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Massasoit had considerable experience with Europeans—his father had sent Martin Pring on his way seventeen years before. But that was before the epidemic, when Massasoit had the option of expelling them. Now he 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, the Indians’ motives for the deal were obvious. They wanted European technology on their side. In particular, they wanted guns. “He thinks we may be [of] some strength to him,” Winslow said later, “for our pieces [guns] are terrible to them.”

In fact Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were
not
technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin.

Reading Massasoit’s motives at this distance is a chancy business. But it seems likely that he did not want to ally with the foreigners primarily for their guns, as they believed. Although the sachem doubtless relished the possibility of additional firepower, 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 an incursion. Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before Massasoit 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 allowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.

MACHINATIONS

Tisquantum worked 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. They did not stop to ask themselves why he might be making himself essential, given how difficult it must have been to live in the ghost of his childhood home. In retrospect, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.

Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few 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, who had held him captive. To accomplish these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.

The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit sent one of his
pniese,
Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. (Hobamok, like Tisquantum, apparently adopted a new name in his dealings with the British; “Hobamok” was the source of evil in Wampanoag cosmology.) Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when Hobamok and Tisquantum 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 Bradford promised to pay back the losses caused by their earlier grave robbing.

By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men 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, Tisquantum covertly tried to persuade other Wampanoag that he was better able to protect them against the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with an equal number of Indian troops—and the Pilgrims, who might be able to intimidate the enemy. He evidently believed that the Narragansett did not have enough experience with European guns to know that they were not as fearsome as they first appeared. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other Indians that the foreigners had hidden away casefuls of the agent that caused the epidemic, and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.

Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment Indian distrust of Massasoit, he told the colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack on Plymouth with the Narragansett. And he attempted to trick the Pilgrims into attacking the sachem.

In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum accompanied a delegation to the Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they left, Bradford later recalled, one of the surviving Patuxet “came running in seeming great fear” to inform the settlers that the Narragansett “and he thought also Massasoit” were planning to attack. The idea clearly was that the colonists, enraged by the putative assault, would rise up and smite Massasoit. Tisquantum would be away, so his hands would seem clean. Instead everything went awry. In Indian villages people could only be summoned by shouting; once a canoe had gone a few hundred yards, it could not readily be called back. But when the news came of the impending attack, Bradford ordered the Pilgrims to fire a cannon to order back the expedition and Tisquantum. Meanwhile Hobamok, who had acquired some English, indignantly denied the story. In a move that Tisquantum apparently had not anticipated, Bradford dispatched Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s home to find out what the sachem was doing. She reported that “all was quiet.” Actually, this wasn’t entirely true. Massasoit was furious—at Tisquantum. He demanded that the Pilgrims send their translator 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 cache of fur to sweeten the deal. When the colony still would not surrender Tisquantum, Massasoit sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off Tisquantum’s hands and head. To make his displeasure manifest, he summoned Hobamok home and cut off contact with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began building defensive fortifications. Worse, almost no rain fell between mid-May and mid-July, withering their crops. Because the Wampanoag had stopped trading with them, the Pilgrims would not be able to supplement their harvest.

Tisquantum, afraid of Massasoit’s wrath, 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 in a few days, his hopes in ruins. 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 fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being pushed around by 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 for the newcomers’ triumph was that by that time they outnumbered the natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633. A third to half of the remaining Indians in New England died. The People of the First Light could avoid or adapt to European technology but not European disease. Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they had.

In the Land of Four Quarters

“LIKE A CLUB RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES”

In the early 1960s, Henry F. Dobyns, a young anthropologist working on a rural-aid project in Peru, dispatched assistants to storehouses of old records throughout the country. Dobyns himself traveled to the central cathedral in Lima. Entering the nave, visitors passed by a chapel on the right-hand side that contained the mummified body of Francisco Pizarro, the romantic, thuggish Spaniard who conquered Peru in the sixteenth century. Or, rather, they passed by a chapel that was
thought
to contain the conqueror’s mummified body; the actual remains turned up years later, stashed inside two metal boxes beneath the main altar. Dobyns was not visiting the cathedral as a sightseer. Instead, he descended into the structure’s basement—cold, dank, poorly lighted—to inspect birth and death registers kept there.

Dobyns belonged to a research team led by his doctoral advisor, Allan R. Holmberg of Cornell, the Holmberg after whom I have unkindly named Holmberg’s Mistake. Holmberg had persuaded Cornell to let him lease an old colonial estate in rural Peru (the Carnegie Corporation, a charitable foundation despite its name, provided the funds). The estate included an entire village, whose inhabitants, most of them Indian, were its sharecroppers. “It was really a form of serfdom,” Dobyns told me. “The villagers were just heartbreakingly poor.” Holmberg planned to test strategies for raising their incomes. Because land tenure was a contentious issue in Peru, he had asked Dobyns to finalize the lease and learn more about the estate’s history. With his adjutants, Dobyns visited a dozen archives, including those in the cathedral.

Dobyns had been dipping his toe into archival research for more than a decade, with results he found intriguing. His first foray into the past occurred in 1953, while he was visiting his parents in Phoenix, Arizona, during a school break. A friend, Paul H. Ezell, asked him for some help with his doctoral thesis. The thesis concerned the adoption of Spanish culture by the Pima Indians, who occupy a 372,000-acre reservation south of Phoenix. Many of the region’s colonial-era records survived in the Mexican town of Altar, in the border state of Sonora. Ezell wanted to examine those records, and asked Dobyns to come along. One weekend the two men drove from Phoenix to Nogales, on the border. From Nogales, they went south, west, and up into the highlands, often on dirt roads, to Altar.

Then a huddle of small houses surrounding a dozen little stores, Altar was, Dobyns said, “the end of the earth.” Local women still covered their heads with shawls. Gringo visitors, few in number, tended to be prospectors chasing rumors of lost gold mines in the mountains.