New England Bound

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to enslavement, violence and sexual violence, suicide, and racial slurs.

Wendy Warren is an American historian and assistant professor at Princeton University. Her research centers around slavery, imprisonment, and colonial North America. Warren completed her master’s and PhD in history at Yale University; her PhD thesis was entitled Enslaved Africans in New England, 1638-1700. While writing her thesis, Warren became more interested in the early development of chattel slavery in New England’s first colonies, and that research has informed her book New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America.

Squanto was a Patuxet man who lived in the early 17th century in the region that is now New England. Warren refers to Squanto’s kidnapping by English captain Thomas Hunt as one of the first instances of capture and enslavement in colonial New England. In 1614 Captain Hunt was exploring the east coast of North America and lured Squanto, along with about 24 other Indigenous men, onto his ship under the pretense of trading with them and then locked them on board. Hunt sailed to Spain, where he sold his captives into slavery. However, Squanto and a few other men were taken by Spanish priests, who wanted to convert them.