“Do you have a flag?” – Suzy Eddie Izzard
Boston has always been a cranky place. To start with, the very land beneath it is a raw geologic pockmark; as the glaciers scraped their way back north, they left a ring of rocky hills that were slowly enclosed on one side by a rising ocean. Four short rivers flow inside this jagged bowl, emptying into what would eventually be named Boston Harbor. And all this happened so recently that the ground level is still rebounding from the weight of the ice at a rate of a few hundredths of an inch per year. It’s an angry little spot.{1}
As the ice melted, plants, animals, and mycelium turned the area into a thick forest filled with creatures great and small; that in turn attracted people, the crest of the first wave of humanity rolling in from the west and crashing into the Atlantic shore. Like all Stone Age people, they were ignorant of an enormous amount of basic information we take for granted, but they were tooled up, smart as hell, and immediately set about improving their new home. Over hundreds of generations they adapted to every change and challenge, learning to manage the land and its denizens ever more effectively.
Crucially for us and later history, thousands of years of growing population did not lead to a kingdom or empire as it had in so many other places. This land and its people were one of those unlikely exceptions where something far less authoritarian had not only developed, but defended and sustained itself.* The people of the coast, and the larger area that is today the northeast United States, lived in a kind of community of communities, a multi-lingual, multi-cultural society that was hooked into continental trade networks but completely independent of the bigger societies further south (more on this later).{2}
(*Other examples include the first Andean civilizations in South America and early Indus civilizations in South Asia.{3})
There was plenty of work to do, but there wasn’t an overlord to make you do it. There was an often harsh hierarchy, including between communities, but people could live more or less as they pleased with whom they pleased. And if a group or individual wanted to split and go in a different direction, it was their natural right to do so. There was no agreed upon name for the place, but in rough translation these first people sometimes referred to their home as “Dawnland”.{4}
This wasn’t a utopia; there were wars, lean years, and jerks who made life harder on everybody. But it was an indisputably better place to live than England, where your lot in life depended entirely on who your father had been and there were armed guys on call to make sure you did as you were told. Catastrophically for these peoples and the world they had made for themselves, a once in history invasion of micro-organisms, macro-organisms, and religious fanatics was about to come ashore.
It started with fishermen and fur trappers, just a handful at first, then more. They had useful items to trade and sailed away when they were done; but, at the same time, new and terrible epidemics began killing people in ghastly numbers while hostile vessels kidnapped others and disappeared them forever. Over just a few generations, barely a hundred years, millions of people became hundreds of thousands, then tens of thousands, an apocalypse as absolute as any sci-fi nightmare.
The latest one, the worst, came in what an unknown calendar called the early 1600s. From 1616-1619, only a third of coastal people survived. On Cape Cod, where a hundred English speaking settlers were about to land, the already devastated population dropped from about 20,000 to a mere 2,000, a death rate of 90% or more in long ravaged communities. Bodies lay unburied in otherwise intact villages the day the Pilgrims set foot in this “New” England.{5}
Five-ish years later, a lone preacher wandered off from a failed colony farther down the coast, squatting on the isolated and misshapen peninsula that is today downtown Boston. He built a cottage, planted an orchard, and lasted a few years as a hermit. Then he made the mistake of inviting some Puritans in as neighbors; regretting that almost immediately, he left. But they stayed put and that’s how Boston was founded. In short, the literal first Bostonian wanted nothing more than to get away from Boston and the people that live there.{6}
Both the preacher and the Puritans were Protestant zealots, early arrivals from the second wave of humanity to hit the area, this one bearing the edge of empire and coming from the east. They were the miscreant castoffs of a century of European religious wars, Biblical radicals too obnoxious even for England. Seeing a land divinely created just for them – look at all those cleared pastures and farmland!, the rivers practically jump with fish! – spared their delicate sensibilities from the horrifying theological implications that their Lord’s work had been done by the unsaved Indians who cultivated the soil and the Catholic microbes* that gifted it to them.
(*The terrible 1616-1619 outbreak was sparked by fur traders who were almost certainly French.)
This was a moment of tremendous historical fusion; and, like regular fusion, it destroyed everyone and everything around it. Colonists and Indigenous died in enormous numbers and the lands and waters have never been the same, but the material power of the Old World was now melding with the egalitarian power of the New.
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Section 2
{1 – Rawson, Eden on the Charles, p8-10}
{2 – Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, p461}
{3 – Frankopan, p92-93}
{4 – This, too, is my very brief summation of a huge amount of scholarship. For a real historian’s recent summation, see Blackhawk, p48-72}
{5 – Blackhawk, p55-56}
{6 – Rawson, p24}
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