Water-Voyaging Indians and the Metropole

Early American historians have gone trans-Atlantic—for those in the field, this observation should come as no surprise. New monographs and edited volumes pertaining to the Atlantic World go into print with alarming regularity. Early Americanists have dedicated countless conferences, seminars, and study groups to the Atlantic World, and scholars will organize more as the discipline continues to mature with subfields more clearly defined. For those not in the field, a few sentences cannot do justice to either the sheer volume of literature or the analytic power blossoming from Atlantic-world methodologies that are now so varied and complex. Approaches have diversified; subject matters have moved back and forth between macro and micro levels.

Interest in the transmission of knowledge and movement of people across the Atlantic has led to scholarship focused on how these exchanges carried cultural, social, political, and intellectual implications for the colonies as well as the metropole. In such varied contexts Native Americans were once neglected. Recently they have gotten the attention they deserve. An emerging body of work has followed "the cultural turn." Troy Bickham, Laura Stevens, and Kristina Bross entwine literary analysis and historical contextualization.¹ Bickman has explored Native Americans' representations within the metropole's print culture and cosmopolitan Londoners' reactions. Bross and Stevens have treated missionary text productions for an Anglo trans-Atlantic audience in which authors framed writings about the proselytizing of New England Indians to appeal to Londoners' enlightenment sensibilities and a growing belief in an English benevolent empire. Additionally, Native American Atlantic Ocean travels no longer go unnoticed. With an influential article Eric Hinderaker set the visit in 1710 of four Iroquois "Kings" within metropole Britons' conceptualizations of the meanings of "empire."² A promising Mohegan preacher, Samson Occom, journeyed in the 1760s to London, garnering mission monies for the Connecticut-based New Light Eleazer Wheelock who ran the Moor's Charity School for native education. Joanna Brooks has edited Occom's letters with fresh evaluations of his mission work and travels to appear in an upcoming book.³ Because of most college textbooks, the trans-Atlantic Croatoan, Manteo, who helped the English with the failed Roanoke project, and the peripatetic Squanto, who assisted the Plymouth Bay Pilgrims, might both be familiar characters. The much-noted seventeenth-century Virginian Indian who ventured to Britain, Pocahontas, was a Disney animation fantasy in a children's movie gone bad, but she has also merited new scholarly treatment from Camilla Townsend.⁴

Separating Vaughn's book from the rest of the literature is its comprehensiveness and rich details about Indians' trans-Atlantic experiences. Vaughn has tried to answer slippery questions. How and why did native peoples move across the Atlantic to Britain? And what happened to them in Britain or if they made it home? Following the tans-Atlantic voyages of members of the colonial "lower sort" always has bewildered scholars because the sources are lacking. Vaughn, like others, is forced to buttress sparse written materials with speculation. To overcome the shortage of sources for some natives but a stronger record for others, Vaughn also resorts to sensitive evenhandedness. He manages to offer up fresh examinations of the well-known Atlantic-crossing Indians and wholly new interpretations about the more obscure traveling native peoples who have remained outside of historical accounts.

The book is chronologically and thematically structured in eleven chapters. In all, Vaughn's effective narrative will make for wonderful reading for scholars and graduate students—readers need only skim the footnotes to immediately recognize the hard work of a veteran historian. Individual chapters, by contrast, will serve well in undergraduate settings. In certain sections Vaughn presses his speculation to make sense of poorly documented Native American travelers. Such speculation is not necessarily disturbing, because he presents several alternatives, though at times he raises important questions more than he offers sound answers. When combined with a lack of theory and no analytic framework, not least of which one built around ethnohistory...