I think it’s really easy for us in the 21st century to look back at the colonial period and forget most of the people who lived through it were experiencing tremendous changes to their lifestyles, homes, diets, and surroundings. Moving from Europe or Africa to the Americas was a huge shift in the types of plants and animals you saw, the foods that readily grew, and the types of homes you might build. American Indian inhabitants also experienced massive changes as newcomers arrived, with new diseases, animals, foods, lifestyles, and religions.
In the classroom, one of the ways I like to illustrate just how different everything was for colonial peoples is to show my students this description of an animal from Samuel Purchas, a 1600s British clergyman and prolific chronicler of other peoples’ travels:
“They have a monstrous deformed beast whose fore part resembleth a Fox, the hinder part an Ape, excepting the feet which are like a mans; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse wherein she bestows her young until they can shift for themselves.”
Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 2nd ed. p. 732. Quoted in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p.83.
Any guesses? I’ll give you a few hints. This is a real animal, and one that is still very much alive and common across the Southeast today. All of my students from Georgia have absolutely seen this animal, typically at least once a year.
Were you close? This description doesn’t immediately bring the animal they’re talking about to mind (at least it didn’t for me!), and I think that’s kind of the point. European colonists were trying to make sense of their new world, and when they saw new animals, they tried to describe them based on animals they were already familiar with–whether that was size, physical features, or other attributes. It’s one of the things I find most fascinating about the colonial era–everyone was dealing with new, strange things and trying to make sense of them.
Leave a Reply