Mohawk

The easternmost tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawk originally lived in the middle Mohawk Valley of present-day New York State.

Probably the second-largest of the Five Nations (numbering perhaps 8,000) at the time of contact with whites, the Mohawk maintained three principal villages and several smaller satellite towns. As “keepers of the eastern door” of the metaphorical Five Nations longhouse, the tribe was closest in proximity to Albany and therefore the Dutch and English traders who sought their wares in the fur trade. This circumstance afforded them wealth and influence disproportionate to the other members of the Iroquois League.

Within the grand council, or governing political body, of the Five Nations, the Mohawk held nine seats, or chieftainships, three each for their three clan structures: Turtle, Wolf, and Bear. According to Mohawk oral tradition, it was their chief Deganawida who first proposed the Iroquois alliance and brought the governing laws to the people, while other tribal histories claim this figure as their own. Nevertheless, the fact that the Mohawk were the first of the Iroquois to engage in trade relations with Europeans does lend credence to the theory that they probably played an integral role in developing and strengthening the league during the early historic period. Seeking the iron weapons and metal tools brought by the newcomers, the Mohawk spearheaded early campaigns to relieve indigenous rivals of these goods. After French-Indian alliances in the early 17th century made Mohawk raiding parties to the west too costly and dangerous, the Mohawk established ties with the merchants who followed in the wake of Henry Hudson’s 1609 expedition and helped secure Iroquois ascendancy in the eastern trade. Afterward, they maintained economic connections to the English, who came to supplant the Dutch.

Further reading: Nancy Bonvillain, The Mohawk (New York: Chelsea House, 1992); William N. Fenton and Elisabeth Tooker, “Mohawk,” in William Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), 466-480; Dean R. Snow, T. Gehring, and Willam A. Starna, eds., In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Tooker, ed., An Iroquois Source Book, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1985).

—Eric P. Anderson

Monardes, Nicholas (1493-1588) doctor A physician from Seville, Nicholas Monardes wrote an influential tract extolling the natural wonders to be found in the Western Hemisphere.

Born in Seville in 1493, only a year after the historic passage of Christopher Columbus, Nicholas Monardes learned medicine in an age when there were few medical schools. He studied at Alcala de Henares, a famous Spanish center for medical science at the time, and soon after receiving his degree in April 1533, he returned to Seville. He published his first medical tract, De secanda vena in pleuritide, in Seville in 1539. After marrying in 1540, he and his wife had seven children, including one son who emigrated to Peru and another son and one daughter who vowed their lives to the church. Monardes became one of the leading physicians in the city, and his clients included the archbishop as well as other members of the Seville elite.

Monardes’s chief achievement was the publication of a book that described the benefits to be had from harvesting American crops for medicinal uses. Published originally in Seville in 1574, the book appeared in London in 1577 under the title Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde. Here Monardes told his readers about such medical marvels as a root found in Florida called the beads of Saint Elen that helped alleviate stomach and urinary problems as well as eased the pain of kidney stones, and the cures to be wrought from medicines made from sassafras, also found in Florida. He was most enthusiastic in his endorsement of tobacco, which he believed could help to cure virtually any affliction. Consuming tobacco would heal infected breasts and stomach pains, reduce pain associated with kidney stones, eradicate troublesome gas, expel worms, take the pain away from toothaches, lessen any pain in joints, and cure all manner of wounds, including bites from venomous beasts. However, he did more than enumerate tobacco’s benefits: He also instructed his readers how to use these botanical products, thereby providing crucial information for Europeans who witnessed the growth of the tobacco trade during their lifetimes.

During the 16th century, European printers came to realize that their books would reach wider audiences if they could prove that the author had seen whatever he or she was describing. Many of these books bore the word “true” in the title, like Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Reporte of the New Found Land of Virginia, printed in its most famous edition in 1590. Printers wanted to offer truthful accounts, but it was often difficult separating charlatans from legitimate travelers. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne worried about precisely this subject in his famous essay “On Cannibals” (see the entry on cannibalism). Yet despite the desire to have eyewitnesses who spoke the truth about what they had seen, Monardes gained enormous credibility even though he had never sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, scholars accepted his views because of his thorough knowledge of the plants he described and because they presumed that Monardes, as a physician, knew from experience what he wrote.

Nicholas Monardes died in Seville on October 12, 1588. With his earthly remains buried at the monastery in San Leandro, his legacy lived because of his efforts to encourage Europeans to use the plants of the Western Hemisphere to improve their lives.

Further reading: Daniela Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Material Medica,” in London Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 83-99; Nicholas Monardes, Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde, trans. John Frampton, 2 vols., ed. Stephen Gaselee (New York: Arno Press, 1977).