sixty indians and twenty canoes: briton hammon’s unreliable witness to history
TRANSCRIPT
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
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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
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.
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
native south volume 2 2009138
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
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
native south volume 2 2009140
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
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
native south volume 2 2009142
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
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
native south volume 2 2009144
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
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
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:
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.