War-torn waters; helpless colonists; fishermen held captive, impressed, or sold for ransom; their cargo and boats plundered; hapless colonial officials; indifferent metropolitan authorities; and, not least, a Native American Dawnland from the Gulf of Maine to Nova Scotia whose waters Indian mariners plied with confidence, authority, and brutal effectiveness from the mid-seventeenth century to the close of the Seven Years War. This is the scene historian Matthew R. Bahar sets in his book Storm of the Sea: Indians & Empires in the Atlantic's Age of Sail. In it, Bahar (Oberlin College) convincingly argues that Native American resistance to British colonialism in the northwest Atlantic is best understood from the water. Here was a space foundational to the spiritual worldview of various indigenous groups, which, over a century, coalesced into an identity as the Wabanaki confederacy. In the process, they coopted European sail technology and combined it with knowledge of local waters; a sparse, weak, and ineffective European presence throughout most of the region; and a shrewd diplomacy in the colonial wars between France and Great Britain to essentially undermine and thus set the terms of British colonialism over much of the period from the founding of English North America to the eve of the American Revolution.

Bahar proceeds chronologically, relying primarily on the records of colonial and metropolitan officials, but also – where they exist – the voices of colonists, fishermen and other European mariners, indigenous voices and Native American oral histories. He begins by examining the centrality of the deep sea and coastal waters within the spiritual worldview of Abanaki, Mi'kmaq, Penobscot, and other groups from Boston to Nova Scotia, particularly placing the cultural significance of this “Dawnland” in contrast to the mystery, danger, and isolation of the inland forests, a juxtaposition that emerges throughout the rest of the book as Native peoples are increasingly implicated in the inland fur trade even as the ocean remained a spiritual, economic, and strategic space significant to their encounters and intercourse with Europeans.

From there, Bahar traces the effectiveness of what he sees as Native American sea power within the numerous imperial wars pitting France against Great Britain. In nearly all of these, Wabanaki seaborne attacks proved devastating, and, Bahar argues, effective time and again at first expelling British settlers and mariners from sparsely settled Maine and later Nova Scotia and then welcoming them back in peacetime on terms largely set by Native American diplomacy. Settlers, for example, were confined to delineated places and, for a time, paid tribute to local Indian groups.

Throughout, Bahar traces the emergence of a pan-Indian Wabanaki identity centered around the late seventeenth-century leadership of the Penobscot sagamore Madockawando. Even so, he attends to various differences in diplomacy, geography, and strategy, and, by the end of the period, an emerging split between Native groups closer to New France and those increasingly beset by colonists from Massachusetts farther to the south. He also examines – though with less depth and commitment – the ways seaborne raiding intersected with indigenous conceptions of masculinity even as these were reconceived by the emergence and decline of the fur trade.

With the defeat of New France, however, with a generational and geographical split from within the Wabanaki confederacy, and with the continued decline of the fur trade, Bahar argues that the period of Indian influence as major players in the waters off Maine and Nova Scotia came to an end. Nevertheless, he has reintroduced the Wabanaki as central players in British North America whose power and influence have long been overlooked by historians. He has also laid bare in a compelling way just how weak and ineffective the British colonies in this region were throughout the colonial period. In looking to the sea as an important and perhaps surprising space of indigenous–European encounter, Bahar follows the wake of and adds considerably to the excellent scholarship by Andrew Lipman and Joshua L. Reid, though one wonders why Bahar has chosen not to adopt or engage with the former's “saltwater frontier” as an analytical framework. Nevertheless, Bahar shows the value in plumbing the often overlooked watery spaces of colonial North America, finding there compelling new stories that reframe our understanding of these encounters and the overarching European colonial projects more broadly.

As with most compelling and provocative books, this reader wishes for more – more Native American voices, particularly on the question of an emerging common identity; more on the evolutionary process of Native mariners coopting sailing knowledge and technology; more comparisons to the ways Wabanaki were like or unlike other Native groups whose seaborne prowess interrupted European colonial ambitions; and more analysis of the reasons why metropolitan officials failed to respond effectively, or even at all, to these attacks even as Bahar argues they threatened the very underpinnings of the British Empire in both the fisheries that sustained the Caribbean slave economy and the timber reserves so important for British naval mastery. In a well- and often beautifully written book, sometimes Bahar seems to barely conceal his own pleasure in exposing the wretched condition of trembling colonists at the mercy of Indian power. All in all, this is a powerful book, valuable to a range of scholars, and useful in graduate and advanced undergraduate classes. It compels us to rethink the ways we teach and write about early America.