Amerindian Power in the Early Modern Northeast: A Reappraisal

Abstract

N April 20o, 1700, the governor of New England and New York, the earl of Bellomont, informed the English Board of Trade that, if... there should be a generall defection of the Indians, the English in a moneth's time be forced on all the Continent of America take refuge in their Towns, where I am most certain they could not subsist two moneths, for the Indians not leave 'em any sort of cattle or corne. While this warning was based on concurrent apprehensions of a Houdenasaunee-Wabanaki alliance-a feared union that never in fact occur-it was a striking estimation of the dangers posed the English imperial presence by aboriginal coercive power. For Bellomont, the simple result be that the native forces would in a short time drive us quite out of this Continent.I Some eighteen years later, the intendant of New France, Michel Bdgon, echoed Bellomont by expressing his own fears of Wabanaki military force. Bdgon envisaged circumstances in which the Wabanakis might be persuaded by the British to pillage and destroy the habitations on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, and even of all Canada. This, he continued, would be easy for them, those natives knowing perfectly all the settlements of New France.2