A unique view of early New England, part 1

 One of the most detailed accounts of the geography, climate, weather, plants, and animals of New England in the 17th century did not come from a person who lived there, but from an English traveller named John Josselyn.  A moderately wealthy man with connections to the original non-Puritan rulers of Maine, he travelled to the Massachusetts Bay colony and Maine as a fairly young man in the 1630s, and again as an older man in the 1660s (by which time Maine had become part of Massachusetts Bay).  He wrote two books, one called New England's Rarities, discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country, and the other one called An Account of Two Voyages to New-England.  These works, especially An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, are written in a meandering, sometimes almost stream-of-consciousness style.  An Account of Two Voyages mixes all sorts of information on New England with accounts of some of his own personal experiences and his opinions about various subjects ranging from geography meteorology to astronomy to mining to law and government.  In spite of his tendency to go off on tangents in his writing, it has a lot of interesting information about the condition of New England in the first generations of English settlement, and an interesting perspective on what New England looked like to an early traveler from "Old" England.

"The shore is rocky, with high cliffs, having a multitude of considerable harbors; many of which are capacious enough for a navy of 500 sail, ... the country within rocky and mountainous, full of tall wood, one stately mountain there is surmounting the rest, about four score mile from the Sea ... between the mountains are many ample rich and pregnant valleys as ever eye beheld, beset on each side with variety of goodly trees, the grass man-high unmowed, uneaten and uselessly withering; within these valleys are spacious lakes or ponds well stored with fish and beavers ... manifesting the goodness of the soil which is black, red-clay, gravel, sand, loam, and very deep in some places, as in the valleys and swamps, which are low grounds and bottoms infinitely thick set with trees and bushes of all sorts ... others having no other shrub or tree growing, but spruce, under the shades whereof you may freely walk two or three mile together; being goodly large trees, and convenient for masts and sail-yards.  The whole country produces springs in abundance replenished with excellent waters, having all the properties ascribed to the best in the world." - John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 37-38.

The description of a rocky coast and spruce forests probably reflects the time he spent in what is now Maine more than what is now Massachusetts - Josselyn doesn't always distinguish one part of New England from another when evaluating it.  It is clear that he was impressed by the abundance of both large trees and the beaver and fish along and in the lakes and rivers.  These resources that later became very depleted from intense use - beaver were almost wiped out in much of New England by the 18th century, which changed the whole landscape, greatly reducing the number of small lakes, ponds, and swamps, many of which had been created by beaver dams.

   It is also clear that there was plenty of fresh water springs in many places - always an important factor for early settlers.  The description of the richness of the soil is somewhat optimistic.  There is indeed good black loam in some parts of New England, but it is often quite thin, and in the more hilly areas there is often barely more than an inch of good topsoil before one hits clay or sand or bedrock underneath it.


"The mountains and rocky hills are richly furnished with mines of lead, silver, copper, tin, and divers sorts of minerals, branching out even to their summits, where in small crannies you may meet with threads of perfect silver; yet have the English no maw to open any of them, whether out of ignorance or fear of bringing a foreign enemy upon them ... The stones in the country are for the most mettle-stone, free-stone, pebble, slate, none that will run to lime, of which they have great want, of the slate you may make tables easy to be split to the thickness of an inch, or thicker if you please, and long enough for a dozen men to sit at.  Precious stones there are too ..."- John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 38-39.

Josselyn is apparently falling into the trap that many earlier explorers had fallen into - assuming that every part of the Americas was full of precious metals.  Although there were small amounts of metal ore in a few places, there were no large veins of metal ore anywhere in New England.  The reason that the English settlers weren't setting up big mines is that there wasn't very much to mine in the first place.  There were later a variety of stone quarries and smaller mines, but although New England became well-known for its rockiness, most of that rock did not have anything valuable in it.

One accurate thing that he notes is that there is no limestone or chalk in most parts of New England, in contrast to many parts of England.  The lack of rocks that produce lime meant that they usually had to import lime from elsewhere, and it also led to the soil in most parts of New England being quite acidic, with no lime to make it alkaline.

"The climate is reasonably temperate, hotter in summer, and colder in winter than with us, agrees with our constitutions better than hotter climates, ..." - John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 39.

Here Josselyn nails the most fundamental difference between the continental climate of New England and the maritime climate of old England - the wider temperature extremes.  When early explorers briefly landed in places like New England or Nova Scotia or Quebec or New York in the summer, they usually assumed that the winters must be mild.  This was based on the warm summer temperatures and the fact that what later became the northeastern USA and southeastern Canada are at a lower latitude and closer to the equator than much of Europe (Boston is on almost the same latitude as Rome).  The first winters that Europeans spent in these areas were usually an unpleasant surprise.

The comment about the climate "agreeing with our constitutions better" than warmer climates may actually be referring to the relative lack of disease, because disease was widely thought to be caused by the effects of climate on the "constitution" of the body.  For the white settlers, New England was one of the healthiest climates in the world.  Diseases like smallpox existed, but were less common than in Europe, while warm-weather diseases like malaria were also rare.  For the American Indians, on the other hand, the disease environment was a disaster, with even the occasional introduced European disease running wild among a population with very little resistance.

"Mid-March their spring begins, in April they have rain and thunder; so again at Michaelmas [late September], about which season they have either before Michaelmas or after outrageous storms of wind and rain. ... Cold weather begins with the middle of November, the winters perpetually freezing, insomuch that their rivers and salt-bays are frozen over and passable for men, horse, oxen, and carts ... The north-west wind is the sharpest wind in the country.  In England most of the cold winds and weathers come from the sea, and those seats that are nearest the seacoasts in England are accounted unwholesome, but not so in New-England, for in the extremity of winter the north-east and south-wind coming from the sea produces warm weather, only the north-west-wind coming over land from the white mountains (which are always, except in August, covered with snow) is the cause of extreme cold weather, always accompanied with deep snows and bitter frosts, the snow for the most part four and six foot deep, which melting on the surfaces with the heat of the sun (for the most part shining out clearly every day) and freezing again in the night makes a crust upon the snow sufficient to bear a man walking with snow-shoes upon it.  And at this season the Indians go forth on hunting of deer and moose, twenty, thirty, forty miles up into the country.  Their summer is hot and dry proper for their Indian wheat [i.e., corn or maize] ; which thrives best in a hot and dry season, the sky for the most part summer and winter very clear and serene; if they see a little black cloud in the north-west, no bigger than a man may cover with his hat, they expect a following storm, the cloud in short time spreading round about the horizon accompanied with violent gusts of wind, rain, and many times lightning and terrible thunder." - John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, p. 45-47.

If the winters Josselyn describes sound a little harsher than those in Massachusetts or southern Maine today, with saltwater harbors freezing over deeply and 4-6 feet of snow, this may be because many parts of North America and Europe really were colder 350 or so years ago.  This was the later part of what is sometimes called the "Little Ice Age", a period of somewhat colder than average weather that lasted from the 1400s through the early 1800s.  This was an era when the Thames River in England and the canals of the Netherlands froze over deeply enough most winters to walk and skate on - and that was in the relatively mild winters of western Europe.  In New England, average winter temperatures were considerably colder than average winter temperatures today - Massachusetts probably felt more like Maine, and Maine might have been almost as cold as central Quebec.

Other aspects of the weather that Josselyn describes are quite familiar to modern New Englanders - the rainstorms of spring and fall, the icy crust that forms over snow from freezing and thawing, and the sudden changeability of the weather, where a small dark cloud on the horizon often means a total change of weather very soon.

Changes in local plants over time

Combining my interest in history with botany, I have sometimes wondered what my area looked like when the earliest Europeans arrived - especially the plants.  How were the plants different, and how were they similar?  Well, based on reports from native and European sources, and scientific analysis of old pollen and plant remains, one can make some guesses.



Apart from the obvious lack of modern cities, highways, roads, housing subdivisions, shopping malls, etc., etc., one of the most striking differences would have been in the characteristics of the forests themselves.  Much of the forest would have much larger trees than we are used to seeing in wooded areas today.  There were large areas of forest that had never been cleared at all, truly old-growth forests that would be full of widely-spaced trees with trunks that were 3, 4, 5, or even 6 feet in diameter at the base, and 10 to 20 feet in circumference, trees that had reached this size because they were several hundred years old.  There is very little forest like this left in New England today - almost every piece of land has been cleared or logged at least once in the last 300+ years.  Almost all wooded areas today are much younger overall, ranging from forests of numerous young saplings 10 or 15 years old to those with much larger, older trees, perhaps 100 years old, that look impressive in size but which are actually still skinny youngsters compared to the massive, several-century old trees that were fairly common when the first Europeans came.

Of course, not all of the land was covered with old-growth forest.  The American Indians in southern New England had been clearing land for agriculture for centuries, and there was quite a bit of second-growth forest in areas that they had once farmed but later left.   They also kept some hunting areas clear of woods for many generations by repeatedly setting small fires that would kill young trees but leave grasses and other non-woody plants to grow back.  Because of this controlled use of fire to create terrain more favorable for hunting, Europeans were sometimes surprised to find large open areas of fields, extending many miles, on land where they expected to find dense forest.  The use of fire extended to the old-growth forests themselves.  Small fires did no permanent damage to the older trees, but they helped to clear out vines and thorny shrubs and other undergrowth, which made tracking and chasing animals in the forests easier.  Again, early Europeans sometimes remarked on how open the forest floor was in the old-growth forests.  A man could easily ride on horseback along the forest floor, with little dense underbrush to impede him.  One early English explorer in Virginia noted that in some areas, the spaces between the big old trees were large enough that one could have driven a full carriage with its team of horses right between the trees with no trouble!  Not all of the wooded areas were this clear, however.  In areas where there were fewer animals to hunt, such as steeper hills and mountains, or areas with poor soil or areas just not frequented by many animals, the Indians didn't practice their forest management through controlled burning, and the underbrush was much thicker and took some effort to penetrate.

The majority of the types of trees most common in forests were the same as today, but their proportions were different.  Old growth forests, not surprisingly, tended to be dominated by the trees that had the longest lifespans, which usually meant various oaks, various pines, sugar maples, and beeches.  Trees that are common in the relatively young forests found today, such as red maple, black cherry, and birches, were a lot less common.  They would be found mainly in the second-growth patches where there had been Indian farms and towns, or major forest fires or storms had cleared an area of its old trees.  They were also often found in areas where the more dominant tree types would not grow, like swamps and steep, rocky hillsides.  One consequence of this was that the autumn foliage was probably not nearly as impressive, since the brightest colors - the reds and oranges and the most brilliant yellows - often come from maples, which were less common in the 17th century forests.

There was one tree that was quite common in these forests that is only occasionally seen anywhere today, and that was the American Chestnut.  They were once common enough that many New England towns have a "Chestnut Street" along with an "Oak Street", "Maple Street", "Elm Street", "Pine Street", but the Chestnut Blight fungal disease killed virtually all of them in the early 20th century, and the only thing that kept some of them alive was their tendency to re-sprout from the roots after the main part of the aboveground tree has died.  Elm trees have suffered a major blow from Dutch Elm disease at the same time, but they were not quite as common as Chestnuts before the diseases came, and Dutch Elm disease isn't quite as universally destructive as Chestnut Blight is.

Many of the other plants one could see at various times of the year would have been familiar to people today - wild grapevines and Virginia creeper climbing up trees, skunk cabbage poking through the ground in swamps before the snow is even gone, short-lived spring wildflowers blooming before the trees above them have grown their leaves in the early spring, milkweeds producing their seedpods full of seeds with feather-like tufts that allow the wind to catch them, goldenrods blooming in late summer, along with the much less welcome ragweed.  There would, however, have been some very familiar plants that would be missing.  Some of these missing plants wouldn't be missed very much, since they are notoriously invasive, fast spreading, and tough to kill.  There would have been no clumps of Japanese Knotweed, no bittersweet vines climbing up trees, no purple loosestrife forming dense swathes in wetlands.  Some less invasive, but very common weeds would also have been lacking.  The best known of these is probably the common dandelion.  Other common weeds seen today that would have been completely lacking at the time of the first Europeans would have been chenopodium, aka lamb's quarters or goosefoot, common plantain, shepherd's purse, and common mullein.  Some common wildflowers would have been lacking as well, including Queen Anne's lace, common or ox-eye daisies, Chicory, and Black-eyed Susans.  Almost all of these plants, whether considered weeds or wildflowers (or both), are originally from Europe and Asia, and were introduced to the eastern part of North America.  The one exception is the Black-eyed Susan, which is native to the prairies of the midwest and was not brought east of the Appalachians until the 19th century.

There is a lot more stuff that I could add, but the short version is that the forests and fields of Massachusetts would have looked considerably different from today in the 16th or early 17th century, even apart from the obvious and blatant changes like clearing of forests, creation of farms and villages and towns, and later cities, factories, highways, malls, etc.  Just the changes in how the forest was handled and used by the people living in the area, and the plants that were introduced, made major changes.  Of course, there were many other changes to the environment caused by changes in the animal life, but that is a story that I don't have time for right now ....

After the first Thanksgiving - English worldview

In 1621, Massasoit, the chief sachem of the Wampanoag nation or tribe, decided that the prudent course of action was to make an alliance with band of English religious refugees, later to be known as the Pilgrims, who had formed a small settlement which they called "New Plymouth" or "Plymouth Plantation". His people had already suffered a hideously high death rate (possibly 50% or more) from European diseases over the previous several years, and rival nations were threatening to subdue his people. The newcomers might make valuable allies. In the fall of 1621, the now-allied Wampanoags and English celebrated a feast together, which has gone down in U.S. history as the "First Thanksgiving".

In 1676, Metacom or King Philip, the middle-aged son of the long-dead Massasoit and his heir as sachem of the Wampanoag, was shot and killed in the last stages of a vicious war between the Wampanoag and several other native nations, on the one hand, and the united forces of three English colonies plus native allies, on the other. Metacom was in fact killed by a native serving as an ally of the English. Metacom/Philip's body was cut into several pieces, and his head was severed and impaled on a pike in the town of Plymouth, not far from the spot where his father and the earliest English settlers had celebrated their alliance some 55 years earlier. At least 1000 natives on the losing side, including Metacom's son, were packed onto ships to be sold as slaves in the West Indies. Thousands of other natives had either died or fled southern New England. Even those that had allied with the English got little reward other than being allowed to remain free and keep at least some of their land. It was the end of both political and cultural autonomy for the native nations in the southern part of what had now become New England.

How did something that started with at least a tentative alliance end up with the descendants of one allied group almost wiping out the descendants of their former allies as a distinct people?

European aggression and subjugation of native peoples in various non-European lands is something that happened so many times between the fifteenth century and the twentieth century that it seems inevitable that any encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans, no matter how well it started, would inevitably end in war, which would in turn usually end with the Europeans crushing their enemies. In reality, it's not quite that simple. In some cases, Europeans and natives were able to coexist relatively peacefully for a long time, and in some cases, the natives were able to beat the newcomers. Not every European was immediately inclined to look upon every non-European as an inferior. Some early encounters were genuinely friendly, although they were rarely completely free of tension. Still, it seems to me that almost all Europeans carried some important "mental baggage" that made it extremely difficult for them to treat non-Europeans as true equals for any extended length of time, and the English Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in Plymouth and later Boston and other places were no exception.

This is almost certainly a gross oversimplification, but I think that there were two assumptions shared by almost all the English settlers in what they called "New England" that made it very difficult to deal with the natives as equals. The first assumption was that Christians had a unique insight into the true purpose of life, and the true nature of both people and the entire universe, that non-Christians lacked. More specifically, the English Calvinists assumed that their particular type of Christian belief had this kind of special insight, which other versions of Christianity either lacked or had distorted, making them essentially the only true Christians. This was a pretty typical view in almost every variety of Christianity in Europe after the Reformation in the 16th century. Since religion was so central to the lives of many English settlers in New England, this set of beliefs had an even stronger effect on the way that they viewed the world than it did with many other, less intensely religious groups of Europeans who were encountering natives elsewhere.

The second assumption was that the way that their society was set up, all the rules, customs, expected behaviors, taboos, and material culture that surrounded their whole existence, was simply and objectively the best way. This is a characteristic that they shared not just with other Europeans but with just about every human culture on the face of the earth. It's probably a bad idea to say that anything is a universal trait of human cultures, because there always seem to be a few exceptions, but most cultures seem to assume that the way that they do things is the right way, the natural way, the most sensible way. What set the Europeans apart from the all the other ethnocentric cultures by the seventeenth century was simply the scope and aggressiveness of the spread of European culture. Only the Europeans were travelling around much of the known world and establishing outposts of European culture all over the place, from trading outposts to extensive settlements to full-fledged imperial territories complete with a subjugated native population (although only Spain had yet succeeded in setting up a really extensive empire, as opposed to a series of scattered outposts, by 1620).

Unlike some other European powers, the English could encounter another culture that was very different from their own without even having to leave Europe. In the early 17th century, the culture and way of life of the people in many parts of Ireland was almost as alien to most English as the culture and way of life of the natives of New England was. There were vast differences between the Irish and the Wampanoag or Massachusett, but from the point of view of the English, there were a few key points in common that made both groups "savage" and lacking in what the English considered proper, civilized living. Both native Irish and native Wampanoag lived in a society in which oral tradition, oral codes of law, and extended family and clan ties played a dominant role, while for the English written texts were becoming more authoritative than any spoken word, and extended family played a minor role in most peoples' lives compared to their immediate, nuclear family, and non-family relationships like church communities or master-servant relations. Native Irish and Native Wampanoag both cultivated some crops, but also lived a semi-migratory lifestyle, in which they would often live in different locations depending on the season. For the Irish, this moving around was primarily to find pasture for herds of domesticated animals, while for the native Americans, it was to hunt and gather different animals and plants at different times of year. The English, by contrast, practiced a more intensive form of cultivation and livestock rearing while living in the same location year-round, in sturdier and more permanent houses. Both Irish and Wampanoag had a society that emphasized bravery and skill in combat as among the most admirable traits in men. The English considered bravery admirable, but increasingly other characteristics such as self-restraint, "polite" conduct, and steady, disciplined work habits, were replacing sheer physical bravery and prowess as the marks of an ideal man.

Given that the English saw many similarities between the Irish and Native Americans, the situation in Ireland by 1620 did not bode very well for the future of Native Americans. Ireland had long been a separate kingdom that was ruled by the same individual who was King or Queen of England, but otherwise it had largely been left to its own devices. Beginning in the sixteenth century, though, the English monarchs and their tried to force Ireland to conform more closely to English political, religious, legal, and cultural norms. By the late sixteenth century, armies raised in England were battling Irish leaders who refused to submit to these impositions, and these wars were often fought mercilessly on both sides. By the early seventeenth century, both England and Scotland, now ruled by the same king, were encouraging Protestants to emigrate to Ireland and settle on lands that had been occupied by defeated Irish rebels. Some of the English settlers in Massachusetts had friends and relatives among these settlers, and in their minds they were probably undertaking a similar mission of establishing a devout and civilized community in a land that had until recently been dominated by "savage" people who knew little or nothing about true religion.

While violent conflict was not inevitable, it would have taken an exceptional amount of understanding and restraint on the part of the English in New England to overcome all of the cultural forces pushed toward a conflict with the natives sooner or later. There were some English who were inclined toward peaceful coexistence, but in the end, those with a more aggressive approach would prove more popular, and would push the course of events