The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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refer to an American Indian here, emphasizes Othello’s gullibility in the face of Iago’s manipulation.17 Stressing his tendency to trust appearance over deeper truth, these lines also link prodigality to naïveté. Othello does not really trade; rather, he throws his treasure away. Instead of focusing on a desire for what glitters, this reference emphasizes a prerequisite eagerness to discard what is more valuable than it seems. Indians toss away pearls because they do not understand their value. Othello, likewise, has tossed away the love of his wife because he was made to distrust its authenticity. The absence of any trade, even for glass, heightens his suicidal sense of loss.
More than a century later Eliza Haywood echoed Shakespeare’s romantic inflection of this trope in The City Jilt (1726), a narrative of love betrayed by greed. Near the end of this story the callous Melladore, who had seduced and then abandoned the heroine Glicera so that he could marry a wealthier woman, finds that Glicera has obtained ownership of the deed to his now bankrupt estate. Throwing himself on her mercy, Melladore writes, “Like the foolish Indians, I have barter’d Gold for Glass, exchang’d the best for one of the vilest that ever disgraced the name of Woman.”18 Although Melladore describes himself as bartering rather than discarding a treasure, the emphasis on poor discernment echoes Othello’s use of this trope. Like Othello, he has judged badly in matters of love, failing to see the value of true gold.
Besides asserting the cost of ignorance, the trope of trade also could suggest the exploitation of innocence. This meaning applied especially when intangible resources were balanced against material ones. John Milton used this image at the beginning of the Civil War in The Reason of Church Government Urg’d against Prelaty (1642). In an autobiographical interlude he pondered the moral burdens that accompany the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, justifying his criticism of England’s bishops as a duty placed on him by the privilege of his education. Those who have received gifts of knowledge should share them, he argued, not hoard them while they sell false treasures at a high price. This autobiographical defense enhanced his attack on the Church of England, because he then contrasted his own generosity with episcopal greed. England’s church hierarchy had failed to meet its duty to the intellectually impoverished, exploiting the common people just as merchants cheat “poor Indians” with cheap trinkets. Expanding on the “burden” of the educated, Milton wrote:
And that which aggravates the burden more is that (having received amongst his allotted parcels certain precious truths of such an orient lustre as no diamond can equal, which nevertheless he has in charge to put off at any cheap rate, yea for nothing to them that will) the great merchants of this world, fearing that this course would soon discover and disgrace the false glitter of their deceitful wares wherewith they abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses, practise by all means how they may suppress the venting of such rarities, and such a cheapness as would undo them, and turn their trash upon their hands. Therefore by gratifying the corrupt desires of men in fleshly doctrines, they stir them up to persecute with hatred and contempt all those that seek to bear themselves uprightly in this their spiritual factory.19
Overlapping images of global commerce become a vehicle of Puritan attack in Milton’s text. While cheating “poor Indians” by selling them glittering trash, England’s bishops have hoarded the treasures entrusted to them by God, those truths of “orient lustre” that they were supposed to give away. Europe’s exploitation of other lands becomes a symbol of England’s exploitation by its church.
As he applied this trope to the domestic realm, Milton added a spiritual dimension. The suggestion of simony, the selling of religious benefits for material gain, created an intersection between axes of spiritual and material worth. Through this accusation Milton made explicit Columbus’s implied vision of an intercontinental reciprocity involving a payment of Christianity for gold, compensating for the false currency of glass. The “spiritual factory,” the same term Joseph Caryl used thirteen years later to advertise America as the place where the English convert Indians, here condemned England’s ecclesiastical corruption through analogy with the cheating of Indians.20
Other seventeenth-century writers used the trope in similar ways. Robert Boyle, best known for his scientific work, invoked this image in his moral writings. “The Aretology” (1645) one of his (until recently) unpublished essays, notes that “Vertu by an aduantagious Exchange for vs, serves her followers as the [silly] Indians do our Mariners, giuing them for Beads and Whistles and Gugaws, precious wares and substantiall meat.”21 Rather than taking the perspective of the cheated Indians, Boyle focused on the “aduantagious Exchange” that the virtuous enjoy for their avoidance of vice, just as European sailors gain from trades with Indians. The essay “Of Felicity” (1646), by the Interregnum writer John Hall, also used the trope of gold for glass to mourn the abandonment of spiritual happiness for material gain: “We have [felicity] brought home to our own doores; … [T]hose happy soules that claspe hold of it…. They can set a true estimation of those sublunarie things, that others are contented so to overbuy, more Sottish then the Barbarous Indians to exchange Gold for Glasse.”22 As with Othello and The City Jilt, Hall’s reference to Indians signifies a poor bargain prompted by the duplicity of appearance. Like Boyle and Milton, he harnessed a moral prescription to the image of the duped Indian, warning his readers not to make an equally poor bargain.
Clearly a variety of seventeenth-century writings replicated Columbus’s depiction of naive Indians exchanging their treasures for the trash of those who would become their conquerors. In their appropriation of this trope they took for granted the distinction between real and apparent worth suggested by exchange. That is, the allusion to Indians and trade conveyed the supremacy not only of reality over appearance, but also of the intangible—whether romantic or moral—over the quantifiable. These texts also took for granted the idea that exchange was to the detriment of Indians.
Ironically, this interpretation did not apply to the texts that claimed to be most interested in the welfare of Indians: missionary writings. While they also adopted the trope of gold for glass, they realigned the meanings Columbus had assigned to it by diminishing the real worth of gold in the face of spiritual goods. This change makes sense when we consider the delicate task these writers faced: raising funds to convert Indians by soliciting many of the very people gaining wealth from the exploitation of Indians. This adjustment made it possible to invoke a sense of moral obligation while presenting a model of fair exchange that would not alienate an English or British audience. Understandable though their motives were, the writers of these texts played an important role in developing a rhetorical justification for colonialism. What Columbus took as an example of exploitation that he had rectified to make possible the Indians’ acceptance of Christianity, British missionaries later presented as an emblem of salvation.
“First Fruits”: The Husbandry of Souls
Because it conveyed that the British were giving something valuable to America, the trope of husbandry was crucial to the interpretation of gold traded for glass in missionary writings. Husbandry already was a central Christian metaphor, and it became especially prominent in the seventeenth century. Besides suggesting the spread of the gospel, it conveyed the ordering and tending of the self. Both ideas were attractive ones in Protestant thought, with its emphasis on individual faith and moral accountability unmediated by priests. The pragmatic connotations of this trope also fit into the increasingly secular and financially saturated perspective of early modern Europe. As Richard Allestree noted in The Whole Duty of Man, a popular book of Anglican practical piety, “There is a husbandry of the soul, as well as of the estate.”23 Teaching its practitioners to tend the estate along with the soul, the notion of husbandry helped individuals operate virtuously within the world rather than separate from it.
This trope occupied a prominent position in the rhetoric of colonization because it validated the plantation model that English and Scottish settlers practiced. As Samuel Sewall wrote in the history of Puritan missionary work that prefaced his Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica (1697), “They who remove from one Land to another, there to dwell; that settlement of theirs is call’d a Plantation. Especially, when a Land, before rude and unfurnish’d, is by the New-comers replenished with usefull Arts, Vegetables, Animals.”24