Sewee

Their territory was on the lower course of the Santee River and the coast westward to the divide of Ashley River, around present-day Moncks Corner, South Carolina.

Ethnologist John Reed Swanton estimated there were 800 Sewee in 1600.

In 1670, the English founded the coastal town of Charleston in the Carolina Colony on land belonging to the Etiwan people and neighboring tribes like the Sewee. Sewee and other native peoples began participating in the Deerskin trade shortly thereafter. The Sewee hunted, processed, and exchanged deer hides for manufactured goods and glass beads from the English. However, they felt that English traders had become middlemen. Noting that the English ships always landed at the same location, the Sewee believed that by rowing to the point on the horizon where the ships first appeared, they could reach England and establish better trading prices. Therefore, the Sewee nation decided to construct canoes with woven mat sails for their expedition.

English land surveyor John Lawson, having heard the story from a Carolina trader, described the process in his book A New Voyage to Carolina:

It was agreed upon immediately to make an addition of their fleet by building more canoes, and those to be of the best sort and biggest size as fit for their intended discovery. Some Indians employed about making the canoes, others to hunting – everyone to the post he was most fit for, all endeavors towards an able fleet and cargo for Europe.

Eventually the Sewee had completed their navy of canoes, and they filled the vessels with hides, pelts, and provisions. Most able-bodied Sewee men boarded the boats and took to the sea, while children, the sick and the elderly stayed home. As the Sewee entered open ocean, an abrupt storm engulfed their canoes and caused many to drown. The survivors were picked up by a passing English slave ship and sold into slavery in the West Indies.

The surviving Sewee settled with the Wando people, with whom they later intermarried.

The Sewee language is poorly attested and unclassified. Some Sewee words were recorded in 1670 by Nicholas Carteret and William Owen.^: 1639

• appada ‘friend’ (?) (recorded by Carteret)
• hiddie dod ‘a word of great kindness among them’ (recorded by Owen)
• hiddeskeh ‘sickly’ (recorded by Owen)
• Hiddy doddy Comorado Angles Westoe Skorrye ‘English very good friends, Westoes are nought’ (recorded by Carteret)

Based on the geographical location of the Sewee people, Zamponi (2024) hypothesizes that that the Sewee language may have been a Siouan language, although no he could not find any evidence of Siouan morphemes in any attested Sewee words and phrases.

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