Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America

Trade, Land, Power

TRADE, LAND, POWER

THE STRUGGLE FOR EASTERN NORTH AMERICA

DANIEL K. RICHTER

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richter, Daniel K.

Trade, land, power : the struggle for eastern North America / Daniel K. Richter. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4500-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Indians of North America—First contact with Europeans. 2. Indians of North America—History—Colonial period, ca.

1600−1775. 3. Indians, Treatment of—North America—History. 4. Indians of North America—Government relations. 5. North

America—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600−1775. I. Title.

E98.F39R54 2013

973.2—dc23

2012049810

To Sharon, still

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I. NATIVE POWER AND EUROPEAN TRADE

Chapter 1. Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic World: Stories of Goods and Power

Chapter 2. Brothers, Scoundrels, Metal-Makers: Dutch Constructions of Native American Constructions of the Dutch

Chapter 3. That Europe be not Proud, nor America Discouraged: Native People and the Enduring Politics of Trade

Chapter 4. War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience

Chapter 5. Dutch Dominos: The Fall of New Netherland and the Reshaping of Eastern North America

Chapter 6. Brokers and Politics: Iroquois and New Yorkers

PART II. EUROPEAN POWER AND NATIVE LAND

Chapter 7. Land and Words: William Penn’s Letter to the Kings of the Indians

Chapter 8. No Savage Should Inherit: Native Peoples, Pennsylvanians, and the Origins and Legacies of the Seven Years War

Chapter 9. The Plan of 1764: Native Americans and a British Empire That Never Was

Chapter 10. Onas, the Long Knife: Pennsylvanians and Indians After Independence

Chapter 11. Believing that Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food: A Quaker View of Indians in the Early U.S. Republic

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I have long suspected, despite some fine examples to the contrary, that anyone who compiles a volume of his or her own essays is either afflicted by egotism, cursed with hubris, or excused by scholarly venerability.¹ I prefer to believe that none of these conditions apply to me. With respect to the last, however, I must confess to having been at this business for three decades and to turning, at least temporarily, toward new fields of inquiry. So the essays compiled here sum up a phase in my scholarly career. The pieces were written at various times, for various purposes, since 1983. As I composed them, I did not set out to explore any single interpretation but only to pursue my general interest in the interactions of Native people and Europeans in early America in general and in the mid-Atlantic region in particular. As I looked back on them, however, and as I thought about them roughly in the chronological order of the topics they explored, I discovered that three themes forcefully emerged, themes I call trade, land, and power. It seemed useful, then, to gather the essays in one place.²

*  *  *

To begin to understand how trade, land, and power entwined, we could do worse than to listen to a man who, in his own eighteenth-century lifetime, stood accused of no small measure of egotism, hubris, and premature old age: Teedyuscung, King of the Delawares. It was late July 1756, and Teedyuscung, along with a handful of other Indians and Euro-Americans, was desperately seeking a way out of the bloody violence of what we now call the Seven Years War, violence that he himself, in his frustration with Pennsylvanians, had helped to initiate. At a treaty conference in Easton, Pennsylvania—where the Delaware leader lived up to his reputation for eloquence as well as for bluster, bravado, and, tragically, excessive drinking—he made a rambling speech outlining his credentials and purposes. Asked if he had finished talking, he said he had for the present, depending on what the English had to say in return. But ‘the main Thing,’ he added ‘is yet in my Breast.’ Hand over heart, "he repeated the Delaware Word, Whish-shicksy …, with great Earnestness."³

At that point in the proceedings, Pennsylvania’s longtime go-between with Native peoples, Conrad Weiser, who knew the Word to have a very extensive and forcible Sense but had not previously met Teedyuscung, "desired the Interpreter to ask him what he meant by Whish-shicksy on this particular Occasion." Through that interpreter, the Delaware orator responded with an example:

Suppose you want to remove a large Log of Wood, that requires many Hands, you must take Pains to get as many together as will do the Business; if you fall short but one, though never so weak an one, all the rest are to no Purpose. Though this be in itself nothing, yet, if you cannot move the Log without it, you must spare no Pains to get it. Whish-shicksy; be strong; look round you; enable us to engage every Indian Nation we can; put the Means into our Hands; be sure [to] perform every Promise you have made to us; in particular do not pinch Matters neither with us or other Indians; we will help you but we are poor, and you are rich; make us strong, and we will use our Strength for you and, besides this, what you do, do quickly; the Times are dangerous; they will not admit of Delay. Whish-shicksy; do it effectually, and do it with all possible Dispatch.⁴

In the margin of one of several transcripts of Teedyuscung’s speech, someone later inserted a reference to Moravian missionary David Zeisberger. According to the unidentified annotator, Zeisberger said Whish-shicksy or Wischixi means be active, nimble. Fellow Moravian John Heckewelder defined Wischiksik as "be ye vigilant, in earnest, quick! (about it). Heckewelder further explained that the word wischiksi or wischixi is by the white people interpreted as signifying ‘be strong,’ which does not convey the true meaning of this word: it comprehends more; it asks for exertions to be made, to fulfil the object." Another Moravian dictionary—probably based on Zeisberger’s—defines wischiki as busily and wischixin as to be active, to be brisk, to be nimble; to exert one’s self.⁵

Whatever the difficulties in translating Teedyuscung’s utterance into English, the term conveyed more than a simple message of strength through unity, of the need for the weak to rely upon the strong. As Weiser said, it carried a very extensive and forcible Sense. Teedyuscung’s message was that real power came when the strong enabled the weak to bear a share of the burden: We are poor, and you are rich; make us strong and we will use our Strength for you. Such a message was not just moral but material: Put the Means into our Hands; do not pinch; make us strong. Teedyuscung’s English hearers would have called the transfer of such material resources trade, or perhaps more bluntly presents, subsidies, or bribes. You are sensible how averse I am, to purchasing the good behavior of Indians, by presents, British officer Sir Jeffrey Amherst blustered a few years later as he announced an ill-fated policy of ending the kinds of practices to which Teedyuscung alluded. But, as Amherst learned when his decisions helped to provoke the conflict known as Pontiac’s War, for Native people, presents went far deeper than the mercenary motives that Europeans saw in such exchanges. As markers of political facts, gifts sealed relationships and symbolized—perhaps even were—the source of power for the givers as much as for the receivers.⁶ These, Teedyuscung seems to have meant, are what allowed people to be strong and do it effectually.

So trade and power were nearly inextricable for Native people. For many centuries before Teedyuscung spoke, exchanges of items that anthropologists label prestige goods had embodied the connection.⁷ In the Delaware leader’s day, the shell beads called wampum, particularly when woven by the hundreds into elaborately patterned belts, continued that tradition, symbolizing relationships among people, serving as a record of important transactions and alliances, and conveying power through their very substance. With this wompompeage they pay tribute, redeem captives, satisfy for murders and other wrongs, [and] purchase peace with their potent neighbors, as occasion requires, New Englander Daniel Gookin had said in the 1670s. In a word, it answers all occasions with them, as gold and silver doth with us.⁸

Like nearly every other European, neither Gookin nor the Anglo-Pennsylvanians later gathered at the Easton treaty conference could quite wrap their minds around the idea that something deeper than monetary value was at work with wampum and other gifts. A letter to the conference participants from Moravian bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg tried to convey a deeper understanding of the role wampum played for Teedyuscung and his compatriots. Spangenberg wrote that, according to a Moravian Delaware man named Augustus, Teedyuskung is the Man who has occasioned the late war [when] he made an exceeding large Belt of Wampum and sent it to all the Indians living on the West Branch of Susquehanna [River], even to the Cherokee Nation with the following Words ‘I am in exceeding great danger the English will kill me, come and help me etc.’ Only Teedyuscung could call back the forces he had thus unleashed, claimed Augustus, but the Delaware chief is now Poor and has no more Wampum to send Word to the Indians which he has brought in such a Spirit of War. He must have a Belt of Wampum at least five or Six Feet long and Twelve Rows broad and besides the Belt he must have twelve Strings to send to the Several Chiefs to confirm the Words he sends. On the recommendation of Augustus and Weiser, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Hunter Morris rounded up every wampum bead he could find and set a group of Indian women to work to weave them into an appropriately grand belt to supply Teedyuscung’s needs. The belt was only partly finished when the treaty conference ended, and the governor had to hand it over in that state, along with piles of unstrung beads and a suggestion that the Women might finish it on rainy days or resting in their Journey home.⁹

The Indians giving a Talk to Colonel [Henry] Bouquet in a Conference at a Council Fire, Near His Camp on the Banks of Muskingum in North America, in October 1764. From [William Smith], An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the Year MDCCLXIV (London, 1766). Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt–Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. No portrait from life of the Delaware leader Teedyuscung is known to survive. This eighteenth-century illustration conveys some of the drama of a Native orator reading a wampum belt.

Before witnessing that embarrassing demonstration of English impotence, Teedyuscung had revealed something else about the relationship between wampum and power. The Delaware leader presented the Pennsylvania governor with a large Belt that he said he had received from his uncles, the chiefs of Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. This is a good Day, Teedyuscung declared, whoever will make Peace, let him lay hold of this Belt, and the Nations around shall see and know it. Only after the governor had take[n] hold of the Belt and pronounced that it is all very good did Teedyuscung explain the imagery woven by its beads, imagery that centered land in its message about power. You see, he explained, "a Square in the Middle, meaning the Lands of the Indians, and at one End the Figure of a Man, indicating the English; and at the other End another, meaning the French; our Uncles told us, that both these coveted our Lands; But let us Joyn together to defend our Lands against both."¹⁰ A year later, Teedyuscung’s interpreter would put things more bluntly at another conference with Anglo-Americans who again professed not to understand the Delaware leader’s flowery language: The Land is the cause of our Differences[,] that is our being unhappily turned out of the land is the cause, and thô the first settlers might purchase the lands fairly yet they did not act well nor do the Indians Justice for they ought to have reserved some place for the Indians.¹¹

For Teedyuscung, then, as for countless other eighteenth-century Native leaders, a matrix of trade, land, and power defined relations with European colonizers. The colonizers’ failure to understand the cultural significance of exchange and their single-minded focus on real estate lay at the heart of the struggle for control of eastern North America.

*  *  *

Exchange is thus the unifying theme of my first group of chapters, which explore meanings inadequately captured by the English word trade and inadequately translated from the Delaware word Whish-shicksy. The exploration begins in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay region, where indigenous people who called their territory the densely inhabited land, or Tsenacomoco, attempted to fit Europeans and their goods into Native systems of power.¹² Subsequent essays trace similar processes through the tangled economic, military, and political webs that Indians created with Dutch, French, and English colonists during the seventeenth century. The Dutch—who, more than any other seventeenth-century Europeans, built their imperial enterprises on global trade—loom particularly large in these stories. Through it all, power flowed not merely through transfers of material goods but through the personal relationships and networks of kin and community that those transfers represented.

For eastern Native Americans, what Europeans called trade was nearly always embedded in efforts to strengthen human connections, socially as well as materially. Two essays on seventeenth-century experiences of Haudenosaunee Iroquois peoples provide glimpses of these processes. Warfare that might appear to be (and was) about acquiring trade routes and hunting territories was also (and more fundamentally) about acquiring human captives to restrengthen disease-ravaged, mourning families. And diplomacy that might appear to be (and was) about grand geopolitical strategy was also (and more fundamentally) dependent on individual brokers who mediated among kin groups and factions and sealed relationships with exchanges of wampum and other prestige goods.

Few Europeans dominate memories of such exchange-based power relations more than the founder of Pennsylvania, the Quaker William Penn. Our most iconic image of him, after all, portrays him dispensing peace and yard goods to the Indians.¹³ Teedyuscung, along with many other eighteenth-century Native orators, recalled Penn as the good old man, … who was a friend to the Indian. He was, the Delaware said, a man who should Inspire the people of this Province at this time.¹⁴

Or so Teedyuscung and his Native contemporaries hoped, but he surely knew that things were not that simple. An essay that reexamines Penn’s policies opens the second half of this book and provides an initial foray into the theme of the remaining chapters: the ways in which eighteenth-century Euro-Americans rendered irrelevant—at least in their own minds—the Native understandings of trade and power that had earlier prevailed. They did so by forcibly injecting land into the equation—not, certainly, for the first time in North American history, but on an unprecedented continental scale that came to dominate everything else. The turning point was the violent period from the Seven Years War through the U.S. War of Independence, events in which Penn’s Pennsylvania successors played crucial roles. For them, as for so many eighteenth-century Euro-Americans, power grew from the individual pursuit of landed property rather than the collective exchange of material and cultural goods. As Teedyuscung tried to explain, land was the cause of the two peoples’ differences. Indeed, it is not too much to say that struggles over land were what finally sorted many diverse Native and Euro-American peoples into the two categories called white and red.¹⁵

Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 1771. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection). Full of anachronistic details and composed nearly a century after the 1682 event it portrays (an event for which there is no conclusive documentary record), West’s painting demonstrates the mythic power of William Penn in memories of Pennsylvania’s relations with Native Americans.

More than a century after that great sorting, Theodore Roosevelt observed in his triumphalist multivolume history, The Winning of the West, that the U.S. Revolution had a twofold character. It was, he wrote, a struggle for independence in the east, and in the west a war of conquest, or rather a war to establish on behalf of all our people, the right of entry into the fertile and vacant regions beyond the Alleghanies. For Roosevelt, whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won, … for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. Indeed, all men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.¹⁶

My final two chapters suggest the laborious cultural as well as political work necessary for Euro-Americans to render those well-inhabited fertile regions vacant and their human stewards’ claims to power contemptible. Leaders of the newly independent commonwealth of Pennsylvania wrapped themselves in William Penn’s legacy while systematically expropriating Indian territory. A few years later, in what would become the U.S. state called, with little sense of irony, Indiana, even a Quaker missionary who devoutly believed he was acting in the best interest of Indians could not imagine a future in which indigenous people could derive any kind of power from their own traditions of trade and land use. By that time, when a Native leader used language similar to Teedyuscung’s—Listen to your children, here assembled; be strong, now, and take care of all your little ones—the response was likely to be dismissive pity rather than engaged probing into the speaker’s meaning.¹⁷

In the 1600s, Europeans had ignored Native understandings of the relationship between trade and power at their peril. By 1756, Anglo-Americans had to ask Teedyuscung to explain what he meant by Whish-shicksy, and in 1757 they had claimed not to understand what he meant when he said that Land is the cause of our Differences. By 1800, they had stopped even listening to what Indian people had to say, for it seemed self-evident to them that Native American conceptions of power no longer mattered.¹⁸

*  *  *

To a degree I did not yet understand when I wrote many of these essays, they are attempts to start listening again. One of the formative books I read when I entered the historical profession was Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, published in 1969 by Native American activist Vine Deloria, Jr. It is time … to understand the ways of the white man, Deloria wrote in phrases Teedyuscung would have comprehended. The white is after Indian lands and resources. He always has been and always will be. For me—a young white graduate student, newly transplanted in the year of the nation’s bicentennial from Northern Kentucky to New York City and to a Columbia University campus still unrecovered from the upheavals of 1968—Deloria’s tract was a powerful indictment. There has not been a time since the founding of the republic when the motives of this country were innocent, Deloria concluded. Is it any wonder that other nations are extremely skeptical about its real motives in the world today?¹⁹

Such sentiments, of course, were far more popular in 1976 than they are in the early years of the twenty-first century. Perhaps it was too easy then for a young scholar to adopt them without fully internalizing them, to put them on like some now-dated polyester leisure suit. Even then, however, I knew the story had to be more complex, and more morally complicated than such sloganeering would allow us to understand. So I devoured the profoundly researched and deservedly angry works of historians such as Francis Jennings and weighed them against the profoundly learned and calmly reasonable advice of my dissertation adviser, Alden Vaughan. Meanwhile, influenced by my future wife, Sharon, I read deeply in anthropology, seeking insights into how human societies organized, made sense of, and differentiated themselves. As I tried to sort it all out, as I pursued my scholarly interests, something from Deloria remained that nagged the conscience. There appears to be some secret osmosis about Indian people by which they can magically and instantaneously communicate complete knowledge about themselves to … interested whites, he jibed. "Anyone and everyone who knows an Indian who is interested, immediately and thoroughly understands them."²⁰

After more than thirty years of scholarly study, I know more than ever that mere interest is insufficient, that understanding is elusive, and no easy judgments can be made about the wretched North American historical experience of Indians and Europeans, indigenous people and settler colonizers. I am less confident than I once was that any of us, whatever our degree of interest, can fully understand Teedyuscung and his contemporaries—much less fully comprehend some of the complicated issues that these essays touch upon. Who will ever be able to imagine, for instance, what was in the minds of people who experienced the awful stew of disease, death, mourning, warfare, captivity, and enslavement that washed through seventeenth-century Native America?²¹ But nonetheless, I am more convinced than ever that we need to probe those mysteries, to trace the roles of trade, land, and power in the conquest of North America, to see Indians and Europeans equally as actors in the process, and, above all, to listen—as imperfectly as the sources permit—to what imperfect people like Teedyuscung tried to tell us about how our continent’s historical wounds might find healing. Whish-shicksy.

PART I

Native Power and European Trade

CHAPTER 1

Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic World: Stories of Goods and Power

In what might be the only surviving early seventeenth-century example of the genre, William Strachey, secretary of the Virginia Company of London, did his best to reduce to Roman letters a scornefull song that victorious Powhatan warriors chanted after they killed three or four Englishmen and tooke one Symon Score a saylor and one Cob a boy prisoners in 1611:

1. Mattanerew shashashewaw crawango pechecoma Whe Tassantassa inoshashaw yehockan pocosak Whe, whe, yah, ha, ha, ne, he wittowa, wittowa.

2. Mattanerew shashashewaw, erawango pechecoma Captain Newport inoshashaw neir in hoc nantion matassan Whe weh, yah, ha, ha, etc.

3. Mattanerew shashashewaw erowango pechecoma Thomas Newport inoshashaw neir in hoc nantion monocock Whe whe etc.

4. Mattanerew shushashewaw erowango pechecoma Pockin Simon moshasha mingon nantian Tamahuck Whe whe, etc.

Strachey explained that the refrain—which almost needs no translation—mocked the lamentation our people made for the deaths and captivities. But far more interesting is the gloss he provided for the verses. The Powhatans sang of "how they killed us for all our Poccasacks, that is our Guns, and for all Captain [Christopher] Newport brought them Copper and could hurt Thomas Newport (a boy whose name indeed is Thomas Savadge, whome Captain Newport leaving with Powhatan to learne the Language, at what tyme he presented the said Powhatan with a copper Crowne and other guifts from his Majestie, sayd he was his soone) for all his Monnacock that is his bright Sword, and how they could take Symon … Prysoner for all his Tamahauke, that is his Hatchett."¹ In spite of all their material goods—their guns, their copper, their swords, their hatchets—and in spite of the fact that many of these same vaunted items had been given to the Powhatans by Virginia’s leader Newport in the name of the mighty King James, the Englishmen had, at least on this occasion, been made subject to Native people’s power.²

Like the song, this essay is a story about goods and power. Or, rather, it is three related stories about Chesapeake Algonquian men and what appear to have been their quests for goods and power from the emerging Atlantic world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Paquiquineo (Don Luis), who probably left the Chesapeake in 1561 and returned with a party of Spanish Jesuit missionaries nine years later; Namontack, who traveled to England with Christopher Newport in 1608 and again in 1609 (while the Thomas Newport Savage of the song took up residence in Powhatan country); and Uttamatomakkin (also known as Tomocomo or Tomakin), who made the oceanic voyage with Pocahontas in 1616–1617. We know very little about any of these men, their status, or their motives, and what we do know comes down to us in highly colored tales written by Europeans who were not exactly their friends. Nonetheless, for all the dangers of skimpy sources, of European chroniclers’ distortions, and, possibly, of an overactive historian’s imagination, the stories deserve serious attention. Traveling at particularly crucial moments in their people’s early engagement with Europeans, the three voyagers allow us to glimpse something of what the emerging Atlantic world meant to the elite of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom—if not to the common people who gave their densely inhabited land its name, Tsenacomoco. In their travels, Paquiquineo and Namontack apparently attempted to exert control over the access to the goods the 1611 song would mock in order to build up the power of their people, their political superiors, and themselves. Uttamatomakkin’s travels, by contrast, confirmed what the singers by then already knew: that power would have to be asserted in spite of, not by way of, guifts from his Majestie.

*  *  *

Just as the arrival of Spaniards and English in the Chesapeake cannot be understood apart from the political and economic characteristics of competitive Early Modern nation-states, the exploits of these three voyagers from Tsenacomoco—and the significance of material goods in the Powhatan song—cannot be understood apart from the political and economic characteristics of the social forms known as chiefdoms. In the classic definition of anthropologist Elman R. Service, "chiefdoms are redistributional societies with a permanent central agency of coordination and a profoundly inegalitarian" political order in which redistributive functions center on exalted hereditary leaders.³ For Service and his contemporary Morton Fried, the material underpinnings of stratified chiefdoms lay in differential rights of access to basic resources … either directly (air, water, and food) or indirectly, through the control of such basic productive resources as land, raw materials for tools, water for irrigation, and materials to build a shelter. More recent comparative archaeological work, however, moves beyond such straightforward materialist definitions to embrace a much more complex variety of cultural forms.⁴

Much of this work roots chiefdoms in what is known as a prestige-goods economy. As archaeologists Susan Frankenstein and Michael Rowlands explain, in such an economy, political advantage [is] gained through exercising control over access to resources that can only be obtained through external trade. These resources are not the kind of basic utilitarian items described by Service and Fried but instead wealth objects needed in social transactions.⁵ They may be, as anthropologist Mary Helms explains, crafted items acquired ready-made from geographically distant places or things valued in their natural, unworked form as inherently endowed with qualitative worth—animal pelts, shells, feathers, and the like. In either case, they constitute a type of inalienable wealth, meaning they are goods that cannot be conceptually separated from their place or condition of origin but always relate whoever possesses them to that place or condition. The social power of such goods thus comes from their association with their source, often described as primordial ancestral beings—creator deities, culture-heroes, primordial powers—that are credited with having first created or crafted the world, its creatures, its peoples, and their cultural skills. Indeed, inalienable goods never fully belong to those to whom they have been given; they always remain in some sense the property of the giver. Those who control such prestige goods wield power because of their connection to—and control over—power at the goods’ source.⁶

In eastern North America, the prestige goods that shaped the power of chiefdoms were the crystals, minerals, copper, shells, and mysteriously crafted ritual items that moved through the ancient trade routes of the continent. Their potency came from their rarity and their association with distant sources of spiritual power. But those same characteristics made eastern North America’s prestige-goods chiefdoms inherently unstable political forms. Lacking a monopoly of force to defend their privileges, chiefs depended for their status on a fragile ideological consensus at home and on equally fragile external sources of supply and trade routes they could not directly control. Chiefdoms thus perched on a fine line between slipping back into less hierarchical forms or moving forward toward the coercive apparatus of a state while cycling between periods of centralization and decentralization. As a result, as social forms, they were forever in flux.⁷

The basic political units of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Tsenacomoco were just such unstable prestige-goods chiefdoms, headed by men and women called, respectively, weroances and weroansquas, whose titles descended, as John Smith explained, to the first heyres of the Sisters, and so successively the weomens heires.⁸ Most of these local chiefdoms were subordinate to a larger paramount chiefdom that Powhatan, or Wahunsonacock, presided over as mamanatowick in the early seventeenth century. The weroances and particularly the mamanatowick owed their status in part to kinship, through their own matrilineages and through marriage alliances with the multiple spouses to which apparently only the elite were entitled. (Wahunsonacock reputedly had a hundred wives strategically placed in subordinate towns.) In a way Service and Fried would recognize, weroances also to some extent controlled food surpluses, through tribute from subordinates and through corn, bean, and squash fields their people planted and harvested to be stored in their granaries. (These food stores may have taken on additional significance during the repeated droughts and crop failures of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.) But most importantly, weroances’ power apparently rested on their control of such goods as copper from the continental interior and pearls from the Atlantic coast. As archaeologist Stephen R. Potter puts it, chiefs handled worldly risks confronting their societies by serving as both a banker to their people and a culture broker to outsiders.⁹

To a significant degree, the power that derived from these functions came from a weroance’s ability to distribute prestige goods to followers and thus create bonds of asymmetrical obligation. He [who] perfourmes any remarkeable or valerous exployt in open act of Armes, or by Stratagem, observed Strachey, the king taking notice of the same, doth … solemnely reward him with some Present of Copper, or Chayne of Perle and Beades.¹⁰ Lavish feasts from chiefly stores and perhaps the bestowal of sexual favors from young women in the weroance’s household served similar redistributive functions for diplomatic visitors.¹¹ Such actions merged into a broader pattern that might best be described as the conspicuous display of chiefly power. Wahunsonacock hath a house in which he keepeth his kind of Treasure, as skinnes, copper, pearle, and beades, which he storeth up against the time of his death and buriall, wrote Smith. The structure was 50 or 60 yards in length, frequented only by Priestes, and at each corner stood Images as Sentinels, one of a Dragon, another a Beare, the 3[rd] like a Leopard and the fourth a giantlike man, all made evillfavordly according to their best workmanship. Smith—who, it should be recalled, appeared to be an emissary from a strangely female-less society—also went out of his way to note that the mamanatowick hath as many women as he will, whereof when hee lieth on his bed, one sitteth at his head, and another at his feet, but when he sitteth, one sitteth on his right hand and another on his left.¹²

Illustrations from John Smith, A Map of Virginia … (London, 1612); and Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia … (Frankfurt am Main, 1590). The fanciful image of Powhatan that graced William Hole’s engraving of John Smith’s 1612 map (left) is based on two engravings of watercolors painted by John White at Roanoke in 1585: an effigy of a spirit-being (top right) and the structure in which the bodies of deceased chiefs were preserved (bottom right). All of these images hint at the status and power that chiefs derived from what modern scholars call prestige goods. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Such conspicuous display embodied the strength and wealth of the people and their connection to the sources of the power that prestige goods and marriage connections represented; indeed, the term weroance roughly translates as he is wealthy.¹³ Such goods visibly accumulated at the apex of the social and political order, in the person regarded not only as a king but as halfe a God, the mamanatowick, a word incorporating the term manitou, or spiritual power.¹⁴ The material, the spiritual, and the political were inseparable in the person of the mamanatowick and the people for whom he acted. The wealth of the chief and his distribution of it are alike means by which he confers life and prosperity on his people, anthropologist Margaret Holmes Williamson explains. Indeed, he really has nothing of ‘his own’ as a private person. Rather, he is the steward of the group’s wealth, deploying it on their behalf for their benefit. The mamanatowick by being rich and generous and by living richly … makes bountiful the macrocosm that he represents.¹⁵

The material, the spiritual, and the political also came together in the fact that the vast majority of the powerful goods that chiefs accumulated were interred with them when they died. Weroances bodies are first bowelled, then dryed upon hurdles till they bee verie dry, and so about the most of their jointes and necke they hang bracelets or chaines of copper, pearle, and such like, as they use to weare, Smith observed and archaeologists confirm. Their inwards they stuffe[d] with copper beads and covered with a skin, hatchets and such, before wrapping the corpses very carefully in white skins, and laying them on mats in a temple house with what remaineth of this kinde of wealth … set at their feet in baskets.¹⁶ In effect, then, because prestige goods died with the chief, weroances and would-be weroances always had to create for themselves anew the tribute networks, the trade connections, the diplomatic and marriage alliances, the masses of prestige goods that undergirded their power. This fact, more than some abstract historical force called cycling, undergirded the inherent instability of these chiefdoms as political forms. And it brings us at last to our three travelers, who apparently sought just such connections, alliances, and goods, either as rising chiefs themselves or on behalf of the weroances who sent them.¹⁷

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We cannot be absolutely certain that the man usually known by the Spanish name Don Luis or Don Luis de Velasco was originally from Tsenacomoco or even that Tsenacomoco was the same place that he and the Spanish called Ajacán. Yet through careful detective work, scholars Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie reasonably concluded decades ago that there are enough indications available to link Don Luis with the ruling Powhatan clique and that Ajacán included territories between the James and York Rivers that were later known to be part of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom.¹⁸ Spanish sources variously describe Paquiquineo as "a young cacique, as a person of note who said he was a chief, as the Indian son of a petty chief of Florida who gave out that he was the son of a great chief, as a chief’s son who for an Indian was of fine presence and bearing, or as the brother of a principal chief of that region.¹⁹ Unhelpfully, the same sources say that in 1570, he was either more than twenty years of age or a man of fifty years."²⁰ It is quite possible that, as Lewis and Loomie suggest, Paquiquineo was either the brother or father of Wahunsonacock and his successors Opitchapam and Opechancanough. Given the matrilineal descent of chief’s titles and European chroniclers’ unfamiliarity with the intricacies of Algonquian kinship terms, Paquiquineo might also have been the uncle of these later paramount chiefs. There is less reason to believe that, as historian Carl Bridenbaugh suggested, Paquiquineo actually was Opechancanough, although nearly anything is possible. Whatever the case, he was almost certainly a member of a chiefly lineage, if not that of the paramount mamanatowick, then of a subsidiary weroance.²¹ The one surviving Spanish document that uses his Algonquian name suggests his high status by referring to his traveling companions as his Indian servants ("su criado indios").²²

And, whatever the case, Paquiquineo seems to have gone into the Atlantic world because of his chiefly lineage, either on his own initiative, or at the behest of his weroance, or because the Spanish perceived him as a high-value captive. We do not know exactly how he found his way onto what was probably Antonio Velázquez’s ship Santa Catalina in 1561. Accounts written more than a generation later give three different versions of the story. Francisco Sacchini wrote that the brother of a principal chief of that region gave himself up to some Spaniards sailing near Ajacán, although none of his family knew of this. In much more detail, Luis Gerónimo de Oré explained that "while the Adelantado, Pedro Menéndez, was governing the presidios of Florida, a ship