“[T]hey saile incomparably well”—
Reconsidering Indigenous Maritime Aggression in Colonial New England
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ive men hanged in Boston on 2 November 1726, convicted by the Massachusetts Admiralty Court for piracy. Historical analyses of their trials leave little doubt as to whether they—Jean Geudry, Jean Geudry Jr., James Mews, Philip Mews, and John Misse—boarded Tyral, a Massachusetts fishing vessel, near present-day Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, with intent to capture it. The men admitted as much. Instead, arguments in the trials focused on what distinguishes “robbery” from “piracy,” and whether the three “Indian” defendants thought their tribe, the Mi’kmaq, was still at war with the British—thus boarding the Tyral with purposes more military than piratical.1 Amidst these arguments, the “settled facts” and assumptions during the trials reveal misleading narratives and assumptions about Indigenous life and maritime culture that persist almost 300 years later. At the time, those narratives justified colonial expansion and explained away colonial defeats. Today, those narratives obscure the depth of maritime knowledge and political agency of Indigenous mariners, both past and present. Of course, this case was not a touchstone event in either American or maritime history. Neither was Dummer’s War, one of many names given to the three-year series of battles between British and Wabanaki forces that preceded the takeover of the Tyral. A growing body of scholarship is examining Indigenous life, politics, and interaction with settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries, showing how Dummer’s War, like many other early colonial conflicts, prominently featured Indigenous maritime aggression. In many cases, Wabanaki mariners defeated or out-maneuvered their counterparts, sometimes while sailing British-built ships and employing British tactics more effectively than the British themselves. More importantly, it
by Kiara Royer and Ned Schaumberg also reveals how the Wabanaki saw the seizure of British ships as both an assertion of economic power and a political response to increasing encroachment of British settlers into Wabanaki territory. This scholarship demands the ocean be treated as a central site for conflicts over colonial expansion, while highlighting the importance of Indigenous maritime knowledge in shaping these conflicts and their outcomes. Perhaps more importantly, considering Indigenous perspectives also demands a revision of conventional accounts of the early modern Atlantic, which are, as Paul Cohen points out, often “fundamentally grounded in European points of view, and leave little room for incorporating Amerindians’ very different aims, cultural perspectives, modes of social and political organization, and frameworks for commodity exchange.”2 Yet in that Boston courtroom, those cultural perspectives and political concepts were flattened into the criminal act of “piracy.” Similarly, trying the Geudrys separately from the “Indian” defendants— who were all of mixed Acadian-Mi’kmaq heritage—reveals an effort to create clear demarcations that belie the complex ethnic and social relations in 17th-century North America. As a key moment in imposing English law on Indigenous populations, this trial is thus a microcosm of British efforts to rhetorically minimize the seafaring skill of Wabanaki mariners, while using British law to undermine Wabanaki resistance to colonial expansion. For while Wabanaki attacks on British military and fishing vessels had been regularly occurring since the mid1600s, British descriptions of these attacks as “piracy” began only in the 1720s. Such descriptions coincide with larger narratives at the time about Indigenous resistance (and by extension, Indigenous civilization) as primitive, unorganized, and lawless. Even if such narratives are now understood to
be both politically motivated and factually inaccurate, their influence remains in the minimal attention paid to the role of Indigenous tribes in shaping early modern maritime history. That history deserves fresh consideration. If “raids” by Wabanaki “pirates” were actually calculated political and economic actions by skilled mariners, the knowledge and traditions of Wabanaki seafaring cannot be easily ignored or dismissed. And the way Wabanaki mariners combined longstanding local knowledge with a strategic use of settler equipment and tactics serves as a reminder that Indigenous cultures are lively and dynamic practices entangled with settler expansion, not some static or ancient set of traditions displaced into history by so-called progress. All this highlights the importance of the sea to the politics of the time and serves as another reminder that Indigenous traditional knowledge and adaptation to settler presence often go underappreciated. Piracy or War? When imagining the development of British settlements in North America from the Wabanaki perspective, a commitment to maritime conflict seems only sensible. What the British described as gradual development and expansion into “unclaimed territory” appears as encroachment and dispossession to that territory’s long-time inhabitants. With this in mind, the Wabanaki rightly ignored distinctions between military incursions and the activities of allegedly innocent farmers and fishermen— both were part of the larger British effort to take over and control Wabanaki territory. Indeed, these concerns were at the heart of the four Anglo-Wabanaki wars between 1675 and 1725; the Wabanaki resisted— both via political negotiation and military action—British efforts to claim land in North America by settlement, law, or war.
1 While the latter three men were tried separately as “Indians,” they were all likely mixed race, which itself highlights the complex, inexact lines of
race and ethnicity. The Mi’kmaq were one of several Algonquin-speaking tribal nations making up the Wabanaki Confederacy. 2 Paul Cohen, “Was There an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34, 2008, p. 394.
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SEA HISTORY 178, SPRING 2022