exuberant tone and elaborate conceits of this passage suggest, English missionary projects sometimes enjoyed a richer existence in print than in reality. For many people in England, texts such as Caryl’s may have been the only outcome they would witness of their contributions to missionary work. As they offered a visible return on generosity and then sought more funds, descriptions like his superseded the activities of mission, and in this excess of representation re-created the worlds they described. Caryl himself never went to America, never encountered its natives, never experienced the difficulties of persuading them to abandon their own customs for alien beliefs. Unlike the writers of countless travel narratives, who claimed the authority of experience, he invented a land and its people from what he read, heard, and believed. While he presented a textually fabricated world to his readers, he compelled them to will a dramatic transformation of it.
These lines replicated England’s early colonial aspirations in miniature, linking the pursuit of material prosperity to spiritual growth and presenting Indian converts as the symbolic profits of both endeavors. Thomas Scanlon has noted, “In his characterization of the missionary enterprise as a mercantile adventure, Caryl accentuates the fact that the Indian discourse functioned as a commodity for England.”5 I would add that this depiction is positioned within a frame of agriculture and manufacture. Mission takes place first through metaphors of plantation, so that America is transformed into an orchard. Wild inhabitants of an uncultivated land, Indians become a “spirituall Garden,” the fruits of cultivation. The text then replaces gardens with gold, placing plantation within commerce. As Christ eats the garden’s “pleasant fruits,” images of these spiritual products are returned across the Atlantic, circulated among readers, and accepted as imported goods. The tone of the last sentence resembles a report to stockholders, promising a “Bill of many particulars,” as if it were a list of assets and expenses. Mission in America is made to suggest the accrual of English wealth.
Churches become orchards and factories, while mission becomes inseparable from commerce. The figure of the heathen, then Christian, Indian—cultivated, transported, and consumed—stands for the settlement and trade already undertaken by England. By focusing on the Indian, Caryl’s readers could visualize colonial settlement, follow paths of trade, and feel themselves to be benefactors and beneficiaries in this enterprise. The idea of the converted Indian made colonialism imaginatively possible. With a coyness worthy of modern advertising strategies, Caryl allured readers with a secular object that he then proclaimed they really did not want. He also offered them a spiritual object that he assumed their virtue must make them desire. This apparent disowning of greed merely brackets the real object he was selling: a sense of belonging, through shared desire and emotional response, to a transatlantic community.
Caryl was able to accomplish this rhetorical feat because of the way in which he drew on two of the tropes, or figures of speech, used most frequently in English missionary writings. These were the metaphors of husbandry—which described agriculture, thrift, and the careful management of the household—and trade. Both images have ample scriptural precursors, especially gospel parables about the talents, the sower, the vineyard, and the mustard seed. The combination of these images stressed the profitability of promoting Christian mission, even as it insisted that the English really cared about Indian souls. The vision of budding Indian converts in the newly cultivated wilderness must have been an appealing one to an audience that was emerging from a civil war and that had recently witnessed the execution of their king.
It also offered an important counter to the bloody images of Spanish conquest in America, with which anti-Spanish propaganda had made the English familiar.6 When he wrote, “Let the gaining of any of their souls to Christ … be more pretious in our eyes then the greatest gaine or return of Gold and Silver,” Caryl did not just contrast two objects of desire. He also alluded to the violence that made possible the wealth of the Spanish Empire. Gold leaves a trail of blood, he suggested, that orchard groves do not. If they valued Indian souls over gold, the English would prove their superiority to the Spanish. His comment was a moral caution against greed, but it was more emphatically a boast about English virtue.
One of the ironies of missionary writings, however, is that by adopting scriptural images to the scene of colonial encounter, these texts altered the point of those images, validating the same acquisitiveness they seemed to shun. This tension emerges in Caryl’s letter as he sells the idea of saving Indian souls through images of agricultural abundance and intercontinental trade. In particular, many missionary texts played a pivotal role in the development of a British imperial rhetoric by borrowing, and then rereading through the lens of scripture, a prominent scene of early modern travel writings. This scene was that of American gold traded for the glass and other trinkets offered to Indians by European travelers. First symbolizing the exploitation of colonized peoples, and then more generally the bilking of the powerless, this image came to signify the opposite of its original connotation. This change took place as the trope was combined with images of husbandry and applied to Christian conversion. It was this rhetorical shift that made possible the catastrophe wryly summarized by Vine Deloria: “It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land.”7
Several scholars have commented on the tendency of British missionaries to characterize their project as a mutually beneficial trade.8 This chapter charts a rhetorical history of this tendency, placing the missionaries’ descriptions in a broader discourse that begins with the Bible. Through their biblical allusions missionary writings transformed the trope of gold exchanged for glass into a sign, first, of Britain’s obligations to its colonies and, then, of the intangible but eternal rewards that conquest would bring to the conquered. Focusing on Paul’s comment in Romans 15:27 that “if the Gentiles have been made partakers of [the Jews’] spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things,” along with his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 9:11, “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?” these texts presented colonialism as a reciprocal circum-Atlantic exchange involving an endlessly replenished and exportable commodity: the prayers and pity of the British people. The piteous spectacle of Indians being cheated by Europeans, refracted through Paul’s description of a charitable collection and framed by images of husbandry, reconfigured the idea of intercontinental commerce. Seeking to convert the “poor Indians” of America, these texts inverted an image that had been used to condemn the exploitation of those Indians. On a rhetorical level, then, selling the idea of saving souls helped make possible the idea of selling Europe’s glass for America’s gold.
“They Bartered Like Idiots”: Early Modern Images of Indian Trade
It is well known that the missionary and imperial aspirations of early modern Europe were intertwined. Whether European desires to save the souls of America’s indigenous peoples were sincere or not, the public expression of those desires rationalized efforts to conquer those peoples and own the resources of their land. Columbus’s first descriptions of the islands upon which he had stumbled made this point clear. Emphasizing that the Taino Indians there “do not carry arms and do not know of them,” he suggested simultaneously that they would be easy to conquer and convert. “They ought to make good slaves,” he wrote, “for they are of quick intelligence since I notice that they are quick to repeat what is said to them, and I believe that they could very easily become Christians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of their own.”9 Besides their mimicry, paltry weaponry, and apparent lack of religion, one of the strongest signs of their pliability was their inability to negotiate a profitable trade. As Columbus noted in the same letter, the poignancy of the Indians’ overly generous bartering proved the ease with which Europe could rob or redeem these people: “They … give objects of great value for trifles, and content themselves with very little or nothing in return…. It even happened that a sailor received for a leather strap as much gold as was worth three golden nobles, and for things of more trifling value offered by our men,… the Indians would give whatever the seller required…. Thus they bartered, like idiots, cotton and gold for fragments of bows, glasses, bottles, and jars.”10 In describing this exchange Columbus
