"The new people were strange, violent and hard to understand. Occasionally, some were captured, and if they survived and learnt your language, they might confide something of their customs and beliefs. Mostly, though, you could only watch what they did, or try making sense of them from their tools and artifacts. You might see them coming ashore from one of their floating islands, or drinking blood. Sometimes, when you killed one of them, or if a floating island smashed against the rocks, axes of a hard, mysterious material were left behind, or thin medallions of metal you could use as jewelry. Strangest of all, was when these white, hairy, stinking people erected a piece of wood, with another set across it, and then fixed on this construction the image of a bleeding, tortured man."
This is how Daniel Richter begins his book Facing East from Indian Country, a marvelous attempt to reconstruct what early encounters between Native Americans and Europeans might have looked like from the point of view of the former. That this imaginative effort is only rarely attempted reveals a lot about the power relations that ultimately ensued from these encounters. A wide variety of early modern European reportage survives about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. But how they viewed successive European invaders, with their sailing ships, goblets of red wine, metal coins and weaponry, and their worship of a wooden cross, is very hard and usually impossible to recover. Native Americans did not write in ink on paper. Nor did they possess secure means of preserving their own carved records and drawings. And, anyway, most of these people were wiped out.
Yet unless we remember that these encounters were not just two-sided, but many-sided — that different indigenous peoples, too, must have possessed widely varying views of what was happening — it becomes easy to succumb to a kind of Eurocentric narcissism. The Europeans' gaze, however much it may be criticized, becomes the only one to be investigated.
A New World: England's First View of America at the British Museum displays the watercolors of John White, the first Englishman (perhaps) to portray some of the flora, fauna and indigenous people of North America; in the National Portrait Gallery's Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700-1850, the star exhibits are the Dutch artist John Verelst's four full-length portraits of Indian Kings, on loan from Canada. These men were not in fact kings, but self-appointed envoys of the Iroquois confederacy of tribes from the borderlands between Canada and what is now upper New York state. They were painted in London in 1710 while on a visit designed to cement Iroquois military support for the British in their struggles with the French for imperial supremacy in North America.
All of these Native American images are products of imperial initiatives. John White seems to have made five voyages to the New World between 1584 and 1590. Most of his drawings and paintings of America derived from an expedition of seven ships that set out from Plymouth in April 1585. Sponsored by Walter Raleigh, its aim was to win the English a permanent colony in what was then termed "Virginia," present-day North Carolina. The time is long past when Raleigh and his kind can simply and acceptably be viewed as bluff English seadogs braving "the raging sea, and the uncertainties of many dangers."
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