Fourteen-Ni!-ty-One

I've been reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus recently; it's an endlessly fascinating book, and while it has its dry moments -- and while the overall picture it paints is a grim one, of the Indians devastated by disease not because of European malice, but because of sheer dumb evolutionary luck -- there are moments in the book that are nothing short of comedy.

The biggest one is the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It's not just that Plymouth was founded in a manner completely unlike the conventional narrative; it's that Plymouth was founded in a manner that reads like the Monty Python version of the conventional narrative.

To set the tone of all this, remember: France, Spain and Portugal approached the New World as a military enterprise; England approached it like the Dot-Com Boom. There were a couple of Amazons created in the process, but there are an awful lot of Pets.com ventures littering this period, which we never seem to hear about.

John Smith was indeed saved by Pocahontas (her name means "hell-raiser," but she was a priestess in training; it's probably a good thing for the Powhatan gods that she converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe) -- moreover, he was saved, from his point of view, twice, once in a mock-execution that everyone except Smith knew was mock-, and again when she tipped off Jamestown that one of the leaders of the Powhatan Confederacy was going to attack them _somewhat_ behind its leader's back. He later returned to England to recuperate from minor injuries -- not inflicted by the Indians, not inflicted by a fellow colonist, but inflicted when he blew up a bag of gunpowder that he was wearing around his neck.

While he was in England, he wrote a book, including maps, on his adventures in Jamestown. He offered his services to the Pilgrims, to get them to Jamestown too, but with classical Puritan thrift, they declined, thinking they could rely on the maps in his book. They ended up in Massachusetts and spent three months (in which half their expedition died) trying to figure out a safe place to land. Smith crowed about this perhaps more than he should have.

Every bit of this sounds hard to believe -- and Smith's earlier life was even crazier -- but this was Captain John Smith (whose rank was in the self-established Army of Smith); he was one of those historical figures who come along from time to time to remind us that fiction is less interesting than reality, because fiction at least has to be plausible.

Squanto, along with about twenty other Indians, had been kidnapped by English traders who intended to sell him as a slave back in Europe. They made the mistake of trying to sell them as slaves in Spain -- and sailed straight into the arms of the Inquisition, who had been charged with prohibiting precisely that for the past hundred and ten years. (Imagine some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley having the brilliant, never-before-seen idea of invading the Philippines.)

Some of the Indians had already been sold as slaves; hopefully the Inquisition managed to track them down and free them. They offered those who hadn't been sold, Squanto included, safe passage to any point of their choosing; having picked up English on the voyage (and I think having some connections there), Squanto decided to go to England. He spent several years as a walking conversation piece for a London aristocrat, and finally managed to get back to Massachusetts (by way of a series of misadventures, even involving one captain so incompetent that he basically wrapped a fishing barque around a tree), just in the nick of time to greet the Pilgrims.

He served as the translator for a formal embassy from the Massachusett tribe, who wanted the Pilgrims' help to oppose another tribal confederation to their west; while he was with the Pilgrims, he taught them the ancient indigenous farming technique of burying fish with their seeds to ensure a greater harvest, which was entirely unknown in Massachusetts but which he had picked up from the Spanish.

And I haven't even mentioned how the Inca Empire was really destroyed by a zombie apocalypse...