I just read this fascinting article in slate about how native Americans on coast were equal or more domianat than european in coastal sea for a time ans europeans even adopted their boats, and shipbuilding. I fine this fascinating and change my view of Native Americans/Indians on my head. Is this true and what do y’all think?
This article is adapted from The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast.
slate.com
This is basically half wishful thinking and half charitable interpretation to say the least.
Let's analyze the claims:
Early conflicts typically began offshore. Natives and newcomers clashed over coastal access and maritime resources including shell beads and whale oil. And though you might reasonably assume that the disparity between European and Indian technologies was the greatest on the water, in fact it would be a long time before colonizers had a clear advantage over the people they hoped to colonize.
Ok let's see the supporting arguments:
Unlike later artists, European invaders seldom ignored or trivialized native seafarers. The fleets of indigenous boats that boldly came up alongside alien craft were seldom the light bark canoes commonly associated with American Indians. Rather they were heavy, narrow vessels carved from the trunks of mature trees, stretching an average of 20 to 30 feet long.
Those canoes are clearly inferior and simpler to the variety of ships European had already the ability to build, but sure. Something the article admits too BTW.
Though Native vessels were simple when compared to European ones, that fact only made foreigners all the more impressed with Algonquians’ nautical prowess. Colonists were astonished at the oarsmen who “will venture to Seas, when an English Shallope dare not bear a knot of sayle; scudding over the overgrown waves as fast as a winde-driven ship.” “They will indure an incredible great Sea,” wrote another, who described indigenous vessels “mounting upon the working billows like a piece of Corke.” When colonists looked for “skilful hands to guide them in rough weather, none but the Indians scarce dare to undertake it.
This is a pointless anectdote, and taking it at face value is really shitty: "X people had more valor and courage than Y people!"
This is clearly a ridiculous argument to make.
Newcomers also prized Natives’ geographic knowledge. Early English traders valued Indians’ advice over “the opinion of our best Sea-men of these times,” for they “understood the Natives themselves to be exact Pilots for that Coast, having been accustomed to frequent the same, both as Fishermen and in passing along the shoare to seek their enemies.”
Local people know local geography, news at 9.
One of the most extraordinary captives was a Wampanoag man named Epenow who was taken to London but convinced his captors to carry him back to his home island of Capawock...
So let me get this, the anectdote of aman escaping English slavery in the first decade of English permanent settlement in the America somehow shows that natives had parity of were more dominant for a while? Clearly it does not, it shows the opposite, Europeans were able to capture hundreds of people from the get go, this is clearly a signal of who's dominant here, but apparently you can spin any argument the way you like it.
Canoe travel could also seem rather daunting to Europeans given that most of them, sailors included, could not swim. Remembering a few perilous sea voyages with his Narragansett neighbors, Williams wrote “it hath pleased God to make them many times the instruments of my preservation.” Once when he “questioned safety” one of his native friends reassured him by saying, “Feare not, if we be overset I will carry you safe to Land.” The man soothing his white-knuckled passenger hints that to Indian mariners, Europeans could sometimes seem like unseaworthy companions.
And I guess we just assume most natives could swim, because why not, after all they had "more prowess" like we established.
A few settlers even began to wonder if natives had in fact crossed the ocean before them, and their rugged sea-canoes were relics from the classical or medieval world.
So Europeans thinking that natives had archaic technology and misunderstanding the difficult of crossing the ocean with said technology means that natives weren't actually that worse nautically? Sure.
Native-style craft were so obviously useful that colonists eventually started building their own dugouts of identical size and form as Indian ones. Indian boatbuilding practices were cheaper and easier to master than European methods—and the shortage of qualified shipwrights in the region meant that plank-built vessels were pricier than most houses. Colonists therefore relied on simpler canoes for transporting goods, people, and livestock. The Dutch even boasted that they possessed a massive “wooden canoe obtained from the Indians, which will easily carry two hundred schepels of wheat”—a capacity of 9,000 pounds.
First I got to appreciate the vagueness of the article, for all we know only 1% of oceanic and river trade could have conducted with native-style ships but I guess the fact that it happened at all somehow means that native ships had a local advantage, which remains unproven.
All of this is ridiculous given this passage directly from the source of the article(page 69-70):
Algonquian dugouts
lacked stabilizers like outriggers or keels, making them tricky and crude
sailing vessels. A colonist noted that they could set sail only “before a wind,”
though if the crew used their paddles as steering rudders and steadying
leeboards a sailing dugout could follow a reasonably precise course,
provided the wind was blowing in the general direction of its destination.
But a steady wind was crucial for canoe sailing, as an underpowered dugout
without an outrigger could be easily capsized by cross waves. Though rarely
recorded, indigenous wrecks did happen, such as the tragic loss of a Niantic
canoe and all twelve men aboard off the village of Dartmouth in the spring
of 1675. Crews of dozens of men on oceangoing canoes were similarly
necessary because Natives’ paddles, held upright rather than leveraged in
locks, did not offer great mechanical advantage. One account described
them as scoops and not quite oars, while another described Native “Oares”
as “flat at the end like an Oven peel,” that is, resembling the wooden paddles
used by bread bakers.25
Some handy design features brought obvious risks. Bark- sided boats’
feather- light weight made them ideal for portages, but their thin hulls could
be easily swept away. A colonist related the tragic tale of an Indian trader
headed down the Hudson in a birchbark canoe “accompanied by his wife
and child and about sixty beaver pelts” at the height of spring flooding.
When the Native pilot trusted “his powers too far” and failed to beach his
canoe properly, “the rapid flow of water flung him and his little vessel of tree
bark” downriver, and his “wife and child were killed, most of his goods lost
or damaged, and his craft broken into many pieces, but he survived.” Birch
canoes’ delicate skins were also easily damaged in a direct attack. In a
dispute between rival Dutch traders in 1614, sailors rammed their sturdy
ship’s boat into a Munsee birch canoe “with such a speed that the canoe
was smashed to pieces” and then set about hacking at the bark sides with an
axe to sink it.26
Yeah those canoes were clearly awful and in fact both the article and the source show that the natives were interested in European ships.
English colonists saw Indian naval attacks as justification for launching wars of conquest. Their casus belli for the 1637 Pequot War were two lethal raids on English vessels in 1634 and 1636. In the latter incident, the Manisses Indians who killed the trader John Oldham actually held onto Oldham’s sailboat for over a month until the colonists redeemed it. The war itself began as a series of estuarine engagements between colonial vessels and indigenous canoes. The English were so frustrated at their inability to win a single coastal battle that they changed tactics, sneaking inland to surprise their enemy with the infamous massacre of 400 Pequot villagers in May 1637.
This is an outright lie, the English were somehow "not winning" coastal battles? What coastal battles? At most there were attempted raids and in fact they did raze a village.
The source itself is ridiculously myopic, no it's not that the natives were the "superior" naval force, the thing is that the British boats were limited by the extremely shallow water, geography was just favourable.
Ultimately though in a bit more than a year the Pequots were annihilated by a 17 years old small English colony formed by people that had to cross an ocean to settle it, but yeah, I guess the fact European ships don't magically become flatter when they encounter shallow waters supposedly proves something. Same thing goes for king's Philipp war.
I just read this fascinting article in slate about how native Americans on coast were equal or more domianat than european in coastal sea for a time ans europeans even adopted their boats, and shipbuilding. I fine this fascinating and change my view of Native Americans/Indians on my head. Is this true and what do y’all think?
I read the article and referenced the source, I really don't see from what grounds they can claim there was dominance or even parity, it's clear Europeans had the initiative and were able to push above their demographic weight despite being non-familiar with the geography, having to fit ships for boat deep and shallow waters and despite all that the 17th century conflict they cherrypicked/presented were fairly brief and none involved any serious native victory or counterattack, ultimately more natives died in all those conflicts and even when they supposedly were resisting European incursions they were still having their settlement razed and suffered also raids, clearly not a sign of dominance.
