As Frobisher's initial contact with the Baffinland Inuits demonstrates,
Europeans took captives not only in order to fashion informants and al-
lies but also to obtain hostages who might be used as instruments of
diplomacy. Europeans employed hostages to ensure the safety of other
Europeans who were in indigenous hands, to bargain for political con-
cessions, and more rarely, to cement alliances. Similar uses of hostages
were known in indigenous societies, as Massasoit's capture of Tisquan-
tum attests. The political use of hostages and the reciprocal exchange of
hostages, then, were forms of mediation between societies with which
both Europeans and indigenous peoples were familiar. However, be-
cause considerable variation existed in conventions regarding hostages
and in the extent to which conventions were followed, there was ample
room for misunderstandings and hostility to arise. Particularly objection-
able to Native Americans were European violations of reciprocity in the
training of interpreters and mediators--that is, their attempts to fashion
such individuals asymmetrically through capture rather than recipro-
cally through hostage-exchange.

In comparison to the English and the Iberians, the French more often
obtained consent before transporting Indians across the ocean, hoping to
win over persons of influence to the cause of the Crown and the Church.
The most notorious exception, Cartier's kidnapping of Domagaya and
Taignoagny in 1534, is revealing in its conspicuous breach of indigenous
expectations. These two boys were the teenage sons or matrilateral
nephews of Donnacona, the headman of the St. Lawrence Iroquoian vil-
lage of Stadacona (at the site of Quebec) (see Map 2.1 ). No doubt the
Stadaconans, like other Iroquoians, would have understood Cartier's

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