Primitives Divined

Divination is a soothing act designed to assuage anxious uncertainty. To meet the requirements of divining one must operate from a precarious ground, a pivotal base always on the verge of coming unhinged. Reality for the divining lies just in sight, rarely in plain view. The divine's discernment is eternally fated to be divisionary. Second sight does not add up except to an ambiguous juncture on which the soothsayer is optically splayed. Because this is the fate of gifted ferrymen caught between one and another world, it is a fate Columbus knew very well. Emphatic perseverance and enthusiastic hyperbole become compensatory gestures for a predicament of such ambivalence and insecurity. And Columbus, as we have seen, wavers rarely, and then only for the sake of self-reaffirmation in the divinely sanctioned surety of conviction. In this, too, Columbus figures as prototype of the blessed New World's cocksure steadfastness.

As divine primitive, Columbus takes the natives of the New World into the ken of his divineness, thereby setting yet another precedent for those who followed him. That precedent is two-fold: first, it consists of an anxious looking both ways on the path of time, now nostalgically, now with impatience, trying to divine the past in the present and to glimpse the imminent presence of the awaited future. Second, Columbus sets the precedent for viewing the natives now as divine ancestors from a revered past, now as incipient anthropoids on the way to a humanity, as Columbus knew it, still in their future. Columbus would be as sure of one as of the other, expressing himself with equal confidence on the

primitive as on the prophetic. Knowing himself at midstream in navigation between the two, Columbus would never allow that he was in the limbo of a human comedy, sticking steadfastly to a divine one instead. Keenly aware that he pertained to both and to neither, he adamantly emplaced himself now in the "no longer" of divine primitivism (whether pagan or baptized), now in the "not yet" of divining prophecy. In that tenacious holding to one's ground that betrays the symptoms of displacement, Columbus also stands as paradigm of the modern epic hero who, unlike his classical counterpart from Antiquity, knows that he is firmly planting himself on ground less than firm. Ironically, only fifteen years divides Columbus's debut as transworlding hero and the utter undoing of the grounds he (dis)covered into the groundlessness of the philologist Waldseemüller's American "Nowhereland," as scanned in our third chapter. As much an itinerant between worlds as any of Robert Cushman's "strangers and pilgrims, travellers and soujourners, [whose] dwelling is but a wandering," Columbus had already given the term "pilgrim" a peculiarly American meaning one hundred and thirty years before Cushman's pilgrimage from Plymouth to Plymouth, a sojourn that utterly transformed the Old World place-name and the New World place so named.

Geographical worlds are also, or chiefly, human worlds, and if Columbus opted for coexisting with the conflated duality of Alpha and Omega, of the end of the East and the end of the West, he also could not extricate himself from the human undecidability of this cosmic ambivalence. He thus found himself wracked on the indeterminacy that would have the native Indians be, at once, venerable ancestors and vendible chattel whose history begins with him and his Pilgrim's investment in their hitherto unfolded existence. Columbus's reckoning with regard to the native peoples, then, oscillates between a tabula radix and a tabula rasa —between a divine genealogy rooted in the common ground of Genesis (whether of the anointed Hebrew Eden or the genesiz [genesis] of pagan Antiquity's Golden Age) and a blank slate on which prophecy's inexorable future could be indelibly, and profitably, inscribed.

Having sighted fires and made his land fall by 2:00 A.M. on Friday morning, 12 October 1492, Columbus waits for dawn. His first recorded observations concern the natives' nakedness, their amicable disposition and total innocence, their well-built and comely bodies. He is taken by the absence and the natives' ignorance of arms of war, noting that in this Edenic setting, "they have no iron." Clearly, for Columbus, this is an Age of Gold, and in next day's journal entry he will also note that indeed "gold is born here [aquí nace el oro]." The gold-ornamented bodies of these otherwise edenically naked people evokes for the Admiral the Garden of Genesis and the ancients' age of yore. The people's guileless commerce ("they took and gave all they had willingly") corroborates this initial impression. But, at the same time, Columbus articulates, and thereby unveils, the other facet of the natives' ill-fated fall into Europe's history. In the final few sentences of this first commentary on the New World, Columbus's words, at once benign description and, as history would prove, indelible curse, seal the natives' destiny. The confluence of elements in Columbus's pronouncement is ominously telling in view of subsequent history: "Ellos deven de ser buenos servidores y de buen ingenio, que veo que muy presto dizen todo lo que les dezía. Yo creo que ligeramente se harían cristianos, que me pareció que ninguna secta tenían. Yo plaziendo a Nuestro Señor levaré de aquí al tiempo de mi partida seis a Vuestras Altezas para que deprendan fablar. [They must be good servants and intelligent, for I see that they immediately repeat what I said to them. I think that they would readily become Christians, for it seemed to me they had no religion. Our Lord willing, I will take with me six of them upon my return for Your Highnesses so that they may learn to speak]."^[46]

A "stranger and pilgrim" on an errand patronized by strangers, Columbus's attitude on this, the New World's first dawn as a New World is strangely assimilationist. And though, as we have seen, by the letter of his third voyage he would be referring to this strange land as "an other world," on the occasion of this initial encounter Columbus takes, literally and figuratively, this world as an idealized version of the world he knew, which is also the

world that preconditioned the way he would know whatever world he might have encountered. As for the human component of this New World, in a manner that obviously is second nature to him, he takes the natives as a secondary humanity in relation to the primacy of his own human world. Hence the automatic move from the natives' tractable and edenic innocence to their serviceability as "good servants," followed by the designation of these people as mimetic echo, albeit surprisingly intelligent, of his speech and speaking culture. They readily repeated "what I said to them." Columbus then moves to a further level of erasure or conversion of the natives into hollow human chambers ready to echo his European culture. From the linguistic, Columbus moves to the metaphysical, assuming outright that he faces a blank surface on which to inscribe the ideology of an entire cosmogony whose tidal waves belched him unto these shores: "it seemed to me they had no religion," and, therefore, "they would readily become Christians." Thus, having rendered this encountered human world blank and mute, Columbus vows that, God willing, he will take back with him a half dozen of these specimens so that "they may learn how to speak [para que deprendan fablar]."

I refer to Columbus's attitude as assimilationist, but the unmistakable suppositions that underlie his attitude and his ensuing actions leave no room to doubt as to who is being assimilated to and by whom. The situation of these two human elements, native and European, from this first encounter precludes any symmetry in the relationship and exchange between them. If the charters we examined in our fourth chapter, especially the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe granted to Columbus, had already "conquered" the geographical world they invented in their inscription, the human component, as also pointed out, had already been rendered proprietary object, scripted there in those texts as naturalized subject(s). In this primal encounter, we see clearly how that rhetorical and textual appropriation works out in practice, as rendered, of course, in textual and rhetorical representation by Columbus in his journal and, in turn, by the paraphrases of Father Bartolomé de Las Casas. As primal, other-worldly pilgrim and economic journeyman on a worldly sojourn, Columbus takes the

New World upon encountering it. He takes it not by storm or surprise but by perplexity, his own and that of the natives. The natives will never overcome theirs since they are overcome by it, and time will give them no opportunity to discern otherwise. A "wonderful plague" visited upon them by God's providence will seal their perplexity with silence for perpetuity. Columbus, on the other hand, may not have been certain of where he was, requiring his crew at one point to sign an affidavit that assured him, Their Highnesses, and posterity otherwise, but such geographical befuddlement did not endanger his cosmological compass in the least. And the greatest certainty of that conviction was the ideological assurance that told him he, on a hierarchical scale of humanity, was first, foremost, and above all, the representative vanguard of humanity's preeminent ranks. Like those who would follow him, whether Papists or Puritans equally convinced of such preeminence as their own rightful condition, Columbus saw his human world and its history as the cosmos' consummate integer whose special dispensation privileged it with the unique opportunity to see (to) the cosmic consummation. For the natives of that initial encounter, the consummation was not long in coming, though their humanity was clearly not nearly as consummate in the dissymmetry of this human exchange.

Prefigured in Columbus's initial reaction to the human world he encountered we find the two principal predispositions toward the Indians that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would institutionalize. The first of Columbus's reactions, the assimilationist, belongs, for the most part, to the religious orders of New Spain in the sixteenth century, the Franciscan and Dominican friars who had to account for these natives from within the human cosmology of their own human world. The second, the appropriative (really expropriative and exclusionary, otherwise it would be another form of assimilation), is more readily manifest in the comportment of the clerisy of New England in the seventeenth century. Though there were a number of Puritans, such as John Eliot and Roger Williams, who would essay assimilative explanations of the Indians, more is said by the friars of New Spain than by the divines of New England on the prove-

nance and genealogy of the natives. In general, the sixteenth-century Catholic friars felt compelled to account for the natives. The seventeenth-century Puritans were compelled by their ideological determinations to do otherwise. In short, and at the risk of oversimplification, the Catholic Spirituals took the assimilationist tact prefigured in Columbus's primal example. The Puritans took the "eliminationist" or exclusionary tact. Such exclusiveness was, after all, the underlying impetus of their nonconformist and separatist ethos that led them to preclude any intercourse with the Old World they chose to leave behind. Thus, there is more said by the Dominicans and Franciscans on the subject of the natives. There is less where an ideology of erasure leaves a blank, though it be an articulate silence in its vacuous denial. What the New England divines, for the most part, saw fit to overlook, their nineteenth-century missionary progeny eventually would address, though it was already too late for any redress of the human consequences the forefathers' erasure had wrought. I refer the reader to studies more properly concerned with this later period that falls outside the chronological purview of the present study.^[47] It may suffice to remember that even John Winthrop, the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company himself, was excluded from the divine communion of the Bay Colony's covenanted divines upon his arrival at Salem on 12 June 1630, much less the "heathenish salvages" so hopelessly far from the divine grace of the Puritans' covenantal God.

In the natives of the New World Columbus finds the embodiment of his divine primitivism and of his incipient Renaissance vision. He sees the Indians as reminiscent of the Golden Age and as the promise of a prophetic future about to become realized as a result of his providential mission. For the missionary apostles of sixteenth-century New Spain, there no longer was a Golden Age of yore, but only the "gold" of an eschatological future and its apocalyptic boon. Their salvationist vision and evangelical primitivism faced with the possibility of a renewed church in the New World, a church that would revive the simplicity and purity of the apostolic age, disposed them toward an explanation of the native peoples in strictly biblical terms. Some felt the Indians were in-

deed the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. But even those who did not believe in the Jewishness of the Indians still felt that these people were descended from the same stock as the rest of humanity, as the record of Genesis proclaimed. The Indians, then, were farflung children of Noah and, as such, divine ancestors whose path after the Flood led them to stray from the rest of humanity and to lapse from the grace of their godly creation.

The compelling need to account for the origin of the natives is grounded in the prophetic tradition. And, most immediately for these latter-day primitive divines who yearned for the earliness of the church and its new covenant, the urgency of such an explanation was apocalyptic. One must underline their pressing necessity since their task originates in the climactic emergency of that apocalyptic moment between the opening of the sixth and seventh seals of Revelation (7: 4–9). This is as close as one comes to the End without being there. And this is the end-time in which all tribes, even those long lost, are gathered for the roll call of cosmic eschatology. The missionary zeal of New Spain's friars had taught them that the Jews were to be converted as Judgment Day closed in and this world prepared to move on to the next. Thus, an explanation based on the prophetic tradition had the double virtue of accounting for the Indians and, for those convinced of the Indians' Jewishness, of reading in this encounter portentous signs that the opening of the seventh seal and the subsequent apocalyptic consummation were imminent. As the Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta put it in his Historia Ecclesiastica Indiana, "who knows whether we are not so close to the end of the world that the conversion of the Indians is fulfilling the prophecies for which we pray that the Jews may be converted in our time? Because if the Indians descend from the Jews, then the prophecy is already fulfilled."^[48] I am inclined to concur then with Phelan's reading of the Franciscan fathers on this point. Phelan noted: "The popularity of the Jewish-Indian myth in the New World was due partly to the fact that it provided a kind of explanation for the origin of American man. But I suggest that the real source of appeal for the spread of this curious legend can be found only in the apocalyptic mood of the Age of Discovery. If

the Indians were in reality the lost tribes, such a discovery would be convincing evidence that the world was soon to end."^[49]

Don Cameron Allen's The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters is close to being a definitive summary of the Renaissance literature on the Indians' origins.^[50] In sixteenth-century New Spain, the most convinced of the Indians' Jewish origin was the Dominican Diego Durán who, though Spanish by birth (1537), lived in Mexico from the age of five or six. His familiarity with New Spain and its natives is intimate and detailed, as is his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y Islas de la Tierra Firme (1576–1581). Father Durán, "most likely . . . himself . . . from a family of converted Jews,"^[51] loses no time in proclaiming his thesis. On the first page of his Historia, declaring that one would need "divine revelation" or "spiritual intelligence" to know the origin of the American natives with certainty, he proceeds confidently with the affirmation that "we could ultimately declare them to be by nature Jews [podríamos ultimadamente afirmar ser naturalmente judíos]."^[52] His proof for such certainty is, in fact, "divine revelation" since sacred scripture offers the necessary testimony for his assertion—"para la probación de lo qual será testigo la Sagrada Escriptura, donde clara y abiertamente sacaremos ser verdadera esta opinion [for whose proof Sacred Scripture shall bear witness, from which we shall prove clearly and openly the truth of this opinion]." The scriptural proofs educed by Father Durán range from Deuteronomy to Micah, from Hosea to Zephaniah, from Jeremiah to Ezekiel. He is not always specific about chapter and verse, but the drift of his "proof" clearly points to covenantal law, especially the reiterated commandment of Deuteronomy, and, what is more revealing, to the admonitory jeremiads of those prophetic voices and their terrific clamor against those who would lapse from the laws of the covenant. This particular focus suggests more than mere interest in the Indians' Jewishness. And the Dominican friar is rather explicit in remarks that not only proclaim the Indians to be Jewish, but serve the unmistakable purpose of justifying the Conquest. Thus, if the Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta's speculations on the natives' Jewishness do the double duty of explain-

ing their origin and corroborating the imminence of prophecy's apocalypse, Father Durán's proofs, likewise, serve a dual purpose. The Indians are undeniably Jewish because of their "nature," and their state of spiritual declension and social degeneracy constitute the cause and necessary conditions for their foreordained afflictions as prophesied in the admonitions of the visionary Patriarchs. The vicissitudes of the Conquest, then, represent the fulfillment of those monitory injunctions and their implicit curse:

. . . el curioso letor podrá ver y notar en el Deuteronomio, cap. 4, y 28 y 32, Isaias, 20, 28, 42 capítulos; Jeremías, Ezequías, Miqueas, Sophonías, donde se hallará el castigo rigurosísimo que Dios prometió á estos diez tribus por sus grandes maldades, y abominaciones y nefandas idolatrías, apartándose del culto de su verdadero Dios, De quien tantos beneficios avian recibido: por pago de tal ingratitud les promete Dios, en los lugares acotados, un azote y castigo rigurosísimo qual le vemos cumplido en estas miserables gentes; conviene a saber, que les avian de ser quitadas sus tierras, casas y tesoros, sus joyas y piedras preciosas, sus mugeres é hijos y llevados á vender á tierras estrañas, gozando otros de sus haziendas: paréceme que aunque no diera más autoridad ni raçon para que entendiéramos questos indios son y proceden de los judíos, que lo dicho bastaba, viendo que aviéndose multiplicado como las arenas de la mar, siendo en su trasmigración número breve, y los muchos años de su peregrinación, despues de aver poblado este mundo tan grande, cansado Dios de sufrir sus abominaciones y echos nefandos y idolatrías, trujese Dios gentes estrañas, como águila que viene de los fines de la tierra, que sin tener respeto á los viejos ni á los moços, á los niños ni á las mugeres, los destruyó y consumió sin ninguna piedad, teniéndolos en hambre, en sed y desnudez y en cansancio perpetuo hasta que fuesen apocados.^[53]

. . . the interested reader can see and note in Deuteronomy, chaps. 4, 28, and 32; Isaiah, chaps. 20, 28, 42; Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Zephaniah, where one will find the most rigorous punishment God promised these ten tribes for their great evils, and abominations, and nefarious idolatries, for straying from the reverence of their true God, from whom they were the recipients of so many blessings: in return for such ingratitude, God promises them, in the cited passages, a calamity and mighty affliction which we see fulfilled in these miserable people; to wit, that their lands, homes, goods, their jewels and precious stones,

their women and children were to be taken away from them and taken to strange countries to be sold, with others enjoying their estate: It seems to me that though I cite no other authority and give no other reason, we should understand that these Indians are Jews and are descended from Jews. What has been said suffices, seeing that having multiplied like the sand of the sea, having been few in their migration, and the years of their wandering many. After having populated this great world, God, weary of suffering their abominations, nefarious deeds, and idolatries, should bring strange people, like an eagle that comes from the ends of the earth, without respecting the old or the young, the women or children, destroyed and consumed them without pity, afflicting them with hunger, thirst, and nakedness and endless weariness until they diminished.]

Like the "wonderful plague" visited by God upon the Indians of New England, the baneful fate that befalls the natives of New Spain as a result of the Conquest is the will of Wonder-Working Providence at work among the strayed tribes of His original fold. Durán and the Spanish hosts, then, are the instruments of God visited upon these errant tribes to exact divine retribution and to redeem them from their errancy by incorporation into a new covenant and a new dispensation. Father Diego Durán's hopefulness for the natives' future, in fact, leads him to see not only the violated covenant of Deuteronomy in their past, he also discerns in their customs and practices elements of the New Covenant and, surely, he concludes, these people had been proselytized by some Christian apostle well before the arrival of the Spaniards, and that evangelist could have been none other than Saint Thomas whom the Indians called Quetzalcoatl and Topiltzin.^[54] Thus baptized, the natives of New Spain become a distant, opaque mirror for the Spanish missionary and historian who, if we follow Todorov's rendition, now seeks to recoup his own Jewish semblance by polishing that opacity with the grace of truth and the saving light that guides his pilgrimage.

Between the Dominican Diego Durán's Historia (1576–1581) and the Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta's Historia Ecclesiastica Indiana (1596/7–1604) intervenes the Aristotelian Jesuit José de Acosta and his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589). This explains, in part, Durán's unconditional certainty

and Mendieta's conjectural, albeit still enthusiastic, attitude toward the Jewish theory on the Indians. Although, as Phelan points out, Father Acosta "subscribed to the major premise of apocalyptic mysticism of the Age of Discovery,"^[55] acknowledging that his times were the last age of the world, "the eleventh hour" (De temporibus novissimus, 1590), his Aristotelian rationalism tempered the enthusiastic expectations of the likes of Mendieta. Acosta's hypotheses on the origin of the Indians rejected their filiation with Israel's Ten Lost Tribes altogether, calling the theory frivolous. In his Historia natural, Acosta proposes, instead, what Don Cameron Allen refers to as "the theory now accepted by modern anthropologists."^[56] This is the theory of the overland migrations through the northern continental straits. In the process, Acosta disallows, as well, the Atlantis hypothesis of Plato's Timaeus that still held some fascination, along with Isaiah's prophecies, for Bartolomé de Las Casas earlier in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, Father Acosta also sees the natives in a primitive stage but, rather than a lapsed people in a state of declension, as Durán would have them, for Acosta this is an unregenerate state of uncivilized earliness, as opposed to a degenerate belatedness of a fall from grace. In either case, the native peoples of the New World are clearly in that primal stage to which Columbus sentenced them on that initial encounter a century earlier. The Dominican, Jesuit, and Franciscan friars are representative of the gamut of opinion on the Indians, though none of the three reflects necessarily the opinions held within his own religious order.

Though belated by comparison, the Puritan opinion on the American natives was equally varied, ranging from the fanciful to the assimilationist evangelical. For the most part, the English reflect the spectrum of received notions articulated initially by Columbus himself and elaborated by the Catholic friars. Thus, Columbus's "Golden Age" theory has its avatar in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1632). The Admiral's prophetic divinations on the Indian as ultimate Christian finally reached by Providence for Its cosmic ends resonate piously in John Eliot and ambiguously in Roger Williams. The indomitable Thomas Morton bases his

observations and conclusions, as the original title page of his treatise avers, "Upon ten Yeers Knowledge and Experiment of the Country." Others, his contemporaries and ours, have declaimed amply on the nature of Morton's "Knowledge and Experiment of the Country," and there is no need to inflate that Aeolean skin of righteousness further. Emboldened by "knowledge and experiment," Morton conclusively affirms and conjectures, at once, that having "bin in those parts any time; besides others lesse, now I am bold to conclude that the originall of the Natives of New England may be well conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans after such time as Brutus departed from Latium."^[57] As for the Asiatic or Tartar origins of the Indians posited in England by, among others, Edward Brerewood (Enquiries touching the diversity of languages, and religions, through the chief parts of the world, London, 1622, pp. 94–102), Morton puts no stock in that theory and its conjectures of overland migrations, as originally put forth by Father José de Acosta. Morton notes that "where as it hath been the opinion of some men, which shall be nameless, that the Natives of New England may proceede from the race of the Tartars, and come from Tartaria into these partes, over the frozen Sea, I see no probality [sic] of any such Conjecture, for as much, as a people once setled must be remooved by compulsion or else tempted thereunto in hope of better fortunes, upon commendations of the place, unto which they should be drawne to remoove."^[58] Morton is all too well "knowledgable and experienced" in such temptations to have his Trojan theory be read at face value. Though his philological tracing and "proof" of such a theory be symptomatic of the kind of divination and conjecture the American natives were being subjected to at the time, I am inclined to suspect that Morton's Trojan genealogy, although valuable as an example, is a Trojan horse in a polemic with the Founding Fathers of the "New English Canaan." Clearly, with the last sentence of the passage just cited, Morton undermines not the theory of the Indians' overland migration necessarily, or solely, but the godly determinacies of providential history. In this sense, he echoes the protean discourse of that other indomitable New England figure who gave New England its name, Captain John Smith. I refer to his Description of New England and

the passage cited in our last chapter where Smith makes quick to invest human and worldly motives in such enterprises as opposed to divine predeterminations and providential elections. As for Morton's "bold conclusion" on the Indians' Latin lineage, I do not believe he is adding a thirteenth book to Virgil's Aeneid . Rather, he is alluding as much to the founding of England as he is remarking the founding of New England. In doing so, and I shall explain presently, Morton insinuates the insightful observation that the Pilgrim Fathers are taking the American natives as blank and faithful mirrors that echo back to them their own English legends and legendary genealogy, whether these be divined from scriptures' Genesis or from pagan lore. Because the Brutus that Morton would have as the strayed shipwreck whose Trojan progeny multiplied into native Indians is the same legendary founding father of the British race, as documented by Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155) in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136). Geoffrey's source is a "most ancient book in the British tongue" furnished him by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Although the veracity of Geoffrey's Historia has been disputed often, its substantial contribution to the formation and popularity of the Arthurian legends remains indisputably telling. Morton might or might not have intended it to be so, but in holding up to the Founding Puritans the mirror of their own legendary genealogy and racial mythos through the ruse of a Trojan origin for the Indian natives, Morton is remarking more than the narcissism of any conquering people whose hubris leads them to see inferior and incipient versions of themselves and their own history in those they conquer. Columbus, as we have seen, is the New World's primal example of this predisposition. But, as I suggested, Morton, in his "war" with the orthodox founders, does more in attributing the genealogical paternity of these natives to one who not only sired the British race, but one who is also a filicide and a patricide as well. Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, grandson of Ascanius, and son of Sylvius, had the misfortune of killing his father, as he would also slay his children. It was such turn of fortune that, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, led to his sailing off with a Trojan remnant to an uninhabited island, England, "vacant" at the time, through the

providence of some "wonderful plague" perchance, except for "a few giants." Surely, the English race would not be sired on runts. As founding father, Brutus had an earlier career than his British sojourn, of course, and this is Virgil's version Thomas Morton obviously knew in his own way. Lucius Junius Brutus drove out the Tarquin kings in 510 B.C. and founded the Roman republic. He executed his sons for plotting the restoration of the Tarquins:

And would you see the Tarquin kings? And, too,
the haughty spirit of avenging Brutus,
the fasces he regained? He will be first
to win the power of a consul, to use
the cruel axes; though a father, for
the sake of splendid freedom he will yet
condemn his very sons who stirred new wars.
Unhappy man! However later ages
may tell his acts, his love of country will
prevail, as will his passion for renown.
                   ( Aeneid, bk. 4, lines 1083–1092).^[59]

It should be clear, I hope, why we can only read Morton on the origins of the Indians as symptomatic of the philological theorizing and philogenetic conjecture that compelled his contemporaries. His own ends, beyond the ostensible genealogy he offers for the Indians, constitute a compelling tale in themselves, but that is beyond our purview at the moment. That tale's political allegory as spectral family romance has been long considered, no doubt, by those who have dared countenance its delightful irreverence. In Morton's plot, the Puritan pilgrims as Brutus's prosopopoeia must be read as the image of those Separatists/Nonconformists who, at once, abandon the fatherland and appropriate/ expropriate the newfound land. But this allegory in Morton's satirical inversions that would have New England's Founding Fathers, including Morton himself, reflected as prodigal patricides and filicidal usurpers surely must be the well-trod ground of innumerable exegetes who have considered this first cultural iconoclast of the Puritans' New Canaan enterprise.

Even as Morton was "knowing and experimenting" in New England, an Old England Puritan and apologist for the New

World enterprise, the Reverend John White of Dorchester, speculates on the Jewish origins of the Indians. Though he sought to remain noncommittal on the conjectures he conveyed, he did venture a number of his own hypotheses. The title page of his The Planters Plea. Or the Grounds of Plantations examined And vsuall Objections answered (1630) is graced with II Thessalonians 5:21—"Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good." There is, obviously, quite a distance between White's doctrinal "proof" and Morton's knowing "experiment." And were he forced to seek scriptural sanction in the form of epigram, Morton might have well improvised with "disprove all things and that which is good shall smile forth upon thee." Proof through experience, as Morton's usage of experiment denotes, is a process of disconfirmation more in the realm of worldly investigating than within the ken of doctrinal proving. Like the rest of the Puritans and the Catholic friars before them, the Reverend White speaks from other-worldly grounds and, his circumlocution notwithstanding, he yields to "philological" evidence to see the American natives in prophetic and eschatological light:

As in New England the Nations beleeve the Creation of the world by God, the Creation of one man and woman, their happy condition at the first, and seduction by the envy (as they say) of the Cony which moves them to abhorre that creature unto this day more then any Serpent. It is also reported that they separate their women in the times appointed by the Law of Moses, counting them and all they touch uncleane during that time appointed by the Law: whether upon any other ground, or by a tradition received from the Iewes, it is uncertaine. Some conceive ther Predecessors might have had some commerce with the Iewes in times past, by what meanes I know not: Howsoever it bee, it fals out that the name of the place, which our late Colony hath chosen their seat, prooves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike, by interpretation, The bosome of consolation: which it were pitty that those which observed it not, should change into the name of Salem [still Hebrew, of course]. . . . Now then, if all nations must have Christ tendered unto them, and the Indies have never yet heard of his name, it must follow, that worke of conveighing that knowledge of them, remains to bee undertaken and performed by this last age.^[60]

"However it bee, it fals out" quite nicely not only in the Hebrew, which the first settlers must have heard in the Indian language as accurately and unmistakably as Columbus heard the language of the Grand Khan in the native Cuban. "It fals out," also that the Reverend White's paragraph begins with Genesis and ends with the Apocalypse. Moving from the Creation and Fall to "this last age," John White sees miraculous providence at work, bringing the cosmic drama to its climactic closure. In the process, there is something reminiscent of both the Dominican friar Diego Durán and the Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta in White's conflation of what we saw in Father Diego as theological justification for the travails of the Conquest and in Father Gerónimo as the anxious expectation that prophecy's realization and the covenant's fulfillment might be at hand, at last, if only the Indians were also the Jews. First, the theological strains of Diego Durán's apologia for the Conquest:

It were little lesse then impietie to conceive that GOD, (whose Will concurres with the lighting of a Sparrow upon the ground) had no hand in directing one of the most difficult and observable workes of this age; and as great folly to imagine, that hee who made all things, and consequently orders and directs them to his owne glory, had no other scope but the satisfying of mens greedy appetites, that thirsted after the riches of the new found world, and to tender unto them the objects of such barbarous cruelties as the world never heard of. Wee cannot then probably conceive that GOD, in that strange discovery, aymed at any other thing but this, that, after hee had punished the Atheisme, and Idolatry of those heathen and bruitish Nation by the Conquerors cruelty, and acquainted them by mixture of some people, with civility, to cause, at length the glorious Gospell of Iesus Christ to shine out unto them.^[61]

And, after this salvaging of the "heathen and bruitish Nation" in This World, comes the deliverance unto the Next, as urgently imminent for the Reverend John White as for the Mendicant friar Gerónimo de Mendieta, whom we have already cited:

. . . to prove that God hath left this great, and glorious worke to this age of the world, is the nearnesse of the Iewes conversion; before which, it is conceived by the most, that the fulness of the Gentiles must come in, according to the Apostles prophesie, Rom . 11.25.

That this day cannot be farre off appears by the fulfilling of the prophesies, precedent to that great and glorious worke, and the generall expectation thereof by all men, such as was found among the Iewes both in Iudea and in some other parts of the world before the comming of Christ in the flesh, now then let it bee granted that the Iewes conversion is neare, and that the Gentiles, and consequently the Indians must needs be gathered in before that day; and any man may make the conclusion that this is the houre for the worke, and consequently of our duty to endeavour the effecting that which God has determined; the opening of the eyes of those poore ignorant soules, and discovering unto them the glorious mystery of Iesus Christ.^[62]

John White's exhortation was most earnestly heeded by John Eliot who arrived in New England the year after the Reverend White's tract was published. From 1646 on, Eliot would be the most signaled advocate of Indian catechism. He would become known as the "Apostle to the Indians" and his example would inspire the founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1649), London's answer to the Jesuits' evangelic zeal. In his Christian Commonwealth (1659), Eliot sees his Christian Indian communities as model societies of a new apostolic age, much like the friars of Minorite orders in New Spain saw theirs a century earlier. Like Mendieta, for example, John Eliot saw his efforts as propitiating the millennial kingdom through the recuperation of the strayed lambs for God's fold. His achievements were so perceived by the expectant Puritans in general. The Puritans' apocalyptic program overlaps unquestionably with the spiritual kingdom of the Franciscans in New Spain inasmuch as Indian evangelism is perceived as the first manifestation of the awaited millennium. A few years before the publication of The Christian Commonwealth, and two years following his successful efforts toward the founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, John Eliot would convey his apostolic vision and his own instrumentality in bringing about God's kingdom on earth in unmistakably hopeful terms: "I intend to direct them [the Indians] according as the Lord shall please to help and assist to set up the Kingdom of Jesus Christ fully, so that Christ shall reigne both in Church and Commonwealth, both in Civil and

Spiritual matters . . . And when everything both Civil & Spiritual are done by the direction of the word of Christ, then doth Christ reigne, and the great Kingdom of Jesus Christ which we weight for, is even this that I do now mention."^[63] Eliot's apostolic enterprise and millennialist vision harken to the sixteenth-century spiritual conquest of New Spain that Robert Ricard has so minutely documented in a book by that title.^[64] In the lines that continue Eliot's just-cited letter, however, the Apostle of the Indians from Roxbury also echoes Columbus's construction of the New World's natives as tabula rasa awaiting the inscription of a whole ideological complex that would prove their boon and final deliverance: "As for these poor Indians," Eliot continues, "they have no principles of their own, nor yet wisdome of their own (I mean as other Nations have) wherein to stick; and therefore they do most readily yeeld to any direction from the Lord, so that there will be no such opposition against the rising Kingdome of Jesus Christ among them."

Writing some seven or eight years earlier than Eliot, Roger Williams was neither as sanguine about the role of apostolic missions nor did he take the natives of New England as unproblematic receptacles as Eliot did for his cheerful evangelism. The Puritan nonconformist and dissenter from the Bay Colony's theocracy cohabited with the Indians not merely as spiritual teacher and apostolic father but as sympathetic ethnographer. His A Key into the Language of America: Or, An Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America, called New England (1643) precedes Eliot's linguistic work by twenty years. Williams rehearses the theories of the natives' Jewish origins in the prefatory remarks—"To my Deare and Welbeloved Friends and Coun[t]ry-men, in old and new England"—of A Key into the Language of America .^[65] Consulted by Thomas Thorowgood in 1635 on the Jewish origins of the Indians, Williams had no qualms about the hypothesis. Thorowgood's Jewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans Are of That Race (London, 1650) reflects the seventeenth-century discourse on the Indians' genealogy. In A Key, Williams conscientiously reports on the varied opinion of "wise and judicious men with whom I have

discoursed," relating the Tartar, or Asiatic, hypothesis, as well as the Icelandic, on the Indians' provenance. As for their racial genealogy, Williams moves from hypothesis to observation, allowing the wise, as he says, to draw their own conclusions: "Other opinions I could number up: under favour I shall present (not mine opinion, but) my Observations to the judgement of the Wise." He then enumerates his "observations" that run the gamut of criteria rehearsed by the Mendicant friars of New Spain in the previous century: linguistic affinities to Hebrew, customs such as ablutions ("they constantly annoint their heads as the Jewes did"), the giving of dowries, and a taboo, already mentioned by the Reverend White, "(which I have not so observed amongst other Nations as amongst the Jewes, and these: ) they constantly separate their Women (during the time of the monthly sicknesse) in a little house alone by themselves four or five days, and hold it an Irreligious thing for either Father or Husband or any Male to come neere them . . . and for their practice they plead Nature and Tradition ." At this point, as if to keep Columbus's construal of the Indians as Europe's incipient history and yearned Golden Age from disappearing, Williams interjects, on second thought and with no explanation, that as for their speech, "Yet againe I have found a greater Affinity of their Language with the Greek Tongue."

Bewildered and vacillating on his own whereabouts in this wilderness, Williams owns, "I dare not conjecture in these Vncertainties, I believe they are lost, and yet hope (in the Lords holy season) some of the wildest of them shall be found to share in the blood of the Son of God." And, though he vacillates, one thing is certain for Williams, and that is his earnest expectation of the "Lords holy season" which, he says, "I hope approaching."^[66] As W. Clark Gilpin points out however, the conversion of the Indians was not yet as propitious or as propitiating of the desired End. In this Williams differed from John Eliot, but that difference affiliated Williams with the Mendicant friars of New Spain who sought in the ecclesia indiana the renascence of the apostolic church, its apostolic poverty and angelic primitivism inspired by the Medieval tradition of the Spirituals and Joachim de Fiore.

Like the primitivist zeal of the apostolic friars, documented extensively, as already noted, by Ricard and Phelan, Roger Williams's reformationist enthusiasm did not see his times as sufficiently regenerated into the true spirit of the strayed church, in apostasy since the Middle Ages, and the conversion of the Indians was not to be expected to yield the hoped-for end-time, since the real conversion of the Christians themselves had yet to occur. The observations and commentary, as well as the intercalated verses among the lexical lists of A Key, clearly convey that by Williams's reckoning Christian and Indian alike had yet to receive the requisite dispensation, or had yet to give themselves over to the spiritual grace of true regeneration, for which he prayed fervently, so that the End of this world's ends could finally ensue. In this, Williams differs from a good number of Puritans and Catholics alike. For whereas the providentialist hopes and messianic aspirations of most, whether English or Iberian, had been linked to a notion of "chosen people" or "elect nation," Williams ultimately sees the prophetic ends through this New World not as ends to be reached by ecclesiastical, national, or racial filiation, but by individual restoration. The vehemence of this conviction led Williams to question the very legitimacy of the charters and letters patent that gave proprietary rights to the Europeans in the New World, a questioning that expedited his departure as suspect dissenter from the orthodoxy and patriarchy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In this ambiguous displacement, Williams may be closest to the "pilgrim and stranger" who was Columbus, though God's "helmsman" without a country but with an unfailing mission never questioned the legitimacy of his Capitulaciones and of his privileged capitulation of Europe's enterprise in the New World.