On First Contact and Apotheosis:

Manitou and Men in North America

Evan Haefeli, Columbia University

Abstract. To understand the significance of stories of first contact in which native

peoples around the world are said to have mistaken Europeans (or their goods) as
gods or godlike, this article examines written and oral accounts of such encounters in the context within which they were transmitted. Noting that the source
of many of these ideas is often native peoples, it suggests moving beyond the tendency to say they did or did not see Europeans as gods. Focusing in particular on
a close reading of Henry Hudsons 1609 voyage up the river that now bears his
name, it argues that the perceived disparity between native credulity and subsequent disenchantment is a function of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of
the terminology employed. The native accounts never claimed the Europeans were
gods in any Christian sense of the term. Instead, their words (in this case Manitou) reflected an understanding of the power and danger of the encounter that the
actual experience confirmed. In this, it reminds us that there are several layers of
interpretationlinguistic, religious, and ideologicalthat need to be taken into
account when assessing these encounters. Also by incorporating what the native
accounts have to say, a deeper understanding of its cultural significance in native
terms can be created.

Apotheosis, the act of turning men into gods, has for centuries been a compelling method of interpreting first contact, that marvelous initial moment
of encounter between Europeans and other peoples in various parts of the
world. Again and again, in Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, and North
America, sources and scholars describe native peoples mistaking European
explorers for gods, spirits, or ghosts. Divine, godlike, celestial, supernatural, otherworldly, and exalted are all words that recur in descriptions of
natives first impressions of European explorers.1 But the apotheosis never
Ethnohistory 54:3 (Summer 2007) doi 10.1215/00141801-2007-002
Copyright 2007 by American Society for Ethnohistory

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lasts long. Soon, so the story goes, native peoples realize their mistake.
They become disenchanted and start to see matters more realistically. In
the words of one historian, after several encounters, the Indians began to
realize that their visitors were not gods but men like themselves from a faraway land. In the social scientific terms of ethnohistorian Bruce Trigger
a similar declension occurs: While cultural beliefs may have significantly
influenced Indian reactions in the early stages of their encounters with
Europeans, in the long run rationalist calculations came to play a preponderant role. Or, in the less academic language of another historian, after
the first shock of meeting Europeans, natives quickly recovered their confidence, and their customary disdain for strangers reasserted itself.2

The first-contact parable of disenchantment persists despite numerous
efforts by scholars to debunk, qualify, ignore, or otherwise defuse it as a
myth. In fact, it only seems to gather steam over time. As Matthew Restall
has shown for Latin America, the apotheosis myth . . . is more a part of
the Western understanding of the conquest today than it was in the sixteenth century.3 One of its North American analoguesthe story of the
native girl Pocahontas, who falls in love at the first sight of a European man
who by some descriptions seems almost godlike to heris currently the
focus of extensive academic and cinematic attention. Here too the relationship ends in disenchantment as colonial conflict sours the initial wonder of
encounter, in this case transmuted into the magical experience of falling in
love.4

Apotheosis has such a powerful hold on the way contact is conceived
that it can apply to Europeans stuff as well their persons. Perhaps as a
way to avoid the (sacrilegious, in some eyes, ridiculous in others) exaltation of European individuals, some have associated the marvels with
European technology. This appears in contemporary sources as well as
later interpretations. The Elizabethan Thomas Harriot was struck by the
native Virginians amazement at English technology: it was so straunge
unto them, and so farre exceeded their capacities to comprehend the reason and meanes how they should be made and done, that they thought
they were rather the works of gods then of men, or at the leastwise they
had bin given and taught us of the gods.5 William Wood, writing of the
natives of Massachusetts in the 1630s, remarked that they do much extol
and wonder at the English for their strange inventions. For example, a
windmill in their esteem was little less than the worlds wonder. At first
they feared to go near it. Likewise, when they first saw a plowman at work,
he was counted little better than a juggler: the Indians, seeing the plow
tear up more ground in a day than their clamshells could scrape up in a
month . . . told the plowman he was almost Abamacho, almost as cunning

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as the Devil. Here too, overfamiliarity produces disenchantment. Wood

noted that as fresh supplies of new and strange objects continued to
pour into New England, it hath lessened their admiration. No longer
full of astonishment, now they dare go anywhere so far as they have an
English guide.6

It should be pointed out that in most, if not all instances, the ideas of
apotheosis and first contact are not simply European colonial impositions.
Native peoples around the world have long found something compelling
about it as well. In fact, without their participation in the creation and
perpetuation of first-contact narratives, the idea of apotheosis would not
exist. Native words provide the substance of what is translated into the
supernatural terminology of gods and spirits. Native traditions continue
to insist that natives first thought Europeans were not human, but a bit
higher, a mystical people, maybe even something out of a myth, as
the Cree Louis Bird described it in the 1990s.7 Europeans have turned
these stories to their own ends. But they have not been entirely inventing
things.

In North America, sources from the seventeenth century onward
document time and time again natives telling colonists about the first time
they encountered Europeans.8 Though recorded and interpreted by Europeans, it is clear that natives were recounting these stories for their own
reasons. In her study of storytelling in northern Canada, Julie Cruikshank
finds that storytellers of Yukon First Nations ancestry continue to tell
stories that make meaningful connections and provide order and continuity in a rapidly changing world. The stories have the power to subvert official orthodoxies and to challenge conventional ways of thinking.
Though they may be traditions about the past, they are deployed in ways
that comment on the present.9 John Long has found examples of stories
about early contact between the Cree and Europeans around James Bay
being used to comment on their subsequent relations.10 It is important to
keep this issue in mind as we turn to the moment of first contact itself.

The pervasive religious idiom employed by both sidesone whose use
only seems to increase over timemakes it difficult to analyze first contact within a historical framework. If native peoples really did believe the
Europeans were agents of divine power, if not spiritual beings themselves,
then how are we to explain why they so often seemed to treat them as mere
men? Primary sources from initial, or very early, contact situations consistently reveal that native peoples interacted with Europeans in a very human
fashion. They exchanged gifts, shared food and lodging, traded, talked,
and fought with not to mention stole from them.11 Yet native traditions
insist there was something spiritually charged, or supernatural about the

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moment. One cannot write the history of first contact and simply drop its
religious allusions. That would not necessarily do away with the European
mythological overtones, which can be expressed through ideas about technology, race, or civilization. It would dismiss a vital element of native
peoples perspective on what happened and why.

This essay attempts to move first contact out of its mythic role and
into a shared history that can be recognized and accepted from both sides
of the encounter. The analytic core is a close analysis of Henry Hudsons
1609 visit to the river that came to bear his name, but I contend that
the dynamics of first contact are global, a by-product of Europeans integration of the non-Eurasian world. While I do not purport this to be an
authoritative study of first contact globally, I lay out shared concerns from
first-contact scholarship from different corners of the world to suggest
how such a thing could be done. Fundamental to the approach is an understanding of the origins and functions of the narrative sources, native and
European, as well as attention to cultural, linguistic, and historical particulars. At the same time, since the phenomenon of first contact is perceived
to have taken place in so many different areas visited by Europeans over
the past five centuries, a close analysis of one incidentHudsons 1609
voyagecan help frame thinking about first contact globally. The goal is
to point toward a new conjoint history that acknowledges but does not
succumb to the mythic appeal of first contact.
The Global Apotheosis Problem
Interpreting first contact has posed a challenge to scholars of a wide variety
of non-Eurasian societies. At times it seems they are continuing ideological
struggles that have roots in the colonial experience. For example, they have
fiercely debated whether or not native peoples really thought Europeans
were gods and why, and whether or not this gave Europeans an advantage
in the initial encounter or (if only implicitly) justified their subsequent
dominance. This discussion has been sharpest in the cases of Mexico and
Hawaii, where remarkable intersections between native traditions and historical events have drawn the attention of a number of brilliant scholars.
The Aztec and the Hawaiians both believed that one of their gods had left
their land at some point in the past and would return at some point in
the future. The Aztec had no idea when Quetzalcoatl would return. The
Hawaiians, on the other hand, conducted a ceremony to host their god
Lono during an apparently annual visit. Each tradition left open a fatal
channel into which unwitting Europeans could sail.

In Mexico, the mythic framework attached to Europeans has been

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traced to native political needs. Aztec imperial authority, it has been

argued, rested on the beliefs in Quetzalcoatls departure. Indeed, like other
Mesoamerican empires before it, the Aztec depended on his absence. Once
a plausible image of Quetzalcoatl appeared in the form of Hernando Corts, waves of doubt and uncertainty undermined the ideology on which the
Aztec empire rested. The myth the Aztec had exploited to dominate Mesoamerica thus contributed to their downfall. In this version the Spanish
triumph can be seen as a continuation of ancient Mesoamerican imperial
ideology, providing a cultural triumph in the face of political defeat. In
another version, the Aztec are defeated by their failure to reconcile the
unpredictable behavior of the Spaniards with their traditions. The combination of the Aztec inability to respond creatively to a new situation and
Cortss success at manipulating their credulity proved their downfall. In
this case, defeat was cultural and political.12

Myths of Europeans as gods need not always lead to conquest and
subjugation, as the case of Hawaii demonstrates. There, divinity worked
against the newcomers, justifying their destruction. Over the past twenty
years, Marshall Sahlins has argued that Captain James Cooks role in a
native mythic script led to his killing, dismemberment, and ingestion by
Hawaiians.13 Greg Dening, drawing on Sahlinss work, argues that the
Hawaiians killed another British explorer, William Gooch, thirteen years
later because they believed he too was a god.14 While Sahlins rightfully
insists that native actions must be interpreted according to native cultural
codes, the use of Christian terminology (like god) and insistence on
interpreting events in a strictly religious context prevent his work from
fully escaping the conventions of first-contact narratives (or at least the
semblance thereof). Europeans remain divine, even if it kills them.

Recently, a growing number of scholars have argued that the idea
of European divinity lay only in the minds of the Europeans themselves.
Gananath Obeyesekere has argued that the British chroniclers of Cooks
death were predisposed to believe (without really being able to understand
Hawaiian language or culture) that the Hawaiians thought Cook was a
god. He suggests that the Hawaiians did not quite think so, and that
it was the British who promoted, and acted on, the myth that the natives
thought they were gods. Matthew Restall has traced the origins of the
idea that Spanish were gods to the influence of Spanish priests who saw
in these stories a divine sanction for the conquest. Since they provided the
most important sources for analyzing the Spanish conquests of Mexico
and Peru (where similar stories were told), this myth actually grew as
those sources were used increasingly over the centuries. William Hamlin
argues there was something about the Europeans culture, not those of the

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many natives they met, that led explorers to believe, especially in situations where they did not know and could not learn the local language, that
they were considered to be gods. How else can we credibly account for
the incessantly repeated claimin Columbus, Pigafetta, Daz del Castillo,
Las Casas, Cartier, Cabeza de Vaca, Thevet, Nicolette, and scores of other
writersthat native Americans attributed divine status to their European
visitors? Stephen Greenblatt has suggested part of an answer, at least in
the case of Columbus. The sense of wonder was an intrinsic part of the
Europeans efforts to appropriate the Americas.15

Another approach has been to shift supernatural power away from
Europeans and onto the goods they brought with them, especially in
regions like North America where trade, not conquest, characterized most
early encounters. For example, Bruce White suggests that the Ojibwa and
Dakota around the Great Lakes distinguished between the persons of
Frenchmen and their goods from the very beginning of cultural contact,
granting Manitou (spiritual) power only to the latter. Since the French
controlled access to the powerful goods, the Ojibwa and Dakota treated
them as they would Manitous: begging and pleading their misery to solicit
the desired gifts. But this did not mean they felt that French people were
intrinsically endowed with a special spiritual power. For White, what to
Europeans looked like begging had a culturally specific meaning, a religious and political significance that Europeans never fully grasped. Mary
Black-Rogers has argued along similar lines about the many natives who
claimed to be starving in order to receive gifts of food from fur traders. In
neither case were the natives actually as miserable and desperate as they
portrayed themselves. They were merely pulling the Europeans into native
expectations of reciprocity and respect through long established native
conventions.16

In both cases, the goods and the relationship or reciprocity, not some
sort of worship of the Europeans, were the focus of native actions. Louis
Bird, the contemporary Cree oral historian, spends much more time in his
histories discussing the useful things the Europeans traded to the Cree, like
guns and knives, than on the spiritual character of the men themselves.
Europeans noticed that native geniality tended to fade when European generosity waned. Never fully understanding the native networks they were a
part of, the Europeans interpreted the problem in ways that had little to do
with native concerns, attributing it to the natives disenchantment with
the all too mortal French, for example.17

As the Europeans begin to seem like the ones trapped in myth, native
peoples look more like pragmatists. Obeyesekere insists that was the case
for the Hawaiians in their encounter with Captain Cook. As for Mexico,

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James Lockhart argues that the Nahua did not initially regard the Spanish as a mysterious new other. Scholars like Inga Clendinnen confirm
that the Nahua treated the Spanish as just another nation, albeit one with
certain unusual possessions, like horses and steel. Only in the generation
after the conquest did accounts emerge that seemed to provide the Spanish with extraordinary spiritual powers. Lockhart considers this to be the
combined product of indigenous efforts to criticize their ancestors loss
and Spanish desires to see the conquest as a providential event. Drawing
on a close linguistic analysis of sixteenth-century Nahua texts, Lockharts
conclusions are compelling and suggestive.18

Finally, scholars have begun to move away from the idea of first
contact altogether. Karen Kupperman has claimed there was no truly
first encounter, as all parties had had previous experience of transatlantic
others.19 Olivia Harris has suggested that for indigenous peoples of Latin
America the Spanish conquest was not the decisive transition point that
the Spanish and Latin American nationalists have long believed it to be.
Instead, it is but one incident in a much more ancient history in which
Europeans are not as important as they would like to believe.20 In North
America, as the study of cross-cultural trade develops in sophistication,
historians now prefer to discuss contact as an ongoing history rather than
as a particular moment of initial encounter.21

But we cannot resolve the problem of first contact simply by walking
around it. Nor can we ignore it. Both approaches allow the mythology
of first contact to persist by not challenging it. To defuse the myths of
first contact we have to unwind them from within. Somewhere betwixt
and between what is usually regarded as an irreconcilable divide between
the divine and the secular, the wonderful and the pragmatic, mundane
experiences and extraordinary actions, European and native perceptions,
or rational and romantic interpretations lies an unexplored territory
where these elements are not as incompatible as scholars insist.22
First Contact in North America
At first glance, native traditions about first contact in North America are
full of marvelous and mystical elements that seem to have no place in a
secular history. Native peoples mistake the first ship they see for a floating
island. The sails seem to be clouds or (in the Subarctic) floating ice. Or perhaps it is a bird, spouting thunder and lightning. The bearded Europeans
are thought to be bears not humans. Many stories have the natives wondering if the Europeans are human at all until they get to know them. The
oral historian Louis Bird provides a rare explanation for why his ancestors

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thought the Europeans must be some kind of God: they did not even
need women out here.23

At times there is also an element of prophecy involved. Much as their
colonized fellows in Latin America, native peoples in North America
began reporting within a generation or so of contact that a dream or a
vision had predicted the Europeans arrival. Among the present-day Cree,
stories begin with a medicine man foreseeing the coming of the first European ship (probably Hudsons). In one version he tells the man who will
encounter the ship, It could find you, but do not be afraid of it. . . . You
can go to the boat. These stories echo accounts in colonial records. For
example, in 1672, the Quaker leader George Fox learned that an Indian
king in New England had said, before the English came, that a white
people should come in a great thing of the sea, and their people should
be loving to them and receive them. The motif continued up through the
nineteenth century and into the interior of the continent. For example, in
1833, in what is now the Midwest, Black Hawk remembered that his greatgrandfather had had a vision that he would see a white man, who would
be to him a father. Occasionally an ominous undertone can be heard. The
story told to Fox continued, If they did hurt or wrong the white people,
they would be destroyed. Since whenever they did wrong the English
they never prospered and have been destroyed, Fox concluded that the
man was a prophet and prophesied truly.24

Fox, in describing the rumored Indian visionary as a prophet, confirmed the appeal a religious interpretation of contact had for the colonists. After all, it was he who validated the native account as true Christian
prophecy. But the story did not originate as a Christian prophecy. And the
bears, birds, islands, clouds, and thunder that appear in the native accounts
are all vibrant elements of (non-Christian) native belief and experience.
George Hammell points to such first-contact stories as evidence that each
culture initially responded to the other from within the logic of its traditional presuppositions about the other world and its inhabitants.25 This is
undoubtedly true, but how are we to reconcile the different worldviews?

An older, more sanguine take on the relationship appears in Gordon
Days classic essay Oral Tradition as Complement. Day maintains that
native oral traditions should be taken into account in our reconstructions
of the past because they are at least potential sources of new information. But here native traditions are doing little more than rounding
out some of the details of the standard scholarly narrative. John Long
has a more inclusive vision, in which using oral traditions will convey a
broader and deeper understanding of history and one that respects and
incorporates Cree oral traditions and more accurately reflects Cree views

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415

of history and their place in it.26 Both see the divide between scholarly
and native histories as potentially fruitful.

For others, the cultural gap between native and European sources
and interpretive traditions poses a serious challenge. Canadian historian
Toby Morantz wonders, How does one draw into a combined history the
native peoples relations with nonhuman inhabitants so fundamental to
their understanding of their past? She argues that to write a history that
tries to find a correspondence between the full body of oral tradition and
the archival records would only destroy what is left of the Cree notions of
their past. It is inevitably a form of plunder, taking from the oral tradition what is needed to fit the Euro-Canadian view that history is structured, chronological, and progressive.27

Morantzs sensitivity to the vicissitudes of native cultures in a persistent colonial condition reminds us that there are real consequences to
doing history. At the same time, her argument rests on the same sort of
dichotomy between Western and native forms of knowledge that has been
the key to first contacts mythic appeal. Must there always be two sets
of conflicting cultures? Need the exchange be all one way? Can Westernstyle archival history complement native oral traditions? Is information
all that can be exchanged between them? Are the two traditions truly so
incompatible?

Over the last two decades a few scholars have been trying to break
down the divide between native traditions and scholarly history by looking
at things rather than words. Using a culturally informed archaeology, they
have begun to reassess early contact in the light of Native American cultural values, reconstructing a world where colors, beads, and hospitality
had great significance. Negotiating encounters with Europeans was on a
par with coping with other outside forces, supernatural or otherwise.28
Acknowledging the importance of Native American values in shaping their
actions at first contact moves us toward a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. However, it does not entirely get us out of the bind of reconciling the distinct sets of historical evidence, the disjuncture between what
native oral traditions claim and European sources prove. Here we will turn
to the story of Hudsons arrival in what is now New York to explore how
the European record and native traditions can interpenetrate.
Hudsons Arrival in the Documentary Record
Places like North America present a special challenge to the idea of first
contact. There were many voyages by ships of several nations scattered
over hundreds of miles of shoreline and decades of intermittent encounter,

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only some of it documented. Native traditions refer to ships, but it is hard

to pinpoint exactly which ships are involved. And when the traditions
were transcribed it was generally by a nonnative person in a European
language, erasing the linguistic nuance and immediacy that enriches Lockharts analysis of Nahua traditions. A remarkable instance of comparison
is afforded by Hudsons 1609 arrival at Manhattan in the Dutch ship the
Half Moon (De Halve Maen) with a half-English crew, including the captain and mate. Though most of Hudsons journal is lost, enough of the
journal of his mate Robert Juet has survived to provide a fairly detailed
picture of what happened, at least through European eyes. Meanwhile,
versions of a native account of the incident can be traced back to within a
generation or so of 1609. Interlacing the two enables a dynamic interpretation of apotheosis at first contact that respects the sources and priorities
of both sides.29

According to Juets journal, Hudsons ship appeared at the entrance
to todays New York harbor in early September 1609. Soon after the ship
anchored, the people of the Countrey came to greet them. This was the
Europeans first encounter with the inhabitants of what would become
New Netherland. Juet recorded that they boarded the ship seeming very
glad of our coming. Additionally, they brought greene Tabacco, and
gave us of it for Knives and Beads. Things went so well that even the
sailors found them very civill.30 The following day Hudson and some
of his crew went ashore. Evidently the whole community had gathered to
greet him. Hudson remembered the swarthy natives all stood and sang
in their fashion. To him they appeared to be a friendly people. Juet
saw great store of Men, Women and Children, who gave them Tabacco
at their coming on Land. Others gave them dried currants.31 Those who
first greeted Hudson were probably Navasinks, a Lenape people who lived
along the south edge of New Yorks bay.

The peaceable mood soured quickly. Only two days later, an exploring
party in the ships longboat was attacked. Off the north shore of todays
Staten Island, two canoes of warriors armed with bows wounded two
sailors and killed a third with an arrow through his throat.32 The sailors
did not know the warriors or understand why they attacked. They immediately began to suspect all natives, including the Navasink, who continued
to treat them hospitably.33 The warriors motives can only be guessed, but
perhaps they feared that the explorers, who were armed with matchlock
muskets, had allied themselves with the Navasink and were on their way to
war against them.34 The attack was a specific reaction by a specific group,
a reminder that not all natives reacted equally to the newcomers.

The suspicious and ignorant Europeans took two hostages from a

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group of warriors who visited their ship three days after the attack. They
were probably Navasinks who thought they had established good relations
with the newcomers. The Dutch put red coats on these men and locked
them up. About a week later, the two captives got out of a Port and swam
away. Free from their captivity, they called to us in scorne, remembered Juet. While the Dutch sailed on to explore the river, their ex-captives
spread the tidings of their ill treatment.35 The documented encounter does
not end here, but before continuing we must pull back and take a look at
the native tradition.
The Oral Tradition
Though they had no written sources of their own, the people who met
Hudson in 1609 did have their own version of the encounter, which can
be traced back at least to the 1640s. It entered the documentary record
in 1650, thanks to the Dutch colonist Adriaen van der Donck, who was
impressed with the effectiveness of native oral history. There are Indians
in the country, who remember a hundred years, he proclaimed. Of course
he had reason to believe them. A lawyer and political advocate for New
Netherland, van der Donck was eager to use native evidence to bolster the
Dutch claim to the region by right of discovery. As he put it, That this
country was first found or discovered by the Netherlanders is evident and
clear from the fact, that the Indians or natives of the land, many of whom
are still living, and with whom I have conversed, declare freely, that before
the arrival of the Lowland ship, the Half-Moon, in the year 1609 they [the
natives] did not know that there were any other people in the world than
those who were like themselves, much less any people who differed so
much in appearance from them as we did.36 Here we see something of
the mutual process by which first contact was created.

It is possible that the native tradition is not about Hudson at all.
He and his crew were not the first Europeans to visit the areasailors,
whalers, and explorers had been sailing off and around the coast for at
least a decade or so before Hudsons visit. Almost one hundred years
earlier Giovanni Verrazano had passed through the area (though he did
not land). The European in the story has no name, nor do any of the native
actors. Yet both the Dutch colonists and their native neighbors seem to have
agreed that Hudson was the man who figured in the story van der Donck
recorded.37 Obviously this was a convenient arrangement for Dutch colonists eager to prove their right of discovery and natives trying to maintain
good relations with them. Nonetheless, despite full agreement on facts,
there are remarkable congruencies between the contemporary documents

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and the later tradition that make it hard to think they are not talking about
the same encounter.

Van der Donck does not mention exactly who told him the story, but
there is reason to believe it reflected something of a composite account
shared by the various groups living along the Hudson River. In 1609 they
were all Algonquian peoples, speaking closely related tongues and sharing
common cultural references but divided into a number of ethnic, political, and village units. The most noticeable divide was between the Lenape
peoples, who lived on the lower Hudson River, and the Mahicans, who
inhabited the rivers upper reaches. Van der Donck spent much of his
career in Mahican country and had more interaction with them than with
Lenapes such as the Navasink. Furthermore, as we shall see, the story as
it emerged in greater detail during the eighteenth century seems to reflect
more the experience of Hudsons upriver encounters with Mahicans than
his downriver interactions with Lenapes. By the eighteenth century the
various Lenape peoples had joined with related groups from what is now
New Jersey and Pennsylvania to form a single group, often known as the
Delaware. Mahicans also took part in the process, though they remained
a separate people.38 In the eighteenth-century version, the encounter with
Hudson was explicitly located at Manhattan (where Hudson did not actually touch down). Van der Doncks version is not geographically specific,
probably because it was not until the eighteenth century that Manhattan
would serve as both a mnemonic device and a symbolic claim to a territory
long since lost.39

Exactly how the natives conveyed the story to van der Donck is unclear.
By the time he published his account, the Dutch had been settled in North
America for two decades. A common trade language had been established
almost immediately, allowing the two peoples to converse even without
fully knowing the others tongue. But with time, and especially around
the important fur trading post of Fort Orange, several interpreters with a
more sophisticated grasp of native languages had emerged. By the time van
der Donck wrote, Dutch and natives of various groups had had numerous
conversations over trade, work, diplomacy, a myriad of everyday matters,
and frequent retellings of the first meeting with Hudson.40
Hudsons Arrival in Native Tradition
For the native storytellers, the encounter with Hudson began as an apparent ontological crisis. When some of them first saw our ship approaching
at a distance, remarks van der Donck, they did not know what to think
about her, but stood in a deep and solemn amazement, wondering whether

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419

it were a ghost or apparition, coming down from heaven, or from hell.

While some speculated on the ships divine origins, it relates, others of
them supposed her to be a strange fish or sea monster. When they discovered men on board, they supposed them to be more like devils than human
beings. Thus they differed about the ship and the men. They also shared
their predicament with their neighbors. A strange report was also spread
about the country concerning our ship and visit, which created great astonishment and surprise among the Indians.41

Van der Doncks tale ends with the strange report (which he never
explains) and great astonishment and surprise among the Indians. Fortunately a more detailed version of the story emerges at the end of the
eighteenth century. It shows every indication of being a descendant of van
der Doncks brief account. The man who reported it, John Heckewelder,
is a far more reliable source as well. He worked for decades as a Moravian missionary among the Delaware and spoke their language, not just
the trade jargon. The tradition was first written down in an August 1800
letter to Samuel Miller, who was preparing a history of New York and
had solicited information from all sorts of experts. Heckewelder noted
that the tradition is verbally in their own words, so as I have heard them
repeat it upwards of 30 years ago, and even down to this summer, where
they related it in the same words. Several months later, after consulting
his notes, he passed on the tradition in another letter. It eventually found
its way into print as part of Heckewelders History, Manners, and Customs
of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring
States, first in English (1819), then German (1821), and French (1822). The
original manuscript account was republished in the New-York Historical
Societys Collections of 1841.42
Manitou and God
Heckewelders version has been the most influential account of Hudsons
arrival. It was better disseminated, has more detail, and situates it on Manhattan, drawing plenty of notice for that reason alone. Of more immediate
interest, it dwells at greater length on the spiritual aspects of the encounter.
Here what may well have been the traditions central theme, humans confronting what Heckewelder refers to as Manitou, hinted at in van der
Donck, emerges clearly. Both accounts begin with the metaphysical debate
on first sighting the Half Moon. After wondering whether Hudsons boat
was an uncommonly large fish or animal or a very big house floating on
the sea, the people concluded that this wonderful object was something
moving towards the land, and that it must be an animal or something else

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that had life in it. They decided to warn the countryside. A host of warriors arrived, ready to fight. Only as the ship steered into the bay where
they had gathered did they decide that it was a remarkably large house
in which the Mannitto (the Great or Supreme Being) himself was present,
and that he was probably coming to visit them.43

By naming the entity Manitou, Heckewelder provides a valuable
entrance into the natives ideological world. Manitou did not mean god,
ghost, or spirit, though it had spiritual connotations. As Heckewelder
explained in 1816, the word Manitto being a very common word in the
language of the Lennape signifieth a being endowed with supernatural
powers. Consequently, they apply the same to the Creator of the Universe, whom they call kitchi manitto the supreme & great beingthe
originalor the head of all that is supernaturalthe being which has not
its sequelthe great, & good Spirit. But Manitou was not simply a force
for good. The Devil is also called a Manittois also supposed to be possessed of supernatural powers, yet only with such, as tend to do harm
which are baddestruction to them (the Indians) he therefore is called the
matschi manitto: bad manittoevil doerevil spirit, etc. Manitou, then,
was a word indicating spiritual power, but was not restricted to spiritual
beings. In some instances the word manitto is applied to such persons as
have performed some very ingenious piece of workmanshipa writer of
letters, whereby the thoughts etc. are put down on paper & conveyed to a
distant friend, used formerly to be considered as a piece of Manittowoagan, the writer being endowed with a supernatural poweryet all such are
only considered as inferior manittossubordinate to the will & pleasure
of the kitchi manitto.44 In other words, persons or objects seen as having
extraordinary power were Manitou. Manitou was a state of being powerful, not a godlike entity in and of itself.

Heckewelders definition of Manitou reflects his efforts to reconcile
it with a Christian conceptualization of the universe. In his work as a
missionary, Heckewelder, like many of his colleagues, looked for affinities
between Native American and Christian beliefs in the hopes of facilitating
the change from the one to the other. Hence he tries to make the Christian
God and Devil variants of Manitou.45 But clearly Manitou did not operate
in the way Christian gods and devils did. The difficulty Christian writers
had with understanding Manitou outside of their Christian presuppositions of divinity could not help but make the natives seem confused and
ignorant about religion, which of course in Christian terms, they were.
Roger Williams translated Manitou as god in his 1643 Key into the Language of America, but he was aware that Christian divinity was not exactly
what was always intended by the word. He noticed

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421

a generall Custome amongst them, at the apprehension of any Excellency in Men, Women, Birds[,] Beasts, Fish, &c. to cry out Manitto, that is, it is a God, as thus if they see one man excell others
in Wisdome, Valour, strength, Activity &c. they cry out Manitto A
God: and therefore when they talke amongst themselves of the English
ships, and great buildings, of the plowing of their Fields, and especially of Bookes and Letters, they will end thus: Manitwock They are
Gods: Cummanitto, you are a God, &c.46

A better way of understanding Manitouthe word interpreted as
godis to turn to Algonquian understandings of how the world works.
As A. Irving Hallowell and others have stressed, Western/Christian ideas
of a division between the natural and supernatural, secular and religious,
heaven and hell, simply do not apply. Instead, Algonquian peoples (like
the Lenapes and Mahicans who met Hudson) saw the world in terms of
relations between personssome human, others other than human
who could assume various forms, including humans, animals, lightning,
and thunder. Other-than-human persons could be sources of power and
knowledge but also trouble and danger. Hallowell, writing in 1960, argues
that Manitou may be considered as a synonym for a person of the otherthan-human class (grandfather, tsokan, pawgan). Among the Ojibwas I
worked with it is now quite generally confined to the God of Christianity,
when combined with an augmentative prefix (ktci manitu). There is no
evidence to suggest, however, that the term ever did connote an impersonal, magical, or supernatural force.47 In other words, Manitou indicated someone and/or something (depending on ones worldview) that was
imbued with power. That power could be spiritual, moral, psychological,
technological, and so forth. But it was power rooted in this world and
attainable by human beings. Manitou was not divinity as the Europeans
supposed it to be, though it was the closest translation they could or would
make of the word. For the missionaries who did much of this work, there
was an imperative to separate the power of gods and spirits from the world
of persons, for that was a necessary step in the path to conversion. But that
was not how things stood at first contact.

When the Navasink first met Hudson, Manitou was part of life, not
above it. It could give a person health or make them sick. It could make
a man a successful hunter and warrior or drive away the game and deliver
him into the hands of his enemies. As a Lenape man explained to Dutch
colonists near New York in 1680, he gave them some fish because Manitou had told him to do so. It is Maneto who kills those who do evil, and
leaves those who do good at peace.48 What made the difference was a

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persons relationship to Manitou. Manitou had to be respected, treated in

certain ritual ways, and held in a reciprocal relationship through regular
gifts. Humans were always in danger of failing to perform the rituals correctly, of giving the wrong gifts, of not respecting the proper spiritual and
social order and so losing Manitou or having it turn against them.49 The
pre-Christian world of Manitou was one of dynamic relationships that
hinged as much on the agency of the human persons as it did on the otherthan-human Manitou. This was far from the Christian ideas of submission
and obedience to divine authority with which it has since been equated.

The use and abuse of Manitou are reminiscent of the Nahua and
Quechua words that allegedly attributed divinity to Spanish conquistadors. The Nahua word teotl does not mean god, though it can have spiritual connotations. More often it is used to indicate that something is fine,
fancy, large, powerful, and so on. Applied to the Spanish it can be taken
to describe their political and military significance, Restall argues, not
divine status. Much the same applies to the term viracocha, which is
still used today in Quechua as a reference not to the divine in the European
sense but to the privileged and powerful.50

Manitou could be scary and unpredictable. But so was life. Associating it with strangers, like Europeans, was not to displace them onto a
higher theological plane but to integrate them into the known world of
hope, fear, and possibility. After all, like Manitou, Europeans were scary
and unpredictable, as Hudson and his crew quickly demonstrated.
Encountering Power
Returning to the Lenape story, we find the peoples leaders assembled on
Manhattan Island. They determine to receive the Manitou with all the
ritual generosity they can summon. It would have to be a communal effort.
To provide meat for a sacrifice, the women were desired to prepare
the best victuals. Then all the idols or images were examined and put
in order. Next it was decided that a grand dance would not only be
an agreeable entertainment for the Great Being, but it was believed that it
might, with the addition of a sacrifice, contribute to appease him if he was
angry with them.51 Heckewelder used the term sacrifice, but offering or
gift might be a more appropriate term. Likewise idols and images are Christian terms for the various physical representations of Manitous, which had
to be treated with care and respect like the Manitous they represented.

At this point, the emotions behind the actions emerge, and they are
not ones of adoration. Distracted between hope and fear, the Lenape
tale explains, they were at a loss what to do. Behind the anxiety in the

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423

celebratory preparations was the knowledge Manitou could be as dangerous as it was helpful. A clarification of this state of being comes from
Birds recent explication of the term the Cree associated with the first
Europeans they saw, Maskatentahowin, used when you are mystified and
awed and fascinated and feared all at the same time.52 Fear is a pervasive
theme of first-encounter narratives. In a brief (translated) Cree account of
The Indians First Encounter with Whitemen (probably Hudsons crew),
which does not mention Manitou or any other religious force, the Indians
who first see the Europeans are leery of these strangers and hide from
them because they knew these strangers were different. Finally, they
decide to meet the Europeans, saying, Why are we hiding from these
people? If they see us, maybe they will not harm us or kill us. Maybe they
will just take us with them. Overcoming their fear, they are rewarded
with gifts of tobacco, matches, and a gun (but no ammunition so that it
did not harm or create any difficulty).53 The Lenapes preparing to meet
Hudson presumably posed similar questions to themselves as the dance
commenced in great confusion.54

While Algonquian peoples in North America shared many concepts,
such as Manitou, there were social and political differences among them.
The small bands of Subarctic Cree remember first contact as a dilemma
affecting a few individuals at most. For the Lenape, who lived in large
villages and had more hierarchical systems of power, the response was
communal and guided by their religious and political leaders, to whom
they turned for guidance in this time of uncertainty. The conjurers, as
Heckewelder calls them, set to work, to determine what this phenomenon portended, and what the possible result of it might be. To these and
to the chiefs and wise men of the nations, men, women, and children were
looking up for advice and protection. Anthropologists today would call
Heckewelders conjurers medicine men or shamans, people with a special
ability and power to relate to and manipulate the spirit world. The Algonquians around the Hudson River called them kitzinacka; those a little further east in New England called them powwauog.55 Powwows (as they are
generally referred to) were a sort of Manitou. On their shoulders rested the
great responsibility of understanding and working with Manitou power.
They had uncommon powers, and had been selected and trained to use
them at an early age, but their very powerfulness made them potentially
dangerous as well. They could call on the power of Manitou to make someone sick as well as cure them, to ruin a mans hunt as easily as help him.
For this reason they were treated with care and suspicion. Sometimes the
powers of political leaders, the chiefs or sachems as they were called, were
combined with those of a powwow in one person. Such men were rare and

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Evan Haefeli

feared and respected for the great amount of power they could wield. Interestingly, the most recent retelling of a North American first contact by a
native speaker does not refer to Manitou but to shamanic power. The Cree
called the Europeans kichi Mitewak, meaning powerful spirit people.
Or, in other words, kitzinackakitzi and kichi being related words for
great or large and Mitewak being the Cree word for shaman.56 The Lenape
conjurers were not preparing to meet a god from heaven, but men of
mystical powermen like themselves.

Generally the powers of powwows and the authority of sachems
remained separate, for they derived from different sources. A powwow
drew power from the ability to interact with the other-than-human world.
A sachem drew power from the ability to interact with humans. Sachems
ruled primarily by consent and persuasion, with occasional resort to coercion. Since sachems were mediators between their villages and others, wisdom, caution, and hospitality were vital qualities of their leadership. But
so was violence.57 Sachems had to weigh all these options when preparing to receive strangers like Hudson. It should be noted that among the
coastal Algonquians neither powwows nor sachems were exclusively male.
Women could become powwows, but the most prominent powwows were
generally men. Likewise women could be sachems.58 Yet most sachems
were men, and the oral history assumes they would be.59
The Encounter with Red
While the powwows, sachems, and common people waited in uncertainty
for the arrival of the Half Moon, runners arrived with more information. The craft was declared to be a large house of various colours, and
crowded with living creatures. Now it seemed certain that it was a Manitou, bringing some kind of game, such as he had not given them before
(Manitous were also the so-called Keepers of the Game, responsible for
providing and looking after the animals on which the Lenape subsisted).60
Then more runners arrived announcing that it is positively a house full
of human beings, of quite a different colour from that of the Indians, and
dressed differently from them; that in particular one of them was dressed
in red, who must be the Mannitto himself.61

Given his prominence, the man in red has long been assumed to be
Henry Hudson. But the explorers left no contemporary record of what
Hudson or any of his crewmen wore. They were more interested in what
the Lenapes had on and whether it had any market value. Yet, wittingly
or not, red actually played a significant role in the documented encounter
between Hudson and the Lenape. Red appears several times in the few

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425

surviving sources. When the crew took the two warriors hostage, they
placed red Coates on them before confining them to the hold. So we
know at least that there were red coats onboard the ship and that at least
some natives would have good reason to remember it.62 Red appears again,
but this time on the native side. In one of the few surviving snippets from
Hudsons own account, he wrote of being treated to a feast by a sachem
who served him food in well made red bowls.63

That the oral tradition remembered a man in red says less about Hudsons personal wardrobe than about the significance of the color red to the
Lenape (and other North American natives). Red was not an accidental
color. It had a long history in precontact America. For millennia it had
been used to cover bodies in burials as part of a cultural complex that had
accompanied the spreading use of copper from the Great Lakes region
to the East Coast. Only later, in the eighteenth century, would the color
be assigned to Native Americans as a race. When that happened, natives
accepted it as a positive identification.64

Three basic colors, red, white, and black, represented a range of characteristics and qualities ranging from life and wisdom to death. White was
the color of clarity, thought, wealth, and well-being. Red represented the
vital but irrational aspects of lifepassion, anger, joy, and war. Black was
the negation of white and reddeath and the absence of thought, vitality,
or prosperity. Captives taken in war who would be adopted into a new
life among their captors were painted in red. Those who were to be killed
were painted black, as were the faces of people in mourning. White was the
primary color used in making wampum, the belts of shell beads on which
treaties, deeds, and histories were recorded. When a people wanted to send
a message of war, they dyed a wampum belt red, or covered a tomahawk
with red clay.65 Red was thus a very striking and potent symbol for Native
Americans, boding either great happiness or anger and hostility. Regardless of whether Hudson wore red or not, the association of him with red in
the tradition reflects the terrible uncertainty and consequence with which
his visit was regarded.

Anthropologist George Hammell and historian Christopher Miller
have contended that the symbolic importance of certain colors was so
important that natives initial response to the goods offered to them by
the explorers hinged more on their coloration rather than any utilitarian
value.66 There are indications that this may have been the case when they
first met Hudson as well. Juet noted that the Lenapes who first greeted
them desire[d] Cloathes. The remark is ambiguous and difficult to decipher, but it does at least indicate that the people took an interest in the
Europeans attire.67 Rather than feeling their own want of clothing, it is

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more likely that they were examining what the Europeans had on for clues
as to who they were and what they meant to do. A red coat was not a
fashion statement. It was a political message, one that both the Navasink
of 1609 and their eighteenth-century descendants listening to the story
understood.

After recounting the Lenapes many doubts and fears, the tradition
allows the Dutch to approach and hail the waiting people. The Lenapes
responded with a shout or yell in return by way of answer, according
to the custom of their country. Still they did not know what to make of
the Europeans greeting. Many wanted to run off to the woods. Others
persuaded them to stay in order not to give offense to their visitor, who
might find them out and destroy them. Then the red man landed with
two others. The chiefs and wise men, assembled in council, greeted the
newcomers. At this point, the tradition describes the Lenapes as lost in
admiration; the dress, the manners, the whole appearance of the unknown
strangers is to them a subject of wonder. This echoes many other accounts,
from the seventeenth century to the present. But the Lenape account preserves a particular fascination with him who wore the red coat all glittering with gold lace, which they could in no manner account for.68

Color had great meaning, both in 1609 and in the eighteenth century when the story was retold. But this should not be confused with
racial ideas about color difference, even when these appear in translation.
Heckewelders version concludes the Lenapes fascination with Hudsons
appearance with a sentence that anachronistically mixes racial and religious wonder: He, surely, they thought, must be the great Mannitto,
but why should he have a white skin? Here closer attention to language
is essential. It is doubtful that the Lenape of 1609 perceived the Europeans
as white. The ostensible white of their skin was not the white of wampum.
Judging by some other accounts, they may have been as curious about
the Europeans hairiness as their coloration. Hairiness was for animals,
like bears. And the multicolored eyes of Europeans only had counterparts
among dogs and wolves.69 The combination of these animalistic associations with people who seemed to emerge straight out of the watery underworld must have been fascinating. The idea of the watery underworld,
which surrounded and underlay the known earth, and with which serpents
in particular were associated, probably explains the debate over whether
or not Hudsons ship was actually a great sea monster.70 It certainly helps
explain the name the Lenape gave to the Dutch, which has since been
translated as white people. Swannekens, as the Dutch wrote it, means
people who come from the sea.71

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427

Giving and Feasting

The Europeans reciprocated the fascination with attire. Juet, keeping an
eye out for any items of value the natives might possess, took notice of
what they carried on their persons. The first to greet the Europeans, he
observed, goe in Deere skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper. The next day many of the people came aboord, some in Mantels
of Feathers, and some in Skinnes of divers sorts of good Furres. Some
women also came to us with Hempe. They had red Copper Tabacco pipes,
and other things of Copper they did weare about their neckes. Another
group encountered several days later had great Tabacco pipes of yellow
Copper, and Pots of Earth to dresse their meate in. A fortnight afterward
some other people brought a stone aboord like to Emery (a stone used by
Glasiers to cut Glasse) it would cut Iron or Steele: yet being bruised small,
and water put to it, it made a colour like blacke Lead glistening; It is also
good for Painters Colours.72 The few scraps from Hudsons own journal
that survive confirm Juets observations. Their clothing, he noted consists of the skins of foxes and other animals, which they dress and make
the garments from skins of various sorts. He too took an interest in their
copper, remarking that the people had copper tobacco pipes, from which
I inferred that copper must exist there; and iron likewise according to the
testimony of the natives, who, however, do not understand preparing it
for use.73

The Europeans were obviously looking for items of value that could
be traded. The Lenape had other concerns. For them, what people wore
and how was a testament of their political and cultural connections, status,
and power. Tribal, clan, and personal identities were marked directly on
bodies with tattoos. Other marks of identity and power, such as personal
medicine bags in which elements representing the sources of a persons
spiritual allies were held, were hung around the neck. Their copper items
bore witness to their ties to distant areas and spiritual and political power.
The copper came mostly from the Great Lakes area, where it had been
mined and put to religious purposes for several thousand years, being worn
on necklaces and crafted into pipes for smoking tobacco.74 Copper and
tobacco had long proven to be effective mediums for accessing power.
When smoked, tobacco could bridge potentially hostile spheres, be they
of a traveler and a new village, or a human and a Manitou. Alternatively,
when offered as a gift, tobacco could placate potentially dangerous powers,
whether the Manitou of a lake or foreign emissaries. Small wonder that
tobacco was the first item presented to the explorers.

Behind the Lenapes hospitality, gifts, and civility lay several thousand

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Evan Haefeli

years of incorporating the new and the strange. Until Europeans arrived,
most major cultural influences, like horticulture, came to the Lenape from
the south and the west, via the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. The
heartland of eastern North America, these river valleys generated a series
of cultural developments that then spread outward over the centuries to
be incorporated by surrounding peoples. Seventeenth-century coastal
Algonquians, including the Lenape, acknowledged their importance. They
knew their agricultural products had come from somewhere to the southwest, and they believed that this was where their spirits went after they
died. What was being extended to the Dutch had been extended before to
others, though they came over land and with different accoutrements.75

Returning to the documentary record, after the initial encounter with
the Navasink, we can watch Hudson and his crew sail past Manhattan
Island before anchoring and allowing more people of the Countrey to
come on board. These natives, Juet noted, made shew of love, and gave
us Tabacco and Indian Wheat [maize]. Though they departed for that
night, Juet felt we durst not trust them. Two days later there came
eight and twentie Canoes full of men, women and children. Still suspicious, the Europeans feared that they intended to betray us. They
suffered none of them to come aboord of us, though there could hardly
be a clearer sign of peaceful intent than bringing women, children, and
food along. The Europeans simply bought some food and moved on.
The Europeans, sensitive to the power of gifts, made a deliberate effort to
characterize the transaction as a market, not a gift, exchange. While this
may have salved their conscience, the natives could not have seen things
the same way.76

Only several days later, as the Half Moon came in range of todays
Catskill Mountains, did its crew feel able to enjoy local hospitality again.
Somewhere, probably around the Esopus (todays Kingston, New York)
they met very loving people, and very old men: where wee were well
used. The following day the people came aboord, and brought us eares
of Indian corne, and Pompions, and tabacco: which we bought for trifles.
Again, what are clearly gift exchanges (how could people without a market economy sell things?) are misrepresented as a good bargain, overlooking the political significance of an act that greatly preoccupied the oral
tradition.77

The feasting continued two days later, when the Half Moon reached
the area a little below modern Albany: Mahican country. Here Hudson
went ashore accompanied by an old savage, a Governour of the Countrey; who carried him to his house, and made him good cheere. Hudson
counted forty men and seventeen women. As he and the sachem came

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429

near the house, two mats were spread out to sit upon, and immediately
some food was served in well made red wooden bowls. Two men were
dispatched at once with bows and arrows in quest of game, who soon
after brought in a pair of pigeons which they had just shot. They likewise
killed at once a fat dog. They wanted Hudson to spend the night, but
he returned after a short time. Thinking he was leaving because he was
afraid of their bows, they took their arrows and broke them in pieces, and
threw them into the fire, giving Hudson the impression that they were a
very good people, but still not convincing him to spend the night in their
village. The next day the ship sailed a bit further north, roughly to the area
of modern Albany. More Mahicans came clocking aboord, and brought
us Grapes and Pompions, which wee bought for trifles. Others brought
Bevers skinnes, and Otters skinnes, which we bought for Beades, Knives,
and Hatchets. So many people came on board the following day that the
crew did not sail on as it had intended.78
Drinking Trouble
At this point an awkward new element entered the relationship. Both the
primary source and the tradition record a first encounter with alcohol. In
Juets account, he and Hudson (suspicious as ever) decided to trie some of
the chiefe men of the Countrey, whether they had any treacherie in them.
So they tooke them downe into the Cabin of the ship. There they gave
them so much Wine and Aqua vitae, that they were all merrie. One of
the guests eventually became drunk, and that was strange to them; for
they could not tell how to take it. The rest of the sachems returned to the
shore, leaving their companion passed out on the ship.79

The drunkenness created a diplomatic incident, the gravity of which
completely escaped the Europeans. Some of the sachems soon came
againe, and brought stropes of Beades: some had sixe, seven, eight, nine,
ten. They left them on board while the man slept all night quietly.
At noon the next day the people of the Countrey came back to the
ship. Obviously concerned about the well-being of their drunken friend (or
friends, Juet is unclear here), they saw the Savages well and were glad.
They returned to the ship several hours later, bringing Tabacco, and more
Beades, and gave them to our Master [Hudson], and made an Oration, and
shewed him all the Countrey round about. They then brought a great
Platter full of Venison dressed by themselves and feasted with Hudson.
Afterward they made him reverence, and departed.80

In the oral tradition, the drinking incident is tied to the first remembered act of the Hudson figure. While of course it does not perfectly

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coordinate with the documentary facts, it does convey the seriousness of

the situation from the native perspective. On arriving, the mysterious man
in red produced a cup, filled it with an unknown substance, drank it,
and passed it to the assembled sachems. The enigmatic gesture provoked
another crisis of interpretation. Not knowing what to make of the drink,
the sachems, one after another, receive[d] it, but only smell[ed] the contents and passe[d] it on to the next chief, who [did] the same until the
cup has passed around the whole circle. The cup was upon the point of
being returned to the red clothed Mannitto when the crisis broke. One
of the men, a brave man and a great warrior, jumped up and criticized
the sachems on the impropriety of returning the cup with its contents.
He says the Manitou gave it to them that they should drink out of it,
as he himself had done. To follow his example would be pleasing to him;
but to return what he had given them might provoke his wrath, and bring
destruction on them.81

Believing that for the good of the nation the liquid should be
drunk, and as no one else would do it, he would drink it himself, let the
consequence be what it might, the warrior reasoned it was better for one
man to die, than that a whole nation be destroyed. The man took the glass
and bidding the assembly a solemn farewell, at once drank up its whole
contents. Every eye was fixed on the resolute chief, to see what effect the
unknown liquor would produce. He staggered, collapsed to the ground,
and fell into a sound sleep. Seeing him fall, and not knowing that he
was merely asleep, the sachems saw their worst fears confirmed. They
bemoan[ed] his fate, thinking he [had] expired. But suddenly the
man woke again, jump[ed] up and declare[d], that he [had] enjoyed the
most delicious sensations, and that he never before felt himself so happy as
after he had drunk the cup. He ask[ed] for more, his wish [was] granted;
the whole assembly then imitate[d] him, and all bec[a]me intoxicated.82
Hence, according to the tradition, the name of Manhattan: Mannahatanink, the island or place of general intoxication.83

The association of contact with Europeans and exposure to alcohol
was a powerful one at the turn of the nineteenth century. Alcohol abuse
had joined a host of other hardships disrupting native communities in
the eastern United States.84 Other versions of the Hudson story point out
the devastating impact liquor had on native communities.85 Christian men
who wrote of the problem of alcohol in native communities often saw
it as the diabolical by-product of contact that undermined the efforts to
turn natives into good Christians. But there is no real moral depravity
attached to the liquor in Heckewelders version. Instead the confusion over
drunkenness is of a piece with the general fear, anxiety, and uncertainty

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431

that characterized the Lenapes relationship with Hudson and his ship
since before he landed. The diplomatic importance of the episode suggests
that it might be drawing on an actual event that had made a powerful
impression.

The congruence between the oral history on and the contemporary
document connected with this incident is a remarkable indicator of how
important truths concerning the dynamics of what happened can be
unraveled even when the sources do not agree on all the details. In both it is
the countrys leaders who interact with the strangers. The offering of gifts
of Beades, or strings of wampum, the political currency of the Northeast, underscores the highly charged nature of the interaction. Wampum
was used in diplomatic negotiations to mark treaties. It was also offered
in wartime as a ransom for captives, or in peacetime to compensate the
relatives of a murder victim. In each case it was a gift of great political
import. It contained the value of a human life or more. Depending on the
color and intent (both lost to us in the primary sources) it could prevent
an escalation of hostilities or encourage allies to go to war.86 The sachems
probably intended the wampum as gestures of peace as well as ransom.
Was the drunken man dead? Was he being held hostage by the Dutch? In
either case, the gifts were attempts to redeem his life and prevent the incident from sparking violence.

The drunken episode occurred as the Half Moon reached the rivers
headwaters. As Hudson and his men headed back downstream, two canoes
came to the ship from the place where we first found loving people. In
one was an old man who brought more strings of beads and gave them
to our master, and shewed him all the Countrey there about, as though it
were at his command, or so Juet supposed. Hudson had the man and his
companionsanother old man and four women, two old and two young
who behaved themselves very modestlyto dine with him. Hudson
gave one of the old men a Knife, and they gave him and us Tabacco.
They left making signes that wee should come downe to them. The Half
Moon took advantage of a good tailwind to sail by their village instead. The
old man who had urged Hudson to stay and eat was very sorrowfull for
our departure.87
Taking and Fighting
There had been some violence at the outset of Hudsons journey upriver.
There was to be more before the Dutch ship departed. Proceeding downriver, the Europeans stopped and let some of the people of the Mountaynes, possibly Wappingers, on board. As the people walked about

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wondering at our ship and weapons, they began to trade, selling some
small skinnes of them for Trifles. Meanwhile, a solitary man rode his
canoe around the ships stern, until he was able to scale the rudder and
enter Juets cabin from the window. He stole out my Pillow, and two
Shirts, and two Bandeleeres, complained Juet. But before the man could
escape, the Masters Mate shot at him, and stroke him on the brest and
killed him. Terrified, the rest of the natives fled, some in canoes, others
jumping into the water to get away. Juet and several sailors went out in the
longboat and got our things againe. One of the warriors that swamme
got hold of our Boat, thinking to overthrow it. But our Cooke tooke a
Sword, and cut off one of his hands, and he was drowned.88

Stealing had been a problem from the beginning of Hudsons visit.
Hudson had noted on his second day that the people he met, though
friendly, are much inclined to steal, and are adroit in carrying away
whatever they take a fancy to.89 Theft, or enforced gift-giving, would
remain a problem throughout the long history of the North American
fur trade because it grew out of the underlying principles of the trade
itself. Richard Whites remarks on the trade in the Great Lakes region
helps clarify what was happening to Hudson. Despite European efforts to
subject the fur trade to market economy rules, it remained rooted in the
gift exchange economy of Native America as long as the native peoples
involved had a modicum of autonomy. Unable to be coerced into accepting market rates for their furs, they forced colonial traders to respect
at least some of the rules of their gift economy, exchanging goods and
services as gifts or, as colonists sometimes deemed them, bribes. When
traders failed to make any gestures toward gift exchange, Indians would
enforce it by theft. Theft, in other words, was gift exchange by other
means.90 It helped balance out the uneven level of exchange Juet and the
crew exulted in. The violence was a furious refusal to shareessentially a
declaration of war.

After the skirmish, the Dutch moved down the river before anchoring
for the night. The next day, after further sailing, one of the two (probably)
Navasink men who had escaped two weeks before approached the ship
with a number of other warriors. Juet suspected they thought to betray
us. The Dutch suffered none of them to enter our ship. Rebuffed, the
warriors attacked. Two canoes full of men, with their Bowes and Arrowes
shot at us after our sterne. The Dutch replied, firing sixe Muskets, and
killed two or three of them. Then above an hundred of them came to a
point of Land to shoot at us. Juet personally fired one of the ships small
cannons at them, and killed two of them: whereupon the rest fled into
the Woods. Yet they manned off another Canoe with nine or ten men,

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433

which came to meet us. Juet fired at them with the same cannon, hitting
the canoe and killing a warrior while sailors shot at them with muskets
and killed another three or four. The native men retreated and the Dutch
continued on down the river.91

This skirmish somewhere above Manhattan was Hudsons last
encounter in the region. Juet and the crew left with a strong impression of
native violence and treachery, even though they themselves had provoked
much of it. More ships would follow in the years to come, trading for furs
and sparking some more violence. But the violence left no imprint in the
native oral histories. In fact, few of the actual deeds, not to mention identities, of the Europeans at first contact found their way into native memory. Instead, the natives remembered what their ancestors had thought,
felt, and done. It is possible that in creating the story they chose to focus
on the various incidents of hospitality Hudson encountered on the upper
reaches of the river, leaving aside for one reason or another the less genial
experience of those who lived near Manhattan. More likely they had other
priorities.
Conclusion
Narratives of first contact such as those contained in Juet and Heckewelders accounts can be interpreted in several different ways. On the
one hand, they have the quality of a Christian morality tale. An innocent,
naive worlda virtual lost Edenfollowed by the inevitable Fall after the
encounter with the outside world, in this case the Europeans and all they
brought with them (except, perhaps, their religion).92 The native experience switches from the divine to the secular, the wonderful to the practical, and the hospitable to the cruel as European colonialism takes root. As
pioneering ethnohistorian James Axtell put it, the history of first encounters, therefore, is a sad reminder that, in spite of the gentle and promising advent of European-Indian relations in many different places and on
many different occasions, the intruders could not help but turn their genial
hosts into stereotypical Savages, whose otherness was as unfathomable
as they were expendable.93 The paradoxical effect of this is to legitimate
the legacy of European colonialism in the very act of criticizing it. Europeans acquire the blame for what goes wrong, but at the same time they
become an ineradicable part of the story. There is an assumption that only
European understandings of the world can properly account for what happens once Europeans and their culture have entered the scene. The most
important implication of this is that Europeans cannot be done away with
once they are present, much like the fallen state of humankind. Lament the

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Evan Haefeli

dreadful impact of colonialism they might, but it is they (and their cultural
descendants) who denounce it, and on their own terms.

For Europeans and their descendants, stories of first contact not
only justify the European presence abroad, they also confirm European
dominance, be it in terms of religion, science, ethnic origin, or otherwise.
They indicate the natives predisposition for obedience (as prefigured by
their recognition of the divine qualities of European goods or persons)
and claim European intervention instructed them in the ways of the real
world and its manufactured goods. When tinged with religion they have
the seemingly paradoxical twist that, because Europeans are bad and sinful, the natives are in all the more need of their Christian God. For God
alone governs them and the Europeans who abuse them. Even the more
secularly minded versions are drawn to the dichotomy between the naive
simplicity of precontact natives and the harsh European reality. In short,
contact apotheosis is a conversion narrative of sorts, marking the shift
from a misguided native understanding of the world to a proper Western,
Christian one. Though misguided, the native attribution of supernatural
power to the newcomers is taken to be indicative of a religious and political sensibility that can be molded to European Christian ends.

Time and again, Europeans combined the empirical evidence of
natives initial generosity with their mistranslations of native words of
power into the belief that early explorers had been seen as godlike. This
says more about European priorities than it does native perceptions. From
the earliest years of colonization, Europeans had tried to turn Manitou into
a tool for conversion. Harriot, who thought the Virginia natives believed
English technology made them godlike, or at least indicated that they were
specially favored by gods, was quite confident of its potential. As he put
it, the evident closeness of the English to Manitou made manie of them
to have such opinion of us, as that if they knew not the trueth of god and
religion already, it was rather to be had from us, whom God so specially
loved then from a people that were so simple, as they fond themselves to
be in comparison of us. And so, he felt, they gave all the more credence
to the English talk of their god.94

Native peoples, whether in North America or elsewhere, never mistook Europeans for gods. They could not have, for they knew no gods as
Christians conceived them. However, natives (correctly) recognized the
Europeans as dangerous and powerful. In the Lenape case, this meant
Manitou. Elsewhere it could be teotl or viracocha, but the effect was similar. Far from reflecting a religious navet, it demonstrated that natives
had a very accurate sense of what was at stakerisk, danger, power, and
opportunity. Looking at Africa, Wyatt MacGaffey sees something similar.

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435

He maintains that the Kongolese insistence on classifying Europeans as

simbi spirits from the land of the dead, may seem simply mistaken, if
not downright irrational. But it was no more so than European ideas
that African religion revolved around the fetish. And, as the subsequent
history of relations showed, the theory worked. It provided a highly
pragmatic framework for dealing with Europeans and conveyed a true
understanding of African-European relations, based in this case on the
violence and exploitation of the slave trade.95

The Lenape oral history is not so much a record of their first meeting
with Hudson as it is a tale of an encounter with Manitou. It reads like
a prescription for the proper communal response to something new and
potentially dangerous. By its very nature, such a thing could not help but
be Manitou. To benefit rather than suffer from the Manitou, one had to act
properly. The community had to be called together to act, dance, and feast.
Women had to prepare food and offer hospitality. Powwows and sachems
had to consult and take the lead in dealing with the strange persons. If they
failed, as in refusing to take a sip of a drink that was offered to them, then
it was the duty of the young warriors to risk their lives and protect their
community from the strangers wrath.

Turning the memory of Hudsons visit into a tale of confronting
Manitou was clearly part of the Lenapes process of coming to terms with
their past and present in the years after 1609. This does not diminish the
oral traditions value as a historical source. A careful reading of the tradition reminds us that European Christian notions of the separation of the
secular and the religious, the quotidian and the divine are as culturally
specific as ideas about the all-pervasive capacity of Manitou. Judging histories recounted from within the framework of one by the criteria of the
other can only be misleading. As the comparison with the documentary
record has shown, while the tradition may be off on individual details and
selectively excluded what for the Europeans were key moments, it is not
entirely off. Both agree on certain eventsfeasting, celebrations, drinking,
and the color red. Moreover, the tradition conveys a sense of the motivations behind the insistent gifts, visits, and hospitality Hudson and his men
experienced. They were not trying to trade for material gain. They were
bargaining with power.

Stories about first contact persisted in native communities, not as testimony to their cultural and political conquest, but because they reaffirmed
native worldviews in a changing world. Hudsons ship may have been
something new to the Lenape in 1609, but Manitou was not. Likewise, the
Europeans strangeness was a familiar onethe strangeness of Manitou,
which could be unknown, but in purely Algonquian terms. The Lenape

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Evan Haefeli

did not become disenchanted with the all-too-human Europeans. As the

contemporary documents reveal, from the beginning natives engaged with
Hudson and his crew on very human terms. At the same time, this does
not mean there was never anything Manitou about the Europeans. Being
human and Manitou were not as incompatible as Christians would like to
think.

Europeans after first contact could not lose their ostensibly divine
qualities because they had never had them. In the case of Hudson and his
fellows, they had been and could still be Manitou. But it was precisely the
quality of being Manitou (or whatever parallel term in other languages
could be translated as gods, spirits, or ghosts) that indicated how thoroughly Europeans were being assimilated into native worlds. First contact
was not the shock of the unknown that Europeans liked to think it was. It
was merely the beginning of a process of coping with a new set of powers,
possibilities, and dangers, something native peoples worldwide had been
doing since time immemorial. Though the idiom was religious, the effect
was pragmatic. The dichotomy between the two is a Christian, European
problem, not a precontact native one.

One could argue that what Europeans thought of as a disenchantment
of the natives world was rather a subconscious realization that Europeans
and their goods could be assimilated into the native world as much as the
Europeans hoped to assimilate the natives into theirs. Noting how the continued arrival of fresh supplies of new and strange objects soon lessened
the Massachusetts admiration, William Wood went on to point out that
it also quickened their inventions and desire of practicing such things as
they see, wherein they express no small ingenuity and dexterity of wit.96
Were the Europeans and their goods losing their quality of wonder, or had
they simply been appropriated to the point that Europeans could no longer
see where their culture left off and that of the natives began?

First-contact stories, long interpreted as evidence of Europeans
superiority in one form or another, should be recast as testaments to the
persistence of native cultures. It behooves us to remember that no native
peoples anywhere ever lived in Edenic innocence and purity. Just because
their fears and suffering were not well recorded does not make them less
real. Matters certainly became worse after colonization began, but the
basic elements of danger, destruction, and transformation that it brought
on were nothing new. If and when Native North Americans underwent a
process of disenchantment in their perception of Europeans, it could only
have happened after they converted to Christianity. They did not have to
undergo a process of cognitive reorganization to cope more pragmatically with Europeans.97 Their traditional beliefs gave them perfectly plau-

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437

sible ways of accounting for what was happening to them and how to react
to it. As for the people who met Hudson, their world was arguably more
full of Manitou after 1609 than it had been before. It certainly was more
destabilized and unpredictable. By the time their story was recorded, they
had lost uncounted hundreds of people, acres of land, much of their power
and authority to the Manitou that first stepped off the ship in a red coat.
Alas, that is just what they had feared.
Notes
For comments on earlier drafts, I thank Daniel K. Richter, the Harvard Atlantic
History Seminar, and the two anonymous reviewers. I also thank the New-York
Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society for permission to cite
from their collections.
1 Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford, 2003), 10820,
offers a number of examples, from Spanish chroniclers to present-day scholars
such as Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard
(New York, 1984); and Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between
European and Non-European Cultures, 14921800 (Stanford, CA, 1989). For
North America, pioneering ethnohistorian James Axtell has tried to reconcile
such portrayals with native cultures by claiming that natives did regard Europeans as deities but from a familiar cosmos (Imagining the Other: First
Encounters in North America, in Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North
America [Oxford, 1992], 39).
2 Carl A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991
[1972]), 106; Bruce Trigger, Early Native North American Responses to Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations, Journal of American History (hereafter JAH) 77 (1991): 119596; Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The
Making of French Canadaa Cultural History (East Lansing, MI, 2000), 25.
3 Restall, Seven Myths, 108.
4 On Pocahontas, see, among other works, Terrence Malicks 2005 film The New
World and the following books: Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian
Country (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 6978; Camilla Townshend, Pocahontas and
the Powhatan Dilemma (New York, 2004); and Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas:
Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (San Francisco, 2003).
5 Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,
ed. Paul Hulton (New York, 1972 [1590]), 27.
6 William Wood, New Englands Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughn (Amherst, MA,
1977), 96.
7 Louis Bird, Story 0122Our VoicesInter Relationships, ourvoices.ca
(accessed 20 January 2006).
8 Axtell, Imagining the Other, 2674; Juliana Barr, A Diplomacy of Gender:
Rituals of First Contact in the Land of the Tejas, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. (hereafter cited as WMQ), 61 (2004): 39396. A wide-ranging
collection of first-contact material from Canada can be found in a special issue
of Recherches amerindiennes au Qubec 22.23 (1992), titled Traditions et
rcits sur larrive des Europens en Amrique.

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Evan Haefeli

9 Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the
Yukon Territory (Lincoln, NE, 1998), xiii.
10 John Long, Narratives of Early Encounters between Europeans and the Cree
of Western James Bay, Ontario History 80 (1988): 22745. Gregory Evans
Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity,
17451815 (Baltimore, 1992), describes how spiritually charged stories about
relations with Europeans helped fuel a movement for unity and resistance to
colonialism.
11 Or, in the case of Australia, danced with them. Inga Clendinnen doubts the
theory that Australians believed the Europeans were ghosts returned, though
she believes it took some time for them to establish through experiment that
the British were certainly human (Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact [Cambridge, 2005], 88).
12 Davd Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies
in the Aztec Tradition (Chicago, 1992); Todorov, Conquest of America. On the
contrary side, Inga Clendinnen maintains that the destruction of Tenochtitln
represents nothing less than Cortss abject failure to understand Aztec culture
or properly communicate with them; Clendinnen, Corts, Signs, and the Conquest of Mexico, in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed.
Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia, 1990), 87130.
13 Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the
Early History of the Sandwich Islands, Association for Social Anthropology in
Oceania, Special Publications no. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1981); Sahlins, Islands of
History (Chicago, 1985); Sahlins, Captain Cook at Hawaii, Journal of the
Polynesian Society 98 (1989): 371425; Sahlins, How Natives Think: About
Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago, 1995).
14 Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A Historys Anthropology (Honolulu, HI, 1995).
15 Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking
in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ, 1992) and Cannibal Talk: The Maneating Myth
and Human Sacrifice: The South Seas (Berkeley, CA, 2004); Restall, Seven
Myths, 10820; William Hamlin, Imagined Apotheosis: Drake, Harriot, and
Ralegh in the Americas, Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 420. See also
Hamlin, Attributions of Divinity in Renaissance Ethnography and Romance;
or, Making Religion of Wonder, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
24 (1994): 41547; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of
the New World (Chicago, 1991), 5285.
16 Bruce M. White first pointed out the important role that the affective language
of kinship, amity, and nurturing played in fur trade negotiations in Give Us
a Little Milk: The Social and Cultural Significance of Gift Giving in the Lake
Superior Fur Trade, in Rendezvous: The Selected Papers of the Fourth North
American Fur Trade Conference (Grand Portage, MN, and Thunder Bay, ON,
1981), 18597. See also White, Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota
Theories about the French and Their Merchandise, Ethnohistory 41 (1994):
369406; Mary Black-Rogers, Varieties of Starving: Semantics and Survival
in the Subarctic Fur Trade, 17501850, Ethnohistory 33 (1986): 35383; and
Axtell, Imagining the Other, 5458.
17 Bird, Story 0122. For a suggestive discussion of a related context, see Richard
White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 16501815 (Cambridge, 1991), 2333.

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439

18 James Lockhart, Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Culture, in

Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters
between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B.
Schwartz (New York, 1994), 21848; Inga Clendinnen, Fierce and Unnatural
Cruelty: Corts and the Conquest of Mexico, in New World Encounters, ed.
Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 1247; Clendinnen, Corts, Signs,
and the Conquest of Mexico, 87130.
19 Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca,
NY, 2000), 5.
20 Olivia Harris, The Coming of the White People: Reflections on the Mythologization of History in Latin America, Bulletin of Latin American Research 14
(1995): 924.
21 Neal Salisbury, in his reassessment of the relationship between pre- and postColumbian history, stresses the many continuities linking the two periods (The
Indians Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans, WMQ
53 [1996]: 43558). Richter (Facing East from Indian Country, 1153) takes a
secular approach, discussing natives encounters with things and rumors and
avoiding the question of whether or not they ever thought Europeans were
gods.
22 Bruce Trigger is one of the most insistent and polemical scholars on the
dichotomy. He concludes his survey Early Native North American Responses
to Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations by stating, While
the importance of native beliefs should never be underestimated, in the long run
a rationalist and materialist analysis of cultural interaction seems to explain far
more about what happened to native people following European contact than
does an analysis that assigns primary explanatory power to their traditional
beliefs (1215).
23 For some examples of such hypotheses, see Wood, New Englands Prospect, 95
96; William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and
Folklore, 16201984 (Hanover, NH, 1986), 6572; and Bird, Story 0122.
24 Colin Scott, La rencontre avec les Blancs daprs les rcits historiques et
mythiques des Cris de la Baie James, Recherches amerindiennes au Qubec
22.23 (1992): 5051; Black Hawk: An Autobiography, ed. Donald Jackson
(Urbana, IL, 1990), 41; The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Philadelphia, 1997), 624.
25 George R. Hamell, Strawberries, Floating Islands, and Rabbit Captains:
Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Journal of Canadian Studies 21.4 (198687):
73.
26 Gordon Day, Oral Tradition as Complement, Ethnohistory 19 (1972): 99
108, rpt. in Michael K. Foster and William Cowan, eds., In Search of New
Englands Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day (Amherst, MA, 1998),
127, 135; Long, Narratives of Early Encounters, 239.
27 Toby Morantz, Plunder or Harmony? On Merging European and Native
Views of Early Contact, in Decentering the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in
Multidisciplinary Perspective, 15001700, ed. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn
Podruchny (Toronto, 2001), 6465.
28 George R. Hamell, The Iroquois and the Worlds Rim: Speculations on
Color, Culture, and Contact, American Indian Quarterly 16 (1992): 45169;
Christopher L. Miller and George R. Hamell, A New Perspective on Indian-

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White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade, JAH 73 (1986): 31128;
Paul Otto, The Origins of New Netherland: Interpreting Native American
Responses to Henry Hudsons Visit, Itinerario 18.2 (1994): 2239; Kenneth
Morrison, Towards a History of Intimate Encounters: Algonkian Folklore,
Jesuit Missionaries, and Kiwakwe, the Cannibal Giant, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3.4 (1979): 5180.
29 Pace William A. Starna, who fears yet another laborious sail up the river with
Henry Hudson would be just another derivative and inconsequential
twist on the same old story; Starna, Assessing American IndianDutch
Studies: Missed and Missing Opportunities, New York History 84 (2003):
78.
30 From The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson, by Robert Juet, 1610, in
Narratives of New Netherland, 16091664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York,
1990), 18 (hereafter cited as NNN).
31 Ibid., 18, 48.
32 Ibid., 19.
33 Ibid. Allen Trelease long ago suggested that the attackers were Canarsee,
whereas the friendly natives belonged to the Navasink band (Indian Affairs in
Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century, intro. William A. Starna [Lincoln,
NE, 1997 (1960)], 26). We both differ from Otto, Origins of New Netherland, who looks for explanations of the New York Indians actions in the
Europeans conduct toward the Indians on the coast of Maine.
34 NNN, 45.
35 Ibid., 21.
36 Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of New Netherlands, ed. Thomas F.
ODonnell (Syracuse, NY, 1968), 4. A brief summary of the tradition had been
included in the 1650 Representation of New Netherland, also authored, at
least in part, by van der Donck, NNN, 293. For some scholars, like Starna,
the fact that van der Donck used the story that he insists some Indians gave
him to establish a firm historical footing for Dutch claims of discovery to
New Netherland is reason for skepticism about its genuinely native origins
(Assessing American IndianDutch Studies, 22).
37 Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York, 2006), discusses other probable visits
to the Hudson River between Verrazanos brief stay and Hudsons visit and
concludes that those who met Hudson had no recent or previous contact with
Europeans (38).
38 A recent study of the processes that created the Delaware in the eighteenth century is Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic
Frontier, 17001763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
39 It seems significant that contemporary Cree oral historian Louis Bird also situates a number of significant encounters between his ancestors and outsiders,
native and European, at one particular location; Bird, Story 0013Our
VoicesCape Henrietta MariaMooshawow, ourvoices.ca (accessed 20
January 2006).
40 Van der Donck, Description, 4; Lois Feister, Linguistic Communication between the Dutch and Indians in New Netherland, 16091664, Ethnohistory
20 (1973): 2538; and Ives Goddard, The Delaware Jargon, in New Sweden
in America, ed. Carol E. Hoffecker et al. (Newark, DE, 1995), 13749.

Manitou and Men

441

41 Van der Donck, Description, 4.

42 John Heckewelder to Samuel Miller, 28 August 1800 and 9 January 1801,
Miller Papers, vol. 1, BV, New-York Historical Society; John Heckewelder,
The Arrival of the Dutch, New-York Historical Society Collections, 2nd ser.,
1 (1841): 6874. This essay uses a later reprint of John Heckewelder, History,
Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, ed. William C. Reichel (Philadelphia, 1876),
7175.
43 Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 7172.
44 John Heckewelder, answer to letter of 27 August 1816, in Letters to John
Heckewelder from the 3rd of April 1816 to the 5th of May 1822 on the Indian
languages, etc., 497.3 H350, American Philosophical Society.
45 On the mixing of Native American and Christian beliefs in the Moravian missions with which Heckewelder was familiar, see Jane T. Merritt, Dreaming of
the Saviors Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania, WMQ 54 (1997): 72346.
46 Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. Howard M. Chapin
(1936; rpt. Bedford, MA, 1997), 126.
47 A. Irving Hallowell, Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View, in Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell (Chicago, 1976),
382. See also his essays Ojibwa World View and Disease, 391448, and The
Role of Dreams in Ojibwa Culture, 44974, in the same collection.
48 Jasper Danckaerts, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 16791680, ed. Bartlett B.
James and Franklin J. Jameson (New York, 1913), 7677.
49 See also Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the
Making of New England, 15001643 (Oxford, 1982), 3439; Daniel K. Richter,
The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of
European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), 2428.
50 Restall, Seven Myths, 112, 116.
51 Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 72.
52 Bird, Story 0122.
53 Long, Narratives of Early Encounters, 230.
54 Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 72.
55 NNN, 68, on kitzinacka; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 4344, for
powwows.
56 Bird, Story 0122.
57 Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 3949; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People
of Southern New England, 15001650 (Norman, OK, 1996), 14055; Richter,
Ordeal of the Longhouse, 4046; Eric Johnston, Some by Threatenings, Others
by Flatterings: A Study of the Sachemship in Southern New England, PhD
diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1992.
58 Robert S. Grumet, Sunksquaws, Shamans, and Tradeswomen: Middle Atlantic Algonkian Women during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in
Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Mona Etienne and
Eleanor Leacock (New York, 1980), 4362; Bragdon, Native People, 14068.
59 Looking at the Southwest, Barr (Diplomacy of Gender) emphasizes the role
of gender in shaping these initial relations between men.
60 Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur
Trade (Berkeley, CA, 1978), provides a useful, if controversial, overview of the

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topic, drawing mostly on literature related to the Ojibwa and other Subarctic
peoples.
61 Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 72.
62 NNN, 1819.
63 Ibid., 49.
64 Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge, 1990), 231. For an
excellent overview of the place of color in cross-cultural relations, and its gradual transformation into racial terms, see Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness:
Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York,
2004), 12540.
65 James Axtell, The White Indians of Colonial America, WMQ 32 (1975):
5588; James H. Howard, Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native American
Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Athens, OH, 1981), 116, 12225.
66 What follows is a summary of the argument presented in Hammell, Strawberries; Miller and Hammell, New Perspective; and Hammell, Iroquois
and the Worlds Rim.
67 NNN, 18.
68 Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 72. Bird (Story 0122) notes
that the exotic appearance of the European men was a particular draw for
young Cree women.
69 Moogk, Nouvelle France, 2527.
70 See Hammell, Strawberries.
71 Shuwanakuw, defined as a White person in the modern Delaware-English
dictionary, derives from the word for ocean, sea, or saltwater (shuwanpuy), not
that for the color white (waapii); see John OMeara, Delaware-English, EnglishDelaware Dictionary (Toronto, 1996), 303, 652.
72 NNN, 18, 20, 25. The stone was probably obsidian.
73 Ibid., 4849.
74 Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas, 23234, 241.
75 Van der Donck, Description, 4, 1045; Williams, Key into the Language, 124.
76 NNN, 20. On the persistence of gift economy values in early modern Europe,
see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI,
2000).
77 NNN, 21.
78 Ibid., 21, 49.
79 Ibid., 2223.
80 Ibid., 23.
81 Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 73.
82 Ibid., 7374.
83 John Heckewelder, The Arrival of the Dutch, New-York Historical Society
Collections, rpt. in Colin Calloway, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: Indian
Voices from Early America (Boston, 1994), 37.
84 See Peter Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America
(Ithaca, NY, 1995), 11415.
85 See Dr. Barton to Samuel Miller, Miller Papers, vol. 1, BV, New-York Historical Society.
86 See, e.g., White, Middle Ground, 7693.
87 NNN, 24.
88 Ibid., 26.

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89 Ibid., 48.
90 See White, Middle Ground, 94141, for the fur trade, and 7576, for theft.
91 NNN, 26.
92 See, e.g., Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact (New York, 1987),
which describes encounters between Australian gold prospecting expeditions
and the last significant population uncontacted by the outside world in highland New Guinea in the 1930s. These episodes have the extraordinary quality
of having both been filmed at the time and having taken place close enough
in time that the authors were able to go back and interview people from both
sides who remembered the event. The book is framed by the disenchantment
paradigm, moving from a time when Europeans were seen as Skymen and the
Living Dead to the End of Eden.
93 Axtell, Imagining the Other, 74.
94 Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.
95 Wyatt MacGaffey, Dialogues of the Deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of
Africa, in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the
Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed.
Stuart B. Schwartz (New York, 1994), 267.
96 Wood, New Englands Prospect, 96.
97 Trigger, Early Native North American Responses, 1196.