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Beyond Words: The Many Modes of
Communication in Early New England
Katherine A. Grandjean
Matt Cohen. The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ix + 237 pp. Figures, notes,
bibliography, and index. $22.50.
Printing arrived early in New England. In the summer of 1638, only a few short
years after the planting of Massachusetts Bay colony (and even as thousands
of migrant hopefuls were stepping ashore at Boston), the first press landed in
the English colonies. Its owner, Jose Glover, did not survive the Atlantic crossing. But the press itself, widowed and hulking and sturdy, went with Glover?s
wife to Cambridge and shortly became the centerpiece of the first printing
house in the English colonies. That colonists wasted no time in setting the
Cambridge press to work, of course, should not surprise historians. Among
those English who settled in America, New England colonists, especially, were
people of the book. As committed Protestants (most of them the ?hotter sort?
we know as ?Puritans?), they believed each man and woman should be able
to read scripture. As a culture, therefore, early New Englanders were more
literate than most in the Anglophone world, and also, it seems, simply more
enamored of reading and writing. Founders of the region, who envisioned it
as a ?city on a hill? that would beckon England toward reform, were intensely
aware of their place in history, and they penned the histories to prove it. Nor
was colonists? culture of print wholly dependent on the Cambridge press.
As David D. Hall and others have demonstrated, the colonial world of print
overlapped heavily with?and depended tremendously on?publications from
Europe. No matter the type in which the story is set, it is abundantly clear:
early New England, as scores of studies now attest, was a place of pens and
ink, of studied reverence toward the book.
Such devotion to writing, the story goes, may have given English colonists the upper hand in their encounter with America?s Natives. Indians, by
contrast, had no alphabetic literacy; unlike the English, they relied primarily
on oral communication to transmit information and to store memory. Such
a stark divide in ways of communicating, historians have largely concluded,
did not benefit Native people. Studies such as James Axtell?s ?The Power of
Reviews in American History 39 (2011) 228?233 ? 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

GRANDJEAN / Beyond Words

229

Print in the Eastern Woodlands? (1987) and Jill Lepore?s The Name of War: King
Philip?s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998) cast the written word
as a profoundly destructive force in Indian lives: it eased the dispossession of
Native people from land; it allowed the writing of enduring texts that excised
them from history; and, as a tool of missionaries such as John Eliot, it aided an
?invasion within? that robbed some Native converts of culture and identity.
But if scholars have sometimes drawn a fairly stark line between Native orality
and English literacy, recent studies are beginning to tell a more complex and
nuanced tale. Colonists, of course, also partook of oral culture, in songs and
sermons and stories, while Native people often used the power of writing for
their own purposes. In Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (2000), for instance, Hilary E. Wyss finds early Native
Christian writers fashioning a uniquely ?bicultural? identity in writing. Such
readings have been part of the scholarly conversation at least since the publication of Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett
(1988), but new methodology is now pushing scholars toward new insights.
Emblematic of what promises to be a new path in Native American studies,
Kristina Bross? and Hilary E. Wyss? recent collection Early Native Literacies in
New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (2008) insists on pushing
our conceptions of ?literacy? beyond the English alphabet in order to examine the varied literacies of which Native people were possessed. Such work
invites scholars to consider even the material objects (baskets, burial goods,
pictographs) that communicated messages among people.
In his ambitious new book, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early
New England, Matt Cohen takes up this mantle. The Networked Wilderness studies
the world of communications in early New England before the arrival of the
printing press in 1638. One of the book?s main contributions is its insistence
that scholars escape the restrictive categories of literacy and orality and, instead,
reimagine communications far more expansively. Cohen?s stated objective is to
?expand our vision of the information systems of early America? in order to
discover the role of communications systems in the settlement of New England
(p. 2). To that end, Cohen defines ?communications? rather broadly, to include
such performances and symbols as ?traps, paths, wampum, monuments, medical rituals, and other messaging systems,? as well as the poems, vocabularies,
and other texts that are more standard fare for book historians (p. 4). If this
approach sounds unwieldy, Cohen, thankfully, has chosen a few episodes to
read deeply. His method is to select for scrutiny several ?publication events,?
which he defines as ?embodied act[s] of information exchange [in which] . . .
participants are aware that an act of communication is intended? (p. 7). By
taking a fairly sprawling view of what constitutes ?communication,? Cohen
hopes both to ?break down the separation of indigenous studies from the
history of the book? and, presumably, to challenge the notion that Native and

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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2011

English ways of communicating (and encounters, generally) were inherently
imbalanced in early New England (p. 25).
Readers, be aware: the title of The Networked Wilderness is somewhat
misleading. It conjures images of Indian runners, passing rumors or news
of warfare from village to village, and suggests that the reader will learn
something about networks of news in early New England. For the most part,
those are not Cohen?s concerns. His approach is something more like that in
Robert Blair St. George?s Conversing By Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial
New England Culture (1998): we are treated to an intensive tour of the various
layers of meaning and implication in a few select texts. This book is not an
easy read, and it leans far more heavily on the techniques of literary criticism
than of history. But if Cohen?s approach is sometimes unorthodox, his choice
of material is not. All four episodes about which Cohen writes?Thomas Morton?s revelry at Ma-re mount; Edward Winslow?s curing of the Wampanoag
sachem Massasoit?s constipation; the publication of Roger Williams? A Key
into the Language of America (1643); and the Pequot War of 1636?38?are well
familiar to students of early New England. So familiar, in fact, that to convince
readers of the worthiness of further exploring such events is no small feat.
Luckily, Cohen has a few interpretive surprises to share.
In the first chapter, we revisit the story of Thomas Morton, who, in the
1620s, ran afoul of the authorities at Plymouth colony. Morton?s transgressions
were many: at his settlement, which he called ?Ma-re mount,? he erected a
Maypole and engaged in holiday celebrations to which the Separatists at
Plymouth were collectively opposed; he developed suspiciously cozy relations
with Indians; he dabbled in the fur trade, thus threatening Plymouth men?s
economic interests. Banished to England twice, Morton was ever a thorn in
the side of colonial leaders such as William Bradford (who spilled not a little
ink complaining about the merrymaker in his own history, Of Plimoth Plantation). Morton?s is an oft-told tale, but Cohen finds within it some additional
clues as to what may have so upset Bradford and his cohorts. He insists that
we set aside classic, facile interpretations that simply set Morton?s ?comedy?
against Bradford?s ?prudery.? What he sees in Morton?s Maypole (as well as
in his 1637 publication, New English Canaan) instead, is a much more complex
challenge to colonial authority?a ?conflict over information cultures and social power in early New England? (p. 30). Take, for example, the poems that
Morton fastened to the Maypole at Ma-re mount. As much as their content,
Cohen contends, it was the ?mode of presenting them that constituted the core
of his challenge to the Pilgrims? (p. 30). By treating the Maypole as a kind
of ?publishing venue? that ?competed with the Pilgrim leaders? control? of
communications, and?worse, even?included Native people in this alternative public sphere, Morton earned the ire of Puritans unready to see Indians
as literate folk. Morton, Cohen argues, treated Indians ?as protoliterate by

GRANDJEAN / Beyond Words

231

English standards of the time,? while casting Plymouth?s leaders as ?a halfliterate set of followers?: a radical position, indeed (pp. 33, 35).
Does Morton?s invitation of Indians into the world of English communication explain why he was persecuted so ?violently? (p. 26)? Cohen thinks
so; but he is hard pressed to make this case. One wonders whether we need
to perceive Native people as part of the intended ?audience? for Morton?s
poems in order to understand, truly, why Bradford and others found him so
threatening. Cohen writes that the ?consensus among historians,? of late, is
that Morton?s involvement in the fur trade motivated Plymouth?s prosecution
of him?despite the fact that he was merely a ?small competitor among many
others? (p. 32). Historians have also acknowledged, however, that Morton?s
inclusion of Indians in the revelry at Ma-re mount earned him a fair amount
of negative attention, most notably in William Bradford?s writing. In Manitou
and Providence: Indians, Europeans and the Making of New England, 1500?1643
(1982), for instance, Neal Salisbury notes the allegedly debauched festivities
at Morton?s plantation, where, according to Bradford, men beckoned ?Indian
women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather? (see pp. 157?61). Bradford may have exaggerated the
goings-on at Ma-re mount, but nonetheless, Cohen?s interpretation points not
so much to a new explanation of why Morton earned such punishment as a
richer picture of his more general inclusion of Native people in the settlement?s
social world?including in its world of publication.
Subsequent chapters find Cohen musing on subject matter as wide-ranging
as Galenic medicine and tribal recognition. Leaving Morton, we are whisked
away to the sick bed of Massasoit, the ailing Wampanoag sachem who was
cured of constipation in the early 1620s by Plymouth?s Edward Winslow. Cohen reads this incident as restorative of metaphorical balances of power: by
curing Massasoit and writing about it in Good Newes from New-England (1624),
Winslow simultaneously demonstrated to English audiences a colonial ability
to minister to a Native body politic (via the body of its leader) and signaled
unthreatening mastery of medicine to a Wampanoag audience. In ?Forests
of Gestures,? the book?s third chapter, Cohen meditates on Roger Williams?
famous Key into the Language of America (1643) as a daring ?critique of the entire organization of English government and society? that used metaphors of
Indian mobility to show that Native people were open to ?potential channels
for godly communication? (pp. 93?94, 103). These chapters feature fascinating
close examination of familiar texts. Still, this material does not always cohere.
In general, the book?s chapters read like self-contained articles, rather than a
fluid narrative.
The book?s fourth chapter, ?Multimedia Combat and the Pequot War,? is
by far its most lucid and readable. Here, Cohen walks the reader through the
exhibits of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, almost as

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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2011

if by hand. We listen in on conversation between a docent and a visitor; peer
over a spectator?s shoulder to ?watch? The Witness, a multimillion-dollar film
that recreates the infamous 1637 massacre at Mystic fort in which hundreds
of Pequots perished; step into the museum?s Gathering Space, which mimics the shape of the fort as drawn in a 1637 engraving. Cohen?s analysis of
the museum is thoughtful and provocative (perhaps enough to ruffle a few
feathers, in fact). Some readers may not like Cohen?s charge that the ?Pequot
Museum tells the tale of the massacre from the point of view of a certain
idealized Mashantucket Pequot tribal perspective,? nor his contention that
much of The Witness is ?at odds both with historical sources and with the
presentation of the war in the media featured in galleries outside the theater?
(pp. 134, 138). But his observation that the exhibits, in effect, call attention to
the ?process of reading? the past, rather than ?transmit a particular interpretation,? is apt (p. 139). And, to be sure, the many iterations of the Pequot War
in the media of the last 400 years beg to be set in dialogue with one another.
It is a worthwhile project to juxtapose the 1630s manipulation of the war?s
story in various media with modern representations. What is at times unclear,
however, is how some of this modern material relates to early New England?s
?networked wilderness??especially given that the rest of the book is almost
exclusively concerned with the very earliest years of the region?s settlement.
The book contains some captivating close readings. Especially when looking
carefully at typology and other visual elements, Cohen offers new insights
into the hoariest of texts. He points out, for instance, that war ?cryes? evoking the ?gathering Native forces? in John Underhill?s 1637 narrative of the
Pequot War are not merely described, but also appear almost physically on the
page. ?The effect is enhanced typographically: marginal notes begin to appear
on this page, calling out like the Niantics from the shore, surrounding and
qualifying the text, not disappearing until just after the fort Mystic battle? (p.
151). And in Roger Williams? Key, Cohen notices, the line separating Algonquian and English phrases?which others have seen as representative of an
impermeable barrier between the two cultures?is ?perforated.? Cohen likens
this visual cue to an episode in which, as Williams describes, Narragansett
sachem Canonicus expressed his dissatisfaction at English deception by way
of a severed stick: the Native man broke the stick ten times to symbolize ten
instances of English ?perfidy.? This was, in a sense, a means of communication
that had some resonance for both Indians and English. If it signified broken
trust to Canonicus, it was also resonant of English accounting practices of
the early modern period: long-term debt was sometimes measured by way of
the ?tally,? a notched wooden stick. In other words, this was a symbol where
Native and English meanings met?though they were not entirely analogous.
Much the same is implied by Williams? ?perforated? vocabulary of English
and Algonquian terms (pp. 110?11, 115).

GRANDJEAN / Beyond Words

233

This is a bold work, in which we glimpse the promise of a new communications history. Relinquishing our notions of colonists as, simply, people of the
book, and Indians as, simply, people of the spoken word, Cohen?s work makes
clear, is necessary and fruitful. In the end, The Networked Wilderness somewhat
overpromises on its ability to reread early New England. The summary on the
back of the book suggests that its contents demonstrate how ?struggles over
information technology were as important as theology, guns, germs, or steel in
shaping the early colonization of North America.? More work will be required
to bear out that argument. When it comes to mapping the communications
encounter in early America, much remains to be done. In all likelihood, this
will mean conceiving of early American ?communications? far more broadly,
as Cohen indicates. Except with regard to print culture, seventeenth-century
communications remain largely mysterious. Beyond the four selected scenes
examined in The Networked Wilderness, the basic mechanics of intercultural
communication are relegated to the shadows. We still know remarkably little
about how people, things, and news traveled in early America?or even how
Native and English people spoke to one another. Scholarly work reconstructing
those channels is long overdue. This is not that book. Nonetheless, one hopes
that Matt Cohen?s interests signal a new turn toward scholarly examination
of early American communications?in the round.
Katherine A. Grandjean is assistant professor of early American history at
Wellesley College. She is at work on a study of travel, communications, and
intercultural encounter in the seventeenth-century northeast, entitled Reckoning: The Communications Frontier in Early New England.