Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“No,” he said. “You have to tell me.”

The Countrey, according to the first Englishmen to see it, more resembled a boundless green Parke than a Wildernesse. From the rocky shores inland as farre as a man could journey in a week, there stretched a Forrest suche as teemed with Dere, and Elke, and Beares, and Foxes; with Quailes and ruffed Grouse and wilde Turkies so innocent and Plentiful that a man could cast aside his Musket and hunt them with bare hands. There were majestical Pines and Hickeries and Chesnuts and Oakes, towering to heighths beyond the ken of any European, and so widely spaced (as severall Travellers noted), that an Armie could march through with ease. Beneath the trees and in the Intervalls, were found neither Brambles nor wooddy Undergrowth, but a low, softe Carpet of sweete Grasses and Hearbes that the Dere and Elke did much affect.

At the dawn of the seventeenth Century of our Lord, the land by Masathulets Bay had been relieved of its trees, by Indians in need of fire-woode. Lush Medowes and shrubby Hills stretched westward from the mouth of the River Charles as farre as the eye could see. Duske might fall at mid-day when a million of wilde Pidgeons filled the sky, and in the spawning Season the waters of fresh Streames congealed into Silver, with Smelts and Sturgions and Basses and Alewives swimming up-stream in suche Multitudes, that it seemed a man might step across them like a Bridge. Oysters in the Bay had foot-long Shells and could not be eaten in one bite. The soyle in many places was black and rich as Caveare.

Although the first Englishmen to settle in this Parke did nearly starve, yet the Indian men were observed to live more like unto Kings —working little and wanting little, and hunting and fishing at theyre Leisure. It was the Indians who, once or twice in a yeare, set the Fires that spred quickly and harmlessly over vast tracts of Forrest, therebye consuming Briers and much useless Woode, killing Fleas and Mice, and permitting of the growth of sweete Herbage. By the time God created the Sun & the Moone & the Planets, these Indians had called this Land theyre own for three thousand of years; and after another six thousand of years it was yet more like a Garden, than on the day when the first Human Beeing trod upon it.

In spring and summer, the Indian Women laboured to plant Maze in mounds, and tended it along with Squashes, Pumpkins, Melons, Tabacco, and the Beanes that climed the corne-stalks. Theyre hap-hazard fields were Nurseries for theyre children too. The men paddled to sea in hollow tree trunks, pursuing Seales and Walrosses, and fishing for codde-fish, and harpooning Porpisces and Whales. If theyre tree trunks sank, as was like to happen, they would swim for two hours to reach shore. Everywhere they chanced to look upon the Land, were Blueberries, Strawberries, Goosberries, Rasberries, Cranberries and Currans. Women and children gathered them, and captured the Birds, which came to feed. They trapped Hares and Porpentines and other small beests. Most of the Maze and Beanes which they harvested, was put away for winter, whilst the rest was eaten, along with Chesnuts and Acomes and Ground-nuts and Scallops and Clammes and Crabs and Mussles and Pumpkins, at Revels suche as lasted many weeks. Then, the Dere and Beares beeing fattest, the men went on hunting trips deep into the woods. Women dragged carcases back to the camps, and made Cloathes of the skins, and processed the Meat. When the men had luck, they ate ten Meales a day, sleeping in between them. When they were out of luck, they went hungrie for the nonce; for, the next summer always brought Abundance .

Wars and Abstinence from carnall Relations, maintained a balance between Population, and what goods the land could produce. A field beeing exhausted, the Indians farmed elsewhere. Fleas becoming intolerable, the Indians moved theyre Villages. They had no use for Propertie as could not be easily transported, or easily abandoned and refashioned. And, forasmuch as they lived in a World where there was either much food or little food, and otherwise had enough Cloathes and Firewoode and Tabacco and Women to satisfy theyre needs, so they were never in a hurry. Whatever could be put off until to-morrow, was put off. There were no Rats in theyre World, no Cock-roaches, no Stinging Nettles, no Pigs or Cows, no Firearms , no Meazels, no Chicken Pox, no Small Pox, no Influenza, no Plague, no French Pox, no Typhus, no Malaria; nor Yellow Fever; nor Consumption.

On the minus side — as Bob himself was always quick to grant — the Indians didn’t have those wonderful Greek black olives. They didn’t have blue cheese, or cardamoms, or the wines of Bordeaux, or violins. They had no conception of butter. Their imaginations were unenriched by Chinese porcelain, Persian illuminated manuscripts, or the idea of a midnight sleigh ride in the Russian winter. Was it perhaps worth the price of the Black Death to know that Jupiter had moons? Would a person trade The Iliad and The Odyssey for contentment and freedom from the flu? Make do without metal cookware and, with it, world history?

You might as well ask whether, if she could, a person would choose never to have been born; and whether, for that matter, North America’s older sister Europe herself might rather have remained in fetal Stone Age darkness.

So the world of the Indians had been sleeping, alive but unborn, until the Europeans came, and the few missionaries and colonists compassionate enough to wonder why such a world had to suffer the pain of awakening to consciousness — and why they themselves had to be the instruments of this awakening — must have answered with conviction: because God wills it. For these Europeans of conscience, the conviction must have been a comfort.

For the rest it was expediency. “Fill the earth and subdue it,” God had commanded in Genesis. His Englishmen came to Massachusetts and, seeing that the natives had disobeyed the commandment — the place was all trees and no fences! no churches! no barns! — felt justified in tricking them and blackmailing them and massacring them. English pigs ate their clam beds and the crops in their unfenced fields; English guns slaughtered fowl and deer. English chicken pox, English smallpox, English typhus killed entire Indian villages, leaving bodies strewn on the ground outside dwellings. They were branches falling in the forest, these seventy-year-old men and thirty-year-old women and three-year-old girls, with no one to hear them. In the space of a generation, more than 80 percent of the Indians in New England died of European diseases. Vermont was essentially depopulated.

“God,” said John Winthrop, “hath hereby cleared our title to this place.”

Felt hats and fur clothing being the fashion in the Old World, the Indians who survived the epidemics were able to trade beaver skins for things like copper kettles and iron fishhooks that made their lives easier. Before long, though, they had plenty of kettles and fishhooks, and so they began to beat the kettles into jewelry. And when copper jewelry became so common that it lost its cachet, the Englishmen conquered the Pequots of Connecticut and exacted a tribute of wampum — polished beads made out of whelk and quahog shells — and flooded the fur market with this currency. Wampum being scarce and portable and ornamental, like gold, there was at first no limit to the prestige an Indian could gam by its accumulation. But with fewer and fewer Indians in circulation and more and more wampum, inflation inevitably set in. Soon enough every last beaver in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island was exterminated, and the least consequential Indian wore necklaces of wampum formerly fit for chiefs, and the English traders were paid in pounds sterling for the furs they shipped overseas. Every market has its winners and losers; sadly for the Indians, the sterling turned out to be a better investment than the wampum. And in the course of attaching abstract sterling prices to abstract parcels of real estate, the smartest of the Englishmen learned to live off the land with even less labor than the king-like Indians had: by buying low and selling high.