Note 229 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

Morton’s attempt to trace the origin of the North American Indians from Brutus, and the support he finds for his theory in the resemblance of some Indian to Greek words, there being no reason to suppose that Brutus or the Latins had any acquaintance with Greek, reads like a humorous satire on the historical methods in vogue with the writers of his time. Until within the last century there were two historical events, or events assumed to be historical, to one or the other of which it was deemed safe to refer the origin of any modern nation. These events were the Siege of Troy and the Flood,—the profane and the sacred beginnings of modern history. Morton wrote in 1635, and his mind naturally had recourse to the profane theory. Fifteen years later, Milton began his history of England, and at the outset came in contact with Brutus. “That which we have,” he then remarks, “of oldest seeming, hath by the greater part of judicious antiquaries been long rejected for a modern fable.” He nevertheless “determined to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales, ... seeing that ofttimes relations heretofore accounted fabulous have been after found to contain in them many footsteps and reliques of something true; as what we read in poets of the flood, and giants little believed, till undoubted witnesses taught us that all was not feigned.” Then passing on, he says: “After the flood, and the dispersing of nations, as they journeyed leisurely from the East, Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, and his offspring, as by authorities, arguments and affinity of divers names is generally believed, were the first that peopled all these west and northern climes.” Coming down to Brutus and the whole progeny of kings, and following Geoffrey of Monmouth, Milton then recounts in detail the marriages, voyages, adventures and mishaps of the descendants of Æneas until Brutus reached an “island, not yet Britain but Albion, in a manner desert and inhospitable; kept only by a remnant of giants, whose excessive force and tyranny had destroyed the rest. These Brutus destroys,” and, after this, “in a chosen place, builds Troja Nova, changed in time to Trinovantum, now London.”

The superiority of Morton’s historical method to Milton’s, or to that in use in Milton’s time, is obvious. Accepting the common origin, he premises that he does not find that “when Brutus did depart from Latium his whole number went with him at once.” Accordingly, some of them being put to sea, “might encounter with a storm,” and then being carried out of sight of land, “they might sail God knoweth whether, and so might be put on this coast, as well as any other.” And hence the author is “bold to conclude that the original of the natives of New England may be well conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”

It would be easy to quote from many serious productions, contemporaneous with the New Canaan and a century after it, examples of the same method of daring historical hypothesis; a single instance will, however, suffice. In his history of Lynn, written in 1829, the Rev. Alonzo Lewis says (p. 21): “The Indians are supposed by some to be the remnants of the long lost ten tribes of Israel; and their existence in tribes, the similarity of some of their customs, and the likeness of many words in their language, seem to favor this opinion.”

More sensible than either Thomas Morton or Mr. Lewis, William Wood, in writing his New England’s Prospect, in 1633, remarks (p. 78), that “Some have thought they [the Indians] might be of the dispersed Jews, because some of their words be near unto the Hebrew; but by the same rule they may conclude them to be some of the gleanings of all nations, because they have words which sound after the Greek, Latin, French, and other tongues.”

There is in the Magnalia (book III. part iii.) a lengthy but highly characteristic passage, in which Mather recounts the points of resemblance which the evangelist Eliot saw between the Indians and “the posterity of the dispersed and rejected Israelites.”