We are back in Virginia, finally! In my defense, offered in response to the many listeners who have asked for "more Virginia," the thirty years before the Third Anglo-Powhatan War and Bacon’s Rebellion are almost blank spaces on published timelines of Virginia history, most noting only the legalization of slavery in 1661. Well, we are now on the brink of the civil war known as Bacon’s Rebellion, which was ramping up as the tide was turning in King Philip’s War in the spring of 1676. To understand that sorry state of affairs, however, we have to step back and look at the evolution of Virginia in the years between 1644, the onset of the last Anglo-Powhatan War, and 1675. How was it that civil war broke out among the English of Virginia during the tumultuous 1670s? This episode explores the root causes of the civil instability that led to Bacon's Rebellion, and will therefore be more thematic than narrative. Along the way we consider the severe gender imbalance in Virginia, the sorry state of indentured servants, the persistance of a brutally high death rate into the second half of the century, the relentless efforts of Virginia's great planters to control the growing population of "masterless men" who roamed the colony, and the arrival in the region of the Susquehannocks, much reduced from the peak of their power mid-century, but still a formidable military force.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom



Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America



"The Sadder But Wiser Girl For Me" (YouTube)

I got the idea for this episode talking to a bartender in Prague. The place was empty, and the fellow was garrulous and quickly said he loved American history, which naturally prompted me to suggest a podcast where he could find some. The barkeep called my bluff – “did I know who Augustine Herrman was?” Uh, noooo.



It turns out he was a Bohemian – now we would say Czech – from Prague who became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in mid-17th century English and Dutch America, particularly in New Netherland and Maryland. He would live and trade in the early colonies for more than 40 years before his death in Maryland in 1686, and such diverse characters as Pieter Stuyvesant and Lord Baltimore would rely on him for their most sensitive diplomatic matters. Most famously, Herrman would draw the most detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay, at a time when maps were evidence in the settling of disputes between empires. Hermann’s map would, among other things, determine the border between Virginia and Maryland on the Eastern Shore, and – through twists and turns – play a role in the establishment of the colony of Delaware. The Czechs are understandably proud of Augustine Herrman, so in gratitude to that bartender and his surprising knowledge of 17th century America, this episode is about Herrman, through the story of his map.



Augustine Herrman's Map:







Augustine Herrman's woodcut of New Amsterdam, mid 1650s:







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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Earl L. W. Heck, Augustine Herrman: Beginner of the Virginia Tobacco Trade, Merchant of New Amsterdam and First Lord of Bohemia Manor in Maryland



Christian J. Koot, "The Merchant, the Map, and Empire: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake and Interimperial Trade, 1644–73," The William and Mary Quarterly, October 2010.

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Dr. Phillip W. Magness is an economic historian and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute. Magness’ research has appeared in multiple scholarly venues, including the Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Southern Economic Journal, and Social Science Quarterly. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The 1619 Project Myth, which is the subject of this conversation.



Our conversation was wide-ranging, including an overview of the original 1619 Project of the New York Times, conceived of and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones; how it was a departure from similar historical projects of the Times before it; the strengths of the 1619 Project; the particular shortcomings of the Project’s claims about the economic consequences of slavery; the attempt by the 1619 Project to tie slavery to capitalism; the actual anti-slavery origins of capitalist theory, starting with Adam Smith; the anti-capitalism ante-bellum arguments in the philosophical defense of slavery; the flawed scholarship of the “New History of Capitalism” school; the Project’s distortion of the importance of cotton to the American economy before the Civil War, and the strange rehabilitation of “King Cotton” theory; the criticisms of leading historians of the colonial and revolutionary era of Hannah-Jones’s claims about the importance of slavery to support for the American Revolution in the South; the status of the “20 and odd” enslaved Blacks who were brought to Jamestown in 1619; the varied influence of the Sommersett ruling in the colonies; Lord Dunmore’s famous declaration after the American Revolution had begun; Hannah-Jones’s dismissive response to academic criticisms of her claims; that Hannah-Jones was correct in her assessment of Abraham Lincoln’s advocacy of “colonization” as a solution to emancipation; the New York Times’s strange unwillingness to correct its 1619 Project errors transparently, as it would otherwise do in other contexts; the explicit political and policy agenda behind the 1619 Project; the slow walking-back of some of the Project’s most controversial claims via ghost-editing; the insertion of The 1619 Project in public school curricula; and how to develop a school history curriculum that does give a balanced treatment of the history of slavery and Reconstruction.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Philip W. Magness, The 1619 Project Myth



Nikole Hannah-Jones and other authors, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story



An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project



An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times’ 1619 Project



Philip W. Magness, "The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History"



Jake Silverstein, New York Times Magazine, "We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project" (free link)

This is the last episode of our telling of King Philip's War. We cover the fate of the last Algonquian sachems, including the daring capture of Annawon, and the consequences of the war for the Indians who fought it and the colonies of New England. We consider the wisdom of the war, and especially the morality, or lack thereof, in the fighting of it. Finally, we explore the fates of the main characters who were still alive at the end of the fighting.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War



James D. Drake, King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676



Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



Daniel Gookin (Wikipedia)

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War



In May 1676 the tide of King Philip's War had turned against the Algonquians of southern New England, but the New English settlers didn't know it yet. They would soon. Suddenly, in a matter of a few weeks, the Algonquian resistance collapsed. This episode looks at that collapse through the eyes of Benjamin Church, whose men would finally catch and kill Metacom on August 12, 1676. Along the way, Church would persuade the Sakonnets, a Wampanoag group, to switch sides. They would teach him a new way of war, and Church would eventually be considered the "first American ranger," at least by people who haven't thought to give that credit to Nompash, the Sakonnet commander who taught Church.



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Regicides on the Run!



Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Thomas Church, The History of Philip’s War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War, of 1675 and 1676



Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War



Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War



March 1676 had been catastrophic for the settlers of New England. Algonquians allied with Metacom (King Philip) attacked all across the frontier, forcing the evacuation of far-flung towns in both Massachusetts and Plymouth, and destroying Providence, Rhode Island. The tide, however, was about to turn. The New English captured Canonchet, the leading military commander of the Narragansetts on April 3, 1676. Less than three weeks later, the Algonquians would win a decisive tactical victory at Sudbury, Massachusetts, but shortly thereafter their alliance would begin to fracture because of a shortage of food, a vicious epidemic, the dawning realization that the English had many more fighting men, and - perhaps most importantly - attacks by the Mohawks from the west. The coastal Algonquians, who had lived mostly at peace with the English for more than 50 years, were now between the ultimate rock and hard place.



Along the way, both sides, but especially the English, would miss many opportunities for peace, and the war would continue in spite of catastrophic losses by both sides.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



 Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War.



William Hubbard, Sermon of May 3, 1676, before the General Court of Massacchusetts.

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War



[Attention Boston-area listeners: We will do a meet-up on Wednesday, June 25, 2025 at 5:30 at Trillium - Fort Point, 50 Thomson Pl, Boston, MA 02210. Reservation under my name. I’ll also post information in a blog post on the website for the podcast, and on X and Facebook, links below. Send me an email at thehistoryoftheamericans *at* gmail if you think you can make it.]



After the Great Swamp Fight, Josiah Winslow turned away overtures from the Narragansetts for a ceasefire, incorrectly believing he had the upper hand. Instead, he pursued the Narrangansetts, stumbling into the "hungry march," in which Winslow and his starving militia were lured to the north by the Narragansetts, who were moving to join the Nipmucs and the Wampanoags in attacks on Massachusetts border towns. February and March would see a string of catastrophic losses, from the English point of view, and thrilling triumphs, from the Indian point of view. Famously, the destruction of Lancaster would result in the capture of Mary Rowlandson, who would go on to write an account of her captivity that would be New England's first bestseller. By the end of March, even Providence had burned, notwithstanding a last appeal from Roger Williams, his last meaningful appearance in history. The situation in New England was desperate.



As often happens, however, for the English it was darkest just before the dawn.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



James D. Drake, King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676



George Ellis and John Morris, King Philip's War



Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War



[Attention Boston-area listeners: We will do a meet-up on Wednesday, June 25, 2025 at 5:30 at a venue TBD. I'll also post information in a blog post on the website for the podcast, and on X and Facebook, links below. Send me an email at thehistoryoftheamericans *at* gmail if you think you can make it or have a suggestion for a convenient venue, and I can respond to that when it is nailed down.]



It is the fall of 1675, and "King Philip's War" rages on. The English colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut have been at war with the Wampanoag nation and its powerful allies, the Nipmucs, since late June. The Indians are beating the English everywhere, in part because the English cannot easily distinguish friendly and neutral Indians from enemies.



The still neutral Narragansetts were the most powerful nation in the region. Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth did not, however, believe that the Narragansetts were in fact neutral, in part because some of their young fighters had gone rogue and joined with Nipmucs and also because the Narragansetts would not turn over Wampanoag refugees who had taken shelter in their lands. Paranoic fear of the Narragansetts would lead the New English to the most catastrophic diplomatic and military blunder in the history of European settlement up to that time. This is that story.



And don't miss the "trees of death"!



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War



Thomas Church, The History of Philip's War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War, of 1675 and 1676



The Great Swamp Fight (Wikipedia)

This is an encore presentation of a Sidebar episode we originally posted on Memorial Day 2023. It seems even more relevant today, strange as that may seem, consumed as we are now about questions of war and peace, and the role of elite universities, such as Harvard, in our own national project.



On May 30 – Memorial Day — 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge.  The speech, known as “The Soldier’s Faith,” is in and of itself fascinating substantively and also for its indirect effects. Regarding those, Theodore Roosevelt, another Harvard man, read the speech some seven years later and determined to appoint Holmes to the Supreme Court on account of it. 



Beyond that, the speech is incredibly prescient, in certain respects, and eloquent, even poetic, on the question of personal courage and purpose to a degree that will seem alien to most Americans today, perhaps especially those of us who have never served.



In this special episode for Memorial Day, we read (almost all of) “The Soldier’s Faith” with annotations and digressions, which we hope you find worthy to reflect upon.



We conclude with a look at the historical context, the United States on the brink of its own imperial moment, and the national imperative to unite North and South at the dawn of a new century.



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Selected references for this episode



Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas



“The Soldier’s Faith”



John Pettegrew, “‘The Soldier’s Faith’: Turn-of-the-Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History, January 1996.



George Root, “Just Before the Battle Mother” (YouTube)

Matthew J. Tuininga is Professor of Christian Ethics and the History of Christianity at Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan. He is author or editor of several books, including most recently The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People, which has been an important source for this podcast's series on King Philip's War.



This episode is useful context not only for our series on King Philip's War, which is still very much in progress, but also many of the other stories we've told about early New England. We talk about the intersection of religion and war in 17th century Massachusetts, the sheer difficulty of colonialism, the evolution of Puritan evangelism in the decades between the landing of Mayflower and King Philip's War, the slow development of racialist thinking, the rise of racial hostility against Indians first among the settlers on the frontier to the distress of the Puritan elites in Boston, the influence, or not, of the younger generation of settlers and Indians on the coming of the war, whether Uncas of the Mohegans was a great and shrewed leader or merely treacherous, whether King Philip's War was inevitable, the "war guilt," or not, of Samuel Mosely and Edward Hutchinson, the wisdom of John Winthrop, Jr., whether King Philip's War was "worth it" from the perspective of the settlers, the influence of the fog of war on Puritan decisions, KPW as counterinsurgency, historical myths of recent vintage that inflate Christian Indian deaths, the validity of Native American oral tradition as an historical source, and the importance of narrative history in getting people excited about history.



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Maps of New England during King Philip’s War



At the end of July 1675 two important things were happening at once. King Philip, known as Metacom to his people, and the sunksqua Weetamoo, were in flight along with at least 250 of their people.  Reports coming into the colonial militias in the Fall River area suggested that Philip and Weetamoo intended to cross the Providence River and head for Nipmuc country.



Farther north, at almost exactly the same time, Massachusetts Bay Colony had heard rumors that the Nipmucs had joined, or were soon to join, King Philip’s Wampanoags. The Nipmucs occupied the strategically important territory between the settled towns of Massachusetts Bay near Boston and places like Springfield on the Connecticut River.  From the Bay’s point of view, it was important to determine whether the Nipmucs were in the war or would remain neutral. Since Edward Hutchinson had succeeded in extracting a purported treaty from the Narragansetts, Massachusetts dispatched him into Nipmuc country with Thomas Wheeler and twenty horsemen to do the same.



Sadly for all the people of New England, Hutchinson and Wheeler would set in motion a chain of events that would cause this awful war to spread everywhere in the region east of the Connecticut River. The New English would find themselves waging a brutal counterinsurgency, with all the tactical problems of irregular war in our own time.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

This is the second of two "Sidebar" episodes in honor of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, which we will celebrate on the night of April 18 by putting two lights in a window of our house. 



Last time we explored the prelude to the ride in the months before the final crisis that triggered the march of the British "Regulars" on Lexington and Concord. This episode is the story of Paul Revere's "midnight" ride on the night of April 18-19, 1775, including the famous lanterns of Old North Church, the fraught trip across the Charles River under the guns of HMS Somerset, his spectacular horse Brown Beauty (one of the great equine heroes of American history), the "waking up the institutions of New England" that night in raising the alarm not just on the road to Lexington and Concord but throughout eastern New England, and his astonishing capture and release. And, sure, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott.



Maps of Paul Revere's Ride



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride



John Hancock's Trunk o' Papers

April 18, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's "Midnight Ride" to alarm the towns around Boston that the "Regulars" were marching out to capture artillery and ammunition at Concord, or perhaps to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. This was but the last of a series of crises that rocked New England in the months before the midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord the next day. This episode explores those crises, known as the "Powder Alarms," and Paul Revere's central role in the resistance movement among Boston Whigs - including the famous Sons of Liberty - during those fraught years before the shooting began.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride



Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley



Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Paul Revere's Ride"



Intolerable Acts



Thomas Gage

It is July 1675 in New England. On June 23, fighting men of the Wampanoag nation and of Plymouth Colony had begun killing each other and enemy civilians in earnest. The question was whether this still small conflict would remain a local and short dust-up within Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag lands encompassed by the colony’s borders as defined by the New Englanders, or would it spread more widely? That question was very quickly answered – the wildfire of King Philip’s War would spread to encompass virtually all of New England east of the Connecticut River and up the coast of Maine. This episode explains how it happened.



The image for this episode on the website is a drawing of King Philip - Metacom - by Paul Revere, who 250 years ago today (April 8, 1775), was riding to Concord to warn the locals, not yet on the famous Midnight Ride but on a false alarm that turned out to be an unplanned dress rehearsal.



Maps of New England during King Philip's War



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

After Massasoit's death in 1660 or 1661, his son Wamsutta became sachem of the Pokonoket community and the leading sachem of the Wampanoag confederation, and early on he followed Algonquian custom and changed his name.  He asked the men of Plymouth Colony, longstanding allies of his nation, to give him an English name, and they proposed Alexander.  His brother Metacom also took an English name, Philip. Alexander would soon die under circumstances that deeply concerned the Wampanoags, and his brother Metacom, now known to the English as King Philip, assumed the paramount sachemship.



During the 1660s and 1670s, a series of crises would degrade the now fifty year alliance between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag confederation, with war narrowly averted in 1671. Then, in early 1675, the Harvard-educated Christian Indian John Sassamon would be found dead, murdered by someone. Plymouth prosecuted and executed three Wampanoag men on scanty evidence, a violation of Philip's sovereignty. Misunderstandings piled on top of outrage, and pressure built on both Philip and the Plymouth authorities to mobilize. The deputy governor of Rhode Island tried to broker peace, but events moved too fast. On June 23, 1673, the war began.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War



Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People



John Easton, A Relation of the Indian War (pdf)



Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

This episode looks at the background causes of the brutal war between the New English colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut and their indigenous allies against a tribal alliance including both the Wampanoags and the Narragansetts between 1675 and 1678.



King Philip’s War is the most widely used name of that bloody and arguably existential war. In surveys of American history, it is often the only event between the founding of Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay and the end of the 17th century that rates more than a sentence or two. This is for good reason, insofar as King Philip’s War changed the trajectory of New England’s history. It is thought to be the bloodiest war in American history as a proportion of the affected population. As many as 1000 colonists died, including perhaps 10 percent of the English men of military age. Three thousand Indians were killed, and as many as a thousand were sold into slavery abroad. The war altered the relationship between the European colonists and the Indians of the region to a far greater degree than the Pequot War or any of the other conflicts that had preceded it, shattered the military and cultural power of New England’s most powerful indigenous nations, and so devastated the English that by some estimates per capita wealth in the region did not return to the level of 1675 until the eve of the American Revolution a century later.  The New England frontier, for better or worse, did not advance for forty years after King Philip’s War.



Suffice it to say, we should understand the issues that broke the long peace in the summer of 1675, almost exactly 350 years ago.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War



Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity



Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America's First People



Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America



Philip Ranlet, "Another Look at the Causes of King Philip's War," The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

This episode ties up the loose ends that remained at the end of the expedition of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673. Among other things, we explore the ultimate fate of Jolliet's optimistic vision that a canal could bridge the continental divide in Illinois, allowing sailing ships to travel from Lake Erie all the way to the Gulf. Along the way we learn all sorts of factoids, including the fate of the Carolina Parakeet, snippits from the earliest history of Chicago, including the origin of the name of that city, and the resolution of Marquette's pervasive gastrointestinal issues.



[Errata: About five minutes along I saw that Jolliet arrived at Quebec about July 29, 1673. Should have been1674. Oops.]



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition



John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent 



Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf)



Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

In the summer of 1673, two now famous Frenchmen and five others who are all but nameless traveled by canoe from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac to central Arkansas on the western bank of the Mississippi River, and then back again. Louis Jolliet was a new sort of Frenchman, a natural born North American, having come into this world in Quebec in 1645, now a fur trader and voyageur. Jacques Marquette was the more usual sort, having been born in France in 1637.  By the time of the expedition Marquette was a Jesuit priest, long known to the nations of North America as a “Black Robe.”



The episode begins with an overview of New France in the years between Samuel de Champlain's death in 1635 and 1661, when it languished because the Five Nations of the Iroquois had it entirely bottled up. The expedition was a marker of New France's rapid expansion after King Louis XIV began to rule in his own right that year.



Along the way, our heroes become the first Europeans to visit Iowa (Go Hawks!), see some extraordinary painted monsters, learn the importance of the calumet, and find a short portage in the eastern continental divide at a place soon to be called Chicago.



Map of the route (visible in the shownotes for the episode on the website), credit Illinois State Museum







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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition



Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf)



Piasa "monsters" (Wikipedia)



Carignan-Salières Regiment (Wikipedia)



Beaver Wars (Wikipedia)

This is the last of a three-episode series on the Dutch "raid on America" in 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland - "Kees the Devil" - and a privateer named Jacob Benckes had pillaged English possessions in the Indies. By late June 1673 their fleet of at least 12 ships was sailing to the Chesapeake Bay, where the year's crop of tobacco from Virginia and Maryland had been loaded on merchant ships to sail by convoy to England. Arriving there on July 10, Evertsen and Benckes fought two English warships in the second Battle of the James River, and captured or destroyed thousands of hogsheads of tobacco. As they left with their haul, they grabbed a ketch with, among other people, a couple of the New Jersey rebels on board. They gave Evertsen important intelligence about the shoddy defenses of New York. By the end of July, only three weeks after arriving at the Chesapeake, Kees the Devil would reconquer New Netherland.



But not before a brave English soldier got decapitated by a cannon ball.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674



John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary



Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke's Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664-1691



Battle of the James River (1667) (Wikipedia)

This is the second of three episodes about a daring Dutch raid on the West Indies and the English colonies of North America during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The extended raid, led by Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland and a privateer named Jacob Benckes, was a sideshow in that war, yet its consequences were far-reaching.  Among other accomplishments, Evertsen, known to his fans as Kees the Devil, and Benckes, “subdued three English colonies, depopulated a fourth, captured or destroyed nearly 200 enemy vessels, inflicted a serious injury upon the Virginia tobacco trade, wiped out the English Newfoundland fisheries, and caused unending panic in the New England colonies.”



This episode covers the first phase of the "raid on America," in which Evertsen's squadron sails from Zeeland for the South Atlantic, aiming to capture the English East India fleet at St. Helena. Failing that, the squadron sailed for South America and the Indies, eventually meeting up with Benckes at Martinique. After capturing prizes and burning down St. Eustatius, the episode ends with Evertsen and Benckes headed toward the rich tobacco fleet then gathering in the Chesapeake.



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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)



Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674



Map of the land campaign against the United Provinces in the Third Anglo Dutch War:







Third Anglo-Dutch War (Wikipedia)



Cornelis Evertsen The Youngest (Wikipedia)



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