Chapter 9

Hunger in Early Virginia

Indians and English Facing Off over Excess, Want, and Need

ROBERT APPELBAUM

About 15 percent of Thomas Hariot's Brief and True Report, whether in its 1588 or in its expanded and illustrated 1590 edition, is concerned with food and drink. That seems about right. In the first volume, Hariot is concerned with the “Marchantable Commodities” of Virginia (Part One) and “Such Commodities as Virginia is known to yield for victual and sustenance of man's life” (Part Two), as well as “Such Other Things” as would be useful for settlers to know (Part Three). In the second volume he is presenting “The True Pictures and Fashions of the People…”¹ From the point of view of the practicalities of colonization, food is obviously a primary concern, whether for trade or for daily sustenance. But from the point of ethnography, of knowing the “fashions” of the people, food is of primary interest too. Travel writing in Europe had already long since adopted the custom of reporting on the food practices of foreign peoples. If one wanted to understand the “customs” or “manners” of a people, one first of all needed to describe and decode what it was the people did to feed themselves, and how what they did was related to other social and economic practices. Even the fanciful Utopia is frequently preoccupied with explaining how the citizens of that fanciful land produced and consumed their food.

English ethnography in the New World beginning with Hariot was similarly preoccupied. Food practices could not tell the whole story of the peoples of the eastern seaboard, to be sure, especially given the obsessive interest of ethnographers in religion. But they articulated an important theme. Indeed, observations of food practices articulated a crucial demarcator of difference, which spoke not only to the fluid domain of habits and manners but to the deeper structures of social life. Food practices are not just a matter of table settings, as it were, a superficial arrangement for consuming goods whose deeper meaning lies elsewhere. They are invested in material life as such; they are intrinsic to the experience of ethnic identity and territorial community. And so when writers described the manners of Native Americans, they turned to food practices as signs of who these people at bottom, materially, really were. But what the writers found was somewhat peculiar.

“They accustom themselves to no set Meals,” Robert Beverley wrote of the Algonquian Indians of Virginia, “but eat night and day, when they have plenty of Provisions, or if they have got any thing that is a rarity.” And conversely, “They are very patient of Hunger, when by any accident they happen to have nothing to eat; which they make more easy to them by girding up their Bellies, just as the wild Arabs are said to do, in their long marches; by which means they are less sensible of the impressions of Hunger.”² The Indians are “very patient in fasting,” Samuel Lee similarly reported of the Algonquians of New England, “and will gird in their bellies till they meet with food; but then none more gluttons or drunk on occasion, they'll eat 10 times in 24 hours, when they have a bear or a deer.”³ “At home,” William Wood wrote, also of Indians in the north, “they will eat till their bellies stand forth, ready to split with fullness; it being their fashion to eat all at sometimes, and sometimes nothing at all in two or three days, wise Providence being a stranger to their wilder ways.”⁴

As might be expected, there are exceptions. Roger Williams, for example, wrote that he “could never discern that excess of scandalous sins amongst them which Europe aboundeth with. Drunkenness and gluttony, generally they know not what sins they be.”⁵ The anonymous author of A Relation of Maryland made similar statements: “They have some things amongst them which may well become Christians to imitate, as their temperance in eating and drinking.”⁶ Thomas Hariot himself originally suggested that the Indians were “very moderate in their eating,” or “very sober in their eating,” and added “I would to god we would follow their example.”⁷ But even these last three writers subscribe to a common set of terms and values, a common perspective through which food practices among the Indians were to be assessed. In explaining the food practices of the natives, over and above the particulars of dietary choices, English ethnographers felt compelled to account for four things: whether or not the Indians overate (or overdrank); with what regularity they ate; with what “providence” the Indians arranged to feed themselves; and to what extent they experienced and tolerated hunger. The terms of analysis and the values behind them remain constant from Hariot's first report, published in 1588, to early eighteenth-century writers like Beverley. Temperance, decorum, providence, and, oddly, hunger—these were the fundamental categories though which English ethnography assessed the food practices of the natives. And, significantly, the majority of reports adopting these categories settled on the less favorable pattern. On the one hand, when the Indians eat, they eat improvidently and intemperately and without decorum, that is without regard for the niceties of time and place or self-restraint: “they accustom themselves to no set meals.” On the other hand, “they are very patient of Hunger.” “In keeping with their stoic nature,” a modern historian writes, adopting the categories of early accounts for his own ends, natives “accepted [the] lean times as inevitable and rode them out without complaint.”⁸

How shall we explain this? Part of the explanation must lie, of course, in what early ethnographers saw—a system of food practices common to most Algonquians of the eastern seaboard that included hunting and foraging expeditions as well as agricultural and aquacultural pursuits, and which seemed to provide a less steady supply of goods and less regular occasions for consumption than the ethnographers were familiar with in England. Indians seemed to respond more cavalierly to the need for food. They didn't follow the rules or betray the psychology of food that Europeans took for granted. But in some respects the observations ethnographers made were faulty, and their generalizations unwarranted, based as they were on limited evidence and constructed by uncertain methodologies.

The Indians of the eastern seaboard kept no livestock, it is true, and therefore relied on hunting and fishing for animal protein. And they had no salt, so that they could only preserve their animal products by smoking and drying them—a difficult feat to pull off while in the midst of hunting expeditions. According to a model developed by William Cronon for the Algonkian Indians north of Virginia and adapted by Timothy Silver for Virginia and parts south, moreover—a model based in large part on the ethnographic record—Indians practiced a seasonally mobile system of subsistence. Indians sought to “obtain their food wherever it was seasonally most concentrated,” Cronon writes, and “Indian communities had learned to exploit the seasonal diversity of their environment by practicing mobility.”⁹ Periods of settlement in villages for sowing and harvesting products like corn, squash, and beans alternated with periods of dispersal, where smaller groups decamped, leaving the village to hunt or fish and forage in the forests for wild fruits, nuts, tubers, and greens. So far as Indians were “mobile,” away from their villages, they may well have had to consume products quickly at the site of a kill, and they may well have had to alternate between eating grandly on freshly caught quarry and grazing modestly, between kills, on the vegetarian products of the forest.¹⁰ They may also have allowed the rhythms of the chase and the successes of hunting and foraging to determine when and how food was consumed, so that at times they may well have eaten “night and day,” as at other times they may well have had to delay eating or even do without for extended periods of time. But the seasonal mobility of the Indians may be exaggerated. Archaeological evidence suggests that many Algonquians were far more sedentary than ethnographic accounts would lead us to believe; Hariot's Brief and True Report, for one, especially through the illustrations by Theodor de Bry (based on paintings by John White), depicts a picture of a largely sedentary, village-bound people, who among other things dine in a formalized setting, largely on agricultural products (Figures 9.1 and 9.2).¹¹ And in any case, eyewitness reporting was relatively scanty. From author to author ethnographic legend and rhetorical conventions were pirated, reduplicated, and elaborated, so that by the time we get to “observers” like Beverley we are dealing as much with hearsay as anything else; even early observers like William Wood and the author of the Relation of Maryland shows signs of pirating some of their material from other accounts. And some of the piracies were based on earlier observations that were made during times of abnormal dearth. When Smith tells us of Indians in certain villages imparting to the white explorers “what little they had, with such complaints and tears from women and children,” or when he similarly notes that “near three parts of the year, they only observe times and seasons, and live of what the Country naturally affordeth from hand to mouth,” he may possibly be responding to conditions when groups he encountered were dispersed from their main villages and larger stores of grain, but he may also be observing people in the extremities of a famine, caused by a drought and an unusually severe cold spell.¹²

So the facts were various, and what early writers actually saw is problematic. And the explanation of the vision of Indian food practices that emerges must therefore lie not only in what the ethnographers saw but also in how ethnographers were seeing it. Attempting to represent who the Indians actually were, early ethnographers also inevitably betrayed who they were. Attempting to disclose the alimentary “fashions” of others, they relied on the categories they had absorbed from the fashions of their own alimentary culture. Yet the vision that emerges is not simply a one-sided account. What early writers composed with regard to food practices was what I shall call a “contact vision,” constructed from within the domain of experience on the eastern seaboard and made of both the phenomena before the eyes of the observers and the biases, textual piracies, interests, and needs they brought to their observations. This vision could be quite superficial at times. “An idle, improvident, scattered people,” they were, said one early observer in Virginia, “ignorant of the knowledge of gold, or silver, or any commodities; and careless of anything but from hand to mouth.”¹³ But even superficial accounts expressed something deeper. Writers were compelled to express a conception or intimation of what it meant for individuals to feed and otherwise provide for themselves. In the circumstances in which observers found themselves, in the course of “facing off,” as Karen Kupperman puts it in the title of one of her books, traditional European notions like temperance and “providence” acquired new associations, and out of the preconscious or unconscious assumptions about social life a vision about the meaning of hunger emerged. As the biological reality of hunger soon emerged as a problem of unforeseen dimensions for early colonists, so did the significance of hunger: the meaning of hunger in the management of human affairs; the consequences of hunger as a symbolic and social as well as personal experience; the accommodation of the need to eat by complex systems of economics, social structure, and “fashions.”

Figure 9.1. Detail of “The Towne of Secotan,” engraving by Theodor de Bry after a drawing by John White. Hariot, Briefe and True Report (1590), pl. 20. Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 9.2. “Their sitting at meate,” engraving by Theodor de Bry after a drawing by John White. Hariot, Briefe and True Report (1590), pl. 16. Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. On the Carolina coast, a native couple share what by European standards would be an appealing and adequate but nevertheless meatless “Lenten” meal, eaten with moderation.

The food system English travelers brought with them to America was not always so completely different from the system of the Indians as the former assumed, to be sure. The European diet as well was marked by seasonal variety and swings of excess and want. Grains and preserves were more staples of the winter months in Europe, for example, and fresh meat and vegetables of summer and fall. Moreover, ritualistic variation in England and elsewhere in Europe had far more in common with Indian practices than contemporary observers cared to admit. Alternating flesh days with fish days, abundant days with lean, feasting with fasting, ceremonial meals with more private and everyday affairs, Europeans too experienced both excess and want; on ceremonial and religious occasions they might even deliberately experience the avoidance of the rule of set meals for which they criticized the Indians.¹⁴ However, the system as a whole was structured to minimize variation and maximize sumptuary regularity; the impetus toward regularity was what colonial writers had in mind when they reacted against Indian customs. Apart from feasts, which followed the liturgical calendar as well as the demands of secular ceremony (weddings, political events, etc.), and which were served out of the deliberate cultivation of surpluses, most Europeans kept to a sparingly monotonous diet, dominated by grain—wheat, barley, rye, and oats, depending on the region, prepared as coarse bread and gruel—supplemented in good times with fresh vegetables, herbs, or bits of meat or cheese or (on lean days) fish, the latter usually of the dried and salted variety.¹⁵ Even the wealthiest members of society kept to a fairly monotonous regime, though with an emphasis on animal flesh rather than grain and on fresh rather than preserved fish. Sumptuary regularity was part and parcel of the immobility demanded by European notions of private property and the stasis necessary to a predominantly landed, agricultural economy.¹⁶ Whether or not the European system was in place because it was the most efficient system for agricultural prosperity (as most writers of the time believed), the imposition of a static way of life for most Europeans, however well or ill it turned out for them, was nearly absolute, and the values of sumptuary regularity were embedded in the way Europeans managed their lands, livelihoods, and social relations.

When early observers took note of the variations in the Indian diet and its swings of excess and want, they were both condemning the Indians for adopting a form of behavior their own society sometimes encouraged and registering the fact that, despite the considerable actual variation in their food practices, the European system as a whole militated against variation, excess, and want. On the one hand, the European was highly rhythmic, and even in Protestant lands like England old customs like lean days and Lent, or indulgence carnivals like Shrovetide (when pork and sausages ruled) and Martinmas (when freshly slaughtered beef was consumed in abundance) guaranteed that the diet would be subject to considerable variation with respect to both the quantities of foodstuffs consumed and the nature of the foodstuffs themselves. On the other hand, a whole system of food practices had emerged by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly in England, whose defining feature was its militant defense against extremes. However important the “war between Carnival and Lent” was to European experience, as the title of a famous painting by Breugel puts it, the defense against extremes, the rule of “not too much” and “not too little” dominated the discourse of food in early modern Europe. The rule determined as well the social relations by which food was produced, distributed, and prepared.

Food writers—and dietary guidebooks, known as “regimens of health,” were extremely popular among the educated classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as were conduct books and moral guides—were universal proponents of moderation, and cautioned specifically against the dangers of both overeating and undereating. Following the traditional strictures of Galenic medicine, which had long since entered into the mainstream of both popular and professional culture, dietary writers maintained that food intake was the primary contributing factor to health. Eating the wrong foods and eating any foods in a bad combination or in excess were the main causes of the humoral imbalances that were thought to constitute most forms of physical and mental illness. Similarly, not eating enough was also a cause of illness; although it would not be until the nineteenth century that the condition of anorexia nervosa would be an established diagnosis, anorexia in general—loss of appetite—was a condition known to physicians since the heyday of the Hippocratic writers, and was always thought to require prompt and thorough treatment. Although dietary writers warned again and again against “surfeit” or “repletion,” they thus also commonly recommended foodstuffs, beverages, and exercises that could help “procure appetite.” For “the wise man sayeth,” as physician Andrew Boorde put it, “that surfeit do kill many men, and temperance doth prolonge the life.”¹⁷

The moralists of the early modern period, especially in Protestant countries, by and large echoed the doctrines of the doctors. The sin of gluttony, accordingly, was even more often a target of homiletic writers than the sin of pride. “O gluttony, full of cursedness!” Chaucer's Pardoner exclaims, “O cause first of our confusion! / O original of our damnation!” “All kind of excess offendeth the Majesty of Almighty God,” the Church of England's “Homily Against Gluttony and Excess” asserts. Popular images of notorious, kingly overeaters like Henry VIII and Louis XIV aside, the official moral code of early modern Europe dictated against consuming more than was enough to sustain a vigorous and muscular body. And taking advantage of medical lore, a tract like the “Homily Against Gluttony” could thus prove its point about the offensiveness of overindulgence by noting how “grievously [God] punisheth the immoderate abuse of those his creatures which he ordaineth to the maintenance of this our needy life, as meats, drinks, and apparel.”¹⁸ Although European thought by and large embraced the pleasures of the table, it tried to maintain a clear distinction between what was known, following Stoic traditions, as “right pleasure” (honesta volupta), deriving from “continence,” and “the pleasure which the intemperate and libidinous derive from self-indulgence and a variety of foods and from the titillations of sexual interests.”¹⁹ On the one hand, wrote the influential Calvinist divine, William Perkins, “We may use these gifts of God [food and drink], with Christian liberty…. Not sparingly alone, and for mere necessity, to the satisfying of our hunger, and quenching of our thirst, but also freely and liberally, for Christian delight and pleasure.” But on the other hand, “We must use our meat in Sobriety,” sobriety being “a gift of God, whereby we keep a holy moderation in the use of our diet.” Eat well, eat joyously, for the sake of the Lord and “in the Lord,” as Perkins put it, but “be very careful and circumspect in taking thy food, bridle thine appetite, take heed thou dost not exceed measure.”²⁰ It is in this spirit that Spenser's Guyon famously goes about temperately destroying the Bower of Bliss, that epitome of luxurious, Golden Age fantasies, declining to be seduced by the “life intemperate,” and Guyon's companion the devout pilgrim remarks,

The dunghill kind

Delights in Filth and foule incontinence:

Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind,

But let us hence depart.²¹

One of the consequences of the dual, medical-moral imperative of temperance was inevitably the rise of controversy over just what constituted eating too little or too much. In England, which seems to have had one of the most abundant diets per capita in Europe during the early modern period, Puritan-leaning critics often complained about the excess of English tables, and what they took to be the new fashion for extravagance and refinement in English cooking. “Oh, what nicety is this,” wrote the anti-theatrical Puritan Phillip Stubbes: “what vanity, excess, riot, and superfluity is here.” In typical fashion combining the moral and the medical, Stubbes adds that “I cannot persuade myself otherwise, but that our niceness and curiousness in diet, hath altered our nature, distempered our bodies, and made us more subject to millions of…diseases, then ever were our forefathers subject unto, and consequently of shorter life than they.”²² By and large, English writers were proud of English abundance, sometimes finding it necessary to defend themselves against charges that they ate too much. As we have seen, despite the crankiness of Puritans like Stubbes, authorities like Perkins found no reason not to eat freely and joyfully, as long as one did so for the glory of God.

But lurking beneath educated attitudes toward food was a suspicion that English sumptuary habits were degenerate, overcivilized and overindulgent. Travelers to Italy were sometimes challenged by the example of the “thrifty” food habits of the Italians, for example, or by discussions favoring Spartan abstemiousness in a number of classical authors.²³ And again and again one finds English writers alluding to the Spartan virtues of their distant forebears, particularly in the north, as first expressed by the ancient historian Dio Cassius. After justifying the lavish hospitality of English tables, for example, William Harrison recalled with a nostalgia for culinary virtue that “In old time…North Britons did give themselves universally to great abstinence, and in time of wars their soldiers would often feed but once or twice at the most in two or three days…. In the woods, moreover, they lived with herbs and roots.”²⁴ The source for Harrison's remarks goes even farther: The northern tribes of Britain, Dio wrote, shortly after the original Roman conquest of Britain,

possess neither walls, cities, nor tilled fields, but live on their flocks, wild game, and certain fruits…. They can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water, and in the forest they support themselves upon bark and roots, and for all emergencies they prepare a certain kind of food, the eating of a small portion of which, the size of a bean, prevents them from feeling either hunger or thirst.²⁵

Obviously we are close here to the Picts or Scots whom Hariot compared to the Indians of Virginia, and close to the language used by many early observers of the Indians with respect to their sumptuary (and conjugal) habits, from Hariot all the way to Beverley. The Indians who could be so “patient of hunger” when necessary were the moral allies of the virtuous tribesmen who inhabited pre-Roman Britain.²⁶ This is the subtext of Hariot's remark, previously cited, that he “would to god we would follow the [Indians'] example.” For if we did so, he goes on to say, “we should be free from many kinds of diseases which we fall into by sumptuous and unseasonable banquets, continually devising new sauces, and provocation of gluttony to satisfy our unsatiable appetite.”²⁷

Living in a land of relative plenty, the English were thus taught the values of abundance, conviviality, and pleasure on the one hand, and the virtues of thrift, stoic abstemiousness, and temperance on the other. If excess was censured, abundance was embraced; yet if abundance was embraced, frugality and temperance were embraced as well. And beneath it all there lurked a suspicion, rooted at once in Biblical injunctions and classical learning, that dietary prosperity in any form, however temperate or generous, however simple or refined, violated a pure code of virtue that advanced civilization had forgotten how to enforce or had become too degenerate to practice.²⁸

This complex culture of food found an especially striking expression—something like a Freudian reaction formation—in the evolution of dining customs. Expressions of abundance—liberality, hospitality, what was in medieval language referred to as the “freedom” of a household—were highly valued in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, so much so that social critics repeatedly bewailed their decline and degeneration over the years.²⁹ In the locus classicus of English Renaissance hospitality, Ben Jonson extolls the “free provisions” of a manorial estate “from whose liberal board doth flow, / With all, that hospitality doth know.” “Here no man tells my cups,” Jonson goes on to say about the ideal manor at Penshurst; “nor, standing by, / A waiter, doth my gluttony envy.”³⁰

However, amidst the displays of abundance, however fictional they might be on occasion, the common meal was all the same a strictly hierarchical affair, a scene of discipline and stratification; and if individuals up and down the ranks were to eat and to eat their fill, Jonson's notorious and often mocked gluttony aside,³¹ they were to do so temperately and modestly, taking what they took from platters going around, consuming their food and generally comporting themselves at the table in accordance with a system of manners that ratified differences of rank. From the perspective of our own more democratic and chaotic system of table manners, the result was striking, and became more and more so as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, and both stratification and politeness advanced (Figure 9.3). “I might here talk somewhat of the great silence that is used at the tables of the honorable and wiser sort, generally over all the realm,” William Harrison notes; “likewise of the moderate eating and drinking that is daily seen, and finally of the regard that each one hath to keep himself from the note of surfeiting and drunkenness.”³² “When you be at Meat,” one writer exhorts “the Young Gentlewoman at the Age of Six, or upward,”

be not out of the Way, but attend the Grace, and then take the Place that is Appointed you: After having done your Reverence, see your Napkin be fastened about you to save your Clothes, and Thankfully take what is given without Craving; nor is it seemly for you to Speak at the Table, unless you are asked a Question, or there be some great Occasion. Cut your Meat Handsomely, and be not over desirous of Sauce, nor of another sort of Meat, before you have disposed of what is on your Plate. Put not both your Hands to your mouth at once, nor eat too Greedily.³³

Norbert Elias, following the lead of Alfred Franklin, made the “civilizing” effect of table manners a commonplace of cultural history; but both Elias and Franklin underemphasized what might be called their subornation effect, their contribution to the enforcement of deference, by which self-restraint was joined at once to good conduct and to one's unambiguous submission to others.³⁴ Certainly, they underemphasized what it felt like to a subaltern at a communal dinner table. “When any thing is given you,” Woolley writes for the female apprentice, “be sure to bow to those who carve it to you; and if your Mistress doth you that favor, you must shew the more respect. Talk not at all at Table, for that is unseemly, unless it be to answer your Mistress when she asks you a question.”³⁵ Not too much food, not too much pleasure, not too much conversation, not too much conviviality, not too much assertiveness, all in the interest of deference—such was the general rule of table manners among those whom Harrison called the “wiser sort,” and who increasingly included the middling sort of people as well as aristocrats and their household guests. Certainly there were exceptions; not all dinners were formal affairs and not all diners would be described as “the wiser sort.” Harrison himself complains about the unruly boisterousness of “the meaner sort of husbandmen and country inhabitants,” and there must have been a number of people, in or out of the cities, rich or poor, who took pleasure in flouting the rules. Intensely ceremonial occasions, such as weddings and court masques, also featuring feasts, are known to have frequently dissipated into unruly affairs under the inspiration of alcohol. But as medical and religious writers extolled an adequate but temperate diet, so dining customs, generally understood, superimposed upon displays of abundance, dictated adequate but temperate consumption, practiced in an atmosphere of deference and self-restraint, and the tendency over the centuries was for more and more deference and more and more self-restraint.

Figure 9.3. “Europeans at Table,” engraving from Georg Phillip Harsdoerffer, Vollstaendig vermehrtes Trincir-Buch handlend (Nornberg, 1640. A waiter (right, with napkin draped over his hand) stands at the ready, perhaps while the lady of the house issues orders for the next course. Courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library.

For all the celebrations of moderated abundance, to be sure, the early modern period was not an age in which food supplies were as secure as they might have been. Dearth was a serious threat throughout the period—especially in the 1590s, the decade just before the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery set sail in the direction of the Chesapeake Bay, soon to establish a colony in Jamestown.³⁶ The distribution of foodstuffs was highly uneven. It has been surmised that while the wealthy classes compromised their health by eating what now may be seen to be excessive amounts of meat and fish, and the poor majority of the people compromised their health by consuming too little of anything but grain, only the middling sort, who could not afford to keep up with the gentry's excessive meat-eating but could afford to avoid the monotony and impoverishment of peasant fare, regularly consumed a nutritionally balanced diet.³⁷ But however inadequate the English system may have been, on the account of foreign visitors and modern statisticians it was more successful than most European systems in providing for its people, second perhaps only to the Dutch.³⁸

In the more urbanized areas of the country, the English economy was already highly capitalized, its agricultural practices often oriented toward the market, the market itself becoming increasingly national and international in scope, and food products becoming highly commodified.³⁹ This convergence of economic procedures—capitalization, marketing, and commodification—reached even into the daily life of peasants in the hinterlands, so far as their subsistence practices had to make way for the sheep-herding or cattle-raising of larger landowners, or so far as their ceremonial Lenten diet came to depend on salted or smoked herring caught and processed by the state-sanctioned fishing industry in port towns like Yarmouth, or by way of the enormous fish trade based in Holland or the international cod fisheries working the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador.⁴⁰ The colonial experiment indeed depended on prior conditions, such as the capitalization of food production and the commodification of food products. And the “ventures” of emigration required that the nutrition be rendered as an abstractly quantifiable operation organized in advance of use and with an eye toward exchange values rather than sustenance. We thus hear from one of the most interesting food writers of seventeenth-century England, the traveler Richard Ligon, describing how prospective settlers in Barbados should consider, among their capital expenses, “the feeding of our servants and slaves, over and above the provisions which the Plantations bear.” “That will be no great matter,” Ligon goes on to say,

for they are not often fed with bone-meat. But we will allow to the Christian servants, (which are not above thirty in number) four barrels of Beef, and as much Pork yearly, with two barrels of salt Fish, and 500 poor-Johns, which we have from New England, four barrels of Turtle, and as many of pickled Mackerels, and two of Herrings, for the Negroes; all of which I have computed, and find they will amount unto 100 l., or thereabouts; besides the freight, which will be no great matter; for you must be sure to have a Factor, both at New England and Virginia, to provide you of all the Commodities those places afford, that are useful to your Plantation; or else your charge will be treble.⁴¹

Himself formerly a professional chef and always a gourmand, repeatedly adverting to the delights of gastronomic experience, Ligon can nevertheless pause to consider food supplies from the perspective of the commodities (a word taking on its modern usage at the time Ligon is writing) needed to feed a labor force and fuel a commercial enterprise. The separation of the population in Barbados (far more simply and dramatically than would be the case back home, or for that matter in Virginia) into a managerial class on the one hand and a laboring class of servants and slaves on the other is one of the chief conditions not only for the commodification of foodstuffs on a grand scale for the many, but for the sustenance of gastronomy on a grand scale for the few.⁴²

An even more striking an example of the commodification of food, and the inequalities it helped to enforce, is to be found in a story from Maryland repeated by Timothy Silver, where both English settlers and Indian hosts engage in disturbing reifications. George Alsop, an indentured servant, in Silver's words,

observed in 1666 that “the extreme glut and plenty” of deer “daily killed by the Indians and brought in to the English” made venison “the common provision the Inhabitants feed on.” Indeed, the man to whom he was indentured (who regularly traveled with the natives) once had some eighty deer cured and stored to feed his family and servants. According to Alsop, “before this Venison was brought to a period by eating, it so nauseated our appetites and stomachs, that plain bread was rather courted and desired than it.”⁴³

The commodification Alsop was subjected to, based on an English predilection for salting and preserving animal products rather than eating them fresh, on the spot, could veer the pleasure of eating meat into the unpleasure of being monotonously force-fed on it, and it could even encourage doubtful social policies of economic specialization. “Though the Jamestown people had easy access to some 3,000 square miles of inland tidal water and were only a little way from the open sea,” we are told by a historian of fisheries, “they never developed their marine riches.” Instead, “though surrounded all the while by their own huge marine resources,” the Virginia colonists soon learned to “subsist on salt fish from the North.”⁴⁴ Sheer commercial calculations may have been responsible for this development. The financial logic of monoculture is a feature of world capitalism. Yet one suspects that a number of other kinds of forces are at work in such situations. The choice for monoculturalists in English America was a choice in the first place in favor of a certain form of expediency, and in the second place in favor of the cultural and social consequences that followed from it.

Sidney Mintz, ethnohistorian of the West Indian sugar industry, has spoken eloquently about “a newly emerging world in which working people produced less and less of what they themselves consumed; in which they filled most of their needs by selling their labor for wages and buying what they consumed in an impersonal market.”⁴⁵ Mintz was mainly referring to West Indian laborers and British laborer-consumers beginning in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the disjunction of production and consumption and desire and need was no doubt established much earlier among many Europeans. It was part and parcel of the surge of large-scale urban life beginning in Italy and elsewhere in the late Middle Ages. Laborers and no doubt many landowners too in early Virginia, bent on producing tobacco for European markets, were forcing themselves to subsist not on what they raised but on venison and fish got in trade from Indian hunters and New England merchants. This was “providence,” providence enlivened (and reified) by the spirit of capitalism, leading to a disjunction between the givens of physicality and sensuality on the one hand and the means of administering to them on the other: a disjunction that would mar much of Anglophone culture throughout modernity (people like the French and the Dutch would make separate sorts of peace between capitalism and gustatory need), but that would nevertheless guarantee that whether at home or abroad British culture would operate officially—“officially,” which is to say ideally, and in principle, whatever the reality at any given time—as a society without hunger.

Not too much, not too little, and the two together making for a society officially prohibited from knowing hunger: the society without hunger that England assumed itself to be was aware of the possibility of hunger and of the idea of societies where hunger could be experienced—even practiced—as a virtue. It was (usually) aware of the great mustering of resources needed to sustain itself as a society without hunger, as well as the self-restraint required to attune consumption with supplies. But hunger itself in this society was always considered an anomaly. It was an exception, a disruption, a corruption. It was not to be borne with patience. It was believed to be caused by anomalous events. And both the toleration of conditions of hunger and the actual experience of it were regarded as something as a taboo. “Why, how have I done this forty years?” a sanguine, elderly merchant named Merrythought proclaims on the English stage at just about the same time as the first fleet arrived in Jamestown, “I never came into my dining room, but at eleven and six o'clock I found excellent meat and drink o'th'table; my clothes were never worn out, but next morning a tailor brought me a new suit; and without question it will be so ever. Use makes perfectness.”⁴⁶ As the upper class were encouraged to exercise hospitality, representatives of the middling sort like Merrythought were exhorted to practice the self-restraint of thrift, but for both classes sumptuary prosperity was ideally and even ethically the norm. And by contrast, in one of the clearest indications of dominance of the idea, in a garrulous and relatively literate society, the observer cannot help but note the absence of discussions about hunger. Appetite, yes. And during periods of dearth, it was true, references to hunger in printed material and public discussion multiply. Thus we find documents like the pamphlet issued by the erstwhile cookbook writer Hugh Plat, Sundrie New and Artificall Remedies Against Famine, recommending “new and artificial discoveries of strange bread, drink and food, in matter and preparation so full of rarity to work some alteration and change in this great and dangerous dearth,” including such preparations as making bread from chestnuts and applying a clod of earth to one's stomach to allay cravings.⁴⁷ But as historian John Walter has noted, unlike the continent, there was no Hansel and Gretel story or analogue thereof circulating in early modern England; there was little folkloric testimony to the realities of starvation.⁴⁸

Texts like Plat's Remedies Against Famine, anticipating modern economic theory, consider the main problem to be distribution, not production. Commoners went hungry, according most observers, because of the greed of landowners. Shortages of grain meant not that there was no grain to be had, but that the price of grain was too steep for too many people, and that the basic resources of agricultural production were too unevenly and unjustly distributed.⁴⁹ This was a position writers could sustain even in a decade like the 1590s, which suffered the worst harvests per capita in early modern English history.⁵⁰ And if problems arose from the failure of harvests, such failures were themselves to be explained theologically, and accounted for as God's own anomalous responses to the repeated sins of his people. Famine “is ajudgment,” wrote the minister William Gouge, “a fearful judgment.” What is not acknowledged, indeed so far as I know never acknowledged, is the idea that inadequate food supplies might ever result simply from a concurrence of natural events and human error, or that starvation might ever be among humans a normal condition. Gouge is speaking representatively when he says that, given God's fearful judgment, His occasional bringing of famine to his people, “it will be our wisdom to do what in us lieth to prevent it, or to moderate, or remove it.” And indeed the process for preventing, moderating, or removing famine, according to Gouge, is both secular and religious, both technological and theological, as Max Weber might have predicted it to be:

For preventing Famine, we must

1. Observe such duties as procure plenty.

2. Avoid such sins as cause famine.

For procuring and continuing plenty, Walk worthy of the Lord, unto all well pleasing: being fruitful in every good work.⁵¹

Even when John Smith considers the causes of deprivation in the first years of the Virginia colony, he makes assumptions about the inevitable bountifulness of the world, if only one has the opportunity to work in good season.⁵²

Under these circumstances, it is easy to see how evidence of sumptuary regularity, and the doctrines and practices sustaining it, could have been one of the first things that ethnographic observers were looking for among the natives of America. Such evidence was first of all a sign as to whether the Indians too lived in a society without hunger, and thus, by the same token, lived in conformity with European standards of civility. It is in light of the normativity of the society without hunger that we should read the comments of English observers like the wary John Smith or the romantic Robert Beverley, for what they are claiming, in effect, is that contrary to their own ideals about these things, the Indians are always hungry. They are hungry under conditions of abundance, eating “night and day, when they have plenty of Provisions,” “gorging themselves.” They are hungry when they have nothing, “girding up their Bellies.” Hunger, according to such observers, is an ever-present condition of Indian experience, even if Indians also show themselves to be quite successful at acquiring food and sustaining themselves nutritionally and, when necessary, enduring hunger with patience. For writers like Smith, indeed, it is not just a token of their savagery, it is savagery itself; and similarly, for writers like Beverley, it is token of something like noble savagery, an innocent ignorance of civilized manners that is also a virtue. Nor are observations about the hunger of the Indians restricted to writers wishing to belittle or romanticize them.

For an observer in New England like Roger Williams, with a rather different agenda in mind, the relation of Indians to hunger serves as an equally noteworthy sign of their amenability to education, both human and divine. Williams's Indians never really suffer hunger, though their appetites are healthy, and this in spite of the fact that their society, given its primitive economic arrangements, ought to make them suffer hunger all the time:

Course bread and water's most their fare [Williams poeticizes],

O England's diet fine

Sometimes God gives them Fish or Flesh,

Yet they're content without;

And what comes in, they part to friends

and strangers all about.

God's providence is rich to his.⁵³

“Content without,” lacking a “diet fine,” not relying on a “plenteous store,” but always generous with what they have, Williams's Indians lack both the wisdom of European society and the corruption that gave rise to it. Living in a society with hunger, they have no appetite; living in a society lacking surpluses, they nevertheless share generously with all comers.

We do not know enough about Indian life in the contact period to determine precisely what kinds of structures and values they attached to eating and drinking, or to determine much about differences between different groups in different areas.⁵⁴ Hospitality was widely practiced up and down the eastern seaboard; feasts were a part of life, but so were non-feasting periods; and from what we know about their time-consuming cookery—the seething of stews, the pounding of maize, the baking of maize-cakes, the rending of oils, the broiling of fish and game—eating and drinking must certainly have followed according to set schedules, though by what schedules they were set, or how, we do not know. Most early Europeans visitors, after all, observed dining customs from the position of a guest, for whom special arrangements were made. And as natives provided for and prepared their food under conditions of cooperative behavior, men fishing together for example, or villagers sowing and harvesting together, so we must imagine them to have observed their own forms of “table” manners and other food-related codes of conduct. Henry Spelman paints a picture of formal dinner customs among the Powhatans, probably on the occasion of a special ritual, which emphasizes a rigid, ritualistic separation of men from women, rich from poor, and individual from individual, and where the same general silence and deference the English valued is strictly observed.⁵⁵ John Lawson provides a picture of village life in the Carolinas which, for all its exotica, corresponds to village life in England, among whom a plenteous variety of food is both exchanged as a commodity and shared as a token of communal values.⁵⁶ Robert Byrd tells us a story (several times) about what for him seems to be an unnecessary and somewhat primitive but otherwise European-like food taboo, where an Indian guide protested against “cooking beasts of the field and birds of the air together in one vessel.”⁵⁷ Eating for the Indians, no less than for the English, was obviously a meaningful activity, with rules and regulations, with laws and values, with totems and taboos. Only, the meanings were different, as was also, therefore, the relation of eating to hunger.

Historians have debated the actual facts of hunger, starvation, and mortality among the English in early Virginia, some suggesting that accounts of starvation or assessments of the affect of starvation on mortality are exaggerated.⁵⁸ But the horror of hunger that early colonists experienced was very real—that is, the horror was real, real enough indeed to play a significant role in the subsequent development of colonial policy.⁵⁹ It is only an expression of the nature of horror and the conditions giving rise to it that it should be experienced and communicated in the context of a complex cultural apparatus. Ideas about food and its values were inscribed in the social order that the European invaders, to use Jennings's term, brought along with them as they set foot in early Virginia; so by the same token were ideas about what it would mean to do without both food and the values it embodied. “WE ARE STARVED! WE ARE STARVED!” George Percy reports the men at Jamestown crying through the streets during the infamous Starving Time: “Many through extreme hunger have run out of their naked beds, being so lean that they looked anatomies.”⁶⁰ The genuine horror, the bare anxiety and dismay, is unmistakable, yet so is the fact that from the outset Percy's representation couples the horror with cultural conventions that mediate and define the experience. Even if Percy and others erred in ascribing most of the deaths to starvation, they did so in accordance with their understanding of the nature of disease, the demands of diet, and psychic economy corresponding to the society without hunger in which they had been accustomed to live. And even if Percy and others set about their work as reporters with the barest journalistic veracity as their primary goal (although that was indeed often the case), what they report is not only colored but even structured by the cultural apparatus of the food system to which they were accustomed. As Percy describes the sequence of events during the starving time, he delineates the regressive behavior of the settlers as they feed themselves first from the valued surpluses, which were to guarantee the condition of alimentary civility they had taken for granted, and then go down the scale and consume less and less edible products, until they are forced to violate the food taboos underlying their nutritional system. The regressive sequence seems plausible, and yet it follows the logic and even the language of those accounts of uncivilized yet virtuous practices reported by writers like Dio.

Now all of us at James Town beginning to feel the sharp prick of hunger, which no man truly describe but he which hath tasted the bitterness thereof, a world of miseries ensued, as the sequel will express unto you, insomuch that some, to satisfy their hunger, have robbed the store, for the which I caused them to be executed. Then having fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin, as dogs, cats, rats, and mice. All was fish that came to net to satisfy cruel hunger, as to eat boots, shoes, or any other leather some could come by. And those being spent and devoured, some were enforced to search the woods and to feed upon serpents and snakes and to dig the earth for wild and unknown roots.⁶¹

Similar sequences, which amounted to something of a “topos,” can be found in stories that had been circulating throughout the European world since Flavius Josephus's account of the conquest of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D.⁶² Such sequences had resonated in legends throughout the Middle Ages. Boistaurau's well-known account of the Great Famine in France of 1528–33 and the poet Edmund Spenser's chilling description of the starvation of Irish soldiers and civilians during a victorious siege waged against them by the English were only two recent, high humanist, Protestant examples.⁶³ The end of the sequence, frequent in ancient and medieval redactions though only hinted at by Boistaurau and Spenser, and repeated again and again in early accounts of the Starving Time, is the experience of cannibalism:

And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows. And amongst the rest, this was most lamentable that one of ours, Collines, murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her wound and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food.⁶⁴

Repeated time and again in the literature of early Virginia, the story of Collines and cannibalism served as a symbol of absolute extremity—the end not only of the natural means of human subsistence but of the natural restraint on human impulses that would several centuries later be discussed so compellingly in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.⁶⁵ Yet interestingly, it does not depict an absolute reversion to savagery, for like any good Englishman (and many other figures of cannibalistic legend in Europe) Collines is made in this story to halt before certain taboos, to practice “providence,” and indeed to commodify his diet: as most English people were trained to be, he is disposed to eat meat from a mature rather than an immature animal (like a typical subject preferring beef over veal or mutton over lamb, he throws away the baby) and programmed to “salt” his meat, to put it in storage, and resign himself to eating it again and again whether he has an appetite for it or not. Even when practicing cannibalism, the Englishman attempts to reproduce the conditions of a society without hunger. Indeed, in refusing to gorge himself at the site of his kill, he practiced not only providence but moderation. Since he seems to have eaten alone, however, it is unclear what kind of table manners he practiced, although it may be conjectured that he comported himself with the quiet dignity of “the wiser sort.”

The contact vision I have been examining is a vision of the English colonists with respect to both themselves and the Indians they encountered. It leaves certain aspects of Indian customs opaque, but it calls attention very strongly to the fundamentals of the conflict between English and Indian culture. Whatever else their needs and wants may have been, and even in spite of sporadic crises and food riots, the English understood themselves to inhabit a world without hunger, a world where the very experience of hunger—of what could be taken as real, morbid famishment as opposed to a healthy appetite—had the status of a taboo. And yet hunger was the first terror the early settlers encountered, especially at Jamestown. They encountered their own hunger; they encountered what they took to be a hunger that the Indians experienced night and day. Moreover, it was with respect to hunger that European and Indian society in the first instance most emphatically differed. They expected hunger to be as missing from the Americas as it was from Britain. If anything, they expected more plentiful supplies of foodstuffs in the Americas than at home, such that as many gentle travelers would continue to live as sumptuously as they were accustomed to at home, so members of lower classes would actually improve their standard of living.⁶⁶ And instead, again, they found hunger everywhere they went; they found hunger to be the normative condition of life in North America, whether among themselves, struggling to survive, or among the Indians, who prospered, paradoxically, in a condition of perpetual hunger.

Obviously, as we critically reexamine the texts of early English colonialism in North America, we assure ourselves that Indian life was only partly what they English took it to be, and take note of how much in early accounts was conditioned by expectations and values based on food practices established on the other side of the Atlantic. We take note, too, of how culturally marked even the most desperate of encounters with hunger among the English really were. Collines kills his wife, according to legend, in order to practice providence and provide himself with salt meat. The notorious famished indentured servant Richard Frethorne pleads to his agent either to free him “out of this Egypt” or else “to send over some beef and some Cheese and butter, or any eating victual will be good trading”—placing his own circumstances metaphorically in a biblical context but still, in his hunger, sticking at once to habitual English preferences and to a commodified relation to food, which includes keeping an eye out for making a quick profit.⁶⁷ He continues in this vein in the course of his still more desperate pleading to his parents: “since I am out of the ship, I never ate anything but pease, and loblolly (that is water gruel); as for deer or venison I never saw any; [we servants] must Work hard both early and late for a mess of water gruel, and a mouthful of bread, and beef; a mouthful of bread for a penny loaf must serve for four men, which is most pitiful if you did know as much as I.” “I am not half a quarter as strong as I was in England, and all is for want of victuals, for I do protest unto you, that I have eaten more in [a] day at home than I have allowed me here for a Week. You have given more than my day's allowance to a beggar at the door.” “For God's sake get a gathering or entreat some good folks to lay out some little Sum of money, in meal, and Cheese and butter, and beef, any eating meat will yield a great profit, oil and vinegar is very good.”⁶⁸ Whatever the real purpose of Frethorne's letter, our servant blithely rushes from the pathetic pathology of suffering from hunger—sure to evoke outrage and pity—to a realm of commodification where pathetic need slides into a calculated demand for the wherewithal to sell quantities of excess goods at a handsome profit.⁶⁹

Food practice was one of the first lines of contact and conflict between the English and the Indians. The English came to depend on Indians economically, especially when it came to food, so that the conflict between the two groups was modified by necessity, tempered by the terms of an uneasy relation of symbiosis.⁷⁰ But the conflict was fundamentally unresolvable on the level of culture and custom because, over and above differences with respect to religion, language, trade, and the like, the Indians and the English constructed their societies according to different systems for ministering to the needs of the body, beginning with the need for food. Symbiosis and assimilation could only be carried so far between societies with such incompatible home economies, social protocols, and attitudes toward the needs of the body. Surely, as most European observers found the Indians to be either always hungry or always in a condition where they ought to be hungry, so the Indians must often have found their visitors from Europe constantly hungry too, for it was food that they were constantly requesting, trading for, and demanding. And if the English imagined that Indians could remain content with their hunger, at least so long as they remained uncivilized, which is to say unassimilated to the English way of life, so the Indians must have seen eventually that the English would never be content with their hunger, that their hunger could not be allayed, that they would always be demanding more, that there would always be more meat to procured and salted, always more grain to dry and put aside, and following behind the preserved commodities, more English bellies to practice temperance upon them.