Atlantic Wars by Geoffrey Plank

Author:Geoffrey Plank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 7.5 Christian Richter, mid-seventeenth century. A European soldier attacking a woman. Richter worked in Weimar between 1613 and 1667, and this image reflects German experience during the Thirty Years’ War. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

Indigenous American women in the early modern era produced few if any written protests against rape, but documents written by Europeans contain hints of the frequency of the practice. During the Pequot War in 1637, for example, John Winthrop described an encounter with a woman who had been taken captive. She pleaded with him for mercy. “One of her first requests,” he reported, “was that the English would not abuse her body.”95 During the Spanish conquest of Alta California in the eighteenth century, soldiers committed rape repeatedly. According to Junipero Serra, the head of the California missions,

In the morning, six or seven soldiers would set out together . . . and go to the distant rancherias even many leagues away. When both men and women at the sight of them would take off running . . . the soldiers, adept as they are at lassoing cows and mules, would lasso Indian women, who then became prey to their unbridled lust. Several Indian men who tried to defend the women were shot to death.96

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