Conclusion

By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were scant traces of the northeast’s former Native power. Wabanaki themselves struggled to hold on to their maritime past as Euro-American powers confined them to small reserves on land and then worked to forget their history of conflict, dependency, and defeat at the hands of a powerful Indian confederacy. Romantic notions of the “vanishing Indian” became commonplace in nineteenth century New England society, and coupled with a similar romanticization of pirates, Anglo- Americans increasingly lost sight of this dark chapter of their past.

Imperial Breakdown and the Crisis of Confederacy, 1727–1763

From the end of Father Rale’s War in 1727 to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Wabanaki political interests fractured along generational and regional lines as sagamores in Massachusetts and Acadia struggled to navigate increasingly disparate geopolitical contexts. To perpetuate the gains secured in Father Rale’s War and enshrined in Dummer’s Treaty, Penobscot leaders embarked on a course of nonviolent diplomacy with the English in the late 1720s and 1730s. Warriors and hunters found themselves caught between an ocean declared off limits by their own leaders and an interior stripped of its resources by a nonsustainable fur trade. By retiring the old way of the sea for a future of imagined prosperity ashore, headmen ultimately jeopardized the economic viability and social cohesion of Wabanakia. Hastening the collapse of their Native dominion was the collapse of their French ally’s North American empire in the Seven Years’ War.

The Indians’ Old Sea, to 1500

Prior to the arrival of European strangers from the east, the ocean possessed a generative richness that contrasted starkly with the predictable darkness and despair of the interior woodlands. Wabanaki oral traditions paint the sea as a rich repository of natural resources awaiting human manipulation, but Native stories also imbue the ocean with capricious forces that lurk just below the surface. Artifacts, legends, and eyewitness accounts reveal that Indians carried out death-defying feats to pursue mammoths of the deep and enemies of distant lands. Climate studies also point to seismic shifts in ocean levels and temperatures that transformed marine ecosystems and the human populations long dependent on them. At once life sustaining and life threatening, the sea’s duality hovered over people throughout the Dawnland’s ancient past and would shape the context of possibilities within which they situated new peoples and things from the east.

Introduction

A Thanksgiving Day pageant at Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts, in 1970 revealed the extent to which modern Americans have forgotten an important chapter of their early past. Though profoundly significant in the political, economic, and cultural development of both Native and colonial societies in the Northeast, the history of Wabanaki sea power has been intentionally and inadvertently overlooked by myriad peoples. New Englanders in the era of the American Revolution ignored their history of victimhood at the hands of Indians and their dependency on the British Empire to mitigate it. The story has since been buried deeper by popular and academic writing informed by historical assumptions about American Indians, the Atlantic world, and piracy.

Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Empire, 1700–1713

Just three years after the War of the League of Augsburg, Indians took advantage of another conflict rooted in faraway places to bear down on English ships, settlers, and settlements, to forge a homeland ruled by its flourishing people. Manipulating English and French neighbors engrossed in debilitating feuds of their own had proven such an effective method of reinforcing sovereignty in 1676 and 1688 that Indians again rallied to execute it after the War of Spanish Succession reached their shores in 1702. The success of their blue-water strategy lay in its successful consolidation of an expanding militancy afloat and ashore with an evolving diplomacy of transatlantic politics. As it did twice before, the strategy forced English subjects from the borderlands to Boston to London to entertain troubling questions about their empire’s wherewithal in the face of Native power.

Glorious Revolutions, 1678–1699

To its Native signatories, the Casco Bay Treaty of 1678 recognized a post-war order where the Dawnland’s rightful inheritors commanded deference and cooperation from its colonial neighbors. By accepting their status as a dependent community whose presence represented a revocable privilege granted by Native leaders such as Madockawando, outsiders gained access to a newly regenerated northeast and began building new lives alongside its first people. But peace proved ephemeral. The rapid expansion of English colonialism after 1680 reintroduced many of the problems that antagonized Indian-settler relations earlier in the century. New evils compounded the old. Desperately hoping to win back the confidence of its people, especially those employed in the increasingly vital fishing industry, New England authorities implemented an aggressive policy for coastal security by severing Native access to the ocean. Within a decade of its formal recognition in the peace treaty of 1678, Wabanaki sovereignty over land and sea faced threats new and old.

New Waves, New Prospects

Over the course of the seventeenth century, sail facilitated a new Wabanaki identity, from the Mi’kmaq coasts of Acadia to the Abenaki woodlands of southern Maine. The technology afforded them the mobility through which they recognized their shared experience of English expansion and the seapower with which they orchestrated a coordinated campaign of violence and theft against intruding colonists from New England. The destruction strategically coincided with a wider conflagration ravaging southern New England in 1675, King Philip’s War. By the time chief-sagamore Madockawando agreed to cease hostilities in 1677, the new Native alliance had succeeded in reducing the neighboring English presence to a tributary vassalage and enriching the emergent headquarters at Penobscot with plundered sailing technology, artillery, and captives.

A New Dawn on an Old Sea, 1500–1600

The arrival of European fishermen, explorers, ships, and supplies in the sixteenth-century northeast emerged from the long-standing paradox that was the Wabanaki ocean. Indians first made sense of these novelties and then incorporated them into their world in the same spirit of cautious opportunism that guided their historic relationship to the sea. While they encountered foreign fishermen and adventurers with increasing regularity through the century, only a fraction of their quotidian exchanges were recorded. In these oftentimes fraught interactions Indians began to regard the attraction of European vessels. None of the exogenous innovations to their maritime world appeared more conspicuous to Indians than the sailing technology that transported the newcomers and their belongings. And none would be more quickly or thoroughly integrated into Native society. By the early seventeenth century, Indians were pursuing a number of avenues to the watercraft they now held in high esteem.

The Golden Age of Piracy, 1714–1727

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 drastically reconfigured the geopolitics of the northeast. Wabanaki adapted to and then manipulated the new imperial arrangement by modernizing their diplomatic and military strategy for regional ascendancy. The process of modernization was threefold. Indians applied their historic claim to sovereignty over sea and shore to the new postwar world while also amplifying their insistence on the tributary status of English neighbors. As much as Europeans might wish to remap the region, Indians insisted on the proper order of things. At the same time, they detached their seaborne campaigning from wars rooted in the distant power circles of European courts, from conflicts touched off by imperial priorities that increasingly seemed arbitrary and unpredictable. The new face of Wabanaki’s hegemonic ambition was born of a desire to unfetter the political and economic fortunes of native communities from those of Europe.