Peter N. Moore weaves a narrative of imperial and Indigenous rivalries in the colonial southeast through the lens of a raid on Santa Catalina de Afuica in March 1785. With the support of their Scottish partners, Yamasee warriors Page 228 →attacked the Spanish mission for the Timucua in central Florida, raiding for captives to enslave and sell. The Scottish–Yamasee partnership that facilitated the raid “marked a turning point in the history of the colonial southeast.” Moore stresses that this moment was far from inevitable; indeed, it was contingent on “local circumstances, personal rivalries, unexpected opportunities, and shifting conditions.” Although it took place within the context of a transition from Spanish to British colonization from 1660 to 1690, Indigenous peoples held the power in the region.

His prologue details the Indigenous South Carolina before and during their encounters with Spanish colonizers. Coastal Indians maintained seven autonomous towns, which they occupied seasonally. Autonomy was sacred to coastal Indians as “their values and practices, their very separateness itself, had a spiritual source and a religious dimension, and they were reflected in myth and ritual.” The Spanish established a settlement at Saint Helena, a location strategically determined by the Orista. Moore explains that the Orista did not trust the Spanish, so they “steered” them “to a location that marginalized the Spaniards while prioritizing their own economic, territorial, and defense needs.” However, when the coastal Indians could not control the Spanish in their region politically and economically, they turned to warfare. When Spanish Ensign Hernando Moyano disrupted an Escamaçu religious feast in 1576, the coastal Indians slaughtered Moyano and twenty of his men. The Guale joined the Escamaçu in fighting the Spanish, and soon the Escamaçu War became a “regional conflict that united Natives all along the southeastern coast.” The pan-Indian alliance proved fragile, and the Spanish abandoned Saint Elena in 1587.

Moore skips ahead to the 1660s in the first chapter, with English colonization and the Westo invasion. He titles it “Maneaters,” because Indians around the English settlement at Charles Town reported that the Westo were cannibals. Moore claims the Westo invasion brought about the collapse of the coastal peoples and “opened the door to Scottish and Yamasee colonization of Port Royal.” The Yamasee did not come into existence until around 1663. They were one of the “southeast’s coalescent societies,” a loose confederation of previously separate groups forced together through the instability brought on by European colonization. As the Westo moved into the area, coastal Indians allied with the English for protection. Moore challenges traditional historiography in his interpretation of the Westo War. Although other scholars have viewed it through an Anglocentric perspective, he argues that the Westo were not “English puppets” and that they were asserting their power in the region with violence and captive-taking.

Page 229 →Moore provides a trans-Atlantic history of Scottish desire to create an empire in the Americas in the 1680s in the second chapter. The Church of Scotland embraced Presbyterianism, which rejected a state-controlled church, and many members, called Covenanters, took an oath to defend it. When Charles Stuart took the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1625, his adherence to the episcopal system of the Church of England threatened Scottish Presbyterianism. Furthermore, the English Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, forbidding the Scottish from trading with England’s colony. In 1681, the Scots were able to establish a colony at Port Royal within England’s territory in South Carolina. In 1682, Scots, led by Covenanters, founded a joint-stock company, the Carolina Company. As the Scottish government fiercely persecuted Covenanters in Scotland, “the colonial scheme took a greater sense of urgency,” and Stuarts Town was born out of this apocalyptic moment.” Moore’s discussion of the convict trade will prove problematic for some readers, as he claims that “in Carolina, they were treated like slaves.” In his notes, he explains how he follows “John Donoghue’s lead in seeing indentured servitude and chattel slavery as two varieties of enslavement rather than two completely distinct labor systems.” However, this downplays the racial ideologies that perpetuated the enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples in the Americas for centuries.

In the third chapter, cleverly titled “Unsettling Port Royal,” Moore details the demographic chaos of the colony in 1684. Coastal Indians, Scottish religious refugees, Yamasee, and fugitives from Spanish missions in Florida came to populate Port Royal. Through separate treaties, nine coastal Indian towns ceded their lands to the Lords Proprietors of South Carolina. Although this was supposed to ensure their protection from enslavement, colonial authorities defied agreements with the Lords Proprietors. The demographics were not balanced. By 1685, there were as many as two thousand Indians living at Port Royal but only around sixty Scots. Nonetheless, “the Scots had big dreams for Stuarts Town, envisioning it as the seat of a Scottish empire.” This might have been possible through their alliance with the Yamasee.

Moore turns up the heat in chapter four, “Consuming Fire.” By the end of 1684, the Lord Proprietors outlawed Carolina’s Indian slave trade and placed restrictions on the export of Indigenous peoples for enslavement. However, the Scottish settlers and Yamasee “reignited the trade.” In the raid on Santa Catalina de Afuica in March 1785, the Yamasee took twenty-eight captives. The Yamasee kept only two of them, and the Scots sold the rest in South Carolina and the West Indies. The raid was “a clear assertion of Page 230 →Scottish empire,” as well as a signal of Yamasee power. The Scots also began to seek enslaved Africans to work in their colony. The Spanish, Timucua, and Apalachee exacted revenge by sacking a Yamasee settlement at Santa Catalina de Guale and leaving Stuarts Town in ruins.

Moore’s epilogue traces the aftermath. He explains that “the timing for a new colony was all wrong; in some sense, it was doomed to fail from its inception.” He also discusses Scottish settler William Dunlop’s paradoxical history with slavery. He went to South Carolina “as a missionary to Native people but ended up enslaving them.” Dunlop went on to write a document that seems to be proslavery and antislavery at the same time. Intriguingly, the Yamasee were able to establish communities at Port Royal without the Scots until the English began to encroach on their lands in the early 1700s. Moore’s concise monograph is a quick read. Because significant portions of it have been published elsewhere, the chapters stand alone well and could quite easily be assigned to more advanced students individually.

Erica Johnson, Francis Marion University