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Rumors, Uncertainty and Decision-Making in the Greater Long Island Sound (1652–1654)

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Rumors, Uncertainty and Decision-Making in the Greater Long Island Sound (1652–1654) chapter 5 Rumors, Uncertainty and Decision-Making in the Greater Long Island Sound (1652–1654) Lauric Henneton On 14 May 1653, a Long Island Sagamore named Ronessock testified under oath in front of the English magistrates at John Underhill’s house in Flushing, on Long Island, an English village under Dutch jurisdiction. His deposition, “inter- preted by Adam the Indian” was “that the Indians told him that the Dutch said they would go and tell the English that the Indians will come and cut of the English … and that the English were apte to believe as children.”1 If this may understandably sound very confusing for us now, it certainly would have been even more so at the time since at stake was no less than the survival of English settlers between the Hudson and Connecticut Valleys, where Dutch sover- eignty was increasingly being challenged by English settlers.2 The central issue for the English magistrates was to figure out whether or not the Connecticut and New Haven settlers were about to be “cut off” by the Indian-Dutch plot, which was the object of increasingly widespread and pressing rumors, and whether those rumors were credible enough to vindicate preemptive armed action. This short deposition vividly illustrates the literally vital dimension of rumors (defined here as unsubstantiated, unconfirmed, unverified informa- tion), the fear they generated, the practical consequences on policy-making at local and regional level in the North American colonies and their possible repercussions throughout the Atlantic world. In other words, this essay 1 Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, in David Pulsifer, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (Boston, 1859), vols. 9 and 10 (hereafter pcr), 10:44. All dates are “old style,” as they appear in the records. I would like to thank Lou Roper, Paul Otto, Jaap Jacobs, David Smith and David William Voorhees for their comments and suggestions on successive drafts as well as the participants to the panel of the oieahc Conference in suny-New Paltz, where an abridged version of this paper was presented in June 2011, notably Neal Dugre, Alejandra Dubcovsky, David Silverman and Jon Parmenter. 2 One of the preeminent New England scholars once wrote that “the real spine of the New Haven colony was Long Island Sound, and the colony’s leaders saw their future as being based on commercial control of the territories bounded by the sound.” Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976), 81. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�4740_007 <UN> 116 Henneton explores the impact of what is by definition immaterial, on what is, also by definition, very material – declaring war, levying troops, taking prisoners, kill- ing other people and how the decision-making process had to cope with an unbearable degree of uncertainty. Regrettably, the historical significance of rumors, however central, remains largely understudied,3 just as is the case focused on in this essay, the “crisis” of 1653–1654, stuck as it is between the more intensively tilled fields of Pequot War and King Philip’s War.4 In the present case, the purely local (the New England–New Netherland interface) is embedded in a wider regional field extending from the Delaware River to at least Acadia, with links to Europe (England and the Dutch Republic). The present case took place in a context of at least Atlantic scope, as both the English and the Dutch had their eyes set on the West Indies, if not global scope with Cornelius Vermuyden’s concomitant project for dividing the globe between Protestant powers, and with echoes of the “tragedy of Amboyna,” in present-day Indonesia, ringing in the back- ground.5 More generally, the history of the Confederation of New England, 3 Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1999 [1978]), 225– 238; Adam Fox, “Rumour, News and Popular political opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997), 597–620; Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 53, no. 3 (1996), 527–560; Tom Arne Mitrød, “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 91–112; James Horn, “Imperfect Understandings: Rumor, Knowledge, and Uncertainty in Early Virginia,” in Peter Mancall, ed., The Atlantic world and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 513–540. 4 Neal Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists in Southern New England after the Pequot War: An Uneasy Balance,” in Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 81–95. Katherine A. Grandjean recently remarked that “the aftershocks of the Pequot War remain somewhat unchartered by scholars” and that “Though they have vigorously debated its causes, historians have given far less attention to the war’s aftermath.” Katherine A. Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies 9, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 379–411, quote on page 383. Grandjean, however, stops short of the 1653 crisis as her story ends with Kieft’s War in 1645. Salisbury’s article also fails to touch upon the 1653 crisis altogether. In his fine biography of Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, Michael Leroy Oberg does deal with the episode. See Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 132–138. 5 Arthur P. Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493–1688 (London: A & C Black, 1933), 210; Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 159–161. Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a native Dutch naturalized English, devised a proposal dividing the world between England and the States General: the Dutch would be given <UN>.
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