Lynn Ceci
On March 22, 1621, a New England native named Squanto strode into the Pilgrim’s new settlement at Plymouth and offered the greeting, “Welcome Englishmen” (Mourt 1963:51; Hubbard 1848:58). According to Pilgrim William Bradford, that spring Squanto “directed them how to set their corn, wher to take fish, and to procure other comodities” (Bradford 1962:73), an act that gained him a prominent place in American history and folklore.
The Plymouth settlers, primarily artisans such as printers, weavers, watchmakers, and carpenters with little farming experience, readily accepted Squanto’s advice. A letter written by E.W. (Edward Winslow?) from Plymouth on December 11, 1621 reports: “We set the last Spring some twentie Acres of Indian Corne, and sowed some six Acres of Barly & Pease, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with Herings or rather Shadds, which we have in great abundance, and rake with great ease at our doores” (Mourt 1622:60; Mourt 1963:81).
Winslow’s logical deduction that fish manuring was a “manner” of all Indians appears to be a syllogistic extension of Squanto’s particular knowledge to Indians in general. It was written, it should be noted, before he or any other Pilgrim actually witnessed Indians planting anywhere. Indeed, by the spring of 1621, the cultivation practices of Squanto’s own Algonquian tribe were no longer observable because of a recent plague; Squanto was then the “only native of Patuxet,” the area the Pilgrims renamed Plymouth (Mourt 1963:55,61). When native planting was observed in the years following, reporters seemed surprised that Indians employed neither fish nor any other fertilizer.
Nonetheless, the original and, as I hope to demonstrate, unfounded conclusion that fish fertilizer was a “manner” of all Indians has long been accepted. It gained support in this century in 1916 when Clark Wissler proposed that the “aboriginal maize culture complex” included the trait of fertilizing with fish where available “everywhere in the Mississippi Valley and eastward” (1916:657-58). A year later he expanded his theory further by stating—still without evidence—that the method of “placing a fish in the maize hill” was “widely distributed in both continents” (Wissler 1937:23). Here, Wissler has apparently linked Squanto’s local advice at Plymouth to coastal Peru, the only other confirmed location in the New World where the use of guano and fish fertilizer (actually fish heads) was demonstrably an indigenous practice (Mason 1964:139). In the decades following, the notion that American Indians in general knew about or used fish fertilizer became entrenched in anthropological and botanical literature.1 It appears repeatedly in popular publications, often annexed to corn recipes (Fisher 1974:85; Sokolov 1974), and is reinforced annually when countless numbers of schoolchildren (including my own son and grandson) reenact Squanto’s contribution to the Pilgrims in pageants celebrating America’s first Thanksgiving. The figure of Squanto now stands immortalized in a diorama at the Plymouth National Wax Museum, where he is shown burying fish before the Pilgrims.
That the evidence for Indian fish fertilizer in North America is poor was first noted in 1880 by G. B. Goode (1880) who, citing the South American data, inferred agricultural fertilizers must be indigenous throughout the Americas. The first scholarly challenge appeared in Regina Flannery’s 1939 research on coastal Algonquian culture traits. Unable to find ethnohistoric or ethnographic sources confirming the practice anywhere along the eastern seaboard she concluded, “The aboriginally of the trait is questionable” (1939:10). The second challenge came in 1957 when Erhard Rostlund discussed problems such as the seasonal availability of fish species in coastal zones, vagaries in the original citations, and the curious uniqueness of the practice. He concluded that the use of fish fertilizer was not a “common and widespread practice in any part of native North America” (1957:222).
In this essay I present new evidence from an ethnohistoric, anthropological, and archaeological perspective.2 This evidence substantiates the conclusions of Flannery and Rostlund, and suggests further that Squanto learned about fish fertilizers in European settlements, not in those of his own or neighboring tribesmen.
Since Squanto’s actions remain the single basis for the claim that use of fish fertilizers was a native practice, let us first examine the possible sources of Squanto’s agronomical knowledge. His rather remarkable history, often uncited, indicates that he had ample opportunity to learn the European “manner” of planting, which included fertilizing with marine debris and cultivating the New World crop, maize.
In 1614, Captain Thomas Hunt, master of a vessel with Captain John Smith, kidnapped Squanto (and other Indians) and sold him into slavery at Málagá, Spain (Bradford 1962:73; Morison 1935:487). This may have been Squanto’s second kidnapping experience because Gorges claimed in 1658, that Captain George Weymouth had kidnapped a “Tasquan-tum” before, in 1605 from Maine (Gorges 1837:50-51). However, this name or other variations thereof (Tisquantum) does not appear on crewmen Rosier’s 1605 list of Indians (Tahanedo, Amoret, Skicowaros, Ma-neddo, Saffacomoit) Weymouth kidnapped that year in Maine (Rosier 1932:394). Since Gorges wrote his account fifty-three years after the event (and Maine was not Squanto’s home), its accuracy is questionable (Burrage in Rosier 1932:394). Similarly, it is unclear whether the native “Tantum” brought from England to Cape Cod in 1615 by Captain John Smith (Morison 1935:487) was this same Indian, Squanto.
Somewhat better documentation indicates that Squanto was smuggled from Malaga after a few years by a captain of a ship belonging to the Guy Colony in Newfoundland; he was brought to a place (ironically) named “Cornhill” in London where he resided for about two years with John Slanie, treasurer of the Newfoundland Company (Mourt 1963:55). The “savage Tasquantum” was next sent to “The Cupids” settlement in Newfoundland (Prowse 1896:104) where he served Captain John Mason, “governour there for the undertakers of that plantation” (Anon. 1832:7). Captain Thomas Dermer next took Squanto with him back to England in 1618, then used this well-traveled Indian the following spring as pilot and guide along the stretch of coast between Monhegan and Virginia (Purchas 1906:129-33).
Squanto left ship at some point and returned to Patuxet prior to greeting the Pilgrims in clear English, one of at least three languages he then spoke (Prowse 1896:105). He quickly became advisor to the Pilgrims in provisioning and planting “corne,” 3 “showing them both the maner how to set with it (in these old grounds) it would come to nothing, and ... in the midle of Aprill they should store enough [fish] come up the brooke” (Bradford 1962:76). More critical to their survival, he also served as interpreter and guide, advising them on how to trade with local Indians for furs, especially the unfamiliar beaver that European ship captains would accept in exchange for supplies they badly needed. By November 1621 “2 hoggsheads of beaver and otter skins” exchanged for “trifling commodities” had been sent back to England (Bradford 1962:8). Squanto’s advantageous dealings with the English led to jealousy among local Indians. He received desirable goods, for example, a “suite of cloathes, ... a horsemans coate . . . [and] other things.” And as a seasoned trader, he also “sought his owne ends . . . by putting the Indians in fear, and drawing gifts from them to enrich him selfe; making them believe he could stir up warr against whom he would . . . [and that the English] kept the plague buried in the ground, and could send it amongs whom they would.” In late September 1622, Squanto “fell sick of an Indian feavor, bleeding much at ye nose and . . . dyed,” after bequeathing his goods to English friends (Bradford 1962:83-85).
Thus, in the years immediately preceding his advice to the Pilgrims, Squanto had learned “foreign” ways by residing with Europeans in both the Old and New World. In Europe, use of fertilizer was a feature of farming technology since the Roman expansion, if not of the earlier Celtics (Vinogradoff 1904: 65; Curwen and Hatt 1953:68). The particular use of marine waste was famous since the medieval period in France, where the fertility of the zone in which it was employed earned it the name “gold belt.” 4 Fish fertilizer (fish bones and rotted fish) was cited in a 1620 English publication, suggesting the practice was also known in England before Squanto—or the Pilgrims—departed for the New World (Rostlund 1957:223; Seebohm 1927:265). One might also note that Indian corn or maize had been cultivated in Spain since 1530, nearly a century before Squanto’s arrival in Malaga; from there its cultivation with appropriate terracing and irrigation techniques quickly spread to several Mediterranean countries (Hamilton 1976:856-57; Masefield 1967:276; Sauer 1976:824).
Europeans creating gardens in the New World before 1621 may have also used fertilizer with their Old World seeds, for example, in Newfoundland in 1583, the Cape Cod area in 1602 and 1603, and Maine in 1605,1607, and 1614.5 The 1605 and 1614 gardens in Maine were planted by crewmen of Weymouth and Smith, two possible contacts of Squanto. In the 1604-1607 French colony in Maine and Nova Scotia, established for trafficking with New England Indians, fertilizer usage was specified: the gardens were “improved” with “hogs’ dung, or the sweepings of the kitchen, or the shells of fish” (Lescarbot 1907:247). So too the English used “manures” in 1611 and 1614 in the Virgina colony to the south (Purchas 1906:89,95).
A key location for Squanto was the John Guy and “Bristol’s Hope” colonies located along “The Cupids” inlet6 on Conception Bay, Newfoundland, where agriculture was practiced and domesticated animals kept since 1610 (Prowse 1896:98; Andrew 1934:305). In 1615, Guy was replaced by Captain John Mason (Stephen and Lee 1917:1313), Squanto’s “governour.” In his 1620 book entitled A Briefe Discourse of the New-foundland, Mason noted that “June has Capline a fish much resembling smeltes in forme and eating and such aboundance dry on shoare as to lade cartes.” Looking to promote immigration, Mason continued with glowing accounts of the local harvests, attributing their success to the use of these fish as manure: “For one acre thereof be inclosed with the Creatures therein . . . would exceed one thousand acres of the best Pasture with the stock thereon which we have in England” (Dean 1887: 151). Newfoundlanders continue to rake up dead caplin to fertilize their gardens even today (Omohundro 1985).
Since Squanto served in the very settlement described by Mason, he most probably observed these same scenes of surplus fish advantageously converted to manure. Given this and the other opportunities to learn the value of fertilizer, I suggest the intelligent and enterprising Squanto acquired his knowledge from European examples. Then, on his 1621 visit to Plymouth, Squanto merely passed along the practical advice he knew to be successful from his most recent experience in European, not Indian, settlements.
The possibility that Squanto learned about fertilizer at his mother’s knee is substantially reduced by the considerable negative evidence for the practice anywhere along the eastern coast of North America (compare Russell 1975:944). It is only in this zone that sufficient numbers of anadromous fish ascending the rivers to spawn would have been available in the critical spring corn-planting months. Corn was not grown by Indians along the western coast of North America (Wissler 1937:20).
Along the south Atlantic Coast from Florida to Virginia, sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French and English colonists described the native cultivation techniques; none mention the use of fertilizer (Rostlund 1957:224; Arber 1910:61-2). In Virginia, where corn planting and fish trapping by Algonquians were carefully detailed and illustrated, fertilizer use was emphatically denied: “The ground they never fatten with mucke, dounge, or any other thing, neither plow nor digge it as we in England” (Quinn 1955:341-42).
Further north, along the mid-Atlantic coast, the Dutch of New Netherlands (New Jersey to southern New England), also described native cultivation techniques. Again, the evidence for native fertilizers is negative, even in areas where fish were caught in great numbers each spring.7 Adriaen Van der Donck claimed in 1653, after residing near Indians of the upper Hudson River Valley and coastal New York for eight years, that he had “never seen land manured” by Indians and that “of manuring . . . they know nothing” (Van der Donck 1968:30-1,96).
From New Netherlands north to the northernmost limit of maize cultivation (Bennet 1955:370), except for two Pilgrim statements, it is only the English who are identified as the users of fish fertilizer.8 In April 1622, the spring after the Pilgrims were warned that “it would come to nothing” if they did not set seed with fish, visitor Richard Whitbourne reported that an “incredible” abundance of herring-like fish had been taken that month and used for “manure” (Arber 1910:781). In 1627, Isaack DeRasieres, the Dutch Secretary at New Netherland, also visited Plymouth and detailed how the English took 10,000 to 12,000 fish, carried them to their fields, and placed three or four in each cornhill (Jameson 1909:111); his comments imply that he found the procedure unusual and noteworthy, that is, unknown among Dutch or Indian cultivators elsewhere. In 1630, John Smith compared the fertile Virginia soils with those of New England where the colonists stuck in a “herring or two” with each corn plant (Arber 1910:952). In 1634, William Wood reported how the English “manured their land with fishe,” and that if there was no “alewife-river” the English settlement suffered an “inconvenience” (1634:12,34). Two years later, Edward Johnson, wrote that “the Lord” provided the English in Concord with “great store of Fish in the springtime, and especially Alewives . . . thousands of [which] they used to put under their Indian Corne” (Jameson 1910:114).
Aside from the original 1621 claim, the single exception to these accounts is John Winthrop’s late 1678 comment: “Where the Ground is bad or worn out, the Indians used to put two or three [Alewives] under or adjacent to each Cornhill” (1678:1065-66). The phrase “used to put” like “manner of the Indians,” it should be noted, represents a conclusion rather than directly observed evidence; curiously, when the younger Winthrop did observe natives planting in 1636, he reported that they had “good corne without fish” (1863:515). Indeed, the absence of a single line describing an Indian actually seen “planting” fish in any of the reliable ethnohistoric sources seems nothing short of remarkable, that is, if the practice was in fact current!
That Indians of New England did not farm as did the English instructed by Squanto earned them harsh criticism. One stern author wrote in 1622, for example, “They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it, but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring” (Mourt 1963: 91-2). The reason Indians did not use fish fertilizer the biased Wood believed was because they were “too lazie to catch fish” (1634:12).9
In short, the extant documentary evidence presents a consistent, uniform cultural pattern: no support for the use of any fertilizing agent as a “manner of the Indians” in the New England “homeland” of Squanto, among Algonquians and others along the Atlantic Coast, or in North America at large. Indeed, the failure to employ fertilizers even after years of exposure to European farming technology suggests some cultural “resistance” or, as we shall see, a better alternate strategy. Let us therefore examine the implications of planting corn with fish.
The type of Indian corn grown “throughout the eastern United States” in the prehistoric and early historic periods was a race of Northern Flint called Maiz-de-Ocho {Zea mays var., Galinat 1967:4; Yarnell 1964:23, 106, 148). This short eight-rowed race with dented kernels, adapted to northern growing conditions, arrived in New England about A.D. 1400 and was described in 1678 (Galinat 1985:277; Winthrop 1678:1065). Like its modern hybrid descendants, its productivity must have depended on a set of growing conditions such as soil type and fertility, total sunlight, length of the frost-free season, and moisture (Ceci 1979). The availability of particular nutrients, especially nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and lime (a neutralizer of the acid soils typical of coastal zones), directly affects corn’s maturation rate and final size, hence its yields (Thompson and Kelly 1957:55-9; Follett et al. 1981:140,172-79).
Soils in which maize is planted, except naturally rich river alluvia, loess deposits, and old lakebeds, are annually depleted of critical nutrients. The resulting problem of lower yields is commonly resolved by either of two solutions: (1) shifting cultivation, move the planting to new still naturally fertile fields or older “fallowed,” temporarily “rested” fields; or (2) fertilizing, restore the lost nutrients. The first solution was characteristic of earliest horticulturalists experimenting with cultigens and of later agriculturalists farming fields in marginally productive soil zones. Recent documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that this was also the practice of Indians cultivating maize races throughout the Eastern Woodlands including—counter to Wissler’s claim—the Mississippi River Valley (Waselkov 1977:517). Indians planting maize along fertile riverbanks further west also “knew nothing of the value of manuring ...” (Will and Hyde 1917:98).
In the interior Northeast, groups known as successful maize growers, for example, the Huron of southern Canada and Iroquois of New York, moved their settlements every eight to twelve years, in part because of soil depletion (Morgan 1901:251; Tooker 1964:42). Accordingly, northeastern archaeologists recognize the role of shifting cultivation and soil depletion when interpreting sites occupied by Indian corn cultivators; soil fertility appears to correlate with site location and duration, and may influence population size as well as the development of social, political, and economic complexity (White 1963: 4; Ceci 1982:15-16).
Shifting cultivation is also specifically reported for Algonquians in the Northeast. In 1605, Champlain noted that the Indians on Cape Cod left fields uncultivated in order to “let them lie fallow” (Biggar 1922: 351-52). Soils in the Plymouth area are “sandy, acid, easily leached . . . ill-suited to agriculture” (Rutman 1967:54). That native cultivators practiced fallowing in these poor soils may be inferred from the Pilgrims’ own observations, in which they distinguished “formerly” planted corn ground from recent fields bearing “new stubble” (Mourt 1963:21-43). Fallowing was defined by Winthrop in 1636 for the Narragansett who had “good corne without fish” despite soils “farre worse” than Massachusetts: “they have every one 2 feilds, which after the first 2 yeares they lett one feild rest each yeare, & that kepes their ground continally in hart” (1863:515). In 1643, Roger Williams recorded two terms for “planting fields” among these natives, one meaning “worne out” field and the other “new ground” (Williams 1963:119); the distinction implies shifting cultivation. When Van der Donck recommended a site for maize, the New Netherland Indians responded: “It is but twenty years since we planted corn there, and now it is woods again” (1968:20).
The second solution for decreasing yields, the use of fertilizer, is thought to be historically a relatively late practice throughout the world, one associated with the establishment of permanent villages and fields (Curwen and Hatt 1953:68). Importantly, this technological advance is based on recognition of the cause and effect relationship between soil improvement and subsequent productivity, a process observable, for example, where domesticated animals are penned or organic waste accumulates. In North America, it should be noted, there were no penned domesticated fauna in pre-contact times for natives to observe, though the value of planting in old midden soils may have been recognized by some (Ceci 1984:67).
The most likely fertilizing agent American Indians might have used was the ashes created naturally wherever fields were cleared by burning. Yet documents raise doubts as to whether the specific value of ashes as a fertilizer—a modest source of phosphorous—was recognized or intended (Follett et al. 1981:73). In Virginia, for example, Indians burned “weedes, grasse, & old stubbes of corn stalkes” but neither dispersed the ash “heapes” to “better the grounde” or “set their corn where the ashes lie” (Quinn 1955:341-42). Further north, New Netherland Indians recognized that annual “bush burning” brought better grasses, but they, like those in New England, confined the burning to wild areas where they hoped to attract game and improve hunting (Van der Donck 1968: 20-1; Wood 1634:15). The concept of ash-improved growth, in short, was apparently not transferred to their gardens, and the beneficial effects of ashes on the soil were incidental.
The use of fish as fertilizer raises other more serious problems. First, as noted above, the seasonal availability and quantities needed restrict the practice to areas near the northeastern rivers where runs of alewife, shad, and herring species coincide with the mid-to-late April beginning of the frost-free season, the earliest time to plant corn (Rostlund 1957:222; Ceci 1978). Though collecting sufficient quantities was easy enough for natives or colonials, even without weirs (Josselyn 1833:273), it is the intensified labor afterward that suggests good reasons why the practice would not be attractive to any planter. Given cornhill spacings of six, five, four, three, and two and one-half feet apart (Jameson 1909:107,219; 1910:114; Van der Donck 1968: 31), the single acre would contain 1208, 1710, 2719, 4834, and 6961 cornhills respectively. If, as reported, two to four whole fish were placed in each hill, the single acre then required 2416 to 27,844 fish. That first planting of “twentie Acres of Indian Corne” in 1621 must have truly required the “great abundance” cited—48,320 to 556,880 fish! A decade later, in 1632, New England farmers were said to fertilize 100 acres with 1000 to 3000 fish per acre (Weatherwax 1954:124), still great totals. If each fish weighed as little as one pound, then tons as well as quantities of fresh and rotting fish had to be gathered, transported to the fields, and buried one by one in each cornhill. The practice next generated the chore of guarding against night raiders attracted to the smelly fish in the fourteen-day rotting period, fauna such as wolf, bear, bobcat, raccoon, skunk, weasel, martin, fishers, and seagulls (Winslow 1832:101; Gould 1974).
And for all this labor, one must apply the critical test: was the effort worth it? There is first the news that despite their labors and “good increase in corn” (Mourt 1963:81) the Pilgrims starved in the first few years; they were “not well acquainted with the manner of Indian corne” and the planting—as we can see—was “arduous” (Bradford 1962: 84-7; Rutman 1967:10). In fact, their estimated rate of corn productivity, eighteen bushels per acre, was no greater than that for Indians not using fish, and less than the twenty bushels per acre raised in Plymouth County two centuries later without ground improvement (Rutman 1967:9,43; Dingley 1853:154). The properties of this fertilizer suggest reasons. Though processed fish meal well worked into the soil is an excellent source of nitrogen and phosphorous, unrefined fish scrap supplies only half the amount (Follett et al. 1981:73). Thomas Hutchinson suggests a related problem in his 1639 statement that three or four years of improving the ground “had exhausted the goodness of the soil .... The common practice, of manuring with fish, left the land in a worse state than it would have been in if they had used no manure at all” (1936:85; emphasis mine). An explanation appears in a criticism made against the use of caplin in Newfoundland in the nineteenth-century: “The farmer, by using fish as a manure, enriches his pastures for a season, but impoverishes the ground rapidly . . . vast myriads of insects, grubs, and caterpillars are developed from the putrid soil, suddenly overenriched” (Omohundro 1985:22).
Thus as a cultural strategy, it is not difficult to understand why experienced and observant Indians might resist the practice of using fish to “improve” their crops in any period and why English farmers, in particular, abandoned the practice in favor of animal manures by about 1640 (Rutman 1967:17). From the native perspective, there was also the allocation of huge fish supplies into the ground during the hungriest season, the traditional lean spring (Van der Donck 1968:76; Bennet 1955:370). Records indicate instead that northeastern natives took the more predictable course of action by feasting on spring supplies of fresh protein and converting surplus fish into future food supplies by smoking or drying.10 English farmers, in contrast, represent an alternate cultural strategy. The huge quantities obtained in one day—10,000 to 12,000 fish at “one tide” (Wood 1634:34; Jameson 1909:111)—must have resulted in surpluses far beyond the amount the Pilgrims could immediately consume or process by salting “against the winter”; such a surplus, perhaps grown spoiled and odoriferous, would then be used “for the ground” or even fed to the pigs (Wood 1634:34; Rutman 1967:48). That these farmers used fish as fertilizer only when or even because there was a surplus is suggested by both the Mason data from Newfoundland cited above and the New England comment, “the plenty of fish which they have for little or nothing, is better to be used, than cast away” (Wood 1634:12). If Indians were to resolve the problem of declining corn harvests, it seems unlikely that they would choose to gather thousands (and tons) of fish beyond their immediate needs and processing capabilities to reach that same point of surplus gathered by English settlers.
The tools and workforce needed to carry out this “solution” are additional considerations. While Indians possessed simple sacks, carrying baskets, crude stone, wood, bone or shell hoes, and wooden digging sticks,11 the Pilgrim farmers had more efficient metal shovels, hoes, dung forks, and carts drawn by domesticated animals. Their metal plows, Indians observed, could “teare up more ground in a day, than their Clamme shels could scrape up in a month” (Rutman 1967:33,36; Wood 1634:78). Moreover, because the division of labor among northeastern Indians reflected the value system of societies still largely dependent upon wild foods, the less prestigious planting chores were the work of females. They are consistently identified as those who “plant it, dress it, gather it, barne it, [and] beat... all their corne with hand” (Williams 1963:65).12 The life of Indian women was thought “slavish” compared with European women because “they carry all their burdens, set and dress their corn, gather it in [about twenty-four to sixty bushels per family] . . . beat and make ready the corn to eat (Winslow 1832:96; Williams 1963:124). At estimated yields of eighteen bushels per acre, women working fields of 1.3 to 3.3 acres would have had to obtain, carry, and bury at least 3148 to 7973 fish—thousands more if cornhills were closer than six feet apart. Even if Indian males had recognized the value of the farming methods by male colonists and their indentured servants (Levermore 1912:826-31), they would not have easily changed their traditional roles to help with the heavy fieldwork fish fertilizer entailed. Planting was womens’ work that would “compromise their dignity too much” and, as they realistically noted, the methods “require too much labor” (Jameson 1909:107; Van der Donck 1968:96; compare Ricciardelli 1963:309).
For settlers facing poor soils and yields, the reverse was the case: less labor was required to apply the abundant waste fish to their fields than to move the fields to other sites in the wilderness as did the Indians. Winslow implied this rationale in 1624 when he wrote: “Where men set with fish (as with us) it is easy so to do than to clear ground and set without some five or six years, and so begin anew”; but he added, perhaps a bit puzzled, that Indians in some places “set four years together without, and have as good corn or better than we have that set with them” (1832:101). In testing the Winthrop/Wissler claim, it is clear that decisions to fallow or fertilize must be evaluated as subsistence strategies, that is, specific programs designed to achieve desired levels of agricultural productivity in each ecological setting. These decisions, by natives or colonials, can only be understood within the social, political, economic, technological, and even ideological context of the whole cultural system in which and for which they were adaptive. Along with the availability of critical resources, each practice, like the Indians’ seasonal “removes” (Williams 1963:74) to different locations are also settlement strategies. Therefore concepts of property ownership and community, “open” vs. “closed” land, and ease in moving and rebuilding settlements must also be considered. To invest so much labor and material in single cornfield plots implies being “anchored” (Bennett 1955:375) to real estate, a concept expected for Pilgrims seeking to possess new lands but not consistent with known native values. It also implies the establishment of habitation sites of long duration in the corn-planting era, from A.D. 1400-1600, that is, the presence of of archaeological evidence for large deeply stratified permanent and well-populated village sites distributed in territories near the spring fish runs. This kind of evidence, like reports describing natives planting fish, is weak if not lacking the length of the New England and New Netherlands coastline.13
In fact, the many lines of evidence strongly suggest that the invention and use of fish fertilizer by northeastern Indians would have been maladaptive, a burdensome land-tethered chore of questionable value for improving corn yields. More adaptive, in fact, was the well documented fallowing technology, especially where beans were planted to “grow up with and against the maize” (Jameson 1909:107). In this way nitrogen became more available to the corn roots (through nitrogen fixation) and the weed area was reduced. The combined beans/corn diet is also higher in available protein and a balance of amino acids, so helps prevent deficiencies caused by corn alone. Given these strategies, might one not argue that the experienced Indians were too wise to adopt the onerous fish fertilizer “solution” taken by the early Pilgrims?
Data for the prehistoric and historic Iroquois suggest the kind of changes that would make fertilizer more adaptive for Indians. These occurred after the presence of traders and expanding colonial settlements had completely transformed the Indians’ culture system and cultivation strategies. Scarce cultivable land and availability of European agricultural technology and staple foods are thought to have brought about permanent settlements (White 1963). Missionary pressure and acceptance of western values, life on reservations, and replacement of hunting by farming as prestigious male tasks are associated with the adoption of “white agriculture” centuries after contact (Riceiardelli 1963). Similar processual changes appear to have occurred among Algonquian farmers along the coast.
The belief that fish fertilizer originated among North American Indians, and was communicated as such by Squanto to the Plymouth settlers, has achieved the status of an unquestioned legend and is therefore difficult to challenge. Responses from my original study confirm both a worldwide interest14 in the topic as well as the legend’s cherished status in this country. Supporters outnumbered critics who, unexpectedly, attacked my supposed “racist” motivations in portraying the Indians as “lazy,” “ignorant or incapable” of making technological advances (Thomas 1975; personal communication; Warden 1975). One wrote, “After the harm we have done physically and culturally to the American Indian we are still relentlessly pursuing them but now . . . on an intellectual level. Trying ... to remove the American Indians from even our folklore is incredible” (LeBouton 1975, personal communication). Most painful of all were the comments of Mashpee Wam-panoag spokeswoman, A.G. Bringham, who charged me with assuming Indians were incapable of surviving without Europeans and of being a non-Indian unable to understand Indian knowledge (Wassaja 1975).
I answered these charges in detail (Ceci 1975b), emphasizing that my cultural analysis of fish fertilizers should in no way be construed as any sort of slur on native capabilities—especially since the practice, in fact, appears to have been so maladaptive. The issue of whether I or any anthropologist can objectively assess the practices of a different ethnic group involves the classic emic-etic question—the different perspectives of knowledgeable participant insiders and that of scholarly outsiders. This question is best answered by the quality of scholarship, ideally, by combining information from “insiders” with expert native knowledge and the analysis of unbiased “outsiders” of scientific mind. Unfortunately, I know of no natives today with expertise in seventeenth-century Coastal Algonquian farming practices. Contrary to LeBouton’s accusation, rather than trying to “remove American Indians from our folklore,” I was trying to remove American folklore from scientific knowledge of American Indians.
That the fish fertilizer “manner of the Indians” was and remains so strongly defended despite the weak evidence raises questions about the “folklorification” process. Confabulated histories in several juvenile works make it clear that the Squanto figure is currently drawn as a “noble savage,” a friendly, benign, almost childlike Indian who unhesitatingly shares native food, technology, and land with Europeans; he even welcomes their coming and suggests the Thanksgiving feast!15 This “invented” Squanto stands in contrast to the real, very interesting historical Squanto, an intriguing, enterprising survivor and culture-broker who facilitated the meshing of disparate cultures on a new frontier. More importantly, the invented Squanto masks the more threatening and numerous Indians of the frontier period who, objecting to the usurpation and “invasion” of their lands (Jennings 1975), attacked and killed settlers—a more accurate representation but a history too “uncomfortable” for popular American consumption.
The “noble savage” movement of the last century is rooted in romantic reconstructions of Indians (for example, Hiawatha) as uncorrupted natural beings—who were becoming extinct—in contrast to rising industrial and urban mobs. An Indian Head coin was struck in 1859 to commemorate their passing, and again (backed by the disappearing buffalo) in 1913-1938 (Yeoman 1987), the period when Wissler and others revitalized the Squanto/fish fertilizer story. Thanksgiving is also a nineteenth-century invented tradition, a Protestant festival of Anglo-Saxon origins resurrected in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln to promote a sense of national history and social cohesion in a country divided by Civil War and waves of new immigrants (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983:279).
As folklore, then, the Squanto-fish fertilizer story contains elements that touch American national and religious values, as well as the feelings of guilt or anger many hold about true Indian history. For modern descendants of New England Indians, the hero Squanto-fish fertilizer story appears to lend strength to their “fragile traditions” (see Simmons 1985:52), especially since World War II when retribalization and land claims became important. This is also the period when the Squanto story entered juvenile literature. Thus to challenge any aspect of the popular story, for non-Indians and Indians alike, would seem “incredible” as the writer charged, if not an attack on personal beliefs.
Nevertheless, while Squanto was unquestionably an important historic figure and did contribute substantially to the Pilgrims’ survival, the belief that fish fertilizer was a “manner of the Indians” because Squanto knew about it should be revised. The current evidence indicates that his advice at Plymouth is best viewed as a special example of culture contact dynamics, one in which a native culture-bearer conveyed a technological idea from one group of Europeans to another.
1 See for example, Mead 1921:409; Driver 1961:53; Weatherwax 1954: 124; Walden 1966:18; and Rutman 1967:9.
2 This essay is a revised and expanded version of an earlier work (Ceci 1975a, 1975b).
3 “Com” etymologically refers to a “worn-down” particle or grain, and derives from the German kern, kernel (O.E.D.). Thus early documentary citations of “corne,” without the modifier Indian or Guinea, may refer to “Wheate, Rye, Barlie, Oates, and Pease” (e.g., Dean 1887:149) rather than the New World grain maize (Arawak maiz).
4 “Cet amendement (débris de coquillages) ... a beaucoup contribué, par las continuité immémoriale de son emploi, à créer tout le long des côtes de Bretagne une zone de quelques kilomètres de profondeur ... La fertilité de ce littoral lui a valu le nom traditionnel de ‘ceinture dorée’” (Grand 1950:263). (This improvement [shellfish debris] . . . has contributed greatly, through the immemorial continuity of its use, to the creation of a zone of several kilometers’ depth, the length of the Brittany coast . . . The fertility of this littoral has earned it the traditional name of “gold belt.” [author’s translation].)
5 See Haies 1938:284; Brereton 1966:6; Purchas 1906:326; Rosier 1932:365; Burrage in Rosier 1932, map facing 412; Smith 1836:113).
6 Recent archaeological fieldwork here has revealed early seventeenth-cen-tury foundations, ceramic sherds, and smoking pipes (R.A. Barakat 1978, personal communication).
7 See Van Wassener, deRasieres, Megapolensis, and DeVries in Jameson 1909:69, 72, 105, 107, 177, 206, 219, 333.
8 Some have interpreted Champlain’s passage about Maine Indians planting maize with horseshoe crab shells (signoc) as evidence for the use of “fish” fertilizer. Careful reading of the original text, however, indicates that the shells were used as implements, not fertilizer, a function for which they would be poorly suited in their natural state (see Biggar 1922:327-28; Ceci 1982:21-2).
9 There is considerable archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence for the trapping of large numbers of fish by northeastern Indians in various types of weirs and nets from the prehistoric Archaic period to the Historic.
10 See for example, Flannery 1939:178; Van der Donck 1968: 76; Williams 1963:138; Gookin 1806:150; Jameson 1909:177,222).
11 See for example, Flannery 1939:11-13; Jameson 1909:69,72,77,107,174, 222; Williams 1963:124; Winslow 1832:96.
12 See also, DeRasieres in Jameson 1909:107; Gookin 1806: 149; Higginson 1630:113; Van der Donck 1968:49; compare Ricciardelli 1963.
13 The weak archaeological evidence for large, prehistoric, corn-producing villages in Coastal New York was the problem that generated my original fish fertilizer research.
14 Letters and request for reprints came in from more than 50 academic departments, laboratories, and individuals in United States, Canada, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
15 Surprising fictional details include: Squanto’s birth in 1596; his gift of eels to a friend so the boy would not have to wear a dress; his fear of malevolent “witch doctors” and local Iroquois attacks; his “decision” since youth not to fight the whites and seek peace; his trading furs with Hunt and contentment with being kidnapped because Europeans were kind to him and taught him about European comforts; and finally how the always smiling Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to refine maple sugar (see chapter 5) and make chowder, cornbread and other foods for the Thanksgiving table (see Bulla 1954; Stevenson 1962; Weisgard 1967; Johnston 1972; Myers 1972; and the Squanto ditto-masters from the November Monthly Activity Units published by Continental Press, 1984).
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