The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast

Abstract

Reviewing a Bancroft Prize–winning book presents a challenge: what else is there to say about a work recognized as one of the year’s best in American history? Moreover, Saltwater Frontier is not a typical piece of academic scholarship. It combines synthesis with careful analysis of published, translated, and unpublished Dutch and English works and of archaeological and environmental surveys. Lipman strives for a different kind of history writing here, a “narrative” that is “concise and provocative rather than magisterial or definitive” (14). This choice reflects the author’s desire to write for a broader public, another rare quality. Satisfying an audience that includes scholars, indigenous communities, and lay readers is a difficult task, but this well-written and engaging book succeeds because Lipman offers a set of bold new premises about where and under what terms intercultural exchange took place.Lipman’s major contribution is his concept of a “floating frontier” of estuaries, rivers, canoes, longboats, and sailing ships as a site for encounters between colonists and Indians. This watery territory remained an arena of trade, communication, cultural exchange, adaptation, and conflict throughout the seventeenth century. For decades, no one held the upper hand; Indians and Europeans each had maritime technology and resources that the other desired. For example, while the latter came to prize canoes for their agility and ease of construction, Indians rapidly learned to maneuver sailing vessels.Looking inland from the sea allows Lipman to transcend regional histories that consider New England and the middle colonies as separate entities. Coastal geography and Indian culture dictate the frame of his study, which includes Long Island Sound, the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers, and Narragansett Bay and Cape Cod and thus a broader range of Indian and European groups. The Narragansett, Pequot, Wampanoag, and Wabanaki all appear here, but so do the River Indians, the Raritan, the Massapequa, and the Munsee. The result is a transnational history that examines English and Dutch strategies alongside those of different indigenous peoples as they responded to one another, to global capitalism, and to shifting geopolitics.In addition to providing terrific syntheses of the latest scholarship, the book is full of original insights, as when Lipman reveals how gendered work patterns on land had their counterparts on water, or when he describes how the English adroitly adopted Native understandings of diplomacy and power and used cultural knowledge to build alliances and undermine the Dutch. Smaller sachemates’ calculation that the English would displace the Dutch also complicated the task of Miantonomi and Metacomet, indigenous leaders who attempted to create Native coalitions in the mid-1600s. Saltwater Frontiers points to the need to view competition over control of waterways as both a cause and a tactic of warfare during the Pequot conflict and King Philip’s War.In a fascinating closing chapter and epilogue about Indian seafaring, Lipman makes a powerful case for the relevance of coastal northeastern Native Americans to larger American stories past and present, especially those involving capitalism, evangelicalism, and race. Indian labor and skill helped launch the first modern industry—whaling—which in turn capitalized the cloth mills in New England. Indian communities along the saltwater frontier incorporated people of distinct races and cultures, a signature of modernity, and produced some of the earliest Native historians and activists. While not downplaying the drastic losses of population, land, and resources that indigenous peoples experienced as a result of globalization, Lipman contends that the sea remained a source of food, protection, identity, and employment for some of America’s most resilient Native communities, whose descendants continue to shape the present and the future of the Atlantic Northeast.