The Salt Water Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast by Andrew Lipman (review)

In this original book, Andrew Lipman reexamines the seventeenth-century English and Dutch invasions of Algonquian territory between Cape Cod and the Hudson River. Pivoting away from traditional scholarship that focuses on Indian-European conflicts over land, Lipman argues that the coastline and sea itself were the formative contested spaces in early New England. Weaving Native American, borderlands, and Atlantic World approaches, Lipman situates small stretches of New England and New Netherland's coastline "as overlapping maritime zones with a shared history rather than as discrete territories with separate pasts" (4). English dominance of the region, he argues, emerged out of this multidirectional struggle between Algonquian sachems and colonial governors for control of the coast. But Lipman's primary contribution is his retrieval of a silenced Native seafaring history. Rather than passive, land-locked victims, Lipman shows that Native navigators, boat builders, fishermen, pirates, and merchants met the colonial advance as a competing maritime culture out on the water.

For Lipman, the ocean was paramount in Algonquian worldviews and their response to European conquest: ocean bounties of fish and shellfish shaped the food ways that governed Algonquian political structures, demographic growth, and gendered construction of space and labor at the dawn of European contact. Wampum shell cultivation and manufacturing provided a locally-sourced luxury good and a form of currency that linked coastal Native and colonial societies alike to the continental web of exchange of furs and maize. The book's narrative is thus highlighted by Lipman's rich descriptions—much of it drawn from Native oral histories—of indigenous political, military, economic, and spiritual attachments to the sea. Moreover, Lipman argues that Native watermen had long used dugout canoe technology to master coastal transportation—manufacturing some vessels as large as twenty to sixty feet in length capable of holding upwards of sixty to eighty people. Turn of the seventeenth-century New England, he argues, "was a place where the sea had long been a conduit, not a barrier" (25).

In a creative contribution to early American historiography, Lipman reframes New England as a "landless borderland." In an excellent chapter of the same name, Lipman shows how many familiar borderland dynamics took place on the water—captive taking, the importance of mobility, reliance on cultural intermediaries, and mutual misunderstandings. These water-based encounters during the first three decades of the seventeenth century, he convincingly shows, established the patterns of violence that reshaped the political landscape of the coastline by the 1670s.

European captive taking in particular gave the coastline a "paranoid character" (6–7) and raised the stakes of cross-cultural exchange. Lipman's first-rate discussion of the Patuxet man Tisquantum (better known as Squanto) and other cultural intermediaries epitomize the violent, amphibious nature of New England's landless borderland. Like most Indians traversing the Atlantic, Squanto was taken across the ocean as a slave in 1614 and traded back and forth between the English and Spanish before securing his freedom and returning to New England as an interpreter in 1619. As one of the only people to speak both English and Algonquian, Squanto established an essential niche translating between the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, Nauset Indians, and the early Pilgrim colonists. But Lipman then demystifies popular, romanticized notions of Squanto. Like other "go-betweens" in North American borderlands,¹ his ability to traverse both sides of the cultural frontier made neither the Wampanoag nor English fully trust him (Squanto died under suspicious circumstances in 1623). Precisely because cultural intermediaries' services were so crucial to maintaining peace, Lipman shows that their very presence exposed the cultural chasm between Europeans and Native peoples in the New England borderlands.

The book's strengths and weaknesses both stem from Lipman's spatial and geopolitical boundaries. Analyzing English and Dutch colonies as "overlapping maritime zones," one of Lipman's most salient points is that historians must analyze the Pequot War in New England from...