In Daniel Defoe’s Life and Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe tells us that in his eighteenth year as a castaway he stumbled across the remnants of a cannibalistic feast. Repulsed by “this horrid Spectacle,” he “gave God Thanks that had cast my first Lot in a Part of the World, where I was distinguish’d from such dreadful Creatures as these.” He then spent several weeks plotting “how I might destroy some of these Monsters in their cruel bloody Entertainment.” After a while, though, he gave up these fantasies, as he considered the injustice of “so outragious an...

In July 1649, a few months after the execution of King Charles I, Parliament established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to subsidize the efforts of John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew, and other Puritan ministers to convert the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard.¹ By 1655, the society had received several thousand pounds from a nationwide parish collection commanded by Parliament.² It used those funds to purchase land throughout England, some of which had just been confiscated by Parliament from loyalists to the king.³ Besides subsidizing a few missionaries and sending supplies abroad, the rents...

Early British missionary writings encompass an eclectic corpus of narratives, dictionaries, biographies, and journals, but one of the most prominent genres is the letter. The British hardly set precedent here, as the vast collection of letters making up The Jesuit Relations testifies. The earliest English effort at fund-raising for a mission in America was organized through letters from James I to the archbishops, and then from the archbishops to their church wardens, who raised money at the parish level.¹ Most of the “Indian Tracts” describing work in New England are made up of letters between ministers on either side of...

While the Anglo-Dutch collaboration envisioned by Jessey’s Of the Conversion of Five Thousand was unusual when it was published in 1650, the inclusion of a Dutch readership in The Conquests and Triumphs of Grace marked a nascent internationalism of the late seventeenth century expressed through references to evangelical endeavor. Over the next three decades Increase and then Cotton Mather published letters to and from Dutch, Danish, and Prussian ministers. Anglican proponents of mission also developed correspondences throughout the continent and attempted international collaborations. A handful of well-positioned individuals—Anthony Boehm, the chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Anne’s consort Prince George of Denmark,...

Among British groups who attempted to convert Indians during the colonial period, the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was the least successful. A few Anglican ministers had preached to Indians since Alexander Whitaker’s and George Thorpe’s efforts in Jamestown before the massacre of 1622, and Morgan Godwyn, a minister of Barbados and Virginia, had published texts stressing the church’s duty to convert Indians and African slaves, but the church otherwise had paid little attention to Indians in the seventeenth century.¹ After its founding in 1702 the society undertook a mission to the Mohawks (which received...

One of the ironies of early British missionary writings is that the priority of eliciting readers’ pity for Indians and closeness with distant missionaries resulted in some erasure of the missionaries. This erasure is distinct from that of the Indians, who are vividly portrayed within the texts but who often are more present as stereotypes than as real people. Missionaries, on the other hand, are not portrayed or depicted for readers. Rather, they are presented as extensions of their readers’ perception. Readers rarely look at missionaries; they look through their eyes and are asked to feel what the missionaries feel....

One of the most uncertain aspects of missionary writings was their influence. Clearly they intersected in important ways with the discourses of colonialism and sensibility, but did they actually shape how the British thought about and treated Indians? The donations these projects received indicate some influence, but it is not always clear that it reached beyond the religious networks that supported missionaries in the first place. Most strikingly, these texts seem to have had little effect on many colonists who lived near Indians and competed with them for land. When John Sergeant tried to raise funds for an Indian boarding...

By the second half of the eighteenth century British missionary writings exhibited a preoccupation with what had become a necessary task: explaining the failure of most efforts to convert Indians. From this anatomy of defeat a familiar catalog of blame emerged: writers in Britain accused colonists of alienating or corrupting Indians, and Nonconformists, especially in the colonies, blamed the Church of England for its feeble conversion attempts. Clergy on both sides of the Atlantic derided merchants for selling alcohol to Indians, and everyone blamed the Spanish and the French—even after France lost Canada in the Seven Years’ War—for...