southern New England was different still. There, a plague introduced by European traders had decimated many tribal groups, upturning political balances that had evolved in response to the fur trade. When Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists arrived in the 1620s, they assumed a powerful hand in their negotiations with weakened tribes, seeking to buy their land or to subject them to English power. At the same time, many religious dissenters and figures at the margins of Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to make treaties with Native peoples in order to acquire power and land. Many Native groups were interested in cooperating, creating a detailed archive of treaties signed by pictographs, which southern New England Natives had learned to use so they could participate in the fur and land market and in political settlements after wars. The development of pictographic signatures enabled the Narragansetts to communicate directly with Parliament, greatly strengthening their position against the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While these and other negotiations were often carried out in the name of larger groups, such as crowns or chiefdoms, it is also important to remember that they were shaped by individual agendas as well. Different tribes had different visions for the future, but many Natives, like many Europeans, were often only looking out for themselves. Their political actions were not always determined by tribal identity, tradition, or religion. Sometimes their speeches, gestures, x-marks, and pictographs represented individual rather than collective agendas.
Each chapter of this book focuses on a particular treaty or group of treaties. It starts with an account of what happened during the treaty negotiations, and then branches out to offer interpretations of the many uses Europeans and Indians made of treaty records. Chapter 1 considers the crowning of Powhatan sachems in early colonial Virginia. When the English crown and its councilors granted the territory around Chesapeake Bay to the Virginia Company, they were aware that the area was occupied by populous groups. During the first years of settlement, colonial governors sought to bring the Powhatans under control by crowning them as vassals of the English king. These crowning ceremonies, written up for transatlantic audiences by colonial secretaries, publicized the Powhatans’ consent to treaties and the crown’s corresponding possession of American land. Powhatans interpreted them differently, as marking English submission to them. These differing interpretations led to a series of standoffs, eventually culminating in a violent conflict known to historians as the First Anglo-Powhatan War. As the colony’s relations with the Powhatans deteriorated, a number of English writers, most notably John Smith, wrote home to criticize the colony’s approach to tribal diplomacy. Arguing that the colony’s “stately kinde of soliciting” had emboldened Powhatan leaders, Smith lobbied for a diplomatic approach based around Spanish models.81 As I will show, the stakes of this debate were quite high. The Spanish spied on Jamestown and circulated counter-narratives of Anglo-Native treaties designed to cast doubt on Powhatan alliances and inspire Philip III to raze the settlement, an action that at this time was still well within his power. While Europeans debated the meaning of the crowning ceremonies, Powhatan, the chief of the Powhatans, used the ceremonial objects he had acquired in such rituals to increase his own authority over Chesapeake Bay Native peoples.
Chapter 2 considers the international public relations war over the kidnapping and marriage of Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan. In 1613, Samuel Argall, an English navigator, abducted Pocahontas in order to ransom her for English captives and goods he claimed the Powhatans had stolen. After the kidnapping failed to resolve the conflict, Pocahontas married John Rolfe, an Englishman. The Virginia Company tried to advertise the marriage as a dynastic union between Jamestown and the Powhatans, claiming that the first male offspring would govern Chesapeake Bay as a cross-cultural leader. This strategy was useful in the wake of the First Anglo-Powhatan War. It enabled colonists to articulate a vision of peaceful order under English sovereignty. After securing funding, the Virginia Company brought Pocahontas to London to advertise their success at converting her to Anglicanism and turning her into a cross-cultural ambassador. While in London, Pocahontas became a pawn in negotiations between the English, Spanish, and French crowns over the composition of Catholic-Protestant alliances after the end of the Anglo-Spanish War. Hopes for an Anglo-Powhatan government perished when Pocahontas died shortly before her return voyage, leaving her son in England. Still, as I will show, colonists continued to debate the meaning of her marriage (and death) for Anglo-Powhatan alliances for years.
Chapter 3 shifts north to Plymouth Colony, describing the diplomatic activities of the Leyden Separatists, known in American history as the Pilgrims. While the Virginia settlement had been troubled by the threat of Spanish invasion, by the 1620s the Spanish had begun to accept England’s rights. And while the French and Dutch cherished competing claims to the land north of Virginia, they did not have the military strength to destroy the English outright. However, the increasing power of the English crown in North America did not mean that colonists abandoned natural law as a vocabulary for framing treaties. Instead, figures with uncertain legal standing, such as the Pilgrims, turned to the law of nations as a way of explaining their own legitimacy to the English crown and nearby European traders. Publishing Native treaties gave dissenters a way of proving their own standing to an English government that ignored them or was hostile to their plans. In Chapter 3, I describe how the Pilgrims used treaties with Native leaders to display their own power and legitimacy to transatlantic readers. The Pilgrims’ relations with neighbors were characterized by tension and sporadic violence. In their published works, the Pilgrims focus on their friendly relations with the Pokanokets, and draw upon the laws of war to defend their violence against enemy tribes, such as the Massachusetts and the Narragansetts.
After the consolidation of its possessions in Virginia and New England, the English crown increasingly encountered protests from Dutch and French rivals, as well as from English travelers involved in disputes with the chartered colonies. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the publication of Native treaties by figures operating beyond the bounds of chartered settlements. Many of the Europeans who traveled to the North Atlantic coast in the early seventeenth century went as traders. These commercial concerns had little interest in land rights. However, they did pursue various kinds of legal authorization that were articulated in the language of the law of nations. In Chapter 4, I examine how fur traders used Native treaties to assert rights to trade in North Atlantic waters. The question of who owned the seas was sharply contested in the early decades of English colonization. Before permanent English settlements were established, the English crown frequently asserted mare liberum, or the right to universal free trade, as a way of making inroads against Spanish claims. By 1630, the crown had begun to assert mare clausum, or exclusive rights to waters off the North American coast. This shift in legal strategy, I will show, drove fur traders under various flags to pursue Native alliances as a way of protecting their own rights against the English crown. I consider the documentary correspondence of two financial concerns, the Dutch ship the Eendracht and the trading post of the English adventurer William Claiborne. Both of these concerns were threatened by the crown’s assertion of mare clausum, and both tried to assert rights by arguing that Native people had given them permission to occupy parts of the coast and the waters adjacent to it. Both appeals were unsuccessful, but their efforts show how figures at the margins of the English colonial system used a variety of treaty documents to assert their own rights, as well as how those rights became entangled with those of Native peoples. The Susquehannocks used the written correspondence between traders and the English crown for profit and to protect themselves from Iroquois enemies.
My final chapter considers the writings of religious dissenters in Narragansett Bay. After being exiled by the governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, many religious dissenters purchased land from Narragansett sachems and began to settle the bay without royal permission. I examine the writings of two such dissenters, Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton. Both used transatlantic accounts of purchasing land from Narragansett
