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King of the Indians: The Hard Fate and Curious Career of Peter Williamson
Timothy J. Shannon
Hard fate to suffer all this! harder still to be prosecuted for telling the interesting tale!
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| —Peter Williamson1 |
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WAS it all just a big lie? |
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The city fathers of Aberdeen, Scotland, certainly thought so. In June 1758 a ragged figure appeared in their city, calling himself Peter Williamson and telling a fantastic tale. He claimed to have been kidnapped from those very streets fifteen years earlier, when he was only eight years old, and spirited away to North America. The vessel that carried him across the Atlantic was shipwrecked off the New Jersey coast, but Williamson survived, only to be sold in Philadelphia to a sympathetic Scotsman who had been carried to America by the same hard luck. |
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Five years later Williamson gained his freedom unexpectedly when his master died. He spent the next seven years "jobbing about the country" and then settled down to marry the daughter of a prosperous Pennsylvania planter, who gave the young couple two hundred acres of land in the Lehigh Valley.2 For a brief time life was good, but then fortune's wheel spun again. Delaware Indians raided Williamson's homestead. His wife was away at the time, but the Indians took Williamson captive. For the next three months, he traveled with his captors, witnessing their raids on other colonial farms and the gruesome tortures and murders they inflicted on those less fortunate than he. Convinced that a similar death awaited him, Williamson seized the opportunity one winter's night to escape. Nearly naked and frozen, he arrived at his father-in-law's home, only to learn that his wife had died during his absence. His tale excited the curiosity and sympathy of many, including Pennsylvania Governor Robert Hunter Morris, who awarded him three pounds after hearing his tale. |
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Williamson had no desire to return to his farm. A man bereft, he took to soldiering. After enlisting in the army, he was stationed at Fort Oswego when that Lake Ontario post fell to a French and Indian force in August 1756, and he survived the mayhem that followed when the Indians took scalps and plunder from the conquered British. Once again Williamson endured captivity, this time as a prisoner of war. He spent a month in a Quebec jail before boarding a ship with hundreds of other paroled British soldiers for the voyage home. Despite harsh weather and meager rations, Williamson survived his second Atlantic passage and landed at Plymouth, England, in November 1756. Four months later his superiors judged him unfit for service because of a wound he had received in his hand and discharged him from the army. Finding himself cut adrift yet again, and with only six shillings in his pocket, Williamson set out for Aberdeen.3 |
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Then things got really interesting. |
. . . |
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