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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Acknowledgments ix
Notes 221
Select Bibliography 263
Index 279
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since I began the journey here, many people have come and gone. Others have
been there all along. Each shaped this book in their own way, and I happily ran
up many debts because of it.
The time and thought Josh Piker generously provided to this project, from
start to finish, proved indispensable to its fruition. I can’t thank him enough
for the myriad ways he helped sharpen the book’s prose and argument, and for
modeling the very best of our profession. Cathy Kelly has also been there from
the beginning, offering inestimable encouragement at every step. In formal and
informal settings, I learned early on to value her insights on early America, aca-
demic publishing, and life in the academy. Jamie Hart’s expertise in Tudor and
Stuart England and steady support of my research interests enriched my explora-
tion of early modern Atlantic history. Gary Anderson, Paul Gilje, Sterling Evans,
and Karl Offen were also eager to share their time and thoughts. Fellow grad
students at OU, especially Dave Beyreis, Patrick Bottiger, and Matt Pearce, pro-
vided reliable sounding boards, entertaining diversions, and lasting friendships.
Several other scholars have given generously to this project with their
comments on various parts and iterations. I first presented my ideas to wider
audiences at a fellows roundtable at the American Antiquarian Society, organ-
ized by Paul Erickson, a brown-bag lunch talk at the Massachusetts Historical
Society, organized by Conrad Wright, and at Jace Weaver’s “Exploring the Red
Atlantic Conference” at the University of Georgia. At each, I was increasingly
heartened to learn from participants that I was on to something. The week-long
“Atlantic Geographies” workshop at the University of Miami, organized by Tim
Watson, helped me interrogate the explanatory power of an Atlantic framework
with junior scholars across the disciplines. Since these initial meetings, the proj
ect began to assume its present form thanks to the feedback of Colin Calloway,
Kelly Chaves, Jeffers Lennox, Andrew Lipman, Daniel Mandell, Andy Parnaby,
Jenny Hale Pulsipher, John G. Reid, Joshua Reid, and Daniel Richter. The
ix
x Ack nowl edg ments
and sage professional advice whenever I needed it. Fr. Bob Franco’s wise and
gentle counsel always seemed to arrive at just the right time.
But the most credit goes to my family. Their unwavering confidence in me has
been encouraging, to be sure, but it’s their own commitments and achievements,
great and small, that offered the most inspiration. Becky, Jared, Cade, and
Mackenzie always received me with open arms (and an open camper) on my
trips back to Minnesota. Mike and Liane expressed the least interest in my book
but had the heart to ask about it anyway, once or twice. I value their sincerity.
Caty and Jeb helped sharpen my storytelling skills by affording me countless
opportunities to put Landon and Caleb to bed. Allison fostered the beginning
and middle of this project but did not see its end. Her grit, patience, and love
demonstrated to me time and again what truly matters. I’m just as grateful to
craft a new chapter with Julieann, whose balance of good cheer and honest re-
alism I’ve come to depend on. My parents, Gerry and Sue, deserve praise for all
those camping trips too numerous to count, and too remote to locate, where
I first developed a curiosity about the past. Thank you most of all for showing
me that meaningful accomplishments take time and happen in little ways that
are best left unspoken.
Storm of the Sea
Introduction
Making, Forgetting, Remembering
The festive autumn day had chilled when they began their conquest. At first
the backdrop seemed quaint and familiar: salty breezes, austere Pilgrims,
godly melodies, grateful prayers, lofty vessel. The pageant at Plymouth Harbor,
Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day 1970 celebrated the 350th anniversary of
an iconic moment in American history: the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth
Rock. But tranquility and reverence suddenly gave way to frenzy and profanity.
As park rangers guided sightseers aboard Mayflower II, a throng of twenty-
five young men “swept aboard” the life-size replica and wrested control. They
stormed the decks, scrambled up the rigging, barked commands from the crow’s
nest, struck the ensign of St. George’s Cross, tossed pious mannequins over-
board, and declared victory. Some prepared to torch their new prize. One of the
leaders held up a musket and warned of an impending revolution. Down below,
panicky and confused tourists scurried off the gangplanks, and from the security
of shore they looked up and beheld the scene. “We made history,” the intruders
announced in the wake of their takeover.1
The momentous commemoration at Plymouth Harbor offered a history
lesson no one had heard before. The rowdy revisionists received their schooling
in the American Indian Movement (AIM), a new coalition of young Indian
activists committed to enhancing indigenous sovereignty, self-determination,
and economic opportunity. The audience for their interpretive performance
included the crowd of bewildered bystanders as well as those who awoke the
following morning to headlines of vandalism and theft. Like the recent occupa-
tion of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, which included the participation of
several Plymouth protesters, the Thanksgiving rally aimed to shock, irritate, and
awaken.2
Much of what made AIM’s publicity stunt so successful was that it subverted
deeply held beliefs, not only about that historic instant when the Mayflower
dropped anchor but also about early American encounters more generally. There
1
2 Storm of the Sea
children. Headmen took to the sea, sometimes with their adolescent sons in tow,
to avert a crisis of confidence at home.
The nautical work of dominion thus served more than a material need
within Wabanaki communities. It functioned as a social enterprise as much as
an economic pursuit. Appropriating sailing technology, investing in a forceful
maritime presence, and raiding vessels for captives and cargoes preserved cus-
tomary gender roles and authority structures amid the environmental and ec-
onomic upheavals touched off by colonialism. By the early eighteenth century,
a new Wabanaki man had emerged. He was first and foremost a man of the sea.
Leading him over the waves was a new Wabanaki sagamore, a decorated captain
who commanded his own ships, marshaled naval units, spearheaded plundering
operations, and enriched his people with the material and human spoils of war.
Together the new men steered the course of their confederacy.11
Indians made room for foreigners in their reconceived homelands and waters
but made clear the conditions of their welcome and the costs of transgressing
them. In essence, the Native conception of a proper Dawnland order included a
Figure 0.1 Abenaki woman and man, circa 1750, with a style of headwear common
throughout Wabanakia. By permission of the City of Montreal, Records Management
and Archives, Montreal, Quebec.
Int roduc tion 7
knew demanded much more. Mired in the increasingly global politics of the day,
England’s monarchs, secretaries of state, privy councilors, and Lords of Trade
weighed Wabanaki advances against a much wider backdrop. Their decision
to invest the empire’s resources elsewhere—in frequent wars with worldwide
theaters, in political schemes throughout Continental Europe, in naval patrols
around the West Indies—reflected not so much indifference toward two of their
colonies but rather the fraught and hydra-headed nature of empire building in
the early modern world. Officials had to pick their battles carefully but desper-
ately hoped they were choosing the right ones.
Imperial prioritizing was made more complicated by North American
agents who warned that few matters were more critical to the empire than those
pertaining to the banks of the northwest Atlantic. The region’s rich stocks of cod
and mackerel underwrote England’s expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, feeding its booming plantation complex in the West Indies, serving
its Royal Navy as “the Nursery of Seamen,” and backing its credit in European
markets. New England also owed much of its rapid growth to the fishery. By the
outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675, fish had become so indispensible to the
regional economy that officials exempted it from the wartime ban on exports—
the only commodity to achieve such status. “The Chief Staple of this Country,”
as Massachusetts lieutenant governor William Stoughton referred to the fishery
in 1696, continued to flourish over the next century. By the end of the colonial
period it constituted the largest sector of New England’s economy, with annual
exports totaling over £160,000—roughly half of all exports by value. Far greater
was the percentage in Nova Scotia. Though it comprised only one square on the
Atlantic chessboard, the North Atlantic fishery figured strategically and deci-
sively in the endgame of supremacy.15
The heart of the ocean powering Britain’s hemispheric ambitions and
Wabanakia’s regional ascendancy resided not at the Atlantic’s geographic center
but along its periphery. Marine biologists locate the most productive oceanic
zones in and around the estuaries, banks, bays, and islands rimming the seas.
In the North Atlantic, this edge effect is pronounced in its western and eastern
boreal regions where currents intersect over shallows and pull up nutrient-rich
water into the sunlight, thus creating an “incubator of life.” After exhausting ma-
rine resources around the British Isles by 1500, European fishermen turned their
attention to the seemingly limitless waters of the Grand Banks, Georges Bank,
and other smaller shoals of the northwest Atlantic. This incubator would come
to sustain two competing visions of the ocean and over a century of theft, vio-
lence, captivity, and death.16
That both Britain’s imperial fortunes and Wabanakia’s extractive economy
relied on a productive fishery was lost on no one. Native seaborne campaigns
were not simply a frontier problem; their repercussions spread far beyond
Int roduc tion 9
ship, kidnapped sailor, impressed crew, slain captain, and razed garrison forced
elites to recall the limits of their influence in the imperial competition. In attacks
that only grew more elaborate, destructive, and profitable over the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, Indians exposed the narrow ambit of authority
extending from governors’ offices and state houses. The rise of an indigenous do-
minion proved just how wide, hostile, and unwieldy the Atlantic Ocean could be.
Forgetting also became politically expedient. Britain’s sequence of military
victories around the globe in the Seven Years’ War settled a nearly century-
long conflict for imperial domination in North America. By its conclusion in
1763, the war had toppled the tenuous Anglo-Franco equilibrium upon which
Wabanaki had staked their own maritime project. Massachusetts colonists
would have ample cause to write off the misery of their past failures with a Native
confederacy, as their relationship with the mother country deteriorated over the
next thirteen years. Quieting the tragic crisis of Indian relations allowed New
Englanders to project more forcefully their capacity to flourish beyond the pur-
view of king and parliament. Looking forward and never back made it easier for
colonists to believe that they could positively affect the circumstances of their
local world, that they were capable of forging a new society unshackled from
the endless turmoil of Europe, and that a new American identity supplanted the
Britishness they celebrated so fervently for much of the century.18
In the process, Euro-Americans forgot the importance of listening to Indians.
English colonists once knew better than to discount Wabanaki voices, but by the
end of the Seven Years’ War their descendants saw little reason to take them se-
riously. Doing so would have offered stark reminders of the story. Many details
of the age of dominion have disappeared from Wabanaki discourse, too, in part
because of pressure from a dominant culture to dismiss them. But an apprecia-
tion of the ocean’s life-giving qualities has endured through material objects and
oral traditions.
The amnesia has been perpetuated in the field of early American studies.
Though studies of British America’s imperial breakdown are beginning to sit-
uate the American Revolution in wider oceanic, hemispheric, and continental
frameworks, the literature continues to demarcate the thirteen rebellious col-
onies from the larger context of British America.19 The empire’s other North
American holdings, including Nova Scotia, are consequently relegated to margi-
nalia in the more meaningful history of community building: of provincials from
New England to Georgia coming together on a rocky road to revolution and
becoming American. The result has been an efflorescence of new perspectives
on the revolution’s transatlantic and transcontinental causes and effects, but
how and why only thirteen colonies joined together to declare their independ
ence in 1776 remains far less clear. More to the point, by severing the future
United States from the future Canada, scholarship on Revolutionary America
Int roduc tion 11
has obscured another imperial crisis. This one forced Massachusetts and Nova
Scotia together under a shared experience of subjecthood and victimhood be-
fore tearing them apart.20
Changing conceptualizations of the Atlantic Ocean further shroud this story.
Long accepted as a daunting barrier separating societies, the early modern
Atlantic has more recently been appreciated for facilitating movement and en-
abling contacts. The circulation of commodities, the extension of market capi-
talism, the diffusion of political ideas, the elaboration of scientific knowledge,
and the flow of migrants characterize an oceanic world that links, transmits,
and accelerates. Put simply, scholars of this interconnected Atlantic world have
stripped the sea of the isolating and inhibiting properties that defined much of its
conceptual history and in turn have transformed it into a governable and seam-
less conduit. The collective effort to Atlanticize four continents has ultimately
reduced a disorderly and hostile piece of the historical globe to an organic and
rational catalyst of progress.21
Historians have only recently begun to explore Native experiences in mar-
itime spaces, following their canoes along contested coastlines and tracing
their migrations aboard Euro-American voyages. Storm of the Sea aims to join
this growing corpus while pushing its contours with new insights into the tech-
nological, political, economic, and temporal scope of Native maritime power.
The advent of sail in the Northeast ushered in a dawn that neither Indians
nor Europeans saw coming. By way of their rapid and extensive assimilation
of sailing vessels, from ocean-going schooners, sloops, and ketches to lighter
single-masted shallops, disparate communities coalesced into a political alliance
that for over a century extended and enforced their sovereignty over the heart
of the ocean. The Age of Sail fueled the transformation of decentralized hunter-
gatherer bands into a regional Wabanaki confederacy enhanced by the wealth of
its tributaries. They took to the sea not merely to preserve, maintain, or resist,
not to protect an old relationship to the water, fight for independence, or repel
colonialism. Their maritime way of thinking proved far more innovative, oppor-
tunistic, and dynamic. Under their sails, Wabanaki endeavored to expand, con-
trol, extract, enrich, and thrive as the people.22
Moving the Native seafaring experience beyond traditional canoes and ances-
tral coasts—thus leaving behind older views of Indians as terrestrial people—
allows Wabanaki to be seen where their victims often located them, alongside
notorious pirates such as Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackam, and Black Sam
Bellamy. Pirates fast became the talk of the British Empire from 1713 to 1730
when an outbreak of seaborne theft plagued the busiest Atlantic and Indian
Ocean shipping lanes and profitable West Indian sugar plantations. The crime
spree taxed Britain’s finances and tested its navy’s wherewithal at the same
moment that an eruption of Native sea raids roiled waters far to the north. To
12 Storm of the Sea
New England and Nova Scotia authorities left to reckon with their latest Indian
problem, Britain’s highly publicized campaign against piracy offered a winning
cause to which they could hitch their historic struggle. Colonial leaders moved
quickly to co-opt a proven and expedient rhetoric in their attempt to open an-
other theater of their empire’s war on seaborne crime.23
Early modern Europeans deployed the term “piracy” to describe a spe-
cific sort of maritime theft. Pirates were seafaring robbers unaffiliated with a
state polity and indiscriminate in their choice of targets. Seaborne plundering
was piracy when a victimized nation, determined to police its sovereign terri-
tory, said so. An important but sometimes slippery distinction was made be-
tween pirates and privateers, seafarers who operated with a license—a letter of
marque—from a state sponsor authorizing the attack of enemy shipping, usually
during wartime. A privateer was expected to remit the spoils of war to the gov-
ernment, which then compensated him according to prearranged terms. When
British victims applied the descriptor “pirate” to Wabanaki raiders, they judged
the People of the Dawn to be a pre-political and pre-modern people, primitive
individuals whose culture lacked the organizing principles of European empires
and the civilized societies those polities built. Indians were people without law
and social structure and thus devoid of political community. They were closer
to a state of a nature than to the states comprising the international commu-
nity. In criminalizing and delegitimizing Native sea power, and in accentuating
the statelessness of Native society, the rhetorical work of piracy prevented
contemporaries from recognizing Indians as political actors.24
Why Wabanaki have since gone undetected as pirates has as much to do
with modern conceptions of Atlantic piracy fostered by both Hollywood
and academia. Pirates when popularly presented are antiheroes. They are
dropouts, rejects, and misfits turned bandits, brigands, and rebels. That they
are of European stock, borne of Europe’s civil and economic instabilities, re-
liant on European trade, and pursued by European courts of law puts them
in a decidedly Euro-centric frame. The caricature of the politically and so-
cially primitive outlaw leaves little room to remember Wabanakia’s architects
of dominion.25
More familiar histories about American Indians further cloud this story.
Vicious tragedies weighing heavily in the Native past—the horrors of epidemic
disease, the destruction of European warfare, the violence of US imperialism,
the trauma of forced relocation, the poverty of reservations, the racism of white
America—have created a paradigm of declension that prevents viewing Native
violence as anything more than resistance and regarding Native confederation
as anything more than a survival strategy. It reduces Indians to reactionary
creatures, always on the defensive, always one step behind the inevitable march
of progress.
Int roduc tion 13
This book highlights a lingering tendency to read the power dynamics of later
periods back into the first two centuries of Indian-European relations. Rather
than stressing what ultimately happened to countless Native Americans, it
underscores the uncertainty of life in early America, the elusiveness of European
agency, and the fluidity of power that render its story deeply foreign and quin-
tessentially colonial.26
The narrative of declension has remained robust in accounts of New England’s
early history. Debates about its puritan ancestors aside, the region possesses a
rich heritage of lamentation over the supposed decay and disappearance of its
Indians. Historians have since recovered a very different Native past, one defined
by displacement and loss, adaptation and continuity, and extreme poverty—but
also by fierce persistence. These studies have succeeded admirably in exposing
the fiction of New England’s “vanishing Indian” trope, but they have neglected
part of an indigenous experience that stretched from modern-day Maine to Nova
Scotia. While they have recovered an important story of impoverishment, dias-
pora, intermarriage, and ethnogenesis, they have also left an impression that it
is the whole story. The Wabanaki engagement with colonialism diverges sharply
from the narrative of marginalization and survival that defines New England’s
diverse Indian past.27
The Comanche, Iroquois, and Powhatan remain outliers in a historiograph-
ical trend that situates the power politics of Indian country within stubbornly
local contexts.28 Though the local turn in Native history has demonstrated that
Indian communities can be fruitful units of analysis, it has also contributed to a
strong aversion harbored by many Native Americanists toward newer transat-
lantic and imperial models.29 A reluctance to see Native violence as coherent,
coordinated, and systematic, as part and parcel of a political project sanctioned
on a scale much wider than the band, the community, and the tribe, explains
the highly localized nature of Wabanaki studies. The light shed on individual
Wabanaki tribes in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes has left the confederacy
as a whole in the dark.30
A counterpoint to perceptions of colonialism as a unidirectional process to
a foregone conclusion, Storm of the Sea recovers the experience of indigenous
communities that coalesced to achieve stability and growth where Europeans
struggled to resist and remain, of Indians who built an economy that grew more
elaborate and more profitable over time, always at the expense of Europeans. It
is a story of early America in which familiar themes of progress and declension
give way to a more human narrative of empire that recalls the unstable, unpre-
dictable, and unmanageable dynamics of power in colonial North America.
The structure of this book reflects its narrative’s disorderly contest for power.
While the following chapters are organized chronologically in order to trace the
historically contingent changes in Wabanakia’s project of dominion—its successes,
0 50 100 miles
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I C W
O C E
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Louisbourg Canso
Port
Toulouse
Cape Halifax Cape Sable
Breton Acadia/
Newfoundland Island Nova
Scotia
Port Royal/
Shubenacadie Annapolis
Minas Royal
G ulf of
Grand
Manan Boston
Prince Bay of Fundy Island G ulf of M aine
Edward Beaubassin Mt. Isles of
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Figure 0.2 Map of the northeast, circa mid-eighteenth century. Designed by Bart Wright.
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[Le 25.] — C’est bien fait pour l’écrire ! une lettre de ma chère
Marie, sur mon chevet, à mon réveil ce matin. Aurore d’un beau jour,
tant en moi qu’au dehors : soleil au ciel et dans mon âme : Dieu soit
béni de ces douces lueurs qui ravivent parmi les angoisses ! Je sais
bien que c’est à recommencer, mais on s’est reposé un moment et
on marche avec plus de force ensuite. La vie est longue, il faut de
temps en temps quelques cordiaux pour la course : il m’en vient du
ciel, il m’en vient de la terre, je les prends tous, tous me sont bons,
c’est Dieu qui les donne, qui donne la vie et la rosée ! Les lectures
pieuses, la prière, la méditation fortifient ; les paroles d’amitié aussi
soutiennent. J’en ai besoin : nous avons un côté du cœur qui
s’appuie sur ce qu’on aime ; l’amitié, c’est quelque chose qui se tient
bras à bras. Comme Marie me donne le sien tendrement, et que je
me trouve bien là ! Ainsi nous irons jusqu’à la mort : Dieu nous a
unies.