Medical Encounters

Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures

Kelly Wisecup

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781613763261
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The conquest and colonization of the Americas resulted in all kinds of exchanges, including the transmission of diseases and the sharing of medicines to treat them. In this book, Kelly Wisecup examines how European settlers, Native Americans, and New World Africans communicated medical knowledge in early America, and how the colonists represented what they learned in their literatures.Against the prevailing view that colonial texts provide insight only into their writers' perspectives, Wisecup demonstrates that Europeans, Natives, and Africans held certain medical ideas in common, including a conception of disease as both a spiritual and a physical entity, and a belief in the power of special rituals or prayers to restore health. As a consequence, medical knowledge and practices operated as a shared form of communication on which everyone drew in order to adapt to a world of devastating new maladies and unfamiliar cures.By signaling one's relation to supernatural forces, to the natural world, and to other people, medicine became an effective means of communicating a variety of messages about power and identity as well as bodies and minds. Native Americans in Virginia and New England, for example, responded to the nearly simultaneous arrival of mysterious epidemics and peoples by incorporating colonists into explanations of disease, while British American colonists emphasized to their audiences back home the value of medical knowledge drawn from cross-cultural encounters in the New World.

CHAPTER 1

Epidemic, Encounter, and Colonial Promotion in Virginia

Invisible Bullets and Early American Colonization

N 1585, SIR Walter Ralegh sent an expedition to the “new found land of Virginia” with Queen Elizabeth’s nominal support and the use of her pinnace.¹ The colony of several hundred men was England’s first attempt to establish a permanent settlement in the Americas, although Ralegh also directed the men to search for gold and a northwest passage that would provide a western route to East Indian ports. After a stop in the West Indies, where some of the men picked up sugar cane and plantains they hoped to cultivate in Virginia, the colonists landed in present-day North Carolina, or, as the Carolina Algonquians called their land, Ossomocomuck.² There the English colonists established trading relations with the Roanoke Algonquians and their werowance, or leader, Wingina.³ Several colonists also observed the land and the Roanoke peoples, for Ralegh had commissioned the mathematician Thomas Harriot and the painter John White to map Virginia’s coastline and to survey local resources.⁴ Harriot published some of his findings in 1588: his Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia presented some of the earliest descriptions of the Carolina Algonquians and of Virginia’s natural resources.⁵

The Report is best known today for its description of the Roanoke Algonquians’ explanation of a mysterious illness, which broke out among the Natives but left the colonists unscathed. As Harriot wrote, the Roanokes attributed the disease to “invisible bullets,” and, he explained, “Those that were immediately to come after vs they imagined to be in the aire, yet inuisible & without bodies, & that they by our intreaty & for the loue of vs did make the people to die in that sort as they did by shooting inuisible bullets into them” (29). Both literary scholars and historians have observed that Harriot’s description of the Roanokes’ theory of disease as caused by “invisible bullets” was at odds with prevailing Galenic medical philosophies, which conceptualized illnesses not as discrete entities that entered and diseased the body but rather as interior conditions or imbalances stimulated by the environment.⁶ To explain this incompatibility, scholars have identified alternative contexts that could have shaped Harriot’s description of disease as “bullets.” Stephen Greenblatt argues that Harriot described the epidemic and the Roanokes’ responses in order to test theories about the political uses of religious power, theories seen as heterodox in England. Greenblatt suggests that Harriot recorded “alien voices” in order to document potentially subversive perspectives that justified the deployment of colonial power, and that attested to the superiority of English culture.⁷ This recording ultimately solidified Harriot’s “hypothesis about the origin and nature of European culture and belief,” in this way allowing him to produce knowledge about European beliefs for European readers.⁸

Joyce Chaplin has revised Greenblatt’s analysis by placing Harriot’s account of the “invisible bullets” in the context of early modern natural philosophy (29). She focuses in particular on Harriot’s interest in atomism, a controversial theory that “matter was composed of discrete, durable particles,” similar to bullets.⁹ Chaplin argues that Harriot placed a description of “natural phenomena being formed of distinct particles” in the Roanoke Algonquians’ mouths in order to explore such ideas without being directly associated with them.¹⁰ Rather than reporting actual Native ideas or words, Harriot attributed his own ideas to Native sources in order to avoid accusations of impiety and to contribute to scientific conversations among Europeans.

Both of these previous studies show how European religious and scientific debates, respectively, informed Harriot’s account of the Carolina Algonquians’ illness, but they occlude the cross-cultural contexts in which Harriot’s Report was produced.¹¹ Philosophical and religious theories from Europe were not the only concepts available to Harriot to describe the mysterious epidemic, nor were Algonquian voices “alien” to Harriot by the time he wrote the Report.¹² He had observed the Carolina Algonquians’ medical knowledge and practices during his time in Ossomocomuck, as he and colonist John White traveled throughout the area to document its peoples, flora, and fauna. Given their ignorance of the geography prior to 1585, it is extremely unlikely that Harriot and White traveled alone; Roanoke guides probably accompanied the men and determined where they went and what they observed on their expeditions. Harriot also reported having “special familiarity” (26) with the Roanoke priests, and as I discuss in more detail below, he smoked tobacco after the Roanokes’ “maner” [sic] (16).

Furthermore, Harriot and representatives of the Roanoke Algonquians had multiple occasions to encounter one another’s medical knowledge even before Harriot arrived in Ossomocomuck. Two of Ralegh’s men, Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas, had made a reconnaissance voyage to Ossomocomuck in 1584; they returned with two Algonquian men, whom the English identified as Wanchese and Manteo. It is probable that the Roanoke werowance Wingina sent Manteo, son of the weroansqua (or female leader) on Croatoan Island, and Wanchese, probably an advisor to Wingina, to London as envoys and as intelligence gatherers.¹³ Manteo and Wanchese lived at Durham House, Ralegh’s house on the Strand, where they worked with Harriot to learn English and where he created a phonetic alphabet for Algonquian.¹⁴ The men also provided information to Harriot and Ralegh useful for planning the 1585 voyage to Virginia, and they were displayed throughout London as a means of eliciting support for Ralegh’s voyages.

Finally, even before the Roanoke voyages, the English had encountered indigenous representatives from the New World and had observed or heard about their illnesses and deaths. By the time Barlow returned with Manteo and Wanchese, several Inuit people from Baffin Island had already traveled to England with the Arctic explorer Martin Frobisher in 1576 and 1577. All the Inuit people died within a few weeks of reaching England, one from a disease apparently contracted on the transatlantic voyage; another, a man given the name Calichough, from a wounds caused by a “Cornishe tricke” (or wrestling move) one of the colonists used to capture him; and a woman and child, given the names Egnock and Nutioc, possibly from measles.¹⁵ European audiences across the social spectrum would have been familiar with the Inuit visitors, their bodies, sicknesses, and responses to death as a result of widely circulating images of the captives. John White painted several images of Calichough, Egnock, and Nutioc, while the Flemish painter Cornelis Ketel produced a postmortem painting of the Inuit man who returned with Frobisher’s 1576 voyage and five paintings of Calichough, including one of him naked. In addition, the physician Edward Dodding performed an autopsy on Calichough; he made Egnock observe this investigation before including her response in his report. By 1585, then, just ten years after the first Inuit man had visited London, the English public—and certainly someone like Harriot, who had trained navigators for Ralegh’s New World ventures and who was well read in the narratives of New World travels—were not strangers to Native peoples’ bodies, knowledge, and languages, especially those of the Roanoke Algonquians.¹⁶

Debates over Harriot’s European sources have overlooked both his preexisting awareness of Algonquian peoples, languages, and knowledge and the shared medical knowledge that circulated in cross-cultural encounters and contributed to the account of invisible bullets in the Report. Conceptions of disease as an ontological entity were already circulating throughout both America and Europe before contact in Virginia, as I show by examining Native theories that disease originated outside the body, in bullet-like objects sent by divine beings, and by investigating Harriot’s interest in Paracelsian medical philosophies, which included a “gunpowder theory” of disease.¹⁷ While Harriot’s, Manteo’s, and Wanchese’s respective knowledge of one another’s languages and cultures was unlikely to have been perfect or exhaustive, their sustained conversations and their shared conceptions of disease made it possible for communication about illness and its causes to take place.

Descriptions of the illness as bullets originated in encounters with the Roanoke Algonquians and possibly developed in conversations between colonists, as this chapter shows by comparing the Report with a second, but often overlooked, description of the epidemic by Ralph Lane, governor of the colony, in his “Account of the Particularities of the Imployments of the English Men Left in Virginia.” Lane wrote the preface to the 1588 publication of Harriot’s Report, a fact that suggests at least some exchange between the men about their reports. A professional soldier with experience fighting in England’s campaigns to control Ireland, Lane did not share Harriot’s philosophical interests, but his description of the epidemic is nonetheless quite similar to Harriot’s. As I detail below, Lane’s and Harriot’s accounts both fractured as a result of their encounters with the Roanoke Algonquians, but they did so for different reasons. Lane presented the Algonquians’ theories of disease as evidence of the colony’s potential by attempting to insert these theories into his narrative of discovery, only to find that Wingina controlled what the colonists discovered and how area Algonquians treated them. Meanwhile, Harriot departed from his narrative of disease by listing the invisible bullets-theory among other possible explanations of the illness. His apparent uncertainty regarding the disease’s cause manifested his desire to promote colonization in Virginia and to assure readers that the New World environment had not degenerated colonists’ bodies. Yet because Harriot’s observation of and participation in Roanoke medical and religious practices threatened to alter his mental faculties and support his reputation for investigating heterodox knowledge, he ultimately employed his catalog of commodities to distance himself from his observation of and participation in the Roanokes’ medical practices.

Providential Bullets

Initially a private report for Ralegh, Lane’s “Account” defended his failure to find either a northwest passage or gold as well as his decision that the colonists should abandon the settlement and return to England with Sir Francis Drake.¹⁸ Lane argued that he had fulfilled his duties as well as possible in difficult circumstances, which included Spanish threats, insufficient food supplies, and, he believed, a conspiracy against the English and false information about the location of gold mines from the Algonquians. He mitigated his own and the colony’s failures by employing a narrative form to give undesired events purpose and meaning as signs of future success. The narrative records Lane’s movement from “discovery” to “departure,” but it is at times structured less by actual experiences than by Ralegh’s instructions and expectations of Virginia.¹⁹ Finding gold elusive and Virginia’s geography and inhabitants different from his expectations, Lane nevertheless attempted to construct a narrative of discovery by imagining how he would have found a northwest passage and mine if circumstances had been different. He employed a conditional tense that made discovery hover on the horizon, requiring only support from England to be realized: he wrote that if only Ralegh “had” sent necessary supplies, the expedition “would have” set off.²⁰ Even the Roanokes were incorporated into the narrative; they stood ready to supply guides with whom Lane “would have gone up to the head of the river.”²¹ Lane’s narrative gave real and imagined experiences in Virginia meaning as promise of future discovery. In his “Account,” attaching narrative forms to disappointing or confusing experiences transformed them into signs of future satisfaction, in this way rhetorically fulfilling Ralegh’s instructions.

Lane presented the Algonquians’ medical knowledge as supporting his narrative of English discovery, just as he portrayed Algonquian guides as willing to direct the colonists to gold mines. He explained that an elderly and influential Roanoke advisor, Ensenore, said that the English were “the seruants of God, and that wee were not subject to bee destroyed by them: but contrariwise, that they amongst them that sought our destruction, shoulde finde their owne, [and] that they have bene in the night, being 100 miles from any of us, in the ayre shot at, and stroken by some men of ours, that by sicknesse had dyed among them.”²² Like Harriot, Lane described the Algonquians’ belief that the colonists were powerful beings with the authority to send disease, and he, too, reported that the Roanokes perceived disease as an entity separate from bodies, which affected people by traveling from place to place and spreading when the English shot at them.

Lane located his account of the epidemic in the context of tensions between the colonists and Wingina, tensions that disrupted his narrative and that exposed Lane’s lack of control over area politics, food supplies, and communication. The disease broke out in the midst of a debate among the Roanoke regarding the nature of the colonists’ intentions and whether to allow them to stay in the area. Both Manteo and Wanchese seem to have concluded that the colonists had significant power on the basis of their experiences in England, but they came to different answers to the question of how to respond to that power. Manteo seems to have decided that the Roanoke Algonquians could make use of English power and an alliance with the colonists, while Wanchese came to the opposite conclusion, one that motivated him to counsel Wingina to refuse the colonists sustenance and assistance.²³ At the same time, Lane himself was mired in considerable confusion regarding which of the Algonquian leaders—and their accounts of friendly or hostile groups—he could trust. When he traveled inland, he found that Wingina had already sent word that the colonists had malevolent intentions to the Choanists and Mangoaks, who were “dismay[ed]” at Lane’s arrival.²⁴ He further discovered that he could not tell signs of welcome from those of aggression: he explained that while on his journey, “certaine Savages . . . presently began a song, as we thought, in token of our welcome to them: but Manteo presently betooke him to his piece, and tolde mee that they meant to fight with us.”²⁵ Finally, as Lane explained, while he was delayed on an expedit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Conents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Epidemic, Encounter, and Colonial Promotion in Virginia
• 2. Healing, Medical Authority, and Moral Degeneration in New England
• 3. African Testimony, Dangerous Communications, and Colonial   Medical Knowledge in the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy
• 4. Obeah, Slave Revolt, and Plantation Medicine in the British West Indies
• 5. Drunkenness, Syphilis, and History in Samson Occom’s Medical Writing Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index