The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens

the profitability of promoting Christian mission, even as it insisted that the English really cared about Indian souls. The vision of budding Indian converts in the newly cultivated wilderness must have been an appealing one to an audience that was emerging from a civil war and that had recently witnessed the execution of their king.

      It also offered an important counter to the bloody images of Spanish conquest in America, with which anti-Spanish propaganda had made the English familiar.⁶ When he wrote, “Let the gaining of any of their souls to Christ … be more pretious in our eyes then the greatest gaine or return of Gold and Silver,” Caryl did not just contrast two objects of desire. He also alluded to the violence that made possible the wealth of the Spanish Empire. Gold leaves a trail of blood, he suggested, that orchard groves do not. If they valued Indian souls over gold, the English would prove their superiority to the Spanish. His comment was a moral caution against greed, but it was more emphatically a boast about English virtue.

      One of the ironies of missionary writings, however, is that by adopting scriptural images to the scene of colonial encounter, these texts altered the point of those images, validating the same acquisitiveness they seemed to shun. This tension emerges in Caryl’s letter as he sells the idea of saving Indian souls through images of agricultural abundance and intercontinental trade. In particular, many missionary texts played a pivotal role in the development of a British imperial rhetoric by borrowing, and then rereading through the lens of scripture, a prominent scene of early modern travel writings. This scene was that of American gold traded for the glass and other trinkets offered to Indians by European travelers. First symbolizing the exploitation of colonized peoples, and then more generally the bilking of the powerless, this image came to signify the opposite of its original connotation. This change took place as the trope was combined with images of husbandry and applied to Christian conversion. It was this rhetorical shift that made possible the catastrophe wryly summarized by Vine Deloria: “It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land.”⁷

      Several scholars have commented on the tendency of British missionaries to characterize their project as a mutually beneficial trade.⁸ This chapter charts a rhetorical history of this tendency, placing the missionaries’ descriptions in a broader discourse that begins with the Bible. Through their biblical allusions missionary writings transformed the trope of gold exchanged for glass into a sign, first, of Britain’s obligations to its colonies and, then, of the intangible but eternal rewards that conquest would bring to the conquered. Focusing on Paul’s comment in Romans 15:27 that “if the Gentiles have been made partakers of [the Jews’] spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things,” along with his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 9:11, “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?” these texts presented colonialism as a reciprocal circum-Atlantic exchange involving an endlessly replenished and exportable commodity: the prayers and pity of the British people. The piteous spectacle of Indians being cheated by Europeans, refracted through Paul’s description of a charitable collection and framed by images of husbandry, reconfigured the idea of intercontinental commerce. Seeking to convert the “poor Indians” of America, these texts inverted an image that had been used to condemn the exploitation of those Indians. On a rhetorical level, then, selling the idea of saving souls helped make possible the idea of selling Europe’s glass for America’s gold.

      “They Bartered Like Idiots”: Early Modern Images of Indian Trade

      It is well known that the missionary and imperial aspirations of early modern Europe were intertwined. Whether European desires to save the souls of America’s indigenous peoples were sincere or not, the public expression of those desires rationalized efforts to conquer those peoples and own the resources of their land. Columbus’s first descriptions of the islands upon which he had stumbled made this point clear. Emphasizing that the Taino Indians there “do not carry arms and do not know of them,” he suggested simultaneously that they would be easy to conquer and convert. “They ought to make good slaves,” he wrote, “for they are of quick intelligence since I notice that they are quick to repeat what is said to them, and I believe that they could very easily become Christians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of their own.”⁹ Besides their mimicry, paltry weaponry, and apparent lack of religion, one of the strongest signs of their pliability was their inability to negotiate a profitable trade. As Columbus noted in the same letter, the poignancy of the Indians’ overly generous bartering proved the ease with which Europe could rob or redeem these people: “They … give objects of great value for trifles, and content themselves with very little or nothing in return…. It even happened that a sailor received for a leather strap as much gold as was worth three golden nobles, and for things of more trifling value offered by our men,… the Indians would give whatever the seller required…. Thus they bartered, like idiots, cotton and gold for fragments of bows, glasses, bottles, and jars.”¹⁰ In describing this exchange Columbus failed to recognize the expectations of reciprocity and the nuances of status-determination that surrounded indigenous American systems of gift giving.¹¹ He also neglected the possibility that the Taino found gold to be as inconsequential as the sailors considered their own “trifles,” or that they attached a metaphorical and ceremonial importance to the glass.¹² With stunning confidence in his interpretive ability, he was quick to see this exchange as evidence of economic innocence. Showing that “Columbus reads the Indian system of valuation (whatever it was) as an empty prefiguration of his own,” Joshua Bellin has observed, “a glass bead is worthless and a pearl precious only in systems of exchange value.”¹³ Echoing Stephen Greenblatt’s comment that this letter epitomizes the European fantasy of “the grossly unequal gift exchange: I give you a glass bead and you give me a pearl worth half your tribe,” Bellin has pointed out that Columbus describes the Indians as “naive consumers beyond Europe’s wildest dreams.”¹⁴ The profits of a few sailors suggest the effortless gain of future treasures.

      Moral self-congratulation accompanied the coy assessment of potential wealth in this letter. Columbus juxtaposed his sailors’ eagerness to exploit the Indians with his own insistence that they be treated favorably: “I forbad [these trades] as being unjust, and myself gave them many beautiful and acceptable articles which I had brought with me, taking nothing from them in return; I did this in order that I might more easily conciliate them, that they might be led to become Christians, and be inclined to entertain a regard for the King and Queen, our Princes and all Spaniards, and that I might induce them to take an interest in seeking out, and collecting, and delivering to us such things as they possessed in abundance, but which we greatly needed.”¹⁵ With this narrative Columbus set in place a vision of intercontinental contact that would unite diverse expressions of European desire.¹⁶ Wonder at the Indians’ financial naïveté, concern to save them from injustice and divine wrath, fervent hopes to win their “regard” and hence receive their wealth—all these reactions became central to the discourse of colonialism. Underlining the contrast between unjust sailors and the just admiral who commands them is a distinction between shortsightedness and foresight that is more intellectual than moral. Columbus’s initial insistence on fair trade will, he hopes, encourage the Indians’ excessive reciprocity. It is an investment, promising a payoff in gold and labor. Christian conversion plays a dual role in a vision of reciprocal exchange: fair trade by Columbus will help lead the Indians to Christianity, and Christianity will keep the trade fair. For what except the gospel can match the wealth that the Indians “abundantly possess” but Spain “greatly need[s]”? Christianity is the only commodity that can balance the intercontinental books for Columbus, offering compensation for conquest.

      At the core of Columbus’s formulation is this vision of “gold for glasse,” of true wealth bartered for its shiny imitation. This trope of trade became central to descriptions of global exploration. It also acquired a broad metaphorical register in the early modern period, suggesting many forms of poor judgment. After killing his wife Desdemona out of ill-founded suspicions of infidelity, for example, Shakespeare’s Othello referred to himself as

      [O]ne whose hand,

      Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

      Richer than all his tribe.