To some Christian thinkers, the Indians’ very lives, not just the fate of their souls, depended on their converting to Christianity and civility. God, it appeared, punished the Indians with devastating epidemic diseases for their pagan savagery and to make way for Christians. Europeans had no other way of understanding why contagions like smallpox, which had been previously unknown in America, appeared so suddenly among the Indians to such devastating effect. After various plagues in 1616–19, 1622, and 1633–34 swept off massive numbers of southern New England Indians while leaving the newly arrived English relatively unscathed, colonial spokesmen found their explanation in God’s providence.
“For the Natives, they are all near dead of the smallpox,” marveled John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.” The colonist Thomas Morton agreed that the depopulation had to be “the hand of God” to permit “the English Nation” to settle the land “and erect in it temples to the glory of God.” The catastrophic toll of foreign epidemics on Native America was one of the most significant disasters in modern world history, both for the millions of lives it claimed and for weakening Indian resistance to colonialism. The New England phase of this apocalypse was the earliest example of Euro-Americans interpreting the die-off as evidence that they were chosen and Indians were damned, with land as the prize.
Indians had their own understandings about Europeans that extended partially from prophecies of the arrival of potent strangers. A Powhatan shaman claimed that well before the first colonists landed at Jamestown, the ancestors taught that “bearded men should come and take away their Country and that none of the original Indians be left, within . . . a hundred and fifty” years.
Likewise, when the missionary John Eliot visited the Wampanoags of Cape Cod in the 1640s, one of them remembered that long ago he had dreamt of a man clad in black, like Eliot, carrying a great book, the Bible, preaching that a great spirit would punish the Indians for their sins. Belief in such visions helped Native people come to terms with the vast uncertainties of early contact.