Do consider the following excerpt and source: https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/exactly-new-englands-indian-population-decimated/
Still, the Indian population didn’t begin its demise until the Europeans arrived in the 16th century. About 60,000 Indians lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut at the beginning of the 17th century, according to Sherburne Cook. Maine had a robust population of Abenaki tribes. According to some estimates, Maine had more than 20,000 Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy Indians. A century later, New England’s Indian population began to disappear. Some tribes were already extinct. This is how the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population. INDIAN POPULATION BEFORE THE PILGRIMS The seeds of the Indians’ destruction were planted more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began even before English and French explorers showed up at the turn of the 16th century. In 1504, a French vessel was documented fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Portuguese fishermen arrived two years later. By 1519, a hundred European ships made round trips to the Grand Banks. The first tourist cruise to North America sailed from London in 1536, but food ran short and many died. The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague. Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans, were devastated by a typhus epidemic in 1586. Other diseases brought the Passamaquoddy population to 4,000 from 20,000. THE 1616 PLAGUE In 1616, a terrible plaque swept the Massachusetts coast, wreaking the most devastation north of Boston. It’s not clear what it was – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague. Whatever it was, it was terrifying. So much of the Indian population died there weren’t enough left to bury the dead. English colonist Thomas Morton described the heaps of dead Indians ‘a new found Golgotha.’ As many as 90 percent of the 4,500 Indians of the Massachusetts tribe perished. The disease cleared the Boston Harbor islands of inhabitants. English explorer John Smith had visited New England before the plague in 1614. He returned eight years later, and what he saw shocked him. “God had laid this country open for us,” he wrote. “Where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found.” Disease persisted among the Massachusetts from 1620 to 1630. When smallpox struck in 1633, it left only about 750 and obliterated entire villages. The colonists herded the Massachusetts who survived into Christian villages of ‘praying Indians.’ Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote ‘about this time [1631] the Indians began to be quarrelsome touching the Bounds of the Land which they had sold to the English, but God ended the Controversy by sending the Smallpox amongst the Indians of Saugust, who were before that time exceeding numerous.’ Along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, Mohawk raids had already weakened the Pennacook Indians when the 1616 plague arrived. It killed three out of four Pennacooks. That same plague almost completely obliterated two other Pennacook tribes in Massachusetts, the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem. On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 4:52 PM Chris Goldsbury <[email protected]> wrote: > North east. I’ll dig up the article > > Typos courtesy of auto spell. > > On Aug 26, 2020, at 4:24 PM, Peter Turner <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I'm surprised to learn that the native tribes on the east coast were wiped > out by diseases imported by trappers before European settlers arrived. I > would have thought that the trappers who brought diseases that wiped out > the native population would have been Europeans themselves. Perhaps the > "Indians" who the European settlers encountered when they arrived were > actually trappers in disguise. > > St. Augustine, a city in Florida, has been in continual occupation since > its founding in 1565. It was founded by Spanish settlers, sent by the same > government that sent Columbus and enslaved native people we often call > Indians. If we want to define a "project" by the modern boundaries drawn > by Europeans, we miss the point: Europeans came to the Americas and > enslaved "Indians" before they imported slaves from Africa. All slavery is > bad, and all victims of it deserve recognition for that. And the last time > I looked, St. Augustine is part of the U.S. > > If Chris' thesis were to reflect actual history, or even what has been > purported to be history by the racist historians we learned from in school, > we would have a European settler population who arrived to find no native > population. We have a slogan for that thesis, one that has been > popularized by European settlers in South Africa and Palestine: "A land > without a people for a people without a land". > > Sorry, I don't buy it. Not the slogan, not the re-write of history, and > not the dismissal of the plight of native people. The 1619 Project's > thesis that the U.S. revolution was largely, or even mostly, about the > perpetuation of slavery is an important correction to our country's myopic > vision of its self-manufactured greatness. But for one representative of > one of the groups victimized by slavery to implicitly ignore another > group's genocide, including slavery, is simply wrong. > > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#889): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/889 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76437371/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
