The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (8 page)

Wasted by disease and now under the thumb of a powerful and proud enemy, the Pokanokets were in a desperate struggle to maintain their existence as a people. But Massasoit had his allies. The Massachusetts to the north and the Nausets on Cape Cod shared the Pokanokets' dislike for the Narragansetts. Numerically, the Pokanokets were at a disadvantage, but this did not prevent Massasoit from attempting to use his alliances with other tribes to protect his people from the threat to the west.

 

◆◆◆ No one was sure how long ago it had occurred, but some of the Indians' oldest people told of what it had been like to see a European sailing vessel for the first time. “They took the first ship they saw for a walking island,” the English settler William Wood wrote, “the mast to be a tree, the sail white clouds, and the discharging of guns for lightning and thunder, which did much trouble them, but this thunder being over and this moving-island steadied with an anchor, they manned out their canoes to go and pick strawberries there. But being saluted by the way with a [cannon's] broadside ..., [they turned] back, not daring to approach till they were sent for.”

As early as 1524, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano had stopped at Narragansett Bay in the vicinity of modern Newport. There he encountered “two kings more beautiful in form and stature than can possibly be described.... The oldest had a deer's skin around his body, artificially wrought in damask figures, his head was without covering, his hair was tied back in various knots; around his neck he wore a large chain ornamented with many stones of different colors. The young man was similar in his general appearance. This is the finest looking tribe, the handsomest in their costumes, that we have found in our voyage.” Almost a century before the arrival of the
Mayflower,
Verrazano may have met Massasoit's great-grandfather.

By 1602, when the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold visited the region, European codfishing vessels had become an increasingly familiar sight along the New England coast. After giving Cape Cod its name, Gosnold ventured to the Elizabeth Islands at the southwestern corner of the Cape, where he built a small fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. A few days after his arrival, fifty Indians in nine canoes arrived from the main-land for the purposes of trade. It was apparent to Gosnold that one of the Indians was looked to with great respect. This may have been Massasoit's father. It is possible that Massasoit himself, who would have been in his early teens, was also present.

Gosnold presented the sachem with a pair of knives and a straw hat, which he placed on his head. Then the Indians “all sat down in manner like greyhounds upon their heels” and began to trade. With the exception of mustard (“whereat they made a sour face”), the Indians appeared to enjoy all the strange foods the English had to offer. For their part, Gosnold and his men enjoyed the Indians' tobacco, a dried green powder that when smoked in carefully crafted clay pipes proved addictively pleasant.

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A nineteenth-century photograph of the Gosnold Memorial, which was erected on the island of Cuttyhunk to commemorate Gosnold's landing on American soil.

Gosnold was at a loss to understand the Natives' language, but the Indians were immediately able to mimic the Englishmen's speech. At one point, a sailor sat smoking beside an Indian and said, “How now, sir, are you so saucy with my tobacco?” The Indian repeated the phrase word for word, “as if he had been a long scholar in the language.”

But Gosnold's introduction to the area and its people turned as sour as his mustard. While out searching for food, two of his men were attacked by four Indians. No one was hurt (in part because one of the Englishmen cut the strings of the Natives' bows with his knife), but Gosnold decided to abandon his fort and sailed for England.

It was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again in the years ahead. soon after Gosnold returned to England with word of his discovery, the explorer Martin Pring sailed for Cape Cod and built a fort of his own in the vicinity of modern Truro. After a summer of harvesting sassafras, Pring also began to wear out his welcome with the locals. When an Indian-lit fire almost destroyed his fort, Pring took the hint and sailed for home.

Beginning in 1605, the Frenchman samuel Champlain explored the Cape and produced detailed maps of several harbors and inlets. In 1611, the year that the playwright William shakespeare produced
The Tempest,
the English explorer Edward Harlow voyaged to the region. By the time he returned to London, he had captured close to half a dozen Indians and killed at least as many in several brutal battles. One of his Indian captives was quite tall, and Harlow helped repay his debts from the voyage by showing him on the city streets “as a wonder.”

The Indian's name was Epenow, and he soon realized that there was nothing the English valued more than gold. He told his captors that back on Martha's Vineyard, an island just to the south of Cape Cod, there was a gold mine that only he could lead them to. An expedition was promptly mounted, and as soon as the English ship came within swimming distance of the island, Epenow jumped over the side and escaped.

Around this time, in 1614, Captain John smith led a voyage of exploration to the region. There were several vessels in smith's expedition, and one of the commanders, Thomas Hunt, decided to take as many Native captives as his ship could hold and sell them as slaves in spain. Hunt's actions badly damaged Indian-English relations in New England for years to come.

The following year, a French ship wrecked on the north shore of Cape Cod, and the Indians decided to do to the French what the English had done to them. Indians from up and down the coast gathered together at the wreck site, and William Bradford later learned how they “never left dogging and waylaying [the French] till they took opportunities to kill all but three or four, which they kept as slaves, sending them up and down, to make sport with them from one sachem to another.”

One of the Frenchmen was quite religious. He learned enough of the Natives' language to tell his captors that “God was angry with them for their wickedness, and would destroy them and give their country to another people.” scorning the prophecy, a sachem assembled his subjects around a nearby hill and, with the Frenchman beside him on the hilltop, demanded if “his God had so many people and [was] able to kill all those?” The Frenchman responded that he “surely would.” In three years' time, everything the captive had predicted had come to pass.

•••In the spring of 1619, the English explorer Thomas Dermer sailed south from Maine in a small open boat. Accompanying Dermer was a Native guide who'd been abducted by Thomas Hunt in 1614. The Indian's name was Tisquantum, or squanto, and after five long years in spain, England, and Newfoundland, he was sailing toward his home at Patuxet, the site of modern Plymouth. In a letter written the following winter, Dermer described what they saw: “[We] passed along the coast where [we] found some ancient [Indian] plantations, not long since populous now utterly void; in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness. Their disease the plague, for we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who descried the spots of such as usually die. When [we] arrived at my savage's native country [we found] all dead.” squanto's reaction to the desolation of his homeland, where as many as two thousand people had once lived, can only be imagined. However, at some point after visiting Patuxet, he began to see the destruction of the plague as an opportunity.

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John Smith's map of New England, 1634.

Upon Epenow's return to Martha's Vineyard, the former captive had become a sachem, and it seems that squanto had similar ambitions. squanto took Dermer to Nemasket, a settlement about fifteen miles inland from Patuxet, where squanto learned that not everyone in his village had died. several of his family members were alive and well. He may already have begun to think about reestablishing a community in Patuxet that was independent of Pokanoket control. In the aftermath of the plague, Massasoit was obviously vulnerable, and as Bradford later said of the former Indian captive, “squanto sought his own ends and played his own game.” But first he had to see for himself the condition of Massasoit and the Pokanokets, so he convinced Dermer that they should push on to the sachem's village.

It took about a day to walk from Nemasket to Pokanoket. There they met what Dermer described as “two kings,” who were undoubtedly Massasoit and his brother Quadequina, and fifty warriors. Massasoit was quite happy to see the Englishman and his Native guide. Dermer wrote that the sachem and his brother were “well satisfied with [what] my savage and I discoursed unto them [and] being desirous of novelty, gave me content in whatsoever I demanded.” Massasoit still had one of the French captives in his possession and agreed to hand him over to Dermer. After locating yet another Frenchman and meeting Epenow on Martha's Vineyard, Dermer left squanto with Native friends near Nemasket and headed south to spend the winter in Virginia.