in search of friendship, helping them in their first winter on those shores and joining them later for the first Thanksgiving vacation.
But there is something darker in this story, as Edward Winslow, a passenger of the Mayflower, recounts in his 1624 pamphlet, “Good New York. “
According to Winslow, Tsquantum spread the rumor that pilgrims kept plague barrels buried in their warehouse, “that, at our discretion, we can send where or with what other people we want and destroy them.
According to Winslow, the interpreter took advantage of the risk of plague for his own position among his people. If that’s true, the pilgrims were too willing to play the game.
When Hobbamock, one of Massasoit’s warriors, asked if they had such a weapon, a settler replied, “No, however, the God of the English had it in reserve and can send it to his will to destroy him and our enemies. . “
The recent epidemic had decimated the Pokanokets, but had largely saved their main rivals, the Narragansett. Some historians have warned that Massasoit helped pilgrims, not out of kindness, but out of necessity.
Whether born of pity, worry or pragmatism, the alliance between the other people of Massasoit and Plymouth did not last long.
Less than 55 years after the arrival of the pilgrims, his son Metacomet, better known as King Philip, united the tribes of the region to push the English across the sea, and Governor Josiah Winslow, Edward’s son, sent to the forests and marshes to hunt them down.
In an article in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts last winter, Dr. John Booss of Yale University School of Medicine argued that the “exquisite moment” of pilgrims’ arrival after a fatal epidemic is one of the key points of success.
“We are placed with a tragic and paradoxical conclusion: lethality in a population has proven to be the means of survival for the group,” Booss wrote. of pilgrims, New England and the myth of America may have been very different.
But there is a heated debate in the room about the extent of the role disease plays in the dominance of ecu on the continent.
In his groundbreaking 1972 book, “The Columbian Exchange,” Alfred W. Crosby argued that the advent of European germs among the “biologically helpless Indians” caused the collapse of the Aztec and Inca empires. His later writings helped consolidate the “virgin soil”. thesis “in education and popular culture.
“It is their germs, not those same imperialists, despite all their brutality and insensitivity, who were mainly guilty of sweeping the natives and opening the neo-Europeans to demographic conquest,” Crosby wrote.
Paul Kelton believes that focusing too much on colonizers’ disease is a possibility.
In an article for the June factor of the Journal of American History, Kelton and co-author Tai S. Edwards argues that through war, legal maneuvers and debt treatment, “colonizers have a duty to create situations that made indigenous people vulnerable to infection, increased mortality and hindered the recovery of the population.
“Let’s give the disease an exclusive signature to allow Europeans to take over,” Kelton said in a recent interview. “In some circumstances, this allowed them to identify bridgeheads. This worked in synergy with other facets of colonialism. But at the end of the day, there are human beings making decisions. And why are these decisions made? Europeans see everything they need and use all the means to achieve it. “
Even the war.
In the spring of 1763, the warriors of Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo besieged Fort Pitt, the site of present-day Pittsburgh. When the Delaware emissaries tried unsuccessfully to convince the English to leave, English merchant and defense force captain William Trent ignored. them with two blankets and a silk handkerchief from the fort’s antivariolar infirmary.
“I hope this has the desired effect,” Trent wrote in his diary.
With smallpox already before siege, Fenn and others said Trent’s “gift” is unlikely to have had the desired effect. But Fenn says it’s hard to overestimate the role the disease played in conquering North America.
In August, native descendants from all over New England were to gather in Plymouth to dance and drum around a ceremonial fire, walk around the city and make tobacco and sage offerings in homage to Massasoit and King Philip. as a “signature event” on the Plymouth 400 calendar.
“We get ahead of this, so we can tell our truth,” troy Currence says, a powwow or healer of the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe on Cape Cod. “That we are still here. We are not a destroyed people. “
Unfortunately, the coronavirus, which has had a disproportionate effect on the country’s indigenous communities, has also suspended those plans until at least next spring.
Currence takes the pandemic as a sign that the country and the world want a correction.
“Finally, if you don’t take care of Mother Earth and live in balance,” she says, “natural law will prevail. “
Allen G. Breed of AP is a linear descendant of Resolved White, born in Massachusetts, who was five years old when his parents, William and Susannah White, arrived in Patuxet on the Mayflower.
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