for fund-raising. As authoritative and accessible as the parables they imitate, these images were appealing to their audience, suggesting a link between initial contributions and long-term results. As the last example indicates, this rhetoric also seems to have offered at least some Indians a way of reconciling themselves to the rigors of conversion. More broadly, it presented Indians as unrealized organic potential. They are described as waiting for the British to save them, not only from the pains of hell but also from a limbo of sterility and waste.
This understanding of the Indians as a people who did not cultivate their land’s resources and did not allow themselves to be “cultivated” was central to the justifications the British developed for their usurpation of American territory. John Locke’s famous comment on America summarizes this perspective: “[I]t is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything…. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything than several nations of the Americas are of this, who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life…. [L]and that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste.”39 Because they derived rightful ownership from the maximal “improvement” of available resources and acknowledged only narrow definitions of improvement, such formulations allowed the British to define themselves as the caretakers of the American continent. Missionaries added to this understanding even as their projects benefited from it.
This claim becomes especially potent if we consider “husbandry” to connote not just farming but also frugality and the management of a household. As the prefatory letter to The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel (1648) proclaims, “An account is here given to thee, of the conquest of the Lord Jesus upon these poor out-casts, who have thus long been estranged from him, spilt like water upon the ground and none to gather them.”40 The image of spilt water transforms colonial conquest into miraculous recovery. That they conceived of their work in these terms may help explain why many found it so easy to believe that Indians were the lost tribes of Israel. Gathering and cultivating scattered souls, missionaries saw themselves engaged in spiritual husbandry.
Images of husbandry also suggest a Protestant distaste for what were perceived to be the baroque excesses of all things Catholic. The Black Legend, the collection of stories that marked Spain as the center of Catholic tyranny and cruelty, assisted in the propagation of this assertion.41 Early modern anti-Spanish propaganda, especially translations of Bartolome de Las Casas’s Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, linked the cruelty of the conquistadores in America to their prodigality and greed.42 In these translations, references to English harvests sometimes were contrasted with images of Mexico’s blood-soaked land. As The Tears of the Indians, a translation of Las Casas’s Brevissima relacion, said of the conquest of Jamaica, “So lavish were the swords of the bloud of these poor souls, scarce two hundred more remaining; the rest perished without the least knowledge of God.”43 The text juxtaposed the abundance of America’s population and agricultural production before the conquest with the destruction perpetrated by the Spanish. Mexico had been “a pleasant Country, now swarming with multitudes of People, but immediately all depopulated, and drown’d in a Deluge of Bloud.” The translator’s preface quoted from scripture to emphasize the countless souls who could have been saved from hell:
Never had we so just cause to exclaim in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah; O that our heads were waters, and our eyes fountains of tears, that we might weep for the Effusion of so much Innocent Blood which provok’d these sad Relations of devout CASAUS, by reason of the cruel Slaughters and Butcheries of the Jesuitical Spaniards, perpetrated upon so many Millions of poor innocent Heathens, who having onely the light of Nature, not knowing their Saviour Jesus Christ, were sacrificed to the Politick Interest and Avarice of the wicked Spaniards.44
The Spanish are cruel, and they are poor managers of wealth. Greedy for gold, they have destroyed a fortune in agricultural revenues and a rich harvest in souls. The only product of their venture has been an “Effusion of … Innocent Blood.” As they weep the English offer a compensatory outpouring of emotion to the sight of extravagant slaughter. They juxtapose Protestant pity with Catholic coldness, matching both affects to the contrasted tropes of conservation and waste.
David Humphries, the secretary of the SPG, summarized this anti-Catholic perspective in his history of the society (1730). Distinguishing between Spanish and English colonies, he wrote, “All the Riches drawn from these Lands now by the English, is owing chiefly to their own honest Labour, scarce any Thing to that of the Natives; whereas the Wealth of the Spaniards, is to this Day dug out of the Mines, at the Expense and Sweat and Blood of the miserable Natives and Negroes.”45 Humphries set English settlement apart from Indian indolence and Spanish violence, both of which waste land. The English deserve America, he suggested, because they are good caretakers, matching agricultural toil with spiritual labor.
Allusions to husbandry or trade often accompanied literary appropriations of the Black Legend such as John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1667), a heroic tragedy based on the conquest of Mexico. In the final act of this play a priest and several Spanish soldiers torture Montezuma, who heroically refuses to abandon his gods or his gold. Frustrated by Montezuma’s resistance, the priest says:
Mark how this impious Heathen justifies
His own false gods, and our true God denies;
How wickedly he has refus’d his wealth,
And hid his Gold, from Christian hands, by stealth:
Down with him, Kill him, merit heaven thereby.46
In a gruesome parody of the trope of gold for glass, the priest attempts at once to force Christianity upon, and extort gold from, Montezuma. The promise to the soldiers that they should “merit” heaven by killing Montezuma marks the priest’s economic paradigm of redemption as perverse. The Aztec king’s ensuing death becomes the only reward for their violent exertion, suggesting the inefficiency as well as the cruelty of the Spanish.
In contrast, British missionaries stressed their role as caretakers. In The Day-Breaking, if not the Sun-Rising of the Gospell (1647), John Eliot’s colleague Thomas Shepard juxtaposed English and Spanish missions in exactly this way. Defending the Massachusetts Bay colonists against accusations that they had not converted enough Indians, he stressed “the vast distance of Natives from common civility” and contrasted the quantity of false Catholic converts with the quality of Puritan ones: “[W]ee have not learnt as yet that art of coyning Christians, or putting Christs name and Image upon copper mettle.”47 The description of “coyn[ed]” Christians suggests spiritual counterfeit, and it alludes to the mines that were known to have helped the Spanish build their empire with the blood of indigenous Americans. In contrast, Shepard described New England’s missionary project through analogy to its agricultural one:
[M]e thinkes now that it is with the Indians as it was with our New-English ground when we first came over, there was scarce any man that could beleeve that English graine would grow, or that the Plow could doe any good in this woody and rocky soile. And thus they continued in this supine unbeliefe for some yeares, till experience taught them otherwise, and now all see it to bee scarce inferior to Old English tillage, but beares very good burdens; for wee have thought of our Indian people, and therefore have beene discouraged to put plow to such dry and rocky ground, but God having begun thus with some few it may bee they are better soile for the Gospel than wee can thinke.48
This comparison helped Shepard stress the difficulty of civilizing Indians, even as it contrasted a true return with the false profits created by Catholic counterfeiting.
Shepard presented other images of husbandry and organic growth that proved central to the developing discourse of Protestant mission. His insistence that “it must certainly be a spirit of life from God … which must
