Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans and Europeans, after they had come to know the variety of indigenous tribes of North America, were perplexed by the question of their origins. The seventeenth-century Puritan clergyman Roger Williams argued that the Indians had remarkable similarities to the Hebrews of the Old Testament—but how these Hebrews would have migrated to America was perplexing. The English historian William Robertson believed that the ancient Phoenicians had thousands of years ago visited an America already inhabited by native peoples; but when and from where had they come?. The greatest eighteenth-century America scientist, Thomas Jefferson, argued that the Indians of America had so many similarities to the peoples of northeast Asia that the latter must have migrated to America in the distant past. The American historian, scientist, and clergyman Jeremy Belknap believed that America’s peopling was comparatively recent, after the death of Christ. His reasoning was based on the Gospel of Matthew of the New Testament, at the end of which, after the crucifixion and resurrection, Christ told his disciples to bring the Gospel to all nations of the world. Belknap wrote in 1782: “the Lord of heaven and earth, . . . He who made and governs the whole world in the most extensive sense, who gave his life a ransom for all, . . . [gave] commission to his apostles . . . to go and disciple all nations, to go into the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature, in order to accomplish the great design of his death and resurrection.” But the indigenous peoples of America had never heard of Christ, His life and message: “If it was necessary that the Gospel should be thus universally published at that time and by that set of men, who were endowed with peculiar powers for the purpose, why was not the gospel at that time and by those men brought into America? Should it be said that America was unknown to the Apostles, it may be answered that it was not unknown to Him who sent them. . . . Why were not even miracles wrought to show the Apostles the way? Why were they not inspired with the knowledge of the magnetic needle, and with the same penetration which Columbus discovered in reasoning out the probability of another continent? . . . Some of Belknap’s contemporaries believed that the Apostles had come to America; but, Belknap argued, there was no evidence of awareness of Christianity in the religious beliefs of the inhabitants first contacted by the Europeans during and after Columbus’s voyage. Belknap could not reconcile the evidence of Indian ignorance of the Gospel with Christ’s commission to His disciples. He therefore concluded “that America was not then peopled. If this be admitted, all the difficulties at once vanish, and though it be not capable of demonstration, yet there are appearances which render it probable that the population of America is an event which has taken place within the Christian era.”

               In light of what we know today about the origins of indigenous peoples in America, Belknap’s argument seems absurd. But at his time, during the eighteenth century, all sorts of theories were being considered to explain the origins of the American Indians and their uncertain relationship with Christianity. Alternatives to Belknap’s implausible argument that America was not inhabited until after Christ’s death, hence it was not part of the Great Commission, included the argument that Christianity (or at least Judaism and the concepts of Yahweh and Messiah) had come to America by means of the ancestors of the Indians, the Lost Tribe of Israel, so actually had been included in the Great Commission; An advocate of this point of view was the founder of Rhode Island, the Puritan minister Roger Williams. Williams had no doubt that Christ, the all-knowing Son of the Father, knew that His Great Commission was to be fulfilled everywhere in the world, and much sooner than the fifteenth century after His death. Williams, who befriended the Indians of Rhode Island, published a study of the American Indian, A Key into the Language of America, in 1643. One section, titled “Of Indians, their Originall and Descent,” includes the following hypothesis about their origins in America:

From Adam and Noah that they spring, it is granted on all hands. But for their later Descent, and whence they came into those parts, it seemes as hard to finde, as to finde the Wellhead of some fresh Streame, which running many miles out of the Countrey to the salt Ocean, hath met with many mixing Streames by the way. They say themselves, that they have sprung and growne up in that very place, like the very trees of the Wildernesse. . . .

Wise and Judicious men, with whom I have discoursed, maintaine their Originall to be Northward from Tartaria [China]. . . .

Other opinions I could number up: under favour I shall present (not mine opinion, but) my Observations to the judgement of the Wise.

First, others (and my selfe) have conceived some of their words to hold affinities with the Hebrew. Secondly, they constantly annoint their heads as the Jewes did. Thirdly, they give Dowries for their wives, as the Jewes did. Fourthly (and which I have not so observed amongst other Nations as amongst the Jewes, and these🙂 they constantly separate their Women (during the time of their monthly sicknesse) in a little house along by themselves foure or five dayes, and hold it an Irreligious thing for either Father or Husband or any Male to come neere them. They have often asked me if it bee so with women of other Nations, and whether they are so separated: and for their practice they plead Nature and Tradition. Yet again I have found a greater Affinity of their Language with the Greek Tongue. . . .

They have many strange Relations of one Wétucks, a man that wrought great Miracles amongst them, and walking upon the waters, &c. with some kind of broken Resemblance to the Sonne of God. . . .

I dare not conjecture in these Uncertainties, I believe they are lost, and yet hope (in the Lords holy season) some of the wildest of them shall be found to share in the blood of the Son of God.

               The theological context in which Belknap and Williams wrote had developed over the course of sixteen centuries, during which theologians beginning with Paul of Tarsus, the first Apostle, tried to understand the significance of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The theology of the Old Testament and New Testament, in brief, is the theology of human sin and redemption, that humans, symbolized by Adam and Eve, had disobeyed God and required forgiveness and redemption in the person of Jesus Christ. Some European thinkers, after Columbus’s discovery of the Indians, argued that in the Great Commission Christ was speaking only about the Fallen, that is, those who inherited the original sin of Adam and Eve; perhaps the Indians were not part of the Fallen. More to the point was the question asked by churchmen: were these people saved by Christ? Writers had for centuries discussed in detail the outlines of salvation provided in the New Testament. One of the more powerful writers was the fourth century theologian, Augustine of Hippo, whose book, City of God, provided a powerful discussion of the nature of human society in light of God’s overwhelming will. Augustine noted that any human society, primitive or not, is the City of Man, where sin, evil, and suffering reign. The City of Man is doomed to destruction. In contrast is the City of God, the heavenly or eternal city of timelessness where God reigns and humans hope to go upon death. The City of God is sinless. According to this way of thinking, the indigenous peoples of America were akin to the peoples of Europe in their mutual sin, awaiting the redemption of Christ so to join Him in the Heavenly City. The logic of Augustine’s City of God was that, if the peoples of America had hitherto been omitted in the Great Commission, it was therefore time to include them.

               At the same time that theologians were debating the relationship of the American Indian to the Great Commission, more secular historians were debating whether or not the Indians were truly indigenous peoples; if not, where did they come from? and when and how did peoples of the Old World (Europe, Asia, Africa) come in contact with them?

               From the beginning, Europeans and Americans assumed that the indigenous peoples of America were indigenous in so far as they came to America long before recorded memory. The Christian worldview dominated thought up through the nineteenth century, and Christianity taught, based on the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, that all humans are descended from one act of the special creation of God in the Garden of Eden. Since all humans derived ultimately from Adam and Eve, their descendants had spread from the Garden, in Mesopotamia, throughout Asia, to Africa, to Europe, and clearly to America as well. As it is written in the New Testament book of Acts (17, 26-27): “And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him.” The American Indians had to have come to America from another place—otherwise Scripture would be incorrect. So from where, then, did the Indians derive? There were possibilities from all three of the Old World continents. Some thinkers believed that an ancient Welsh explorer, Madoc, came to American long ago, and the Indians were descended from the Welsh. Even up to the 1800s explorers tried to find evidence of the Welsh Indians. Other thinkers favored the theory that one of the sons of Noah, or one of the sons of Jacob, might have led the Israelites to America. Then there were those who believed that the ancient Phoenicians sailed to America by way of their western Mediterranean colony Carthage in North Africa. Ancient Greek and Roman writers had recorded accounts of Phoenician sailors in the Atlantic Ocean and Carthaginian sailors discovering a giant island far west in the Atlantic. Some fanciful thinkers considered this island to be Atlantis, the ancient civilization that according to legend was swallowed up by the sea, and which was the namesake of the great ocean. Or, perhaps Atlantis was in fact America. The most reasonable argument was that the Indians were descended from the ancient Tartars, as they were called, that is, the ancient Chinese. Besides the similarities of physiognomy, hair, and stature, it seemed plausible that the people of ancient Siberia could have made the crossing of the Bering Sea and journeyed into America. The first advocate of this point of view was Jose de Acosta, who wrote The Natural and Moral History of the Indies in 1590. Others took up this argument, notably the greatest eighteenth-century American scientist, Thomas Jefferson, who in his Notes on Virginia, written originally in French in 1782,  includes the following passage:

Great question has arisen from whence came those aboriginal inhabitants of America? Discoveries, long ago made, were sufficient to shew that a passage from Europe to America was always practicable, even to the imperfect navigation of ancient times. In going from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Groenland, from Groenland to Labrador, the first traject is the widest: and this having been practiced from the earliest times of which we have any account of that part of the earth, it is not difficult to suppose that the subsequent trajects may have been sometimes passed. Again, the late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamschatka to California, have proved that, if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow streight. So that from this side also, inhabitants may have passed into America: and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former: excepting indeed the Eskimaux, who, from the same circumstance of resemblance, and from identity of language, must be derived from the Groenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent. A knowledge of their several languages would be the most certain evidence of their derivation which could be referred to. How many ages have elapsed since the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss, the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes have separated from their common stock? Yet how many more must elapse before the proofs of their common origin, which exist in their several languages, will disappear? It is to be lamented, then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke. Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North and South America, preserving their appellations of the most common objects in nature, of those which must be present to every national barbarous or civilized, with the inflections of their nouns and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, and these deposited in all the public libraries, it would furnish opportunities to those skilled in the languages of the old world to compare them with these, now, or at any future time, and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.

               Jefferson’s supposition that the American Indians were not indigenous to America, rather were migrants from northeast Asia and, perhaps, mariners from Asia or elsewhere, finds support among modern archeologists, who place the origin of the Indians in America at between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago. According to this view, migrants by land followed herds of the mastodon from Siberia across a land bridge now covered by the Bering Strait to Alaska, then proceeded south, over the millennia spreading throughout North, Central, and South America, forming distinctive cultures.

               The debate over the origins of the Indians in America and how their distinctive cultures have developed continues among scholars to the present day. Modern scholars differ in their explanations for the emergence of culture in America. Some believe it is indigenous, others that it is borrowed. Isolationists argue that American culture is indigenous, that cultures worldwide emerge in isolation through parallel development. For example, the reason why many world cultures built pyramids was because of the human attempt to reach the sky, to approach the divine: a universal idea that finds concrete realization in the monumental architecture of many cultures. Some isolationists embrace the theories of Carl Jung, that there is a shared universal human consciousness that would explain how humans living in isolation from one-another can still have the same ideas. Diffusionists, however, believe that cultural characteristics diffuse from one culture to another. For example, the idea of the pyramid began at ancient Iraq, (the mastaba or primitive pyramid), spread to Egypt: (the same mastaba, now more sophisticated), then to India (Harappan step pyramids), and finally to America, where step pyramids are found throughout the cultures of Central America. Norwegian archeologist Thor Heyerdahl made several dramatic attempts to prove the diffusion of cultures. He built several boats along the lines of ancient models and made successful attempts at crossing the Pacific and the Atlantic. Heyerdahl argued that the indirect evidence of his voyages supported the theory that ancient Peruvians could have sailed across the Pacific from South America to South Pacific Islands, and that ancient Egyptians could have sailed west across the Atlantic to America.

               Heyerdahl, in Early Man and the Ocean, argues that ancient peoples worldwide were much greater mariners than historians have otherwise suspected. The earth’s oceans have prevailing winds and currents that will take any craft under sail, or even adrift, in a set direction—west across the southern Pacific if the mariner launches off of the coast of Chile; northeast toward the Aleutian Islands if the mariner begins off of the coast of northeast Asia; west toward the Caribbean if the mariner launches off of the coast of northwest Africa. To support this theory, Heyerdahl in 1947 built a raft, christened the Kon Tiki after an ancient Peruvian god, made of balsa wood from the forests of Peru, and set sail west from Peru in the southern Pacific, eventually reaching the islands of Polynesia. In 1969 and 1970 Heyerdahl constructed two ships from papyrus, the tall reed that grows along the Nile and other rivers of the Middle East. He discovered archeological evidence that ancient peoples constructed sea-going vessels of papyrus, and he decided to try it out. In 1970 Heyerdahl and a small crew successfully sailed such a reed ship, christened the Ra after the Egyptian sun god, from northwest Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Heyerdahl was careful in his claims for the visits of ancient Africans and Asians to ancient America. Other diffusionists have made more extravagant claims. Barry Fell, in America B.C. and Bronze Age America, argued that throughout America there are archeological sites of the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, ancient Phoenicians, and ancient Egyptians. The Irish legend of a Catholic monk, St. Brendan, setting sail for paradise across the ocean west of Ireland has spawned attempts to recreate his voyage to America. There is a tourist site in New Hampshire that allows the credulous visitor to wander the ruins of ancient Irish buildings that are thirteen to fourteen hundred years old. The ancient Greek mariner Pytheas of Massilia set sail around 300 BCE west through the Strait of Gibraltar and north along the European coast to Britain to trade in tin. But he apparently explored even further, to a distant land called Thule, which could have been Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, or even further west. The ancient Carthaginians, following the great seafaring traditions of the Phoenicians (Carthage was a colony of Phoenicia, founded about 1000 BCE) explored the Atlantic; one story has it that Carthaginian mariners came to a large island with great rivers, that unfortunately they refused to explore further. Perhaps ancient Egyptian mariners did sail to America four thousand years ago followed by the Carthaginians twenty-six hundred years ago and the Greeks three hundred years later. But if so, what impact did they have on the native peoples? Did they return to Africa, Asia, and Europe with knowledge gained from their experiences in America?

               To be sure, whoever the first voyagers were to cross the Atlantic or Pacific to America found a land already inhabited and cultivated, and successful societies built and thriving. Native American communities extended throughout the North American continent. Along the east coast south of the St. Lawrence River, the natives were divided into many tribes that spoke different dialects that were all part of the Algonquian language. Up the St. Lawrence, and west to the Appalachian Mountains and the trans-Appalachian region to the Mississippi River, tribes spoke dialects of the Iroquoian and Siouan languages. Further south, from the mid-Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, tribes were part of the Muskogean language family. West of the Mississippi River, in the Great Plains, were Cadoan and Siouan language groups. In all of these regions, the Native Americans lived off of the land through hunting, gathering, and agriculture. They typically lived in modest communities in wooden and skin homes. They had a strong community ethos yet each tribe was fiercely independent.

The first contacts between European explorers and Native American tribes for which we have recorded evidence were sometimes peaceful, othertimes warlike, but always unequal due to the superior technology of the explorers from across the Atlantic. Whereas Native American culture and society was based on a comparatively primitive technology of tools and weapons fabricated from stone, wood, and animal bones, Europeans had long before discovered metallurgy, and by the second millennium CE produced sophisticated tools and weapons out of a variety of different elements, particularly iron, copper, and tin. Whereas Native Americans were at least part of the time nomadic, living in loosely structured tribes dominated typically by warriors, Europeans lived in settled communities with a patriarchal government with a citizenry with some freedoms and a growing sense of equality.

North American Indian tribes did not independently invent writing; as a result, Native American historical experiences are often known to us today through the recording of their customs, habits, stories, and experiences by means of outside observers: explorers, adventurers, scientists, and missionaries who made contact with and traveled among or lived with the native peoples. Examples are numerous of these European and American sources of information about the American Indians. In this and subsequent chapters, we will sample a variety of sources providing firsthand accounts of a variety of native peoples. The sources range in quality from being excellently written and scientifically detached to being poorly written and biased against Indians. The examples provided in the narrative that follows mirrors, chronologically, the exploration and colonization of America by Europeans beginning with the Vikings around 1000 CE.

               The explorations of the Vikings or Norse from Scandinavia about 1000 AD provide the first recorded evidence of Europeans crossing the Atlantic and exploring America. According to the Vinland Sagas, stories told for centuries of the Viking colonization of a land that they called Vinland (which could mean either land of wine, land of grapes, land of vine, or land of grain), one Erik the Red, a criminal from Iceland who established a colony in Greenland, had a son Leif (the Lucky), who crossed the Atlantic from Greenland to Baffin Island (Canada) becoming the first known European to visit America. The Vinland Sagas discuss subsequent voyages of the Norse to this new land. For many years scholars assumed that the Vinland Sagas were based on legend and myth, until in the early 1960s Helge Instad, a Norwegian archeologist, discovered the remains of a Viking settlement at L’Anse de Meadows, Newfoundland (northern tip of Newfoundland). Did the Vikings explore other parts of North America? Possibilities include the St. Lawrence River upstream to the Great Lakes, and the bays of the Maine coast. Viking explorers would have found the rivers of the St. Lawrence watershed as well as the many rocky inlets of the Maine coast similar to Scandinavian coastal and inland waters. Viking ships had a single mast with a square sail to propel it before the wind and oars for navigation and extra propulsion against the wind or when going upstream. Ships had shallow drafts, excellent for exploring narrow rivers and intricate bays, such as along the Maine coast. The only concrete evidence of a Viking presence centuries ago in Maine is a silver coin dating from the eleventh century found at Naskeag Point, a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic at Penobscot Bay. The environs of the Bay, with its many islands and rocky points, would feel like home to the transplanted Scandinavians. As Naskeag Point was home to generations of Abenaki, the coin might have belonged to a native who acquired it by trade originating from the Norse settlements of Newfoundland. There are, moreover, throughout America museums and parks with runestones, runic being the writing script of the Vikings. A well-known example is the Kensington Stone in Minnesota.

The geographical and chronological extent of Viking settlements in North America are unknown; however, wherever they did establish camps and communities, they made contact, often violent, with the native peoples, whom the Vikings called, derisively, Skraelings—in Newfoundland these were either the Beothuk or Mi’kmaq tribe. One of the Vinland Sagas, the Graenlendinga Saga, describes a brief but violent conflict between the Vikings under one Thorvald and the natives, who attacked in “skin boats,” canoes made of moose hide. Both sides suffered losses. Another saga tells the story of Thorfinn Karlsefni’s voyage to Vinland, during which he established trade with the Indians, who offered skins in return for cows milk. Eirik’s Saga provides more details of Karlsefni’s voyage, including an account of the approach of numerous Indians in skin boats: “the men in them were waving sticks which made a noise like flails, and the motion was sunwise [clockwise].” The Vikings took the waving of these rattlesticks as “a token of peace,” and approached the natives with a white shield. The Indians “rowed towards them and stared at them in amazement as they came ashore. They were small and evil-looking, and their hair was coarse; they had large eyes and broad cheekbones. They stayed there for a while, marveling, and then rowed away south round the headland.” Later they returned to trade, giving up skins in return for the red cloth of the Vikings. Still later they arrived in numerous skin boats, this time waving their sticks in a counter-clockwise fashion and screaming loudly, which the Vikings correctly interpreted as a war cry. The two sides came to blows. The natives attacked with small ballistic weapons: the Vikings “saw them hoist a large sphere on a pole; it was dark blue in colour. It came flying in over the heads of [the Vikings] and made an ugly din when it struck the ground. They also used arrows and other projectiles with sharp flint heads. At one point after the battle, the Vikings came upon “five Skraelings clad in skins, asleep; beside them were containers full of deer-marrow mixed with blood.” The Vikings “reckoned that these five must be outlaws, and killed them.” The marrow and blood was probably pemmican, meat mixed with marrow used by hunters on long hunts. The Vikings also captured five Indians: a bearded man, two women, and two boys; the man and women escaped, but the boys were adopted by the Vikings, baptized, taught the Icelandic language, and encouraged to tell about their culture. The boys told the Vikings that their people had “no houses” but “lived in caves or holes in the ground.”

               The Vinland Sagas imply but are not explicitly detailed about the eventual abandonment of their American colonies by the Vikings. The Viking discovery of Vinland was well-known in Iceland and Scandinavia but apparently not further west and south in England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. By the time Columbus developed his idea of sailing west across the Atlantic to China, it appeared to him and the Europeans to whom he conveyed it as a new idea. There is some evidence that Columbus heard of Vinland on voyages he made to England and Scandinavia, but if he did hear of the Viking voyages, such awareness was not recorded, and whether or not it influenced his developing ideas of exploration is not known.

               Columbus sailed at a time when European explorers of the fifteenth century were in quest of new trade routes to Asia (the East Indies). To discover a new route to Cathaia (which is what Marco Polo called China), the Portuguese (King John II) sponsored several exploring voyages from Portugal south down the coast of Africa. Portuguese sailor Bartholomew Dias in 1488 reached the Cape of Good Hope, proving wrong the belief of ancient geographers that Africa is landlocked; Dias discovered that the continent is surrounded by oceans, and by extension there is more water on the earth’s surface than hitherto recognized. Another Portuguese sailor, Vasco da Gama, in 1497 rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed through the Indian Ocean to India, founding a Portuguese colony there. Columbus, who was inspired by the scientific and exploring work of the Portuguese, was born in Genoa in 1451, went to sea as a boy, but had no formal education. He was a ship captain by age 20. Self-taught, Columbus learned a variety of languages, including Latin, and techniques of cartography. During his career, Columbus captained ships that explored the Atlantic down to the Gulf of Guinea, and north as far as Thule (so called by the Europeans; perhaps Scandinavia, Iceland, or Greenland). Living in Portugal in the 1580s, he developed his idea of the “Enterprise of the Indies,” a plan to sail west from Europe to reach Asia. He tried to sell this plan to Italian princes, and the kings of Portugal, Spain, France, and England. Columbus argued (erroneously) that geographic knowledge indicates that the quickest and most efficient way to get to Cathaia is to sail directly west from Spain with the Trade Winds and in two months time the ship should reach Asia. After repeated attempts, Columbus finally convinced Queen Isabella of Spain to support his voyage. Columbus set sail with three ships in August 1492. He made landfall in the Bahamas, Oct 12, 1492. In all, Columbus made four voyages (1492-93, 1493-96, 1498-1500, 1502-1504), and was the first known European to discover the islands of the Caribbean, the coast of South America, and the coast of Central America. Columbus never sailed along the coast of North America. His journals of his voyages describe in detail what he saw and the impressions he had of the native peoples.