Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion

Abstract

Bahar emphasizes the dynamic and contingent nature of Wabanaki power during this era. The book explicitly rejects what Bahar calls “a lingering tendency to read the power dynamics of later periods back into the first two centuries of Indian-European relations.” Instead, Bahar insists the Wabanakis undertook a blue-water strategy as part of a “coherent, coordinated, and systemic” plan of violence in pursuit of particular goals. In doing so, the Wabanakis forged a more integrated polity that “coalesced to achieve stability and growth” (13). Readers familiar with Pekka H€am€al€ainen’s much-lauded Comanche Empire (Yale University Press 2008) may hear echoes of that argument in Storm of the Sea. Both scholars argue that an indigenous power succeeded in turning European imperial pretensions upside down, redirecting trade, plunder, and captives into its own orbit at the expense of the newcomers. Storm of the Sea should provoke fruitful debate in a similar manner, as scholars will have reason to question how well Bahar’s expansive argument for a Wabanaki “imperial quest” (172) holds up. Storm of the Sea covers a great deal in a slender volume, and it would be unfair to expect Bahar to wade into the thickets of diplomacy ashore in detail, but, by neglecting important terrestrial contexts, Bahar paints an oversimplified portrait of Wabanaki power in action. To highlight one example of many, Bahar portrays the sagamore Madockawando, who is widely regarded as a powerful leader from the 1670s to the 1690s, as a sort of generalissimo, even calling the region “Madockawando’s Dawnland” (126). Bahar writes that the Penobscots remembered “their noble old sagamore” after his 1698 death and “carried out his vision” in the eighteenth century (129). Perhaps so, but nowhere does Bahar mention that Madockawando’s influence cratered in 1694, when his people learned that he had signed a unilateral, unsanctioned land cession with Massachusetts that year as part of a truce. By 1695, the sagamore no longer led the Penobscots at all and was living in a distant village, perhaps not by choice. The Penobscots spent the next sixty years disavowing that part of his legacy. Wabanaki leaders maintained power through painstaking consensus building; successful leaders had to overcome sometimes bitter factional rivalries that stemmed from different responses to the wartime pressures faced by the home villages of the maritime fighters who appear in this book. Those pressures included devastating losses to disease in the 1690s; disruption of seasonal subsistence patterns; and the repeated English destruction of villages, which forced families to spend years living as refugees along the St. Lawrence or elsewhere out of reach of colonial forces. Framing the 1690s conflicts as “unmitigated victories” (132) for the Wabanakis, as Bahar does, is only possible with a selective reading of their experience. No one can read this book and doubt that the Wabanakis inspired terror among New England’s mariners and coastal communities during the war years or question that their fighters more than held their own for decades. Granting that, scholars may hesitate to agree with Bahar’s analysis that the Wabanakis in 1700—as war weary as their neighbors, facing destroyed homes and a shrinking population—were “an increasingly hegemonic powerbroker” (141) compared to New France and New England, or that their subsequent raids represented a “project to build a Dawnland dominion” (179). The evidence presented in Storm of the Sea could just as easily buttress a different argument, one that Wabanaki speakers made in numerous encounters with European intruders: they had ceded their claims to no one; they merely wanted to be respected and left alone; and most of them viewed the wars plaguing the Dawnland not as rich opportunities for plunder, but as necessary struggles to preserve what was rightfully theirs. The book is written for a college audience, and undergraduates and general readers alike will be drawn to the subject matter and to Bahar’s vibrant narrative. Scholars of this region will benefit from the book’s highlighting of maritime events that are often overlooked. Bahar’s interpretation of Wabanaki power and ambitions will likely spark debate, especially among scholars of Algonquian politics and culture. The results may well prove illuminating, like this volume itself.