American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England by Katherine Grandjean (review)

In seventeenth-century New England, news was hard to come by, but rumors were quick to spread. Travel, both on water and on land, proved a hazardous, painstaking, and protracted affair, and yet individuals, letters, and goods flowed seamlessly across all-but-imaginary colonial borders and cultural boundaries. In American Passage, Katherine Grandjean convincingly demonstrates how the “mechanics” (164) of colonial communications account for these contradictions and invite exciting new readings of well-known episodes in the fifty-year period following the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Her book takes readers through the transformation of New England from a group of scattered colonial outposts—“a few isolated pockets of plantings” (9), tenuously connected via the unreliable circulation of letters in the early 1630s—to a rapidly growing community drowning under “an inescapable tide of bad news” (172) in the later part of the century, as war with French and Indian neighbors intensified and the genre of captivity narratives took the colony by storm.¹ In Grandjean’s straightforward and engaging narrative, the story of the making of early New England thus moves forward not with the settling of new towns and the erection of new steeples but with the development of communications networks in the spaces between the colonies, networks that encompassed both material media (letters, roads, bridges) and more intangible genres of content (oral news, gossip, and panic). Rather than moving inland in steady waves, the appropriation of Indian landscapes by colonist-settlers thus occurred first with the creeping of English news, goods, animals, and peoples within and over the existing indigenous matrix—“a sort of unsettling” (215).

One important contribution the book makes is therefore to offer a parallel chronology of the first century of colonization marked by the crossing of communication and travel frontiers that importantly affected and involved Native groups. In line with a number of studies that have stressed colonial connections and overlapping claims to North America rather than clashes, Grandjean does much to refine our understanding of the changing ways in which Indian and English (as well as Dutch) societies were closely entangled, knew each other and cooperated intimately, but also misunderstood and distrusted one another deeply.²

This is, to some extent, a familiar story: that of the westward expansion of the hydra-headed English colonies and of the concurrent and seemingly unstoppable loss of land and power that resulted for Native groups. Grandjean’s book, however, while not fully successful in knocking New England off its historiographical pedestal, does not depict this process as inevitable or linear and provides a fresh new look at Indian agency. She shows how Native individuals and groups, by actively taking part in intercolonial and cross-cultural communications, were engaged in a complex tug-of-war for power, land, and sovereignty with the English in the first half century of cohabitation. Indigenous peoples were privy to and manipulated the content of information that was disseminated through them, and they disrupted or interrupted communication channels at will. In arguing that “travel and communications, in fact, provide uncannily strong barometers of power” (7), Grandjean thus reveals a multidimensional process by which power could be wielded simultaneously by multiple parties, change hands in an instant, or be attributed to a foe based on anxiety rather than facts. Grandjean’s third chapter, in particular, investigates the roots, channels, and consequences of a rumor about an alleged plot by Ninigret, the prominent Narrangansett leader of Niantic lineage, to attack the English colonies with the help of the Dutch in New Amsterdam in 1653. Her meticulous disentangling of this tale leads her to conclude that “the real significance of what happened in 1653 lies not in the relative difficulty of cross-cultural communication but, rather, in the relative ease of speaking across languages” (93).³ Grandjean also argues that “gossip was often as good as a gun” (88), underlining the Natives’ keen awareness and use of the “political potency...