3

---

NATURAL MAN IN
AN UNNATURAL LAND

`Kings' from America
measure England, 1600-1800

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffick
would I admint; no names of magistrates;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation -- all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty.
	--William Shakespeare,      The Tempest[1]

The very European monarchies that set out to rule the world eventually were undermined by ideas of liberty that returned to Europe with more tangible cargoes. These new ideas spread like an intellectual virus through the courts, commons, and streets of Europe, awakening hopes, aspirations, and political passions, shaping the character of the Enlightenment, filling it with "natural men," living by "natural law," asserting their "natural rights," recalling ancient utopian visions as old as the Garden of Eden and Plato's Republic.

Reports from America of societies operating by natural consensus provided Europeans with what they believed to be a window on their own pre-monarchial heritage; by recalling the past, social and political revolutionaries hoped to shape a new future free of the crown and truncheon. America became Europe's dream slate, an answer to every troublesome question, a cure for every ailment, from baldness, to poverty and tyranny. America provided a vision, and an outlet for a crowded, cloistered little continent: land for freeholds, and a spirit of freedom that must have had tremendous appeal among the crowded, coerced, and rack-rented of Europe.

In their accounts of America, Europeans mingled fiction and fact. Europeans encountered versions of America in travel narratives, newspaper accounts, stage plays, satirical broadsides, and books of philosophy. The well-placed might even have spoken personally with one of a number of American natives who traveled from America to Europe, some feted as kings, others held for exhibition like zoo animals. Many of Europe's majority who could not read or write heard of America only through gossip and rumor. For every European who made the journey to America, perhaps dozens more traveled only on the map of imagination.

Europeans likely mingled with native peoples of America well before Columbus' voyages, providing the intellectual groundwork for the imagination that fired Enlightenment thought. Cotton Mather found what he believed to be Celtic inscriptions in New England and, in 1773, Samuel Mather wrote a pamphlet titled An Attempt to Shew, That America Must Have Been Known to the Ancients. . . . Benjamin Franklin read it, and argued that if such contact had taken place, it must have been before the time of Tubalcain (Genesis 4:22), to whom the Old Testament attributes introduction of ironworking, since natives of America did not use iron. Franklin also cited approvingly theories advanced by "Professor [Peter] Kalm, a learned Swede," that the Vikings made landfall in America. After Kalm visited Pennsylvania, Franklin wrote that "The circumstances give the Account great Appearance of Authenticity."[2] Franklin speculated that the climate of Newfoundland and New England must have been warmer at that time if it had supported grape vines, as Kalm indicated Viking accounts said it did.

Lending credence to Mather's theories, the first published history of Wales, The History of Cambria, Now Called Wales [1584] contains pre-Columbian references to America as "the New Found Land." According to this history, Madoc, son of Owen Gwyneth, Prince of Wales during the reign of Henry II, sailed westward with men and munitions, visiting America at least twice.


On both sides of the Atlantic, sporadic contacts left a residue of myth, transmitted from generation to generation in oral histories. American Indians from Nova Scotia to Mexico told their children about pale-skinned, bearded strangers who arrived from the direction of the rising sun. Such myths played a large part in Cortez' conquest of the Aztecs, who were expecting the return of men who looked like him.[3] The natives of Haiti told Columbus they expected the return of white men; some Mayan chants speak of visits by bearded strangers. The Lenape (Delawares) told Morovian missionaries that they had long awaited the return of divine visitors from the East. These premonitions, among others, suggest that the peoples of the old and new worlds communicated with each other centuries before Columbus. We have, however, no tangible evidence of what they might have talked about. For while bones and pottery can be dug up and carbon-dated, ideas were as perishable and mutable as memory in a time when few things were written, and fewer writings preserved. Did early visitors return to Europe with accounts of America that lay dormant during the Middle Ages, to sprout only with the arrival of the Renaissance and Enlightenment? Perhaps we shall never know.

The trail of ideas begins with the invention of movable type in Europe, which coincided nearly with the voyages of Columbus. By early in the sixteenth century, Europe had books, and an American imagination with which to fill them. With movable type came incitement to change, and resistance to an established order in which every man and woman had his or her place, through a secular and religious chain of command that stretched from popes and kings, through a wealth-ranked assortment of tradesmen, to serfs and beggars. As Europe imported the New World's material riches, it also harvested ideas of ordering societies in new ways, all foreign and often intriguing, horrifying to those who benefitted from Europe's existing order, often very appealing to those who did not.

When Columbus and other explorers brought home accounts of "natural men" living by "natural law," they were playing to beliefs that had existed in Europe since the Greeks and Romans. The Roman historian, Tacitus, had used the "barbarian" tribes of northern Europe as a counterpoint to the corruptions of Roman civility. In Agricola, Tacitus quoted a leader of the Britons, on the character of the Romans: "Robbery, butchery and rapine the liars call Empire. They create a desolation, and call it Peace." Aristotle and Plato wondered whether the original state of humankind had been democratic and communistic.[4] Centuries before Columbus, English commoners recited an old poem from memory, describing the "Land of Cokaygne, far west of Spain," in terms that could warm the heart of any medieval serf, not to mention utopian socialist:

Every man takes what he will
As of right, to eat his fill,
All is common, to young and old,
To stout and strong, to meek and bold.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Geese fly [overhead] roasted on the spit.
Every goose in garlic dressed. [5]

Into the often bleak and hungry lives of English commoners, Cokaygne threw visions of stream banks encrusted with gold and precious jewels, and birds in every bush. Overhead, "Geese fly roasted on the spit -- every goose in garlic dressed."[6] Cokaygne, in a few lines of verse, combined all those dreams of the human spirit that yearn for a more perfect, more egalitarian society, from Plato, to Thomas More, to Marx, between, and beyond. So, when voyagers returned from America with stories of societies without class structure or poverty, where people seemed to live by natural law without judges, jails, kings or queens, these accounts fit finely into European visions honed for millenia on the grinding wheel of a dreary reality.

European imagination eagerly consumed the early reports from America. It was almost as if Europe needed an ideological counterpoint. Europeans' myth of the lost Eden prepared it for America in a way strangely similar to the fashion in which the Aztecs' remembrance of bearded strangers from the east prepared them for a brutal and agonizing conquest. Nothing excited European imagination in its time as much as a purported account of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. Actually a work of fiction, The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci was circulated through Europe in 1507 in Latin.

According to Professor Bruce A. Burton, this account at once appealed to European wish-fulfillment by describing the freedoms of American native peoples, and justified the seizure of wealth from them by emphasizing Indians' lack of lust for riches as Europeans defined them. The theme of Europeans subjugating America's native peoples while evoking liberty in them would ring through the next five centuries.[7] The Vespucci forgery contributes a description of native freedoms which would reappear, time and time again, during and after the Enlightenment, in the French philosophers, Franklin, Jefferson, Marx and Engels, as well as countless novelists and tract writers: "These people have neither King, nor Lord, nor do they yield obedience to any one, for they live in their own liberty."[8]


The "discovery" of America by Columbus was followed closely by the flowering of a literary genre to which Thomas More's work gave a name: utopia. More's work was only one of many that gave readers scope for egalitarian dreams for three centuries, or until the last frontiers closed on a fully-mapped world around 1900. As the term terra incognita vanished from earthly maps, writers had to look to other planets for such things. H.G. Wells became the first great science-fiction writer just as the earth offered no new frontiers. On earth, today's futurist usually picks dishes from the cafeteria of the apocalypse: will we crowd ourselves off the planet, drowning in our own garbage, or irradiate ourselves with our genius for weaponry?

When More wrote Utopia in 1515 and 1516, the voyages of Columbus were within living memory, as were the accounts of Vespucci and Martyr. More had read the Vespucci forgeries, and was familiar with other travel accounts when, by his own account, he met with the sailor-philosopher Hythloday, who told More he had sailed to America with Vespucci, before becoming separated from his shipmates. For five years, he traveled where no European had ever been. In this context, Utopia could be regarded as a travel narrative, as well as (as Burton puts it), "the first explicit literary example, rooted in the New World, of a political alternative to Europe's tyrannies."[9] Utopia was regarded as so subversive in England that More was forced to write it in Antwerp. Not until 1551, several years after More was beheaded in the London Tower, was Utopia published in England.

More's invented world owes a great deal to travel accounts of the early explorers. Utopians' disdain for private property (especially gold), could turn any righteous conquistador's stomach. In Utopia, no one killed to enforce doctrine, and no church regimented the purity of the soul. Utopia, a society of peers, was governed by consent. Leaders were elected by the people, and removed from office by them, "on suspicion of some design to enslave the people."[10] It was a society without lawyers, judges, or debtors' prisons, a place that sounds in some respects amazingly similar to the American Indian societies that would be recalled by Rousseau, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, and Engels, among others. More, like Tacitus before him, made of "primitive" societies a mirror of social criticism for "civilized" Europe.

Utopians valued leisure (much as Franklin later would describe American Indians). Six hours of work per person per day provided plenty for all, because Utopia had no rich, idle nobility. Where poverty did not exist, neither did greed: "There is no danger of a man asking for more than he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure they shall always be supplied."[11]

Utopia was not invented wholly of American observation, of course. More's citizens read books and attended lectures, used cattle and horses and required passports for travel outside their home cities. Utopians also practiced a form of slavery reserved for criminals who worked off their sentences at menial tasks, wrapped in gold chains, a badge of dishonor. Even this description sounds to a degree like the way many American Indian societies treated offenders: by scorning them, and forcing them to earn their way back into society. The "slaves" of Utopia also could earn their freedom and return to honorable society.


For about a century, the English got their reports of the New World through Spanish and Portugese (and later French) explorers. By 1607, with the settlement of Jamestown, accounts of the New World came to them more directly. William Shakespeare wrote his plays as England's eyes were being opened to America. In The Tempest (written in 1611 and 1612), Shakespeare, who had read Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's "Of Cannibals," nearly steals lines the French philosopher had written in 1580:

In the commonwealth I would by
          contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of
          traffic
Would I admit, no name of
          magistrate.
Letters should not be known; riches,
          poverty,
And use of service none;
All things in common nature should
          produce
Without sweat or endeavor. Treason,
          felony, sword, pike, knife, gun or need
          of any engine
Would I not have
I would not in such perfection govern, sir
To excell the Golden Age.

Again, accounts of American societies mixed with European memory of a pre-monarchial Golden Age, a common theme from the first landings in the New World, and a major reason why Europe became so fascinated, so quickly, with native societies of the New World. A century after Shakespeare penned these lines, native Americans would experience this frenzy of fascination first-hand on the streets of London.


Imagine standing on a street corner in London, near Buckingham Palace, on a spring day in 1710, during the reign of Queen Anne. Like most Britons of the time, you have only rarely traveled outside your home town or village. A trip even to London is an exotic experience.

You marvel at the surge of humanity streaming after an elegantly painted and plated pair of carriages crawling through the excited mob. Elbowing your way through the crowd, you catch a fleeting glimpse of the passengers in the carriages: American kings! Tall, well-muscled, black of hair and bronze of skin, clothed in a riot of color, a combination of their native dress and royal gifts that make them look even more exotic than you might have imagined.

The carriages disappear into the palace, bound for the Court of Saint James, four Mohawk Indians on their way to an audience with Queen Anne and her ministers, all taking part in an ongoing contest for North America and the rest of the world as Europe's mapmakers know it. English royalty have cast the four visiting Mohawks in their own image, believing, because this is how kings and queens imagine things, that these four Mohawks can issue edicts to their nation, and the other four Iroquois nations. They imagine in error, of course, since, in reality, only one of the four has any real influence at home, and he leads his fellow Mohawks not by edict, but by persuasion. This one "king" is a young man whom his people call Tiyanoga. The English call him Hendrick even in 1710, almost half a century before English colonists will invite him to the Albany Congress of 1754 to describe for them how the Iroquois Confederacy operates.

Queen Anne had not invited Hendrick and his three companions to London for a lesson in democracy, however. She has invited them to see the grandeur and power of England, which is now bidding for the Iroquois' alliance in the contest for North America with the French. In Iroquois country -- so the story goes -- Jesuit missionaries have been telling the Indians that Christ, the savior, was born in France and crucified in Protestant England. Not that the story matters so much to the Indians. It matters a great deal to the English.

American Indians had visited England, France, Portugal and Spain for at least a century before that spring day in 1710, but they had never before come as the feted guests of royalty. One of the most memorable visitors, Squanto had visited England by the time the Pilgrims got to America, and met them on the beach, speaking English. For decades, European fishermen had taken a few American natives back to England -- some willingly, some not. Traders had enslaved small groups in hopes of making a killing with them as carnival attractions. Never before, however, had London risen in quite this degree of excitement over such visitors.

Thus the carriages, the pomp, the mobs of gawkers and hawkers, the columns of newsprint mixing reporting with imagination. With as much speed as the communication and transportation technology of the early eighteenth century could muster, the four Mohawk "kings" became instant celebrities.

No Mohawk or Iroquois council had appointed the four "American kings" as ambassadors to Queen Anne's court. They had been chosen more or less at the convenience of Peter Schuyler, British Indian agent, from the Iroquois he knew. The fact that all four were Mohawks was not coincidental, for the Mohawks were the best-known of the five Iroquois nations to the English, the keepers of the eastern door of the longhouse, which opened at the British trading post of Albany.

The three Mohawks who accompanied Hendrick had very short historical careers. Oh Nee Yeath Ton No Prow's Christian name was John; during the royal visit, he was often called "King of Ganajahhore," which suggests that many English, in 1710, were still not quite past Columbus' geographical error. He signed with the wolf, his clan. History has left us nothing more about him. Sa Ga Yean Qua Prah Ton's Christian name was Brant, and he would later become known as the grandfather of Joesph Brant, a famous figure in Iroquois history late in the century. The elder Brant, who also signed with the wolf, died shortly after returning to America from London. During the visit, the English called him "King of the Maquas."[12]

Elow Oh Kaom was christianized Nicholas, and called "King of the River Nation" during the visit. He may have been born a Schacook or Mohican, whom the English sometimes called the "River Indians," and adopted as a Mohawk. He signed with the tortoise.[13]


Hendrick was the youngest of the four. His native name was Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Prow, often shortened to Tiyanoga. He was probably not more than thirty years of age in 1710, although his birthdate is unknown. Later in life, Hendrick would become a key figure in the English alliance with the Iroquois, and would die in 1755 at the Battle of Lake George, leading a force of Mohawks allied with the British against the French.

Hendrick became important not only as an historical figure, but also as an object of European and American literary imagination. A lifelong friend of Sir William Johnson, Hendrick appeared often at Johnson Hall, near Albany, and had copious opportunities to rub elbows with visiting English nobles, sometimes arriving in war paint, fresh from battle. Well known as a man of distinction in his manners and dress, Hendrick visited England again in 1740. At that time, King George presented him with an ornate green coat of satin, fringed in gold, which Hendrick was fond of wearing in combination with his traditional Mohawk ceremonial clothing. By 1754, Hendrick was well enough known among the colonial English to earn a special invitation to the Albany Congress, a year before he was killed in battle. At the Congress, he consulted with Benjamin Franklin and other colonial delegates on a plan for intercolonial union that in many ways resembled the Iroquois own system of government.[14] Like two of the other three visitors to Queen Anne's court, Hendrick was a member of the wolf clan.

Riding around London in their carriages, the four "kings" doubtless looked at the flood of English people around them with as much awe as the English looked at the native Americans. They, too, were drinking in the novelty of a "new world." The Mohawks first visited Buckingham Palace April 19, 1710. In the Court of Saint James, the Duke of Shrewsbury introduced the four "American kings" to Queen Anne, who had been an invalid most of her life. Abraham Schuyler, Peter's cousin, interpreted.

"GREAT QUEEN," Hendrick opened, with a sense of pomp enhanced by the creative capitalization of English printers, "We have undertaken a long and tedious Voyage, which none of our Predecessors could ever be prevailed upon to undertake." Hendrick reminded Queen Anne that the Mohawks had been "a strong wall [of] Security" for the English against the French in North America, "even to the loss of our best men." Hendrick then told the Queen that the Mohawks were tired of getting ready to do battle against the French with the English, only to have the engagements postponed, giving a sense that they were eager to reclaim for the Mohawks "Free hunting and a great Trade with our Great Queen's children." The four Mohawks then punctuated the importance of their statements by presenting the queen with several large wampum belts.

The speech then became very nearly a warning: "We need not urge our Great Queen . . . that in Case our Great Queen should not be mindful of us, we must, with our families, forsake our Country and seek other Habitations, or stand Neuter, either of which would be very much against our inclinations." After Hendrick was finished speaking, the four Mohawks requested the queen's "most Gracious Consideration," and then left her with their words and wampum belts to begin a hectic, two-week tour of London and other nearby points in Southern England.[15]

Day by day, the four "American kings" were spirited from their lodgings at London's Two Crowns and Cushions, to see the sights of Southern England -- to dinner with the Duke of Ormonde near Richmond; by Queen's barge to visit Dr. Flamsteed, the astronomer royale, at Greenwich, to the Greenwich hospital and the dockyards of Woolrich, to Whitehall. At every stop, their celebrity seemed to grow; crowds often followed their carriages.

By April 24, five days after the Mohawks' audience with Queen Anne, at least one theatre manager was using them as an advertising gimmick, to upstage Shakespeare. In the Daily Courant, the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket advertised a performance of Macbeth, "For the Entertainment of the Four INDIAN KINGS lately arriv'd." On the 24th, as advertised, the four Mohawks appeared at the theatre wearing black waistcoats, stockings, and breeches. The curtain rose, and the performance began as schedule, until the audience stopped it, shouting for an eyeful of the Mohawks.

"The kings we will have!" the patrons shouted, louder and louder, as a Mr. Wilks, who was playing Macbeth, tried to carry on. Stopping in the midst of his lines, Wilks assured the crowd that the "kings" were indeed present, in the front box. Wilks' words only raised the clamor of the crowd, which shouted that it had come to see the Americans' faces, not their backs. They could see Macbeth any time on a London stage, but four Mohawks were a real rarity. The crowd told the actors to get off the stage and put the "kings" on it.

The actors had little choice. Wilks found four chairs and seated the Mohawks on stage in full view, as one broadside writer of the time described them:

The persons of these princes . . . are well-formed, being of a stature neither too high nor too low, but all within an inch or two of six Foot. Their habits are robust, and their Limbs muscular and well-shap'd; they are of brown Complexions, their Hair black and long, their visages . . . very awful and majestick, and their Features regular enough, though something of the austere and sullen. [16]

The same writer felt obliged to reconcile the celebrity status of the four Americans with what he assumed was their more humble life at home. "According to the custom of their Country, these princes do not know what it is to cocker and make much of themselves," he wrote. The frenzied round of wining and dining in London stood in stark contrast with the Indians more wholesome fare at home, free of "those indispositions our Luxury brings upon us." Such abstinence earned the "kings" lifelong freedom from "Gout, Dropsy, or Gravel," as well as various fevers, the writer rhapsodized, as one of them (probably the elder Brant), laid on his bed at the Two Crowns and Cushions, groaning with illness from English overindulgence. Despite that fact, the anonymous writer could not help but use the Mohawks as counterpoint to the rich, fat, stale life of English nobility. He said they had offered to entertain the Queen by running down "a Buck or Stag . . . when she pleases to see them, in any of her Parks or Chaces. They are to tire down the Deer, and catch him without Gun, Speare, Launce, or any other weapon."[17]


Meanwhile, the Mohawks remained on the stage of the Queen's Theatre until the audience had had its fill of them, and then Macbeth continued. No trace remains of what the Americans thought of the stage play, but, as Richmond P. Bond pointed out in Queen Anne's American Kings (1952), the reaction of the English to the Mohawks was obvious:

The kings proved to be a hit, and for the remainder of the week, the Haymarket tagged all its performances `For the Entertainment of the Four INDIAN KINGS,' including Hamlet, Otway, two operas, and a one-act farce. [18]

The use of the Mohawks as crowd-bait was catching. They could not possibly have attended every event that was advertised in their honor. Drury Lane's Theatre Royal announced two plays in their name, and the Cockpit Royal on Cartwright Street offered a cockfight for their entertainment. The Tatler (Number 165, April 27-29) advertised a concert of "Vocal and Instrumental Musick" sponsored by "Several Ladies of Quality" for them on May 1. On the same day, Powell the Puppeteer offered a show at Punch's Theatre in honor of the "kings," whose visages he sketched on a handbill advertising the event (see figure 6).[19]

The Daily Courant of May 2 advertised a "Tryal of Skill to be fought in the Bear Garden in Hockley in the Hole." In this contest, John Parkes of Coventry and Thomas Hesgate, "a Berkshire Man," were to go at each other with "these following weapons, viz.: Backsword, Sword and Dagger, Sword and Buckler, Single Falchon, Cafe of Falchon, and Quarter Staff." If the Mohawks had been in the audience, one can only wonder what might have crossed their minds had they watched these two warriors of the urban wilderness trying to slice each other up in front of a crowd of frenzied Londoners attempting, perhaps, to forget a new tax on bread. The new tax was announced in the Daily Courant May 3, when the promoter of the "Tryal of Skill" again advertised the event in honor of the four "kings," several hours after they had departed London for the last time.

Figure 6. Playbill of Performance of Powell's Puppets for the Entertainment of the Four Indian Kings.

Between attending royal audiences and public spectacles, the four Mohawks also asked English missionaries to counter the influence of French Jesuits among their people. The Society for Propagation of the Gospel was happy to oblige; its members also sent the four Mohawks home with one copy each of The Bible, "bound handsomely in red Turkey leather."[20] The Mohawks also got from the missionary society a pledge that it would help combat the sale of intoxicating liquor to Indians in America. In the meantime, speculation in the newspapers centered on the Mohawks' own drinking habits. The general consensus, quite without factual foundation, was that they much preferred English "pale ales" to French wines.

The Mohawks heard a sermon preached by the Lord Bishop of London at Saint James' Chapel, and, according to The Royal Strangers' Ramble, a poem composed shortly after their visit, also visited Leadenhall Market to witness the bounty of English agriculture and industry, as well as the London Tower, to see some of the military might the English were prepared to use against the French. They stared up at the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral, and attended innumerable receptions by "persons of quality."

Following a short audience of leave-taking with Queen Anne, the Mohawks departed London by carriage early May 3, arriving at Portsmouth the next day via the main road through Southhampton. The dock beside their ship groaned under crates of gifts: clothing of linen, cotton and wool (including 43 linen shirts), razors, hair combs, jews' harps, two-dozen large pair of scissors, an equal number of magnifying glasses, hats, pistols, 400 pounds of gunpowder, lead bars, brass kettles, portraits of the Queen, and more of England's carefully strutted industrial produce, all meant to convince them that they would do better siding with the English than with the French.

On May 6, the Royal Navy had its turn to show off English power to the Mohawks. They were received on board the Royal Sovereign, flagship of Admiral Matthew Aylmer, commander of the fleet, where they "tarry'd on board till the evening, and at their departure received the usual honours of the ship." Delayed by incessant socializing and contrary winds, the Mohawks did not set sail for the open ocean until May 19 on board the Dragon, a man of war accompanying a merchant fleet for Boston.


England would get other glimpses of American Indians. Two or three (sources disagree on the number), probably also Iroquois, visited London in 1720. In 1730, a group of Cherokees made the trip, and thirty years after that Ostenaco, another Cherokee, did the same. In 1776 and again in 1785 and 1786, Joseph Brant, who played a major role in rallying a some of the Iroquois to the British cause during the American Revolution, crossed the Atlantic. His sketch appeared in the July, 1776 edition of London Magazine just as (unknown to Londoners until mid-August) American revolutionaries were posting their Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.[21]

In a sense, the four "Indian Kings" never really left England. They lived on in the gossip and literary imagination of England, to be reinvented by each successive generation of authors, poets and playwrights. Soon after the four Mohawks' departure in 1710, a "Mohock Club" began perpetuating stunts of creative mischief on London's streets. A year after that Addison and Steele made of the "kings" a vehicle of satire vis a vis contemporary British society.

Addison and Steele's Spectator used the Mohawks to twit British society in its April 27, 1711 issue: "When the four Indian Kings were in this Country about a Twelve-month ago, I often mixed with the Rabble and followed them a whole Day together, being wonderfully struck with the Sight of every thing that was new or uncommon."

In addition to its eyewitness account, The Spectator claimed access to a manuscript left behind by the Mohawks at the Two Crowns and Cushions. According to The Spectator, the manuscript was turned over to its editors by the owner of the hostelry, who had been given a Mohawk name by the visitors: Cadaroque, "which is the name of the strongest fort in their Part of the World."[22] The hotel owner had been so honored because he introduced the "kings" to the pleasures of English bedding. A neat trick it was for the hotel owner to lay claim to "a little Bundle of Papers" left behind by the Mohawks, since none of the Americans had a written language as Europeans understood it. As neat a trick was The Spectator's purported translation of the little bundle.

Even if the "papers" were faked, the fact that Addison and Steele invented them point up a frequently used literary device in Enlightenment Europe and America: the use of "other eyes", usually those of American Indians, to critique society. Throughout England, France, and America, "natural man" was often called upon to hold court on the foibles of civilization. In this case, Addison and Steele used Hendrick to needle English religion:

Reasons . . . make us think that the natives of this country had formerly among them some sort of worship; for they set aside every seventh day as sacred; but upon going into one of their Holy houses on that day, I could not observe any circumstance of devotion in their behavior. . . . A considerable number of them [were] fast asleep . . . [as a] . . . man in black who was mounted above the rest seemed to utter something with a great deal of importance. [23]

The Spectator's Hendrick also found the dress of the English "likewise very barbarous, for they almost strangle themselves about the neck, and bind their bodies with many ligatures." Instead of wearing "beautiful feathers" on their heads, The Spectator had the Mohawks writing that the English often "buy a monstrous bush of hair [a wig] . . . with which they walk up and down the streets . . . proud of it as if it were their own growth."[24]

The Spectator next turned its ersatz Mohawk eyes on English politics. According to the "bundle of papers," the Queen had appointed two men to accompany the Mohawks, both of whom had an elementary knowledge of their language. Quickly, the four Mohawks surmised that their two hosts did not agree on politics. One told them that "This Island is very much infested with a monstrous kind of Animal, in the shape of men, called Whigs."[25] The Indians were told by him to keep an eye out for such beasts: "He hoped that we should meet with none of them in our way, for, if we did, they would be apt to knock us down for being Kings."[26] The other man told the Indians about another animal, "called a Tory, that was as great a monster as the Whig, and would treat us ill for being Foreigners." According to The Spectator, the Mohawks compared Whigs and Tories to the Elephant and Rhinoceros, another neat trick, since neither animal existed in the New World, and it is unlikely any of the Mohawks had ever seen them.[27]

On Friday, May 4, 1711, Spectator number 56 returned to the thoughts and actions of the "Indian Kings." This time, the paper described what it said were the Mohawks' own religious beliefs. "The Americans believe that all creatures have Souls, not only Men and Women, but Brutes, Vegetables, and even the most inanimate things, such as Sticks and Stones."[28] Thus far, the paper had reasonably accurately characterized some American Indian religious beliefs. Afterwards, however, Addison and Steele went off on a fanciful tangent. From its "bundle of papers," the authors drew a tale of one Marraton, who, trying to enter the "world of spirits," encounters a lion (another beast of the Old World).[29] He prepares to do battle with the beast before discovering that it is actually a ghost. Marraton makes his way past the ghost lion and an array of other apparitional oddities, into the spirit world, a sort of American Indian Garden of Eden: "This happy Region . . . peopled with innumerable Swarms of Spirits, who applied themselves to Exercise and Diversions . . . as their fancies led them."[30]

Having taken its readers to a sort of American heaven, The Spectator also provided them with a glimpse of Mohawk hell, as it maintained the "Indian Kings" had described it: "Several Molten Seas of Gold, in which were plunged the souls of barbarous Europeans who put to the sword so many Thousands of poor Indians for that Precious Metal."[31] Like Thomas More, who wrapped the slaves of Utopia in chains of Gold, and Lenin, who bragged that the proletariat would someday sit on 24-karat commodes, The Spectator turned the Europeans' primary symbol of avarice on its head, using the device of outsiders' eyes to satirize the colonizers' lust for what the nineteenth century Lakota holy man Black Elk later would call "the yellow metal that drives white men crazy."

The Spectator offered its two tales with a plea for cultural relativism that would appear again, late in the same century, in Benjamin Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" [1784]: "We are all guilty in some measure of the same narrow way of thinking," Addison and Steele editorialized in Number 50. "When we fancy the customs, dresses and manners of other countries as ridiculous and extravagant, if they do not resemble our own."[32] As they would do often during the early years of European-American contact, American Indians were providing Europeans an entirely new standard by which to judge their own customs and assumptions.


As The Spectator was delivering its comment, Francis Bird was designing another memento of the Mohawks' visit. Near Saint Paul's, where the four Mohawks earlier had stared up at the cathedral dome. Bird erected a statue of Queen Anne on a pedestal. She looks down upon Britannia, holding a trident, Hibernia, holding a harp, and Gallia, holding the Queen's crown, along with America, personified as an Indian woman in a head dress of feathers, a quiver of arrows slung over one shoulder -- the same image that would be called upon by Paul Revere and other British colonists three generations later as they searched for a symbol of emerging American identity vis a vis British tyranny.[33]

After The Spectator published its accounts of the Mohawks' visit, Jonathan Swift complained in his journal to Stella that the paper's editors had poached the idea from him, and that he had planned to write a book on the subject.[34] That book may have turned out to be Gulliver's Travels, in which the image of the American Indian seems rather similar to the Houyhnhnms, those supremely rational horses, whose name, in their own language, was said by Swift to mean "The Perfection of Nature."[35]

In his Travels, Swift, in the person of Gulliver, is called on to describe English society to the Houyhnhnms. In so doing, he sounds a lot like The Spectator's Mohawks. How, for example, is Gulliver to explain to a race embodying "the perfection of nature" the behavior of English lawyers, for whom legal obfulscation is money in the bank? "My master," he wrote, "was yet wholly at a loss to understand what motives could incite this race of lawyers to perplex, disquiet, and weary themselves by engaging in a confederacy of injustice."[36]

Likewise, the Houyhnhnms are at a loss to understand Europe's economy where, as Gulliver explains it, "the rich man enjoyed the fruits of the poor man's labor . . . that the bulk of our people are forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages to make a few live plentifully."[37] Here, Swift uses his rational horses to critique European class structure in a way that Franklin, Jefferson, Paine and Engels, among others, later would use American Indians' counterpoint. The Houyhnhnms could not reconcile such a system with their own, which "went upon the supposition that all animals had a title to their share of the productions of the earth."[38]

The original title of Gulliver's Travels was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Swift's book, while purposefully fanciful and satirical, falls squarely within the genre of travel literature which did so much to open Europe's eyes to the wonders of other continents during the Age of Discovery. Swift wrote his book as European explorers were conveying home descriptions of traditional societies from Africa, Australia and Asia, as well as the Americas. The Houyhnhnms could be a composite of Tasmanian, African, Aztec and Mohawk, more or less, all or none. The image of natural man loomed large in European imagination during this time, living a life of simple equality that awed and confounded Europeans, blessed with civilization, cursing its burdens. There was a sense among many Europeans of a world about which they only could dream. And dream they did, weaving fact and fancy, myth and desire, using the image of natural man to provide amusement, or provoke revolution. In our tamed and wholly-mapped world, we have nothing like it, except science fiction, which weaves the knowns of other planets and galaxies with fictional speculation about their possible life forms and societies.

Gulliver spent less than a year with the Houyhnhnms, and wished he could have stayed for life. The noble horses were not about to let Gulliver's scent of Yahooism linger in their paradise, so, as the traveler expressed his "firm resolution never to return to humankind, but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable Houyhnhnms in the contemplation and practice of every virtue," the proprietors of paradise told him to build a boat and get out.[39] Gulliver cried on his departure, making his way sorrowfully back to "enjoy my own speculations in my little garden at Redriff, to apply those excellent lessons of virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms, hoping to teach the same virtues to the Yahoos of my family."[40]

Back in England, Gulliver becomes a strangely lonely man. At dinner, his wife sits at the far end of a long table, and, even at that distance, Gulliver finds he must stuff his nostrils with "rue, lavender, and tobacco leaves" against "the smell of a Yahoo continuing very offensive." He suffers the sights of his homeland with a tortured equanimity: "My reconcilment to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult if they would be content with the vices and follies which nature hath entitled them to." The sight of "a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a whoremonger . . . an evidence [paid informer] . . . a traitor" offends Gulliver's newly refined senses less than the fact, so recently obvious to the traveler in paradise, that each effects an insolent pride in his own degradation.

At every turn, Gulliver is haunted by the knowledge that he has seen a better society. He cannot rid his mind of the Houyhnhnms' image, abounding "in all the excellencies that can adorn a rational creature."[41] Like Montaigne's Indians, Gulliver's noble Houyhnhnms do not even have words in their language for depravities that the English take for granted as much as the air they breathe. "But the Houyhnhnms, who live under the government of reason, are no more proud of the good qualities they possess than I should be for not wanting a leg or an arm, which no man in his wits would boast of, although they would be miserable without them."[42] Poor Gulliver, having seen what he and his society is without, is now condemned to live between two worlds, one of myth and memory, the other of bitter, reeking Yahoo reality -- his desires in heaven, his experience in hell.


Whether horse or human, the image of the noble outsider became a staple of English literature, as well as debates over social, economic and political issues, for the rest of the eighteenth century. Two years after Hendrick's second visit to London, the Scots Magazine and London Magazine both published identical "Indian Letters." the ersatz savage quoted in both magazines finds himself to be a natural man in a very unnatural land. "The very order of nature is inverted here," the Indian tells his English readers, very much as Swift's noble horses told Gulliver. Again, like Swift, the American visitor seems perplexed at the British legal system, especially at the lawyers who profit by arguing over what the law really means. "Those very men of law disagree with one another what is or is not law; but however they disagree about it, they live by it, and live the better the more they do disagree."[43]

With each passing generation, Londoners had a chance to renew their acquaintance with American Indian visitors. In 1762, Ostenaco (also called Outasette) made the long voyage across the Atlantic. Thomas Jefferson had heard Ostenaco's farewell speech near Williamsburg as a young man; his father had often lodged Indian leaders on their way to or from the colonial capital. Late in his life, Jefferson recalled "his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires filled me with awe and veneration, altho' I did not understand a word he uttered."[44]

In London, Ostenaco's visit inspired an essay in the Saint James Chronicle, which made reference to the four Mohawks who visited Queen Anne, and The Spectator's essays about them.[45] The Saint James Chronicle claimed to have interviewed Ostenaco, who called his English hosts a brave people, "though undoubtedly inferior to the Cherokee Nation, and tinctured with many follies that we are entirely free from."[46] Ostenaco was said to take issue with the British propensity to weigh a person's material fortune when choosing leaders, whom "are reckoned worth a great deal of that shining ore [gold], which in this country passes instead of wampum." In the "interview," Ostenaco contrasts such a system unfavorably with that of American Indians, who choose leaders based on skill at oratory and bravery in battle. In England, argues Ostenaco, "the path to honors is lined with gold. . . . How different in this respect are they from the Americans, among whom merit is the only passage to honors."[47]


Shortly after he advised colonial leaders to form a federal union at the Lancaster Treaty Council of 1744, the Iroquois sachem Canassatego also became a British literary figure, the hero of John Shebbeare's Lydia, or, Filial Piety, published in 1755. The real Canassatego had died in 1750. With the flowery eloquence prized by romantic novelists of his time, Shebbeare portrayed Canassatego as something more than human -- something more, even, than the "Noble Savage" that was so popular in Enlightenment Europe. Having saved the life of a helpless English maiden from the designs of a predatory English ship captain en route, Canassatego once in England became judge and jury for all that was contradictory and corrupt in mid-eighteenth century England.

In modern science fiction, the same stock character alights on earth, emerges from his space ship, and describes the self-destructive follies of the human race with a devastating simplicity that no earth-bound commentator can match. Canassatego, in Lydia, is conjured truely as a figure from another world, an all-purpose wise man, with an advantage over late twentieth century extra-terrestrial sages, who at best come envisaged as whisps of cerebral consciousness or agglomerations of otherworldly organs in strange shapes and sizes. The Onondaga sachem was, in point of historical fact, a very handsome physical specimen, "full-chested, brawney-limbed, of a manly, good-natured countenance."[48] He was a speaker who could summon verbal thunder, and capture the eyes, and ears, of an individual, or a crowd. He was never, however, quite the Greek god that Shebbeare created:

No human form was ever more graceful than that of Canassatego . . . his stature six feet. . . . On his large neck his head stood erect and bold; his face was animated with features that spoke sensibility . . . the perfection of his form and expression of his of his visage were such that the Grecian sculptors of the famed statue of Lacoon, or the fighting gladiator, might have studied him for instruction or delight. [49]

Shebbeare was not the only writer to compare the Iroquois and their sachems to the Romans and Greeks. Less than a decade before Lydia was published, Cadwallader Colden had augmented his landmark study of the Iroquois, the first systematic description of the Six Nations in English, which used the same device. To see in American Indians and their societies the animus of the Golden Age of European antiquity was all the rage in those years, in factual as well as fictional accounts, on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Cadwallader Colden, and many others, Shebbeare thought the Iroquois a window on Europe's own simpler, more democratic past.

The author outfitted Canassatego with a beautiful wife named Yarico, and also portrayed her as a living Greek sculpture. The author also supplied Canassatego with a missionary who taught him to write English, so he could keep Yarico informed of his travels. Perhaps the same missionary also taught Yarico to read. In the letters, a necessary literary device for the story, Canassatego tells the reader what he really thinks of this strange and barbarous land across the Great Water.

While Shebbeare describes his work as history, and himself as an historian, Lydia is obviously what the late twentieth century would call historical fiction, with an emphasis on fiction. Unlike Hendrick, Canassatego never visited Europe. While not history in and of itself, Lydia is another example of the image of American Indians and their societies being used as counterpoint to Europe's. Borrowing the eyes of Canassatego to needle the corruptions of English civilization, Shebbeare assures his readers that the Iroquois sachem is qualified for the job. Not only were the Iroquois known "through all the western world" for their valor and military prowess, but, according to Shebbeare, "Nor, in the milder parts of legislative knowledge, are their souls deficient. Elocution, reason, truth, and probity are not less the characteristics of this people's knowledge."[50]

Shebbeare seems to have researched the real Canassatego's life relatively well. At the Lancaster Treaty Council of 1744, in addition to advising the colonists to form a federated union on the Iroquois model, Canassatego worried about the increasing dependence of his people on European manufactured goods. In Lydia, Shebbeare has Canassatego complaining that many native Americans have become dependent on European manufactures: "What are we but slaves, who traverse the wide Woods of America in search of furs and skins."[51]

But what of England? Disembarking, Shebbeare's Canassatego meets with a rude sight: a ragged collection of dwellings "little better than the Huts of Indians," and men rising from the bowels of the earth, dirty, broken, and degraded.[52] Asking his hosts for an explanation, Canassatego is told that the men have been digging coal. The Iroquois sachem inquires whether everyone in England digs coal for a living, and reflects that he is beginning to understand why so many English have fled to America.

Subsequent encounters do little to warm Canassatego to English life and government. The sachem's hosts are forced to confess that England has a class structure, and that some labor for the benefit of others:

He asked if England were not a free country, where all were destined to the same employment, or if the Great Spirit had made two species of men, one inferior to the other, and the lesser destined to the service of the greater? . . . How can it be reconciled that Creatures born of the same land, in the same Form, and endowed with the same Faculties, should be doomed to this inhuman labour whilst others live at ease? [53]

A generation later, Jefferson would echo the same themes in letters from Europe to America, using a stream of metaphors: horse and rider, hammer and anvil, wolves and sheep. Franklin would criticize a system that kept "multitudes below the savage state that only a few may be rais'd above it." Like Shebbeare, Addison and Steele, and many others, Franklin also used "other eyes" to provide perspective on Europe's class structure: "Had I never been in the American Colonies, but was to form my judgement of Civil Society from what I have lately seen, I would never advise a Nation of Savages to admit to Civilization."[54]

By Shebbeare's fictional account, Canassatego came to England not only as a tourist, but also to present a petition of grievances on behalf of his people. Continually frustrated in his efforts to do so, he finds England's sachems to be men of small measure. The prime minister, in particular, strikes Canassatego as "ungrateful, whiffling, inconsistent, [a man] whose words included nothing to be understood . . . the farce and mockery of national prudence." Exasperated, Canassatego asks "Can it be . . . that this man can direct the business of a people?"[55]

After a series of snubs and rebuffs in high places, Canassatego can claim only two friends in England, Lydia, and her husband, the only two persons he meets with "Indian souls . . . among polluted millions." He begins to sound much like Gulliver, or The Spectator's fictional Mohawks, saying that most of the English have been ruined by a slave-passion to gold, "The slaves of money, that yellow ore [that] changes the face of nature. All human faculties die before its influence" and "frozen is the heart."[56]

By and by, Canassatego meets Lady Susan Overstay, a woman of rank and breeding who is overly conscious of her lofty station in society. Faced with a windy exposition by Lady Overstay on the quality of her breeding, Canassatego replies that in his country no one is born any better than anyone else, and that wisdom, courage, love of family and nation, as well as other virtues of the mind and body are "the only qualities that give authority and esteem among the Indians."[57]

Lady Overstay seems not to comprehend the significance of what Canassatego has said. He invokes Jefferson's aristocracy of merit before it had a name: America's critique of European monarchy, the ideological forces that would soon power the American Revolution. But Lady Overstay would rather talk of personal grooming. She asks whether ladies at Onondaga powder their hair, to which Canassatego replies (presumably with a straight face) that in Onondaga, hair dressing runs to bear grease. He then returns to the political point which Lady Overstay seems to miss:

Madam, family creates no distinction but by its Acts of Wisdom and Valour; the Son, unequal to the Father's glory, sinks to Disgrace, and Blood knows no Honours but what Virtue bequeaths it; high and low, noble and ignoble, find no Distinction from Birth; where mental and bodily Qualities are found Superior, that Man gains authority over our Hearts, the Good he does his Country is rewarded by Glory and Esteem; such are our Indian manners and ideas. [58]

So Shebbeare's Canassatego, speaking for America, delivers to Lady Overstay a message the rebellious colonists would send King George III a generation later: "All men are created equal." As a fictional character, Lady Overstay seems to be standing in for the entire royal family that was so unprepared for events that would overtake America. Turning his back on England in disgust, Canassatego writes to Yarico:

The very God which they tell us they worship seems to be forgotten amongst them; the Image of the King, made on bits of yellow Metal is the sole power which they adore . . . according to the number each Man possesses, [it] makes him brave, honest, just, humane, and wise; this creates Sachems and Warriors, the Excellencies of Heart and Head find no reception or Preheminence [sic] . . . Judge them, my Yarico, what can be expected from such Men, and such Manners, in favor of Indian nations? [59]

Sounding once again much like America's patriots of a generation hence (as well as More's Utopians), Shebbeare's Canassatego finds in monarchial England "Avarice, detested Vice, engaged in one eternal Pillage; Virtue in Want labors for pampered idleness."[60]

The character of Canassatego that Shebbeare created says a lot about what addled Europe late in the age of monarchy. It says as much about what people yearned for: freedom from oppressive taxation and the falseness of social convention, from a caste system that enriched a few and impoverished many. It was a mere century from the needling of a fictional Indian to the first publication of The Communist Manifesto.

At times, this desire to attain "a state of nature" approached nihilism, a desire simply to escape. The Indians, a stage play published in 1790 and attributed to William Richardson, professor of humanities at Glasgow University, includes a conversation between Sidney, an Englishman, and Ononthio, an Indian. Like so many other visitors before him, the Indian is giving advice to the Englishman, and, through him, to the rest of Britain, and the "civilized world."

Away with your culture and refinement. . . . Ye become refined [and] ye feelings are extinguished . . . ye become unjust and perfidious; the slaves of avarice and ambition, the prey of envy, and malice. . . . Enjoy the freedom and simplicity of nature. Be guiltless -- be an Indian. [61]

As a figure of English literary imagination, Hendrick outlived the flesh by at least half a century. The Mohawk sachem appears as a character in Berkeley Hall, or, the Pupil of Experience, a novel published in 1796. In the novel, Tim, a young man, escapes a complicated love life by accompanying a Doctor Sourby on a search for the Noble Savage. Along the way, Dr. Sourby lectures young Tim that they will see a land where "nature reigns in true sublimity and lovely simplicity," as unvarnished a stereotype as any English novelist ever harbored about America. "Here," pontificates Dr. Sourby, "We shall meet men in their original innocence and independence, untrammeled by forms, or the yokes of ancient institutions. . . . Here we shall find the true nature and life of man."[62]

Deep in the wilderness, reality rudely intrudes, as a party of irresolutely ignoble savages surround the philosopher and his young charge, preparing to lift their scalps. An old chief, Tonondoric, offers to adopt Tim to replace his own lost son, but Dr. Sourby is marked for death: "Let us sacrifice the pampered glutton, who burdens and impoverishes the earth -- he who has no wind for the chase, no legs to pursue an enemy." The Indians snicker at Dr. Sourby's paunch. As he waddles through the woods, the Indians compare the old doctor to "the unwieldy moose laboring through the snow, or the greasy bear clambering up a tree."[63]

Tim offers to take Dr. Sourby's place at the stake as Sancho, a slave accompanying the pair, offers the same. They are refused, but save themselves by offering the Indians a cask of rum. Once the Indians have become deliriously inebriated, the three novice samplers of a suddenly more complicated wilderness flee with Tonondoric and his rapturous daughter Ancuna.

Hendrick appears as the party nears Berkeley Hall, New Jersey. He is Ancuna's lover, and every bit as handsome as she is beautiful. Hendrick is described as every inch the Greek god that Shebbeare styled Canassatego. Once all six reach Berkeley Hall, they engage in all sorts of debates comparing "civilized" and "savage" societies. Hendrick makes the most telling points. Like Lydia's Canassatego, he is being used to critique the mess that civilization has made of European humanity.

"You may depend so much on horses to carry you, muskets to kill for you, glasses to see for you, and your gold to fight for you, that you may lose the use of your own legs, not be able to defend yourself with your own arms, [or] to see with your own eyes," Hendrick lectures Dr. Sourby.[64] Hendrick laughs in the face of his feeble conquerer, enchained by his civilization, his machines, his formalities, laws, and conventions, his false gods, his gold. Dr. Sourby fidgets, perhaps wondering why he and his people so admire nature and natural man, while, at the same time, squeezing the natural vitality out of everything they touch. Having used the image of the Indian to critique "civilization," the iron gauntlet rolls on, with its brass kettles, its guns and smallpox and Bibles, trying so earnestly, and often so ineptly, to remake the man of nature in the image of its own civilization.


In the meantime, Europeans were providing a study in duality by imitating the "noble savage" in their architecture and dress, as well as their ideas. The "return to nature" inspired new forms of landscape architecture in England. Londoners embraced loose-fitting garments in an attempt to "return to simplicity," made possible by the mass manufacture of cloth from cotton, another New World import. The new styles were said to be more comfortable and healthier than "the compressive ligatures of modern drapery."[65]

Ladies of fashion wore hats that were sold as replicas of American Indian head dress.[66] Hannah More, an observer of English fashion, wrote in 1776 that proper English ladies were wearing four or five ostrich feathers in the backs of their perpendicular caps.[67] Ladies of fashion also fancied fur, especially beaver. The rush to embrace the clothing of the Noble Savage propelled French and English trading companies to devastate the wilderness that had sustained "natural man" in America for many thousands of years. The most expensive beaver had been worn in the wild by Indians, to wear away the bristles on its undersides.

One wonders whether Lady Overstay's beaver had been worn by an Indian in the wild. Properly, it should have been, as Canassatego's critique of her rank and station -- indeed, her entire society -- thundered in one metaphorical ear, and out the other, while American observation and imagination helped turn former Europeans in America into rebellious seekers after liberty mirroring the images that the architects of the Noble Savage had imagined.


References

1. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 2, scene 1, lines 15-60.

2. Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950- ), 20: 287-88.

3. Daniel G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World, (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1905), pp. 220-223.

4. For discussion of naturalism in Roman and Greek thought, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, et. al., eds., Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1935), Vol. I.

5. This modernized version of the original Middle English is from A. L. Norton, The English Utopia, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1952), pp. 217-22.

6. Ibid.

7. Bruce A. Burton, "First Contact: Paradigm and Plunder in the New World 1492-1610," mss. draft supplied by Burton to Johansen, August, 1989, p. 4.

8. Ibid, pp. 4-5.

9. Ibid, p. 9.

10. Charles M. Andrews, Famous Utopias, (New York: Tudor, n.d.), pp. 163, 167.

11. Ibid., p. 175.

12. Richmond P. Bond, Queen Anne's American Kings, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 40.

13. Ibid.

14. Bruce E. Johansen, The Forgotten Founders; Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution, (Ipswich, Mass.: Gambit, 1982), pp. 69-70.

15. Anonymous, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, Digested into Annals: Year the Ninth, (London: Thomas Ward, 1711), pp. 189-191. For more detail on the "American Kings'" visit to England, see: "To our Great Queen, April, 1710," and "The Four Indian Sachems Letter to Rt. Honourable Lord's of her Majesty's Council," [April, 1710] in Schuyler Indian Papers, Box 13, Mss. Div., New York Public Library; and Donald A. Grinde, Jr., The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation, (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1977), p. 30.

16. Anonymous, "The Four Kings of Canada," (London, 1710), pp. 6-7.

17. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

18. Bond, American Kings, p. 5.

19. Josh Aston, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), I:294.

20. Bond, American Kings, p. 8.

21. For detail on Joseph Brant's visits to England, see Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant 1743-1807, (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984), pp. 161-175; 379-394.

22. Tatler No. 171, May 13, 1710.

23. The Spectator No. 50, April 27, 1711.

24. Ibid.

25. Henry Morley, ed., The Spectator, (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1891), I:190.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 210.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 212.

31. Ibid., p. 213.

32. Bond, American Kings, pp. 83-84.

33. Ibid., p. 91.

34. Harold Williams, ed., Journal to Stella, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), I:254-55.

35. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels [1726], Martin Price, ed., (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 246.

36. Ibid., p. 262.

37. Ibid., p. 263.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., p. 270.

40. Ibid., p. 310.

41. Ibid., p. 311.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), II, p. 307.

45. St. James Chronicle No. 214, July 24, 1762.

46. Bond, American Kings, p. 89.

47. Ibid., p. 90.

48. Albert Cook Myers, The Boy George Washington Aged 16 . . . His Own Account of an Iroquois Indian Dance, 1746, (Philadelphia: the author, 1932), p. 37.

49. John Shebbeare, Lydia, or Filial Piety [1755], (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), I, p. 34.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid, 1:11.

52. Ibid, 2:7.

53. Ibid.

54. Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Birth of a Nation, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 236.

55. Shebbeare, Lydia, 3:264.

56. Ibid, 3:266.

57. Benjamin Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1925), p. 206.

58. Shebbeare, Lydia, 3:279.

59. Ibid., 4:13-14.

60. Ibid.

61. Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), pp. 118, 120-21, 133-35.

62. Ibid., p. 272.

63. Ibid., pp. 272-73.

64. Ibid.

65. European Magazine [1785], cited in Jay Botsford, English Society in the Eighteenth Century: The Influence From Overseas, (New York: MacMillan, 1924), p. 92.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid.