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Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization

Author(s): Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Jan., 1997, Vol. 54, No. 1, Constructing Race (Jan., 1997), pp. 193-228

Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2953317

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Presentment of Civility: English Reading

of American Self-Presentation in the Early

Years of Colonization

Karen Ordahl Kupperman

R ) ACE in modern times is thought to be indelibly written on the body, visible for all to see. Moderns see races as great divisions of human eings stretching back to prehistory and originating in forces,

supernatural or natural, beyond human control. Only very recently have contemporaries begun to admit the notion that race is socially and culturally constructed rather than immutably predetermined.

This way of thinking about race would have been utterly foreign to English people in the early years of colonization because they did not divide humankind into broad fixed classifications demarcated by visible distinc- tions. They thought in terms of descendants of a single progenitor or of generations that shared characteristics or, sometimes, following humoral theory, of residents of a particular environment. They argued that in most cases visible differences between people were, as they put it, "accidental"- acquired characteristics in modern parlance-resulting from environment or experience. Thus early modern usage cut across the concept of race as modern people customarily use it. They thought in terms of socially and culturally created categories. Like modern people, early moderns expected the body to be emblematic of these categories, and color, posture, and other features were interesting to them because they were accidental rather than inborn.

Early descriptions indicate that English writers who actually spent time in America accepted as self-evident the notion that the Native Americans were from a common stock with themselves and that all differences between the two peoples were accidental. Moreover, they were extremely curious about who these newly revealed folks were, how they had landed in America, and how they fit into the broad categories by which Europeans customarily judged one another. English readers consumed books about the Americans in part because they offered revelation of unknown peoples, and also because

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is professor of history at New York University. She has bene- fited from the comments of members of the Huntington Library Early Modern British History and Early American Seminars on earlier versions of this article, the participants in the seminar Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World, I400-I700, and the Huntington Library's rich scholarly resources and environment. Daniel K. Richter read the arti- cle and helped to tighten the argument.

The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Vol. LIV, No. i, January I997

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194 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

knowledge of the Indians could help them in thinking about England's problems. 1

By the time English venturers began seriously to found colonies in America, their compatriots were keenly aware of the dangers as well as the benefits brought by Europe's opening to the world and by the wealth and sophistication that accompanied it. Ambivalence pervaded the whole project of expanding into world trade and establishing colonies in America. The English feared the effects of such initiatives as much as they were excited by the prospects of the changes they would bring. England's insularity, the sim- plicity and straightforwardness of its people, were the sources of its strength and virtue. These were already being lost, and anyone with eyes to see knew that opening up the land to further foreign influences would only accelerate the degeneration.

Whereas experienced observers wrote about the American Indians as if the attributes we subsume under the category of race were manipulable and constructed, they and commentators in England constantly expressed con- cern about maintenance of other categorical boundaries. Gender distinctions were crucial; they were determined by nature but required visible and emphatic demarcation. It was a commonplace that in countries such as France, which was considerably farther along in its descent into luxury and sophistication, fashionable dress blurred the sexual division of society. Class and status, equally given by nature, were also vital categories necessary to the maintenance of civility and good order in society. As travelers reported their experiences, their criterion for civility was the degree to which the Indians recognized male-female distinctions and a hereditary hierarchy and maintained these demarcations by outward signs.

English commentators feared their own society was breaking down and that crucial distinctions of social rank and gender were being elided. Elegantly dressed men seemed effeminate, and women, "suting their light feminine skirts with manlike doublets," were too masculine.2 This period saw an unparalleled "rage for novelty and bizarre experimentation in dress," including wearing items of clothing associated with the opposite sex, that defied all attempts to control it.3 As the fundamental distinction between the sexes was elided, the visible demarcation between social ranks was also threatened; the two processes were interrelated because, with expansion, wealth and power were coming into the hands of new people who lacked the lineage and background of the "better sort." If rank was not honored, authority and respect, absolutely necessary to the commonwealth, would also

1 These themes are developed in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Apprehending Native America (Ithaca, forthcoming).

2 Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full Body (London, i63I), constantly returned to the dangers posed by importation of "Phantasticke habits or forraine

fashions," A4, B3v, IO, I4-I5, 23, 25. 3 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (New York, i986), chaps. 4-5, quotations on 72-73. I

thank John Styles for calling this source to my attention.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 195

go. The literature of this period is shot through with concern for the need to maintain categories and their visible signs. Writers on this subject were keenly aware that trade and contact with the world only hastened dangerous blurring as they brought disproportionate riches to some and unique experi- ence to others.4

This ambivalence forms the context in which ideas of the American Indians were formed, and conceptions of the Indians reflected this mental dividedness. Sometimes writers celebrated their compatriots' sophistication and attainments, castigating the Americans as primitive savages. But then again the very same writers turned and praised the Americans' vigor, sim- plicity, and primary virtue, contrasting that virtue with the luxurious degen- eracy of England. Many observers saw in the Indians the lost world of their own past with all its roughness and its strength, and these writers asked their readers to reflect on the losses and gains England had made along the way to wealth and sophistication.5

Thomas Hariot, for example, wrote that the Indians he knew were " verye sober in their eatinge, and drinkinge, and consequentlye verye longe lived because they doe not oppress nature." A few pages later he returned to his praise of Indian moderation and went on, "I would to god wee would followe their exemple. For wee should bee free from many kynes of diseasyes which wee fall into by sumptwous and unseasonable banketts, continuallye devisinge new sawces, and provocation of gluttonnye to satisfie our unsa- tiable appetite."6 The restless, greedy search for new food sensations was symbolic of all that was wrong with English society; the need for "variety of Sauces to procure appetite" showed how jaded it had become.7

Appetite was emblematic of the more serious greed that was destroying English life, and wealth was squandered on "soft unprofitable pleasures."8 On all sides virtue was dissipated. Blurring of categories meant not only that

4 On the contemporary obsession with honor and anxiety over eroding gender distinctions

and cross-dressing see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, i5oo-1800 (New Haven, I995), 23-24, 28, I2I, I26-53.

5 On contemporary perceptions of the dangers of wealth and acquisition of new territories to the commonwealth see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I: The Renaissance (Cambridge, I978), chap. 6. esp. I49-50, i62-65.

6 Hariot, notes to woodcuts of John White's paintings published by Theodor de Bry, in

David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, i584-i590, vol. i (London, I955), 430, 438. On Ben Jonson's use of the masque form to urge restraint in ostentation as well as in eating and drinking in the Stuart court see Martin Butler, "Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric," in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, I993), 9I-II5.

7 Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (i637), in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other

Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America . . , vol. 2 (Gloucester, Mass., i963; orig. pub. i838), 39.

8 Richard Hakluyt, "To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Cecil Knight" (I599), dedication to vol. 2, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (I599-i600), in E.G.R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, vol. 2 (London, I935), 457.

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i96 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

the lower orders refused to honor authority but also that the rich, who should have been the better sort, failed to live up to the responsibilities of their position. Formerly, communities had taken care of their own, and peo- ple had worked for the common good; openhanded hospitality had been the hallmark of the great. Now, the sharpest at cutting corners came out on top, and anyone who cared for integrity or the welfare of others was counted a fool. In a series of sermons and books commissioned to support renewed effort after the initial setbacks in Virginia, ministers thundered on the theme that English selfishness was destroying the values that had made the country strong. William Crashaw compared those who put their own comfort before contributing to the great work of conversion in Virginia to "Sowes" wallow- ing in their own pleasure.9

Even so, however imperfectly its members performed their roles, a status structure existed in England, and those involved in colonization on both sides of the Atlantic saw it as absolutely crucial. People at the bottom of the social scale, even in England, were considered cultureless and uninteresting. Michael Drayton assumed that the Indians would all be like the "meaner sort" of English people. In "To Master George Sandys, Treasurer for the English Colony in Virginia" (i622), he listed the news he and his fellow writers who stayed home hoped to receive from Sandys in Virginia. He went on to write:

But you may save your labour if you please, / To write me ought of your Savages. / As savage slaves be in great Britaine here, / As any one that you can shew me there.10

Drayton demonstrated in the most direct way his assumption that savagery is a constructed category, dependent on social status as much as ethnicity.

Writers who actually went to America proved Drayton wrong-not about the English poor but about the Indians-because they were in no doubt that the latter lived in highly organized societies and recognized key categorical boundaries. The more direct experience a traveler had, the more complex became the description and its lessons. For practical as well as intel- lectual reasons the reports tended to focus on the elites and how they main- tained order and distinction. Such writings held the Indians up as a mirror in which English readers could examine their own society.

Study of the Indians as a formerly isolated branch of the human family offered a way to answer questions that were uppermost in many minds at home: were gender and status distinctions primary, timeless, and inherent? did these categories, as commentators on English life asserted, represent the natural order of things? An affirmative answer would help to settle debates

9 Crashaw, A Sermon Preached in London before the right honourable the Lord Lawarre ... (London, i6io), Cv-C2, D2.

10 Drayton, The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford, I932), 3:206-08.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY I97

about social control in England and support those who favored rigidly enforced markers. Lessons could be drawn from Indian lifeways to reestab- lish order and virtue as the basis of life.

A positive report would mean that a relationship of mutual benefit and understanding could be achieved quickly and easily in America. If the Indians recognized the same distinctions and observed the same codes of conduct as the English, the gap could be bridged easily and peacefully. Reflecting all the time the doubleness of vision they brought to their task, writers assured their audiences that the American natives would benefit from exposure to the sophistication and learning the English would bring them, especially knowledge of the Bible; only intermittently did observers confront the corrupting influences they saw with dismay in their own world.

Even in this early period, however, thoughtful observers were forced to recognize that the newcomers' impact on the Indians' virtue was at best mixed. Moreover, some were horrified to realize that fashionable men and women at home, far from rejecting the Americans as cultureless savages, were actually consuming Indian cultures in their search for the new and the exotic. The colonial reporters' own writing, rather than shaming their com- patriots into a more virtuous simplicity, doubled back and fed the flames of sophistication and luxury.

When early modern English observers examined the American natives, they employed a traditional template for categorizing others. Most eyewit- nesses included a description of the Indians' appearance in their accounts of America, and these almost always followed this pattern. The writers usually began with stature and moved on to color of hair, skin, and eyes. The other elements of a successful description were clothing, jewelry and other forms of decoration, and, often at great length, the way natives dressed their hair. Looking at American Indian life, the reporters were gratified to find the same social and cultural concerns that motivated the English and the same distinguished bearing that set the better sort apart. William Strachey-his choice of words emphasizing conscious performance-had been surprised to find "so much presentment of Civility.""1 Moreover, because elite Americans distinguished themselves and maintained distance from ordinary people through display as English leaders did, these observers reported that the Indians were simultaneously attempting to read English bodies and behavior with the same issues in mind.

Physique and carriage provided valuable indicators of one's place in the world. Countless manuals informed the European gentry and those who aspired to gentle status about how they should act and conduct their lives, and these emphasized proper deportment and presentation of one's body in society. Gait, posture, and clothing all occupied central roles in this litera-

11 Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (i6U2), ed. Louis B. Wright and

Virginia Freund (London, I953), 64-65.

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i98 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

ture, whose authors included writers as eminent as Erasmus. The shape and presentation of the body reflected the reality of the inner self. 12

Thus when English colonists described the Indians, their descriptions began with physique, and it is noteworthy that Indian bodies were univer- sally praised. Readers steeped in the manuals of gentility would have seen their ideal reflected in these descriptions. Their "perfect constitution," wrote John Brereton of the New England Indians he met, was seen in their strength, agility, and upright carriage as well as in the complete absence of the physical problems that so troubled Europeans of the time. William Wood, also writing from New England, agreed: "I have beene in many places, yet did I never see one that was borne either in redundance or defect a monster, or any that sicknesse had deformed, or casualitie made decrepit, saving one that had a bleared eye, and an other that had a wenne on his cheeke." 13

Many writers considered Indians well proportioned, but there was a wide range of opinions about their typical height. The English thought of themselves as generally of medium height, and some put the Indians into the same category. More often, though, the Indians were deemed tall, taller than Europeans. Opinion also differed on how lean Indians were; some wrote that women were shorter and fatter than men, an indication of good health and fruitfulness. There was no controversy about the admirable, erect posture of the Indians, as "straite as arrowes," according to John Underhill. Thomas Morton, who, like Underhill, wrote of southern New England, thought the Indians' straight spines were a cultural product, the result of being carried on their mothers' backs "by the help of a cradle made of a board forket at both ends, whereon the childe is fast bound, and wrapped in furres." He summed up his impressions: "to give their character in a worde, they are as proper men and women for feature and limbes as can be found, for flesh and bloud as active." John Smith similarly described the Susquehannocks, who "seemed like Giants to the English." One whom he met at the head of Chesapeake Bay was "the goodliest man that ever we beheld."'14 Descriptions

12 On increasing concern with the presentation and control of the body see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, I978), chap. 2, and Anna Bryson, "The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England," in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. i540-I660 (London, I990), I36-53. On the sources of aristocratic honor see Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, i485-i642, Past and Present, Supplement 3 (Oxford, I978); William Hunt, "Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War," in Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, eds., The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, I990), 204-37; A. J. Fletcher, "Honour, Reputation and Local Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, i985), 92-II5; and Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, i984), chap. 2.

13 Brereton, A Briefe and true Relation of the Discoverie of the North part of Virginia (i602), in David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., The English New England Voyages,

I602-i608 (London, i983), I57-59; Wood, New Englands Prospect (London, i634), 63. 14 Underhill, Newes from America. . . (London, i638), 5; Morton, New English Canaan, 24;

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 199

of Indians the writers knew "experimentally" all portrayed the Indians as admirable physical specimens, more-perfect examples of European bodies. As in Europe, the better sort were seen as more attractive, their physical beauty reflecting their inner qualities.

During the later sixteenth century and the early decades of the seven- teenth, as Europe confronted the need to communicate with a wider world, scholars developed the notion that a universal language of gestures linked peoples of all regions. This natural language of signs allowed communication in situations where no spoken language was possible.15 John Bulwer pub- lished a guide to gestures for the use of public speakers in i644 called

Chirologia: Of the Naturall Language of the Hand . . . Whereunto is added Chironomia: Or, the Art of Manuall Rhetorique. A friend who signed himself "Jo. Harmarus, Physician at Oxford" attested to the use of signs, particularly among leaders, in Virginia: "In this garb long ago / We spake with the Indian Apochankano."16 Roger Williams began his book on the Narragansett language with gestures of greeting and in doing so reinforced the notion that communication between English leaders and aristocratic Americans was natural. The Indians Williams knew were of "two sorts, (as the English are.)" in their mode of greeting. Some were "Rude and Clownish" because, although they would return a salute, they would not ini- tiate it. "Others, and the generall, are sober and grave, and yet chearfull in a meane, and as ready to begin a Salutation as to Resalute, which yet the English generally begin, out of desire to Civilize them."17

Because attire played a key role in delineating categories in England, colonists assumed that Indian clothing and hair dressing would be the soci- ety's most important markers, and even brief accounts sometimes devoted more than a page to elaborate descriptions of all the various hair and apparel fashionings the author had seen. Discussions concentrated on details of clothing that changed with seasons, with age or marital status, or that marked higher or lower rank. Readers took satisfaction from knowing that dress performed such social functions.

On the other hand, everyone "knew" that savages are naked. The naked savage, a staple of European assumption, is found even in eyewitness accounts. Some writers gave detailed descriptions of Indian dress; others

Smith, A Map of Virginia (i612), in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (i580-i63i), vol. I (Chapel Hill, i986), I49, I50. See Douglas H. Ubelaker, "Human

Biology of Virginia Indians," in Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, I500-I722 (Charlottesville, 1993), 53-75.

15 Dilwyn Knox, "Ideas on Gesture and Universal Languages, c. I55o-I650," in John Henry and Sarah Hutton, eds., New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education, and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt (London, I990), IOI-36.

16 Bulwer, Chirologia, ed. James W. Cleary (Carbondale, Ill., I974), I2. Ironically, i644 was the year when Opechancanough was shot by his English captors after the second great Virginia Indian attack. Jo. Harmarus may have been related to Ambrose Harmer and Charles Harmer, both burgesses in Virginia during the early period.

17 Roger Williams, A Key into the Language ofAmerica (London, i643), I-2.

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200 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

flatly spoke of the Indians as naked. Often writers presented one kind of portrait in one context and used the single adjective naked in others. Naked is thus a complex word, conveying a variety of levels of meaning, and would have been read in that way. Clearly, it did not mean completely without

clothes, which would have been rendered by "stark naked." For many, it seems to have implied that Indian clothing was less elaborate than European, lacking the layers so common at home. English men and women wore, when sleeping as well as awake, a long shirtlike shift over which their outer clothes were tied or buttoned on. A person wearing only a shift was described as naked. 18

Writers who used the term naked often tied it to simplicity in clothing, as when William Bradford and Edward Winslow wrote that southern New England Indians were naked, "onely a skin around their middles." George Percy similarly portrayed the Indians in Virginia as "altogether naked, but their privities are covered with Beasts skinnes beset commonly with little bones, or beasts teeth."19 But even those who wrote of the Indians in this way often emphasized their modesty, another attribute the conduct manuals associated with virtuous carriage. Wood, for example, commended the mod- esty of Indian women, though several times he referred to the Indians as naked and in "Adams livery," and Williams warned against associating nakedness with immodesty. Morton repeatedly praised the modesty of Indian men and women, noting "they seeme to have as much modesty as civilized people, and deserve to be applauded for it"; Bradford and Winslow at Plymouth went further, saying that Indian women were "more modest then some of our English women."20

Williams, throughout his Key into the Language ofAmerica, insisted on a pervasive and literal nakedness among the Indians and presented a more nuanced account. There were two sorts of nakedness. Children, he wrote, went stark naked until age ten or twelve, although girls' genitals were cov- ered from infancy, a claim corroborated by John White's painting of an Indian girl. Adults wore a kind of apron "after the patterne of their and our first Parents" and a long mantle of skins or English wool. Inside their houses, the mantle was cast aside and only the apron worn, but "I have

18 When John Williams of Deerfield was roused from sleep and captured by Indians in I704, he wrote they "bound me naked, as I was in my shirt," in The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (I707), ed. Edward W. Clark (Amherst, I976), 45.

19 Bradford and Winslow, A Relation or Journall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England (London, i622), known as Mourt's Relation, 32, 34, 62; Percy, "Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, i6o6," in Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, i606-i609, vol. i (Cambridge, i969), I36.

20 Wood, New Englands Prospect, 96, quotation on 63; Williams, Key into the Language of America, ii8-i9 [misnumbered iio2-III2]; Morton, New English Canaan, 23, Bradford and

Winslow, Mourt's Relation, 59. Elias argues that modesty was linked to internalization of a sense of shame, in Civilizing Process, chap. 2, pt. 9, esp. i8i. Brathwait wrote that modesty is the high- est virtue in women; English Gentlewoman, i8o.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 20I

never seen that wantonesse amongst them, as, (with griefe) I have heard of in Europe." Old men made cloaks of fine turkey feathers comparable to English velvet.21

"Naked" as a description seemed automatically to go with the word savage, and promoters without any experience of America used the word freely in their writing. The armchair traveler Samuel Purchas even corrected James Rosier's eyewitness description of Indian women wearing beaver skins, substituting the single word "naked" when he reprinted Rosier's account of New England.22 Its rhetorical use evoked a complex set of meanings with lit- tle relation to what travelers actually saw. For some writers, particularly those whose direct experience was limited or nonexistent, the presumed nakedness of the Indians served a utilitarian purpose. Writers drew conclu- sions about the American climate, arguing that it must be mild if the natives lived comfortably without elaborate clothing.23 Others, citing the support that would flow to the English textile industry from sales to the naked sav- ages of America, argued, as did Richard Hakluyt, that "great multitudes of course clothes" would be sold to those who lived in regions with "sharpe and nippinge winters."24 The poor of England could be employed providing warm coverings for the deprived people of America.

Naked also hinted at a more pervasive deficiency to some writers. To be naked was to be weak and defenseless against both the weapons and the ideas of Europeans. Indians, they implied, lacked a hard shell of complex culture and were therefore open to the new. As Richard Eden wrote in transmitting early Spanish reports and before direct English experience, "these simple gentiles lyvinge only after the lawe of nature, may well bee lykened to a smoothe and bare table unpainted, or a white paper unwritten, upon." The nakedness of the Indians was the guarantee of English superiority. Promoters, especially of early projects, argued, as did Sir George Peckham in 1583, that settlement would be easy, "these Savages, beeing a naked kinde of people, voyde of the knowledge of the discipline of warre." Similarly,

21 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, ii8-2I [misnumbered II0-I3]. 22 Rosier, "A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage . .. in the Discovery of the

land of Virginia" (i605), in Quinn and Quinn, eds., English New England Voyages, 276; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (i625), 20 vOlS. (Glasgow, i906), i8:343.

23 Richard Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland (London, i620), 55; George Best, "A true discourse of the three Voyages of discoverie . .. conteining certaine rea- sons to prove all partes of the Worlde habitable" (I578), in Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (I598-i600), I2 vols. (Glasgow, I903-I905), 7:260-6i.

24 Hakluyt, A particular discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the westerne discoveries lately attempted, written in the yere i584, ed. Quinn and Quinn (London, I993), known as Discourse of Western Planting, 67; see also 29-3I, II5. See Edward Hayes, "A Treatise, conteining important inducements for the planting in these parts," in Brereton, Briefe and true Relation (i602), I72, and Ralph Lane, "An extract of Master Lanes letter, to Master Richard Hakluyt Esquire, and another gentleman

of the middle Temple, from Virginia" (I585), in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, I:209.

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202 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Edward Hayes said the Indians were "simple, naked and unarmed."25 The poor simple Indians presented by these writers would welcome the English and their way of life; those few who might attempt to resist could easily be dealt with.

Yet another connotation of naked reversed the equation. Some readers drew the conclusion that the simplicity of the Indians represented a kind of superiority, because they were content with little rather than constantly seek- ing novelty and excess, as so many Christians did. Adam and Eve were naked in Eden, clothed only in "Originall purity," until they sinned and became aware of their shame. Adam could not answer God's question, "Who tolde thee, that thou was naked?" Their need to cover their bodies was the visible emblem of their sinfulness, and God "made coates of skinnes, and clothed them" before expelling Adam and Eve from the garden.26

The association of nakedness with innocence continued to be problem- atic. The Reverend Alexander Whitaker, while he was instructing the captive Pocahontas in the Christian faith, exhorted the English to contribute to mis- sionary efforts, calling the Indians "naked slaves of the divell." His book is a festival of plays on the word naked. Whitaker, a Puritan and the son of a Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, attempted to subvert the lesson of Genesis, writing that "they live naked in bodie, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no covering." And, he went on, "their names are as naked as their bodie." But his book also offered proof that nakedness really meant simplicity, even virtue. In his opening he addressed the book's readers, charging them to remember that "none other be worthie of God, but those that lightly esteeme of riches. Nakednesse is the riches of nature; vertue is the only thing that makes us rich and honourable in the eyes of wise men." His friend William Crashaw, in the book's preface, said that Whitaker had not written it for publication. If he had, he would have "written it in Latine or in Greeke, and so to have decked it for phrase and stile, and other ornaments of learning and language" as to show his attain- ments. But the Virginia Company decided to publish it nonetheless "so the naked and plaine truth may give a just affront to the cunning and coloured falshoods devised by the enemies of this Plantation."27 Direct prose, naked

25 Eden, trans., "To the Reader," introduction to Peter Martyr, The Decades of the newe worlde or west India (I555), in Edward Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America (Birmingham, i885), 57; Peckham, "A True Reporte . . . of the Newfound Landes" (I583), in David B. Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, vol. 2

(London, I940), 47I; Hayes, "Treatise, conteining important inducements for the planting in these parts," I75. See also Anon., "For Master Rauleys Viage" (I584-I585), in Quinn, ed.,

Roanoke Voyages, I:I30, and Hakluyt, "Epistle Dedicatory" to Sir Walter Ralegh (I587), in Taylor, ed., Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2:377.

26 These are the words of the Geneva Bible (I56o), Gen. 3: II, 2I; see also Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (London, i988), chap. I. Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, 2, portrayed Adam as clothed in purity though naked in Eden.

27 Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, i6I3), I, 24; Crashaw, "Epistle Dedicatorie," ibid., A2v, A3v.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 203

in its simplicity, was the best way to confront clever, sophisticated enemies. What did this suggest to readers about the primitive simplicity of the Americans confronting English sophistication?28

Some writers applied this lesson directly to the Indians, especially two men writing of their New England experiences. One was William Wood, who wrote to promote the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the other was Thomas Morton, the most persistent thorn in the Puritans' side. Morton evoked the Genesis story of the expulsion from Eden:

Now since it is but foode and rayment that men that live needeth (though not all alike,) why should not the Natives of New England be sayd to live richly having no want of either: Cloaths are the badge of sinne, and the more variety of fashions is but the greater abuse of the Creature.

Morton and Wood each argued that the clothes the Indians wore were better suited to their bodies and way of life than English clothing would be. Because of their superior adaptation to the American environment, the Indians, they wrote, should not be encouraged to abandon their traditional ways of dressing. Morton concluded, "and in this kinde of ornament, (they doe seeme to me) to be hansomer, then when they are in English apparrell, their gesture being answerable to their one habit and not unto ours." Wood agreed, saying the Americans did not want English coverings except "a good course blanket, thorough which they cannot see" or a piece of "broade cloth . . .they love not to be imprisoned in our English fashion." They rejected the imported apparel partly because they refused to spend extra time dress- ing themselves and partly "because their women cannot wash them when they bee soyled, and their meanes will not reach to buy new when they have done with their old . . . therefore they had rather goe naked than be lousie, and bring their bodies out of their old tune, making them more tender by a new acquired habit, which poverty would constraine them to leave."29 Wearing the same clothes day after day with infrequent cleaning did not bother the English unduly, and most were accustomed to the lice and fleas that shared their lives.30 Thus, Wood implied that Indian simplicity involved a higher standard of cleanliness and hardiness.

English people and Indians both considered clothing a fundamental demarcator as well as the most immediate emblem of the difference between

28 On this point see Susi Colin, "The Wild Man and the Indian in Early i6th Century Book Illustration," in Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Aachen, i987), 23-26.

29 Morton, New English Canaan, 23, quotation on 39; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 65. 30 On this point see Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert

Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, I99), 7I, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, i650-i750 (New York, i982), 28.

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204 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

the two peoples. Right from the beginning, the Indians were as interested in English clothing as the English were in the Indians' dress. Arthur Barlowe, writing of the initial encounter on his reconnoitering voyage to Roanoke, said that the native name for the region was "Wingandacoa." But the colony's sponsor Sir Walter Ralegh later wrote that the Indians' reply to the explorers' question about their name for the land actually meant, "you weare good clothes, or gay clothes."31 Roger Williams reported that the Narragansetts' word for Europeans meant "Coat-men, or clothed." Williams told them that Christians had been given clothes by God, apparently with- out mentioning the circumstances. In chapter-ending verses he represented the Indians musing on the crimes they had heard were committed in Europe and the oaths they heard Christians in America utter and asking "if such doe goe in Cloaths, And whether God they know?" The Indians, on their part, averred, in Williams's rendition:

We weare no Cloaths, have many Gods, / And yet our sinnes are lesse: / You are Barbarians, Pagans wild, / Your Land's the Wildernesse.

He reminded his readers that Indians and English alike would appear naked before God at the last judgment.32

The social functions of clothes were exemplified in the details, such as whether Americans wore skins with the hair on the inside or outside, which were of consuming interest to many observers. Often a writer simply affirmed that Indians' genitals were decently covered. Some described Indian clothing in detail, and these reports focused on whether clothes reflected gender and age differences. New England writers described long deerskin leggings-"long hosen up to their groynes, close made; and above their groynes to their wast another leather"-that attached to belts or loincloths and extended to their moccasins, and compared these to "Irish trouses." William Strachey, writing of Virginia also likened these leggings to "the fashion of the Turkes or Irish Trouses."33 Virginia observers compared native skin cloaks to "Irish mantels," as did Wood and Martin Pringe in New England.34

31 Barlowe, "The First Voyage Made to the Coastes of America" (I584-I585), in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, i:98-99; Ralegh, The History of the World (London, i6I4), bk. i, chap. 8, I75-76.

32 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, A4-A4v, 52, 59; I45, I5I, 204 [misnumbered I37, I43, i96].

33 Bradford and Winslow, Mourt's Relation, 34; Gabriel Archer, "The Relation of Captaine Gosnols Voyage to the North part of Virginia" (i602), in Quinn and Quinn, eds., English New England Voyages, II7; Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England, (London, i624), 6o; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 65; Morton, New English Canaan, 22; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 73.

34 Smith, Map of Virginia, i6i; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 73; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 65; Pringe, "A Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll" (i603), in Quinn and Quinn, eds., English New England Voyages, 222.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 205

Much more ink was spent describing the way Indians wore their hair, a subject of intense interest. Hair and its dressing were ideologically charged subjects in England, as the Civil War epithets Roundhead and Cavalier demonstrate.35 Although many writers faulted the Americans' dress because, like that of the Irish, it appeared to embody few discriminations between men and women, hair styles were perceived as involving key distinctions.36 Generally, Indian men were said to shave the hair on one side of their heads, with that on the other side growing long. Some writers said the long hair was allowed to hang down but others portrayed it as tied up at the back of the head in "an arteficiall and well laboured knott." The knots were then ornamented with "feathers of fowles, in fashion of a crownet." Wood saw that "their black haire is naturall, yet it is brought to a more jetty colour by oyling, dying, and daily dressing. Sometimes they weare it very long, hang- ing down in a loose dishevel'd womanish manner; otherwhile tied up hard and short like a horse taile, bound close with a fillet, which they say makes it grow the faster: they are not a little phantasticall or customsick in this par- ticular." According to Wood, boys were not allowed to wear their hair in this way till they were sixteen. Meanwhile, as they approached manhood, boys experimented with cuts "which would torture the wits of a curious Barber to imitate."37

Henry Spelman was a boy of fourteen when he was sent to Virginia, where, much to his surprise, Captain John Smith sealed a bargain by hand- ing him over to live with Parahunt, an adult son of Powhatan. Later, Spelman was able to impart an insider's view of Indian culture that was almost unique. Spelman argued that the dominant hairstyle was utilitarian. Although men allowed the hair on the left side of their heads to grow long, that on the right side was cut short "that it might not hinder them by flap- pinge about ther bow stringe, when they draw it to shoott." But when Samuel Purchas interviewed Pocahontas's brother-in-law Tomocomo (Uttamatomakkin) in England, he extracted an ideologically charged expla- nation. Tomocomo told Purchas that the Virginians' god, Okeus, appeared to the priests and chief men "in the forme of a personable Virginian, with a long blacke lock on the left side, hanging downe neere to the foote," and it was in imitation of Okeus that "Virginians wear these sinister locks." Hair and its cut were as important to Indian culture as to English. Tomocomo

35 During the i640s, parliamentarian pamphleteers ridiculed the long hair affected by the "cavaliers"; see Tamsyn Williams, "'Magnetic Figures': Polemical Prints of the English Revolution," in Gent and Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies, 93-94.

36 On Ireland see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England," in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (London, I992), 157-71, who argue that English analysts saw Irish life as deficient in order because the mantle was worn by all

classes and both genders, i65-66. 37 Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 73-74; Brereton, Briefe and true

Relation, 157-58; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 64.

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206 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

told Purchas that he could not accept the Christian God because of "this defect, that he had not taught us so to weare our haire."38

Among the Indians, as with the English, significant life changes were marked by transformations of hair. Women changed their hair at marriage. Narragansett virgins could be "distinguished," according to Williams, "by a bashfull falling downe of their haire over their eyes." Morton wrote that when a girl came to marriageable age, she wore a red cap for a year to make her eligibility known. Other writers said married women cut their hair dif- ferently from "maides."39 Edward Winslow of Plymouth reported that the father of a dead child would "cut his hair, and disfigure himself very much in token of sorrow."40

But one distinction common in Europe was lacking; even mature men rarely had beards. Because Indians' beards were sparse, many reporters wrote, they plucked the hair from their chins. So firmly established was this perception that when the Jamestown colonists were joined in their explo- rations by one Mosco, "We supposed him some French mans sonne, because he had a thicke blacke bush beard."'41 Brereton wrote that the New England Indians he met wore artificial beards "of the haire of beasts: and one of them offered a beard of their making to one of our sailers, for his that grew on his face, which because it was of a red colour, they judged to be none of his owne. "42

The most basic social and political demarcator of all was color, and observers worked hard to convey what they had seen and the meaning of hair, eye, and skin color. Accounts agreed that Indian hair was black, although some writers thought that children's hair could be lighter. Arthur Barlowe reported seeing children with "very fine aburne, and chestnut colour haire."43 The Pilgrims were deeply puzzled by their discovery of an adult male skeleton wrapped in a sailor's cassock and breeches with "a great quantity of fine and perfect red Powder" and whose skull had "fine yellow haire." There was a "varietie of opinions" as to who the dead man could be. "Some thought it was an Indian Lord and King: Others sayd, the Indians

38 Spelman, "Relation of Virginea" (c. i613), in Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds.,

Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, vol. i (Edinburgh, igio), cxiii; Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 3d ed. (London, i617), 954; Francis Higginson, New-Englands Plantation (i630), in

Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers, Relating ... [to] North America, 1:12; Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, 24.

39 Williams, Key into the Language of America, 29; Morton, New English Canaan, 23; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 114; Winslow, Good Newes from New England, 59.

40 Winslow, Good Newes from New England, 58. William Prynne, The Unlovelinesse, of Love-Locks (London, i628), 6i, argued that in ancient times English people had cut their hair in sign of grief and suggested they should do so in the i62os because of the grievous situation into which England had fallen.

41 Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, Newe-England, and the Summer Isles ... (i624), in Barbour, ed., Complete Works of Capt. John Smith, 2:173.

42 Brereton, Briefe and true Relation, i58. 43 Barlowe, "First Voyage Made to the Coastes of America," 102.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 207

have all blacke hayre, and never any was seene with browne or yellow hayre; some thought, it was a Christian of some speciall note."44

Skin color was another matter, because it, like the clothing worn over it, was a manipulable attribute. Indians were never said to be red in this early period; they were almost always described as tanned or tawny. But their darker color was an artificially produced cultural badge. As such, it was far more interesting than it would have been as an inherited, inborn characteris- tic. Pringe presented the formula "swart, tawnie or Chestnut." Brereton compared Indian color to "a darke Olive," and to William Strachey it was tawny, "as a sodden Quince is of, (to lyken yt to the neerest coulour I can)."45

These descriptions carried no implication that the Indians were of a dif- ferent race, because the writers hastened to add that they were naturally as light-skinned as the English. English observers affirmed that they were, as Strachey wrote, "from the woumb indifferent white," and John Smith asserted flatly, "they are borne white." Gabriel Archer affirmed that the Virginians were tawny but "not so borne," and Wood said of the New Englanders, "Their swarthinesse is the Sun's livery, for they are borne faire."46 Indian color was a cultural artifact, self-consciously produced on a pale background.

Observers agreed that Indian skin color was accidental, the result of manipulation. Some assumed, with William Wood, that the Indians' darker skin was the "Sun's livery," but others reported that the Indians colored their skin with walnut juice or dyes made from roots and minerals. They did so partly, observers thought, because it rendered them more resistant or less attractive to mosquitoes and other biting insects. More important, they enhanced their skin color because they liked the way it made them look; col- oring their skin was a deliberate act of self-presentation. As Pringe wrote of New England, the natives were tawny "not by nature but accidentally." William Strachey wrote that both men and women "dye and disguise them- selves, into this tawny coulour," the women especially "esteeming yt the best beauty, to be neerest such a kynd of Murrey," by which he meant mulberry- colored. Strachey also drew a comparison with the ancient "Britaynes" who "died themselves redd with woad."47

44 Bradford and Winslow, Mourt's Relation, 11-12. 45 Pringe, "Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll," 221; Brereton, Briefe and true

Relation, I57; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 70. Sodden meant stewed. 46 Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 70; Smith, Map of Virginia, i6o;

Archer, "A Breif discription of the People" (i607), in Barbour, ed., Jamestown Voyages, I:103; Wood, New Englands Prospect, 63. Strachey cited John Smith as his source. On the introduction of "red" to describe the Americans see Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971), 39-42, and Alden T. Vaughan, "From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian," American Historical Review, 87 (i982), 917-53.

47 Pringe, "Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll," 22I; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 70.

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208 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

The writers did not doubt that one of themselves, immersed in that cul- ture, would appear the same. In fact, Ralph Hamor, accompanying Captain Christopher Newport on a state visit to Powhatan, was startled to see

William Parker, who had been captured three years before: Parker had "growen so like both in complexion and habite to the Indians, that I onely knew him by his tongue to be an Englishman."48

American experience forced the English to think anew about how differ- ences between people from various parts of the world should be explained. For example, it cast doubt on any simple relationship between climate and skin color. Unlike William Parker, colonists were happy to report, English people following a European style of life did not find their skin color chang- ing in the New World. The New England settlers whom Wood surveyed "keepe their naturall complexions," though he thought immigrants to Virginia's hotter climate were becoming paler as their blood volume dropped.49

Skin color as a cultural artifact was a subject of great interest but also made many observers nervous, because such manipulation involved the pos- sibility of deception. Color, especially when linked with manipulation, was another word filled with possible meanings. Often it referred to the presen- tation or appearance of actions, especially hidden or disgraceful acts. Bradford and Winslow, for example, castigated the unscrupulous ship cap- tain Thomas Hunt who, "under colour of truking [trading] with them," kid- napped twenty Pawtuxets and seven Nausets, including Squanto, and sold them from New England into slavery in Spain. Or, as in William Crashaw's preface to Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia, it could mean presentation that cleverly disguised reality: "cunning and coloured falshoods." Father Andrew White, however, evoked a more benign sense when he wrote that Maryland's leaders "bought the space of thirtie miles of ground" from the Indians "To avoid all occasion of dislike, and Colour of wrong," meaning that they wanted to avoid even the undeserved appearance of unscrupulous dealing.50

Partly because of the implication of constructed reality, Indian manipu- lation of skin color was troubling. Father White acknowledged the conven- tional wisdom that the natives painted themselves dark red to keep away gnats but went on: "wherein I confesse there is more ease than honesty," employing honesty in the now-obsolete sense of decorum or comeliness. Even more problematic was the Indian practice of painting designs on the

48 Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia ... (London, i6i5), 44. 49 Wood, New Englands Prospect, 8-9; see also Crashaw, Sermon Preached in London before

the right honourable the Lord Lawarre, E2. On blood volume in hot climates see Kupperman,

"Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown," Journal ofAmerican History, 66 (1979-ig80), 24-40. 50 Bradford and Winslow, Mourt's Relation, 33; Crashaw, "Epistle Dedicatorie," to

Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, A2v; White, A Briefe Relation of the Voyage unto Maryland (i634), in Clayton Colman Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, i633-i684 (New York, igio), 42. See also color as persuasiveness in David Norbrook, "Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Elizabethan World Picture," in Peter Mack, ed., Renaissance Rhetoric (London, 1994), 140-64, esp. 149.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 209

faces and bodies of both men and women. Strachey wrote that "he is the most gallant who is the most monstrous and ugly to behold." White found the red and blue painted faces "gastly."51 Roger Williams provided the words by which English emissaries could dissuade Indians from painting them- selves: "Mat pitch cowahick Manit keesiteonckqus," meaning "The God that made you wil not know you." But Williams also reminded his readers that "our Fore-Fathers in this Nation" similarly painted themselves like "all bar- barous Nations." He wondered why Indians wanted mirrors, having "no beauty but a swarfish colour."52

Strachey linked Indian "annoynt[ing]" of their bodies with colored dyes to domestic concern over "our great Ladies" in England with their "oyle of Talchum, or other Paynting white and redd." One danger of such a practice was its happening behind closed doors out of sight of the unsuspecting pub- lic. On the other hand, reflecting the many-layered debate over face painting in England, Strachey implicitly criticized English women who refused to share the empowerment locked in their cosmetics, saying Indian women who perfected a cosmetic did not keep it secret, as in England, "but they freindly comunicate the secrett, and teach yt one another."53

Some writers admired the Indians' art. As descriptions moved from preparation of the canvas, dyeing the skin, to painting designs on it, the writers' emphasis tended to shift from the virtuous simplicity of Indian life broadly to the equally important theme of the sophisticated ways that the better sort manipulated their self-presentation in the style of European elites. As George Percy, the younger brother of the earl of Northumberland and therefore a man used to aristocratic display, wrote, "some paint their bodies blacke, some red, with artificiall knots of sundry lively colours, very beautifull and pleasing to the eye, in a braver fashion then they in the West Indies." He gave a long description of the "Werowance of Rapahanna" and his train-"as goodly men as any I have seene of Savages or Christians":

the Werowance comming before them playing on a Flute made of a Reed, with a Crown of Deares haire colloured red, in fashion of a Rose fastened about his knot of haire, and a great Plate of Copper on the other side of his head, with two long Feathers in fashion of a paire of Hornes placed in the midst of his Crowne.

51 White, Briefe Relation of the Voyage unto Maryland, 43; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 71.

52 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, i65, 192 [misnumbered 157, i84]. 53 Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 70-71. On control and creativity in

the face-painting debate see Frances E. Dolan, "Taking the Pencil Out of God's Hand: Art,

Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England," PMLA, io8 (I993), 224-39. Many English authors wrote against the use of cosmetics by English women; see Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, i560-i620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, Eng., i98i), 7-8. One notable example occurs in Prynne, Unlovelinesse, of Love-Locks, 2, who argued that the "Meretricious, Execrable, and Odious Art of Face-painting" insulted God by implying that he was a bungling or unskillful workman.

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210 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

His body was painted all with Crimson, with a Chaine of Beads about his necke, his face painted blew, besprinkled with silver Ore as wee thought, his eares all behung with Braslets of Pearle, and in either eare a Birds Claw through it beset with fine Copper or Gold, he entertained us in so modest a proud fashion, as though he had beene a Prince of civil government, holding his countenance without laughter or any such ill behaviour.

Percy also described the Indian women's practice of tattooing themselves, imprinting designs of "sundry lively colours . . . which will never be taken away."54

Painting and dyeing, combined with artful hair dressing, served the function, according to many of these writers, of delineating differences in status, origin, and role. Such demarcation was absolutely crucial in English society, where knowledgeable men and women learned to read presentations of the self. Portraits contained such obvious markers as the insignia of the Order of the Garter and also many more hidden references to heraldry or to the subject's roles or office. The number and placement of jewels and other ornaments, the colors and shape of the feathers decorating a person's hat, even the length of the draperies behind the sitter in a portrait, indicated the level of regard due him or her.55

Posture as well as decoration conveyed one's position in society as can be seen in new trends in portraiture, especially of elite men and women. Representation of men in positions of power and authority changed in the direction of bolder presentation of the body.

The classic pose was of an armed figure, with one arm akimbo and one leg extended. This is a pose of great arrogance, reserved for those who could command respect, and northern European portraiture in the early seven- teenth century "experienced an explosion of male elbows."56 Many objected to such aggressive postures. John Bulwer, in his guide to gestures for orators called Chironomia, warned that "to set the arms agambo or aprank, and to rest the turned-in back of the hand upon the side is an action of pride and ostentation, unbeseeming the hand of an orator."57 This stance was pro- scribed to any but the better sort. A particularly telling example comes from Massachusetts Bay where Captain John Endecott admitted in i63I that he had been "too rash" in striking "goodman Dexter"; only later, he argued, did he learn that it was "not lawfull for a justice of peace to strike." "But," he

54 Percy, "Observations gathered out of a Discourse," I36-37, 142. Similar reports came from New England; see for example Bradford and Winslow's description of the "Antick" designs painted on the faces of Massasoit's train, in Mourt's Relation, 38

55 Ellen Chirelstein, "Lady Elizabeth Pope: The Heraldic Body," in Gent and Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies, 36-59.

56 Joaneath Spicer, "The Renaissance Elbow," in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca, i992), 84-128, quotation on 86. The queen was virtu- ally alone among women in being painted in this posture.

57 Bulwer, "The Apochrypha of Action," Chirologia, sec. 9, 219.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 211

FIGURE I

Sir Walter Raleigh and his son Wat, I602, by an unknown painter. By cour- tesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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212 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

U 8 *0 a Ave, ^> (rt -R& - oo .- Am ,?!rt .V~rk-t kter&1 4n27

tihrVp^CPC~i

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 213

FIGURE III

"One of the wyves of Wyngyna." John White identified this figure for the engraver as "A younge gentil woeman." Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum, British Museum Press.

wrote Governor John Winthrop, "if you had seen the manner of his carriage, with such daring of me with his arms on kembow etc. It would have pro- voked a very patient man."58 Gestures, Francis Bacon concluded, are "a kind of emblem."59

Ralegh and his son Wat were painted in this haughty posture. Ralegh's employee John White painted a Carolina Algonquian leader in the same aris- tocratic attitude, and Theodor de Bry's woodcut of the painting with a note

58 Endecott to John Winthrop, Apr. 12, 1631, Winthrop Papers (Boston, 1929), 3:25. 59 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, bk. 6, chap. I, in James Spedding ct al., eds., The

Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols. (London, i857-i874), 3:400, 4:440.

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214 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

FIGURE IV

"The wyfe of a Herowan [weroance] of Secotan." Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum, British Museum Press.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 215

FIGURE V

"A cheiff Lorde of Roanoac," according to the engraver's caption. Probably a picture of Wingina, chief of the Roanokes. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum, British Museum Press.

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2i6 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

S: -m;:% - t!/C to tl~ {<<}~wl' /)z/.4

FIGURE VI

Pocahontas in London, engraved by Simon van de Passe in I6IO. By permis- sion of The British Library, G 7037.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 217

FIGURE VII Marks of allegiance, engraved from John White's lost original by Theodor de Bry. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum, British Museum Press.

by Hariot identifying the subject as one of "The Princes of Virginia" was pub- lished and republished as emblematic of Indian authority (see Figures I, II).

Other conventions of portraying highborn women as well as men were extended to American elites. Renaissance painters proclaimed the modesty of their elite female subjects by showing them with their arms in a "self-enclosing gesture," and White linked the American "better sort" to the European by employing this convention in his portraits of Carolina Algonquian women.60 (See Figure III.) White painted separate portraits of a coastal Carolina Algonquian Indian chief and a werowance's wife, each standing with arms folded. Hariot's notes, in explaining this stance, evoked the European language of civility: "they fold their armes together as they walke, or as they talke one with another in signe of wisdome." When Pocahontas was in London, Smith reported, the courtiers who saw her thought "many English Ladies worse favoured, proportioned, and behavioured."61 (See Figures IV, V, VI.)

60 On this convention see Chirelstcin, "Lady Elizabeth Popc," 36-59, quotation on 38. See also Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, 42: "Chastity is an inclosed Garden."

61 Hariot, notes to John White's woodcuts, in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 1:439; Smith, Map of Virginia, Iso; Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, 1o6-07, quotation on 26!. On the recep-

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2i8 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

As they looked at Indian culture, English observers believed they saw a society that recognized the same kinds of gender and status distinctions as their own. Reports of graded status markers in badges, body painting, and tattooing were reassuring because they indicated impressively sophisticated social and communal distinctions and an orderly society. White's paintings and Hariot's explanations of the woodcuts created from them made this point again and again, noting minute differences in patterns of tattooing and hair dressing from village to village and various badges of rank, occupation, and origin. Hariot wrote that most men had marks "rased" on their backs "wherby it may be knowen what Princes subjects they bee, or of what place they have their originall." White drew a figure surrounded by all the region's marks, with an identifying list by Hariot "that they might more easelye be discerned."62 (See Figure VII.) Barlowe, writing about the same society, described an initial scene of general trading between his mariners and the Indians, "but when Granganimeo, the kings brother was present, none durst to trade but himselfe, except such as weare redde peeces of copper on their heades, like himselfe: for that is the difference betweene the Noble men and Governours of Countries, and the meaner sort."63

White's paintings of Indian leaders show them wearing badges of office and assuming postures appropriate to their dignity. The portrait of Wingina, chief of the Roanokes, was reproduced as a woodcut for de Bry's America with a note by Hariot. (See Figure V.) Hariot wrote of the "cheefe men" that "in token of authoritye, and honor, they wear a chaine of great pearles, or copper beades or smoothe bones abowt their necks, and a plate of copper [hung] upon a stringe."64 Williams reported such use of tokens in New England as well, where men, women, and children hung strings of wampum on their necks and wrists. Some wore heavy girdles or collars of wampum, and "Princes" wore "rich Caps and Aprons (or small breeches) of these Beads thus curiously strung into many formes and figures: their blacke and white finely mixt together."65

Some men flaunted exotic adornments in holes punched in their ear- lobes. John Smith said he had seen men wearing "a smal greene and yellow coloured snake, near halfe a yard in length, which crawling and lapping her selfe about his necke often times familiarly would kisse his lips. Others wear a dead Rat tied by the tail." Their heads were adorned with various emblems, some as elaborate as a stuffed hawk with the wings outspread and including such objects as "the hand of their enemy dryed."66 Since rats had been inadvertently introduced by the colonists, it is intriguing to wonder

tion of Pocahontas see Karen Robertson, "Pocahontas at the Masque," Signs, 2I (i996), 55i-83. 62 The list of the pictures with Hariot's notes is in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages,

I:390-462, quotations on 44I, 443.

63 Barlowe, "First Voyage Made to the Coastes of America," I03 64 Hariot, notes, in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, I:438-39.

65 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, I57 [misnumbered I49]. 66 Smith, Map of Virginia, i6i.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 2I9

what kind of statement was being made, especially as "he is most gallant that is the most monstrous to behould." Wood described ear pendants carved in the shapes of animals complementing tattooed "pourtraitures of beasts" that the "better sort" wore on their cheeks and

a Sagamore with a Humberd in his eare for a pendant, a black hawke on his occiput for his plume, Mowhackees for his gold chaine, good store of Wampompeage begirting his loynes, his bow in his hand, his quiver at his back. with six naked Indian spatter- lashes at his heeles for his guard, thinkes himselfe little inferiour to the great Cham; hee will not stick to say, hee is all one with King Charles. He thinkes hee can blow downe Castles with his breath, and conquer kingdomes with his conceit.67

Elite women exhibited the same emblems of rank. In Virginia, Archer saw a woman leader, whose name he rendered as "Queene Apumatecs." She came to meet his exploring party in "state" preceded by an usher. She had "much Copper about her neck, a Crownet of Copper upon her hed." Her female attendants were "adorned much like her selfe (save they Wanted the Copper)." Her posture also bespoke her dignity. She sat "with a stayed Countenance" and permitted "none to stand or sitt neere her."68

What did it mean to call an Indian leader a king or queen? In England, aristocrats and monarchs, knowing that government rested more on honor and credit than on law or force, took care to surround themselves with visual emblems of magnificence, great state, presenting their persons in ways that affirmed their place atop the hierarchy. They staged lavish public spectacles such as coronations, weddings, and investitures. Other displays occurred within the court or noble house, and the most magnificent of these were the masques performed at the Stuart court. The masques, in which the king and courtiers took part, showed royal power bringing harmony to a disordered world and gave visual form to the divine order underlying proper human relationships. They were designed to convey ideas that mortal minds could not grasp directly; their desired effect was to evoke in the affirming audience a sense of wonder or awe.69

67 Wood, New Englands Prospect, 66 68 Archer, "A relayton of the Discovery of our River" (i607), in Barbour, ed., Jamestown

Voyages, I:9I-92.

69 Malcolm Smuts, "Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I," in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, I99I), 99-II2; Steven Mullaney, "Brothers and Others, or the Art of Alienation," in Marjorie Garber, ed., Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (Baltimore, i987) 67-89. On the theatricality of power see also Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-I650 (Woodbridge, Eng.,

i984) esp. chap. 5, "Illusions of Absolutism: Charles I and the Stuart Court Masque," and Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, i988), 64-65.

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220 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

It is against this backdrop that we should read reports like that of William Strachey, a member of the London literary world, as he transmitted his impression of Powhatan, who conveyed "such Majestie . . . which often- times strykes awe and sufficient wonder into our people" that, although Powhatan was a heathen, Strachey was persuaded he possessed "an infused kynd of divinenes." John Smith was similarly awestruck. When first brought into Powhatan's presence, he found the "Emperour proudly lying uppon a Bedstead" with "such a grave and Majesticall countenance, as drave me into admiration to see such state in a naked Salvage."70 The performance of mag- nificence required an affirming audience, and Smith and Strachey fell natu- rally into that role.71 When Smith returned to Powhatan with Christopher Newport, he again experienced the effect of majesty: "This proude salvage, having his finest women, and the principall of his chiefe men assembled, sate in rankes as before is expressed, himselfe as upon a Throne at the upper ende of the house, with such a Majestie as I cannot expresse, nor yet have often seene, either in Pagan or Christian."72 No wonder Newport had "fowle trou- ble" trying to get Powhatan, who understood the language of gesture and posture, to "kneele to receave his crowne."73 Later, when Smith was presi- dent in Jamestown and visited Powhatan on an official embassy, he sharp- ened the comparison by describing the ceremony of welcome as "A Virginia Maske."74

Reports from every region echoed the language of English aristocratic self-presentation. John Winthrop sent an embassy to the Narragansett leader Canonicus, and the party "observed in the sachem much state, great com- mand over his men, and marvellous wisdom in his answers."75 Massasoit's great dignity similarly impressed the Pilgrim leaders: "in his person he is a very lustie man, in his best yeares, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech." They described Iyanough, "a man not exceeding twentie-six yeeres of age," as "very personable, gentle, courteous, and fayre condi- tioned."76 Indian kings acted like kings.

Noble women created similar effects. As Strachey described the beloved consort of a deposed werowance, she was not the most handsome woman he had seen in America, "yet with a kynd of pride can take upon her a shew of greatnes." Her attendants dressed her in "a faire white drest deare-skyn,"

70 Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 6o-6i; Smith, A True relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia (i6o8), in Barbour, ed., Complete Works of Capt. John Smith, I:53.

71 See Whigham's discussion of the "enfranchising audience," in Ambition and Privilege, chap. 2, quotation on 45.

72 Smith, True relation of... Virginia, 65. 73 Smith, The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (i612), in Barbour, ed.,

Complete Works of Capt. John Smith, I:236-37. 74 Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, i82-83. 75 Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal: History of New England, i630-i649, ed. James Kendall

Hosmer, vol. i (New York, i908), i86. 76 Bradford and Winslow, Mourt's Relation, 37, 50.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 22I

adding a collar, necklaces, and earrings of white coral, pearl, and copper and finished with a cloak of blue feathers "so arteficially and thick sowed to- gither, that yt showes like a deepe purple Satten, and is very smooth and sleek." When elite native women were fully decked out, "they seeme as debonayre, quaynt, and well pleased, as (I wis) a daughter of the howse of Austria behoung with all her Jewells." The sense conveyed by these words has evolved. In Strachey's day, "debonair" meant gracious or courteous and "quaint" meant beautiful, handsome, fashionably elegant. Strachey justified this "digression . .. synce these were Ceremonies which I did little looke for carrying so much presentment of Civility."77

Pocahontas in London conveyed majesty through her comportment. As Rebecca Rolfe, she "still carried herselfe as the Daughter of a King, and was accordingly respected."78 When Pocahontas and Smith met in England, she insisted that she would call him father while she was in his country, but, Smith wrote, "I durst not allow of that title, because she was a Kings daugh- ter." She was incredulous: "Were you not afraid to come into my fathers Countrie, and caused feare in him and all his people (but mee) and feare you here I should call you father." But Smith, who was by his own account fear- less in Virginia, was not bold enough to contravene social boundaries in England.79

These portrayals and references were not created frivolously or ironically in an age when every particular of clothing and other forms of display was carefully regulated according to rank. The splendid urban mansions of the English nobility, although they might be more magnificent than the king's residence, were always called houses, never palaces.80 Thus the Jesuit official report from Maryland for the year i639 created a powerful picture when it described Father White as living in "the metropolis of Pascatoa . . . in the palace with the Emperor himself of the place."81 Maryland governor Leonard Calvert, in the most direct way, attested to the authority and majesty of Indian leaders. Writing to his brother Lord Baltimore, the Maryland propri- etor, about "Porttobacco now Emperor of Paskattaway," Calvert, using the language that European rulers reserved for each other, referred to "my Brother Porttobacco."82

Observers of all backgrounds sent reports whose effect was similar. A colonist's story about Powhatan described him acting in the mode of English monarchs. It began: "The greate Werowance Powhawtan in his annuall progress through his pettye provinces." Others talked of events in

77 Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 64-65. 78 Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, i9:ii8. 79 Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, 26i.

80 J.S.A. Adamson, "The Architecture and Politics of the London Aristocratic Town House,

g59o-i660," paper presented at Huntington Early Modern British History Seminar, Oct. I4, I995. 81 The English Province of the Society of Jesus, Annual Letter from Maryland, i639, in

Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, I24.

82 Calvert to Lord Baltimore, [Apr. 25, i638], ibid., I50-59, quotations on I59.

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222 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

"Opochancano's courte."83 New Englander William Wood also wrote of Indian chiefs making annual progresses to inspect their domains; those with "large Dominions" used this occasion to judge the behavior of their "Viceroyes." When the king entered, he was greeted by "an Oration gratula- tory to his Majesty for his love; and the many good things they enjoy under his peacefull government."84 Roger Williams actually traveled "with a great Prince, and his Queene and Children in company, with a Guard of neere two hundred" He wrote that the prince's house was both larger and finer than others'.85 Indian kings behaved as kings, indicating shared understand- ing of the force of self-presentation.

Acting the part was a reciprocal process. Not only did the early modern English believe that identity is created, or assumed, or assigned and commu- nicated to the world through signs, but they also believed in the psychologi- cal power of donning a role. Once a role was taken up and one's outward aspect tailored to the part, a person's actions were subtly molded to its demands. English writers describing American Indian life constantly attested to their belief in the link between changes in clothing and personality.86 The promoter Richard Hakluyt quoted an early chronicle recording the three Newfoundland men brought to the court of Henry VII by John Cabot: "These were clothed in beasts skins, & did eate raw flesh, and spake such speach that no man could understand them, and in their demeanour like to bruite beastes, whom the King kept a time after. Of the which upon two yeeres after, I saw two apparelled after the maner of Englishmen in Westminster pallace, which that time I could not discerne from Englishmen, til I was learned what they were, but as for speach, I heard none of them utter one word."87 As with the captive Englishman William Parker, lan- guage, a culturally constructed indicator, was a surer guide to identity than appearance. The Indians were equally aware of the role-enforcing power of clothes. Powhatan, for example, was extremely reluctant to put on the "scar- let cloake and apparel" that the English sent him until his close adviser Namontacke, who had actually been in England, convinced him "they would doe him no hurt."88

83 William Powell to Edwin Sandys, Apr. I2, i62I, in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington, D. C., i906-i935), 3:438; Proceedings of the Virginia Assembly, Aug. 4, i6i9, ibid., I74-

84 Wood, New Englands Prospect, 8o. "Your Majesty" became the normal mode of address to the English monarch, replacing "your grace," in the I530s as symbolic of a new level of sovereignty in the throne; Steven J. Gunn, "State Development in England and the Burgundian Dominions, c. I460-c. i56o," paper presented at Huntington Early Modern British History Seminar, Feb. 24, i996.

85 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, I4I, i85 [misnumbered I32, I77]. 86 On this point see Robertson, "Pocahontas at the Masque," 568-73. 87 Robert Fabian, "Chronicle," in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (I598-i600), 7:I55. In

Ben Jonson's Irish Masque at Court (i613), New English leaders are restored to civility just by doffing their Irish cloaks; see Lisa Jardine, "Mastering the Uncouth: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and the English Experience in Ireland," in Henry and Hutton, eds., New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought 68-69.

88 Smith, Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, 237. For William Parker see note 48 above.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 223

Powhatan may have been right to worry, because changes of heart were often signaled or effected by changes in clothes. Indians and English alike associated the wearing of European clothes with Christianity, and it seemed clear that one moved closer to being a Christian by dressing as one. Williams told the Narragansetts that it was God who had given the English "Clothes, Books, &c."89 In i639, the Jesuit missionaries in Maryland reported that the Tayac, a title they translated as emperor, had asked to be baptized and had "exchanged the skins, with which he was heretofore clothed, for a garment made in our fashion." Earlier, Father White, unselfconsciously conflating European dress and Christian values, had written that the Indians "exceed- ingly desire civill life and Christian apparrell."90 Robert Cushman wrote of the Plymouth venture that the younger Indians were ripe for conversion "if we had means to apparel them, and wholly to retain them with us, (as their desire is,)."91 Attiring the Indians was not necessarily the complete transfor- mation the English hoped for, however. The Narragansetts Williams knew wore English clothes only while they were actually with English people and took them off as soon as they returned home.92

Among the Chickahominies of Virginia an eight-man council of "elders" was the governing body. This "stout and warlike nation," loosely allied with Powhatan but anxious not to be drawn fully into his empire, had agreed to become English allies, thus becoming "King James his men," the first king they had ever acknowledged. Both sides honored the power of self-definition through clothing, as the Chickahominy elders, "no longer naturalls," donned red coats, which were to be sent them annually, and "each of them the pic- ture of his Majesty, ingraven in Copper, with a chaine of Copper to hang it about his necke wherby they shall be known to be King JAMES his noble Men." These adornments signified their change of identity, but the English took care to make the copper medal similar to the gorgets worn by werowances. Henceforth, the Chickahominies would call themselves "Tassentasses," which the colonists understood was their name for the English. Meanwhile, the elders, pointing out that Governor Sir Thomas Dale was extremely busy, suggested that they should continue to "injoy their own lawes and liberties" and to be governed by their eight elders "as his substi- tutes and councellors." They would supply corn to Jamestown, which would be paid for in trade goods. Whereas the English presented all this in terms of

89 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, A4v. 90 The English Province of the Society of Jesus, Annual Letter from Maryland, i639, I27;

White, Briefe Relation of the Voyage unto Maryland, 44. 91 See also the case of Captain John Underhill, who had been expelled from Massachusetts

Bay for his challenges to the religious order. To signal his newfound humility when he sought readmission he "came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes"; Winthrop, Winthrop'sJournal, ed. Hosmer, 2:I2-I3; Cushman, "Of the State of the Colony, and the Need of Public Spirit in the Colonists" (i622), in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth. .. (Boston, i841), 260.

92 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, I2I [misnumbered II32].

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224 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

sovereignty and tribute, the negotiations actually produced an alliance and trading pact under which the Chickahominies governed themselves as before.93

All parties to the multicultural exchange of the early years were engaged in learning new languages of presentment and attempting to influence the others' behavior. When the natives desired peace following the great Indian attack of i622 in Virginia, they sent home a captive, Mrs. Boyce "(the Chiefe of the prisoners) . . . appareled like one of theire Queens, which they desired wee should take notice of." Similarly, a Plymouth expedition seeking a lost boy, ten-year-old John Billington, conferred with Iyanough, the Cummaquid sachem, whom they described as "indeed not like a Savage, save for his attyre." Before he directed the searchers to the Nausets, Iyanough introduced "an old woman" seeking news of her three sons who had been among the group kidnapped and sold into slavery in Spain several years before by Thomas Hunt. The English found her weeping "very grievous" but could do nothing to restore her sons or rectify the wrong done her. The Nausets, although they remained "ill disposed to the English" because of the "wretched" Hunt, could and did return John Billington, who was brought to the search party "behung with beades" in another symbolic gesture. As they returned, the Plymouth party again met Iyanough, whose people showed them "all the kindnes they could, Iyanough himselfe taking a bracelet from about his necke, and hanging it upon one of us."94 Both parties to this encounter understood a powerful language of social symbols involving mag- nanimity and hospitality.

Both English and Native Americans also picked up items from the other's culture and adapted them to their own purposes. Just as Queen Elizabeth sought pearls from America to create the elaborate displays she wore as emblems of her greatness, so Indian leaders adapted items from England to the same purpose. Barlowe wrote of the venturers' bemusement at Roanoke when Granganimeo claimed "a bright tinne dishe" from among the array of trade goods. He then "made a hole in the brimme thereof, & hung it about his necke," in imitation of English armor, they thought.95 In actuality, he was fashioning the English dish into a gorget, a badge of authority.

Powhatan, having accepted without kneeling the artifacts of his English coronation, changed and adapted them to his own purposes in reinforcing

93 Hamor, True Discourse, II-I5; Dale, "To the R. and my most esteemed friend, M.D.M. Smith," June i8, i614, in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, i9:i06-07; Smith, Map of Virginia, I46; Strachey, Historie of Travell, ed. Wright and Freund, 69.

94 Virginia Council to Virginia Company, Apr. 4 i623, in Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 4:98; Bradford and Winslow, Mourt's Relation, 32-36, 50-53. Inga Clendinnen cites similar gestures by Moctezuma in the earlier Spanish-Mexica confrontation: see her "Cortes, Signs, and the Conquest of Mexico: Models of the Conquest," in Grafton and Blair, eds., Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, 94-5.

95 Barlowe, "First Voyage Made to the Coastes of America," ioo-oi.

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 225

the exercise of his power. Henry Spelman described the annual coming together of the people to plant corn for the king. When they were finished, Powhatan donned the crown sent him by King James and walked among the planters throwing out beads or placing them in the hands of favored people. At harvest time, the people returned and brought in the corn for Powhatan. Whereas the harvested corn and other offerings from his own people were stored by Powhatan in a specially created building and overseen by an idol, the crown, beads, and other presents from the king of England were stored "in the gods house at Oropikes," the mortuary for the royal line.96

While Powhatan deployed his crown, the symbol of his recognition by King James, as he presented himself to his clients, in England cosmopolitan men and women adopted and adapted-played with-aspects of Indian identity. George Chapman's Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn (i613), performed to celebrate the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, was set in Virginia. The principal masquers, who were the court's most prominent aristocrats, took the parts of "Virginian Princes," and Inigo Jones's designs played on the correspondence between the noble English and the "noblest

Virginians," the reality underneath the disguise. The i6I5 wedding portrait of Elizabeth Pope, daughter of Virginia Company investor Sir Thomas Watson, is filled with references to Virginia. As in Chapman's masque, white ostrich feathers denote the noblest connections, pearls the riches of the New World. This Elizabeth, passing from virginity to fruitfulness, was portrayed as America.97

At the same time, Francis Higginson reported speculation that the style of wearing one long lock of hair among fashionable young men in England was conscious imitation of the asymmetrical Powhatan male cut. In i6I7, Purchas quoted Sir Thomas Dale and Pocahontas's husband, John Rolfe, on the colonists' belief that the fashion had been "borrowed from these Salvages" by the returning Roanoke colonists over thirty years earlier. Purchas, informed by Tomocomo that his people wore this style in imitation of their god, was indignant: "(a faire unlovely generation of the Love-locke, Christians imitating Salvages, and they the Divell)." Nevertheless, the fash- ion continued. In i63I, Richard Brathwait ridiculed London's "young Green-wits" and their shallow affectations: "A long Locke he has got, and the art to frizle it."98

96 Spelman, "Relation of Virginea," in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Capt. John Smith, cv, cxii; Rountree, Powhatan Indians of Virginia, I09-I2.

97 Chapman, Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn (i613), in The Plays and Poems of George Chapman, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (London, I914), 2:435-60, 823-29; Chirelstein, "Elizabeth Pope," 36-59.

98 Higginson, New-Englands Plantation (i630), I2; Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 3d ed., 954; Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, 24; Tamsyn Williams, "'Magnetic Figures,"' 93-94. The earl of Essex was painted with a lovelock in the I59os; see Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 78. Margaret Holmes Williamson argues that the asymmetrical hair of Powhatan men was meant to indicate a nature that combined male and female elements, in "Powhatan Hair," Man, New Ser.,

I4 (I979), 392-4I3. I thank Cynthia Van Zandt for bringing this source to my attention.

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226 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Frivolous playing with an Indian identity by London gallants opened the possibility, unwelcome in this optimistic early period, of influence mov- ing in the wrong direction and tapped deep fears among the insular English of how the pursuit of commerce and exchange with the whole world and the wealth it brought to some were changing and distorting English society. William Prynne in England and Roger Williams in New England denounced the wearing of lovelocks copied from America, which Prynne characterized as "Effeminate, Proud, Lascivious, Exorbitant, and Fantastique." These and other elaborate fashions threatened to break down the essential division of English society into two unequivocal genders. Prynne argued that in these "Degenerous, Unnaturall, and Unmanly times," women were being "Hermaphrodited" by "Odious if not Whorish Cutting, and Crisping of their Haire." Men likewise were "wholy degenerated and metamorphosed into women" in their "Womanish, Sinful, and Unmanly, Crisping, Curling, Frouncing, Powdring, and nourishing of their Lockes and Hairie excre- ments." Prynne saw no difference between this importation and the con- sumption of French frippery: "Are not many degenerated into Virginians, Frenchmen, Ruffians?" Williams denied that any Indian would so "forget nature it selfe in such excessive length and monstrous fashion, as to the shame of the English Nation, I now (with griefe) see my Countrey-men in England are degenerated unto." Indian hairstyles and painted faces were foul, he wrote, but "More foule such Haire, such Face in Israel. England so calls her selfe, yet there's Absoloms foule Haire and Face of Jesabell."99

Early observers had done their work too well. They had set out to describe previously unknown peoples in books and pamphlets whose pri- mary purpose was to argue for English colonization of America. Those with a degree of knowledge and experience of Indian cultures, intrigued by what they saw, seized the opportunity to instruct their readers on burning issues involving the course and future of English society; cultural priorities shared across the Atlantic could be construed as authorized by nature. In the process, these observers conveyed a composite portrait whose chief element was the Indians' common humanity with Europeans-even common origins. As writers who ventured to America struggled to report their authentic expe- rience of Indian cultures, they communicated a picture of graceful figures who presented themselves in ways that recognized and preserved all the distinctions English society considered important. These distinctions bespoke a structured society, one in which Europeans could see "presentment of civility."

So close were the Indians to European norms, in fact, that commenta- tors assured their readers that only a series of short steps-aimed at the cre- ation of a favorable context-separated the Indians from achieving full civility. Certainly, they were of the same stock and origins as the English

99 Prynne, Unlovelinesse, of Love-Locks, "To the Christian Reader," 4-8, 25, 32; Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, 49, I93 [misnumbered i85].

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PRESENTMENT OF CIVILITY 227

themselves. The Reverend William Crashaw, though he never went to America, confirmed this contention from his own experience. He reported that he had seen living in England a "Virginean" whose skin "was so farre from a Moores or East or West Indians, that it was little more blacke or tawnie, then one of ours would be if he should go naked in the South of England."100 All these reports generated tremendous optimism: the task of bringing together English and Indians, always by "raising" the Indians to English levels, would be easy to accomplish, and soon the two groups would be indistinguishable. Such were the hopes of the early years, informed by the belief that environment was more important than inheritance in determining human character and values and based on the assumption that the Indians, accustomed to manipulating their self-presentation, would naturally seek to transform themselves into Europeans.101

Early writers wilfully misled themselves and their audiences regarding both the American desire for and the ease of that transformation. That the Indians were heathens did not bother them because in this initial period that represented God's choice. The Indians lay in "Ethnicke darknesse" because they had not had access to the truth. The Devil, after all, was active in human affairs only because God allowed it, and the future Jesuit James Rosier argued that it was God who had elected to "darken" the Americans' "understanding," making them a "purblind generation."102 For his own reasons, God had chosen to withhold knowledge of the Gospel from these people until now.

The Indians' own development had brought them to the point of readi- ness. At the beginning of the English colonial period, Thomas Hariot was especially encouraged because the native priests he encountered were most interested in the Christian religion, having been "brought into great doubts of their owne."103 At the end of the first phase of colonization, Roger Williams, who like Hariot had acquired sophisticated knowledge of an Algonquian language, wrote that the Indians, hearing that the English had once been deprived of books, letters, and the knowledge of God, as they were, "are greatly affected with a secret hope concerning themselves."104 But, even in the early i640s when Williams's book was published, others already knew that the Indians would resist acculturation and that the priests were central to the maintenance of American cultural integrity (although this contention was worded somewhat differently).

Over the course of the seventeenth century, as the naivete of simple envi- ronmentalism was proven and the depth of natives' commitment to their own

100 Crashaw, Sermon Preached in London before the right honourable the Lord Lawarre, E2. 101 On these early years in Jamestown see Martin H. Quitt, "Trade and Acculturation at

Jamestown, i607-i609: The Limits of Understanding," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 52 (I995), 227-58.

102 "Ethnicke darknesse" is from [Robert Gordon ofi Lochinvar, Encouragements. . . to Under-takers (Edinburgh, i625), D3; Rosier, True Relation of the most prosperous voyage, 297. On Rosier's biography see ibid., 62-64.

103 Hariot, Briefe and True Report, in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, I:372, quotation on 375. 104 Williams, Key into the Language ofAmerica, A4v.

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228 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

culture and traditions was demonstrated again and again, English commenta- tors, feeling betrayed, came to regard Indian differences from Europeans as fundamental and fixed. The dignity and authority they had celebrated in Indian leaders now stood in the way of the cultural convergence toward European norms they had envisaged. Colonists, faced with native hostility as they competed for land and resources, increasingly thought of the Native Americans as permanently other-and permanently lower. Developing ide- ology, as in contemporaneous Ireland, spread fears of mixing too closely with Indians lest the powerful American environment pull the other way and draw the English away from their civility.105 Races, defined as broad, separate, and immutable categories of people, began to figure in colonists' thinking as an avenue to understanding their own experiences in America, especially the treachery they perceived in Indians' unwillingness to assimilate to their construction of the normal.

105 On the conclusion that English people in Ireland became more like the Irish rather than "raising" the Irish to civility see Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, i560-i800 (Baltimore, i988), 36-4I.

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997) pp. 1-279

Front Matter [pp. 1-6]
Constructing Race: A Reflection [pp. 7-18]
Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans [pp. 19-44]
Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered [pp. 45-64]
The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery [pp. 65-102]
The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods [pp. 103-142]
The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought [pp. 143-166]
"Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder": Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770 [pp. 167-192]
Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization [pp. 193-228]
Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies [pp. 229-252]
Reviews of Books

Review: untitled [pp. 253-259]
Review: untitled [pp. 259-263]
Review: untitled [pp. 263-266]
Review: untitled [pp. 266-268]
Review: untitled [pp. 269-271]
Review: untitled [pp. 271-273]
Review: untitled [pp. 273-274]
Review: untitled [pp. 274-277]
Review: untitled [pp. 277-279]

Back Matter