When three English ships sailed into the Chesapeake Bay in late April 1607, they did so amid a soundscape of groaning masts and spars, crew members heaving on the capstan and furling the sails, and the strains of song and instrumental music. This simple claim reminds us that music provided one of the most significant yet underreported dimensions among the first encounters between indigenous and invading cultures as the English established a permanent presence on the western shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. The 2010 commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Hampton, Virginia, the oldest continuous English-speaking settlement in North America, was also the 400th anniversary of the dispossession of the Kikotan people, routed in a military attack enabled by a musical ruse.

What might seem like a novel stratagem for battle was actually not unusual. Historical texts reveal that music was a vital military tool on both sides of the Atlantic, and much more: a key element of ritual; an indispensable aid to labor; a method for building and maintaining morale; and above all, an integral part of communication. The most elemental of instruments—the human body—was the most common. People clapped their hands, stamped their feet, or, especially, raised their voices. During the early-modern period in virtually all cultures around the globe, wherever instrumentation was wanted or needed, a striking variety was available, to serve a surprising number of functions and employ virtually everyone in a troop, crew, or community in some sort of music production. In a world where not everyone could read or even speak a common language, everyone could make music, and did.

It is one thing to recognize this musical world, another to explore it. Early-modern methods of recording sound—text, musical notation, and oral traditions—leave a compromised record that can only be accessed intellectually and theoretically, rather than experienced sensually through ears and eyes. Orality poses problems of its own. Even the most sophisticated mnemonic devices can be suspect, in terms of whether they tell the history of the people involved in the story, or in its re-telling. Further complicating the evidentiary problem for these earliest Anglo-Atlantic musical histories is that the surviving record was written largely by only one party involved in this cultural contact—the English. Even the historical evidence that does exist presents a great challenge to musical inquiry, perhaps because so little was said about music in primary documents of the period, leading relatively few historians to write about it as more than a garnish to the main courses of historical inquiry.

Yet even this limited historical record suggests a shared understanding and utility of music across cultures. The sources—primarily travel narratives written by English explorers—frequently reference the music, song, dance, and instrumentation used by English and Natives alike, offering tantalizing hints about the music’s reception by both parties. One of the richest sources documenting such encounters involving the English prior to 1600 isPrincipall Navigations, English cleric and geographer Richard Hakluyt’s masterwork, published in editions in 1589 and 1599-1600. The editions fulfilled what historian Peter Mancall called the author’s “promise” to promote English settlement around the world, a commitment that drove Hakluyt’s collection and publication of widely read travel narratives. No less a commentator than author and courtier Sir Philip Sidney (to whom Hakluyt dedicated his 1582 Divers Voyages) once employed a musical metaphor to praise his work: “Mr. Hakluyt hath served for a very good trumpet.” Hakluyt’s personal investment in English exploration culminated in his participation in the formation of the Virginia Company, promoter of the expedition that, in 1607, led to the first recorded Anglo-Kikotan contact.

Principall Navigations became a “bible” for transatlantic voyagers of the seventeenth century, chronicling English expeditions allegedly reaching back to the dawn of time, undertaken to every corner of the known world. Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and John Davis all reported on the usefulness of music as they sought to stake a claim for England in the Western Hemisphere. Hakluyt’s accounts gave copious evidence of music as a means of communication, a tool of warfare, an aid to commerce, a religious practice, a form of entertainment, and a means of building community between Europeans and Natives alike. Elements included trumpets, drums, timbrels, barrel organs, and much singing and dancing. Morris dancing, a common English village dance practice, was specifically mentioned in the provisioning of Gilbert’s 1583 final voyage, to the North American Atlantic coast, as an activity to be executed “for solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages.” Central among the instruments used on such expeditions were trumpets, useful whether to announce the beginning of a conquest—as when Gilbert sounded a trumpet to formalize English “regency” over Newfoundland—or the end, as in the case of the Roanoke colony, when, in 1589, John White returned looking for his family and friends: “we sounded a Trumpet, but no answer could we heare.”

Hakluyt even reported an example of musical subterfuge that took place during Frobisher’s first voyage, undertaken in 1576 to search for a Northwest Passage. Frobisher’s scribe, George Best, told how his captain wanted to capture a Native person to take home as a “token,” and “knowing wel how they greatly delighted in our toyes, and specially in belles, he rang a prety lowbell” to lure a potential captive to the side of the ship. Several attempts were unsuccessful until, “to make them more greedy of the matter he rang a louder bell.” The bait worked, and the captive would eventually pay for it with his life, reaching England but dying “of cold which he had taken at sea.”

That Davis considered music to be essential to his mission is clear; he allotted four of twenty-three berths on his flagship to musicians. Even John Smith of Jamestown, who rarely mentioned the ways music would have been used in the Virginia colony and did not include a single musical instrument on his list of things to take to the Americas, nevertheless documented the presence of at least one working musician: among the handful of men in the 1607 crew identified as having a specific skill is “Nic. Scot, drum.” This is not to say that Smith never mentioned music—on the contrary, several of his books demonstrated its importance to a variety of functions, particularly military uses. Smith’s True Travels, Adventures, and Observations included his description of a European coupling of the musical and martial at the battle of Rottenton, begun “with a generall shout, all their Ensignes displaying, Drummes beating, Trumpets and Howboyes [oboes] sounding.” Similarly, in A Sea Grammar, Smith described how the pursuit of an enemy ship would begin by hailing it “with a noise of trumpets,” and conclude with the “sound[ing of] Drums and Trumpets,” after which, the officers would “board [the] other ship … with the Trumpets sounding.”

Nor was all shipboard music instrumental. Smith described in the Grammar how the “Gang of men” who rowed the smaller boats would “saies Amends, one and all, Vea, vea, vea, vea, vea, that is, they pull all strongly together,” a style suggesting the familiar work song of the sea, the shanty. The Grammar also contained another example of vocal music, in which crew members would begin and end the evening watch with a psalm and a prayer.

Though Smith mentioned the presence of drums and drumming, only the trumpeting that figured so centrally in Hakluyt’s accounts also appeared in Smith’s texts with a formal role for its practitioners among a ship’s “Company,” or crew. An earlier version of the Grammar entitled An Accidence for the Sea indicated that the trumpeter was compensated at the same rate as the boatswain, marshalls, and quartermasters, and at a higher rate than the corporal, “chyrurgion” (surgeon), steward, cook, coxswain, the sailors, and the “boys.” The Grammar indicated roles for both a “Trumpeter” and a “Trump. Mate,” with the former valued at the same rate as the surgeon, gunner, boatswain, and carpenter. Smith provided this description of duties and compensation:

The Trumpeter is alwayes to attend the Captaines command, and to sound either at his going a shore, or comming aboord, at the entertainment of strangers, also when you hale a ship, when you charge, boord, or enter; and the poope is his place to stand or sit upon, if there bee a noise, they are to attend him, if there be not, every one hee doth teach to beare a part, the Captaine is to incourage him, by increasing his shares, or pay, and give the master Trumpeter a reward.

Folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has argued that English parading traditions such as those described here originally grew from medieval practices “to display and enhance the power of the nobility or the monarchy.” Abrahams cited an early example of this at Plymouth Plantation in which Miles Standish “would not leave the encampment without arraying in parade his six or seven soldiers led by a drummer and a horn-blower.” An earlier, similar example can be found in Virginia, according to an account in True Relations. During a meeting between John Smith and Wahunsonacock, the powerful chief most often referred to by Natives and English alike as “Powhatan,” trumpeting preceded the arrival of Captain Christopher Newport, producing a sound that Philip Barbour observed, in his edition of Smith’s Complete Works, would have been “surely more strident than any sound the most stout-lunged Indian warrior could make.” (Smith also identified “Powhatan” as the name of a river, a nation, a country, and at one point, a “place” with forty fighting men.) Beyond a question of volume, though, Newport’s procession would have been intended as an impressive display of personal or monarchal power, or both.

In contrast to his other books (or, for that matter, the relatively rich record of significant musical functionality aboard early-modern Atlantic expeditions reported by Hakluyt), Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, first published in 1624 and often relying on earlier accounts by others, revealed very little about the English use of music in the early days of encounter in the Chesapeake. But the Historie did contribute significantly to the otherwise elusive musical history of the Powhatan peoples, a deficit due to what some ethnomusicologists have referred to as a “shattering” of musical traditions among southeastern Native tribes following the first decades of contact with Europeans. In the same way he documented the names of rivers, tribes, flora, and fauna, Smith (or his scribe) faithfully recorded evidence of Native music used for communication, rituals, entertainment, warfare, and work. Just as the European musical salvos reported by Smith were designed to impress their auditors, so did Native music produce an impressive, even “fearful” sound—the “terrible howling” also remarked upon by William Strachey. Still, the Historie demonstrated an explicit understanding of the ability and intent of certain types of this “savage” music to “delight” rather than “affright” the listener.

The Historie used European terms to describe Native instrumentation. The description of an aerophone made of “a thicke Cane, on which they pipe as on a Recorder” suggests both visual and tonal similarities between the English and Native instruments named. In the case of “their chiefe instruments … Rattles made of small gourds, or Pumpeons shels,” the author assigned the voice-parts of “Base, Tenor, Countertenor, Meane, and Treble,” terminology reflecting a European understanding of the tones the rattles produced—low to high, respectively, with larger gourds producing deeper tones. This attempt to make sense of a musical relationship across cultures by imposing a European framework would have made the objects more familiar (and perhaps less “savage”) to the author and his readers alike, part of what Karen Ordahl Kupperman has described as a tendency on the part of both sides to see the other culture “in terms of traditional categories …. to fit these other people and their trappings into their own sense of the normal.”

Reading the narratives with new ears, then, shows the development of a musical dialogue evolving right from the moment that English ships arrived at the mouth of the river that Natives called “Powhatan,” and which we know today by the name imposed by the English to the river and their settlement alike: James. Three very different periods of musical encounter mirror the moments in which they took place: introduction, cooperation, and destruction.

In April 1607, as the English ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery prepared to enter the Powhatan River, they encountered a smaller river flowing north that shared a name with its inhabitants, the Kikotans. It was “a convenient harbour for Fisher boats … that so turneth it selfe into Bayes and Creekes, it makes that place very pleasant to inhabit.” The Kikotans themselves were relative newcomers, having been sent by Powhatan to remove another Native group some fifteen years earlier. A decades-long continental demographic crisis followed the arrival of Europeans, and David S. Jones has argued this may have been due to multiple factors, including disease but also “poverty, social stress, and environmental vulnerability.” For the survivors, this was a time of consolidation and intense intertribal conflict, and Kupperman has suggested the English contingent’s potential as allies in these struggles may have been the reason Powhatan allowed the English to survive during those first fragile years of settlement.

Smith did not record how the English might have introduced themselves musically to the Kikotans, though his examples in True Travels, the Grammar, and the Accidence suggest that trumpets and drums might well have announced their arrival. But the journal of George Percy provided a much clearer picture of how the Kikotans introduced themselves.

As the youngest son of the ninth earl of Northumberland, Percy had the highest social status among the English, though as a lieutenant he was subordinate in military rank to Smith. According to Percy, the Kikotans performed music as part of a spiritual ceremony characterized by “a doleful noise,” and in rituals of hospitality inviting the English to share a meal with their hosts, amid “singing … dancing … shouting, howling, and stamping against the ground, with many antic tricks and faces.” In deconstructing English assumptions that such music was “savage,” one can perceive a musical aesthetic that was rhythmic, energetic, and participatory—characteristics also found in European music. This first encounter created for the participants an aural record of each other’s cultures and would have affected their evolving cross-cultural sensory understanding as music continued to play a role in subsequent encounters.

Given the nearness of the Kikotan village to Jamestown and its strategic location at the first inland river off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps Smith was relieved to estimate that “besides their women & children, [they] have not past 20. fighting men.” The musical component of any potential fighting became immediately apparent when, shortly after their initial encounter, Smith returned to Kikotan with a half-dozen crew in a small vessel called a “shallop” to trade for food, only to be greeted by “scorn” and “derision.” Smith responded with gunfire. Hostilities quickly escalated, as “Sixtie or seaventie” painted “Salvages” emerged from beyond the tree line, charging while “singing and dauncing out of the woods.” Smith’s men answered by shooting the Kikotans’ religious idol, then suing for terms. The result: more singing and dancing, but this time “in signe of friendship,” as the two sides traded “Beads, Copper, and Hatchets” for “Venison, Turkies, wild foule, [and] bread.”

Several times in 1608, the Kikotans provided refuge to the English during the latter group’s explorations of the Chesapeake, encouraged by a belief that Smith and his crew had been, or would be, “at warres” with the Kikotans’ enemies to the north, the Massawomeks. On one of these occasions, they sheltered an injured Smith after he had suffered what he supposed to have been a near-deadly encounter with a hog-nosed ray at a place still known as “Stingray Point”; another time, when the wind delayed the English for “two or three dayes … the King feasted us with much mirth.” But perhaps the most poignant encounter documented during this period of relative cooperation took place the week following Christmas 1608, when one of the punishing winter storms characteristic of the region forced Smith and a contingent of men and vessels to stop at Kikotan for about a week on their way to negotiate with, and obtain corn from, Powhatan at his capital of Werowocomoco. The following passage from the Historie documents what took place:

… the extreame winde, rayne, frost and snow caused us to keepe Christmas among the Salvages, where we were never more merry, nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England, then in the dry, smoaky houses of Kecoughtan

The word “merry” in the Historie is associated with leisure, money, marriage, pastime, sports, laughter, feasting, singing, and dancing—elements that were also central to Elizabethan village festive practices. François Laroque has argued that each religious celebration and season had a secular analogue; winter “revels” got an early start in November on Queen Elizabeth’s accession date, and peaked with the twelve days of Christmas, defined by its two “eves”—Christmas and New Year’s—and the Epiphany, known secularly as Twelfth Night. The fires of the Kikotan houses would have been reminiscent of solstice imagery of light amid nocturnality, and the smokiness calls to mind the centerpiece of any English Christmas celebration: the Yule log. The pagan origins of “Yule” notwithstanding, the English at Kikotan would have aware of the season’s Christian practices, including the feeding of the poor mimicked in the exchange by Mummers of song for coin and wassail, as they themselves sought succor in their time of need.

That Smith found it necessary to venture out at a time when weather and custom would have dictated otherwise showed the seriousness of their situation, and especially after having been warned by the chief of the Warraskoyack that Powhatan “hath sent for you onely to cut your throats.” But natural disasters and holidays both have a way of calling political time-outs—and, in this case, the storm and unscheduled layover could have had the effect of restoring the English to a more “holiday” attitude. A merry Christmas, as celebrated in England, would have been a time of rest, when work would have been considered a bad thing. As Laroque noted, during the Christmas season “time was not conceived as a regular continuum,” and the presence of a Lord of Misrule would have encouraged the flaunting of convention. At Kikotan, the English would have received a musical welcome as part of their hosts’ own traditions of greeting, parting, worship, mealtime, and entertainment, and on New Year’s Day—which the English spent at Kikotan—it would have been customary for presents to have been exchanged. None of this is documented in the narratives left by the participants, but an examination of contemporary English festive practices might help explain what Smith meant when he used the word “merry.”

Though various English festivals may have belonged to distinct seasons, their elements of music, dance, and themes moved fluidly across the calendar. Robin Hood may have been most closely associated with the grotesque characters of the Morris dance, and the Morris itself might have been most often associated with spring festivities, or the Mummers’ plays with Christmas or Easter, but the same instrumentation and tropes animated all—so much so that secondary commentators over the last century have struggled to explain the overlap between various forms of dance, or even the exact boundaries of dates and practices.

Laroque also identified ambiguity in “meaning and functions,” for while “the essence of these festivals lay … in the music, the dancing, the movement and colour,” they also brought “foreboding” and “boos of derision,” making festivals “essentially … two-edged affairs.” This ambiguity could have religious dimensions—”Morice dauncers” with “devellishe inventions” on St. Bartholomew’s Day “shame[d] not in ye time of divine service, to come and daunce about the Church”—but also raised the specter of violence. Laroque specifically connected “the uproar of the Morris dance” to “the description of martial music,” as in the case of a 1598 Ascension Day celebration in Oxford with “drum and shot and other weapons.” Such accounts suggest a sense that “merriment” had an inherent potential to get out of hand and become “a vehicle of discord, exclusion and chaos,” whether in the thematic oppositionality of festive symbols—snowballs at Midsummer, roses at Christmas—or the characterization of Mummers as “troupes of decked-out musicians who would suddenly invade homes,” posing as much of a threat to public order as to piety. Yet, as Christopher Marsh has pointed out, drumming that was both “festive” and “combative” could also “conceal a warning within the sounds of celebration” when deployed by town officials, who frequently hired drummers or invested in drums themselves.

How would the musicality of this merriment have translated to Christmas in the Chesapeake? Historical Anthropologist Ian Woodfield’s findings, and Hakluyt’s travel narratives specifically, suggest that many types of musical instruments could have been present at Jamestown, whether or not specific documentary evidence for their presence survives. The work of multiple disciplines has sometimes helped to bridge these evidentiary gaps, such as when archaeologists found evidence of jew’s harps at sites around Jamestown that could be connected to numerous accounts of that instrument’s use in trade with Native peoples. Absent those connections, though, there are nevertheless three types of instruments (or four, if you include the human voice and body) documented as being used by the English at this time and place: the trumpet, the drum, and the combination of tabor pipe and drum.

In the overlapping world of English festivities, no instrument was more commonly mentioned than the original one-man-band, the tabor pipe and drum. This musical contrivance allowed a single musician to play a melody on a pipe designed to be played with one hand while keeping a beat on a drum with the other. Significantly, taboring labors under the same kind of ambiguity noted for secular festival practices. Woodfield found the instrument serving the Elizabethan Navy as one of its “instruments of warlicke designes” in the “usual military band,” and at least one example of the instrument’s presence in a military setting suggests a hierarchy of use in which the lowly tabor may have been regarded as inferior. As reported in Principall Navigations, Captain Luke Ward, vice admiral to General Edward Fenton in the latter’s 1582 unsuccessful attempt to find a Northwest Passage by way of China, carried “trumpets, drum and fife, and tabor and pipe” on his “skiffe,” while his superior, “the generall in his pinnesse,” had “his musicke, & trumpets.” This musical combination serenaded the representatives of the governor of St. Vincent down the river, punctuated by an even more intimidating aural expression: a “salute” in the form of “a volley of three great pieces out of ech ship.”

If there were such a hierarchy of instrumentation, it could have been purely functional; volume-wise, the tabor pipe would have been no match for the sonic capabilities of the trumpet noted by Barbour. The distinction could also be attributed to taboring’s humble pastoral associations. John Forrest has argued that its cousin, the Morris dance, passed only gradually from royal to rural use between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a trajectory the tabor pipe and drum traversed, too. But by the turn of the seventeenth century, the instrument’s association with rustic entertainments was reinforced by its use by professional comic actors—the “clowns” and “fools” of the early Shakespearean stage, including some of the most famous theatre celebrities of the day. The most visible examples, Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp, both famously performed the dances most closely connected to the instrument, the jig and the Morris. As noted in Shakespearean scholarship, later “fools” weren’t quite so “foolish,” and Kemp’s celebrated buffoonery may have led to both his departure from performance and partnership at the Globe Theatre as well as his subsequent (in)famous publicity stunt, a “Morrice daunce” to Norwich in 1600.

But a lower status for taboring would also be consistent with the often terrible reputation the instrument enjoyed. “Baudie Pipers and thundering Drummers” were likely “to strike up the devils daunce withall,” and even on an ordinary “Lord’s Day,” one pious commentator complained, one could neither “read a chapter,” nor “pray, or sing a psalm, or catechise, or instruct a servant, but with the noise of the pipe and tabor.” Nor was the mischief attributed to the tabor pipe and drum purely of an irreligious nature; in a double entendre seen in other commentary on musical instruments, William Fennor wrote in 1612 of a man being cuckolded by a “knave … playing frolickly upon his Tabor.”

According to many of its critics, the remedy for the evil of taboring could be found in religion. The master in Christopher Fetherston’s 1582 dialogue against dancing cautions his student “to reioyce, not in a bawdy pype or tabor, but in the Lorde.” Yet even this prescription is ambiguous, for “Tabor” was also the name of the mountain that Christianity holds to be the site of the transfiguration of Jesus. The punning connection of the holy mount to the wicked musical instrument was not lost on the early-modern audience; Henry Greenwood, writing in 1609, may have had the linkage in mind as he condemned “unrighteous” “hypocrites” who “praise the Lord in the Tabor, but not in the dance.” The author and composer John Marbeck in 1581, too, saw good in the instrument but evil in some of its users. Acknowledging that, while “The wicked runne after the Tabor and the Flute,”

… the Flute and the Tabor and such other like things are not to be condemned, simplie of their owne nature: but onelie in respect of mens abusing of them, for most commonlie they perverte the good use of them: For certainlie, the Tabor doth not sooner sound to make men merrie, but … men are so caried awaie, as they cannot sport themselves with moderate mirth, but they fling themselves into the aire, as though they would leape out of themselves. This then … [is] a cursed mirth … that God condemned.

Marbeck encouraged restraint in such pastimes, so that God in “the ende … maie blesse our mirth.”

With respect to the winter holidays, the pipe and tabor served as well at Christmas as it did on Whitsun or May Day. The specific connection of piping to the Christmas season is made in Richard Brathwaite’s 1631 satire on pipers in Whimzies:

An ill wind … begins to blow upon Christmasseeve, and so continues very lowd and blustring all the twelve dayes … then … vanisheth to the great peace of the whole family, the thirteenth day.

Though Brathwaite’s anecdote may have had some form of bagpipe in mind—his “Inventorie” of the dead piper includes “a decayed Pipe-bagge”—Laroque argues that “pipe” in this case could have referred to either form of pipe, and certainly his evidence suggests it is the taborpipe that is associated with much of the musical mayhem of the early-modern village festival. When combined with Morris dancing, Laroque found, taboring “justly deserve(d) to be called profane, riotous and disorderly”—or, worse, in the view of Puritan critic Philip Stubbes, “a form of pagan idolatry and a homage paid to Satan.”

All of these examples suggest that the musical accompaniment the English would have been able to provide during the “merry” Christmas spent at Kikotan would almost certainly have included the taboring and dancing so completely conjoined with the English village practice. If so, this would mean the Kikotans would have had ample opportunity over this period of winter sequestration to become familiar with the instrument in its most English, most intimate, most comical, and least threatening expression, without the layers of violent or warlike ambiguity attached to the instrument at home or in battle.

In the months that followed, the “merry” moment that had welcomed 1609 faded as the parties on either side of the cultural divide grew more aware of the unsuitability of the other as potential trading partners and military allies. This difficult year of intercultural tension, drought, and privation marked Smith’s departure from the colony and ushered in both the First Anglo-Powhatan War and the “Starving Time” that nearly ended the Jamestown project—though recent scholarship suggests political reasons why Percy’s and other accounts may have exaggerated some of the more dire claims, including cannibalism. In spring 1610, a new governor, Sir Thomas Gates, finally arrived in Virginia after having been shipwrecked the previous year at Somers Island (the present-day Bermuda) in a widely publicized story that may have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Gates packed up the survivors and headed back down the James with the intention of returning to England, only to be met by reinforcements led by Thomas West, Lord De La Warr. Fresh from the brutal English campaigns in Ireland, the new commander would soon set a more aggressive tone for encounters with Powhatan peoples. This growing tension provides the context for one final musical encounter between Kikotans and English, involving a military ruse, and a taborer.

By the summer of 1610, the Kikotans and English had had ample opportunity to familiarize themselves with each other’s musical presentation styles for greeting, and for war. There was room for misinterpretation, of course; one early example recounted in the Historiefrom Sir Richard Grenville’s 1585 Roanoke expedition involved “a song we thought for welcome” but which their Native ally Manteo told them meant “they came to fight.” But many more examples from encounter literature suggest that both sides knew exactly what to expect, musically, preceding a fight. The Historie’s description of Natives’ “manner of Battell” told how warriors would “[approach] in their orders … leaping and singing after their accustomed tune, which they onely use in Warres,” and how, at “the first flight of arrowes they gave such horrible shouts and screeches, as so many infernall hell-hounds could not have made them more terrible.” Smith gave no examples of the English use of music at the onset of any attack in Virginia before 1610, but given the paucity of English musical references in the Historie, this is perhaps not surprising. But elsewhere, his descriptions of the specific role of trumpeting and drumming before and after battle agree with an account that the Historie did report took place just two years later, in 1612, during an incident on the way to Pamunkey following the kidnapping of Pocahontas. Sir Thomas Dale’s forces offered a truce, but, “if they would fight with us, they should know when we would begin by our Drums and Trumpets.” The consistent English descriptions of trumpet-and-drum salvos at the beginning of battle suggest what Natives might have expected from a hostile force. What they might not have expected … was a taborer.

The ambiguity of taboring’s martial and merry utility, and,very likely, the experience of the “merry” Christmas at Kikotan, would have combined with the familiar use of music in the greeting practices of both cultures to create, on July 9, 1610, the deceptive conditions that Percy’s account made clear were the intent:

… S[i]r Tho[mas] Gates beinge desyreous for to be Revendged upon the Indyans att Kekowhatan did goe thither by water w[i]th a certeine number of men, and amongste the reste a Taborer w[i]th him. beinge Landed he cawsed the Taborer to play and dawnse thereby to allure the Indyans to come unto him the w[hi]ch prevayled. And then espyeinge a fitteinge oportunety fell in upon them ….

The attack resulted in the slaughter of several Natives and the removal of all Kikotan inhabitants of the lower Virginia peninsula, allowing the English to seize their lands and occupy their homes just in time to harvest the corn—the same homes where, less than eighteen months earlier, during Christmastide, their fellows had been given shelter from the storm, in surroundings the English had compared favorably to their own distant homes.

In an ironic postscript, Smith used a familiar contemporary analogy to the tabor to provide, in the Historie, his “opinion” on some of the skirmishes that followed a later massacre—the well-publicized 1622 “Virginia Massacre” of English by Natives that helped fuel the colony’s transition from private to royal governance. Smith advised the use of “patience and experience” in subduing the Native population, asking, “will any goe to catch a Hare with a Taber and a Pipe?” But in the case of the 1610 Kikotan massacre—a tale that Smith surely knew—that is exactly what the English did, and successfully, through subterfuge that benefited from the musical encounters of 1607-1610.

Those encounters were all but lost after the founding of Hampton, Virginia, much like the Native people who took part in them. The Kikotans who survived would assimilate into other Powhatan groups, the “small tribal islands in a sea of non-Indians” described by anthropologist Helen Rountree. A tiny fraction of their pre-contact extent, Powhatan peoples saw their culture eroded not only by time, but likely, too, by the viciousness of later ages culminating in the “Jim Crow” era, where the myth of “separate but equal” tended to further silence old practices in the face of race-based legal strictures that accompanied the designation “colored.”

Today the name Kikotan—spelled in the English way, “Kecoughtan”—is most familiar on Virginia’s lower peninsula as the name of a high school whose sports teams bear the sobriquet “Warriors;” the school is located near the headwaters of the river renamed “Hampton,” like the town, likely for Virginia Company patron Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. If you search for “Historic Kecoughtan” online, you find not the legacy of a Native people but a “17th Century Trading Plantation” that adopted the name of the land originally named for, and subsequently wrested from, the earlier inhabitants. The name Kecoughtan remains, too, on the easternmost section of an ancient road that today takes Route 60 from near where the Kikotan village once stood past the exclusive Wythe neighborhood toward the James River and the plantations that mark English expansion into Powhatan lands to the west and north. The site of the original village became a neglected corner of an otherwise thriving early American town, occupied by freed slaves after the Civil War before being incorporated within the grounds of Hampton University (formerly Hampton Institute), which itself was founded by another culture whose labor was appropriated—like the Kikotans’ land—to enrich the English-speaking colonial project and the nation it subsequently spawned.

The music that animated the Anglo-Kikotan moment can no longer be heard. Yet in reconstructing those first, brief musical encounters of 1607-1610 from shards of evidence mined from the documentary record, we add a dimension of aurality to our understanding of a very complex period of encounter, one founded on various hopes and misunderstandings, characterized briefly by possibly pragmatic yet undeniable generosity, and ultimately undone in violence and betrayal, where two cultures collided, musically, on the banks of the Kikotan.

Further reading

The 400th anniversary of Jamestown produced considerable scholarship; here are a few representative publications.

Primary works by John Smith, including A Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) and other texts referencing music, appear in Philip Barbour’s The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols. (Williamsburg, Va., 1986). George Percy’s account is included in its entirety in Mark Nicholls’s article, “George Percy’s ‘Trewe Relacyon:’ A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement,” in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 113:3 (2005): 212-275. Larger secondary collections of primary documents of the period include James P. P. Horn’s Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America (New York, 2007), and Edward Wright Haile’s Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony: The First Decade, 1607-1617 (Champlain, Va., 1998, 2000).

Secondary evaluations of the period include Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), which examines political stressors at the time of English arrival in the Chesapeake; her follow-up, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), puts the story in its broader early-modern and Atlantic contexts; and a forthcoming article, “The Language of Music in Early-modern Encounters,” explores the use of music as communication by many early-modern cultures that otherwise shared no language in common. Helen C. Rountree’s Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville, Va., 2006) provides a Native perspective and applies anthropological methods to early encounters in the Chesapeake region. David S. Jones’s examination of the demographic crisis in Native populations of the Western Hemisphere following the arrival of Europeans appears in “Virgin Soils Revisited,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 60:4 (October 2003). Rachel B. Herrmann’s reconsideration of the Jamestown “Starving Time” appears in “The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 68:1 (January 2011): 47-74. An introductory ethnomusicological overview of Native musical traditions is provided in Ellen Koskoff’s Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The United States and Canada (New York, 2001).

Beyond the Chesapeake, the period of English forays into the “ocean sea” is explored in Peter C. Mancall’s Hakluyt’s Promise: an Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, Conn., 2007). Great detail on the musical dimensions of the period is provided by Ian Woodfield’s English Musicians in the Age of Exploration: Sociology of Music No. 8 (New York, 1995). For musical festivities in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods , see François Laroque’sShakespeare’s festive world: Elizabethan seasonal entertainment and the professional stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1991). Christopher Marsh explores the duality of drumming in “‘The Pride of Noise:’ Drums and their Repercussions in Early Modern England,” in Early Music 39:2 (May 2011): 203-216. John Forrest assesses taboring and much more as part of The History of Morris Dancing, 1438-1750: Studies in Early English Drama (Toronto, 1999), and Max Thomas discusses Kemp, Morris dancing, and taboring in “Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market,” in PMLA 107:3 (May 1992): 511-523.

I would also encourage visiting the spaces on Virginia’s lower peninsula inhabited by Kikotans and English in the years 1607-1610, and the venues that preserve artifacts of the same. In addition to the familiar Jamestown Settlement and Historic Jamestowne at the southern terminus of Virginia’s Colonial Parkway, the Pamunkey Indian Tribe Museum, located on the Pamunkey Reservation created by treaty from ancestral lands in 1646, “teaches about the Pamunkey people and their way of life throughout history, from the ice age to the present.” The Hampton University Museum, on the grounds of Hampton University—site of the Kikotan village—maintains a permanent collection entitled, “Enduring Legacy: Native Peoples, Native Arts.” And the Hampton History Museum, located near the site of the original village, has a large collection of Kikotan and colonial English artifacts of the period.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges with deep gratitude the support of the late Dorothy Rouse-Bottom, who made possible the conference for which an earlier draft of this paper was produced, and without whose support the 400th anniversary of Hampton might have passed without a single official notice of the Kikotan massacre; also, the scholarship and inspiration of conference panel members Karen Ordahl Kupperman and Helen C. Rountree, who have offered many helpful comments to, and much encouragement during the writing of, several incarnations of this paper.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Jeanne Eller McDougall brings a life-long love of traditional song and music to her PhD candidacy in history at the University of Southern California, and is finishing a dissertation on political song in British colonial America, 1750-1776. She was a 2011-2012 USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Fellow, and a Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2011-2012.

In the 2013-2014 academic year, over 350 historians collaborated to produce The American Yawp, a free online, collaboratively built American history textbook. This project is the first attempt by academic historians to collaborate on such a massive scale and to use open annotation tools to enable widespread public feedback. Because many historians were involved in writing each chapter, The American Yawp draws more directly on more specialists’ expertise than a textbook written by four or five historians; at the same time, the uniquely collaborative review process challenged us to confront linguistic and historiographical questions as we wove specialists’ contributions into a new synthesis. Crafting material on pre-Columbian America for our first chapter, “The New World,” illuminated the contours of current scholarship and the challenges faced by instructors. Ultimately, the collaborative writing and review process pushed us to re-envision how we teach this topic and to create a textbook chapter that explicitly engages scholarly debates about pre-Columbian America.

I began teaching the early American history survey five years ago with a narrative that hinged heavily on political events. In pacing lectures, I used major political benchmarks to ensure “coverage.” As I gained experience and confidence, I began to subsume some of these benchmarks under discussions of more nuanced social, cultural, or economic trends that had blurrier boundaries but offered more vivid depictions of how life was actually lived. In a sense, this process mirrored macro trends in the historiography of American history. A consensus narrative was complicated by voices of dissent from those outside the halls of power; high political changes were given meaning by exploring their impact on the life of all economic strata; great men and great ideas received context in larger cultural movements; and now my students begin by questioning what the word “America” means, and we foreground transnational connections throughout the survey narrative.

The American Yawp similarly began with a framework of conventional chronological boundaries and broad topics assembled by my co-editor, Joseph Locke, and me. For example, our chapter entitled “Colonial Society,” centering on events occurring 1700-1763, began with the following short list:

Growth of American slavery
Consumer Revolution
Great Awakening
Immigration and urbanization
Marriage and family life
Seven Years War
Pontiac’s War

After producing this list, I searched for content experts who possessed the historiographical command and familiarity with evidence to ensure that our text both reflected current trends in scholarship and provided details and texture to make content come alive. I scoured recent editions of The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, and other academic periodicals looking for authors of excellent articles or even insightful book reviews. I then combed through lists of recent dissertations on the eighteenth century, conference programs, and the rosters of graduate programs with a traditional strength in the era.

The raw materials of these contributions had to be assembled, and often reshaped, to build a narratively coherent synthesis.  It is here that writing history becomes more art than science; the construction of synthesis is textbook writers’ and teachers’ most challenging task.

The result was a roster of fifteen contributors pledged to produce specialized contributions for the “Colonial Society” chapter. For example, Katherine Smoak and Mary Draper drew on their dissertation research to produce 500 words on eighteenth-century currency and connections between North America and the Caribbean, respectively. We want synthesis to bubble up from research, not descend from institutional gatekeepers, so we deferred to the expertise of our contributors, asking, “what do you believe undergraduates absolutely need to know about your topic?” We encouraged our contributors to offer the kind of research specificity that only they could offer, including colorful characters and illuminating anecdotes. These details often make the most memorable and enlightening material for students, and remind us of the importance of integrating research and teaching.

Creating New Narratives

The raw materials of these contributions had to be assembled, and often reshaped, to build a narratively coherent synthesis.  It is here that writing history becomes more art than science; the construction of synthesis is textbook writers’ and teachers’ most challenging task. Nora Slonimsky took on the challenge for our “Colonial Society” chapter, weaving the excerpts into a coherent narrative. Creating a synthetic narrative necessarily sacrificed some of the specificity of the original contributions, but all of our editors worked hard to mold the research-driven content into a form that would accurately reflect contemporary scholarship, yet be accessible to undergraduates.

This process repeated itself for all thirty of our chapters, and in fall of 2014, we quietly released a beta edition. The experience of constructing this beta edition, as well as the feedback we have received since its launch, yields several observations regarding the field of early American history. Perhaps our most stark realization is that an extremely small number of historians work on pre-Columbian Native America. After an initial recruitment effort turned up little interest, we attempted a wider solicitation through H-OIEAHC. Still, finding scholars of pre-Columbian Native America proved more difficult than recruiting specialists in any other chronological or topical area. Where are all the specialists in pre-Columbian history? Our mistake was to assume that these individuals would be historians. It is clear now that we will have to branch beyond our traditional disciplinary boundaries and make connections with anthropologists and archaeologists if we are going to offer our students a solid grounding in pre-Columbian history. Interdisciplinarity here is not a buzzword; it is the essential requirement for understanding the era.

Open Source History

Other insights into early American history continue to emerge as we improve our first chapter. We have solicited feedback through Comment Press, an open-source annotation platform that enables our contributors, editorial advisors, and others to give paragraph-by-paragraph comments. Over 100 historians shared their insights on our beta edition—ranging from highly specialized content corrections to suggestions that would improve our prose. It is here that the walls of specialization began to crumble, as content outsiders often gave us the kind of fresh perspective necessary to ensure that our text is accessible to students. For example, Jonathan Wilson and Michael Hattem—specialists in antebellum intellectual history and the politics of the American Revolution, respectively—both remarked that the chapter opening was abrupt and potentially intimidating for students. As a result, our new chapter includes a short introduction to the chapter, as well as an introduction to the entire text. When connecting research communities to students, it is valuable to have go-betweens to translate, and classroom teachers provide exactly this perspective.  

The American Yawp is the first textbook to employ the open collaborative potential of tools like Comment Press, balancing Wikipedia’s ability to crowd-source content production with scholarly oversight and rigor. My co-editor and I understand our role less as traditional textbook authors and more as organizers, administrators, and editors. American history is simply too big and too broad for one individual to master. Highly synthetic projects like textbooks depend on a wide base of expertise, and ongoing collaboration can ensure that material reflects the latest research innovations. New technologies should enable the networks of peer support on which our profession has always depended to find new expression. The American Yawp is an experiment in the democratization of knowledge production within a collegial community of experts.

The input we received from seventeen historians on our first chapter provides an example of the value of this kind of feedback and exposes some important challenges facing all teachers of early America. James Merrell pointed out the Eurocentric language that suffused the chapter as well as most synthetic treatments of early America. The chapter’s very title, “The New World,” implies a dismissal of millennia of Native life and ignores the fact that for some people, the continents known as North and South America were not at all “new” by 1492, or even in the tenth century when Norse explorers crossed the ocean. Even the phrase “pre-contact” or “Pre-Columbian” adopts an excessively European/Indigenous binary that obscures the extensive contact between vastly different groups in North America. We of course knew this, but failing to foreground this challenge not only opened us to misinterpretations of our content, but also overlooked a teachable moment.

Stepping outside of Eurocentrism is extremely difficult for a number of reasons, including the greater number of Eurocentric sources, the greater cultural and even epistemological similarities shared between our world and that of early modern Europe as compared to Native America, and the teleological impulse to see early America as a prehistory of the United States. Of course, even the term North America adopts the geographical signifier of settler colonialism. But these difficulties need not turn into straightjackets strangling our narratives or preventing us from challenging our students’ assumptions. In fact, explicitly acknowledging this problem in the text shows students the challenges we all face in making sense of this period. Since our chapter discusses the Asiatic migrations that led to North American settlement, the title—“The New World”—now reminds students that this land was at one point new to both Native Americans and Europeans. However, Ian Chambers suggests that ignoring the origin stories of indigenous people, especially when we discuss the religious worldviews of Europeans, is a mistake. Our second draft and new primary source reader reflect this valuable suggestion, including creation stories from the Salinan and Cherokee peoples. Neglecting archeological research on North American origins in favor of cataloging indigenous cosmology myths would be irresponsible, but ignoring these stories denies students the opportunity to better understand the peoples who first settled the continent.

Tom de Mayo, associate professor of history at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, pushes us on the issue of origins, arguing that we should do more to illustrate the intense scholarly debate over the origins of Native Americans. Indeed, historiographical debates such as these can show our students that our field is one of constant contestation, that history is an ever-evolving conversation, one that they would hopefully join themselves. All of these smart, substantial critiques informed our revised draft. Comments from others also enabled us to identify talented new contributors. For example, Daniel Johnson, of Bilkent University in Turkey, offered several insightful comments. As a result, we recruited him to serve as the editor of our third chapter, entitled “British North America.”

We draw inspiration for the ongoing revision of The American Yawp from the academy as new research challenges our content. For example, the latest edition of Early American Studies includes a revisionist piece by Jane Mt. Pleasant, where she powerfully critiques current depictions of pre-Columbian agriculture, including some depictions we included in the beta edition of our text. Mt. Pleasant’s argument is two-fold. First, her research indicates that intensive, permanent agriculture was in fact the norm in eastern and central North America, rather than shifting cultivation, which suffuses most existing narratives, including our beta chapter. Second, she recasts the use of hand tools as agriculturally advantageous compared to the plow. As a result, we’ve added a brief paragraph to our first chapter:

Native American agriculture varied. Some groups used shifting cultivation where farmers cut the forest, burned the undergrowth and then planted seeds in the nutrient rich ashes of what remained. When crop yields began to decline, farmers would simply move to another field and allow the land to recover and the forest to regrow before they would again cut the forest, burn the undergrowth, and restart the cycle. This technique was particularly useful in areas with difficult soil. But in the lush regions of the central and eastern United States, Native American farmers engaged in permanent, intensive agriculture, using hand tools rather than European-style plows. The lush soil and use of hand-tools enabled effective and sustainable farming. These techniques produced high yields without overburdening the soil.

At the 2015 joint conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and the Society of Early Americanists, a roundtable of scholars specializing in North American indigenous history surveyed the research prospects for their field. Michael Witgen observed that depictions of territory in early America more often explain imperial ambitions than actual realities. Native peoples held territory in land claimed by Europeans for centuries, and most maps of colonial North America obscure this reality.

As we begin to launch a mapping initiative using GIS software, we look forward to the challenge of creating maps that reflect both the ambitions of colonial powers and the reality of long-enduring indigenous resistance. Scott Manning Stevens emphasized the importance of oral histories and other non-documentary sources, a theme that echoed throughout as all of the scholars mentioned their reliance on community knowledge to make sense of the sparse documentary record. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant acknowledged the important work being done by the Native and Indigenous Studies Association, but we are in many ways dependent still upon knowledge bases beyond the academy to give depth and texture to our understandings of Native American life. Digital projects like The American Yawp, through forums like our Comment Press platform, have the potential to harness the community knowledge that academics often struggle to access. With the aid of future institutional partners, we look forward to making connections with and listening closely to both scholarly and broader public communities.

After a summer applying the feedback we received, as well as integrating insights from new scholarship, we launched a new edition of the text in August. But the work continues. A new cycle of feedback and revision will start, along with new attempts to better exploit digital tools and move our text beyond words and static images. We invite you join us, participate in our new Comment Press site, and ensure that your particular expertise is made available to new generations of students. I teach my students to follow the words of our text’s patron poet, Walt Whitman, and “Re-examine all that you have been told.” We are eager to follow the lead of the profession in doing the same.

Further Reading:

Please visit americanyawp.com to view the text. We also welcome you to visit americanyawp.com/comments to offer suggestions on how we can improve our content.

For discussions of pre-Columbian America, see Susan Alt, ed., Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America (Salt Lake City, 2010); Cheryl Claasen and Rosemary A. Joyce, eds., Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica (Philadelphia, 1994); Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York, 2006); and Jane Mt. Pleasant, “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America,” Early American Studies, 13:2 (Spring 2015): 374-412.

For more on the open access movement see Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” The Journal of American History 93:1 (June, 2006): 117-46; Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future (New York, 2014); Lisa Spiro, “This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” in Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital (Minneapolis, 2012); and Martin Weller, The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why It Doesn’t Feel Like Victory (London, 2014).

For more on The American Yawp see Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, “A Free and Open Alternative to Traditional History Textbooks,” Perspectives on History, 53:3 (March 2015); Scott McLemee, “Free American History!” Inside Higher Ed, March 11, 2015; Rachel Beltzhoover and M. Omar Siddiqi, “A Conversation with Ben Wright and Joseph Locke, Editors of The American Yawp,” The American Historian.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Ben Wright is assistant professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His book manuscript “Antislavery and American Salvation” is under advance contract with LSU Press. He is the co-editor of Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era (2013) with Zachary W. Dresser, and The American Yawp, a free and online American history textbook, with Joseph Locke.

Mariner’s Art in International Perspective

Although we think of our own age as the one of “globalization,” in fact, as historians are now demonstrating, early Americans were connected with the Atlantic world as well as with global trade and information networks in a variety of ways. The “global turn” in early American studies has worn down the barriers that formerly existed between the history of the U.S. and the rest of the world. As an interpretive model for historians and art historians, globalization remains controversial. In the case of art history, while many scholars want to recognize the international exchange of objects and aesthetic concepts in the past—themes often overlooked in the earlier literature—many also remain skeptical of the applicability of a twentieth-century notion to the understanding of works from the past.

Folk art studies have been largely impervious to the advent of the Atlantic and the global as methodological frameworks, probably because the association between folk art and American national identity has been so strong since the moment that folk art was “discovered” in the early twentieth century. Historians Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. and Claudine Weatherford have written of Holger Cahill, who promoted folk art as early as the 1920s, that “self-conscious chauvinism expressed itself boldly in […his] definition of American folk art. And there is some/much truth to this. Said by Cahill to give ‘a living quality to the story of American beginnings,’ folk art was glorified as representative of an indigenous artistic heritage of a great democratic nation.” The connections Cahill drew between folk art and national identity typified scholarship and criticism in the field from its infancy onward: The first gift in 1962 to the collection of the fledgling institution that would eventually become the American Folk Art Museum in New York City was, tellingly, a gate in the form of an American flag.

Such objects suggest the complex cultural and political identifications of folk art producers. They undoubtedly drew on local, vernacular traditions, but that did not preclude their familiarity with national imagery which would in turn imply that they possessed some sense of belonging to the nation. The affiliations of folk artists moved even further outward, however, from their local communities to the broader world in which they lived and worked. The objects they made must thus be interpreted in relation to a continuum of identifications that range from the local to the global. Seen in this light, the works themselves, as well as their makers, take on a new complexity.

Take the work of sailors, who were among the most prolific makers of folk art—from scrimshaw to decorated trunks to ditty bags. A good (but late) example of the latter is a sea bag decorated by Maine native and seaman Jack Gardner during a voyage around the world in 1920-21. Now in the collection of the Maine Maritime Museum, it depicts people, places, and monuments that Gardner encountered during his time abroad. In general, the objects sailors produced or decorated evidence the long idle hours they spent on lengthy sea voyages. At the same time, those trips took them around the world and put them in contact with the cultures of Europe and Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Many seem to have possessed the “unsettled subjectivity” that literary critic Patricia Fumerton ascribes to early modern seafarers and other workers who lived their lives without maintaining strong ties to family and friends. Being “unsettled” meant that these folk artists were cut off from their families, friends and other associates at home during long stretches of time at sea, yet they formed bonds with shipmates, and were also introduced to people around the world whom they would otherwise never have known. Thus, even if seamen were isolated from their communities of origin, and sometimes only loosely integrated into port life, they nonetheless profited from an exposure to foreign cultures that more rooted people did not enjoy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even in more recent times, international trade by sea simultaneously created conditions of intense isolation and exhilarating social interaction.

The effects of this kind of global exposure on folk art becomes clear when we look at a small selection of works included in the Maine Folk Art Trail, a series of exhibitions held in ten Maine museums in 2008. Because the state was economically dependent on maritime trade both before and after its political separation in 1820 from Massachusetts (of which it had been a “District”), and because folk art associated with seafaring is prevalent as well as exemplary of global connections, the Maine-related objects provide useful examples. The objects produced by two men—the lighthouse keeper Eliphalet Grover (1778-1855) and his son Samuel Grover (1816-1898)—offer a point of departure. The Grovers are credited with having made several objects now in the collection of the Museums of Old York in York, Maine, including a violin (1821) and a wooden box (ca. 1832) by Eliphalet and a child’s violin (1834) by Samuel. Their biographies and the objects they fashioned reveal the dynamic relationship between social isolation and integration that characterized globalized seafaring life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although he was not a mariner himself, Eliphalet Grover’s job was a direct outgrowth of maritime commerce and it entailed some of the same hardships and frustrations seamen faced. After the American Revolution, both maritime trade and related industries like ship-building expanded in Maine, although trade disruptions were caused by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812. During the thirteen years prior to the embargo, for instance, shipping registered in the District of Maine nearly tripled, from 50,000 tons to 148,000 tons. Coastal trade depended upon the ability of vessels to avoid the hazards of Maine’s jagged coastline. One such hazard was Boon Island, located nine miles off of York Beach in the open waters of the Gulf of Maine. At its widest it is about a third of a mile, although to call it an “island” is perhaps to overstate the case: It is a rock outcropping only fourteen feet above sea level and can support no vegetation. The wife of one twentieth-century lighthouse keeper recalled that “there was not a blade of grass or a weed on the island.” In the eighteenth century, coastal vessels had wrecked on Boon Island numerous times and the first beacon was installed there, at a time of increasing maritime activity, in 1799. It was forty feet in height and its construction was funded through the office of Benjamin Lincoln, the Boston Customs Inspector. During the first half of the nineteenth century, four different towers were swept away by the sea. On May 31, 1831, Eliphalet Grover noted the laying of the first stone for a new lighthouse on Boon Island, but despite its construction of masonry, it was carried away some time after its completion in July of the same year. The granite tower built in 1852, however, was substantial enough to withstand punishing surf and still stands. During the period that the Grover family was on Boon Island, the lighthouse was seventy feet tall and a residence was located adjacent to it, although in the latter part of his tenure they also had a house on the mainland.

Eliphalet Grover, who became the Boon Island lighthouse keeper in 1816, was born in 1778. With his wife, Susanna (1780-1858), he had three children, one of whom was Samuel, born the year his father received his appointment. Eliphalet had a long career as keeper, which lasted until 1839 when he was dismissed for somewhat mysterious reasons, probably because such positions had become by then the objects of political patronage. A variety of alleged infractions, including selling portions of the whale oil shipments that were supposed to keep the light burning, had been made against the lighthouse keeper to justify his dismissal, but he denied them. Grover soon became keeper of Whaleback Lighthouse in nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which seems to suggest that his behavior on Boon Island had not been criminal. Samuel apparently moved after his father’s dismissal, if not earlier, to North Berwick and eventually married Olive Jane Grant (c. 1837-1872) of Acton, Maine.

The objects the Grovers made reflect their most immediate surroundings, the harsh, isolated island on which they spent much of their lives, as well as their identification with the nation and their connections to a global economy. The men’s offshore lives were expressed in the objects they made: small, portable pieces, fashioned from the meager materials at their disposal. Although the family went back and forth from Boon Island to the mainland, inscriptions on the objects the Grovers crafted underscored the paradoxical fact of their production on such a tiny island with so few natural resources from which to make anything. The inscription on the violin made by the elder Grover reads, “Made on Boon Island by Capt. Eliphalet Grover 1821” and the smaller violin made by his son (who likely learned instrument-making from his father) is labeled on the interior “Made by Samuel Grover Boon Island, Maine, 1834.” The extremely limited physical space the Grovers had available to them on Boon Island meant that they had to express their creativity on a very small scale. They even made use of scrap materials available on the island: Eliphalet Grover recorded in his log that in a bad storm, the wind would tear the shingles off of the buildings on Boon Island, so it is not surprising he had a good supply on hand to repair the intermittent damage. Eliphalet used split-wood roof shingles, likely from his repair supply, to make the top and back of his 1821 fiddle. The musical instrument demonstrated Grover’s skills as both a joiner and a carver, for he shaped and fitted together the shingles to make the body of the instrument, and then carved its head with a human likeness. The project was well adapted to an island since it required only minimal space and small handtools; moreover, it could be worked on over an extended period of time, taken out and put away as the daily schedule of maintaining the light permitted. The portable violin, which could be easily taken back and forth to the mainlaind, was typical of the objects the Grovers made. The box Eliphalet fashioned—primarily from locally plentiful pine wood—was well suited to his restricted surroundings. It measures just 5 ½ by 7 ⅝ by 6 ½ inches and could have been useful for transporting valuables between the island and the mainland.

The imagery, with its repetition of human faces around the exterior, may well have reflected Eliphalet’s isolation. These images are profile silhouettes which have been cut out and then affixed to the box. This emphasis on the human face runs through the Grovers’s work: Both of their violins are distinctive for having carved and painted heads incorporated into the scrolls, perhaps reflecting a desire for human contact. The Grovers apparently longed for their time ashore, as an anecdote recounted by the poet Celia Thaxter in Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) attests. Thaxter’s father was a New Hampshire lighthouse keeper from 1838 onward, so she was well aware of what life on a small Atlantic island was like. In her book, she recounted traveling on a boat bound for Bangor, Maine, where she met an unnamed man who had grown up on Boon Island and who was likely one of Eliphalet Grover’s sons. Thaxter recalled that “He spoke with bitterness of his life in that terrible solitude, and of ‘loneliness which had pursued him ever since.’ […] He ended by anathematizing all islands, and, vanishing into the darkness, was not to be found again.”

Making and decorating objects filled some of the hours Eliphalet and Samuel Grover spent on their lonely outpost, and they surrounded themselves with likenesses. These objects would also have been useful in the context of island living. The violin, for example, could have been very useful on Boon Island, the year round. In the summer, when the surf is generally subdued, music from the violin would have melded with the sounds of swells rising against the rock outcropping. In the more severe weather typical of fall and winter, the violin would have helped drown out the relentless sound of crashing surf and filled the empty days, weeks and months when the waves made it difficult for a boat to land on Boon Island. A twentieth-century resident recalled how very nearly inescapable the sound of pounding surf could be: “One day there was a terrible storm so terrible that we went to the top of the lighthouse and sat with our heads almost in our laps so we wouldn’t hear the storm.” When the Grovers went ashore, they could have taken their musical instruments with them and joined in the social life of York and other nearby villages and cities. The musical instruments then wove together the Grovers’ solitary lives on Boon Island and their intermittent social connections with the community on the mainland. The forms, materials, and decorative aspects of the objects all attest to the dual character of these folk artists’ lives: at once circumscribed by their island home and also connected to national and even international economic and social networks.

We can see the Grovers’ identification with the nation and with nationalism on the same objects that testified to the world immediately surrounding them. The faces on Eliphalet’s box are enhanced with military uniforms and drawn swords. In the corners of the top of the box are painted eagles and shields on maple veneer. Together, the military themes and eagles and shields suggest an association with battle and ultimately with national history. These motifs reflect Grover’s interest in the iconography of the American nation, which he could have encountered through a variety of means, but most likely through popular print. Newspapers, almanacs, and cheap prints all would have served as sources of such imagery; Grover would have seen such printed materials while on shore or have obtained them from visitors to Boon Island. Indeed, the box is lined with pages from a contemporary New York newspaper. He creatively interpreted the visual aspects of the world of popular print in his own original works.

These motifs also echoed the national imagery that appeared on a variety of objects made by mariner folk artists, including what has been probably the most highly sought-after category of seamen’s art: scrimshaw. To take just two examples, in the collection of the Mystic Seaport Museum are two whale’s teeth with scrimshaw scenes (c. 1848), the Battle of Lake Erie and the Battle of Lake Champlain, attributed to Nathaniel Sylvester Finney. Simon Newman has also shown that the most personal of sailors’ works, tattoos, also employed symbols of the nation, such as eagles, alongside initials and other motifs that related both to their shipboard relationships and to their connections to loved ones on shore. In the 500 records of sailors’ tattoos found in the Seamen’s Protection Certificate Applications (1798-1816) studied by Newman, he identified seventy-one that featured either “eagles, American flags, the date 1776, [or] representations of liberty,” with eagles being the most popular. Newman connects this body of imagery to sailors’ interests in early national politics, to their patriotism, and to their advantageous positions as witnesses to the age of revolution throughout the Atlantic world. This interpretation of the tattoo imagery provides a way of understanding the eagles and armed figures that appear on Grover’s box. However obliquely, these motifs reference the international conflicts that somebody at sea would have witnessed—or learned about from mariners who had direct experience of the American, French, or Haitian revolutions and other events—in the early national period, conflicts that took their tolls on the very maritime trade that the lighthouse was supposed to facilitate. The eagle may also signal Grover’s allegiance to the patriotism of sailors who would have passed by Boon Island and occasionally landed on the rock, as well as to his interest in politics on the mainland.

Eliphalet Grover’s box decoration is not an anomaly among the motifs that appear on maritime folk art from Maine, as a ship’s figurehead of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry makes clear. Newman points out that many seamen were staunchly anti-British and for them Perry would indeed have been the “Hero of Lake Erie.” He led the United States naval forces in a successful battle against the British navy on Lake Erie on Sept. 10, 1813, despite serious damage to his ship, the USS Lawrence, whose battle flag bore the famous slogan, “Don’t give up the ship.” Although who was responsible for the naming of the ship on which this figurehead appeared, and the selection of Commodore Perry as the motif for the figurehead, is unclear in both cases, the ship’s owners as well as its crew could have appreciated the patriotism of the gesture.

Figurehead carving was intimately tied to the shipbuilding (particularly in wood) and shipping trades. As those industries declined in Maine from the end of the nineteenth century onward, the production of figureheads, and indeed maritime carving in general, came to be thought of as a dying art and examples were sought out to document its heyday earlier in the nineteenth century. As art historian Samuel M. Green remarked, “I have seen figureheads and other carvings in deserted corners, lofts, and barns throughout the state [of Maine], all of which will inevitably disappear without a trace unless recorded, just as hundreds of their kind have disappeared before now.” In fact, the Index of American Design, a WPA project that produced some 22,000 watercolors and photographs of “various arts and crafts in the field of Design in the United States from before 1700 until about 1900,” included examples of Maine maritime carving. (The work of Edbury Hatch, “the last of the figurehead carvers in the towns of Newcastle and Damariscotta,” was especially highly valued. ) The Index of American Design positioned such carving alongside a wide variety of “folk” objects, all of which were valued for the high quality of their design and execution. Figureheads and other decorative elements from ships were also obviously associated with Maine’s earlier maritime history. At the same time, however, these artifacts were connected to a larger American cultural history, even if the first generation of folk art scholars could not have recognized the full political, social, and economic contexts of seafarers’ lives.

Nor would any early folk art critic, dealer, or collector have spoken of the works as evidence of a particularly international, or even global, mentality on the parts of the makers. But in fact some examples of folk art might be said to signify in just that way. For instance, a ship model known as “A Sailor’s Dream” in the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, provides some evidence of how distant continents appeared in the American sailor’s imaginary. The museum notes that “this ship model is imbued with the romance and exoticism that was often attached to seafaring life.” It features a three-masted sailing ship at sea “on which are numerous carvings of oversized fish, birds, sea-serpents, and smaller rigged sailing and fishing vessels.” The ship sails towards a lighthouse (reminding us of how important those structures were in maritime life) and above the ship hangs a carved eagle (recalling some sailors’ favored motifs). On the portside quarterboard is inscribed the word “Japanese” and on the opposite side is written “Souvenir.” Near the port side on the bow is written “Sterndorfer” and on the stern is inscribed “Maine,” perhaps indicating both the ship’s place of origin and the model’s since it was found in a boat shed in Rockland in the 1950s.

The ship model can appropriately be considered a “dream” to the extent that it distorts the scales of various elements—the ship that dwarfs the lighthouse, for instance—and combines things (some of them fantastic) that could not ordinarily be found together, like the varieties of carved sea life and the eagle in the sky. The model may have been called a dream because it also brings together two distant lands: Maine and Japan. However, given the long history of New England’s maritime relationships with Asia, this work can also be understood as a window onto how some seamen thought of their places in the world, assuming that a mariner made, commissioned or owned the model. The dream of shipboard life was then not so much “romantic” or “exotic” as it was filled simultaneously with excitement and peril, limited and unbounded.

The many ways in which Maine’s folk art evidenced the district’s and later the state’s vigorous participation in international trade from the colonial period forward was barely acknowledged during the period when folk art was being established as a field of collecting and scholarship. True, scrimshaw, ships’ figureheads, ship models, and other objects fashioned at sea or produced in response to maritime trade were the subjects of considerable interest in the early decades of the twentieth century, but a countervailing tendency to associate them with local culture worked against their being understood in relation to global networks of trade and otherwise. The conceptual affiliation of folk art with American identity, addressed at the outset of this essay, provides part of the explanation for this failure to see folk art as part of a larger, more cosmopolitan culture. The other reason is that by the early twentieth century, when artists, curators, and collectors—particularly from New York City—began to buy and exhibit Maine folk art, the state had changed. By the twentieth century, Maine’s ports had been outstripped by others as places of economic activity, and its shipbuilding had become less important as wooden vessels were increasingly limited to pleasure boats. The urbanites who came to Maine after 1900 did so specifically because many parts of the state had become sleepy backwaters by then. They had become isolated, to some extent, as maritime travel and shipping decreased in favor of railroads, and later, highways. And so the slow pace of life in such enclaves suited the purposes of city-dwellers looking to escape frenetic urban life.

The consequence of the early collecting of Maine folk art was its conceptual disassociation from the global economic activity that originally brought it into being. As historians have raised awareness of how deeply interconnected was the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is appropriate to reinsert the “folk” objects produced during the period into that context. Doing so, we will see makers like Eliphalet and Samuel Grover less as isolated artists whose very separateness from cultural centers and urban institutions was responsible for their creativity, and more as makers whose embeddedness in international economic and cultural networks provided the time, opportunity, and aesthetic impulse to create works that provide a perspective on their own period’s “globalization.” The danger here is that just as early twentieth-century conceptions of folk art supported present-day concepts of the nation, so this repositioning of folk art in relation to a broader geographic horizon will only go to underwrite—in an uncritical way—our own notions of twenty-first century globalism. Brian Connolly has addressed the conceptual and political pitfalls entailed in rewriting early American history from a global perspective. He urges us “to consider how invocations of the Atlantic and other extra-national scales might simultaneously displace the nation and secure other relationships of power, especially those of present-day global capitalism,” and concludes that “we should feel a great deal of anxiety to be writing at the same scale and deploying the same terms as global capitalism.”

In the case of folk art studies, adopting a global perspective can be potentially as limiting as were the pioneering but nationalistic interpretations of the objects that came about in the early twentieth century. Thus we should consider, before we inscribe folk art (or at least some of it) within a global framework, the skepticism that has been expressed vis-à-vis globalization with regard to art history. Art historians, like other sorts of historians, have been leery of projecting a twenty-first century notion of globalization back onto earlier periods for fear of inadvertently legitimating contemporary economic structures and political regimes, and misrepresenting the historical situation. As a way of side-stepping these potential limitations, but at the same time recognizing the ways that art makers around the world were interconnected—however fragilely, intermittently, discontinuously—in the pre-modern period, Alessandra Russo has suggested that we “work on the tension between distance and proximity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This tension had a crucial role in the production of objects.” Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the relationship between distance and proximity provides a valuable lens for thinking about the production and consumption of folk art. Avoiding the ideological consequences of “globalization,” by bringing these terms to the fore in our thinking about art made by non-professionals, we are able to capture, at least to some degree, the mentalities and the horizons of experience that their makers possessed.

That word—”horizon”—has particular resonance for the Grovers and for seamen who must have spent hours staring at it. On the one hand, folk artists working within the context of the maritime economy, the Grovers among them, made objects from materials that were proximate and they represented landscapes, people, and objects that were also present in their local setting. On the other hand, that did not mean that their perspectives were narrow. The unknown maker of “The Sailor’s Dream,” for instance, gave material form to his vision of the world which encompassed not only the ship to which he may have been confined for long periods of time, but also the distant lands which he may have visited but certainly had heard of from other mariners whose horizons were similarly wide. For the producers of folk art who were involved in a variety of ways with long-distance commerce by sea, lands and cultures beyond their immediate horizons may indeed have been the subjects of romantic attachment or exotic associations. But they were also distant places woven into the fabrics of their daily lives.

Further Reading:

Although the literature on folk art, its history, and issues with defining it is large, especially relevant here are: Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr. and Claudine Weatherford, “Modernism, Edith Halpert, Holger Cahill, and the Fine Art Meaning of American Folk Art,” in Jane S. Becker and Barbara Franco, Folk Roots, New Roots; Folklore in American Life (Lexington, Mass., 1988); and Kevin D. Murphy, ed., Folk Art in Maine: Uncommon Treasures, 1750-1825 (Camden, Maine, 2008). On the Atlantic world, globalization and their implications for American studies and art history, see: Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Spring 2011): 1-37; Brian Connolly, “Intimate Atlantics: Toward a critical history of transnational early America,” Common-Place Vol. II, no. 2 (Jan. 2011); “Roundtable: The Global before Globalization,” October 133 (Summer, 2010): 3-19; Katherine Manthorne, “Remapping American Art,” American Art 22 (Fall 2008): 112-117; Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domíguez Torres, “Editors’ Introduction,” Winterthur Portfolio 45 (Summer/Autumn 2011): 101-106 (Special issue on “Objects in Motion”); and Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003). In considering the lives of mariners I have relied on Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006) and Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2003).

Eliphalet Grover’s log book is in the collection of the Museums of Old York along with a typescript by Sue Tolle. Further information about the Grovers and their period in Maine history is to be found in Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic, From Revolution to Statehood (Hanover and London, 1988), Laura Fecych Sprague, ed., Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art in Southern Maine, 1780-1830 (Kennebunk, Maine, 1987), and Steven C. Mallory, “Capt. Eliphalet Grover’s ‘Boon Island Fiddle’: The Folk Violin in New England, 1750-1850,” in New England Music: The Public Sphere, 1600-1900, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, Vol. 21, 1996 (Boston, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Kevin D. Murphy is professor and executive officer in the PhD program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He is the author of Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture and Community on the Eastern Frontier (2010), and a previous contributor to Common-Place.org.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March of 1777 it became the first to alter it. The change originated from John Paul Jones and a small group of naval officers dissatisfied with the mandated ensemble consisting of a red-lapelled blue coat, a gold-laced waistcoat, and blue breeches. An unofficial agreement allowed American naval men to substitute a white-lined, red-lapelled blue coat and white waistcoat for the official model, and to forego blue breeches for white. The alterations, ornamented with an epaulet inscribed with a rattlesnake and “Don’t Tread on me,” Samuel Eliot Morison observes, resulted in “a much smarter uniform than the blue and red.” Perhaps the “smartest” quality of the new uniform, however, derived from the confusion it caused during engagements with the enemy. From a distance, ships populated by officers dressed in the new uniform resembled captains of the British fleet, leading John Adams to describe the uniform as “English.” Lowering the ensign, at least temporarily, added to the deception. This masquerade, embraced by Captain Jones, created a tactical advantage while at sea: the enemy saw the unmarked ship as familiar and relaxed its defenses, only to find itself unexpectedly engaged, and quite often over-matched, by a smaller, scrappier opponent.

John Paul Jones was a figure who would have been familiar to most American readers in the first half of the nineteenth century as the greatest naval hero of the Revolutionary War. Lauded as the first officer to raise the Grand Union flag aboard an American warship (the Alfred, in 1775), the victor of ferocious sea battles against the British frigate Serapis and the man-of-war Drake, Jones is best known today as the originator of the oft-quoted American mantra “I have not yet begun to fight.” John Paul Jones enjoyed popular acclaim throughout the nineteenth century. No fewer than twenty-three biographies featured Jones as the subject; three editions of his writings and letters became available to the public; and fiction writers, poets, and dramatists on both sides of the Atlantic claimed Jones as their title character. In iconography Jones cut his most dashing figure—a figure he personally constructed and adorned with that costume he himself had carefully designed in 1776. After Charles Willson Peale painted his portrait four years later, and Jean-Antoine Houdon sculpted his bust in 1780-1, these depictions set the pattern for pictures of Jones for at least seventy years thereafter—with precisely the kind of commanding appearance he favored for himself. But the duplicity he had stitched into the navy’s uniform—what you saw was not what you actually got—became a motif that worked its way into an entire series of representations of Jones after his death in 1792.

Was the hero actually a bloodthirsty pirate? A rake and seducer of ladies? Indeed, a robber, a murderer, a political opportunist?

Of course, in patriotic histories of the Revolution Jones stood in for the courageous patriot, the tireless warrior in the battle for Independence. Still, Jones had lived a highly eventful life before (and after) joining the American cause, and his nineteenth-century commentators seized upon those adventures to depict certain unsavory aspects of the hero’s character. Although crewman Nathaniel Fanning understood Jones to be “a great lover of the ladies” for his practice of “carrying off” women, many nineteenth-century authors indicted Jones as a “libertine” and a “rapist,” even while they commended his patriotic service to their audience of young men. George Sinclair, as early as 1807, published a biography of Jones modeled after the 1803 London-based original with the omnibus title: The Interesting Life, Travels, Voyages, and Daring Engagements of the Celebrated and Justly Notorious Pirate, Paul Jones: Containing Numerous Anecdotes of Undaunted Courage, in the Prosecution of his Nefarious Undertakings. So was the hero actually a bloodthirsty pirate? A rake and seducer of ladies? Indeed, a robber, a murderer, a political opportunist?

For many readers (and publishers), it may have been so much the better that tales of John Paul Jones presented him as a ruthless pirate. In much of popular literature, the pirate was the “romantic outlier” rather than the feared terrorist plundering ships and port cities. Versions of pirates attractive to popular audiences emerged through such works as Byron’sCorsair; numerous popular ballads about Captain Kidd, notably, “The Dying Words of Captain Robert Kidd”; Alexandre Exquemelin’s popular history The History of the Bucaniers of America(first published in Dutch in 1678, this book offered influential accounts of the lives of seventeenth-century pirates); Charles Ellms’ frequently reprinted collection of pirate biographies, The Pirates Own Book (1837); and numerous popular songs about the piratical life.From a political standpoint, in some quarters piracy even became synonymous not with greedy banditry but with independence and the struggle against injustice. American pirate-types, like those characterized in The Florida Pirate (1823) and later in Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno,” often flew the skull and crossbones only after being “denied the general consent of nations.” Moreover, in early nineteenth-century British and American novels, John Paul Jones (or men based upon the late captain) frequently dropped in on tales of mismatched love, maritime adventure, and epic romance. Among the best known examples are James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, Walter Scott’s The Pirate, and Alexandre Dumas’s Captain Paul. For the inheritors of the Revolution, to use Joyce Appleby’s phrase, at least to the book-buying public, the static portrait of the stalwart patriot was often shelved in favor of the excitement of the rakish marauder.

When William Borradaile reissued Sinclair’s edition of Life and Remarkable Adventures … of John Paul Jones twenty years after its first publication, he included a frontispiece illustration of Jones shooting one of his officers point-blank, even as he advertised Jones as the “celebrated” hero rather than the “celebrated and justly notorious pirate” as originally promoted by Sinclair’s title. “Paul Jones Shooting Lieutenant Grub”, Borradaile’s choice for his edition’s frontispiece, echoes the spirit of the image titled “Paul Jones shooting a sailor who had attempted to strike his colors in an engagement” (1779) found in the British original and, as a result, raised old concerns over the increasingly storied figure. While “Paul Jones Shooting Lieutenant Grub” cloaks the captain in national legitimacy as Jones and his combatants announce their shared cause through their similar uniforms, the illustration exposes the captain’s barbarism in his actions. The print not only indicts Jones of summarily executing one of his crew, but the range of the shot and the bodies below it also suggest the action to be both murderous and habitual. Jones may be remembered for raising the American colors aboard the Alfred and refusing quarter with “I have not yet begun to fight”; however, the Grub image illustrates a dark side of Jones’s fiery will and the bloodshed that sometimes ensued, in the process questioning his legitimacy as a hero.

This frontispiece illustration therefore revealed the flexibility of cultural memory and encouraged some writers to try to rehabilitate Jones’s reputation by publishing official accounts of his life authorized by the Jones estate. For although The Life and Remarkable Adventures… was sold as a sensational novel, the impression of Jones as a piratical murderer made the leap from fictional illustration to widely accepted fact, according to newspaper articles and biographical accounts, and Jones’s family wanted to “correct” that image. Historian Robert Sands, armed with a more complete set of Jones’s papers and determined to “circulate an unvarnished and full account of the rear admiral’s life,” credits the ubiquity of both the Grub print and the false testimony incited by it as his motivation for publishing the corrective Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (1830). Sands, dissatisfied with the ever-evolving “juvenile” version of Jones’s story, producedLife and Correspondence to tidy the chronological disorder of the captain’s life found in previously circulated versions, what he calls the “inextricable confusion” created by some “capricious demon”; rectify the “fabulous” and “monstrous legends” encouraged by the popular press; and correct the biographical misrepresentation constructed by a “decidedly” British gloss.

The protagonists that emerge through the pages of antebellum fiction, however, illustrate the public’s appetite for the “active and enterprising” miscreant rather than the cleaner and perhaps more accurate version of the American hero provided by authorized biographies like Sands’. American authors working in the genre of popular romance in this period often disguised their heroes as misunderstood beggars, thieves, and pirates in order to muddle the distinction between hero and villain. Herman Melville further complicates the distinction by characterizing Jones as the “model rogue” in his novel Israel Potter, the lone “crimson thread” flitting through the “blue-jean” travails of Israel R. Potter.

Serialized in 1854-55, Israel Potter is loosely based on a pamphlet autobiography written by a Rhode Island-born veteran of the Revolutionary War who had been taken prisoner by the British and lived much of his life in exile in England. The novel appears, at first glance, to be a bad-luck story of an American boy always caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Israel Potter shares the field-to-battle story popularized by Israel Putnam, Potter’s Bunker Hill experience leads to capture rather than to celebrity and sends him to England in chains. Melville recounts the clumsy happenings described in the original autobiography, including Potter’s chance meetings with King George III and Benjamin Franklin (in his role as the American ambassador to France), yet the novel eventually veers away from authenticity, in both style and content, and links the fate of Potter to the various enterprises of John Paul Jones. Melville, for example, positions Israel within earshot of Jones’s famous “I have not yet begun to fight” speech, and credits him with sparking Jones’s fiery retaliation upon the port of Whitehaven, the city the captain first sailed from at age twelve. Yet Israel’s fame is short lived. His fictional service to Jones—much like his “real” life—eventually lands him aboard another British ship and keeps him on the wrong side of the Atlantic for the better part of fifty years.

Melville advertised his Revolutionary tale as an “adventure” in a letter to his editors at Putnam’s, yet the intention of the autobiographical pamphlet Life and remarkable adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824) was to secure remuneration for Potter’s military service rather than to spin a thrilling tale of intrigue. In his motley characterization, however, Melville does more than transform Potter’s story from one of hapless exile to one of unlikely celebrity as it riffs on autobiography to produce fiction. Israel Potter presents Jones, as well as the country he serves, as more rogue than Revolutionary. Melville’s Jones looks like the pirates in Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America,dresses like the pirate suggested by the lurid frontispieces of sensational novels, and acts like the pirates cum revolutionaries of nineteenth-century American fiction, all the while advertised as the emblem of a maturing nation—as Melville writes, “America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.” Like the confusion Jones fashioned at sea, the narrative portrait offered in Israel Potteralternates between patriot and pirate, and therefore refuses to advance a single version of the nation’s complicated history.

Of course, Melville allows neither his narrator nor Israel to actually call Jones a pirate. Israel may describe Jones’s “jaunty barbarism” and “savage” markings under his European finery, but he never truly interprets what he sees. Assumptions and hearsay, however, provoke incidental characters to associate Jones with piracy. An oddly placed maritime “quack-doctress” calls Jones a “reprobate pirate”; English sailors assume the Ranger to be “some bloodthirsty pirate” when they fail to recognize her nationality; and a British ship unknowingly solicits information from Jones about “that bloody pirate, Paul Jones.” In the last instance, Melville shows Jones, when confronted by his reputation, as a light-hearted Robin Hood rather than a despotic Captain Kidd. He encourages his enemies to arm themselves with money rather than ammunition: “So, away with ye; ye don’t want any powder and ball to give him. He wants contributions of silver, not lead. Prepare yourselves with silver, I say”—and offers a keg of pickles rather than one of powder demanded by his enemies.

Melville’s use of the term “pirate” as a charge leveled at Jones only by his enemies did revive this earlier cultural mythology of Jones in the 1850s, as most subtitles of American publications about Jones by this point had stopped using the word “pirate,” and most accounts had done away with inflammatory frontispiece illustrations. Yet not all Americans succumbed to the intoxicating memory of Paul Jones. The 1846 edition of Life and Adventures of John Paul Jones may lack a frontispiece illustration, but its preface decries the character of Jones and other revolutionary leaders even as it reprints the partially disreputable version of Jones within, announcing that “the whole race of magnificent barbarians, gorgeous tyrants, unparalleled cutthroats, and gigantic robbers … have never been able to fix our devotion.”

Melville reinforces the roguish designation of Jones as “outlaw,” as well as Israel’s initial impression of the captain, by fashioning him as more Continental aristocrat than stalwart George Washington, while at the same time marking him as recklessly uncivilized. Never does the reader of Israel Potter see the Jones of Peale’s 1781 portrait, nor do we witness the proud dignity illustrated by the many Jones prints and publications of the nineteenth century. Instead, we are given “pagan” tattoos covered by a “laced coat sleeve” and hands covered in rings and “muffled in ruffles.” The novel’s references to clothing and appearance, rather than offering a sense of period authenticity, reinforce Melville’s editorial position suggested by his tongue-in-cheek introduction, contradict the popular understanding of “homespun” through uncomplimentary characterizations of Potter and Benjamin Franklin, and certainly complicate the understanding of Jones in the nineteenth-century imagination.

Jones as the emblem of America as created though Melville’s paradoxical layering (“à-la-mode [but not] altogether civilized…”) criticizes the American practice of myth-making even as it creates a maritime frontiersman as its “Representative Man,” to use Emerson’s term. Although Melville’s Jones resembles the lonely backwoodsman of much of the frontier literature of the period, the Jones of Israel Potter appears as Indian rather than as an “Indian-fighter” like other frontiersmen. Of course, Melville’s representative American displaces Native Americans even as he assumes so-called “Indian” characteristics. By comparing Jones’s manner to “a look as of a parading Sioux demanding homage to his gewgaws” and determining the captain’s seated posture to be “like an Iroquois,” Melville prompts the reader to rely on stereotypical “stock” poses for Native Americans created by literature and then directs the reader to assign these characteristics to Paul Jones. These descriptions co-opt familiar notions of indigenous peoples to disguise the Scottish Jones in “native” legitimacy while dressed as the very English enemy he sought to destroy.

Coupled with the cultural resurrection of colonial homespun fabric, evidenced through the emergence of spinning wheels as parlor ornaments and historical decor at public events—such as Fourth of July celebrations—in the mid-nineteenth century, initiated in part by Horace Bushnell’s 1851 tribute to the “simply worthy” men and women of America’s pre-Revolutionary “Age of Homespun,” it would seem that Melville might have wanted the lasting image of Jones that readers took from his novel to emphasize Jones’s humbler attributes rather than his interest in fashionable apparel. Yet, clothing—and Jones’s interest in it—is a frequent topic of conversation. Upon their reunion aboard theRanger, Potter and Jones almost immediately digress into discussions of apparel. Paul Jones even solicits Israel’s opinion of his hat—”What do you think of my Scotch bonnet?”—overtly calling attention to Jones’s national origin, but also signaling the captain’s concern for his appearance and his alteration of the naval uniform. The sartorial packaging of Jones in Israel Potter begs the question of authorial intent. Namely, why did Melville clothe his self-professed national emblem—”the Paul Jones of nations”—in European fashion rather than joining his contemporaries and idealizing the homespun and “linsey-woolsey” of the heroes that fought the Revolution?

Melville, it would seem, uses clothing to critique the United States’ emerging national mythology through the “homespun” of Israel and the “linsey-woolsey” of Franklin, and punctuates the argument through the fashionable “savagery” of John Paul Jones. The raw portrait of the swarthy, daring Jones, therefore, becomes an ideal rather than an embarrassment for Melville’s America, a model of transparency and honesty. In Israel Potter Jones can no sooner hide his “savage” tattoos than camouflage the absence of rings from his hand. Try as he might, Melville’s Jones can never transcend his true identity by dressing in European finery. In spite of his sartorial extravagance, or rather because of it, Jones becomes the icon of America which—like Jones, Melville insists—must admit its failings despite the prevailing trends in national mythology. America in the mid-nineteenth century may have been trying to fashion an identity for itself based on the Yankee ideal popularized by Benjamin Franklin, and to identify itself as a pioneering nation rooted in characters ranging from Cooper’s frontiersman Natty Bumppo to the 1856 Whig candidate for president John C. Frémont, whose campaign identified him as “The Pathfinder.” From Melville’s more jaundiced perspective, however, such posturing in the 1850s was a ruse, and America (having just seized California and much of the Southwest from Mexico) was more a pirate than a pioneer.

John Paul Jones duped the British by disguising his identity in enemy colors. Melville’s counterfeit deceives the “skimmer of pages” who, in trusting the authenticity of the historical reprint, believes the character of Jones created in Israel Potter to be a “true blue” copy of the man lionized by American memory. It is not. The alternate “crimson thread” spun by Melville challenges the portrait of Captain Jones and, by extension, American identity. America in Israel Potter is no different from the gardener’s son who surreptitiously finds himself leading a navy. Rather than American Exceptionalism and the “city upon the hill” motif put forward by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, Melville emphasizes the reliance upon chance for the nation’s success, and he refashions the accepted standard of the “pattern American” through his endorsement of the “unprincipled” and “reckless” John Paul Jones. Melville’s challenge to popular memory probably went unnoticed by the early readers of Israel Potter who, even when being complimentary, saw little in the text beyond a pleasurable diversion. Yet Melville’s single book-length offering of historical fiction, dedicated “TO HIS HIGHNESS THE Bunker-Hill Monument” topples gilded memorials to the past and American nostalgia with his collage of the pirate-patriot-indigenous-foppish John Paul Jones. In lieu of monuments, Melville—against the grain of most of his contemporaries—leaves a democratic marker more fitting to the ideology and cultural fabric of the antebellum United States at mid-century; a marker that prophetically foreshadows a civil war that would tear the fabric of the nation to shreds.

Further reading:

For information on John Paul Jones, see Samuel Eliot Morison’s John Paul Jones: A Sailor‘s Biography (Boston, 1959) and the more recent Evan Thomas, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, and Father of the American Navy (New York, 2003). For information on American identity and national mythology, see D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973.) For information on homespun and its connection to the national imagination of the nineteenth century, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

For the primary sources quoted here, see Henry Brooke, Book of Pirates. (Philadelphia, 1841); Carrington Bowles, Paul Jones shooting a sailor who had attempted to strike his colours in an engagement (1779); Nathaniel Fanning, Narrative of the adventures of an American navy officer, who served during part of the American Revolution under the command of Com. John Paul Jones, Esq. (New-York, 1806); Florida pirate, or, An account of a cruise in the schooner Esparanza(New York, 1823); John Paul Jones, The interesting life, travels, voyages, and daring engagements, of that celebrated and justly renowned commander, Paul Jones. : Containing numerous anecdotes of undaunted courage, in the prosecution of his various enterprises. / Written by himself (Philadelphia, 1817); Life and Adventures of John Paul Jones (New York, 1846); Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857) and Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855); Charles Willson Peale, John Paul Jones, oil on canvas (1781); Israel R. Potter,Life and remarkable adventures of Israel R. Potter (Providence, 1824); Robert Sands, Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (New York, 1830); “The Sea Captain, or Tit for Tat” (Boston, 1811).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Anne Roth-Reinhardt is a lecturer at the University of Minnesota and a former Jay T. Last Fellow (2010) at the American Antiquarian Society.