The Saltwater Frontier

A fascinating new perspective on Native seafaring and colonial violence in the seventeenth-century American Northeast

Winner of the 2016 Bancroft Prize in American History

“Gripping. . . . Lipman innovatively uses the sea to unite the histories of New York, New England and the region’s native peoples by following the sailing ships and canoes along Long Island Sound up to Nantucket.”—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal

Andrew Lipman’s eye-opening first book is the previously untold story of how the ocean became a “frontier” between colonists and Indians. When the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape Cod, the sea itself became the arena of contact and conflict. During the violent European invasions, the region’s Algonquian-speaking Natives were navigators, boatbuilders, fishermen, pirates, and merchants who became active players in the emergence of the Atlantic World. Drawing from a wide range of English, Dutch, and archeological sources, Lipman uncovers a new geography of Native America that incorporates seawater as well as soil. Looking past Europeans’ arbitrary land boundaries, he reveals unseen links between local episodes and global events on distant shores.

Lipman’s book “successfully redirects the way we look at a familiar history” (Neal Salisbury, Smith College). Extensively researched and elegantly written, this addition to Yale’s seventeenth-century American history list brings the early years of New England and New York vividly to life.