Joining Signs with Words: Missionaries, Metaphors, and the Massachusett Language

Abstract

N his ecclesiastical history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Cotton Mather reported a striking incident between the missionary John Eliot and the Wampanoag sachem known to the English as King Philip. Our Eliot, Mather wrote, looking back some thirty years to a time before Philip led a devastating war against the New England settlements, made a tender of the everlasting salvation to [King Philip]; but the monster entertained it with contempt and anger, and, after the mode of joining signs with words, he took a button upon the coat of the reverend man, adding 'That he cared for his gospel, just as much as he cared for that button.' ' The Indian mode of joining signs with words would have been understood by pre-twentieth-century readers as the use of gesture-in this case the aggressive grab for Eliot's coat button-to supplement verbal communication. Believing that the languages of the Americas were in vocabulary and syntax incapable of representing the full range of civilized thought and action, many writers and travelers from England and Europe thought that the gestures of oratory were meant to compensate for that inadequacy. Some regarded the gestures and