In what might be the only surviving early seventeenth-century example of the genre, William Strachey, secretary of the Virginia Company of London, did his best to reduce to Roman letters a “scornefull song” that victorious Powhatan warriors chanted after they killed three or four Englishmen “and tooke one Symon Score a saylor and one Cob a boy prisoners” in 1611:

1. Mattanerew shashashewaw crawango pechecoma Whe Tassantassa inoshashaw yehockan pocosak Whe, whe, yah, ha, ha, ne, he wittowa, wittowa.

2. Mattanerew shashashewaw, erawango pechecoma Captain Newport inoshashaw neir in hoc nantion matassan Whe weh, yah, ha, ha, etc.

3. Mattanerew shashashewaw erowango pechecoma...

Dutch traders had come to North American shores at almost exactly the same time that English people arrived in Tsenacomoco. In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed up what later became his eponymous stream, which the Dutch simply called in their language the “North River.” By 1614, one hundred and fifty miles upstream on that river at the future site of Albany, European traders were conducting a thriving annual trade. Algonquian-speaking Mahicans, along with Iroquoian-speaking Mohawks and other people of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois, or Five Nations, mostly peacefully exchanged beaver skins and varied furs for the copper, glass beads, tools, and other...

Like the writings of Harmen Meyndersz van den Bogaert or John Smith, the works of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, constructed complicated images of Native people. And like those of the others, his images conveyed real, if convoluted, insights. “O the infinite wisedome of the most holy wiseGod, who hath so advancedEuropeaboveAmerica, that there is not a sorryHowe, Hatchet, Knife, nor a rag of cloth in allAmerica, but what comes over the dreadfullAtlantickOcean fromEurope,” Williams wrote inA Key into the Language of America(1643). “And yet thatEurope...

“The character of all these [Iroquois] Nations is warlike and cruel,” wrote Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune in 1657. “The chief virtue of these poor Pagans being cruelty, just as mildness is that of Christians, they teach it to their children from their very cradles, and accustom them to the most atrocious carnage and the most barbarous spectacles.”¹ Like most Europeans of his day, Le Jeune ignored his own countrymen’s capacity for bloodlust and attributed the supposedly unique bellicosity of the Iroquois to their irreligion and uncivilized condition. Still, his observations contain a kernel of truth often overlooked by our...

At the height of the seventeenth-century Iroquois wars, Jesuit missionaries in New France attributed much of the violence to unscrupulous Dutch firearms traders.¹ Yet, despite such firsthand testimony to New Netherland’s impact on power relationships in mid-seventeenth-century North America, historians have remained unimpressed with the colony’s role. Its most thorough and sympathetic recent scholar admits that “New Netherland was not of prime economic importance,” and authors of both newer and older general studies agree; Alan Taylor, for example, calls New Netherland “a relatively minor enterprise in an especially wealthy, ambitious, and far-flung empire.” C. R. Boxer’s classicThe Dutch Seaborne...

Building on the wreckage left by the departure of the Dutch West India Company from North America in the late 1670s and early 1680s, English governors of New York and Haudenosaunee leaders of the Five Nations forged what was known as the Covenant Chain, an alliance that became the centerpiece of diplomatic relationships across much of eastern North America. Relying on these relationships, in the early 1690s the Iroquois and the English fought, independently but in concert, against New France and its Indian allies in the conflict colonials called King William’s War. Whether understood in terms of the patterns of...

Among the major figures in seventeenth-century European-Indian relations, one is usually portrayed standing alone above the messy everyday business of politics, brokers, and deal-making, somehow exempt from the matrix of trade, land, and power. “William Penn told the Indians that he loved them all; their Men, Women and Children, and that he held Councils with them to perpetuate the Remembrance of his Affection towards them,” said the Conestoga chief Tawenna in 1729. Echoing a refrain sung repeatedly by Indians and English alike in the early eighteenth century, Tawenna hoped “that all those things which Governour Penn Spoke to them may...

The global war that began nearly three-quarters of a century after William Penn wrote his letter—the war whose origins the Delaware leader Teedyuscung struggled both to explain and bring to an end when he negotiated with Pennsylvanians in the 1750s—has usually been called the “French and Indian War.” Native peoples certainly would not have used that term. How could they, when few recognized more than a uneasy alliance of convenience with the French king and none could deny deep differences among the many communities that Euro-Americans lumped together as “Indians”? And who was their enemy? Europeans and Euro...

For a brief moment after the Seven Years War, a handful of British officials on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to imagine an empire where Native Americans and Europeans might coexist. Their ideas spawned an ill-starred document known as the “Plan for the future Management of Indian Affairs,” which the British ministry circulated for transatlantic comment in 1764. To set this “Plan of 1764” in context, and to explain both the logic of its vision and the reasons for its failure, requires an eighteenth-century back story reminiscent of the period’s popular novelTristram Shandy, for the perceived problems that...

In April 1792 the war chief Red Jacket led a delegation of Seneca Iroquois to the Federal capital at Philadelphia. Their main business was with the President and Congress, but the Native leaders also paid a courtesy call on Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Mifflin. Standing beneath Benjamin West’s portrait of Penn’s Treaty in the statehouse council chamber, Red Jacket addressed his host as “Brother Onas Governor,” using the Iroquoian translation of the Pennsylvania founder’s surname that had long been employed to refer to governors of the province and state. The sight of Onas’s portrait, Red Jacket declared, “brought fresh to our...

In the spring of 1804, Gerard T. Hopkins traveled from Baltimore to Fort Wayne, in Indian country. As secretary of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends and a member of its Committee on Indian Affairs, he carefully kept a journal, which he later edited to “convey inteligibly, both the route we took and the various circumstances attendant upon our Journey”; his traveling companions were fellow committee member George Ellicott and a young man named Phillip Dennis, who had been employed to live with the Indians and “instruct them in Agriculture and other useful knowledge.” Hopkins’s journal records that, when the...