"This Our Earth Is Truly English": Protestant Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

"This our earth is truly English" sounds like a straightforward
assertion of imperial power, proclaimed perhaps by an English
explorer.  But in the imagination of Samuel Purchas, the
early-seventeenth-century English propagandist for empire, these were
the words cried out by the "carcasses" and "bones" of English victims
of the Powhatan uprising of 1622.
This paper explores the analytical insights to be gained by viewing
the English victims of the 1622 uprising as martyrs.  The Protestant
tradition of martyrdom—represented most famously in Foxe's Book of
Martyrs—usually insisted that to be considered a martyr an individual
had to be killed for his or her beliefs.  The central issue in the
Powhatan uprising was land rather than religion.  Yet English writings
emphasized the ways in which the victims' fates mirrored those of
early Christian saints and more recent English Protestant martyrs.  In
particular, a focus on corpse desecration situated the English dead in
a long line of Christian hagiography.
English writers reached even deeper into history to understand the
events of 1622.  Purchas drew on the Old Testament when he wrote that
"the Holy Patriarchs had a promise of Canaan, yet held no possession
but with their dead bodies."  Here Purchas referred to the story of
Jacob (Israel) and his son Joseph. For Purchas, the crux of this story
was that the bones of Jacob and Joseph gave the Israelites title to
Canaan and the right to dispossess the Canaanites.  In parallel
fashion, the bones of the English men and women slaughtered by the
Powhatans in 1622 gave the English the right to dispossess the
Powhatans.
This paper thus considers how English attitudes toward death, the
body, and religion were mobilized in response to Powhatan practices of
corpse mutilation.  English writers used tropes of martyrdom to render
the landscape "truly English."