People of the Dawn, People of the Door: Indian Pirates and the Violent Theft of an Atlantic World

Extract

In the spring of 1759 a familiar supplicant stood before the legislature in Boston's State House. As royal governor of Massachusetts during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), Thomas Pownall envisioned a lasting victory for his empire through the conquest of the Penobscot River valley in the colony's northeastern frontier, the very heart of the Wabanaki Indians' ancestral homeland. “For many Years a Den for Savages,” he reminded his lawmakers, a “Rendevouz of the Eastern Indians when they come against our Frontiers,” the region long loomed as a swarming nest of Indian outlaws. Circumstances there now necessitated the appropriation of assets for a strong garrison, Pownall argued, since “the Enimy have now no Outlet to ye sea but thro this River Penobscot; The Door being Shutt upon them in every other Part.” Pownall's incessant agitation of the General Court (Massachusetts's legislature) to slam shut this final door eventually paid dividends. Bolstered by British military victories throughout this borderland in early 1759 and by the subsequent allotment of funds for the construction of Fort Pownall, the jubilant governor could finally declare in a victory speech that “this River was ye last & only door That the Enimy had left to ye Atlantic & I hope this is now fairly shutt upon them.” Equally confident of the strategy's success, the legislature congratulated him for his defeat of the Indians now, they affirmed, “deprived of the only Opening they had left to the Atlantick.” Pownall sought to infect his superiors at Whitehall with the same enthusiasm, boasting in a June letter of his triumphant closure of “the last & only Door which the Enimy had left to ye Atlantic.”¹