Henry Whistler’s Journal, 1655

This Island [Barbados] is one of the Richest Spots of ground in the world and fully inhabited. But were the people suitable to the Island it were not to be compared. . . . The gentry here doth Hue [appear] far better than ours do in England : they have most of them 100 or 2 or 3 of slaves[,] apes who they command as they please : here they may say what they have is their own : and they have that Liberty of conscience which wee so long have in England fought for : But they do abuse it. This Island is inhabited with all sorts : with English, French, Dutch, Scots, Irish, Spaniards they being Jews : with Indians and miserable Negroes borne to perpetual slavery they and their seed : these Negroes they do allow as many wives as they will have, some will have 3 or 4, according as they find their body able : our English here doth think a negro child the first day it is born to be worth £5, they cost them nothing the bringing up, they go all ways naked : some planters will have 30 more or les about 4 or 5 years old : they sell them from one to the other as we do sheep. This Island is the Dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish : Cadges and whores and such like people are those which are generally Brought here. A rogue in England will hardly make a cheater here : a Bawd brought over puts on a demure comportment, a whore if handsome makes a wife for some rich planter.

William Wood, New England’s Prospect, 1634

But it may be objected that it is too cold a country for our English men, who have been accustomed to a warmer climate. To which it may be answered . . ., there is wood good store and better cheap to build warm houses and make good fires, which makes the winter less tedious. . . . [T]rue it is that some venturing too nakedly in extremity of cold, being more foolhardy than wise, have for a time lost the use of their feet, others the use of their fingers; but time and surgery afterwards recovered them. Some have had their overgrown beards so frozen together that they could not get their strong-water bottles into their mouths. . . . [W]hereas many do disparage the land, saying a man cannot live without labor, in that they more disparage and discredit themselves in giving the world occasion to take notice of their dronish disposition that would live off the sweat of another man’s brows. Surely they were much deceived, or else ill informed, that ventured thither in hope to live in plenty and idleness. . . . For all in New England must be workers of some kind. . . . And howsoever they are accounted poor, they are well contented and look not so much at abundance as at competency.

“Europeans came to America to create new societies. Their invasions added to peoples of the human landscape. However, the conquest of North America was not a simple process in which Indian peoples were removed and their places taken by European and African immigrants. Europeans might aspire to displace Indians and create societies that were pristine duplicates of Old World societies, but they could not. . . . The mingling and mixing of peoples produced new kinds of people and societies, different from what had existed in North America and in Europe.”

Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, 1998

“Between 1630 and 1633, approximately 3000 settlers poured into Massachusetts Bay to establish their farms, churches, and towns. Already outnumbered by English settlers, the 200 Massachusetts and Pawtucket who had survived a decade and a half of epidemics and of Micmac and Plymouth raids were now overwhelmed. As John Winthrop rightly foresaw before leaving England, the Indians would represent little threat to the colonists. . . . The terrorizing effects of the raids, plus the overwhelming numbers and close proximity of the English, left the survival bands of Pawtucket and Massachusetts with even less room to maneuver or resist than their Plymouth area counterparts had enjoyed a decade earlier.”

Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643, published in 1983