On February 10, 1670, the fellows of the Royal Society assembled at Arundel House for the viewing of experiments. Those present that Thursday evening were “entertained with . . . the View of divers Curiosities of Nature”: namely, four boxes of natural history specimens recently received from the society’s only fellow in the American colonies, the alchemist, physician, and Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr.
Like the agents and reagents of a chemical demonstration, Winthrop’s specimens illustrated a fundamental transformation as they were unpacked from their crates: not a transformation in their material state, per se, but rather an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of colonial New England according to Winthrop’s careful designs. The tangle-rooted dwarf-oaks and the plump ears of Indian corn represented the before and after of Winthrop’s plan to clear the New England forest and establish profitable plantations. The Indian-language Bible and the girdles of Indian currency testified that the natives could be taught to live both as Christians and as producers and consumers participating in the emergent world market. The candlewood and even the boxes themselves, presumably made of New England pine, illustrated the potential for harvesting the raw materials of a shipping industry from the Connecticut hills—an industry on which the success of England’s commercial economy was widely seen to depend. Holding all this and more, the boxes contained a representation of the project that ended in their own creation—a project emblematic of Winthrop’s promises for England’s success in building a commercial empire on the western shore of the Atlantic.
As the majority of the specimens in the boxes indicate, Winthrop’s colonial project rested on the New England Indians’ assimilation of European conceptions of the land and its potential. John Eliot’s Algonquian Bible and the strings of wampum (complete with an account of exchange rates) represented the bookends of a missionary project that began with the Indians’ conversion to Christianity and ended with their full participation in the commercial economy of the English Atlantic world. In pursuing a goal of remaking Indian-held lands into productive farms and manufacturing centers, the English aimed consciously to avoid the brutal conquest that characterized, in their imagination at least, Spanish imperial activity in Central and South America. Their approach was based in part on a different notion of wealth than that motivating the Spanish conquistadors—namely that wealth could be created through human labor and ingenuity and was not limited to what nature provided. While the Spanish may have been able to exploit the natural abundance of their possessions in the tropical zone, New Englanders would have to make something more of the resources their stony lands provided them. As projectors like Winthrop saw it, if their colonies were going to prosper, New Englanders would have to indoctrinate their Native American neighbors into a European program of “improved” agricultural and manufacturing processes, rather than merely exploit their labor to extract valuable commodities.