Elopement - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 45

Elopement with indigenous peoples was seen by the colonial
authorities as a major threat to their attempts to subjugate the New
World. When, in 1612, young men started defecting from Jamestown,
the first sustained English settlement in North America, the deputy
governor, Thomas Dale, hunted them down. According to a contem-
porary account,
Some he apointed to be hanged. Some burned. Some to be broken upon
wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death. 2
The severity of these sanctions hints at the strength of the attrac-
tion. Despite the penalties, Europeans continued to defect, or to
remain with the indigenous peoples who had captured them in war,
until the Native Americans had been so reduced and broken that there
was no longer a life to be drawn to. In 1785, Hector de Crèvecoeur
remarked upon the fierce determination of European children to stay
with the Indian communities that had kidnapped them, when their
parents came to collect them during periods of peace.
. . . those whose more advanced ages permitted them to recollect
their fathers and mothers, absolutely refused to follow them, and ran to
their adopted parents for protection against the effusions of love their
unhappy real parents lavished on them! Incredible as this may appear,
I have heard it asserted in a thousand instances, among persons of
credit. In the village of -------, where I purpose to go, there lived, about
fifteen years ago, an Englishman and a Swede . . . They were grown to
the age of men when they were taken; they happily escaped the great
punishment of war captives, and were obliged to marry the Squaws
who had saved their lives by adoption. By the force of habit, they
became at last thoroughly naturalised to this wild course of life. While
I was there, their friends sent them a considerable sum of money to
ransom themselves with. The Indians, their old masters, gave them their
choice . . . They chose to remain; and the reasons they gave me would
greatly surprise you: the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the
absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail
with us . . . thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no exam-
ples of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become
Europeans! 3