Quotes About Colonization

Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description—all of them poured from the hulls of Colón's vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of postcontact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation

The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.

De Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.

By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern

Holmberg's Mistake.

As a result, Jamestown and the other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity

Blinded by the shine from Potosí silver, the Spaniards paid little attention to conquered peoples' excremental practices.

Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to "the good hand of God," which "favored our beginnings" by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that he might make room for us." Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease.

For each European, the colony had more than twenty-five Africans.

By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern colonies.

In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. "Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father's House Ã¢â'¬Â¦

In Deloria's opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fits neatly into this plan. If we're only thieves who stole our land from someone else, Deloria said, then they can say, 'Well, we're just the same. We're all immigrants here, aren't we?

after the war Massachusetts sold more than a thousand Indians into slavery—perhaps one out of every ten native adults in the region.

After Columbus everything changed. The Indian population collapsed. Clams and mussels exploded in number; they also grew larger. Game overran the land. Sir Francis Drake sailed into San Francisco's harbor in 1579 and saw a land of plenty.

The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," wrote historian Stephen Pyne, "it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.

Because they did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in with weeds, then bushes and trees. My ancestor Billington's great-grandchildren may not have realized it, but the impenetrable sweep of dark forest admired by Thoreau was something that Billington never saw. Later, of course, Europeans stripped New England almost bare of trees.

Smith returned to Maine and then England. He had a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him by asking him to award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he put the maps in the books he wrote to extol his adventures. In this way Patuxet acquired its English name, Plymouth, after the city in England (it was then spelled "Plimoth").

Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way—scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians.

Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

In the latter country alone, very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live. Before their introduction, however, the surface must have supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.

Did man, after his first inroad into South America, destroy, as has been suggested, the unwieldy Megatherium and the other Edentata?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.