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But we by the blessing of God are conuerted lately from Popery, and formerly from paganisme: Nor can it be denied that they (in this case) are our brethren: for the same God made them as well as vs, of as good matter as he made vs, gaue them as perfect and good soules and bodies as to vs, and the same Messiah & sauiour is sent to them as to vs, for if a Virginian hauing our language had learned our religion, professed our faith; craued baptisme, and challenged saluation by Christ: could either man deny him baptisme, or would God deny him saluation? Surely God would not the one, and man may not the other: so then they are our brethren...

-William Crashaw, A Sermon Preached in London, 1610

The report goeth, that in Virginia the people are sauage and incredibly rude, they worship the diuell, offer their young children in sacrifice vnto him, wander vp and downe like beasts, and in manners and conditions, differ very litle from beasts, hauing no Art, nor sciēce, nor trade, to imploy themselues, or giue themselues vnto, yet by nature louing and, gentle, and desirous to imbrace a better condition.

-Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia, 1609

English descriptions of the Indian societies and people they encountered could vary wildly as is evident above. Both of the men opining here are doing so from the other side of the Atlantic, where a fascination with New World peoples and technologies was entrenched well before the settlement of Jamestown. By the time of Crashaw’s sermon, Richard Hakylut’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation had been in circulation for 20 years. Contained within was Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, a groundbreaking proto-ethnographic work based on Harriot’s time in North America during the failed Roanoke venture. Harriot’s report relayed to English readers tantalizing insight into the lives and culture of the Indians he encountered, to include their clothing, religious practices, the food they ate, how they planted crops, hunted, fished, how they fought, raised children, etc. In addition, he catalogued the flora and fauna of the region, highlighting the agricultural promise of Virginia, details that did not go unnoticed by participants in the joint-stock companies with an eye on the Americas. Briefe and True Report was reprinted again in 1590 by Theodor de Bry, this time including engravings based on the drawings of John White, who had been there with Harriot. The report and accompanying visual depictions fueled English fascination with all things American. Indian material culture –weapons, tools, jewelry, clothing, etc.- went on display in “cabinets of curiousity” in England’s metropolitan centers, to be looked upon with wonder by a public with a rising interest in natural philosophy and the exotic works of faraway peoples. Shakespeare, via Trinculo in The Tempest, played on this:

A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

Often, the ways in which English understood Indians reflected the ways in which they understood themselves. Note the framing of Crashaw’s assessment of Indian humanity. He reminds his audience that the English themselves were descended from pagans and that only recently had they been freed of what they perceived as the wrongheadedness of the Catholic church. As the English ventured abroad, Tacitus’s history of Britons and Germans enjoyed renewed popularity at home. English readers were able to draw parallels between their own uncivilized ancestry and the Indians across the ocean. Saxon heritage certainly contained a savage aspect that the English were glad to have been freed from, but it also alluded to a certain level of nobility as nostalgia for “simpler times” grew in the face of what many saw as an encroaching lewdness and excess in changing social norms. The “natural” state of Indians, as perceived by many English, was similarly noble in ways. English pagan roots also gave rise to an expectation that the Indians could be lifted up from their savagery and brought into the fold of Christianity and civility. Illustrating a sentiment that Indians in New England and Virginia were similar to the English lower classes is a poem by Michael Drayton to George Sandys in 1622:

But you may save your labour if you please,

To write me ought of your savages.

As savage slaves be in great Britaine here,

As any one that you can shew me there.