On March 22, 1621, a Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to meet with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had brought along only reluctantly as an interpreter.
Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced
would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of
his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole
villages had been depopulated. It was all Massasoit could do to
hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his
problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime
enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit
feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness
and overrun them. And the only solution he could see was fraught
with perils of its own, because it involved the
foreigners—people from across the sea.
Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century.
Shorter than the Natives, oddly dressed and often unbearably
dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped
out of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They
were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery and
often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like
basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful
goods—copper kettles, glittering colored glass and steel knives
and hatchets—unlike anything else in New England. Moreover, they
would exchange these valuable items for the cheap furs that the
Indians used as blankets.
Over time, the Wampanoag, like other Native societies in coastal
New England, had learned how to manage the European presence.
They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would allow their
visitors to stay ashore only for brief, carefully controlled
excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully
reminded of the limited duration of Indian hospitality. At the
same time, the Wampanoag fended off Indians from the interior,
preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In
this way the shoreline groups had put themselves in the position
of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to Indian
products and Indian access to European products. Now, reversing
long-standing policy, Massasoit had decided to permit the
newcomers to stay for an unlimited time—provided they formally
allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.
Tisquantum, the interpreter, had turned up at Massasoit’s home a
year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had
lived for several years in Britain. But Massasoit worried that
in a crisis Tisquantum might side with the foreigners.
Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—had appeared a few
weeks before, having hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an
English ship that was plying the coast. Because Samoset also
spoke a little English, Massasoit had first sent him, not
Tisquantum, to meet with the foreigners.
On March 17, 1621, Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed
into the circle of rude huts in which the British were living.
The colonists saw a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a
loincloth; his straight black hair was shaved in front but
flowed down his shoulders behind. To their amazement, this
almost naked man greeted them in broken but understandable
English. He left the next morning with a few presents, returning
a day later with five “tall proper men”—in colonist Edward
Winslow’s words—with three-inch black stripes painted down the
middle of their faces. The two sides talked inconclusively, each
checking out the other, for a few hours.
Now, on the 22nd, with Massasoit and the rest of the Indian
company hidden from view, Samoset and Tisquantum walked into the
foreigners’ ramshackle base. They spoke with the colonists for
about an hour. Then, Massasoit and the rest of the Indian party
suddenly appeared at the crest of a nearby hill, on the banks of
a stream. Alarmed, the Europeans withdrew to a hill on the other
side of the stream, where they had emplaced their few cannons
behind a half-finished stockade. A standoff ensued.
Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his
selection as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and
carrying a sword, he waded through the stream and offered
himself as a hostage. Massasoit’s brother took charge of
Winslow, and then Massasoit crossed the water himself, followed
by Tisquantum and 20 of Massasoit’s men, all unarmed. The
colonists took the sachem to an unfinished house and gave him
some cushions on which to recline. Both sides shared some of the
foreigners’ homemade moonshine and settled down to talk,
Tisquantum translating.
Massasoit wore the same deerskin shawls and leggings as his
fellows and, like them, had covered his face with bug-repelling
oil and reddish purple dye. Around his neck hung a pouch of
tobacco, a long knife and a thick chain of the prized white
shell beads called wampum. In appearance, Winslow wrote
afterward, he was “a very lusty man, in his best years, an able
body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech.” The Europeans,
who had barely survived the previous winter, were in much worse
shape. Half of the original colony now lay underground beneath
wooden markers painted with death’s heads; most of the survivors
were malnourished. The meeting between the Wampanoag and the
English colonists marked a critical moment in American history.
“A friendly indian”
"A Friendly Indian"
The foreigners called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims. As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services of Tisquantum, usually known as Squanto. In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was a succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role:
A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He
showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of
the wilderness. A soldier, Capt. Miles Standish, taught the
Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly
Indians.
My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the
Pilgrims and that Squanto had demonstrated the proper way to
plant it—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt,
accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine
themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to
fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize
seeds. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists
grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the
first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students
took notes.
The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t
wrong, so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is
entirely misleading.
Tsquantum was critical to the colony’s survival. He moved to
Plymouth after the crucial meeting and spent the rest of his
life there, during which time he indeed taught the Pilgrims
agricultural methods, though some archaeologists believe
Tisquantum picked up the idea of fish fertilizer from
European farmers, who had used the technique since medieval
times. But America: Its People and Values never explains why
he so enthusiastically helped the people who had invaded his
homeland. Skipping over such complexities is understandable
in a book with limited space. The lack of attention,
however, is symptomatic of a larger failure to consider
Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives.
Much the same is true of the alliance Massasoit negotiated
with Plymouth. From the Indian point of view, why did he do
it? The alliance was successful from the short-run Wampanoag
perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But
it was a disaster from the point of view of New England
Indian society as a whole, because it ensured the survival
of Plymouth Colony, which spearheaded the great wave of
British immigration to New England. All of this was absent
not only from my high-school textbooks, but from the
academic accounts they were based on.
This omission dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who
ascribed the lack of effective Native resistance to the will
of God. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin
wrote, favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the
English.” Later writers tended to attribute European success
to European technology. In a contest where only one side had
rifles and cannons, historians said, the other side’s
motives were irrelevant. By the end of the 19th century, the
Indians of the Northeast were thought of as rapidly fading
background details in the saga of the rise of the United
States—“marginal people who were losers in the end,” as
James Axtell of the College of William and Mary dryly put it
in an interview with me. Vietnam War-era denunciations of
the Pilgrims as imperialist or racist simply replicated the
error in a new form. Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God,
Pilgrim guns or Pilgrim greed, Native losses were
foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization,
in this view, and they hardly tried.
But beginning in the 1970s, historians grew dissatisfied
with this view. “Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual
patsies,” Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, told
me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply
didn’t make sense.” Salisbury and other researchers tried to
peer through the colonial records to the Indian lives
beneath. Their work fed a tsunami of inquiry into the
interactions between Natives and newcomers in the era when
they faced each other as relative equals.
“When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that
Indians were trying to control their own destinies,”
Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to
learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not
what they expected.
The Dawnland
More than likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.
Nor did Tisquantum think of himself as an “Indian,” any more
than the inhabitants of the same area today would call
themselves “Western Hemisphereans.” As Tisquantum’s later
history would make clear, he regarded himself first and
foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, one of the dozen or so
shoreline settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts
and Rhode Island that made up the Wampanoag confederation.
The Wampanoag, in turn, were part of an alliance with the
Nauset, which comprised some 30 groups on Cape Cod, and the
Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around
Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of
Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family,
the biggest in eastern North America at the time. In
Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the
Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of
the Dawnland were the People of the First Light.
Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoamerica and Peru
were inventing agriculture and coalescing into villages, New
England was barely inhabited, for the excellent reason that
it had been covered until relatively recently by an ice
sheet a mile thick. As the sheet retreated, people slowly
moved in, though the area long remained cold and uninviting,
especially along the coastline. Because rising sea levels
continually flooded the shore, marshy Cape Cod did not fully
lock into its contemporary configuration until about 1000
b.c. By that time the Dawnland had evolved into something
more attractive: an ecological crazy quilt of wet maple
forests, shellfish-studded tidal estuaries, thick highland
woods, mossy bogs of cranberries and orchids, complex snarls
of sandbars and beachfront, and fire-swept stands of pitch
pine—“tremendous variety even within the compass of a few
miles,” in the phrase of ecological historian William
Cronon.
By the end of the first millennium A.D.,agriculture was
spreading rapidly and the region was becoming a patchwork of
communities, each with its preferred terrain, way of
subsistence and cultural style. Scattered about the many
lakes, ponds and swamps of the cold uplands were small,
mobile groups of hunters and gatherers. Most had recently
adopted agriculture or were soon to do so, but cultivated
crops were still a secondary source of food, a supplement to
the wild products of the land. New England’s major river
valleys, by contrast, held large, permanent villages, many
nestled in constellations of suburban hamlets and hunting
camps. Because extensive fields of maize, beans and squash
surrounded every home, these settlements sprawled along the
Connecticut, Charles and other river valleys for miles, one
town bumping up against the other. Along the coast, where
Tisquantum and Massasoit lived, villages tended to be
smaller and looser, though no less permanent.
Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and
coastline did not roam the land; most shoreline families
would move a 15-minute walk inland, to avoid direct exposure
to winter storms and tides. Each village had its own
distinct mix of farming and foraging—one adjacent to a rich
oyster bed might plant maize purely for variety, whereas a
village just a few miles away might subsist almost entirely
on its harvest, filling great underground storage pits each
fall. Each community was constantly “joining and splitting
like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its bounds,”
wrote Kathleen J. Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College
of William and Mary. Such settlements, she remarked, have
“no name in the archaeological or anthropological
literature.”
“Sweet , Toothsome, and Hearty”
In the Wampanoag confederation, one of these quicksilver communities was Patuxet, where Tisquantum was born at the end of the 16th century. Tucked into the great sweep of Cape Cod Bay, Patuxet sat on a low rise above a small harbor, jigsawed by sandbars and so shallow that children could walk from the beach hundreds of yards into the water before it reached their heads. To the west, maize hills marched across the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a mile or more away from the sea, rose a forest of oak, chestnut and hickory, open and park-like, the underbrush kept down by expert annual burning. “Pleasant of air and prospect,” as one English visitor described the area, Patuxet had “much plenty both of fish and fowl every day in the year.” Runs of spawning Atlantic salmon, shortnose sturgeon, striped bass and American shad filled the harbor. But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village.
Tisquantum’s childhood wetu (home) was formed from
arched poles lashed together into a dome covered in winter
by tightly woven rush mats and in summer by thin sheets of
chestnut bark. A fire burned constantly in the center, the
smoke venting through a hole in the roof. The wetu’s
multiple layers of mats, which trapped insulating layers of
air, were “warmer than our English houses,” sighed the
colonist William Wood. It was also less leaky than the
typical English wattle-and-daub house. Wood did not conceal
his admiration for the way Indian mats “deny entrance to any
drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long.”
Around the edge of the house were low beds, sometimes wide
enough for a whole family to sprawl on together; they were
usually raised about a foot from the floor, platform-style,
and piled with mats and furs. Going to sleep in the
firelight, young Tisquantum would have stared up at shadows
of hemp bags and bark boxes hanging from the rafters. Voices
would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing a
lullaby, then another person, until everyone was asleep. In
the morning, when he woke, big, egg-shaped pots of
corn-and-bean mash would be on the fire, simmering with
meat, vegetables or dried fish to make a slow-cooked dinner
stew. Outside, he would hear the thuds of the large mortars
and pestles in which women crushed dried maize into
nokake, a flour-like powder “so sweet, toothsome, and
hearty,” colonist Gookin marveled, “that an Indian will
travel many days with no other but this meal.” According to
one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time
averaged about 2,500 calories a day, a higher level than
those in famine-racked Europe.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families
were close and loving—more so than English families, some
thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as
moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of
7 and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents,
by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of
playful development, and they kept their offspring close by
until they married. Boys like Tisquantum explored the
countryside, swam in the ponds at the south end of the
harbor, and played a kind of soccer with a small leather
ball; in summer and fall they camped out in huts in the
fields, weeding the maize and chasing away birds. Archery
began at age 2. By adolescence, boys would make a game of
shooting at each other and dodging the arrows.
The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest and uncomplaining. Chatterboxes and gossips were frowned upon. “He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love,” Wood reported. When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest, equipped only with a bow, hatchet and knife. These methods worked, Wood added. “Beat them, whip them, pinch them, punch them, if [the Indians] resolve not to flinch for it, they will not.”
Tisquantum’s regimen was probably even more rigorous than that
of his friends, according to Smith College’s Salisbury, for it
seems that he was selected to become a pniese, a kind
of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem. To master the art of
ignoring pain, prospective pniese had to subject themselves to
such experiences as running barelegged through brambles. And
they fasted often, to learn self-discipline. After spending
their winter in the woods, pniese candidates came back to an
additional test: drinking bitter gentian juice until they
vomited, repeating this process over and over.
Patuxet, like its neighboring settlements, was governed by a
sachem who enforced laws, negotiated treaties, controlled
foreign contacts, collected tribute, declared war, provided for
widows and orphans, and allocated farmland. The Patuxet sachem
owed fealty to the great sachem in the Wampanoag village to the
southwest, and through him to the sachems of the allied
confederations of the Nauset in Cape Cod and the Massachusett
around Boston. Meanwhile, the Wampanoag were rivals and enemies
of the Narragansett and Pequots to the west and the Abenaki to
the north.
Sixteenth-century New England was home to 100,000 Native people
or more, a figure that was slowly increasing. Most of them lived
in shoreline communities, where rising numbers were beginning to
change agriculture from an option to a necessity. These larger
settlements required more centralized administration; natural
resources like good land and spawning streams, though not
scarce, needed to be managed. In consequence, boundaries between
groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given more power and
more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political
tensions were constant. Coastal and riverine New England,
according to the archaeologist and ethnohistorian Peter Thomas,
was “an ever-changing collage of personalities, alliances,
plots, raids and encounters which involved every Indian
[settlement].”
Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European
standards. The catalyst was usually the desire to avenge an
insult or gain status, not conquest. Most battles consisted of
lightning guerrilla raids in the forest. Attackers slipped away
as soon as retribution had been exacted. Losers quickly conceded
their loss of status. Women and children were rarely killed,
though they were sometimes abducted and forced to join the
victors. Captured men were often tortured. Now and then, as a
sign of victory, slain foes were scalped, and in especially
large clashes, adversaries might meet in the open, as in
European battlefields, though the results, Roger Williams,
founder of Rhode Island Colony, noted, were “farre less bloudy,
and devouring then the cruell Warres of Europe.”
Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family and familiar
custom. But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of
confusing actions and individuals fighting to maintain an
existence in the shadow of change.”
And that was before the Europeans showed up.
“Beautiful of Stature and Build”
British fishing vessels may have reached Newfoundland as early as the 1480s and areas to the south soon after. In 1501, just nine years after Columbus’ first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted more than 50 Indians from Maine. Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his astonishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver rings.
The earliest written description of the People of the First
Light was by Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian
mariner-for-hire commissioned by the king of France in 1523 to
discover whether one could reach Asia by rounding the Americas
to the north. Sailing north from the Carolinas, he observed that
the coastline everywhere was “densely populated,” smoky with
Indian bonfires; he could sometimes smell the burning hundreds
of miles away. The ship anchored in Narragansett Bay, near what
is now Providence. Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the
Natives had seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett
were not intimidated. Almost instantly, 20 long canoes
surrounded the visitors. Cocksure and graceful, the Narragansett
sachem leapt aboard: a tall, long-haired man of about 40 with
multicolored jewelry dangling about his neck and ears, “as
beautiful of stature and build as I can possibly describe,”
Verrazzano wrote.
His reaction was common. Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating a nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in. Native New Englanders, in William Wood’s view, were “more amiable to behold (though [dressed] only in Adam’s finery) than many a compounded fantastic [English dandy] in the newest fashion.”
Evidence suggests that Indians tended to view Europeans with
disdain. The Huron in Ontario, a chagrined missionary
reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence
in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other
Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy,
atrociously ugly and just plain smelly. (The British and
French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire
lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal
hygiene.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were
disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is
unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in
our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it
upon the ground.”
For 15 days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s
honored guests—though the Indians, Verrazzano admitted, kept
their women out of sight after hearing the sailors’ “irksome
clamor” when females came into view. Much of the time was
spent in friendly barter. To the Europeans’ confusion, their
steel and cloth did not interest the Narragansett, who
wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and
other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck.” On
Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine coast, the Abenaki did
want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But up north
the friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied the
visitors permission to land; refusing even to touch the
Europeans, they passed goods back and forth on a rope over
the water. As soon as the crew members sent over the last
items, the locals began “showing their buttocks and
laughing.” Mooned by the Indians! Verrazzano was baffled by
this “barbarous” behavior, but the reason for it seems
clear: unlike the Narragansett, the Abenaki had long
experience with Europeans.
A Small Ship
During the century after Verrazzano, Europeans were regular visitors to the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping Natives as souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about 8.) By 1610, one historian has estimated, Britain alone had about 200 vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later the British nobleman Ferdinando Gorges tried to found a community in Maine. It began with more people than the Pilgrims’ later venture in Plymouth and was better organized and supplied. Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed, killed 11 colonists and drove the rest back home within months.
Tisquantum probably saw Champlain and other European visitors, but the first time Europeans are known to have affected his life was in the summer of 1614. A small ship hove to, sails a-flap. Out to meet the crew went the Patuxet. Almost certainly the sachem would have been of the party; he would have been accompanied by his pniese, including Tisquantum. The strangers’ leader was a sight beyond belief: a stocky man, even shorter than most foreigners, with a voluminous red beard that covered so much of his face that he looked to Indian eyes more beast than human. This was Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame. According to Smith, he had lived an adventurous and glamorous life. As a youth, he claimed, he had served as a privateer, after which he was captured and enslaved by the Turks. He escaped and awarded himself the rank of captain in the army of Smith. Later he actually became captain of a ship and traveled to North America several times. On this occasion he had sailed to Maine with two ships, intending to hunt whales. The party spent two months chasing the beasts but failed to catch a single one. The fallback plan, Smith wrote later, was “Fish and Furs.” He assigned most of the crew to catch and dry fish in one ship while he sailed up and down the coast with the other, bartering for furs.
Despite Smith’s peculiar appearance, Tisquantum and his
fellows apparently gave him a tour, during which he admired
the gardens, orchards and maize fields, and the “great
troupes of well-proportioned people” tending them. At some
point a quarrel occurred and bows were drawn, Smith said,
“fortie or fiftie” Patuxet surrounding him. His account is
vague, but it seems likely that the Indians were hinting at
a limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended cordially
enough, and Smith returned to Maine and then England. He had
a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince Charles to
look at it, and curried favor with him by asking him to
award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he
put the maps in the books he wrote extolling his adventures.
In this way Patuxet acquired its English name, Plymouth, and
the region became known as New England.
Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading the other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smith, Hunt decided to visit Patuxet, and, once there, he invited some Indians to come aboard. The thought of a summer day on the foreigners’ vessel must have been tempting. Several dozen villagers, Tisquantum among them, canoed to the ship. Without warning or pretext the sailors tried to shove them into the hold. The Indians fought back. Hunt’s men swept the deck with small-arms fire, creating “a great slaughter.” At gunpoint, Hunt forced 19 survivors, including Tisquantum, belowdecks, then sailed with them to Europe, stopping only once, at Cape Cod, where he kidnapped seven Nauset.
In Hunt’s wake, the outraged sachems of the Wampanoag and
Nauset confederacies vowed not to let foreigners rest on
their shores again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt,
lamented Gorges, the would-be colonizer of Maine, “a warre
[was] now new begunne between the inhabitants of those
parts, and us.” Despite European guns, the Indians’ greater
numbers, entrenched positions, knowledge of the terrain and
superb archery made them formidable adversaries. About two
years after Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked at the
tip of Cape Cod. Its crew built a rude shelter with a
defensive wall made from poles. The Nauset, hidden outside,
picked off the sailors one by one until only five were left.
They captured the five and sent them to groups victimized by
European kidnappers. Another French vessel anchored in
Boston Harbor at about the same time. The Massachusett
killed everyone aboard and set the ship afire.
“God’s Good Providence”
The Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could simply use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but had neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules or horses. (They may have had pigs.) To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Only half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter.
How did even that many survive? In his history of
Plymouth Colony, Governor William Bradford himself
provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves.
The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An
armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they
found a deserted Indian habitation. The
newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and
ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of
food. After two days of nervous work, the company hauled
ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower,
carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men
had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence
that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we
know not how we should have done.”
The Pilgrims’ lack of preparation was typical.
Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by
the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed
to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were
almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped
for a quick cash-out. Decades after first touching the
Americas, London’s venture capitalists still had not
figured out that New England is colder than Britain
despite being farther south. Even when they focused on a
warmer place like Virginia, they persistently selected
as colonists people ignorant of farming; the hope of
fleeing religious persecution uppermost in their minds,
the Pilgrims, alas, were an example. Multiplying the
difficulties, the would-be colonizers were arriving in
the middle of a severe, multiyear drought. Jamestown and
the other Virginia forays survived on Indian
charity—they were “utterly dependent and therefore
controllable,” Karen Ordahl Kuppermann, a New York
University historian, has written. The same held true
for the adventurers in Plymouth.
Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not
woodspeople. Huddled in their half-built village that
first terrible winter, the colonists rarely saw the
area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of
brass- or claw-tipped arrows. After February, glimpses
and sightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims
hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower
and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But
after all the anxiety, their first contact with Indians
went surprisingly well. Within days Tisquantum came to
settle among them. And then they heard his stories.
No record survives of Tisquantum’s journey across the
Atlantic, but Hunt—John Smith’s renegade subordinate,
who had kidnapped Tisquantum and more than a score of
his fellows— would have tied or chained and jammed the
Indians into whatever dark corner of the hull was
available. Presumably they were fed from the ship’s
cargo of dried fish. Smith took six weeks to cross the
Atlantic to England. There is no reason to think Hunt
went any faster. The only difference was that he took
his ship to Málaga, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.
There he intended to sell all of his cargo, including
the human beings.
In fact, Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives
before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the
Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward
Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III had proclaimed that
“Indians themselves indeed are true men” and should not
be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our
service like brute animals.”) The priests intended to
save both Tisquantum’s body, by preventing his
enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to
Christianity, though it is unlikely they succeeded in
the latter endeavor. In any case, this resourceful man
convinced them to let him return home—or, rather, to try
to return. He got to London, where he stayed with John
Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland.
Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while
maintaining him as a curiosity in his town house.
Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for
passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended
up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge
of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as
Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky
coastline and the Micmac and Abenaki alliances, which
were at war with one another.
Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be
difficult, Tisquantum began looking for a ship to take
him to Patuxet. He praised New England bounty to Thomas
Dermer, one of Smith’s subordinates, who was then
staying in the same camp. Dermer contacted Ferdinando
Gorges, who despite his previous failures retained his
interest in the Americas, and with Tisquantum
sailed back to England and met with Gorges. Gorges
provided Dermer with a fresh ship, and after touching
land in Maine, they set out in May 1619 for
Massachusetts.
The Europeans’ Secret Weapon
What Tisquantum saw on his return stunned him. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Gradually Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery 200 miles long and 40 miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained.
Looking for his kinsfolk, Tisquantum led Dermer on a
melancholy march inland. The settlements they passed lay
empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Finally,
Tisquantum’s party encountered some survivors, a handful
of families in a shattered village. These people sent
for Massasoit, who appeared, Dermer wrote, “with a guard
of fiftie armed men”—and a captive French sailor, a
survivor of the Cape Cod shipwreck. Massasoit told
Tisquantum what had happened.
One of the shipwrecked French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, likely spread by contaminated food, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the recently infected fled from the dying, unknowingly carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them the dead were “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed up to 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.
Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand
people and held sway over a confederation of as many as
20,000. Now his group was reduced to 60 people and the
entire confederation to fewer than a 1,000. Both the Indians
and the Pilgrims believed that sickness reflected the will
of celestial forces. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury, the
Smith historian, came to the obvious conclusion: “their
deities had allied against them.”
Similarly, Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the
plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our
beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the
natives...that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than
50 of the first colonial villages in New England were
located on Indian communities emptied by disease. The
epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people]
to disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession
thereof, from when we may justly conclude, that GOD made the
way toe effect his work.”
Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of
thousands, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New
England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they
lived in balance with an intelligible world. On top of that,
the massive death toll created a political crisis. Because
the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring
Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the
disease had not spread to the latter. Now Massasoit’s people
were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of
subjugation.
After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum
returned with Dermer to southern Maine—the home he had been
trying to find no longer existed. But he couldn’t stay with
the Europeans, either. He ended up returning to
Massachusetts on foot—the long, risky journey through
war-torn territory that he had wanted to avoid. Almost
inevitably, Tisquantum was seized on his journey home,
perhaps because of his association with the hated Europeans,
and sent to Massasoit as a captive.
Once again, Tisquantum tried to talk his way out of a jam,
filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of the English, their
cities and powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according
to a colonist who knew him, that if Massasoit “Could make
[the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yet weare to[o]
strong for him”—in other words, the Narragansett—“would be
Constrained to bowe to him.” Massasoit demurred, apparently
keeping Tisquantum in a kind of house arrest. Within a few
months, word came that a party of English had settled at
Patuxet. The Wampanoag observed them as they suffered
through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit
concluded that he should ally with them—compared to the
Narragansett, they were the lesser of two evils. Still, only
when the need for a translator became unavoidable did he
allow Tisquantum to meet the Pilgrims.
Massasoit told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave
them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away
would have taxed his limited resources). But in return he
wanted the colonists’ assistance with the Narragansett. To
the Pilgrims, Massasoit’s motive for the deal was obvious:
the Indian leader wanted guns. “He thinks we may be [of]
some strength to him,” Winslow said later, “for our pieces
[guns] are terrible to them.”
From today’s perspective, though, it seems likely that
Massasoit had a subtler plan. He probably wanted more to
confront the Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of
attacking one group of English people at the same time that
their main trading partners were other English people. Faced
with the possibility of disrupting their favored position as
middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging
such an incursion. If this interpretation is correct,
Massasoit was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the
web of Native politics. Not long before, he had expelled
foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory. But
with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its
former communities, the best option seemed to be to allow
the Pilgrims to remain. It would turn out to be a drastic,
even fatal, decision.
First Thanksgiving
Tisquantum worked hard to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him, the colonists sent out a military expedition to get him back. Never did the newcomers ask themselves why he might be making himself essential. But from the Pilgrims’ accounts of their dealings with him, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.
Recognizing that the colonists would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few Native survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit. To accomplish these goals, as Governor Bradford later recounted, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.
The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious
Massasoit had sent one of his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth
as a monitor. Sometimes Hobamok and Tisquantum worked
together, as when the pair helped the Pilgrims negotiate a
treaty with the Massachusett to the north. They also helped
establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Governor
Bradford agreed to pay back the losses caused by the
colonists’ earlier grave robbing.
By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they
held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with “some
ninety men,” Winslow later recalled, most of them with
weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around
and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to
convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of
food and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce
Thanksgiving.
All the while, Bradford wrote, Tisquantum “sought his own
ends and played his own game.” Covertly he tried to persuade
other Wampanoag that he could better protect them against
the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack,
Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with as many Indian
troops—plus the Pilgrims. To advance his case, Tisquantum
told other Indians that the foreigners had “buried in the
ground” a cache of the agent that had caused the epidemic
and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.
Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment distrust of Massasoit
among the Indians, he told the colonists that Massasoit was
going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack with
the Narragansett on Plymouth. Then he tried tricking the
Pilgrims into attacking the sachem.
In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum went with a delegation of
Pilgrims to the Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after
they departed, according to Bradford, one of the surviving
Patuxet “in seeming great fear” informed the settlers that
the Narragansett and Massasoit were planning to attack.
Apparently Tisquantum believed that the colonists, upon
hearing this news, would rise up and kill Massasoit. Since
Tisquantum was away, his hands would seem clean. Instead,
everything went awry. Upon hearing the news of an impending
attack, Bradford ordered the firing of a cannon to call back
the delegation, including Tisquantum. Meanwhile Hobamok, who
had acquired some English, indignantly denied the rumor.
Then in a move that Tisquantum had not anticipated, Bradford
sent Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s home to find out what he
was up to. She reported that “all was quiet.” When Massasoit
found out about the plot, he demanded that the Pilgrims send
Tisquantum to him for a quick execution.
Bradford refused; Tisquantum’s language skills were too
vital. Tisquantum is one of my subjects, Massasoit said. You
Pilgrims have no jurisdiction over him. And he offered a
load of furs to sweeten the deal. When the colony still
would not surrender Tisquantum, Winslow wrote, Massasoit
sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off
Tisquantum’s hands and head. To make his displeasure even
clearer, he summoned Hobamok home and cut off all contact
with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began building
defensive fortifications. Between mid-May and mid-July,
their crops withered for lack of rain. Because the Wampanoag
had stopped trading with them, the Pilgrims would not be
able to supplement their harvest.
Now a marked man, Tisquantum was unable to take a step
outside of Plymouth without an escort. Nonetheless, he
accompanied Bradford on a trip to southeast Cape Cod to
negotiate another pact. They were on the way home when
Tisquantum suddenly became sick. He died after a few days.
In the next decade tens of thousands of Europeans came to
Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people through the
wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth
lasted for more than 50 years. Only in 1675 did one of his
sons, angered by the colonists’ laws, launch what was
perhaps an inevitable attack. Indians from dozens of groups
joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New
England.
The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of the victory
to Indian unwillingness to match the European tactic of
massacring whole villages. Another reason was manpower—by
then the colonists outnumbered the Natives. Groups like the
Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616,
had been crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633. A third to
half of the remaining Indians in New England died of
European diseases. The People of the First Light could avoid
or adapt to European technology but not to European germs.
Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents
could not control and did not even know they possessed.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/native-intelligence-109314481