The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians by Patrick M. Malone

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 147 approach to the German professions. While German professions may have capitulated to the Nazi coordination policies without great resistance, there is little evidence that professionals were enthusiasti­ cally going over in great numbers to the Nazis before 1933. The book’s primary interest to historians of technology may lie in the author’s comparison and contrast of engineers and chemists with other professionals. What he says about engineers—the VDI’s inabil­ ity to build as successful a professional organization as other groups, its neutrality stance, and its disinclination to become involved in union-like activities, opening the way for the more radical Bund der Technischindustriellen Beamter—has been said already in more de­ tail by such authors as Kies Gispen in his New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815—1914 (Cambridge, 1989) and by German scholars such as Wolfgang Koenig. Nonetheless, this work is an important, if somewhat tediously written, contribution to the study of professionalization in the German context. It shows that we need more studies of how professionals like engineers relate to state power and to the important social issues of our time, given the significant role professionals play in modern society. Donald Thomas Dr. Thomas is professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute and author of Diesel: Technology and Society in Industrial Germany (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987). The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians. By Patrick M. Malone. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1991. Pp. 133; illustrations, notes, index. $29.95. Patrick M. Malone, a past president of the Society for Industrial Archeology, a senior lecturer in the American Civilization Depart­ ment of Brown University, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and a Marine who served in Vietnam, has brilliantly combined technical expertise and historical research in this study of technology and tactics among the New England Indians in the 17th century. Building on his 1971 Ph.D. dissertation at Brown on “Indian and English Military Systems in New England in the Seventeenth Century” (in which Malone first brought to light the extraordinary skill with which the Indians of New England adapted to their own needs the military technology of Europe), The Skulking Way of War is lavishly illustrated, with technical drawings (some by Malone himself) of the weapons and tactics discussed. The volume is of more than local interest since the modification of European weapons and tactics to meet the forest environment and the “skulking” tactics of the Indians occurred throughout the continent but is nowhere more completely documented than in New England. Malone deals successively with the aboriginal military system, the 148 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE arrival of the white man, the arming of the Indians, a cultural comparison of white and Indian proficiency with firearms, and a concluding chapter on technology, tactics, and total warfare. Malone presents overwhelming evidence of the skills New England Indians brought to the acquisition of European military technology, despite the efforts of both the home and colonial governments to prevent such technology transfer. He points out that “craft techniques can spread easily across cultural boundaries without verbal commu­ nication” (pp. 67—68). Sometimes by simple observation as they walked through English villages, sometimes through techniques learned as apprentices or laborers, the New England Indians were able to cast bullets and make basic repairs on muskets. They were never able to make gunpowder (the English colonists themselves did not build a successful gunpowder mill in America until 1675), although they desperately sought to learn. Citing archaeological excavations as well as historical sources, Malone sees European design in the construction of the Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp of Rhode Island in 1675. When the English forces assaulted the Indians in the fort during King Philip’s War they killed ‘“an Indian black-smith’ who repaired Narragansett firearms” and also “demolished his forge, and carried away his tools” (p. 74). The designer of another Narragansett fort, “the Queen’s Fort,” near the present town of Wickford, was, according to Nathaniel Saltonstall, “famously known by the name of Stonewall, or Stone-layer John; for that being an active ingenious fellow he had learned the mason...