Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (review)

Vaughan has been a productive presence in the scholarship on colonial America for more than four decades, and his work has consistently been of high quality. Although historical anthropologists, those with stronger interests in Native Americans than in the English, or more theoretically oriented scholars of colonialism, might sometimes wish that Vaughn would focus more on their particular interests, they still approach his work with great interest. His research is sound; he is reasonably open to interpretive approaches; and he writes well.

In Transatlantic Encounters, Vaughan handles the subject of American Indians who were taken to England prior to 1776 with his usual skill. He notes in his preface that he started out to focus on the (relatively few) well-documented cases, but “time and again, the experiences of less-prominent voyagers undermined my assumptions and generalizations and eventually persuaded me to make the narrative as comprehensive as possible” (xviii). His decision to explore the murky shadows and back-alleys of documentary passing mentions has produced a far more important work than would otherwise be the case: Vaughan is able to give accounts based on approximately 175 individuals instead of just a handful.

There are two threads to the argument—the lives and travels of individuals and the assessment of their contributions to the development of colonial America, and to some extent, of England. For most of the book, the former thread takes precedence in the narrative. The book presents its cases chronologically, beginning with an anonymous Baffin Islander taken to London by Martin Frobisher in 1576 and continuing through Samson Occam in the mid-eighteenth century; the penultimate chapter discusses several of the more obscure individuals from the 1770s before closing with Joseph Brant. The final chapter contextualizes these transatlantic encounters in the developing Anglo-Atlantic world, bringing together the threads that weave throughout the individual stories presented in the earlier chapters. This “Retrospect” could stand on its own, as could many of the individual stories, but the sum is even greater than its parts.

Some scholars might prefer an approach more grounded in the cultures of Native America and more oriented toward the roles of cultural mediators in their own societies. Others might want a more theoretically oriented study; discourse analysis could be productive with some of the texts, for example. Moreover, although Vaughan sometimes mentions Native Americans who were taken back to Spain, France, and elsewhere—whose stories can help to contextualize and understand those that Vaughan tells in detail—he does not portray them in depth because they were not his focus. Although his concentration on transportees to England is certainly understandable, the immensely challenging project of similarly treating other countries would be a valuable complement to this study.

Specialists in some of the areas covered in this book might quibble about a few missing facts. But they will also find new information from other cases, and a useful framework for thinking about the world of these encounters.