Abstract
In the London summer of 1762, Lord Egremont, the Secretary of State in charge of Britain’s overseas colonies, welcomed the latest arrival of an indigenous diplomat to the imperial metropolis. The Cherokee warrior, Ostenaco, had travelled to London to meet King George III, ostensibly to seal a peace treaty just signed between the British and the Cherokee back in the Appalachians. Egremont was a gracious host and ensured that Ostenaco would, during his two-month stay, ‘want for nothing’.1 To the governor of Virginia who had arranged his trip, however, Egremont was less warm. ‘You rightly observe’, he wrote to Governor Fauquier, ‘that such visitors are always troublesome’.2
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Notes
H. Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake (1765), (ed.), D. H. King (Cherokee, N. C.: Museum of the Cherokee, 2009), 59.
I use the term ‘broker’ and ‘go-between’ as discussed in S. J. Schaffer, L. Roberts, K. Raj, & J. Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2009).
See also A. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005);
M. C. Szasz (ed.), Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
On Raleigh, see A. T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–41
and K. Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain 1710–95 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 20–24.
See Fullagar, The Savage Visit, ch. 1; F. Karttunen, ‘Interpreters Snatched from the Shore’ in E. G. Gray & N. Fiering (eds), The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 215–29.
See J. Oliphant. ‘The Cherokee Embassy to London, 1762’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27, 1 (1999), 1–26;
K. Smith, Bennelong (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 2001).
See, for example, W. Anderson, ‘The Cherokee World Before and After Timberlake’ in A. F. Rogers and B. R. Duncan (eds), Culture and Conflict: Chrokee British Relations 1756–1765 (Cherokee, N.C.: Museum of the Cherokee Indian, 2009), 9.
See Evans, ‘Notable Persons in Cherokee History’, 44; Oliphant, ‘The Cherokee Embassy’, 1; J. Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier 1756–63 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 191, 195;
D. H. Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740–62 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 263.
See for example, L. J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 50.
See Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 76.
On this incident and on Cherokee forts generally, see D. Ingram, Indians and British Outposts in Eighteenth-Century America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012), 27–58.
See C. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 188–89;
G. Nash, Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1974), 298–305.
G. Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 40;
K. Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 63.
E. McCormick, Omai: Pacific Envoy (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1977), vii, 132.
McCormick, Omai, 1; Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 284.
Admiralty instructions cited in H. Wallis (ed.), Carteret’s Voyage Round the World 1766–69 Vol 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 302.
See A. Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Penguin, 2003), 311.
For his return, and the aftermath of Cook’s death, see Fullagar, Savage Visit, 145–48. And see N. Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York: Penguin, 2003), 292–348.
M. Langton, The First Australians (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 16, 29;
I. Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne: Text, 2003), 264;
B. Carr, 27 May 2000, cited in K. Smith, ‘Bennelong among his People’, Aboriginal History 33: 41 (2009).
W. H. Stanner, ‘The History of Indifference thus Begins’, Aboriginal History, 1, 19–20 (1977).
W. Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales… 1786–92, facsimile reprint (Sydney: Trustees of the Public Library of NSW, 1969), 181–83.
Stanner, ‘The History of Indifference’, 19–20; D. J. Mulvaney, A Good Foundation: Reflections on the Heritage of the First Government House (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985), 14.
D. Collins, Account of the English Colony at New South Wales Volume 2 (London, 1798), 49.
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© 2015 Kate Fullagar
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Fullagar, K. (2015). From Pawns to Players: Rewriting the Lives of Three Indigenous Go-Betweens. In: Jackson, W., Manktelow, E.J. (eds) Subverting Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_2
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