British attitudes to Native Americans shifted over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and varied dramatically by exact location. However, historical patterns and trends do emerge regarding British attitudes toward North American indigenous people and should provide you with an answer to your question.
Early contact between indigenous peoples and Europeans in North America did not begin with settlement; it began with trade. English, French, and Spanish fishing and whaling vessels frequented the Atlantic Coast throughout each summer of the 1500s and traded extensively with indigenous people. Historical documentation of these exchanges is sparse, but they appear to have been mostly mutually beneficial. Fishermen obtained foodstuffs and furs, while Native Americans acquired knives, cookware, and other manufactured goods. There are few recorded incidents of large-scale conflict between indigenous people and English fishermen and whalers at this point, although the Spanish did ruthlessly raid parts of the coast during this time.
Many Englishmen who encountered Native Americans in the 1500s often expressed a degree of grudging admiration for their ruggedness and hospitality. Simply surviving the wilderness of North America, an environment that seemed hostile to Europeans, was enough to merit respect! For example, a settler of Jamestown wrote of the Native Americans in his 1607 diary:
They are a very witty and ingenious people, apt both to vnderstand and speake our language, so that I hope in god as he hath miraculously preserved vs hither from all dangers both of sea and land & their fury so he will make vs authors of his holy will in converting them to our true Christian faith by his owne inspireing grace and knowledge of his deity.
Notice the dueling admiration and desire to make the Native Americans more like the English! However, this tentative appreciation of indigenous peoples was superseded by a pervading sense that Native Americans were “savage” or subhuman.
The relative peace between the English and the Native Americans ended when the British began to colonize the Atlantic Coast of North America and displace local populations of Native people. When the British first attempted to establish a colony in Roanoke in 1585, for example, conflict erupted between the English and the Native Americans over accusations of theft. Although the disappearance of the colony is mysterious, it is likely that conflict with Croatan tribe may have been a factor.
Like Roanoke, the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 was marked by early cooperation with the local Powhatan people, which later soured and curdled into violent conflict. Native hospitality and generosity kept the early settlers of Jamestown alive for the first three years of the Jamestown Colony. Despite this initial cooperation, the leader of the colony, John Smith, became determined to compel the Native Americans to “drudgery, work, and slavery.” Many Jamestown residents came to despise and distrust the Native people who had helped them so much. For example, in 1608, the Native Americans are described in a letter home to England by a colonist as “inconstant Savages.”
This sneering attitude further hardened as violence erupted with a series of skirmishes and massacres. With the English now sensing that the Powhatan posed an existential threat, the rhetoric surrounding Native Americans became much more poisonous. An explosion of English colonization along the Atlantic Coast occurred over the next four decades. By 1650, there were tens of thousands of British colonizers living in America. This proliferation of invaders led to violent conflicts over land and resources with unfortunate frequency; many English colonists to view the Native people with permanent mistrust at best and hatred at worst.
In addition to pursuing territorial expansion, white colonizers also made concerted efforts to forcibly convert the Native Americans to Christianity. The Puritans establishing “praying villages” to attract Native Americans to Christianity, and, to some degree, their efforts were successful. According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, residents of these mission-centers “learned English, engaged in regular church attendance, lived in Puritan-like houses, farmed, and so on, essentially recreating the pastoral aspects of England.” One dominant focus of these Protestant missions was an effort to eliminate Native “savagery” and have Native groups assimilate as fully as possible to a European way of life. The political hope for this Christianization was that it could remove the Native tribes as obstacles for English expansion across New England.
Finally, it is important to note that while violence pervaded early English colonization efforts, this was not necessarily true of Native American encounters with the British across the continent. Most Native groups’ interaction with the British during the 1600s, apart from the Algonquin and other indigenous tribes who lived along the coast, was limited to the fur trade. Many English trading ventures, particularly the Hudson Bay Company, viewed the indigenous groups of North America as a valuable economic asset due to their access to animal furs. Beaver pelts were particularly coveted, and throughout the mid- and late seventeenth century, many Native people traded extensively with the British in modern-day Canada. However, even in the north, British attitudes of superiority remained embedded. For example, the British intermarried with indigenous people much less frequently than the French did. In general, the English viewed Native Americans as necessary but disposable allies in their economic and territorial expansion across North America.
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British colonizers of North America were roughly divided into two camps regarding Native Americans: those who advocated aggressive militaristic expansion and those who sought growth through the conversion and assimilation of indigenous peoples. Both opinions demonstrate the disdainful view of Native cultures and the extreme ethnocentrism that was prevalent among the British during the settlement of the Atlantic Coast. As John Lawson, an English traveler, noted in 1709, “They are really better to us than we are to them.”
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