The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens

some missionaries is suggested by the fact that these lines appeared forty years later in Daniel Gookin’s Historical Collections of the Indians in New England. Gookin, who was the superintendent of Indian affairs in Massachusetts during King Philip’s War and a supporter of Eliot, quoted this poem as he described the piety of the praying Indians, mourned their treatment during the war, and called for more missionary efforts.⁷⁸ Two of Herbert’s lines also appeared in Thomas Randall’s SSPCK sermon of 1763. Randall suggested that his audience could prevent the flight of religion from Britain by returning some of their wealth to the society’s mission in America.⁷⁹

      Many poems of the Restoration and the eighteenth century expanded on this vision of riches flowing eastward from America in exchange for intangible forms of wealth. Herbert’s poem also influenced British understandings of empire, although the alterations made to his vision of exchange are as telling as its appropriations. After Herbert, English and then British visions of empire rarely saw gold and grace flowing in opposite directions. Rather, they imagined an organic expansion of grace both prompted and proved by the wealth that the world brought to Europe. In Annus Mirabilis (1667), John Dryden adapted Isaiah’s prophecy of gentiles worshipping Yahweh (Isa. 60) to a future in which merchants flock toward a glorious, gold-paved London like “suppliants” before a beautiful woman.⁸⁰ Christopher Smart’s “On the Goodness of the Supreme Being” (1756) envisions a scene of worldwide thanksgiving, in which peoples across the globe converge to offer their wealth to God and a well-armed “Europa” guards the loot. After describing caravans of elephants bearing “frankincense and myrh” from Araby and trains of camels bearing gold ingots from Africa, Smart addresses an American Indian maiden:

      And thou, fair Indian, whose immense domain

      To counterpoise the Hemisphere extends,

      Haste from the West, and with thy fruits and flow’rs,

      Thy mines and med’cines, wealthy maid, attend.

      More than the plenteousness so fam’d to flow

      By fabling bards from Amalthea’s horn

      Is thine; thine therefore be a portion due

      Of thanks and praise: come with thy brilliant crown

      And vest of furr; and from thy fragrant lap

      Pomegranates and the rich ananas pour.⁸¹

      Identified with organic abundance rather than the luxury of the east, the “fair Indian” also mirrors and belies the bodies of upper-class British women who displayed the wealth of colonial commerce.⁸² Described as Amalthea, who nourished the infant Jupiter with goat’s milk, she is termed “wealthy” because of the “fruits and flow’rs … mines and med’cines” with which she can enrich others. Identified with the products of a fertile and generous land, she becomes inseparable from them.

      Although both America and Europe are female, Smart deploys their gender in different ways, illustrating the power dynamics between the continents. America is a nurturing Amalthea, but “Europa” is a fierce Athena, “Clad in the armour of the living God,” whom the poet beckons:

      Approach, unsheath the spirit’s flaming sword;

      Faith’s shield, Salvation’s glory,—compass’d helm

      With fortitude assume, and o’er your heart

      Fair trust’s invulnerable breast-plate spread. (ll. 119–23)

      Smart describes Europe in terms of her military might but the other continents in terms of their available products. The peoples of America, Africa, and Asia offer the riches of their lands for the glorification of an altar guarded by Europa. In exchange for this generosity, America receives only “a portion … of thanks and praise.” Charitable as her intentions may be, Europa wages a crusade of conquest and becomes the caretaker of God’s wealth.

      Such expectations of gifts from America also directed the ways in which real Indians were treated and discussed. After the “four Indian kings” of the Iroquois Nations visited London in 1710, for example, an apocryphal story circulated that they had offered some of their land to the “Poor Palatines,” German religious refugees camped out on the hills of Blackheath.⁸³ That this legend circulated at all is significant, especially in light of the attention the visitors’ request to the queen and the Church of England for a mission received.⁸⁴ This story was not the only episode that connected the visitors with pity and generosity. While touring London, the kings were reported to have given alms to a poor woman in a scene that affected the crowds watching them.⁸⁵ I suspect that the vision of Indian Kings remedying the material poverty of pitied Europeans suffering from Catholic persecution was viewed as the complement to their highly publicized desire for Protestant missionaries, reinforcing the model of spiritual-material exchange.

      But the more vividly English poets identified Indians with luxury, the more impoverished real Indians, especially those on the eastern seaboard, became. A letter from the missionary Gideon Hawley to the Massachusetts Historical Society, describing his almost forty years of work with the Mashpee Indians on Cape Cod, presents us with a wry fulfillment of Herbert’s prophecy. Writing in 1794, Hawley described his first meeting with the Mashpees in the late 1750s: “The natives here appeared in a very abject state…. They were dressed in English mode; but in old tattered garments and appeared below a half naked Indian in possession of his Liberty…. Their children were sold or bound as security for the payment of their fathers’ debts…. These Indians and their children were transferred from one to another master like slaves. Nevertheless to console them they had the Christian religion.”⁸⁶ Like Herbert, Hawley paired material poverty with spiritual wealth. He described the latter as compensation for the former, “consoling” the Mashpees for the loss of their wealth and freedom. Although Hawley did depict himself as trying to ameliorate the Mashpee’s material conditions, his description of their status presents an uncanny repetition of Herbert’s vision.

      The metaphors of husbandry and trade were pervasive enough that they shaped the articulation of the early Indian policy of the United States. In an address to Congress in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson noted, “The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the United States have for a considerable time been growing more and more uneasy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, although effected by their voluntary sales.” Because some tribes had begun to protect their land by refusing to sell it, he argued that the government should convert the Indians entirely to a sedentary, agriculturally based economy supported by federally subsidized trading posts. Because farming required less land than hunting, “the extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless” to them. This project, combined with efforts to “multiply trading houses among them, and place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort than the possession of extensive but uncultivated wilds,” would make the Indians more willing to sell their lands. After all, he predicted, “Experience and reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want for what we can spare and they want.”⁸⁷ Like many a missionary, Jefferson sought to reduce the Indians to a civility marked by land enclosure, and he sold this scheme as a mutually profitable exchange.

      In this public address Jefferson insisted, “I trust and believe we are acting for [the Indians’] greatest good.” In a private letter, though, he described a less benevolent plan: “To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”⁸⁸ Jefferson described a transaction that, while more complex, amounted to the same trade Columbus’s soldiers had made of their glass for the Indians’ gold. In exchange for the lasting wealth of land, he offered only the fleeting “comfort” of manufactured goods, the alleviation of a debt in which the government had entrapped them, and the skills to farm their diminished land. He was able to describe his plan in the way he did because the discourse of mission had transformed