ABSTRACT
Historians struggle to understand first contacts because they have to rely on narratives written by explorers and colonists who believed themselves superior to the native peoples with whom they were interacting. Here we have geographer Thomas Harriot writing about Algonquian Indians he observed during the first English attempt to settle Roanoke; an account of Henry Hudson’s 1609 arrival at Manhattan taken down by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, who heard it from Delaware and Mahican Indians in the middle of the eighteenth century; and William Bradford’s description of the devastating effect of disease on Indians along the Connecticut River in 1633.
