At Robert Egger's 'The VVitch'

As web piety or good netizenship requires, multiple 'spoilers' ahead.

I went with a friend to see 'The VVitch'. The work has been put in on this film, and it benefits. I was startled to recognise bits of the dialogue as things I'd read in witchcraft pamphlets (the Warboys/Throckmorton children, and one of the other demoniacs also verbatim - Thomas Darling, maybe?).

I especially liked the way the film adroitly exploited our typical narrative expectations of a Hollywood film - 'The Witch'? Yes, her in the woods, the one with the lair, the hag who can appear like a Cavalier courtesan. Eggers is distracting us with expectations of a daring assault on the sorceress' den by the axe-swinging father, while his film is quietly getting on with its own narrative of how Thomasin comes to accept that role. From the moment when Thomasin tries to quell her younger sister Mercy by a sudden profession that, yes, she is indeed the witch who lives in the forest, one can see her fate starting to unfold. Voicing the unthinkable makes it seem more possible.

The film is very aware of its cinematographic forebears: there's quite a set of regular tropes here. So, the young heroine who is reaching her menarche, the uncanny twins, the coven dancing round a fire in the forest. It creates its own space in which to be original by a commitment to historical reconstructions of language and religious thinking. The climax of the film, as the young women transvect up to tree top height seems less 'teenage witch' than it might, because we have watched and listened to Thomasin slowly reaching this point.

My family used to play a Scrabble-like card game called 'Lexicon', one of those games in which you pick up as many cards as you have played in your turn, until the pack thins to the last few cards. But if by that stage you have worked out that there has to be an unplayable Q or Z still lurking, then you don't want to pick up any cards, which you will probably be left with in your hand, their value to be deducted from your accumulated score.

Thomasin's game plays out like that: being forced to pick up the last, most undesirable card. After the abduction of the baby from her care, her mother suspects her. Her younger sister Mercy, herself in cahoots with Black Philip, accuses Thomasin, who rashly accepts the charge to try to assert herself over the obstreperous child. Mercy and her twin brother exchange mutual accusations with their sister, are possessed, and are killed. Her staunch brother Caleb has gone; the goat kills her father (who has also accused her of witchcraft). Finally the wretched Thomasin is caught in a fight to the death with her own deranged mother (and wins, bloodily).

What is left for her? Providence has made a very poor show as far as these Calvinist settlers are concerned. Caleb has some kind of vision of Jesus as he expires, but Eggars cunningly makes it seem mad or somehow indecent: really, heaven does nothing. Only Satan cares.

So, as the traumatised Thomasin staggers away from the corpse of her mother, what is left? She can't bury the dead and survive alone in the wilderness, she probably can't walk back to the settlement without being identified as a witch and being hanged for it. The last card, the card she doesn't want, but must pick up and try to play, is to talk to the goat.

And Black Philip answers, not at first, but soon, and then is seen, deep in shadows, as the black-dressed gentleman wearing spurs - the devil as so readily invented by the much-prompted fantasies of those accused of witchcraft. He will guide Thomasin's hand as she signs his book, and she will go naked into the forest to meet her new sisters. The actress plays the terror and the exhilaration as she transvects upwards very well.

The film accepts the supernatural as real. This is not 'The Crucible'. The weird claims of demonology are not psychologised away: evil exists. And yet, and yet, there's almost an explanation, so careful has the film been to show the mindset of the Calvinist settlers: the sin that they insist that they all bear individually, inherent to their nature, their acceptance of the demoralising possibility of their own predestined damnation. All this makes the witch or witches in the forest a very comprehensible extroversion of that (inner) state of sin: as if the community imagines them into being, the unthinkable other that it's so easy to become.

As easy, indeed, as stepping into the forest, where emptiness closes in, the arboreal labyrinth Una and Red Crosse enter in the first canto of The Faerie Queene. Here you will meet your other self: Eve / Duessa / The Witch.

Sin, in this film of continuously somber colours (sky, clothes, interiors), is a source of colour (blood red, mainly). Sin or witchcraft liberates from everything, even gravity. 

Eggers reports himself to have read the whole of the Geneva Bible, the Bible of the Puritans, to get the language right. The effort paid dividends. The phrase with which Black Philip / Satan secures his converts is based on Tyndale (2 Peter, 2), but re-appears among the cruder phrasings and vehement annotations of the Geneva text - the unjust, that 'walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleaness' 'count it pleasure to live deliciously for a season ... They are cursed children and have forsaken the right way'.

Eggers himself answers most scrupulously to a pointed query about factual inaccuracies in the film
(https://www.quora.com/Robert-Eggers-What-are-the-major-factual-inaccuracies-if-any-in-The-Witch/answer/Robert-Eggers-3)
I think he probably knew that a baby's fat was used in a flying ointment, rather than mashed-up baby - he wanted the gore, the colour. The horrible scene of the deluded mother suckling her baby, back from the dead, unable to perceive it as demonic, as a raven pecking viciously at her nipple (it prompted a unanimous wail of horror from the women present in the screening I attended), Eggers lightly passes off this as his invention, something he came up with because he is himself evil. [In a forum exchange here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/46m0lf/im_robert_eggers_writerdirector_of_the_witch_ama/  ]
Again, after five years with witchcraft sources, he'd know all about vampiric familiars feeding on a witch's blood. The devout mother is turning into another instance of witchcraft: her final appearance, hair down, murderous, hag-like, completes the journey.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the acute desire of the emigrants to turn back, get back to England, even if England was the Babylon of 'Dog and Bitch Yard':

http://roy25booth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/witch-detected-en-route-for-america.html

Eggers has both the mother confess to her desire to be back at home, and the daughter quizzing her brother as to whether he remembers life before this exile - when they lived in a house with glass windows.

A thoughtful film: a witchcraft film with integrity. No gross CGI, no electronica on the soundtrack. I think I will have my 'Witchcraft and Drama' people watch it and learn. There: that's approval!

'Stranger things in the world, than are to be seen between London and Staines': in America with John Josselyn

Page from 'New England's Rarities' showing the "beautiful leaved pirola"

I recently had to mark some student papers, and one favoured question among them was a chance to write about Defoe’s use of the journal form in Robinson Crusoe. This, if not interesting in itself, made me interested to find a non fictional journal of two voyages across the Atlantic, John Josselyn’s An account of two voyages to New-England (1674). It gives details of two trips to New England and back, for lengthy stays in the country, in 1638-39 and 1663-71.

Josselyn’s publication was intended to win him an invitation to join the Royal Society. That august body could have fanciful and credulous moments, but even they had to draw a line somewhere, and Josselyn was disappointed. The interest of his book is, in the end, that it is a record of average sentiments, middling insight, the small bulwarks an average nature erects against the overwhelming nature of new experiences. Yes, he does try to order his observations, with sections given over to the natural history of New England, to the native inhabitants, to key dates in the colony’s existence. But a truer record of confusion, incomprehension, alarm, and rough-and-ready strategies for coping emerges.

The book is in many, many places, deplorable. Josselyn’s responses to what he witnessed, heard, and did, are so limited, and often brutal, that the book becomes, in its deplorable way, funny. I was recurrently reminded of Michael Green’s half-forgotten classic of prose comedy, Squire Haggard’s Journal http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/19/1000-novels-comedy-part-two ,

as secure prejudices and a very strong stomach enable Josselyn to cope complacently with his fellow creatures being horribly treated (“they speed not so well as the waggish lad at Cape-porpus, who baited his hooks with the drown'd Negro's buttocks”), and an insalubrious or alarming extistence in early New England.

The colonists arriving are, to be frank, a poxy lot:

3^rd May “and now a Servant of one of the passengers sickned of the small pox.”

day 14 “Now was Scilly 50 leagues off, and now many of the passengers fall sick of the small Pox and Calenture.”

“The Two and twentieth, another passenger dyed of a Consumption”

The voyage they are on is mediated through literature. Here’s whale in a battle with a swordfish and a ‘Flailfish’:

“the other was further off, about a league from the Ship, fighting with the Sword-fish, and the Flailfish, whose stroakes with a fin that growes upon her back like a flail, upon the back of the Whale, we heard with amazement.”

This is surely a yarn derived from whatever source it was that Donne used for the same unlikely encounter in his Metempsycosis.

They see an ‘enchanted island’: “June the first day in the afternoon, very thick foggie weather, we sailed by an inchanted Island, saw a great deal of filth and rubbish floating by the Ship, heard Cawdimawdies, Sea-gulls and Crowes, (Birds that alwayes frequent the shoar) but could see nothing by reason of the mist: towards Sunset, when we were past the Island, it cleared up.”

Icebergs, when they see them, could with equal likeliness have foxes or devils moving on them. Notice that even as he reports a possible sighting of devils, Josselyn also records how cold the air was while they were in proximity to the berg. What he undoubtedly experienced gets mixed up with things he may or may not have seen:

“The Fourteenth day of June, very foggie weather, we sailed by an Island of Ice (which lay on the Star-board side) three leagues in length, mountain high, in form of land, with Bayes and Capes like high clift land, and a River pouring off it into the Sea. We saw likewise two or three Foxes, or Devils skipping upon it. These Islands of Ice are congealed in the North, and brought down in the spring-time with the Current to the banks on this side New-found-land, and there stopt, where they dissolve at last to water … Here it was as cold as in the middle of January in England, and so continued till we were some leagues beyond it.”

Once he arrives for the first time in new England, the local news immediately imparted to him is of the birth of a monstrous child to a Quaker woman. Josselyn is interested in examples of inter-breeding and miscegenation. Mrs Dyer’s malformed baby makes him think of a story he heard, and the explanation he credited about the piglet with some apparently human features. One can see what he thought of the poor Quaker woman; Josselyn, a man who thinks of himself as having some medical expertise, imagines that bestiality can lead to offspring:

“The Thirtieth day of September, I went ashore upon Noddles-Island … the next day a grave and sober person described the Monster to me, that was born at Boston of one Mrs. Dyer a great Sectarie, the Nine and twentieth of June, it was (it should seem) without a head, but having horns like a Beast, and ears, scales on a rough skin like a fish  called a Thornback, legs and claws like a Hawke, and in other respects as a Woman-child.

I have read that at Bruxels, Anno 1564, a sow brought forth six pigs, the first whereof (for the last in generating is alwayes in bruit beasts the first brought forth) had the head, face, arms and legs of a man, but the whole trunck of the body from the neck, was of a swine, a sodomitical monster is more like the mother than the father in the organs of the vegetative soul.”

As for sexual relations between different human races, Josselyn gives us a moment of pure Nathanial Hawthorne:

“An English woman suffering an Indian to have carnal knowledge of her, had an Indian cut out exactly in red cloth sewed upon her right Arm, and enjoined to wear it twelve months.”
She was relatively lucky. Josselyn reports the 1646 codes of laws:
“For being drunk, they either whip or impose a fine of Five shillings; so for swearing and cursing, or boring through the tongue with a hot Iron.
For kissing a woman in the street, though in way of civil salute, whipping or a fine.
For Single fornication, whipping or a fine.
For Adultery, put to death, and so for Witchcraft.”
Because he rejects no story that came his way, Josselyn tells us what happened if absconding lovers arrived in New England. Rank was no refuge:

“Sir Christopher Gardiner descended of the house of Gardiner Bishop of Winchester, Knighted at Jerusalem of the Sepulcher, arrived in New-England with a comely young woman his Concubine, settled himself in the Bay of Massachusets, was rigidly used by the Magistrates, and by the Magistrates of New-Plimouth to which place he retired.”

Even though he spent long periods in New England, Josselyn clearly continued to regard the established settlers as ‘they’ and ‘them’, a different people.

Among these early Americans, Josselyn is always ready to try his hand at a cure. Snakes plague this American Eden, but all things were, naturally, created for use, and so here’s a possible first example of the virtues of snake oil: “The fat of a Rattle-snake is very Soveraign for frozen limbs, bruises, lameness by falls, Aches, Sprains. The heart of a Rattle-snake dried and pulverized and drunk with wine or beer is an approved remedy against the biting and venom of a Rattle-snake.” The snake’s heart as remedy for its own poison: that’s such a typical piece of early modern thinking!

The sea and the rivers swarmed with fish. When his first voyage arrived off the Grand Banks, it happened to be a Sunday. The sailors fish for the voracious and easily-taken cod, but the Puritans on board, though hungry, will not partake of the fish they have just seen taken on the Sabbath:

“The Sixteenth day we sounded, and found 35 fathom water, upon the bank of New-found-land, we cast our our hooks for Cod-fish, thick foggie weather, the Cod being taken on a Sunday morning, the Sectaries aboard threw those their servants took into the Sea again, although they wanted fresh victuals, but the Sailers were not so nice.”

Huge lobsters abound, salmon swarm. Josselyn has a typical note about what to do with trout: “Trouts there be good store in every brook, ordinarily two and twenty inches long, their grease is good for the Piles and clifts.” The OED says that ‘clefts’ were chapped skin: just rub some trout fat on your face!

New England also swarmed with insect life, and Josselyn is good on these details of how it was to live there in the early days: “Likewise there be infinite numbers of Tikes hanging upon the bushes in summer time that will cleave to a mans garments and creep into his Breeches eating themselves in a short time into the very flesh of a man. I have seen the stockins of those that have gone through the woods covered with them.

The Countrey is strangely incommodated with flyes, which the English call Musketaes, they are like our gnats, they will sting so fiercely in summer as to make the faces of the English swell'd and scabby, as if the small pox for the first year.”

I have read somewhere – was it in Peter Watson’s The Great Divide? -  that European settlers took the earth worm with them to America, not deliberately, but mixed in the soil of seedlings. I found this astonishing, but Josselyn does seem to report that the familiar worm was not among the native fauna: “The Earth-worm, these are very rare and as small as a horse hair.”

Josselyn also published an account of the wildlife of New England, New-England's rarities discovered in birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants of that country (1672). Here in this work, he repudiates those who had scoffed at his reports of the size of the moose, that “Monster of superfluity.” He speaks of a tamed beaver, that would run up and down the streets of Boston, before returning to its new home.

So, John Josselyn’s America, so full of hazards, so full of living things, peopled by devil-worshippers and cannibals, but still a kind of Eden: “ 'Tis true, the Countrie hath no Bonerets, or Tartarlambs, no glittering coloured Tulips; but here you have the American Mary Gold, the Earth-nut bearing a princely Flower, the beautiful leaved Pirola, the honied Colibry, &c. They are generally of (somewhat) a more masculine virtue, than any of the same species in England, but not in so terrible a degree, as to be mischievous or ineffectual to our English bodies.”

But, above all, it’s a land where anything might be true. I will leave off with the haunting anecdote he picked up from a Mr Foxwell. Now, the context here is definitely one in which men are trying to top one another’s stories. ‘Mr Mitten’ has just been telling a yard about a ‘Triton or Merman’. After this, “The next story was told by Mr. Foxwell, now living in the province of Main, who having been to the Eastward in a Shallop, as far as Cape-Ann … in his return was overtaken by the night, and fearing to land upon the barbarous shore, he put off a little further to Sea; about midnight they were wakened with a loud voice from the shore, calling upon “Foxwell!  Foxwell! come ashore”, two or three times: upon the Sands they saw a great fire, and Men and Women hand-in-hand dancing round about it in a ring, after an hour or two they vanished, and as soon as the day appeared, Foxwell puts into a small Cove, it being about three quarters floud, and traces along the shore, where he found the footing of Men, Women and Children shod with shoes; and an infinite number of brands-ends thrown up by the water, but neither Indian nor English could he meet with on the shore, nor in the woods; these with many other stories they told me, the credit whereof I will neither impeach nor enforce, but shall satisfie my self, and I hope the Reader hereof, with the saying of a wise, learned and honourable Knight, that there are many stranger things in the world, than are to be seen between London and Staines.”

(It’s Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, of course, that he refers to.)

In the land of 8 foot high hermaphroditic Australians

I have a one-off lecture to give on Gulliver’s Travels, with a focus on Lilliput. Seeing the familiar map locating Lilliput and Blefuscu to the west of Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) triggered me to try ‘Australis’ in the EEBO title keywords search (thinking of ‘Terra Australis Incognita’).

This threw up the usual mixture of things, and led to me start reading A new discovery of Terra incognita Australis, or, The southern world, by James Sadeur, a French-man, who being cast there by a shipwrack, lived 35 years in that country and gives a particular description of the manners, customs, religion, laws, studies and wars of those southern people, and of some animals peculiar to that place ... translated from the French copy (1693).

Now, of course reports purportedly from people who have survived shipwrecks are always suspicious, but Gabriel de Foigny’s narrative (for he was the author masking behind Sadeur) starts in the usual deadpan way, then does its shipwreck with authenticating details, like his being unable to uncurl his fingers from the plank that kept him afloat in the sea. In my happy ignorance, then, I started reading this narrative as people once must have started reading the similarly straight-looking Gulliver’s Travels, maybe ready for the moment that confirmed the inevitable background suspicion that this traveler is a liar like others (‘perhaps I should be hardly believed; at least a severe Critick would be apt to think I enlarged a little, a Travellers are often suspected to do’, says Gulliver, with an obvious pun, in Brobdingnag), but still able to relish to the full that complete revaluation of the narrative, when the author finally betrays what game he is playing; when what was being received as ‘lying like the truth’ is grasped instead as an extravagant thought experiment. That moment comes rapidly in Gulliver, while de Foigney’s narrative rambles towards extraordinariness. But get there it certainly does.

Well, I was scanning the EEBO page images, of a densely inked quarto, at some speed (I think I was looking for giants or pigmies), so I may have been exceptionally slow on the uptake. But it was pleasant to stumble over a text that was completely unknown to me, but which has (it turns out) quite a bit of scholarship about it, among those scholars who do fantastical travels, utopias, and the like.

Reading it with no preconceptions from relevant scholarship, I was of course gratified most by the startling declaration that all the Australians are about 8 feet high and hermaphrodites. I’d seen this motif of hermaphroditism before in Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem, and I suppose it may be a recurrent thing triggered in the first place by genuine accounts of the gender-neutral folk the first Europeans found quietly accepted in the native communities of Florida. The text I was reading gives a surprising twist to this: Sadeur is baffled about their physical mechanisms of reproduction: ‘In all the time that I was there, I could never discover how Generation-work was performed amongst them.’ Instead of his own discoveries of a ‘deviant’ sexuality in the natives, Sadeur is put under irresistible philosophical pressure by one sage old Australian who befriends and teaches him. (I should say that language problems are not just set aside: these hyper-rational beings have a graspable language whose radical simplicity and directness stems from a system of (monosyllabic) word formation based on the observable and elemental qualities of things.) The Australian sees the European as a ‘half-man’, a defective example of humanity: “Thou canst never reconcile the use of reason with the exclusion of both sexes in one person … it is certain, that both Sexes are necessary for the perfection of an nature Man … As you seem to keep a kind of medium between Man and Beast, I believe I do you no injury in calling you half-Men”.

Like Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, Sadeur suffers a complete philosophical bouleversement: here is the sage chiding him about the habitual European distinctions between the sexes:

“Thou hast advanced that the Father and Mother act together to produce it; thou hast made me apprehend, that the Mother is the most nearly concern’d in it; from whence is it then this thou concludest the Father ought to be lookt upon as the Principle cause? I found myself shock’t by the Discourse of this Old man; and although I cou’d not consent to his reason, which overturn’d all our Laws, I cou’d not hinder my self from making a thousand reflections, and confessing that they treated that Sex with so much severity, from whom all Mankind receiv’d so many obligations: My thoughts furnish’d me then with an hundred reasons to maintain what my Philosopher had asserted; I found my self forc’d to believe that this great power which man had usurped over Women, was rather the effect of an odious Tyranny, than a Legitimate Authority.”

While de Foigney’s narrator remains year after year completely in the dark about the propagation of these perfect and rational beings, they are repulsed by his one inadvertent revelation of his own single gender: “It happen’d another time, about six months after my arrival, that the extraordinary Caresses of the Brethren, caused some unruly motions in me, which some of them perceiving, were so very much scandalized at it, that they left me with great indignation.”

A similar veil is drawn over the god of the Australians, locally only ever referred to as ‘the incomprehensible’: “There is no Subject more curious and secret among the Australians, than that of their Religion.” This version of de Foigney’s fable is apparently based on a bowdlerised text (or so I learn from the EMLS review of a new edition of the original, linked to below).

For the other aspects of this fantasy Australia, there is euthanasia, as in More: “there is never held any Assembly at the Heb, at which there is not twenty or thirty Persons that demand the Liberty to return to their rest”. (Those wishing to die consume an overdose of the local panacea, the ‘fruit of rest’, and for the one time in their lives sing and dance among this nation of austere agelasts. This is ignored politely: the partakers then die. Also, they are vegetarians from a radical persuasion of the elevation and difference of their own species: “A Beast is a thing so much beneath us, that it were better for a Man not to be at all, than to debase his noble nature, so far as to adulterate it with the mixture of a Beast, by making it his Food.”

Like the Utopians of More, they fight with all the unchivalrous determination of pure rationalists. During his long stay, Sadeur witnesses their vicious war against the human ‘Fondins’ by ‘the Brethren’, which is carried to an extreme beyond genocide: after wiping out the Fondin population, the Brethren excavate and then inundate the whole island territory of their enemies.

This terrifying people make hopeless prospects for European colonisation. They are seen wiping out a European fleet and over-confident invasion force, but also, as More’s Utopia, they are incorruptible:

“There is no likelihood of bringing them to a Compliance, by the allurements of Gain, or Rewards, or of Pleasure, nor any practical means left for us to overcome that strange aversion they have for us, which is so great, that they cannot endure to hear us mentioned, without declaring the passion they have to destroy us. And then besides those things that we usually carry into the newly discovered Countries, and which procure us access to their Inhabitants, pass in the esteem of the Australians, for Childrens Play-things, and meer trifles, and baubles; they look upon our Gawdy Stuffs, and richest Silks, as Spiders Webs, they know not so much as what the names of Gold and Silver signify.”

Our narrator had tried briefly to intervene in the killing of a Fondin woman and her two beautiful daughters: in disgrace for this, manages to fly from the island by means of a large bird, and so escapes back to Madagascar.

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/02-2/rev_bur1.html

http://www.amazon.com/Southern-Land-Known-Utopianism-Communitarianism/dp/0815625715

De Foigney’s book, even in this censored early version, intrigued me. It lacks the settled stance of the best philosophical tales, switching too conspicuously between yarn and pedagogic dialogue (though I suppose the mixed style is to be expected in such works). Most of all, I relished that initial generic uncertainty in my reading. Though I will never recapture that indeterminacy, I have ordered a copy of David Fausset’s new edition and complete translation.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Southern-Land-Known-Utopianism-Communitarianism/dp/0815625715/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202548228&sr=8-1

Visions of delight

1607, 2007: tomorrow, the 10^th of January, the US Mint releases commemorative coins for the 400^th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony. As you will see on their site, the silver dollar design represents “Three Faces of Diversity, representing the three cultures that came together in Jamestown”. That's nice, and quite tempting at $35.

http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/index.cfm?action=Photo#2007Jamestown

I’ve recently and dutifully watched Terrence Malick’s film, slightly mistimed in its release last year (and sure to have a ‘director’s cut’ this year), The New World. http://www.thenewworldmovie.com/

There’s some highly intelligent for and against argument about the film on the IMDB talkboards,

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402399/usercomments

I confess freely that it took me three sessions to get through the DVD. If you haven’t seen it, you have to imagine the stalagmitically slow enigma of ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ coupled with the chocolate box tragedy of ‘Elvira Madigan’ – yea, it even has a Mozart piano concerto for the walking-together-in-the-long-grass-wondering-if-a-hearty-shag-might-help-us-

over-the-language-difficulties scenes (of which there are many). You cannot imagine anyone doing better with the I’m-in-harmony-with-the-great-mother elegant arm-wavings of Matoaka (Pocahontas)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas

than the splendidly named Q’Orianka Kilcher, Colin Farrell furrows his brow a lot as John Smith. Superbly shot in natural light, the sound recordist’s perverse work apparently renders a large part of what dialogue there is maddeningly inaudible.

When you read the self-vindications of the ‘Counseil for Virginia’, it’s clear that the English colonists expended their energies falling out with one another, but Malick wants the sound of the wind in the trees and the grass, the sound of raindrops and rivers, and so the one adequately descriptive quarrel ends with a pistol shot that could have been the director’s.

I thought as I watched that the term for the ‘first people’ used in the film, ‘the Naturals’ was false to early 17^th century usage, but I was wrong, and someone has done their homework, for there it is “for the Naturals withdrew from all commerce and trafficke with them, cunningly making a war upon them, which they felt not” (A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, 1610, p.11), and there it is in the OED: ‘Natural’, n1., III. A person or thing of or from a designated region; a native. 19. a. A native of a place or country. It must have pleased the polemic purpose of the director no end to discover that.

Here’s the American archaeologists digging up what can be found of Werowocomoco:
http://powhatan.wm.edu/