Beware the Abandoned Woman: European Travelers, “Exceptional” Native Women, and Interracial Families in Early Modern Atlantic Travelogues

Abstract

As the traveler Jean Mocquet sailed up the American coast near Cumaná, Venezuela, one of his shipmates told him a tragic tale about their ship’s pilot. Years before, the pilot had been the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the West Indies, near an island Mocquet felicitously calls St. John de Love in his volume Travels and Voyages (1616). Stumbling upon an Indian woman, the lost man made “her fine Promises by Signs, that he would Marry her, which she believed, and conducted him through these Desarts; where she showed him the Fruit and Roots good to Eat, and served him for an Interpreter amongst the Indians, which he found, she telling them that it was her Husband.” During the “2 or 3 years” they spent together, the pilot had “no other Comfort but this Woman,” who bore their child and “so dearly Loved” him that she “had abandonned her Country and Friends.” “Without her,” Mocquet assures his readers, the pilot would “have been dead a thousand times.” But when he finds an English ship docked in the harbor, he abandons his wife, “being ashamed to take along with him this Indian-Woman thus Naked.”