Navigating the Atlantic world
This excerpt from Geoffrey Plank’s Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution looks at the beginning of the transatlantic era and first contact between Europeans and Native Americans.
Until the fifteenth century, apart from the polar seas, the Atlantic was the world’s least navigated ocean. The peoples of the Caribbean traveled and traded extensively amongst themselves, but they did not take their canoes far from the coast beyond the Bahamas and perhaps the southeastern shores of North America. In the far north, successive waves of migrants traveled eastward by sea as far as Greenland. Sometimes ocean currents carried individuals farther. There are intriguing reports from Europe in the Middle Ages of strange-looking men, some dead, some alive, arriving on the shore in kayaks and dug-out canoes. Simply as a function of the distance between landmasses, it was easier to cross the ocean in the north than in the mid-Atlantic, the tropics, or the Southern Hemisphere. Compounding the problem of distance, Africans and Europeans who ventured into the ocean confronted a strong southerly current that could propel explorers down the coast of Africa without any possibility of return. This problem was solved only in the fifteenth century with the discovery of a patch of water west of Africa where opposing currents met. Portuguese sailors found a way to go south down the coast of Africa and return not by retracing their route but instead by sailing westward into the ocean to find the current that would take them home. After this discovery, Europeans began to occupy the islands of the mid-Atlantic. They also started to encounter people in Africa and the Americas who had never before seen European sailing ships.
Those ships were dramatically different from kayaks and canoes. They were larger, more complex and fragile, and more likely to sink when damaged. Therefore, when approaching uncharted coastlines, the Europeans kept a distance from the shore. Seen from afar, their ships made a dramatic impression and helped define the character and identify of the Europeans. An Iroquoian man named Pastedechuoan provided one of the most vivid accounts of that moment of first contact, though he acquired his story second-hand.
They were larger, more complex and fragile, and more likely to sink when damaged.
Early in the seventeenth century, when he was a small boy, Pastedechouan was taken from his mother’s home near the St. Lawrence River and carried to France. In Angers he learned French and the rudiments of Christianity, received baptism, and acquired the name Pierre. French Recollect Fathers intended to educate him before returning him to his home country to work as a missionary among the indigenous peoples of Canada. Their plan went awry, however, because during his time in France Pastedechouan lost his native tongue, and when he returned to the St. Lawrence, he struggled to gain readmittance to the community of his birth. After a short marriage, his wife expelled him. The French missionaries disapproved of the way Pastedechouan had tried to reassimilate into indigenous society, and they dismissively declared that he had “become a barbarian like the others.” Nonetheless, recognizing that he could still be useful, they took him back into their mission, gave him a suit of French clothes, and employed him as a translator.
This young man had become a foreigner in his own country, and this perspective animated the story he told to illustrate the cultural chasm that originally separated Europeans from indigenous Americans. In 1633 Pastedechouan told the missionaries that “his grandmother used to take pleasure in relating to him the astonishment of the Natives, when they saw for the first time a French ship arrive upon their shores. They thought it was a moving island; they did not know what to say of the great sails which made it go; their astonishment was redoubled in seeing a number of men on deck. . . . as they were unable to understand to what nation our people belonged, they gave them the name which has since always clung to the French, ouemichtigouchiou; that is to say, a man who works in wood, or who is in a canoe or vessel of wood. They saw our ships, which were made of wood, their little canoes being made only of bark.”
This young man had become a foreigner in his own country, and this perspective animated the story he told to illustrate the cultural chasm that originally separated Europeans from indigenous Americans.
Variations of this story were told and retold across eastern North America for the next several centuries. In the summer of 1672, when the Quaker founder George Fox was traveling through New England, he met a man he identified as an “Indian king” who told him a version of the story in an effort to explain why the indigenous people of New England suffered so much. The man told Fox that “before the English came” a local person had warned the community “that a white people should come in a great thing of the sea.” This unnamed person issued a warning that everyone “should be loving” to the white people “and receive them, but if they did hurt or wrong the white people, they would be destroyed.” Fox and the “king” agreed that “that Indian was a prophet and prophesied truly,” because “this hath been seen and fulfilled.” The white people came in their ships, and after the indigenous people wronged them “they never prospered and have been destroyed.”
In the late eighteenth century Moravian missionaries working in eastern North America reported in general terms that “The Indians relate, that, before the arrival of the Europeans, some prophets pretended to have received a divine revelation, from which they foretold, that a people would come to them from a country beyond the great ocean, and even pointing out the very day of their arrival. They further relate, that upon seeing a ship arrive on that day, they addressed their countrymen, ‘Behold, the gods come to visit us.’ Upon their landing, the white people were adored by the Indians, to whom they made presents of knives, hatchets, guns, and other articles.”
Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire; Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire; and An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia.
