The Barbarous Years

Bernard Bailyn “The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600 - 1675”   Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 529 pp.

This is a very tough book to read, even for the historically curious; it is a book by an historian for historians.  It covers a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school, and what they do hear is mostly fantasy.  The topics examined are those in the decades from the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 up to King Philip’s War, a war that effectively expelled the Indians from New England in 1676.  The history of this period taught in our school systems has been, can I say, Disneyized.  (Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, etc.)  In fact, the author doesn’t mention Thanksgiving.  It was decades of  brutal encounters between Europeans and native peoples, as well as between the Europeans themselves.  It was a struggle for survival among aliens, rude, and uncultured people.  The presence of religious bigotry is a common theme.  It is not a history that would be acceptable to be taught in our school system. 

The first settlement was a commercial enterprise, started by the Virginia Company. Once the colony’s backers discovered that Chesapeake Bay had neither gold or silver nor a passage to the Pacific, they tried everything they could think of to salvage their investment. Ship after ship of ill-equipped migrants — many of them abducted, many of them children — were sent to the Americas, each vessel intended to fulfill some new harebrained scheme: winemaking, silk-making, glassmaking. Each and every one failed, as did the Virginia Company, which went bankrupt in 1624. By then three-quarters or more of the Jamestown colonists had died, felled by starvation, disease, murder, wolves, Indian arrows and even cannibalism.

What turned the tide for the settlers was the discovery of tobacco.  This highly addictive smoking weed was an ideal consumer product for Europeans.  The Chesapeake Bay area became a barely governed swarm of semi-independent tobacco fiefs, owned by families, operated by squads of indentured servants, all squabbling with one another, Protestants against Catholics, English against other Europeans, everyone against Indians.

The Chesapeake Bay is the first and probably most familiar of the three regional histories that constitute the bulk of the book. The second concerns the mid-­Atlantic seaboard, “the Dutch farrago.” Initially even more commercial in intent than Jamestown, New Amsterdam and the other Dutch settlements were created, reluctantly, by the Dutch West India Company, which saw itself as a “supervising body, overseeing and profiting indirectly from the efforts of private investors who at their own risk would populate the land.”

The third of Bailyn’s histories is of New England.  A great majority of New Englanders in these years arrived in a rush, a small but purposeful exodus in the 1630s, fleeing Charles I’s stumble-footed suppression of religious dissension. (The outward pressure stopped in 1649, when Puritans took over England and killed the king.) Most of the migrants were Puritans, their leaders determined to exercise their newfound religious freedom by making sure that everybody else didn’t exercise too much of it. Unlike the other migrants, many New Englanders arrived in networks of interconnected families.

My Notes:

The Pequot War began in 1634 and convulsed New England for five years.  The conflict was a straightforward struggle over money (the last profits of the declining fur trade) and land (the Connecticut River Valley, which has the region’s most productive soil). The powerful Pequots, who occupied much of the terrain and were long-term trading partners with the Dutch, fought an alliance of other Indian groups and the English colonies in Massachusetts. The English-Indian alliance won, massacring many of the Pequots and shipping out others to the West Indies as slaves.

Pg. 11- 27:  The sector of North America that the English would come to know in the course of the seventeenth century stretched from North Carolina to Nova Scotia and west to the Appalachians and the eastern Great Lakes—a domain five and a half times the size of England.  There were an estimated 300,000 Indians populating this area.  A Indian village of two hundred hunter-gather inhabitants required a hunting area of 272 square miles, or approximately 175,000 acres.  Life expectancy among the Indians was only 21 to 23 years because of the 30 percent infant mortality rate) but those who survived to age 15 could expect to live to 35—not much less than their English contemporaries.  The European killer epidemics—smallpox, plague, cholera, yellow and scarlet fever, diphtheria, chicken pox, whooping cough—were absent, as were the immunities that might limit their effect.