Scott Weidensaul’s book, “The First Frontier,” opens on a fog-misted dawn as six Wapanahki – “people of the east” – paddle two bark canoes through the sea south of Penobscot Bay. To the north toward Monhegan, Capt. George Waymouth aboard the Archangell has but one task remaining before returning to England.
Like many initial encounters between Old and New World people from Maine to Florida, Waymouth’s eventual engagement with the Wapanahki was marked by suspicion and hesitancy, followed by acts of friendship and then dark deception.
When Waymouth turns toward England four days later, he has what he came for: Stowed below deck are five Wapanahki captives. Four were destined to become servants and sources of information in the homes of Sir John Popham, England’s lord chief justice and a keen advocate of colonization, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a knight of Plymouth who had successfully secured a royal charter to colonize the land that Waymouth explored.
One of the chief appeals of “The First Frontier” is that it doesn’t hone to an exclusive Euro-centric view of the early exploration and settlement of the American colonies. It is a more balanced accounting of the deceit, betrayal and savagery that was cruelly perpetuated by both sides.
Much of the book is shaped by highlighting five “Indian Wars” that took place between 1643 and 1764. These include King Philip’s War in the 1640s and King William’s War in the 1680s (both King Philip and King William were Native American leaders, so-named by opposing colonists). Both of these wars were fought in New England.
Weidensaul also covers the Yamasee War in the Carolinas that began in 1715, the Seven Year War in the 1750s in the Ohio Valley, and Pontiac’s War that began in 1763 near the Great Lakes. Confederacies of various tribes seeking to settle longstanding grievances, primarily with European settlers, fueled these violent clashes. King William’s War and the Seven Year War were also battles between competing European interests to secure greater claim to land for settlement.
Weidensaul gives his narrative human scale by focusing on a handful of key characters that, for various reasons, were in the thick of things. One is the story of Mary Rowlandson, wife and mother, who is kidnapped from a settlement in Massachusetts during King Philip’s War.
Another is of 10-year-old John Gyles of Pemaquid, Maine, who is captured during King William’s War. He is taken up the Penobscot River past Katahdin, where he is enslaved by the Maliseet, an Algonquin-speaking tribe of the St. John River Valley. He is subsequently sold to a French trader on the lower St. John.
Both Rowlandson and Gyles went on to write and publish accounts of their time as captives, and Weidensaul draws significantly on both works.
Weidensaul challenges several common misconceptions, including that the first frontier was a wilderness when the Europeans arrived. Primary source material of early explorers describes it as heavily populated, with a vast network of trails that interwove the entire Eastern Seaboard. Early explorers found “park-like” forests devoid of undergrowth due to the widespread native practice of regularly setting forests aflame to manage buildup of brush and deadwood.
One early explorer wrote that “By this meanes the place is made so much more fit for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the glory of God.”
The way to “glory” for the English was also greatly facilitated by the “great dying” that was caused by an endless stream of viruses brought by the Europeans, starting with De Soto and followed by the flood of English families who began arriving in the late 1600s. Within 75 years of Columbus, 90 percent of the pre-Columbian native population was decimated by disease.
According to the author, in 1623, Christopher Levett “enthused over the prospects for an English settlement in southern Maine that he would call York, saying there was “good ground and much of it already cleared, fit for planting of corne and other fruits, having heretofore ben planted by the Salvages who are dead.”
“The First Frontier” is interesting, informative and a good read. It also paints a picture very different from the one popularly recounted about the founding of our country.
Frank O Smith is a South Portland writer whose novel “Dream Singer” was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize.
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