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Storm of the Sea
 Storm of the Sea
Indians and Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail

M AT T H E W R . B A H A R

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Bahar, Matthew R.
Title: Storm of the sea : Indians and empires in the Atlantic’s age of sail / Matthew R. Bahar.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022490 (print) | LCCN 2018025991 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190874254 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190874261 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190874247 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Abenaki Indians—History. | Ocean and civilization. |
Indians—First contact with Europeans.
Classification: LCC E99.A13 (ebook) | LCC E99.A13 B245 2019 (print) |
DDC 974.004/9734—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022490

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

For my parents
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: Making, Forgetting, Remembering  1

1 The Indians’ Old Sea, to 1500  17

2 A New Dawn on an Old Sea, 1500–​1600  39

3 New Waves, New Prospects: Strategizing the Sea, 1600–​1677  67

4 Glorious Revolutions, 1678–​1699   99

5 Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Empire, 1700–​1713  131

6 The Golden Age of Piracy, 1714–​1727  159

7 Imperial Breakdown and the Crisis of Confederacy,

1727–​1763   187

Conclusion: What the Bell Tolls  213

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

year-​long fellows at the Huntington Library in 2014–​2015 helped me rethink

early chapters of the manuscript and push it toward the finish line. That same
year I enjoyed the brief but memorable friendship of Carl Degler, whose enthu-
siastic encouragement of the project in the final months of his life imparted new
inspiration to my own.
The research and writing of this book occurred in many places thanks to the
financial support of several institutions. The Huntington Library, through the
capable hands of their Director of Research, Steve Hindle, provided a long-​
term NEH fellowship and a paradisiacal setting to continue writing the manu-
script. A Legacy Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, an Andrew
W. Mellon Research Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society,
and a Phillips Fund for Native American Research award from the American
Philosophical Society granted me opportunities to conduct archival research
throughout New England. In addition, generous support from the University
of Oklahoma’s Department of History in the form of a Hudson Fellowship, an
A.K. Christian Scholarship, and a Morgan Family Fellowship offered the time
and funding to visit archives abroad.
This book found an ideal home with Oxford University Press. Susan Ferber,
editor extraordinaire, expressed thoughtful interest in the project at an early stage
and has since shepherded it to completion with her pointed advice, deft editing,
and kind encouragement. Because of her guidance, and the critical, thorough,
and smart reader reports she solicited, the manuscript reached a fuller potential.
My colleagues at Oberlin College, especially in the Department of History,
provided a welcoming and supportive environment to finish the book while be-
ginning a career. I’m grateful for their willingness to mentor newcomers through
the learning curve that every professor trained at a research university and em-
ployed at a liberal arts college experiences. In their stellar teaching and research
records, they set a high bar that I hope to someday reach. My students also de-
serve credit. Their deep and genuine curiosity about the past, along with their
eagerness to join me in thinking through issues that inform this book, are just
some of what makes liberal arts teaching so rewarding.
Several friends have provided a welcome escape from the all-​consuming
tendencies of academic research and writing. Chad Boers has been there since
we forged an impossible alliance to win Diplomacy in a high school history class
(long live Austro-​Turkey). The friendship of Francis and Ang Revak is a special
gift that words can never describe. John Paul and Regina Cook, Chris Dalton,
Sam and Erin Snow, Adam and Casey Theisen, and Michael Ukpong provided a
tight-​knit and caring family in Norman. Always edifying were fireside chats with
Jon Detwiler, which could meander anywhere from hooded mergansers to sur-
vival tactics. Mike Parkin provided good company on many summer afternoons
 Ack nowl edg ment s xi

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

sit wide-​eyed Indians in dimunitive canoes and wooded shorelines dwarfed by

ships of strangers who will soon descend to make landfall and begin history.
Now it was the Indians moving history. It was the Indians towering at ship’s helm
and making waves. What could more forcefully galvanize the cause of decoloni-
zation than such a radical assault on colonization’s origin story?
Perhaps what is most surprising about the revelry at Plymouth Harbor is that
it was surprising at all. No one there was really making much history. Instead they
were all animating a scene from another story, unwittingly but precisely. It was a
far older tale whose characters had since vanished, whose details lived on only in
scattered shards, whose moral no one was left to remember. It took place in a time
as old as the footsteps on Plymouth Rock and a place not far from the shelter of
Plymouth Harbor. Its cast and plot bore uncanny resemblances to the spectacle
of 1970. That everyone gathered on the stage of Mayflower II believed they were
experiencing history in the making rather than history already made—​history
hijacked as activism rather than history as it really happened—​reveals just how
fully the story had been forgotten in a dark recess of America’s early past.
◆ ◆ ◆​
Over the course of the early modern period, during North America’s imperial
age, several Algonquian peoples across the American northeast confronted an
invasion of European colonizers by undertaking an extractive and expansionist
political project, a campaign of sea and shore that united their communities,
alienated colonial neighbors, and stymied English and French imperialism.
Their warriors took to the waves in fleets of ships to make tributaries of strangers
and men of themselves. Their peacekeepers took to the trail with promises and
demands to articulate policies and ensure compliance. Impelling them all were
ambitions for a proper social order in which their people exercised dominion
and reaped its rewards, while others showed deference and honored its duties.
Their communities responded to the strange, the unstable, and the threatening
by reimagining it to conform with the recognizable, the balanced, and the
sustaining. In the process they forged something new.
This book is about a maritime power built on the backs of two European
empires in the waters of the northwest Atlantic, from the arrival of foreign
explorers and fishermen in the sixteenth century until the end of the Seven Years’
War in 1763. Out of many hunter-​gatherer peoples they became Wabanaki—​the
People of the Dawn—​the first to experience daybreak over an ocean that had
captivated their attention and oriented their world long before strangers from
the east appeared on its horizon early in the sixteenth century. By then they
were making their homes along the major riverways, coastlines, and offshore
islands of present-​day Maine, eastern New Brunswick, eastern Quebec, Prince
Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. These Wabanaki subcultures became known as
 Int roduc tion 3

Abenaki, Penobscot (Penawapskewi), Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik), Passamaquoddy

(Pestomuhkati), and Mi’kmaq.3
In the beginning, Gluskap emerged from the ocean’s recesses to breathe life
into his people and into the pelagic universe that would sustain them after his
departure. The newcomers who later surfaced in his wake appeared to possess a
generative power akin to their great culture hero’s, and as such, Gluskap’s chil-
dren accorded them a place in their world as profitable but compliant neighbors.
But by the mid-​seventeenth century, as English colonists expanded into the
region and struggled to resist their dependent status, circumscribe Native au-
thority, and subjugate Native interests to their own, Wabanaki first looked to
one another and then to the ocean for answers. The long campaign they carried
out was a century-​long effort to build community among themselves and struc-
ture relations with outsiders. The campaign sprung from a common vision of a
Dawnland ordered, possessed, and ruled by its first people.4
The people pursued their project of dominion through a blue-​water strategy
designed to manage and manipulate their growing entanglement with two
global empires from the mid-​1630s to 1763. Discovering their old waters
enriched with new wealth brought from afar and their political affairs drawn into
a transatlantic game of imperial fortunes, native leaders, diplomats, and warriors
turned east to the ocean and invested in a mutually reinforcing complex of diplo-
matic and militant policies designed to extend control over the sea and shore of
their ancestral inheritance. Naval initiatives targeted distant offshore prospects
around Atlantic fisheries as well as opportunities closer to home along north-
eastern coastlines. Some political negotiations addressed regional ambitions,
while others postured toward transoceanic possibilities. Some achieved success,
while others fell short. All unleashed changes intended and unplanned. Taken
together, the centralization of disparate communities into a confederacy, the in-
tegration of foreign tributaries into a newly conceived Wabanakia, the punitive
and plundering enterprises of sea fighters, and the transatlantic diplomacy of
headmen all exemplified a regionally ascendant power whose project of expan-
sion and extraction in the Northeast rivaled the European empires with which
its circumstances would always remain intertwined.5
Native leaders aimed to secure international recognition of their sovereignty
by engaging in a discourse of power and prestige with European statesmen
they believed to be their equals. Sagamores cultivated a judicious appreciation
of the opportunities European politics afforded the mission of Wabanaki as-
cendancy at home. Incorrigible rivalries and thorny dynastic affairs across the
ocean, including England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 and Jacobite Rebellion
of 1715, invested the people separating France and England’s North American
empires with new power on an international stage. Headmen and their warriors
learned to leverage their interests by exploiting this geopolitical advantage with
4 Storm of the Sea

impunity, counterbalancing each colonial power’s economic and military need

for borderland allies.6
The diplomatic initiatives advanced by sagamores and warriors fortified the
other pillar of their dominion: maritime power. It was their commitment to
extending and enforcing authority beyond the coast that exposed the precar-
ious limits of English and French influence in territory colonists understood as a
frontier separating New England and Acadia. Appropriating both conventional
and cutting-​edge nautical technology, Wabanaki expanded the Dawnland from
its long-​standing contours encompassing the coasts, highlands, and lowlands
of present-​day Maine and eastern Canada to the offshore fishing banks of the
northwest Atlantic and greater Gulf of Maine. Colonists who flouted Native au-
thority over local waters risked incurring the predatory retribution of warriors
eager to enrich their kin, bring honor to themselves, and enhance their seaborne
presence. Wabanaki routinely reduced English ships, sailors, and cargoes to
perquisites of sovereignty, building a new extractive economy with the broken
pieces of wider European Atlantic networks.7
When Anglo-​French tensions exploded into open conflict in the War of the
League of Augsburg (1689–​1697), the War of Spanish Succession (1702–​1713),
the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–​1754), and the Seven Years’ War
(1756–​1763), Indians intensified their seaborne campaigns against a British em-
pire militarily stretched thin. The offensive strategy in turn amplified Natives’ in-
dispensability to their French neighbors. Neither France nor England’s calculus
for hemispheric dominance, warriors and sagamores repeatedly demonstrated,
could discount the variable of Native sea power.8
A technological revolution of sail around the turn of the seventeenth cen-
tury fueled Wabanakia’s naval and diplomatic agendas. Native oral traditions and
European written accounts concur that ships captivated their interest even be-
fore Indians encountered the people and goods traveling aboard them. The ap-
preciation did not fade quickly. Though never supplanting traditional birchbark
canoes as the common mode of Native transport, the coastal and oceangoing
ships and tackle arriving in northeastern waters during the sixteenth century
soon proliferated in a culture that long valued maritime mobility. Already by
the 1630s, after only a few decades of steady contact with Europeans, Native
mariners had so thoroughly assimilated sailing technology that explorers and
colonists instinctively assumed the unmarked ships they spied on the horizon
belonged to Indians. By the 1730s, after a century of encounters with indige-
nous sea power, and after four Indian wars and many years of Indian diplomacy,
colonial settlers and fishermen spotting such ships braced for what they feared
would follow.
Sailing technology enriched and transformed Wabanaki’s political economy
by the turn of the eighteenth century. At the same time that it shortened
 Int roduc tion 5

technological and spatial distances separating Indians and Europeans, sail

enhanced the interface between far-​flung Native settlements and fostered rec-
ognition of their common experience with colonialism. Ships eroded barriers of
geography and communication that had contributed to long-​standing divisions
between locally minded communities vying for resources. On their decks, be-
neath their sails, at their helms, Indians from Cape Breton Island in Acadia to the
Kennebec River in Maine appeared everywhere in northeastern waters, increas-
ingly in polyglot crews skippered by well-​traveled sagamores whose growing
kinship networks personified a burgeoning society. Native sailors hunted seals,
dispatched envoys, plundered cargoes, transported captives, and destroyed
settlements. Indians aboard ships gave lie to European pretensions of new world
dominance and implemented their own vision for prosperity. Ships provided
the connective tissue of a wider Dawnland confederacy as they enriched the
confederacy’s constituent communities.9
Sailing vessels also served as vehicles of social mobility in a culture that priv-
ileged masculine valor in the hunt and in combat. Pulling Indians seaward and
propelling their ships were the currents of an economic crisis that by the early
seventeenth century was transforming the landscape and impoverishing Native
villages. As the European fur trade depleted northeastern forests and wetlands,
Native men struggled to provide for their kin and communities through the tra-
ditionally male work of hunting, trapping, and trading. Without furs to process,
women found their own economic contributions increasingly marginalized. The
decline of economic prospects onshore precipitated a rediscovery of what had
served as the source and sustenance of Native culture for generations prior to
the arrival of Europeans. At sea, young men cultivated opportunities to prove
their courage and honor, traits that garnered approbation in their communities
and gave meaning to their lives. In pursuit of new prey, men executed daring
feats of physical strength and mental fortitude, exhibiting martial grit for one
another and for the old men, women, and children who eagerly awaited their
homecoming. The ocean came to function as a theater for the performance of
manhood and the celebration of its attendant honors.10
Because it mobilized young hunter-​warriors, sail also stabilized power rela-
tions within Native communities. By opening new avenues to social advance-
ment and material wealth, ships provided political ballast to Native leaders eager
to shore up their influence and prestige at a community level and keep it in
the family. The fur trade crisis compromised the authority of headmen whose
leadership, while often inherited through elite lineage, had always been sub-
ject to the ongoing consensus of their constituents. As the trade’s diminishing
returns strained community cohesion and undermined public trust in its elders,
sagamores set sail in search of new wealth that could provide material stability
for their kin, political security for themselves, and future privilege for their
6 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

profitable, subordinate, and compliant colonial presence scattered across north-

eastern Massachusetts and Acadia. This expectation would always remain non-
negotiable. Negligent English colonists were periodically reminded of this by
Native leaders such as Peter Nunquaddan who, after hijacking a merchant sloop
near Minas, Nova Scotia, in 1720, “demanded fifty livres for liberty to trade
saying this Countrey was theirs, and every English Trader should pay Tribute
to them.” Though Indians achieved their ambition through shrewd diplomacy
and calculated violence in the late 1670s and early 1680s, growing numbers of
New Englanders began to resist their status and disregard Native assertions of
sovereignty.12
Rebellious colonists looked to provincial and imperial leaders for support in
their defiance—​those whose own claims to supreme authority they hoped were
more than a conceit—​but mostly they received only disheartening reflections
of their own frailty. When they refused to observe their fixed role in Dawnland
society, and when they prioritized a foreign power’s hegemonic objectives,
English men, women, and children endured punitive and exploitative lashings
that reinforced their status in an order determined far from the power circles of
Europe. Abandoned to their despair and their Native neighbors, frontier settlers
and colonial elites began to see through the fervor of imperial boosters and the
paternalism of royal princes to what their empire really was, and they came to
accept the fact that they were trapped alone in what Massachusetts militia leader
Samuel Penhallow decried as the “storm of the enemy by sea.” The coalescence
of a Wabanaki confederacy contrasted sharply with the broken and isolated
fragments of English colonialism that it regularly exposed and enveloped in the
borderlands.13
Against the bustling but isolated Atlantic fisheries and the secluded coastal
habitations of northeastern Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, Indians launched
seaborne expeditions to terrify, extract, punish, and coerce. Their tributaries
continued to demand relief from Boston, Port Royal, Halifax, and London,
imploring authorities to “see the Sea of trouble we are Swimming in,” as
Massachusetts residents described it in a petition to their colony’s metropolitan
agents in 1690. But the nobles, governors, lawmakers, and soldiers on the re-
ceiving end of these requests could never quite rise to the occasion, and their ca-
pacity to effect meaningful change proved increasingly doubtful with each new
outbreak. It did not matter how loudly or persistently they pled for an end to it
all because the reply was always the same. Some felt they had no other choice
than to take matters into their own hands. But that never ended well either.14
Colonial leaders in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia sounded their own alarms
and sent up their own supplications. They, too, failed to break the troubling
cycle. The metropolitan officials in London proved capable of little more than
acknowledging the gravity and urgency of a problem everyone on the ground
8 Storm of the Sea

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

the borderlands to colonial capitals and European centers. Diverse voices

throughout the British Empire—​from common fishermen, farmers, and traders
to military officers, governors, and metropolitan agents—​sounded warnings
about the micro-​and macro-​level implications of Indian sea raiding that slowly
collapsed Dawnland relations, New England politics, and European empire
building into one economic system. The collective outcry communicated a vis-
ceral anxiety over local, colonial, and imperial prognoses, for almost all of the
afflicted acted on their words and supplemented their pleas with their own des-
perate solutions. Yet acknowledging the problem and solving it proved stub-
bornly different matters.17
Neglected by their preoccupied superiors an ocean away, colonial authorities
would have to reckon with their problems alone. Massachusetts and Nova Scotia
officials struggled to elicit mutual support, but neither proved able to muster the
fortitude, resources, and manpower for an intercolonial solution to what clearly
was an imperial crisis. Others reached for epidemiological terms and described
the plundering operations as plagues, epidemics, and scourges. The dread of
infection at once revealed the stealthy and inescapable nature of Wabanaki
sea prowess while also exposing a fear of its savage impulses. English colonists
exposed to the recurring assaults had good reason to believe that nothing would
ever change, and so the cacophony of the settlers and the beseeching of the
leaders would fade with the passing of each outbreak as they readied themselves
for the next.
◆ ◆ ◆​
Many have forgotten this story, some deliberately, others inadvertently. The pro-
cess of forgetting began long ago in the unsettled hearts and minds of people
central to the events and has carried on for centuries.
English colonists had several reasons to forget. Common fishermen and
farmers from Massachusetts and Nova Scotia wished to put behind them their
collective experience as victims, which was an identity that defined much of
their isolated existence for nearly two centuries. Their struggle to escape the do-
minion of those who aimed for nothing less than their subjection showed scant
signs of hope, reducing them to fixities in a tedious rhythm of extractive and
punitive violence. The distress that always accompanied these eruptions sprung
from slivers of doubt about the cultural and political feasibility of English impe-
rialism in a North American context.
Governors, legislators, and military officers also had little to gain from
remembering. Over time, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia leaders resigned them-
selves to the fact that they could do very little to stop the never-​ending cycle
of theft and violence from damaging the people and territory over which they
claimed authority in His Royal Majesty’s inviolable name. Each commandeered
10 Storm of the Sea

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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