Indian birch-bark canoes, to take another example, were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles around the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails were obviously better for long-distance travel along the shore. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the Pilgrims, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin and the English were fearful, Harvard historian Joyce E. Chaplin has argued, ''that Indians might get the upper hand."
Most important, the foreigners, coming from lands plagued by recurrent famine, were awed by Indian agriculture. Based on maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal, it used sophisticated techniques that kept the land fertile in ways that Europeans had not seen. A 2003 commentary in the journal Science described the creation of maize as ''arguably man's first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
Even the Europeans' purported superiority in military technology was evanescent. The ''peeces" that Winslow thought the Wampanoag wanted, for example, were less than they seemed. To be sure, Indians were disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives quickly learned that 16th-century matchlocks were fired by shoving a flaming fuse into an open pan of gunpowder, a process that took two or three minutes for every shot. In any case, most of the colonists were such dreadful shots, from lack of practice, that their muskets were little more than noisemakers.
By contrast, Indian longbows were fearsomely fast and precise--''far better than the average musket of the Plymouth colonists in rapidity and accuracy of fire," according to the noted arms scholar Harold L. Peterson. Wielded by people who had practiced archery since childhood, they could shoot 10 arrows a minute and were accurate up to 200 yards. To the dismay of colonists at Jamestown in 1607, a Powhatan Indian sank an arrow a foot deep into a target the Europeans thought impervious to an arrow shot--''which was strange," Jamestown council president George Percy observed, ''being that a Pistoll could not pierce it."
Similar stories played out across the hemisphere. Schoolchildren still learn that superior European technology let Francisco Pizarro and a force of 168 Spaniards conquer the Inca in 1532. Pizarro, textbooks say, had two advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. (Geographer Jared Diamond, in his 1994 bestseller ''Guns, Germs, and Steel," echoes this point.) The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such inferior technology, the Inca had no chance. ''What could [the Inca] offer against this armory?" asked John Hemming, author of a fine history of the conquest. ''They were still fighting in the bronze age."
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