The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Some women had formed a circle, and Gyles was pushed into the middle, “where the other Squaws seiz’d me by the Hair of my Head, and by my Hands and Feet, like so many Furies.” But his captor “laid down a Pledge and released me,” he recalled, explaining, “A Captive among the Indians is exposed to all manner of Abuse, and to the utmost Tortures; unless his Master, or some of his Master’s relations, lay down a Ransom, such as a Bag of Corn, or a Blanket.”

  From Mattawamkeag, Gyles was taken by canoe another sixty miles up the east branch of the Penobscot, then along a series of lakes and portages, passing through what is now Baxter State Park and into the heart of an immense, empty plateau of low hills, bogs, and spruce woods. There were no permanent villages in this part of their territory, but because of the numerous rivers that flowed out of this region, the Wapánahki used it as a transportation hub. From here they could travel easily throughout what is now Maine, New Brunswick, and the St. Lawrence Valley of Quebec.

  To a European, it would have seemed a frightening and trackless wilderness, but to the Wapánahki, it was as familiar and welcoming as the wagon roads Gyles and his family followed between home, village, and farm. And although their progress by birch-bark canoe might seem remarkable—pushing more than 160 miles upstream along the Penobscot, then another 50 miles across lakes and portages—this was workaday travel for the Wapánahki, whose canoeists often made the more than 400-mile roundtrip from the coast to Quebec City and back in as little as three weeks.

  Gyles had no clear sense of where he was being taken. His captor had left him in the care of an elderly man and two or three women, and the only English the old man knew was “By and by—come to a great Town and Fort.” Had Gyles known then what he would come to learn about Abenaki culture, he might have guessed his destination, for his captors were subtly different from the Penobscots his family knew near Pemaquid. They spoke a different dialect and referred to themselves as wolastoqiyik, “the people of wolastokuk (the bright or good river)”—which the English called the St. John and whose headwaters the party eventually reached. The French and English knew these Wapánahki as the Maliseet (or Malecite).

  With the current now in their favor, the party raced along, following the river east and then south another 150 miles to Meductic, the chief village of the Maliseet, which lay along the St. John about 80 miles from the coast. By following the traditional canoe trails, the party had inscribed an enormous inverted J on the region, traveling more than 350 miles by canoe to reach a village only 120 miles, as the crow flies, from Saint-Castin’s fort at Pentagoet. But traveling by land would have been more dangerous, more arduous, and certainly not as fast as tracing the waterways, however circuitous the route.

  By and by, come to a great town, the old man continued to assure Gyles. “I comforted myself in thinking how finely I would be refreshed etc. when I came to this great Town,” Gyles admitted. Instead, he found himself pulled into a lodge where thirty or forty Maliseets were dancing around half a dozen English captives—hostages taken during the Cochecho raid against Major Waldron.

  Gyles saw one captive “seiz’d by each Hand & Foot, by four Indians, who swung him up and let his Back with Force fall on the hard Ground, ’till they had danced (as they call it) round the whole Wigwam, which was thirty or forty feet in length.” Others were lifted off the ground, head down, and jolted “ ’till one would think his Bowels would shake out of his Mouth,” or grabbed by the hair and struck on the back “ ’till the Blood gush out of his Mouth & Nose.” A captive might be whipped, or old women would fling shovelfuls of hot embers on his chest, “and if he cry out, the other Indians will Laugh and Shout, and say, What a brave Action our Grandmother has done!”

  Ritual torture among the Algonquian tribes could have multiple meanings, often centering on replacement. The loss of a respected leader in war could prompt the survivors to kill an equally high-ranking captive, and lost children, even dead spouses, might be replaced by adoption, sometimes after the captive had been tested or threatened. Not surprisingly, few Europeans understood the symbolism of what was happening to them. This may explain the story John Smith told of how the Powhatans, ready to brain him with a war club, were stopped when Pocahontas “got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.” While many scholars question whether the episode occurred at all, if it did take place, the preteen girl may have been playing a well-scripted role in an adoption ritual.

  Nor was youth or long captivity a guarantee of safety. If the captive didn’t play by the culturally expected rules, and especially if he or she tried to escape, all bets were off. Gyles’s brother James, who was captured with him, was held for three years by the Abenaki at Pentagoet. He eventually escaped with another Englishman, but they were both recaptured and hauled back to Pentagoet, where they were tortured with fire and, like Waldron, had their noses and ears cut off and fed to them before being burned to death.

  As the Cochecho captives were tested (as the Maliseet saw it) or tortured (as the Englishmen viewed it), Gyles assumed his turn was next. “I look’d on one and another, but could not perceive that any Eye pitied me,” he wrote. But then a woman stepped into the circle and laid down a bag of corn, while a young girl took the boy by the hand and led him away. John Gyles’s life with the Maliseet had begun.

  Summer passed into autumn, the sky filled with clamorous flocks of waterfowl and the maples flaming orange. The Maliseets caught fish from the river, picked pungent alaqiminol (wild grapes), and dug the starchy roots of pkuwahqiyaskul (cattails) and skicinuwi-poceteso (groundnuts). The family band of eight or ten people to which Gyles now belonged began traveling up the wolastokuk toward their winter hunting grounds, hundreds of miles inland. When the river froze, they cached their canoes and walked on the thickening ice, carrying what they needed on their backs and building rafts to cross whatever open water they encountered.

  “I met with no Abuse from them,” Gyles recounted, “tho’ I was put to great Harships in carrying Burdens, and for want of Food: for they underwent the same Difficulty, and would often encourage me, saying, in broken English, By-by—great deal Moose.” Gyles kept expecting the band to settle down, but instead they moved from camp to camp throughout the winter, covering an enormous swath of northern Maine and New Brunswick, eventually crossing the Notre Dame Mountains on the Gaspé Peninsula.

  Although he was unaware of it at the time, the Maliseets weren’t dragging Gyles around aimlessly. Among the Wapánahki, family bands had traditional hunting territories, usually delineated by watersheds and encompassing sizable, sometimes widely separated, tracts of land. Like the network of canoe paths that linked the expansive forests and mountains of wôbanakik, these hunting grounds, even though they covered thousands of square miles, were familiar, their routes and boundaries passed down through the oral tradition and reinforced by the annual round of seasonal travel.

  In the words of two modern scholars (speaking in this case of the western Abenaki), “It is not really accurate to say that a family band actually owned its territory . . . Indeed, it might even be said that the members of the band belonged to the territory, so close was their identification with it.” To an English farmer such as Thomas Gyles, the Maliseet were shiftless nomads, but to the Maliseet, the idea of voluntarily leaving one’s homeland and crossing the ocean to live in a new place was incomprehensible, even pathological. Viewed from their perspective, it was the agrarian Europeans who were the nomads, each generation pushing into new lands, leaving home ever farther behind. To the Maliseet, that would have seemed to be a form of insanity.

  There were two men in the band, armed with muskets, on whom the group depended for food. Winter was the best time for big-game hunting, since even with their long legs, moose bogged down in the heavy drifts, while men on snowshoes could easily cut off the fleeing animals. Sometimes the hunters found denned black bears, heavy with fat, and when one of these was brought in, the old women would stand outside the bark wigwam “shaking
their Hands and Body as in a Dance: and singing Wegage Oh Nelo Woh! which if Englished would be, Fat is my eating.”

  More often that winter, the band went without food for three or four days at a time, and once Gyles ascribed their salvation to divine intervention. The two hunters had chased a moose, hoping that the thin crust on the snow, which held up the men but through which the moose sank, would give them an advantage. But the bull escaped into a swamp, and they lost the trail in the dark. The next morning, they returned to find that the moose, crashing away in its haste, had broken through the ice and gotten tangled in the roots of a toppled tree, dislocating its hip. “GOD wonderfully provides for all Creatures!” Gyles concluded.

  In spring, the band stitched the hides of several moose around wooden frames, calked them with charcoal and balsam gum, and floated down the St. John in the makeshift skin boats, trading them for their cached bark canoes as they made their way back to Meductic. Gyles settled into his new life as a captive—helping to plant and weed the corn that spring and summer, fishing for salmon, digging for roots, drying the mature corn in autumn, and placing it in bark-lined pits where it was safe from animals and weather, then packing up once more for a winter of travel and hunting.

  Some European captives, such as Eunice Williams, were eventually adopted as full members of a community, while others were not. In Williams’s case, there was a Mohawk family anxious to replace a dead daughter. Perhaps there was no similar desire among any of the Maliseets holding Gyles. Or perhaps it was a matter of attitude: Gyles remained very pointedly English throughout his captivity. Then again, he was always treated as a slave; it’s worth wondering how this adaptable, curious boy would have fared—and how firm his identity as an Englishman would have remained—if he’d been welcomed as a son into a Maliseet family.

  As it was, Gyles and several other male captives in Meductic were never viewed as anything other than chattel—worked hard, poorly clothed (until it fell off his back in pieces years later, Gyles wore the same, outgrown shirt in which he was captured, along with a breechclout and a greasy blanket), always at risk of suffering the indignities and abuse considered acceptable in the treatment of captives. One old woman, for instance, took particular delight in tormenting hostages, throwing scoops of hot embers on adults or dragging children through the fire. Yet Gyles managed to avoid the worst excesses on all but one occasion.

  A year and a half after his capture, Gyles’s Maliseet owners went to Canada, leaving him in the care of several other Indians, who took him downriver to help plant corn. When he arrived, however, he was grabbed by Indians he didn’t know and, with another English captive named James Alexander, was beaten so severely that the two could barely walk for several days.

  Interestingly, it was not Maliseets from Meductic who initiated this abuse, but visiting Mi’kmaqs from southern Nova Scotia. “This was occasioned by two Families of Cape Sable Indians, who having lost some Friends by a number of English fishermen, came some hundreds of Miles to revenge themselves on the poor Captives,” Gyles wrote. When the Mi’kmaqs and others came back for Gyles several days later, his master had him hide in a swamp until they gave up the search. Alexander wasn’t as lucky and was again severely beaten.

  Such heavy-handed torture aside, slaves had to accept a certain degree of day-to-day abuse. But every rope has its breaking point. While Gyles was cutting wood one day, a young Maliseet man of about twenty—“a stout, ill-natur’d young Fellow”—threw Gyles to the ground, sat on his chest, and pulled a knife, saying he’d never killed an Englishman.

  Gyles tried to talk him out of it—“I told him he might go to War, and that would be more Manly”—but as the Maliseet began stabbing him, Gyles grabbed the man’s hair and flipped him onto his back. Now the English boy’s dander was up, the consequences be damned. “I . . . follow’d him with my Fist and Knee so, that he presently said he had enough; but when I saw the Blood run & felt the Smart, I [went] at him again and bid him get up and not lie there like a Dog,—told him of his former Abuses offered to me & other poor Captives, and that if he ever offered the like to me again, I would pay him double.”

  Gyles marched the bully back to the village, where the other Maliseets praised Gyles for his actions. “And I don’t remember that ever he offered me the least Abuse afterward; tho’ he was big enough to have dispatched two of me.”

  As with anyone living in the woods, Gyles had his share of narrow escapes, though none quite as racking as the blizzard that caused such profound frostbite in his feet. Like many Europeans, John never learned to swim, which the Maliseets found amusing—and no doubt a little puzzling, since most Wapánahki children learned to swim at an early age. Once, after a day of spearing salmon, his companions encouraged him to join them in a deep pool in the river. When with some reluctance he did, he dropped straight to the bottom, where he would have drowned if a young girl, following his bubbles, had not swum down, grabbed him by the hair, and pulled him to the surface.

  On another occasion, he and a Maliseet were spearing giant Atlantic sturgeon when the man misstepped in their canoe, flipping it and dumping both of them into the river. Gyles floundered to the surface, grabbing the crossbar of the upside-down boat and keeping his face above water in the small pocket of air trapped beneath the canoe. His feet thrashed in the current, but he couldn’t touch the bottom.

  For fifteen minutes, he clung to the boat as it drifted downstream, the air quickly running out, “expecting every Minute that the Indian wou’d have tow’d me to the Bank: But he had other Fish to Fry!” When Gyles’s feet finally found purchase on a rocky point half a mile downriver, he clambered weakly ashore and saw that the Maliseet was still hauling in the eight- to ten-foot sturgeon he’d speared. “I went to him, and asked, Why did he not tow me to the Bank, seeing he knew I could not Swim? He said he knew that I was under the Canoe, for there were no Bubbles any where to be seen, & that I should [eventually] drive on the Point: therefore he took care of his fine Sturgeon.”

  Another time, James Alexander, the captive tortured with Gyles, used the Maliseet’s terror of the Mohawk—“a most ambitious, haughty and blood-thirsty people”—to have some fun. The weather had turned hot, and the villagers kept Gyles and Alexander running constantly to and from the spring for cool water. After dark, Alexander set a copper kettle at the top of a hill studded with tree stumps, then ran back to the palisaded village, “puffing & blowing, as in the utmost Surprize,” claiming he’d seen something near the spring and thought it might be Mohawks.

  Alexander’s master, a respected warrior, followed him into the darkness, and as they came to the hill, the boy pointed to the stumps and nudged the kettle with his toe. “At every turn of the Kettle the bail clattered; upon which James and his master could see a Mohawk in every stump . . . and turn’d tail to, and he was the best man that could run fastest.” The village cleared out, dozens of people fleeing for more than two weeks. By that time, “the heat of the Weather being over, our hard Service abated for this Season.”

  These dryly humorous episodes are only one way in which Gyles’s account differs from Mary Rowlandson’s. His story doesn’t seem to have been intended simply, or even primarily, as a moral lesson, in which every indignity is an opportunity to see God’s plan, and in which the Indians are satanic actors against whose machinations the righteous must persevere.

  Gyles was hardly irreligious—he accepted as casual fact that the Maliseet “not brought over to the Romish faith” worshipped the devil, and he highlighted what he saw as divine intervention during his stay, such as the crippled moose that warded off the band’s starvation. But he claimed no special providence as a Christian among heathens. In the case of that moose, for example, God was providing “for all Creatures,” and Gyles explicitly lumped himself and his Maliseet captors together as deserving recipients, something few hard-line Puritans would have considered. And it wasn’t until a friendly Franciscan priest, preaching against the evils of torture, pointed out that every member o
f the two Mi’kmaq families that so severely beat Gyles and James Alexander died before they left Meductic that Gyles, too, decided it was a case of providential justice. “Were it not for this Remark of the Priest, I should not, perhaps, have made the Observation,” he admitted.

  But with age and time in captivity, Gyles seemed to grow into sensible skepticism about religion on both sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide, with little patience for zealots in either camp. The boy who once refused to eat a biscuit out of fear of Catholic magic was upbraided by a fellow English prisoner for wanting to see a ceremony in which a Jesuit was to sprinkle holy water on fields of French wheat to exorcise flocks of hungry blackbirds. “He said, that I was then as bad a Papist as they, and a d—n’d Fool. I told him that I believ’d as little of it as they did, but I inclined to [go] see the Ceremony”—and so he did.

  After six years among the Maliseet, John Gyles’s fortunes took a dramatic turn. When his second master died, the man’s widow and Gyles’s first captor argued heatedly about who should get the slave. “Malicious persons” suggested they settle the dispute by killing the captive, but the village priest proposed they sell him to the French instead—perhaps to merchants at the mouth of the river or to gentlemen visiting the colonies on a French warship.

  Gyles pleaded that if he must be sold, let it be to one of the traders, since he believed that if he was taken to France, he’d never see New England again. Yet when he was informed that he had, in fact, been bought by one of the merchants, he was inconsolable. “I . . . went into the Woods alone and wept until I could scarce see or stand! The word Sold, and to a People of that Perswasion, which my dear Mother so much detested, and in her last words manifested so great Fears of my falling into!”