According to human reason, guided only by the light of nature, these people lead the more happy and freer life, being void of care, which torments the minds of many Christians: They are not delighted in baubles, but in useful things.
Thomas Morton (1637) writing about his experience with Native Americans in his book, The New English Canaan. This was the first book the Puritans banned in America.
It is little recorded that some early English colonists to America either ran away to live with Native Americans or refused to return from captivity when given the chance. One writer put it that these reluctant colonists enjoyed the “most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail upon us”. Famously, an early French Jesuit found Native American customs “afforded me illumination the more easily to understand and explain several matters found in ancient authors”.
Just imagine the entire lot of colonists ran away to live with Native Americans, once realizing both that better practices had already been found and that colonization was altogether a ghastly prospect by comparison. Now that’s a counterfactual!
Sources
Axtell, J. (1985). The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford University Press: New York.
Connolly, C. (2023). “How America’s first banned book survived and became an anti-authoritarian i” (accessed online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-americas-first-banned-book-survived-and-became-an-anti-authoritarian-icon-180982971).
Knox, B. (1993). The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.
A recent version of The New English Canaan in which the epigraph appears can be found at https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/new-english-canaan-part-i
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 