Transatlantic Encounters
American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776

Transatlantic Encounters examines the diverse origins and experiences of approximately 175 American Indians and Inuits who traveled to the British Isles before the American Revolution. Their homelands ranged from northern Canada to Brazil, their ages from infant to nonagenarian, their statuses from slave (the largest category) to “emperor,” and their occupations from warrior to missionary. Some American natives died soon after arrival, but others remained as long as fourteen years and returned home; still others, their arrival and death dates undocumented, may have endured long lives abroad. A few of the travelers are widely known (Pocahontas, Samson Occom, and Joseph Brant, for example); many others are here identified for the first time. And always, Indians and Inuits fascinated the British people, whether the Americans were captives on commercial display, interpreters-in-training, or voluntary voyagers to petition the monarch and tour Britain’s famous sites. British artists painted their portraits and eminent writers invoked them in plays and essays. In the imperial crisis of 1776, Indian diplomats who had been to London would staunchly support the British Empire.

Alden T. Vaughan is Affiliate Professor of History at Clark University and Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he taught for several decades. He is the editor or author of many books, including Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1991), with his wife, Virginia Mason Vaughan.

Transatlantic Encounters

American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776

ALDEN T. VAUGHAN

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521865944

© Alden T. Vaughan 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Vaughan, Alden T., 1929–
Transatlantic encounters : American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 / Alden T. Vaughan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-521-86594-4 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 0-521-86594-8 (hardback)
1. Indians of North America – History – Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775.
2. Indians of North America – Public opinion. 3. Public opinion – Great Britain –
History – 18th century. 4. Great Britain – Colonies – America. I. Title.
E77.V35    2007
303.48′208997041 – dc22    2006007792

ISBN-13 978-0-521-86594-4 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-86594-8 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Personally, to Ginger, for everything.
Professionally, to legions of scholarly editors,
epitomized by the late David B. Quinn,
for a rich documentary storehouse.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

The westward crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by countless Europeans and Africans is a hallmark of early American history. Largely forgotten are the far fewer, but nonetheless important, crossings in the opposite direction – American natives who left ancestral homes in the New World (as Europe perceived it) to live for a time, and perhaps to die, in the Old World. One strand of that eastward trajectory is recounted here: the approximately 175 Indians and Inuits who are known to have journeyed to the British Isles between about 1500, when the first documented case occurred, and 1776, when thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies declared their separate political identity.^* Transatlantic Encounters reconstructs the backgrounds of the American migrants’ trips abroad, the nature of their experiences in the British Isles, and – if they survived the sojourn – their subsequent lives.

   These Indian and Inuit voyagers were not migrants in the usual sense. Rather, most of America’s eastward travelers became temporary residents of Britain, their visits ending when they chose to sail homeward or their hosts decided the time had come. Although some Indians and Inuits succumbed to illness or other conditions abroad, and a few died on the outward or homeward voyage, a sizeable majority completed the circuit and spent the rest of their lives on native soil.

   While abroad, these Americans^† were the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ most persistent and accessible wonders. Arriving in an irregular but substantial stream, usually in scanty native costumes and with little or no command of English, the exotic strangers became instant celebrities. British crowds, especially in London, ogled them on the streets and in public parks; kings and queens entertained them at court; leaders of church and state consulted them at formal and informal meetings; merchants feasted them at elegant restaurants; less reputable Britons plied them with drink. Newspapers and magazines reported the Americans’ attendance at courts and castles, at theatres and fairs. English authors – Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Elkanah Settle, Oliver Goldsmith, and James Boswell – wrote visiting Americans into plays and essays. As The Tempest’s Trinculo quipped, even a dead Indian attracted an audience in England.

   Visiting Americans were major phenomena for more than their wondrous appearance. The painted “savages” en route to Whitehall or St. James’s Palace who dazzled London crowds proved powerful negotiators inside those stately buildings with Britain’s commissioners of trade, privy councilors, and monarchs. Indians from North, Central, and South America helped the British Empire gain footholds and expand its influence in the western hemisphere, and, later on, often argued persuasively with Britain’s imperial government. In their meetings abroad, American natives had much to offer. Disgruntled Indian delegates might swing their tribes to war rather than peace, to alliances with France or Spain rather than England, to Roman Catholicism rather than Protestantism, to commercial policies that favored Canada or New Spain rather than British America. Imperial leaders from Sir Walter Ralegh’s day to Lord George Germain’s knew that Britain’s Indian guests deserved careful, respectful attention. That was also true of the Indians who came to plead for justice from colonial governments or to raise funds for charitable causes. By the mid-eighteenth century, even the few Americans on commercial display enjoyed the British government’s concern and protection.

   With striking exceptions. During the third quarter of the seventeenth century and probably far longer (the evidence is murky), at least twenty-five Indians – and surely many others on whom no evidence survives – suffered long-term, if not lifelong, bondage. These victims of the transatlantic trade in human bodies, known principally by advertisements for the desperate handful who fled their English masters, comprised the largest, though least recorded, category of overseas Americans.

   The lives of American voyagers who sooner or later returned home were often significantly changed. Many gained great prestige within their communities for the new knowledge they shared, the valuable gifts and artifacts they distributed; most returnees earned admiration for completing a dangerous journey and meeting an English monarch or other dignitaries in the increasingly interconnected Atlantic World. In many cases, an Indian voyager, flattered by the attention and encouraged by promises he had received abroad, thereafter cooperated enthusiastically with imperial officials and colonial neighbors. By contrast, some resentful travelers, having been brazenly kidnapped or deviously recruited, deplored their time in Britain and henceforth resisted its territorial and cultural expansion in America. But however an individual native responded to Britain during the long era of mutual discovery between America and Europe, the transatlantic journey for an Indian or Inuit – as for British men and women who traveled in the opposite direction – was a memorable, even transformative, experience.

Americans in Britain between 1500 and 1776 were remarkably diverse. Their homelands stretched from Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to Brazil; their ages varied from infant to nonagenarian; their sociopolitical statuses ranged from bond servant to “emperor”; their occupations from warrior to missionary. American visitors’ stays in Britain lasted from a day or two, ending in death, to at least fourteen years and a trip home, though other Indians and Inuits, unrecorded, may have endured Britain for several decades and died there in old age. And while most Americans who survived their British sojourns returned to their native lands, a few headed elsewhere – to Bermuda, for example, or Bohemia. Also diverse were the visitors’ encounters with people and places in Britain. They met paupers as well as royals, saw Bedlam as well as St. James’s Palace, attended cockfights as well as operas. Most American travelers resided in London and its vicinity, but some spent much or all of their time in Plymouth, Bristol, Bideford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, or other communities outside the metropolis. A few traveled widely in the British Isles.

   American Indians and Inuits who returned from Britain differed also in what they carried home. They gleaned a wide range of information – practical, disturbing, puzzling, or amusing – to share with their families and friends. Many learned the English language, with varying degrees of fluency. In the eighteenth century, diplomatic delegations returned with cargoes of gifts – tools, musical instruments, weapons, religious tracts – to savor and distribute as vital ingredients in British efforts to woo Indian allies. The travelers also brought disparate feelings about Britain, often overlapping and sometimes contradictory: awe at its lethal military devices and mammoth (by American standards) buildings; scorn at its polarized economy and gluttonous lifestyles; puzzlement at its flamboyant royalty and pretentious officials. A few returnees valued the experience enough to risk the ocean’s perils and Europe’s diseases a second time. At least four Indians made two or more round trips.

   The stereotypical judgment has been that Indians in Britain, with few exceptions, were shamelessly exploited – kidnapped, shown as freaks, and struck down by foreign diseases – with no lasting benefit to human society on either side of the Atlantic. (Because the Indian bondservants have just come to light, they played no part in earlier generalizations.) Like most stereotypes, those about Americans abroad have a shred of truth. Some natives, especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were brazenly stolen; some, throughout the colonial era, were put on commercial display; some died in Britain of Old World maladies. But they were unusual. Most Americans who crossed the Atlantic went voluntarily, conducted serious business abroad, survived the exposure to deadly viruses, and, safely home, influenced their own people and often the course of Indian–European relations in their region of North, Central, or South America, thereby contributing from the western side of the ocean to an increasingly international/multicultural Atlantic World.

Modern attention to American natives in early Britain has been sparse and, with a few notable exceptions, misleading. On a fictional but regrettably persuasive level, Walt Disney Studios presented legions of children (and many adults?) with utter nonsense about Pocahontas, including her implied survival of a visit to England. By contrast, numerous historians and cultural anthropologists in recent decades have told Pocahontas’s story accurately and insightfully, although diversely.¹ But however related, her trip to Britain, and perhaps the Pilgrims’ helpmate Squanto’s, are the only ones widely known to the general public. Even students of early American history are likely to recall only a few of the American natives who encountered British people and culture on the eastern side of the Atlantic. And recent studies of American natives who traveled abroad usually treat overseas sojourns as isolated episodes, unassociated with earlier or later, or even contemporaneous, American expeditions. Cases in point are the young Croatan man, Manteo, who twice sailed to England in the 1580s; the three Mohawks and a Mahican, dubbed “Four Indian Kings,” who visited Queen Anne in 1710; the eight Creek men and one woman, led by the ancient Tomochichi, who attended King George Ⅱ in 1734; and chief Joseph Brant and a Mohawk companion, who impressed King George Ⅲ in 1775–1776. Each of these individuals or groups has been carefully and thoughtfully assessed with little reference to the broader historical context of American natives in Britain.²

   A few authors have cast wider nets. In the early twentieth century, the prolific British biographer Sidney Lee’s sprightly account of American Indians in Elizabethan England uncovered many visitors from North and South America in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Because Lee’s essay appeared in a magazine for general readers, he cited no sources and, probably because he wrote before the outpouring of twentieth-century editions of Renaissance texts, he overlooked many of the Americans in Tudor and early Stuart England.³ Recently, two overviews of Indians in England and elsewhere in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe have helped to fill the gaps in Lee’s narrative. Yet even these meticulous essays miss many of the era’s transatlantic voyagers, and, with their chronological coverage confined to the early centuries, omit the many Indian and Inuit travelers after c. 1650.⁴

   One historian in the mid-twentieth century attempted a comprehensive narrative of American Indians who crossed the Atlantic – to Britain, continental Europe, or elsewhere – between Columbus’s return from “India” in 1493 and the beginning of her research in 1938. Carolyn Thomas Foreman’s Indians Abroad (1943) is generally sound on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where her scholarly interests lay. Its treatment of the period before 1776 (most of her chapters 1– 9), however, is incomplete and largely undocumented; the facts and quotations are often inaccurate; the generalizations are infrequent and unhelpful.⁵ Indians Abroad has nonetheless served several generations of scholars and general readers as the only comprehensive work. Because Foreman uncovered dozens of previously unknown or little-known cases of Indians abroad, her book – warts and all – remains the primary guide to a neglected subject.

   One purpose of Transatlantic Encounters is to supplant the portions of Foreman’s book that address Americans in Britain before 1776 and to move beyond them in thoroughness, accuracy, and analysis. Other scholars – American, Spanish, Dutch, Canadian – have already addressed, explicitly or implicitly, portions of Foreman’s book that treat destinations abroad other than Britain, especially continental Europe, and eras other than the colonial.⁶ Many gaps remain to be filled, but a comprehensive picture is gradually emerging of the post-1492 eastward migration that differed, in numerous respects, from its better-known westward counterparts. Transatlantic Encounters tries to rectify the record for the American natives who spent portions of their lives in the British Isles during the eras of exploration and colonization.

   The more basic purpose of Transatlantic Encounters is to put a human face on the Americans’ experiences before and after, but especially during, their overseas ventures. My previous work on Indian–English encounters in British North America examined Anglo-American perceptions of American natives and the colonial policies those perceptions provoked. Although Pocahontas, Squanto, and many other Americans appear in those writings, it is almost exclusively for their roles in the perceptions and policies I sought to explain. In the present book, every American traveler to Britain – some eminent in their day, others barely identifiable in the existing records – are the central characters. Although the following narrative tries to position the Indian and Inuit travelers in their specific historical contexts during the long span between 1500 and 1776, the main focus is on the men, women, and children who braved the ocean’s perils (freely or coerced) to confront a strange place and unfamiliar people and, if the fates allowed, to regale their compatriots with the wonders and woes they had witnessed abroad. Transatlantic Encounters also seeks to dispel some persistent myths and stereotypes about America’s surprisingly numerous eastward voyagers, to reveal the diversity of their overseas experiences, and to rescue them from undeserved obscurity.⁷

The evidence from which this book reconstructs the diverse experiences of Indians and Inuits in Britain between c. 1500 and 1776 ranges from moderately complete to barely existent. Ideally, we would learn from the travelers’ own words – recorded by their hands or inscribed by reliable listeners – of their backgrounds in America, their reasons for going abroad (if they went voluntarily), their experiences at sea and especially in Britain, their receptions back home, and their subsequent reflections on a foreign place and culture. No such writings exist – no autobiographical narratives comparable with the hundreds by European captives among American natives or North Africans, for example, or accounts by European travelers to foreign lands that enrich Richard Hakluyt’s and Samuel Purchas’s mammoth anthologies.⁸ Because very few of the Indian and Inuit voyagers to Britain wrote any language, firsthand accounts by American natives are extremely rare (the only major exception, the writings of Samson Occom, enrich Chapter 10), and transcribed utterances or memoirs are few and fragmentary. Most Indian expeditions to the British Isles must be reconstructed from the evidence in English and other European writings, which vary widely in thoroughness, reliability, and objectivity.

   The principal sources for the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries are the narratives of Englishmen who accompanied one or more Indians across the Atlantic or who met them in America or Britain. Many of those accounts were first published by Hakluyt in the late sixteenth century or by Purchas in the early seventeenth; other English narratives appeared separately in England or continental Europe. In such writings, Indian and Inuit voyagers are often mentioned anonymously and always tangentially; American travelers to Tudor or early Stuart Britain were never the narrator’s principal focus. Further scraps of evidence on Americans abroad appear in British and continental diaries, correspondence, government files, church and corporation records, and, toward the end of the century, in a few weekly and semiweekly news sheets.

   Much more is known about American travelers in the last century of the colonial era. With the rapid expansion of British schooling, literacy, and printing, written records became more prevalent and better preserved. The rapidly proliferating daily newspapers, with their frequent attention to the arrival, departure, and entertainment of exotic foreigners, are especially important in documenting the overseas presence of American natives. Although early English newspapers must be used with caution, they put flesh on the official records’ bare bones accounts of visiting Americans. Newspapers, especially London’s, often summarized their backgrounds and cultures; announced or predicted their attendance at plays, musicals, puppet shows, and bear baitings; hailed their meetings with kings, queens, nobles, churchmen, and statesmen; related their excursions to castles, cathedrals, public gardens, hospitals, and prisons; described their costumes, facial paint, ornaments, and symbols of rank; imagined (occasionally) their romances with English maidens; and documented their departures for America or burials in England.

   Neither the travel narratives and ancillary documents of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries nor the institutional records and newspapers thereafter provide much insight into the Americans’ minds – their thoughts about places they saw, events they witnessed, or people they met. Two journals – one by an Anglo-American military officer, the other by a former English officer – are partial exceptions: Each attempts to explain how the Americans they guided in England reacted to various new sights and circumstances.⁹ But as with so much of the immense and profoundly important story of Anglo-Indian relations, most of the evidence on encounters in Britain, even the two revealing journals, suffers from a Eurocentrism that obscures the Inuits’ and Indians’ interior lives and raises as many questions as it answers. Admittedly and regrettably, Transatlantic Encounters reconstructs the dynamic encounters of Americans and Europeans primarily from the latter’s evidence. Similarly, without comprehensive reports by the repatriated travelers or their native contemporaries, we can never know the full extent of the insights the indigenous American societies gained from the travelers’ experiences, or precisely how the material acquisitions affected their lives, but clues in the surviving documents suggest that useful information and goods often passed in both directions. Cultural exchange was a two-way street.

   When I began to examine the Indians’ and Inuits’ transatlantic encounters, I intended to focus almost entirely on the well-documented episodes, bypassing the barely remembered journeys that had little apparent political, economic, or social impact on either side of the Atlantic. The evidence, however, changed my mind. Time and again, the experiences of less-prominent voyagers undermined my assumptions and generalizations and eventually persuaded me to make the narrative as comprehensive as possible.

   Three examples should suffice. Only one American woman (an Inuit captive in 1577) is known to have crossed the Atlantic before 1616, when a few Powhatan women and girls attended Pocahontas. Only one woman accompanied the major diplomatic delegates of the eighteenth century. Transatlantic travel for American natives was, apparently, an almost exclusively male activity. The relatively unknown visitors in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, include numerous female participants, even a contingent in the 1770s with a female majority. I also initially assumed, because it was true of the major delegations, that the mortality rate among American natives in Britain in the eighteenth century was far lower than in the previous centuries. Again, the less-prominent travelers disprove the generalization: A disproportionate number of deaths among unheralded Indian and Inuit visitors in the 1730s, 1760s, and 1770s raise significantly the mortality totals for the century and thus alter comparisons over time of the dangers faced by Americans in the British Isles. Finally, to overlook the bond servants in the last quarter of the seventeenth century only because the information is deplorably incomplete would seriously underplay the grim realities of the American experience abroad. Transatlantic Encounters accordingly addresses the small contingents and the large, the nameless travelers and the famous, the trips that are known from a clue or two and those that can be charted extensively from start to finish. (Surely some Americans in Britain before 1776 eluded my search; I welcome additional information.)

   Much of the research on lesser-known American travelers to Britain is necessarily of the needles-in-the-haystack variety: a rummaging for clues in disparate places, some likely and fruitful, some tangential and ultimately disappointing. Complicating the task is the anonymity of many American travelers, identified in the records only as “an Indian,” for example, or “three Mohawks,” or “some inhabitants” of a particular region. Where European records do mention an American native by name, it is sometimes a transliteration of a native appellation, sometimes an English nickname, occasionally both. Questions abound. Were any of the unnamed South American Indians who went to London with Ralegh in 1595 the “William,” “John,” and “Harry” known to have lived for a time in England and who greeted English expeditions to Guiana in the early seventeenth century, or were they additional eastward travelers? Was “A Virginian [Indian], called Abraham,” buried in London in the summer of 1616, one of the several anonymous Powhatans who arrived with Pocahontas that spring? Or was he “Nanawack,” known to have been in England at about that time but perhaps renamed after his conversion to Christianity? Or did Abraham arrive in an unrecorded earlier voyage and have no connection to the Pocahontas expedition or to Nanawack? As late as the 1770s, London newspapers sometimes reported the arrival of Indians without mentioning their names or ages, or even their tribal affiliations. Because the identities of these and many other American visitors cannot be precisely determined, the total number who crossed the Atlantic before 1776 is likely to increase as further research uncovers additional voyagers but subject also to occasional subtractions as references to apparently separate individuals prove ultimately to have concerned a single person.

   Despite such shortcomings in the historical record, enough reliable evidence survives to reconstruct fairly thoroughly the experiences of many Indians and Inuits who traveled to England in the colonial era. Pocahontas is the most obvious example. Many events in her life from 1607 to 1617, including her fateful visit to England, are reported in the writings of numerous contemporaries and in the Virginia Company of London’s extensive records. Information is also reasonably abundant, but always with lacunae, on other Indians and Inuits. The captivity in 1577 and untimely death in Bristol of Kalicho, an eastern Canadian Inuit, is poignantly recorded in several documents, including a physician’s loquacious autopsy report. The well-traveled Patuxet Squanto, who befriended the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, is mentioned by many colonists and English promoters. The Mohegan preacher Samson Occom’s career after age sixteen is more thoroughly documented, in his own words and other people’s, than any other American native’s. Thayendanegea, alias Joseph Brant, appears in many letters and official documents on both sides of the Atlantic, including some of his own writings and a newspaper interview by the soon-to-be famous biographer James Boswell. At the opposite end of the information spectrum are Americans in Britain whose sole trace is a nameless entry in a parish burial register or fleeting mention in a London newspaper.

   Lamentations over the paucity of information on Indian and Inuit visitors to Britain in the era of discovery and colonization should be tempered by the knowledge that, on average, perhaps more is known about the approximately 175 recorded Indians and Inuits who went to Britain than about many thousands of Europeans and Africans who went in the opposite direction. In both the eastward and westward human flows across the Atlantic, the lives of some individuals are quite thoroughly documented, while the majority in that era of predominantly oral communication remain almost wholly obscure. The challenge is to use constructively and gratefully the evidence that somehow survives to inform us about long-ago lives. Transatlantic Encounters reconstructs the varied and often influential experiences of one very special category of early American cultural mediators.

Editorial Note

Quotations from primary sources are taken from the earliest reliable version, except when modern editions faithfully adhere to the originals and contain important additional information. I have altered the orthography of the sources in only a few customary ways: The Anglo-Saxon thorn (“y”) becomes “th”; “u” and “v,” “i” and “j” are converted to modern usage; unfamiliar abbreviations are expanded. My editorial insertions are enclosed in brackets; omissions from the original are indicated by ellipses. Dates are retained as they appear in the sources, except that the year is adjusted to begin on January 1 rather than March 25 for dates in the Julian (Old Style) calendar, which prevailed in the British Empire until September 1752.

Acknowledgments

Transatlantic Encounters originated in 1998 when Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman invited me to contribute to their anthology on Shakespeare’s Tempest. One of their desired topics caught my fancy: “Trinculo’s Indian” – the American natives in early seventeenth-century England who might have influenced Shakespeare’s formulation of Caliban and almost certainly prompted Trinculo’s famous quip about him: “Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver....When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (The Tempest, 2.2.27–32). That brief allusion to an American corpse raised tantalizing questions about early seventeenth-century England: How likely was Shakespeare to have enountered Indians? Were indigenous Americans, dead or alive, displayed for a fee? How did Shakespeare’s contemporaries perceive and treat overseas Americans? Why were they there?

   The brief essay I submitted to “The Tempest” and Its Travels sparked my curiosity about eastward-traveling Americans throughout the colonial era. My initial acknowledgment, accordingly, is to Peter and Bill for planting a seed and providing a preliminary forum.

   In telling the larger story, I have drawn on many scholars and many libraries. In the latter category, I am deeply indebted to the superb collections and talented, genial staffs of the Folger Shakespeare Library for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical and literary sources; the American Antiquarian Society for eighteenth-century American books and newspapers; the British Library for rare books and microfilmed British newspapers at St. Pancras and the annex at Colindale; and the Library of Congress for a great variety of sources – primary and secondary, in print and in microform. I am grateful to the libraries of Clark University for a host of favors, including interlibrary loans and reference materials.

   Several repositories and their staffs shared unique materials: the British National Archives, formerly the Public Records Office (Colonial Office manuscripts), the Cambridge University Library (Ferrar Papers), the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Samuel Vetch photostats), the Connecticut Historical Society (Samson Occom Papers), the Dartmouth College Library (Papers of Eleazar Wheelock), the Lambeth Palace Library (ecclesiastic manuscripts), the Massachusetts Archives (colonial court and executive manuscripts), and the Newberry Library (Edward Ayer manuscripts).

   Numerous friends and acquaintances contributed with heart-warming generosity to my search for evidence on American natives in Britain and my effort to tell their stories. Notably helpful were four historians with expertise on early Indian-English encounters: Barbara Graymont, who improved Chapters 7 and 11; W. Stitt Robinson, who gave wise counsel on Chapters 8 and 9; John T. Juricek, who constructively criticized Chapter 8; and Daniel R. Mandell, who provided bibliographic leads and photocopied documents to the betterment of several chapters. Cultural anthropologists Harald E. L. Prins and Bunny McBride alerted me to eastward travelers I would otherwise have missed.

   Without mentioning their specific contributions to the research or writing – they, I trust, will remember – I thank James Axtell, Virginia Bernhard, George and Margaret Billias, John Blydenburgh, Jackson Boswell, Lisa Brooks, Steven Bullock, Robert Dykstra, Christian Feest, Uwe Gertz, Christopher Grasso, Ann Gross, Mary Hartman, John Jewitt, Lisa Kasmer, Willem Klooster, Karen Kupperman, Chris Kyle, Alastair Laing, Irvin Matus, Steven May, John Montiero, Michael Oberg, Paul Otto, Mark Peterson, Richard Proudfoot, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, David Ransome, Daniel Richter, David Sacks, June Schlueter, Nancy Shoemaker, Jerry Sokol, Ann and John Thompson, Laurel Ulrich, Irene Walch, and the late Archie Hallett and Gunther Michelson. For help in obtaining illustrations and permissions, I am grateful to many institutions in the United States and abroad, as indicated in the credit lines. Anne Gibson prepared the map with precision and patience.

   As the book evolved, I delivered several tentative excerpts. For the stimulating audiences they organized, I thank director William Fowler of the Massachusetts Historical Society (2000), the program committee for the Glasgow meeting of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (2001), director Daniel Richter of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2004), director Thomas Doughton of the Vision Quest Lecture Series at the College of the Holy Cross (2004), professor Yanek Mieczkowski of the History Department at Dowling College (2004), and professor Thomas Kuehne of the Modern History Colloquium at Clark University (2005). The sponsors and participants at each of these venues, in ways they may not suspect, enhanced my project.

   Forerunners of the book appeared in print as “Trinculo’s Indian: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England,” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 49–59; “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters, 1584–1618,” in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 59 (2002), 341–76; and “Powhatans Abroad: Virginia Indians in England,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: Copyright © The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 49–67. Substantive points and a few verbatim passages from those essays are scattered through Chapters 1 to 5 and are reprinted here by permission of Reaktion Books, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the University of Pennsylvania Press, respectively. I am grateful to the editors and external referees of those essays and, especially, the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press.

   Three extremely generous souls read the entire manuscript. Lois Brynes, an ideal “general reader,” applied her keen eye and lively mind to a late version; her numerous suggestions appear in ways that only she and I can recognize. Jerri Pries read the penultimate draft rapidly and perceptively. Virginia Vaughan assessed the manuscript at several stages, served frequently as an overqualified but unpaid research assistant, and responded constructively to my musings on almost every part of the enterprise, while pursuing brilliantly her own scholarly projects. Equally essential, she and our canine “kids” kept the home front cheerful and creative during the book’s long gestation. My appreciation is boundless.

Alden T. Vaughan
Worcester, Massachusetts
February 2006