Table of Contents

Soundings

PART I. ALONGSHORE
1. Alongshore: Stories to Tell of the Virginias
2. "The Island"

PART II. SHARED BEACHES
3. The Quarterdeck and Trading Station
4. Natives and Strangers

PART III. STAYING ALONGSHORE
5. Sovereign People
6. Masters of Their Lands
7. Inland Drownings

PART IV. OMENS OF A TRAGEDY COMING ON
8. Bells of War
9. "Only This and Nothing More"
10. The Connecticut Valley: The Strangers' Ways of Violence

PART V. DEADLY ENCOUNTER
11. The Indian War Seen
12. The Indian War Given Words
13. The War's Haunting

PART VI. CROSS-COLONIZATION
14. Watchful Waiting
15. Alongshore Compromised
16. Considerations on a Just War

PART VII. FINAL LOGGED ENTRIES
17. Cultural Entanglement
18. No Closure

Weighing Up

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

During the forty years of the Dutch presence in colonial America, their intrusion led to the betrayal of their own values and the betrayal of the indigenous peoples. They reaped the shame of reproaching themselves for unjust wars and faced a native insurgency that they could neither negotiate nor satisfactorily quell.

About the Author

Donna Merwick is Senior Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, Long Term Visiting Fellow at Australian National University, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research at the Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time, also available from University of Pennsylvania Press, and Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York.

Reviews

"Merwick is unafraid of 'weighing up' the evidence carefully to recapture the 'moral murkiness' that dominated seventeenth-century Netherlanders' efforts. . . . [A] beautifully constructed work."-Australasian Journal of American Studies "Merwick's book is certainly interesting, often beautifully written, but it is also a strong contribution to historical scholarship."-American Historical Review