Joe Borsato
When examining Anglo-Indigenous relations and colonization in the early seventeenth century Americas, scholars rarely treat colonial experiences in North America and South America together. Yet, a hemispheric framework brings fresh insight into the history of colonial expansion.[1] In northern South America, a region commonly referred to as Guiana, or Güiri noko (“the land of many waters” in Lokono, the language of the Arawak peoples), Anglo-Arawak relations inadvertently shaped English arguments for colonization on the island of Newfoundland. Initially, English colonizers saw significant value in Guiana as a potential base from which to plunder Spanish treasure fleets in the Caribbean.[2] However, English merchant corporations struggled over the question of how to justify their colonial expansion in the face of clear Indigenous expressions of territorial possession, forcing the colonizers to recognize the existence of law, governments, and political society in the respective Indigenous communities. Contemporary natural law theory, particularly in the works of the Salamanca theologian Francisco de Vitoria, held that as long as a people occupied their land then they were its rightful possessors.[3] It was only when the English companies developed a form of comparative ethnology, a theoretical framework which compared Indigenous societies to one-another, that they checked this moral uncertainty.[4] This comparative ethnology thereby became the basis for English colonizers to deny any Indigenous capacity to possess territory.
English interest in exploring and colonizing Guiana dated back to the ventures of the colonizer Walter Ralegh in 1595, during which time he aligned with the Arawaks of the Wiapoco (Oyapok) River in Guiana against the Kalina (mainland Carib) to the west.[5] In an effort to build on and surpass Ralegh’s expedition, the merchant Robert Harcourt established a settlement on the Wiapoco with Arawak assistance in 1609. Despite their willingness to assist the newcomers, the Arawaks were displeased with Harcourt because King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) had failed to send military aid, as Ralegh had previously promised. They reminded Harcourt of his country’s obligations to them in exchange for their supplies and shelter when they told him that they “had expected long, and now they made much doubt thereof, and said they were but words, and having heretofore been promised the like, but nothing performed.”[6] The Arawaks scolded Harcourt for his failure to meet the expectations of their alliance. They thus drew Harcourt and his handful of colonists into an Arawak world, compelling him to serve in their campaigns against the Kalina.[7] The (temporary) success of Harcourt’s settlement in turn encouraged English colonizers to found new merchant corporations, the Amazon Company (1619-1621) and then the Guiana Company (founded 1626), for colonizing in Guiana.[8] These companies however struggled to sustain long-term settlements in the face of limited investment and poor planning.
As the Guiana settlements floundered, some propagandists appropriated the colonial experiences in South America to revitalize interest in new colonial ventures. In particular, the Somerset vicar Richard Eburne employed images of Arawak allies in an effort to encourage colonization in Newfoundland. In his text dedicated to Newfoundland colonization, A plaine path-vvay to plantation (1624), he framed the moral philosophy of expansion as a Platonic dialogue between two opposed characters: (1) Respire, a farmer, and (2) Enrabie, a merchant. While the former remained skeptical of costly expansion in far-away lands, the latter stressed that Guiana was the best model for English colonization, pointing to the Anglo-Arawak alliance as the foundation of expansion since it avoided any moral problems associated with intruding into other peoples’ lands. Enrabie stressed that if “[w]e plant by Composition, when seeking to gaine a Country already somewhat peopled and reasonably inhabited, as is Guiana, we doe vpon faire conditions, as by proffering them defence against their enemies”[9] Eburne rejected the idea of English expansion rooted in dispossession, which was reminiscent of both the Black Legend, a narrative that stressed Spanish atrocities against Indigenous peoples in contrast to supposed English benevolence, and a scepticism of empire rooted in Renaissance humanism which feared that empire inevitably led to moral and political corruption at home.[10] According to Eburne, for Newfoundland colonization to succeed, the company members needed to forge close economic and political alliances with the Beothuk people.
It was also clear to many colonizers that the Beothuk, like the Arawaks, possessed a political society with laws, institutions, and governments, which meant that any attempt to dispossess them would violate natural law. In 1610, the Bristol-merchant John Guy led members of the Newfoundland Company in founding a settlement at Cupper’s Cove on the Avalon Peninsula and in 1612 a Beothuk trading party met with the company. According to Guy’s journal, they traded goods and the Beothuk marked the formation of new relations with songs and dancing.[11] The celebration functioned as a form of social acceptance, bringing the English into the Beothuk fold. Guy observed an unnamed Beothuk man who “seemed to have some command over the reste, & behaved him selfe civillie. For when meate was offred him, he drew of his mitten from his hand, before he would receive yt, & gave ane arrow for a present, without a head, who was requited with a dozen of pointes.”[12] These Beothuk expressions of political life thus forced the English to recognize Indigenous governance, customs, and legal norms. Consequently, according to natural law, there was no defensible basis to argue for their dispossession.
In contrast to Eburne and Guy however, another colonial promoter, Richard Whitbourne, rejected the existence of Beothuk political society. In Whitbourne’s A Discourse and Discovery of Nevv-found-land (1620), he wrote that “[t]he natural Inhabitants of the Countrey … are but few in number; so are they something rude and sauage people; hauing neither knowledge of God, nor liuing vnder any kinde of ciuill gouernment.”[13] By the 1620s, the Beothuk had begun to snub trade with the English and so the small colonial settlements became increasingly isolated from any cross-cultural interactions. Whitbourne speculated that they found more rewarding markets in trading fish with the French and Mi’kmaq on the southwestern coast of the island.[14] By rhetorically redescribing them in these comparative ethnological terms, Whitbourne’s rejection of Beothuk law and governance reduced them to a people who could not possess territory since they lacked the capacity, as a pre-political people, to possess at all. The colonial basis of this thinking later became fundamental to the writings of John Locke but it is important to recognize that Whitbourne made this argument in opposition to the Beothuk and Arawak expressions of power that Guy and Harcourt documented.
Throughout the rest of the seventeenth century, the Newfoundland colony survived as a handful of fishing settlements while the Guiana colony precipitously declined. By the 1630s, a few dozen settlers remained at trading outposts along the Guianan coast. For the duration of the early modern period, the Arawaks remained autonomous from European colonizers, making the region akin to what historian Michael Witgen calls a Native New World in the seventeenth century Great Lakes region or what historian Kathleen DuVal calls a Native Ground in the Arkansas River valley.[15] The English experience in Guiana showed that the recognition of Indigenous law and governance could pose significant moral problems for colonial projects, in both Guiana and Newfoundland. Whitbourne’s disavowal of Beothuk law and governance stemmed from his rejection of Beothuk possession, but taking an Atlantic or hemispheric view of these developments shows that English denials of Indigenous political societies did not come prefigured. Rather, they came as consequences of the colonial experience. Taking a hemispheric view also reveals that, since the earliest instances of cross-cultural entanglement, Arawak and Beothuk assertions of territorial possession impacted English arguments about the justice of empire. Perhaps historians today would be well served to likewise take these assertions seriously.
Joe Borsato is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in Cataraqui (Kingston, Ontario) where he studies the history of Indigenous peoples and European empires in the Atlantic world. His dissertation research examines Indigenous nations’ legal assertions of territorial possession against English merchant companies in the early seventeenth century. He can be found @TheEcoAlchemyst.
[1] Lauren A. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 28-29.
[2] Joyce Lorimer, “The Failure of the English Guiana Ventures 1595–1667 and James I’s Foreign Policy,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no. 1 (1993): 1-4.
[3] Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 1500 – 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 64.
[4] On comparative ethnology, see: Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 75-76.
[5] Neil Whitehead, “The Discoverie as ethnological text” in Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 90-91.
[6] Robert Harcourt, “A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana,” (London, 1613), 11.
[7] Harcourt, “A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana,” 11.
[8] Philip Stern, Empire Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2023), 64
[9] Richard Eburne, “A Plaine Path-vvay to Plantations,” (London, 1624), 96.
[10] Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonization, 1500 – 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 166.
[11] Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter: LPL), MS 250, fol. 409v-410r.
[12] LPL, MS 250, fol. 410r.
[13] Richard Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery of Nevv-found-land (London, 1620), 2.
[14] Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery, 2.
[15] Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 4.
Featured Image: Image of John Guy’s meeting with the Beothuk from Theodore de Bry, America (Historia Americæ sive Novi Orbis), pt XIII. Edited by Matthaeus Merian (Frankfurt, Caspar Rotel, 1628), 7. Courtesy of Memorial University of Newfoundland (https://collections.mun.ca/digital/collection/cns_images/id/35).
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