Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

This is an original and unusual work that defies easy categorization. It is a heavily illustrated paperback of just 100 pages of text in an 8 x 11-inch format, yet it includes footnotes and other scholarly trappings. Skulking Way of War is also more than ten years old, as it was first published by Madison House in 1991 and then reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1993. Patrick M. Malone apparently designed his work to attract the widest possible audience of general readers, students, and academics interested in the technology and tactics of warfare among natives and Europeans in seventeenth-century New England. With some reservations, readers in each of these groups will find useful and informative discussion. Largely based on his Brown University dissertation and a 1973 American Quarterly article, Skulking Way of War documents the origins of a distinctively American variety of frontier warfare that emerged as the result of a cultural exchange between Europeans and New England natives in the seventeenth century. The English, Dutch, and French contributed European technology, most significantly in the form of the flintlock musket, which the Wampanoags, Nipmucks, Pequots, Mohegans, and other tribes integrated into their existing culture of hunting and armed conflicts. For their part, the English were reluctant to accept native tactics into their own style of warfare until the experiences of King Philip's War (1676-77) made it a necessity.	1
The new type of frontier warfare hinged on how the musket was used in the field. European soldiers were a disciplined and regimented lot, trained to fire in volleys on command in open battlefields. European soldiers and their militia counterparts in New England were not trained to seek individual targets, but to concentrate their fire in the general direction of a massed enemy. This of course would not do on the New England frontier, where armies of fighters were not likely to seek battle in open country. New England natives, in contrast, had a long hunting tradition, in which stealth and shooting accuracy were the skills needed to kill nervous game or a wary human enemy. Natives quickly discovered that muskets served their purposes of long-distance weapons just as well as their bows, and in many situations, they found muskets superior. For them, adoption of firearms was an easy and natural cultural adaptation. When open warfare broke out between the English colonies and several of the New England tribes, Malone suggests that the natives held the advantage. Native fighters had already acquired muskets and had mastered their use. They had made sophisticated assessments of these new weapons, quickly discerning the advantage of the flintlock over the matchlock, for example. Natives learned how to use muskets to their own advantage and had obtained the means to repair them. In addition, their individualistic tactics were better suited to frontier conditions than European methods of making war. In contrast, English settlers were relatively unfamiliar with firearms and were further hampered by tactics better suited to another continent and cultural setting. Only when English militiamen, such as those led by Capt. Benjamin Church, began adopting the native "skulking way of war" did the English begin to gain the upper hand during King Philip's War. The two-way transfer of culture was then complete.	2
Malone relied on an interdisciplinary mixture of sources, including well-worn contemporary accounts and more recent archaeological evidence, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century secondary works. The wide range and large number of illustrations, paintings and engravings from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, drawings of archaeological artifacts, modern maps, and photographs of historical reenactments reflect this diversity of sources. In both instances, the juxtaposition of such contrasting material is distracting and sometimes misleading. The inclusion of several late nineteenth-century romantic book illustrations depicting rather formal and cordial interactions between natives and English settlers contrasts with the violence that permeates the text. In addition, more recent scholarship may have superseded Malone's interpretations. Still, much of the initial appeal of Skulking Way of War is based on the lavish use of visual material and the variety of sources, even if students may be a bit confused by the odd juxtaposition of illustrations and sources. Malone is best when explaining the details of matchlock and flintlock muskets, native methods of acquiring and repairing these weapons, and other technical aspects of firearms. All the rest, including his overview of New England native culture, first contacts with Europeans, and even the fighting during King Philip's War, seem more like the necessary scaffolding that allowed Malone to analyze the role of muskets in a significant context. Read Malone for technical discussions of weapons and tactics, but there are better and more comprehensive interpretations of King Philip's War, including Jill Lepore, The Name of War (1998) and James D. Drake, King Philip's War (1999).	3
Emil Pocock Eastern Connecticut State University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.