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By the 1710s relationships between the Yamasees and their South Carolina neighbors were rapidly deteriorating. Colonists enslaved and physically abused Yamasee people, stole their property, and encroached on their lands. In the midst of this, a Yamasee "Prince" made a singular trip to London, spending twenty-one months with Anglican schoolmasters and tutors who attempted to transform him into a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Why did his community pursue this path? This article argues that the Prince's clan was attempting to engage in spiritual diplomacy with the British: sending a diplomat to a spiritually and politically important capital who then converted to Christianity. This practice was indigenous in origin but was practiced particularly by Indian communities that had sustained contact with Spanish missionaries in La Florida. Such was the case with the Prince's community: the Euhaws rejoined the Yamasees in 1703 after a century spent in La Florida and needed to establish a more secure footing for themselves in the Yamasee and British worlds. Though it would prove disappointing in a number of respects, analysis of the Prince's voyage reveals how southeastern Indians responded to European colonialism by drawing on long-standing Native practices.
In 1713 a Yamasee Indian "Prince" traveled from Charleston to London, where he was schooled in Anglican principles, reading, writing, and arithmetic.1 His voyage has become the stuff of historiographical legend, culminating as it did with his 1715 baptism in the Royal Chapel at Somerset House and presentation to King George I. To the Anglican missionary society that funded the Prince's twenty-one-month trip and sponsored his education in England, he represented the great potential of British missionaries and schoolteachers to convert, civilize, and thereby conquer Indians. This Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), which had been founded in 1701 to send missionaries and schoolteachers to America, expected that the conversion of one southeastern Indian Prince would lead to many more, and would politically knit the Yamasees to the fragile British Empire in the South, while also enlarging the kingdom of God.* 2 Yet the Prince's case remains a rare instance of Indian conversion to Anglican Christianity. The historian Frank Klingberg, who first reconstructed the story in 1962, considered it a sad symbol...