![]() ![]() Up or down meant little in the jumble of paths, brooks, woods, cranberry bogs and meadows. “John Billington,” wrote Governor William Bradford, “lost himself in the woods and wandered up and down some five days, living on berries and whatever he could find.” Bradford’s vertical description of Billington’s horizontal predicament captured the panic of bewilderment. In the summer of 1621, a young man got completely turned around in the countryside beyond Plymouth Colony. In relational space, Native caretakers kept their eyes on colonial transplants to prevent catastrophic blunders. The Hurons “begged” Champlain “not to stray off from them any more.” They did not want to be held responsible for his disappearance, or worse, death. He wandered lost for the next three days, praying to God for a rescue until he happened upon a waterfall he recognized and followed the stream down to his hosts’ camp. But camp was boring, and the bird, according to Champlain, was “peculiar.” The size of a plump hen, it had the beak of a parrot and “was entirely yellow, except the head which was red, and the wings which were blue.” After following the creature as it flew from perch to perch, Champlain looked around and realized that he had no clue where he was. His Huron hosts had asked him to stay in camp while they went out deer hunting. One morning in 1615, Champlain chased a bird into a forest north of Lake Ontario. Samuel de Champlain commanded the French empire in North America in the early 17th century, yet he could not be trusted to go for a walk in the woods by himself. Perico recovered enough to lead de Soto into a weeks-long ramble in the woods, but he remained shaky until the army accidentally stumbled upon some local residents with whom he could converse.Ī statue of Samuel de Champlain in Ottawa's Major's Hill Park He ran out of people to ask for directions and “ began to foam at the mouth and throw himself to the ground as if possessed by the Devil.” While his captors watched on, he came undone, an excruciating ordeal brought on by social dislocation as much as geographic confusion. On the outskirts of a thick forest 20 miles from Cotifachequi, a city rumored to possess gold in the uplands of today’s South Carolina, Perico’s network failed him. He connected people and commodities across territories by extracting news of high-demand ceremonial items from strangers. Prior to being taken captive, enslaved and baptized by the Spaniards, Perico had traversed the Mississippian chiefdoms of the southeast, suppling wealthy clients with goods like oyster-shell jewelry and copper disks. The boy was a nimble navigator, a skilled linguist and monger of gossip. In 1540, Perico, a Native American guide in the involuntary service of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto’s invading army, met his limit. ![]() And in so doing, I stumbled upon the twisted route Americans followed to reach a moment when blue dots pulsating on miniature screens tell them where to go. By meeting distressed individuals teetering on the edges of the worlds they knew, I learned how people constructed their worlds and how these constructions changed over time. Over five centuries, North Americans traveled from relational space, where people navigated by their relationships to one another, to individual space, where people understood their position on Earth by the coordinates provided by mass media, transportation grids and commercial networks. I call this extreme version of getting lost “nature shock,” the title of my new book, and eight years ago, I set out to find the terribly lost in American history. However, every so often, people get utterly lost, so lost that they scramble their brains along with their bearings. ![]() A hiker backtracks to find a missed trail marker, or a driver rolls down a window to ask a pedestrian for directions to a certain street or landmark. Usually, these bouts of disorientation end happily enough.
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