Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America (18 page)

Read Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America Online

Authors: Giles Milton

BOOK: Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America
12.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He was enough of a realist to foresee considerable difficulties in converting a native population whose interest in the Bible had so far been limited to stroking their bellies with its vellum jacket. Many of the Indians believed the English to be imbued with supernatural powers, and however much Harriot tried to correct them, he found himself fighting a losing battle. When the tribes were decimated by sickness, the Indians believed that the English spirits were killing their people “by shooting invisible bullets into them.” They even managed to prove it; the Indian “phisitions” punched holes into the veins of their tribesmen and told Harriot “that the strings of blood that they sucked out of the sicke bodies were the strings wherewithall the invisible bullets were tied and cast.”
They “could not tel whether to thinke us gods or men,” wrote Harriot; partly because there was “no man of ours knowne to die,” but also because “we had no women amongst us, neither that we did care for any of theirs.” How the men gratified themselves remains unanswered, but Harriot’s disdain for the appearance of the Indian women suggests that he, for one, was never going to share his eiderdown with a shaven-headed maiden.
One of the most persistent complaints made by Lane’s colonists was the lack of any victuals more nourishing than acorns and oysters. Harriot dismissed such stories and launched into a withering attack on the returnees, accusing them of an unhealthy obsession with “daintie food.” He proceeded to describe dozens of mouth-watering
viands and fruits that were readily available to anyone who had the sense to go hunting: “turkie cockes and turkie hennes, stockdoves, partridges, cranes, hennes and, in winter, great store of swannes and geese.” He was tempted to include “wolves or wolvish dogges” in his list of tasty meat, but declined from doing so “least that some would understand my judgement therein to be more simple then needeth.” But he could not stop himself from informing his readers that he himself had tucked into a plate of “wolvish dogges,” adding that “I could alleage the difference in taste of these kindes from ours”—a reference to the unfortunate bullmastiffs that were eaten on the expedition up the Roanoke River.
Harriot’s list was less convincing when he came to record Virginia’s edible fruits and nuts. What was scrumptious to him was unlikely to find favour with everyone, and although many English settlers were happy to munch their way through “chestnuts, walnuts, grapes and straberies,” they baulked at the idea of tucking into a plate of acorns. To Harriot, this was yet another example of fussiness. “They make good victual,” he wrote defensively, “either to eate so simply, or els being also pounded to make loaves or lumpes of bread.”
Harriot strongly believed in the virtues of a simple diet and was convinced that bland food was better for the digestion than “sawces” and “blanketts.” The Indians, he said, were living proof of his theory: “they are verye sober in their eatinge and drinkinge and, consequentlye, verye longe lived because they doe not oppress nature.” Unfortunately, this was exactly the message that Elizabethan England did not wish to hear. People had no desire to swap roast capons for roast acorns, for the country was in the process of discovering the delights of gluttony and sumptuous foods. Household accounts reveal that even quite modest families thought nothing of tucking into a hearty lunch of pottage, stewed meat, bacon, pork, goose pie, roast beef, and custard. And those were merely appetisers. For the main course, it was not unusual to serve a platter of roast lamb, rabbit, and capon, along with chicken, venison, and tarts. A growing interest in elaborate recipes had also led to households’ competing to produce ever more outlandish dishes. Almond tart, for example, was no longer the plain dish of the past. Now it was de rigueur to make it with blanched almonds, cream, sugar, rosewater, butter, and egg yolks.
 
Harriot did not find the Indian women to his liking. “They have small eyes, plaine and flatt noses, narrow foreheads, and broade mowths.”
None of this was particularly good for the health, as Harriot was well aware. But he also knew that he had discovered something in America that worked wonders on those with aching bellies and sluggish circulation. It was this miracle cure that he now hoped to unleash on a plump but far from jolly population. His fellow Londoners were the most sickly, “bursten with bancketing and sore and sick with surfeting,” although many country folk were also beginning to discover the delights of “bellicheer [and] drunkenesse.” Some physicians had abandoned all hope of promoting a healthy diet and, aware that their patients paid more for advice they wished to hear, began recommending hearty meals centred firmly on meat. The suggested diet for those wishing to strengthen their blood was to eat plenty of capons, pheasants, turtledoves, blackbirds, and mutton. Vegetables were not recommended; fresh herbs were forbidden.
But not all were convinced that you could eat your way to good health. As early as 1541, the dietary expert Sir Thomas Elyot used his book
The castel of helth
to castigate England’s growing love of excess, “banqueting after supper and drinking much, specially wine.” He urged people to reduce their meat intake, particularly in summer, and attributed a rash of hitherto unknown illnesses to England’s gluttony. In particular, he noticed an alarming increase in cases of the rheums, an energy-sapping disease of the mucous glands whose symptoms were obvious to all: “wit dull; much superfluities, sleep much and dull.”
The problem that physicians faced was finding a cure that would be acceptable to the gorging gluttons of the court. Elizabethan medicine was still extremely primitive. Most remedies hinged on the theory of “humours” or bodily fluids. The body was believed to contain four humours, and the balance of these determined the character
and temper of the individual. Since gluttony and the rheums made the head more watery, the obvious cure (short of eating less) was to ingest something hot and dry, thereby bringing the humours back into balance. But what no one had yet discovered was a suitable hot and dry substance.
Harriot chastises the settlers for their obsession with “gluttonnye.” He said the simple fare of the Indians—fish and maize—was the reason why they were “verye longe lived.”
It was here that Harriot felt he had something to contribute—a substance so efficacious that he believed it could be the saving of Ralegh’s American colony. “There is an herbe which is sowed apart, by itselfe,” he wrote, “and is called by the inhabitants,
uppowac
. In the West Indies it hath divers names, according to the severall places and countreys where it groweth and is used: the Spaniardes generally call it tobacco.”
What made tobacco particularly effective was the manner in which it was consumed. Unlike most herbal remedies, which were infused in water or wine, tobacco was inhaled directly into the lungs, a novel procedure that was said to bring immediate relief.
“The leaves thereof being dried and brought into pouder,” explains Harriot, “they [the Indians] use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it thorough pipes made of claie, into their stomacke and heade.” The effects were quite extraordinary, both in the speed with which the smoke took effect and in the herb’s healing properties. “It purgeth superfluous fleame and other grosse humors, [and] openeth all the pores and passages of the body.” Harriot added that regular smokers were the most likely to be blessed with a good constitution: “their bodies are notably preserved in health, and know not many greevous diseases wherewithall wee in England are oftentimes afflicted.”
His extraordinary claims for the efficacy of tobacco were not altogether new. More than two decades previously, an adventurer accompanying one of Sir John Hawkins’s slave-trading voyages had noticed the Indians smoking tobacco and learned that it “causeth water and phlegm to void from their stomachs.” Several of London’s rheumatic physicians had managed to lay their hands on some tobacco, and after smoking themselves into a stupor, they concluded that it was indeed a remarkable drug. But it was far too expensive to catch on, and it was also difficult to acquire, since any consignment had to pass first through the hands of numerous Spanish middlemen.
Harriot quickly realised that tobacco could prove the saviour of Ralegh’s colony, if only he could make smoking a popular pastime. His motives were not purely cynical, since he himself was already a convert. “We, ourselves, during the time we were there used to suck it after their maner, as also since our returne, and have found in manie rare and wonderfull experiments of the vertues thereof; of which the relation woulde require a volume by itselfe.” Harriot himself did not have the time to write such a book, but he was able to point his readers to the work of the Spaniard Nicholas Monades, whose
Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde
had recently become available in English translation.
Monades had devoted time and effort to conducting tobacco
experiments on sick patients, with results that were little short of spectacular. He claimed that the drug provided an instant cure for numerous ailments, including chilblains, dropsy, and constipation. He particularly recommended it for pregnant women and young children, claiming that a moderate use of the weed “doth take awaie their naughtie breathyng and it doth make that thei goe to the stoole.” For worms, “it killeth them”; for aching joints, “it maketh a marveilous woorke”; and for swellings, “it dooeth disolve and undoe them.” The Spaniard had even experimented on patients suffering from festering and cankered wounds; on every occasion, the results had proved startling.
“I sawe a manne that had certaine old sores in his nose whereby he did caste out from hym muche matter,” he wrote, “and daily did rotte and canker inwardes.” Monades’s solution was to apply tobacco juice to the affected areas, which, to his amazement, took immediate effect. The patient “did caste out from hym more than twentie little wormes, and afterwarde a fewe more, untill that he remained cleane of them.” Even Monades was astonished, claiming that “if he had tarried any longer, I thinke that there had remained nothyng of his nose, but all had been eaten awaie.”
Many of his cures involved chewing the leaves or drinking tobacco cordials; he recommended smoking the herb only for dropsy and a few other ailments. This was a complex procedure in which the smoker first had to sit with his head covered with a heavy blanket. Then the tobacco was “caste on a chaffying dishe of coales to bee burned,” and the patient was told to suck “through a tonnell or cane.” Monades also recommended tobacco for insomniacs, advising that it be taken on a daily basis. Heavy smokers, he declared, slept soundly and “remaine as dedde people … thei bee so eased in suche sorte that when thei bee awakened of their slepe, thei remaine without wearinesse … and be muche the lustier.”
Ralph Lane and his settlers had eagerly adopted the Indian habit of smoking. When they returned to England, they “brought pipes with them, to drink the smoake of tobacco.” It was a novelty that
found instant popularity among courtiers. According to an early English book on tobacco, “since that time, the use of drinking tobacco hath so much prevailed all England over, especially among the courtiers, that they have caused many such like pipes to be made to drink tobacco with.”
One of the most enthusiastic smokers was Sir Walter Ralegh, who loved the rarity and exotic nature of the substance. The fact that it was used by the Indians in their wild, ritualistic dances only enhanced its darkly romantic appeal, and he delighted in Harriot’s account of their smoking sessions, which were accompanied by “strange gestures, stamping, sometime dauncing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, and staring up into the heavens, uttering therewithal and chattering strange words and noises.” It was not long before Ralegh had persuaded more and more of his fellow courtiers to take up smoking, a habit they adopted with gusto. Most smoked pipes made of “a walnutshell and a straw,” but Ralegh’s was altogether more extravagant—a chiselled silver bowl with a long and elegant stem.

Other books

Plaid to the Bone by Mia Marlowe
Kisses and Revenge by Riser, Cherron
The Hidden Summer by Gin Phillips
Wired (Skinned, Book 3) by Robin Wasserman
Only Us by Susan Mallery
The Promise of Paradise by Boniface, Allie
The Rogue Retrieval by Dan Koboldt