Foreign agents collected and perused colonial relations and digested them for home governments. Alongside this officially recognized traffic in diplomatic papers, there was also an illicit circulation of narratives and stories about treaties. The Anglo-Spanish War saw the withdrawal of many official diplomatic embassies and an increase in spying and surreptitious written correspondence.72 While England, Spain, and France maintained diplomatic embassies throughout the early colonial era, diplomats often doubled as spies, intercepting documents and cultivating sources among discontented courtiers or religious dissenters. As well as addressing English authorities, colonists wrote for a shadow coterie of rivals. This coterie acted as a surveillance force, spying upon English settlements and intercepting their written communications. Colonists were extremely fearful of such spying. The establishment of the first English settlements coincided with rampant hysteria about Catholic conspiracy, stoked by the Gunpowder Plot as well as by James I’s deeply unpopular attempts to establish a marriage alliance with a Hapsburg princess. While this fear-mongering exaggerated the reality of Spanish power, Spanish ambassadors, Catholic loyalists, and English renegades frequently intercepted accounts of Native alliances and scrutinized them for evidence that Native leaders were less than fully agreeable to English designs. For example, Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador in London during the early years of Virginia settlement, intercepted letters and narratives from returning colonists and collected information from Irish Catholic spies at Jamestown. He used this information to characterize Jamestown as a piratical venture and attempted to compel James I to distance himself from the settlement. He also tried to persuade Philip III to attack the Chesapeake Bay. Rivalry with France likewise inspired fear about the interception of treaty documents. In 1624, the French captured the English agent Robert Cushman as he was returning from Plymouth Colony on a supply ship bound for London and held him and the rest of the crew at an island. The governor of the island, Marquis de Cera, “opened and kept what he pleased” of the colonists’ papers, including a narrative of Indian treaties by William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth.73 To be sure, spies and raiders did not intercept all correspondence from the colonies. However, the English were always cognizant that they might, and this fear shaped the way they recorded alliances. As a London Council circular had put it in 1610, “The eyes of all Europe are looking upon our endevors.”74
International contests over treaty documents were particularly intense during the first decades of permanent English settlement, when Spain still cherished claims north of Florida. However, even after English settlements gained strength in the 1620s and Spain largely dropped its protests, conflicts over treaties continued between the English and their Dutch and French rivals, and became particularly intense among English colonists themselves. Indeed, much of my narrative will concern figures at the margins of the colonial world, such as disgruntled officials, religious dissenters, and fur traders, who sought to acquire power by penning their own stories of treaty making. Dutch shippers, for example, appealed to the English crown for trading rights on the basis of agreements with Native peoples, employing the natural law arguments the English crown had itself used against Spain. English squatters also pointed to land purchases from Native leaders as part of appeals to the English Parliament for charters for their settlements. In the course of such controversies, the English crown often found itself resisting the very arguments it had made to Spain just a few decades earlier.
This culture of quasi-official treaty making was a central part of English colonial politics. Many important issues, such as the proper boundaries of colonies, the lawfulness of English fur trading, and the legitimacy of religious dissent, were adjudicated on the basis of evidence in Native treaties. However, the use of Anglo-Native treaties for strategic purposes was not limited to Europeans. After all, treaties were only meaningful because they carried some sign of consent from an important Native person—a transcript of a speech, for example, or a tale of a ceremony or ritual. Coastal political leaders also used treaties—and transatlantic communication—to gain an upper hand over Europeans and rival tribes alike.
Native Americans and Early Colonial Treaties
In many accounts of Native American history, treaties are synonymous with tragedy. From the beginnings of settlement on, Europeans made and broke many treaties, often with devastating results for Native peoples. From this fact, many have concluded that Native Americans had little agency in treaty making, or little knowledge of what treaties meant. Their lack of alphabetic literacy has reinforced the notion that they were at an inherent disadvantage when it came to the settlers, who wrote everything down, and could thus keep separate accounts, promising one thing while doing another. In a powerful account of the Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 agreement between Maori chiefs and the government of New Zealand, D. F. McKenzie has shown how New Zealand officials exploited Maori leaders’ lack of written English literacy to induce them to transfer sovereignty to the English crown.75 Undoubtedly, the lack of alphabetic literacy was a disadvantage in many cases. Natives, for example, did not have written duplicates of treaties, which was a liability if some clause later came into dispute. But this does not mean that Native negotiators failed to understand the newcomers or their means of communication, or had little knowledge of what treaties meant. Lack of written literacy did not prevent Native leaders from manipulating political negotiations to their own ends, especially in the early period, when many treaties took Native form. Of course, even in situations where Natives had most of the power, discerning their intentions today is always a great deal harder than figuring out those of Europeans.76 The English went to great lengths to document their plans, leaving few of their intentions to conjecture. Native people, by contrast, appear through second-hand accounts of speeches or ritual actions, or, in later decades (after documentary treaties became more common), x-marks and pictographic signatures. To make matters more complicated, the English always framed or altered these expressions for their own ends. These many layers of mediation seem to make it difficult to recover how Native people used treaties, or what they thought of them.77 In recent decades, however, many literary scholars have begun to consider European writing as a potential medium of Native agendas, intentions, and meanings. A tradition of scholarship on the settlement cultures of Latin America has pointed the way toward understanding Native uses of writing and print. This work has examined how Natives appropriated a number of literary and visual genres to their own ends.78 Scholars in North American colonial studies have made parallel contributions to this field, showing how Northeastern Native people participated in English modes of communication, such as preaching, printing, and scribal publication.79 This work has focused on how Native people used English technologies for reasons other than those its originators intended.80
Understanding the Native perspective is crucial to interpreting treaty documents. Europeans only cared about treaties because they captured Native intentions. Treaties therefore cannot be understood without an inquiry into how and why Native people participated in their making. Native people left their figurative and literal marks on treaties in a variety of ways. When Virginia colonists arrived in the Chesapeake Bay region, for example, they confronted the Powhatans, a tribal chiefdom whose leader welcomed them as potential subjects and sources of trade goods. They also made contact with groups at the periphery of Powhatan control, who saw the newcomers as an opportunity for escaping subjection to the Powhatans. The complexity of Powhatan interband alliances, and the contentious nature of English transatlantic governance, meant that many different parties in the Chesapeake Bay wrote down accounts of treaties, producing a vast and verbally detailed archive of narratives of diplomacy and records of political accord, much of which made its way back to England. In such situations, it is often possible to compare multiple documents, and reconstruct what Native people thought about treaties and what they hoped to gain from them. North of the Virginia grant, things were different. Merchants and Catholic settlers in Maryland encountered Native groups already heavily invested in the fur trade, such as the Susquehannocks. These commercial interactions produced a much sparser written archive of Native words and deeds, as Virginia-based adventurers and their rivals in Maryland recorded interactions with the Susquehannocks and other groups in written receipts of land purchase and trade. In some cases, though, absences can speak volumes, as when the Susquehannocks refused to make trade agreements with Maryland because they were angry at how its governors had treated their Virginia trading partners.
