2 Why Billington Survived

2 Why Billington Survived 1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann

Note:2@@@@@@@@@@@ da indicizzare fino al segnalibro 1031 poi da leggereil primo contatto tra indiani e colonigli indigeni si alleano a fini militari (x combattere meglio i nemici) non x spirito di amicizial omissione dei reali motivi è sintomatica e nn riguarda solo i testi x bimbidio e la tecnologia c entrarono poco con la sopravvivenza dei primi colonil etnocentrismo sembra universale: entrambe le parti si credevano superiorile tende indiane: tutt altro che primitivei givani indiani: bamboccionila proprietà: c era eccome... veniva poco utilizzata ma c erail capo: si votava coi piedile battaglie rrano più che altro risse... prima degli europei: una rissa continua tra tribufisicamente gli indiani erano più prestanti di noi... nn hanno conosciuto carestie o epidemie

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THE FRIENDLY INDIAN
Note:T

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They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions.
Note:la politica degli indiani nei confronti dei bianchi

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Now Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules. He would permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time—provided they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.
Note:alcune tribù sfruttano l'aiuto dei bianchi nei loro conflitti interni

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A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.
Note:come la etorica scolastica ha ridotto l'incontro tra indiani e bianchi

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Winslow didn’t know that fish fertilizer may not have been an age-old Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all. So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the idea from European farmers.
Note:l'idea del pesce come fertilizzante

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omission is symptomatic of the complete failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett.
Note:l'omissione fondamentale dei testi storici canonici

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This variant of Holmberg’s Mistake dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective native resistance to the will of God. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote, favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the English.” Later writers tended to attribute European success not to European deities but to European technology.
Note:c'è un errore opposto ovvero considerare la resa indiana una volontà Divina

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“Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian emeritus at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.”
Note:gli indiani non erano considerati un popolo arretrato e barbaro

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The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or technologically determined.
Note:le cause della sconfitta indiana

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When native met newcomer, both groups tried to benefit, as people will. In almost every case, each side believed itself to be superior—ethnocentrism seems to be a near-universal human quality—and
Note:i due gruppi si ritenevano entrambi superiori

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Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years.
Note:l'amico indiano non era affatto un indiano

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As Tisquantum’s later history made clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet,

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lui stesso non si riteneva tale

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Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoamerica and Peru were inventing agriculture and coalescing into villages, New England was barely inhabited, for the excellent reason that it had been covered until relatively recently by an ice sheet a mile thick.
Note:il Nord America una periferia dell'Impero

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The ancestral language may derive from what is known as the Hopewell culture. Around two thousand years ago, Hopewell jumped into prominence from its bases in the Midwest, establishing a trade network that covered most of North America. The Hopewell culture introduced monumental earthworks and, possibly, agriculture to the rest of the cold North.
Note:la prima cultura del Nord America di cui abbiamo traccia

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Nor did the English regard the Dawnland wetu as primitive; its multiple layers of mats, which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warmer than our English houses,”
Note:gli indiani non erano considerati dei primitivi dai coloni

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Europeans bemoaned the lack of salt in Indian cuisine, they thought it nourishing. According to one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time averaged about 2,500 calories a day, better than those usual in famine-racked Europe.
Note:abitazioni e cucina indiane erano ammirate e limitate anche dai coloni

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Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until marriage.
Note:famiglia presso gli indiani

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The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest, and uncomplaining.
Note:pedagogia indiana

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When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest,
Note:cccccc

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To master the art of ignoring pain, future pniese had to subject themselves to such miserable experiences as running barelegged through brambles.
Note:dominare il dolore

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(Dawnlanders lived in a loose scatter, but they knew which family could use which land—“very exact and punctuall,” Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island colony, called Indian care for property lines.)
Note:il sistema della proprietà

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sachems had to gain the consent of their people, who could easily move away and join another sachemship. Analogously, the great sachems had to please or bully the lesser, lest by the defection of small communities they lose stature.
Note:gli indiani potano con i piedi

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In consequence, boundaries between groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political tensions were constant.
Note:cresce il numero degli indiani cominciano le prime tensioni territoriali

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Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European standards. The casus belli was usually the desire to avenge an insult or gain status,
Note:i conflitti sono numerosi ma poco intensi per lo standard europeo

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Women and children were rarely killed,
Note:cccccc

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Nevertheless, by Tisquantum’s time defensive palisades were increasingly common, especially in the river valleys. Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family,
Note:warfare indiano

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outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of confusing actions and individuals fighting
Note:tutti contro tutti

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TOURISM AND TREACHERY
Note:ttttttttt

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The earliest written description of the People of the First Light was by Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian mariner-for-hire commissioned by the king of France in 1523 to discover whether one could reach Asia by rounding the Americas to the north.
Note:il primo a descriverli

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Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens.
Note:sani e aitanti

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Because famine and epidemic disease had been rare in the Dawnland, its inhabitants had none of the pox scars or rickety limbs common on the other side of the Atlantic.
Note:poche carestia e poche epidemie

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The Pilgrims were less sanguine about Indians’ multicolored, multitextured mode of self-presentation.
Note:i nostri sempre più malaticcii

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And the hair! As a rule, young men wore it long on one side, in an equine mane, but cropped the other side short, which prevented it from getting tangled in their bow strings.
Note:la grande bellezza dei capelli

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As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans with disdain as soon as they got to know them.
Note:il disprezzo delle indiano per il bianco

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With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended.
Note:una terra ben difesa

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THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
Note:ttttttt

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To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive? In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves.
Note:come sono sopravvissuti i padri fondatori?

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The Pilgrims were typical in their lack of preparation. Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living.
Note:i Padri Pellegrini all'avventura

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Huddled in their half-built village that first terrible winter, the colonists rarely saw the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of copper- or claw-tipped arrows. After February, glimpses and sightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But after all the anxiety, their first contact with Indians went surprisingly easily. Within days Tisquantum came to settle among them. And then they heard his stories.
Note:primi contatti tra i padri e gli indiani

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The Indians’ appearance in this European city surely caused a stir. Not long before, Shakespeare had griped in The Tempest that the populace of the much bigger city of London “would not give a doit [a small coin] to a lame beggar, [but] will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed that “Indians themselves indeed are true men” and should not be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our service like brute animals.”)
Note:gli indiani in Europa. Il fenomeno da baraccone. L'opposizione cattolica ad ogni brutalità.

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the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia.
Note:la strage. I prigionieri europei erano malati. Probabilmente si trattava di epatite. il contagio fu terribile nelle sue conseguenze

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In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities.
Note:cccccccc

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The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are well placed. Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces.
Note:la mancanza di nozioni sulla viralità scatenò interpretazioni di carattere religioso

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Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people
Note:Il prima è il dopo. Sintesi, dapprima gli indiani si alleano con gli europei in cerca di alleanze strumentali ai loro conflitti interni. La strage avviene a causa dell'epatite portata da alcuni francesi

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The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives … that he might make room for us.”
Note:l'interpretazione della strage. Il nostro Dio ci favorisce. È la stessa interpretazione degli indiani medesimi

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The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to disturb or appease
Note:l'epidemia lascia un territorio deserto da conquistare

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Now he told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away would have taxed his limited resources). But in return he wanted the colonists’ assistance with the Narragansett.
Note:altra richiesta di aiuto da parte dei capi indiani per combattere i loro nemici. Ora vogliono le nostre pistole.

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Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology. Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, an unrifled, early seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed.
Note:un luogo comune da sfatare. La superiorità tecnologica degli Europei. È vero, le pistole fecero da prima impressione agli indiani ma si rivelarono ben presto solo degli aggeggi molto rumorosi e poco pratici.

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At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable
Note:d'altro canto gli europei stupirono per la tecnologia indiana. Il mais, i mocassini, e molto altro

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the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes.
Note:gli europei scambiarono ben volentieri i loro coltelli e le loro pistole con le pratiche canoe indiane

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Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before Massasoit had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory.
Note:gli indiani vedevano gli europei come un'ennesima tribù con cui allenarsi

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MACHINATIONS
Note:tttttttt

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In the next decade tens of thousands of Europeans came to Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people through the wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth lasted for more than fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being pushed around by colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps an inevitable attack. Indians from many other groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New England. The Europeans won. Indeed, after the war Massachusetts sold more than a thousand Indians into slavery—perhaps one out of every ten native adults in the region. Most went to the Caribbean, but a few ended up as far away as North Africa.
Note:il patto tra coloni e indiani durò 15 anni. Fu infine rotto dagli indiani che scatenarono una guerra vinta dagli europei. I vincitori schiavizzarono i vinti e li vendettero spedendoli soprattutto ai Caraibi e in Africa

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The historian Alan Gallay has estimated that between 1670 and 1715 English slavers in the South sold somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand native people.
Note:numeri

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What happened? Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the English tactic of massacring whole villages.
Note:perché i coloni vinsero le loro guerre? Non per la presunta superiorità tecnologica ma per la maggior coesione. Le tribù indiane erano divise e incapaci di coalizzarsi.

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But another, bigger part of the reason for the foreigners’ triumph was that by the 1670s the newcomers outnumbered the natives.
Note:ci fu poi la questione del numero da una certa data in poi gli europei erano superiori anche per numero

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Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633.
Note:infine un ruolo fondamentale continuarono ad averlo le epidemie

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Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they had.
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