sixty indians and twenty canoes: briton hammon’s unreliable witness to history

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Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes: Briton Hammon’s Unreliable Witness to History Daniel Vollaro Native South, Volume 2, 2009, pp. 133-147 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: 10.1353/nso.0.0018 For additional information about this article Access Provided by your local institution at 10/13/12 9:14PM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nso/summary/v002/2.vollaro.html

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Page 1: Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes: Briton Hammon’s Unreliable Witness to History

Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes: Briton Hammon’s UnreliableWitness to History

Daniel Vollaro

Native South, Volume 2, 2009, pp. 133-147 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska PressDOI: 10.1353/nso.0.0018

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by your local institution at 10/13/12 9:14PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nso/summary/v002/2.vollaro.html

Page 2: Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes: Briton Hammon’s Unreliable Witness to History

field notes

Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes

Briton Hammon’s Unreliable Witness to History

daniel vollaro

Just after Christmas Day in 1747, Briton Hammon, the servant of a man

named General John Winslow from Massachusetts, left Boston on The

Howlet, a sloop bound for Jamaica to gather “logwood.” On the return

trip in June of 1748, fully laden with cargo, the sloop ran aground near

Cape Florida, an area of dangerous reefs just south of present-day

Miami. Stuck on the reef for two days, the captain ordered Hammon

and eight members of the twelve-man crew to row for shore while he

waited aboard the sloop with two others. While still paddling for the

beach, loaded down with provisions, they spotted what appeared to be

rocks on the horizon. Hammon and his crewmates soon realized they

were mistaken. What they had seen was a complement of sixty Indians

in twenty canoes advancing toward them. The Indians killed everyone

except Hammon and held him captive for six weeks. Hammon even-

tually made his way aboard a Spanish schooner that had anchored off

the cape and began a twelve-year odyssey of successive captivities and

escapes that took him from a prison cell in Havana to a stint serving

aboard a British warship, and then finally and miraculously to a reunion

with his old master in London.

Hammon’s story was first told in A Narrative of the Uncommon and

Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, an autobio-

graphical narrative published in 1760 by Green and Russell, the fore-

most printer in Boston during the period.1 In the 1760s New Englanders

were hungry for stories of Indian captivity, so it is no accident that the

first five weeks of Hammon’s twelve-year odyssey occupies five of the

ten total pages in the Narrative. Indian captivity narratives were a popu-

lar “dime novel” publication phenomenon in mid-1700s America, read

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more for vicarious thrills and entertainment than serious literary merit.

The “adventure story” aspect was the most important feature of these

publications, and authors of seventeenth-century captivity narratives

were not above adding lurid, obviously exaggerated details, fictionalizing

portions or even the entirety of their stories, and Hammon’s Narrative

relies heavily on such conventions.

The Narrative’s modern audience, however, sees something more

weighty and noble, and less “Indian,” in this text. Revived in the last two

decades of the twentieth century along with many other lost or long

overlooked African American texts, the Narrative’s modern academic

audience has framed it as an early example of African American litera-

ture. The original audience for the Narrative was apparently nonplussed

by the racial identity of its author,2 but modern readers are fixated on it.

Indeed, Hammon is now widely acknowledged among literary scholars

as the first black person to author a literary text in North America, and

this fact more than any other controls the modern revival of this text.

Consequently, most of the scholarship on Hammon focuses on the enig-

matic and historically fuzzy personage of Hammon, with writers prob-

ing very basic and as yet unanswered biographical questions: Who was

Britton Hammon? How much of the narrative did he write, and how

much should be attributed to his editors and publishers? Was Hammon

a free servant or a slave, or did he occupy some status in between? Why

did he happily return to Boston with his master after their miraculous

reunion in London? Hammon’s status as a person of color is now the

centerpiece of our understanding of the Narrative.

Ironically, scholars’ focus on the African American identity of Ham-

mon has produced an unfortunate side effect: as I survey the scholarship

on the Narrative, I find not a word on the identity of the Indians who

Hammon says attacked him and his shipmates. They have been relegated

to shadows.

In this essay I hope to correct this imbalance by pursuing the “Indian

question.” My work began with an interest to fill out some of the his-

torical background of the narrative. My inquiry took me deep into the

dense mangroves and swamps of South Florida, where I stumbled across

evidence of a massive regional depopulation, propelled by a cruel cam-

paign of Indian slavery that decimated Florida’s native population in

the first half of the eighteenth century. My investigations also took me

into the enigmatic heart of the mid-eighteenth-century Indian captivity

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Field Notes 135

narrative with its compelling mix of pulp fiction, documentary writing, religious tract, and poor man’s travelogue. Following this thread, I com-pared Hammon’s brief account of Indian captivity to other captivity sto-ries published around the same time in New England, and to the histori-cal record on Southern Florida in the 1740s. I expected this research to add to the historical depth of the Narrative; instead, I found good reason to doubt Hammon’s witness to history. Details of Hammon’s account are suspiciously similar to accounts of Indian attacks that were circulating in Boston before Hammon’s departure. Also, his observation of the Indians themselves suggests a social and cultural dynamic that fails to line up with most demographic data and eyewitness accounts of the region dur-ing this period.

According to Hammon The Howlet wrecked on a reef near Cape Flor-ida, just south of modern-day Miami in 1748.3 As I have already said, Hammon was accompanying some of the crew as they paddled toward the shore. The Indians attacked suddenly, writes Hammon, and in large numbers, intercepting them before they reached the beach. Bearing an English flag, these Indians “soon came up with and boarded us, took away all our Arms Ammunition, and Provision.” At that point most of the Indians paddled toward the stranded ship.

Hammon reports:

The whole Number of CaRoes (being about Twenty,) then made for

the Sloop, except Two which they left to guard us, who order’d us to

follow on with them; the Eighteen which made for the Sloop, went

so much faster than we that they got on board above Three Hours

before we came along side, and had kill’d Captain Howland, the

Passenger and the other hand.4

From this point the Narrative reports that the attackers quickly killed the remaining crew members, and when Hammon tried to swim away from the slaughter, they chased him down, hauled him into a canoe, and then beat him with a cutlass. They tied him up, set the sloop on fire, and brought Hammon ashore.

The next paragraph briefly sketches Hammon’s captivity among the Indians:

After we came to the Shore, they led me to their Hutts, where I expected

nothing but immediate Death, and as they spoke broken English, were

often telling me, while coming from the Sloop to the Shore, that they

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intended to roast me alive. But the Providence of God order’d it oth-

erways, for He appeared for my Help, in this Mount of Difficulty,

and they were better to me then my Fears, and soon unbound me,

but set a Guard over me every Night. They kept me with them about

five Weeks, during which Time they us’d me pretty well, and gave me

boil’d Corn, which was what they often eat themselves.5

I have highlighted two phrases in this paragraph with italics to iden-tify two tropes that suggest Hammon may have fictionalized some of his account. The first—Indians speaking “broken English”—suggests an Indian population that spoke English, an unlikely scenario given the sociolinguistic dynamics of southern Florida during the period. The sec-ond trope, the threat of burning at the stake, is generally common to Indian captivity narratives and suggests that Hammon may have shaped some of the details of his Narrative to satisfy the genre expectations of his readers. I will explore both issues in greater detail shortly.

Hammon escaped when a Spanish schooner arrived, serendipitously captained by a man he had met in Jamaica. The schooner took him to Havana, but the Indians followed him, arriving four days later to make “Application” to the governor for his return.6 The governor paid them ten dollars and told them to hand over any other marooned sailors they might find in the future.

Hammon’s witness to history begins to blur when we situate his account regionally. If Hammon was indeed shipwrecked where he says, he would have landed in a frontier territory of the Spanish empire in North America. Throughout the first period of Spanish occupation, which ended in 1763 when Spain ceded the peninsula to British rule, the territory had the reputation of a backwater in the Spanish empire—a military outpost—in large part because of the inability of the Spanish to “pacify” the Indians there or entirely protect Spanish subjects from attacks by the English and their Indian allies in the North.7 In the half century preceding the shipwreck, the northern edge of the territory near St. Augustine that butted up against the southern edge of the British empire in North America had been the site of constant tensions and occasional war with the English, with major flare-ups in 1702, 1715, 1719, and 1739. Neither side was able to dislodge the other entirely in these conflicts, though the first of these colonial wars, which lasted from 1702 to 1713, destroyed the mission system in northern Florida, Spain’s main

instrument for social, political, and cultural control in the region.

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Field Notes 137

This history is important because it helps contextualize the situ-

ation on the ground in the region of South Florida where Hammon

and his crewmates were shipwrecked. The southern tip of the Florida

Peninsula was under assault by powerful nations from Georgia and the

Carolinas during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The

brushfire wars between Spain and England helped to create an uneven

power balance between the Indians of North and South Florida. In the

north, surrounding the English colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas,

the Creek, Yamassee, and Yuchi nations benefited materially and mili-

tarily from their trade contacts and alliances with the British. William

Sturtevant bluntly reports that the English gave their Indian allies guns

and the Spanish did not, and while this statement is an oversimplifica-

tion of the level of armaments possessed by Indians on both sides of

the colonial divide, it does begin to explain why, in the first half of the

eighteenth century, southern Florida tribes like the Tequestas and Carlos

were so vulnerable to attack.8 Before the protracted, 1702–1713 war with

England, the Spanish were able to protect the Indians of Florida, but the

war relegated Spanish military power to the heavily fortified town of St.

Augustine. As a consequence the Spanish were no longer able to pro-

tect the Indians of southern Florida from raids by neighboring Creeks,

Yamassees, and Yuchis.

The incentive for these raids was slave profiteering. Indians in the

South were among the earliest victims, and perpetrators, of the European

slave trade in North America. Historian Allan Gallay has called the Indian

slave trade “the most important factor affecting the South in the period

1670 to 1715” with an impact “felt from Arkansas to the Carolinas and

south to the Florida Keys.” Because many Southern nations already had

a tradition of taking war captives as slaves, they were easily persuaded

to participate in the European slave trade that grew up in the Carolina

and Virginia colonies in the seventeenth century. Powerful nations like

the Creeks would raid weaker neighbors for slaves and exchange their

captives to the English slave traders for much-desired European trade

goods; many of these captives were shipped overseas to the West Indies

to work on sugar plantations.9 In this way indigenous practices of slavery

that were associated with warfare became implicated in European sys-

tems of profit, similar to the role indigenous forms of slavery in Africa

played in the Atlantic slave trade.

The nations of Florida suffered terribly in the slave trade. Gallay offers

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a conservative estimate of between 15,000 and 20,000 Florida Indians

taken in slave raids by the English and their allies by 1717, and historian

Charles Arnade estimates that 1,000 Indians were left alive in Spanish-

controlled Florida in 1713, the nadir of the peninsula’s Native population.

“By the early years of the eighteenth century the Creeks had finished

what European diseases had begun,” observes Katherine E. Holland

Braund, “the depopulation of the aboriginal tribes of the Florida pen-

insula.”10 Most historians agree that by 1763, when the Spanish ceded

Florida to the English, the peninsula was largely depopulated, a vacuum

that would be filled by the Seminole over the next century. Peter Wood

estimates that the population of South Florida shrank from 1,500 in 1730

to 500 in 1760, and Paul Kelton, writing in Epidemics and Enslavement,

claims that by 1715, “Florida was essentially vacant with the exception of

a few hundred Natives huddled around St. Augustine and some scattered

bands of Calusas [in the South] who hid from English-allied slave raid-

ers in the Everglades.”11

The southern tip of Florida was especially hard hit by this campaign

of slave-raiding. In 1711 the bishop of Cuba wrote that the Indians of

the Keys and South Florida reported they were under heavy attack by

the Yamassees, who were raiding villages at will and carrying off hun-

dreds to sell into slavery in Charleston.12 Thomas Nairne, an English

slaver, describes how he and thirty-three Yamassee Indians went “a Slave

Catching” from South Carolina halfway down Florida’s Atlantic coast,

capturing Indians in groups of between six and twenty-nine before they

returned home with their captives.13 The Spanish were helpless to defend

their Indian subjects from these attacks. Unlike North Florida, which

had been defined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by an exten-

sive mission system radiating out from St. Augustine, South Florida was

devoid of permanent Spanish settlements or fortifications. With the mis-

sion system destroyed in the north and Spanish power huddled around

the fortress of St. Augustine, slave traders and slave catchers were free to

hunt in the south.14

Most eyewitness reports from the 1740s suggest that the Indian popu-

lation of South Florida was teetering on the verge of extinction. South

Florida was home to two major nations when the Spanish arrived in

the region—Calusas, who dominated the Keys and southwestern Gulf

Coast region, and the more powerful Tequestas, who dominated the east

coast of southern Florida up to present-day Palm Springs, including the

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Field Notes 139

territory of present-day Miami.15 By the 1740s the Tequesta appear to

have been supplanted by, or fused with, the remnants of other nations

from South Florida who had banded together for protection. Bernard

Romans, writing in A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida

(1775), claims that Cape Indians during this period had been driven into

the mangroves by attacks from northern nations and were living hand to

mouth.16 In July and August of 1743 two Jesuit missionaries accompanied

by a small group of soldiers arrived at the mouth of Miami River, scout-

ing locations for a mission. They found a settlement there comprised of

remnants of three South Florida tribes: the Keys, Carlos, and Bocarraton

Indians, who were gathered into a village numbering 180 people. The

plan for a mission was never approved and the Jesuits and their military

escort soon withdrew. Anthropologist William Sturtevant reports that in

1763, when the Spanish turned Florida over to the British, they evacuated

just eighty Indian families from the region—the entire Indian popula-

tion of South Florida.17 Collectively, these accounts portray an Indian

community in the Biscayne Bay area that was more prey than predator.

The Miami settlement account is a key piece of evidence in assessing

the veracity of the Narrative, because if Hammon’s estimate of location

of the wreck is accurate, The Howlet likely ran aground just a few miles

south of the community in the Jesuits’ account, about four years after

they returned to Havana. Hammon and his fellow crewmates likely would

have encountered members of this mixed-nation settlement of Indians

in 1748, but his observations do not line up with historians’, archaeolo-

gists’, and demographers’ portrait of these people. If we can believe the

firsthand reports about the Miami River settlement, the number “Sixty

Indians” seems a far larger force than what the local Indians could mus-

ter. If the Jesuits’ report is accurate, there were about 180 people living

here; half of these were children. Archaeologist John W. Griffin, using the

Jesuits’ report as his guide, estimates that of the remaining population,

there were perhaps forty-five males.18 Hammon may have exaggerated

the size of the force, or the Jesuit’s may have underestimated the popula-

tion of the settlement, but enough of a discrepancy exists to ask a few

more skeptical questions about Hammon’s account.

My faith in Hammon’s reporting is further eroded by the fact that

sixty Indians in twenty canoes is exactly the complement that Samuel

Penhallow reports attacked a settlement in Merrymeeting Bay, Maine,

at the opening of Lovewell’s War in the summer of 1722. Lovewell’s War

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was a three-year campaign of skirmishes between Abenaki Indians allied

with the French and English settlers who had moved north into present-

day Maine. Writing in The History of the Wars of New-England, with the

Eastern Indians (1726), which was published just a few years after the

events in question, Penhallow recalls:

But in the Summer they [the Abenaki] renewed their insults and on

the thirteenth of June 1722 about sixty of them in twenty Canoos,

came and took nine Families in Merry-meeting-Bay, most of

which they afterwards set at liberty, but sent Mr. Hamilton, Love,

Handson, Trescot, and Edgar to Canada; who with great difficulty

and expence afterwards got clear.19

This parallel might be an extraordinary coincidence, or it might also

point to one of the areas where Hammon or his editor embellished or

fictionalized portions of his Narrative using a historical account that

would have been known to most literate New Englanders.

Another detail of Hammon’s Indian captivity narrative that triggers

warning bells is his description of their linguistic abilities. He claims the

Indians spoke “broken English.” This detail is suspicious because it defies

the documentary evidence of linguistic patterns in South Florida during

this period. Archaeologist John W. Griffin reports that the three Indian

groups living at the Miami River settlement spoke their own languages,

and the adult males “understood and spoke Spanish moderately well.”

It is possible that these Indians also spoke English, but unlikely. By the

1740s Spain had controlled Florida for two centuries. Spanish missionar-

ies had been working on the peninsula from 1595 to 1704, achieving some

level of acculturation of the various tribes on the peninsula to Spanish

customs, language, and religion.20

It is certainly possible that South Florida Indians had learned some

English words, either through trade or by contact with Englishmen ship-

wrecked in the region, but again, other reports of Indian captivity in

Florida suggest a different linguistic dimension. One compelling chal-

lenge to Hammon’s account comes from God’s Protecting Providence,

Man’s Surest Help and Defence in Times of Greatest Difficulty and Most

Imminent Danger . . . from Cruel Devouring Jaws of the Inhuman Cannibals

of Florida, a captivity narrative written by Jonathan Dickinson, a Quaker

merchant who was shipwrecked along with his and several other families

in 1696 just north of present-day Palm Springs. Published in 1699, this

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Field Notes 14 1

narrative details the captivity these families endured before they were

allowed to go north along the coast to St. Augustine, and eventually to

Philadelphia. The Indians in this account lived seventy-five miles north

of Miami, closer to English territory, but according to Dickinson, they

were clearly able to understand and speak some Spanish, but unable to

speak English.21

Again, Hammon may have supplemented his own memory of events

with details that his New England audience would find familiar and

compelling. The phrase “broken English” was commonly used in New

England stories of encounters with Indians, which is probably where

Hammon picked it up. The Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliver-

ances, etc. in the Captivity of John Gyles, Esq., Commander of the Garrison

on St. George’s River, Published in Boston in 1736, for example, contains

this passage about the author’s captivity: “I met with no abuse from them

in this winter’s hunting though I was put to great hardships in carrying

burdens and for want of food, for they underwent the same difficulty

and would often encourage me, saying in broken English, ‘By-by, great

deal moose.’”22 The spectacle of an Indian speaking “broken English”

would have been familiar to New Englanders who knew Cotton Mather’s

account of the first winter the Pilgrims spent in Plymouth, published in

Magnalia Christi Americana. In it, he describes the sudden “appearance

of two Indians, who in broken English bade them, welcome English-

men! It seems that one of these Indians had been in the eastern parts of

New England acquainted with some of the English vessels that had been

formerly fishing there.”23 The other was Squanto, the Indian who was

captured, was enslaved by the Spanish, and escaped to England where he

learned English well enough to render aid to the struggling colonists.

These questions deserve to be asked about Hammon’s Narrative, but

modern writers have expressed little skepticism over the details of Ham-

mon’s story, treating the Narrative as an unvarnished accounting of

events witnessed by its author.24 A few writers, for example, have used

Hammon’s account to add The Howlet to lists of shipwrecks along the

Florida coast. Archaeologist John Griffin uses the text to establish that

“there were still Indians around [in 1748] who lived in huts, ate boiled

corn, had canoes in which they could reach Havana, and also knew a few

words of English.”25 Similarly, William Sturtevant, who has written the

most thorough article on the Miami River settlement, uses a single-para-

graph summary of Hammon’s account to establish that Spain did not

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exercise sovereignty over South Florida in the 1740s.26 Literary historians

and scholars are attracted to the Narrative because it is virtually the only

source of biographical data about the author himself, which makes the

text a valuable document in establishing the early origins of an African

American literary tradition in colonial America.

This deference to the “documentary” value of the Narrative runs

against the grain of a literary analysis, which would suggest that we not

so readily trust Hammon’s witness to history. Hammon’s account should

prompt a wry smile from anyone who is familiar with classical literature.

Yarns are as old as seafaring itself, and prodigal sailors since Homer’s

time have returned home with fantastical stories of captivity, encounters

with strange people in strange lands, and survival against overwhelm-

ing odds in answer to the question, what happened to your ship and

the crew? For this reason alone, we should approach his account with a

skeptical eye.

Hammon’s chosen genre should also raise doubts about the author’s

accounting of events. Christopher Castiglia says the captivity genre

“blur[s] the line between what a captive witnessed and what she added

or invented for the sake of narrative convention or the projected pruri-

ence of her audience.”27 Such attention to genre over historical accuracy

is especially true of eighteenth-century Indian captivity narratives. Roy

Harvey Pearce has decisively shown the evolution of the captivity narra-

tive from religious document to anti-Indian propaganda to sensational-

ized literary genre from the seventeenth through eighteenth centuries,

calling these narratives the “eighteenth-century equivalent of the dime

novel.”28 Many eighteenth-century narratives, like the French and Indian

Cruelty Exemplified, in the Life and Various Viscissitudes of Fortune, or

Peter Williamson (1757) and A True Narrative of the Sufferings of Mary

Kinnan (1795), contain obviously exaggerated passages of torture and

cruelty; others are complete fabrications.

How do we separate fact from fiction in Hammon’s Narrative? Ham-

mon almost certainly fictionalized parts of the Narrative according to

the audience’s expectations of what should appear in an Indian captiv-

ity narrative. In the memorable passage cited earlier, Hammon writes,

“After we came to the Shore, they led me to their Hutts, where I expected

nothing but immediate Death, and as they spoke broken English, were

often telling me, while coming from the Sloop to the Shore, that they

intended to roast me alive.”29 The fear or threat of being burned alive

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Field Notes 143

in a sacrificial manner is a common trope in captivity narratives, from

sixteenth-century accounts of the DeSoto expedition to James Fenimore

Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.

If we assume that something happened to Hammon on the South

Florida coast, there are several plausible theories about the people he

may have encountered. Hammon may have simply embellished a vio-

lent or even peaceful encounter with the remnants of Tequesta or Calusa

Indians who lived nearby and arrived on the scene to engage in a cen-

turies-old tradition of salvaging ships wrecked along the treacherous

reefs. In his book, The Florida Keys: The Wreckers, John Viele explains

that Indians living in the Keys had a long history of plundering ships

stranded in these perilous straits. In the sixteenth century Keys Indians

were reported to have stripped many shipwrecks, sometimes killing and

enslaving the survivors.30 Hammon’s crew may have been victimized by

Indians from the Miami River settlement; many years later, Hammon

exaggerated the size of the force for dramatic effect.

Or perhaps the crew died in the shipwreck. A peaceful encounter with

the Miami River settlement Indians also seems possible. Their reputation

for fierceness had dwindled considerably by the eighteenth century, but

their interest in salvage remained. A French priest, Pierre de Clairlevoix,

who was shipwrecked in the Keys in 1722 speculated that the people stayed

in the Keys primarily to plunder the numerous shipwrecks in the area.31

Hammon may have survived the wreck and lived with these Indians for

a brief time before being picked up by a boat bound for Havana. The

audience-pleasing surprise attack by Indians might have been a flourish

added to make the account consistent with the captivity genre.

A second scenario credits Hammon with a more honest accounting of

what he saw, but questions his interpretation of events. Hammon may

have encountered members of that predatory class of slave raiders and

brigands from the Creek territories of present-day southern Georgia

or northern Florida who continued to terrorize the East Florida coast

through the 1760s. If we give credence to some of the details in Hammon’s

account—the well-armed Indians with cutlasses and firearms, the Union

Jack, the “broken English”—it seems possible that he was describing

Creek or Yamassee slave raiders from the English-speaking territories to

the north. Most historians agree that the end of the Yamassee War in

1715 marked the end of large-scale slave-raiding into South Florida, but

evidence suggests that the Creeks continued to launch attacks and take

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slaves through the 1760s. John Worth, writing in a paper presented at

the 61st Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference,

explains that at the start of the Seven Years War in 1756, Creek war par-

ties, supported by the English, launched savage assaults against the sur-

viving Indians of South Florida and the Keys.32 Spanish sources suggest

that these attacks were the final act of a terror campaign waged by the

Creek against the tribes of South Florida that continued after the end of

the Yamassee War. When the small Spanish complement that arrived at

the mouth of the Miami River in 1743 left for Cuba, they apparently razed

the temporary fort they built there to deny it to the “Uchizas” or Creek.33

Given the long-standing Creek practice of slavery, it seems likely that the

Creek slave-raiding continued to take captives during these raids.34

But why would the Creek slave raiders looking for Indian captives

attack a stranded ship from New England and take a black man prisoner?

Hammon reports that he was bound and held by his captors, which sug-

gests that they had a purpose for keeping him alive. One possible expla-

nation is that they were specifically looking for fugitive black slaves, or

perhaps saw an opportunity to profit from capturing blacks and collect-

ing a “fugitive” bounty for them. The British Crown, hoping to prevent

slaves from “marooning” south into Spanish territory, offered the Creeks

financial incentives to hunt down fugitive slaves, a practice that appar-

ently worked as a deterrent.35 In the 1740s the Georgia colony was paying

Creek hunters four blankets or two guns for every fugitive slave returned

alive; the bounty was one blanket for the severed head of a runaway slave.

Bounties increased through the 1760s, ranging between twenty and forty

pounds of deerskin for each returned runaway.36

Hammon and the other black and mulatto crew members were thus

potentially valuable prizes for these attackers. At least one other crew

member, Moses Newmock, is described by Hammon as a mulatto. Other

crew members may also have been black or mulatto. The Indian attack-

ers may have stumbled across the shipwreck and seeing blacks among its

crew, sniffed an opportunity for profit.

Hammon’s Narrative offers almost no new insight into the life of Indi-

ans living on the southernmost tip of the Florida peninsula in the 1740s,

but the text raises important questions about how historians should read

the Indian in Indian captivity narratives. How far should we trust the

captivity narrative’s witness to history? To what extent are descriptions

of Indians shaped by the literary conventions of the captivity narrative

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Field Notes 145

and the cultural stereotypes of the period in which it was published?

Most modern Americans understand that 1950s Western films do not

accurately depict Native Americans, yet many contemporary scholars

seem willing to take the equivalent colonial-era chronicler of Indian cap-

tivity at his or her word when describing the events of captivity by Indi-

ans. Perhaps it is prudent to shelve most captivity narratives—including

Hammon’s—closer to fiction than documentary or history.

notes

1. John Sekora, “Printers, and the Early African-American Narrative,” in A

Mixed Race, ed. Frank Shuffelton, 97 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

2. Sekora, “Printers,” 101.

3. The name of the ship is one of the few details about the incident that exists

outside of Briton Hammon, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Sur-

prizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (Boston: Green and Russell,

1760).

4. Hammon, Narrative, 5.

5. Hammon, Narrative, 5.

6. This detail is one of many in the Narrative that invite a skeptical reading

of this text. Many observers from the period noted that the Indians of South

Florida and the Keys traveled to Havana in large sea-worthy dugout canoes to

trade, but would a small group of Indians island-hop across the Keys and then

cross ninety-four miles of open ocean from Key West to recover one escaped

captive?

7. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Republic of Spaniards, Republic of Indians,” in The

New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon, 63 (Gainesville: University Press of

Florida, 1996).

8. William C. Sturtevant, “Spanish-Indian Relations in Southeastern North

America,” Ethnohistory 9 (1962): 69.

9. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the Ameri-

can South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 7–8.

10. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 108; Charles W. Arnade, “Raids, Sieges, and

International Wars,” in New History of Florida, 100–116; Kathryn E. Holland

Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” Journal of Southern History

57 (1991): 606.

11. Peter Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Over-

view by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colo-

nial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley, 80

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); and Paul Kelton, Epidemics and

Page 15: Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes: Briton Hammon’s Unreliable Witness to History

native south volume 2 2009146

Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 123.

12. Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (Gaines-

ville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 228.

13. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 127.

14. Father Monaco, a missionary in the region, reported in 1743 that the Yuchi

raided the area regularly; Creek sources, which are almost certainly exaggerated,

reported that the Creeks made war in the Cape and reduced the population of

the area to thirty persons. Two Jesuits who moved north from the Keys into the

Miami area in 1743 to begin mission work there reported that they were forced

to abandon their work because raids by Muskhegan tribes from the north were

so disruptive. Michael Gannon, “First European Contacts,” in The New History

of Florida, 20.

15. Gannon, “First European Contacts,” 13

16. Gannon, “First European Contacts,” 20.

17. Sturtevant, “Spanish-Indian Relations,” 69; and William C. Sturtevant,

“Last of the South Florida Aborigines,” in Tachachale: Essays on the Indians of

Florida and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period, ed. Jerald Milanich

and Samuel Proctor, 142–46 (Gainseville: University of Florida Press, 1978).

18. John W. Griffin, Fifty Years of Southeastern Archaeology: Selected Works

of John W. Griffin, ed. Patricia Griffin (Gainseville: University Press of Florida,

1996), 200.

19. Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England with the East-

ern Indians (1726; reprinted, Cincinnati: J. Harpel, 1859), 85.

20. Griffin, Fifty Years, 200 and 220–35.

21. Jonathan Dickinson, God’s Protecting Providence, Man’s Surest Help and

Defence in Times of Greatest Difficulty and Most Imminent Danger . . . from Cruel

Devouring Jaws of the Inhuman Cannibals of Florida (1699; reprinted, London:

James Phillips, 1787), 23.

22. John Gyles, The Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc. in

the Captivity of John Gyles, Esq., Commander of the Garrison on St. George’s River

(1736; reprinted, Cincinnati: Spiller & Gates Printers, 1869), 103.

23. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or, The Ecclesiastical History of

New England (1702; reprinted, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2006), 55.

24. A short list includes Joan Potter, African American Firsts: Famous Little-

Known and Unsung Triumphs of Blacks (New York: Dafina Books, 2002); Vin-

cent Caretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the Eng-

lish-Speaking World? (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Audrey A.

Fisch, ed., Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Hor-

ton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (New Brunswick, NJ:

Page 16: Sixty Indians and Twenty Canoes: Briton Hammon’s Unreliable Witness to History

Field Notes 147

Rutgers University Press, 2001); and Joanne Braxton and Maria I. Diedrich, eds.,

Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory (Münster, Germany: LIT

Verlag, 2005).

25. Griffin, Fifty Years, 201.

26. Sturtevant, “Last of the South Florida Aborigines,” 146.

27. Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture, Culture-

Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 107.

28. Roy Pearce, “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative,” American Lit-

erature 19 (1947): 13

29. Hammon, Narrative, 7.

30. John Viele, Florida Keys: The Wreckers (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press,

2001), 19.

31. Griffin, Fifty Years, 199.

32. John Worth, “A History of Southeastern Indians in Cuba, 1513–1823,” paper

presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Confer-

ence, St. Louis, Missouri, October 21–23, 2004, 8.

33. Sturtevant, “Last of the South Florida Aborigines,” 145.

34. Slavery was an integral part of Creek society, from before the arrival of

Europeans through the end of the American Civil War, and the Creek commonly

took women and children and noncombatants as prisoners of war. Braund,

“Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 632.

35. Rebecca B. Bateman, “Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the

Black Carib and Black Seminole,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 3.

36. Braund, “Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 611.