AT THE START OF the seventeenth century, Europeans who explored Cape Cod and nearby coastlines described thickly settled Native villages and verdant fields. They rhapsodized about the region’s natural bounty and suggested ways that it could make them rich. The Pilgrims did so as well, but they encountered a place already transformed by contact with Europeans. The fish and fowl remained abundant, but many of the region’s human inhabitants had vanished.
Contemporary scholars use the term Wampanoag to designate the communities of southeastern Massachusetts. Some seventeenth-century sources used versions of the term as well, but Natives and Europeans generally employed more particular names: Paomet and Nauset on the eastern cape, Manomet and Patuxet along the western shore of Cape Cod Bay. Farther to the west, in present-day Bristol, Rhode Island, the Pokanokets—whose sachem the Pilgrims called by his title Massasoit—exercised a fragile hegemony over these communities. Massasoit was not a king but a paramount sachem, a sachem over other Wampanoag sachems. Along with those living on the islands to Cape Cod’s south, the above-mentioned peoples were bound together through kinship, a particular dialect of Algonquian, ritual practices and a shared cosmology, and a rough acceptance of Massasoit’s leadership. The Wampanoags were among the many Algonquian peoples of the region, and they were surrounded by peoples who were both rivals and trading partners: the Narragansetts and Pequots to the west, the Massachusetts to their north, and beyond them the Abenaki.1
These coastal communities thrived because of the region’s abundance of seafood. Shellfish included clams, mussels, and oysters. Whales were abundant, if hard to catch. Easy to catch were eels, present near Patuxet in tremendous numbers. Europeans expressed astonishment at the diversity and quantity of fish: cod, striped bass, sturgeon, and many other species. Wampanoag and other regional communities supplemented their diets with corn, the cultivation of which had spread gradually from present-day Mexico and the American Southwest into the eastern woodlands of North America.2
In 1602, the English explorer and colonizer Bartholomew Gosnold sailed to present-day southern Maine, then continued to what he named “Cape Cod” for its “great store of cod-fish.” Gosnold rounded the Cape, proceeding nearly as far as Narragansett Bay. Gosnold’s men and the peoples they encountered had a few moments of tension, but there was bartering and feasting rather than violence. A published account of the venture boosted English interest in what was then called Norumbega or northern Virginia, a place teeming with seafood, waterfowl, and deer, a landscape rich in sassafras (used as a treatment for syphilis) and copper.3
Subsequent English-Native encounters were less peaceful. The peoples of the region quickly learned that the English did not fish only for cod. They were also fishers of men. In 1605, George Waymouth abducted five Abenaki men while trading along the Maine coast. The English sailors enticed a few men to come aboard their ship by offering them food and “trifles.” They also used brute force. Waymouth’s men subdued two other “strong” and mostly “naked” men by grabbing them by their long hair. Presumably, Waymouth intended to groom the men as translators and navigators, a long-established European tactic.4
Upon reaching England, Waymouth handed over three of his captives to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, commander of the fort at Plymouth. The Abenaki men fired Gorges’s imagination with their talk of navigable rivers and safe harbors. “This accident,” he later wrote, “must be acknowledged the means under God of putting on foot and giving life to all our plantations.” Gorges never set foot on North American soil, but he helped secure charters for the London and Plymouth companies, with the latter obtaining the privilege of settling northern Virginia. On the first of many expeditions he backed over the next several decades, Gorges sent Waymouth’s captives as guides and translators for a short-lived colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River.5
Other kidnappings followed. In 1611, ship captain Edward Harlow abducted five Natives. Among them was Epenow, from an island known as Capawack or Noepe, which Gosnold had named Martha’s Vineyard. In London, Harlow exhibited Epenow to paying crowds. “When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar,” quipped a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” A living Indian was even better. But when Londoners tired of Epenow, Harlow turned him over to Gorges, who described him as “of a goodly stature, strong and well proportioned.” Gorges was more impressed with Epenow’s body than with his brains. He joked that the captive knew only enough English “to bid those that wondered at him, welcome, welcome.”6
Gorges badly underestimated his captive, who was a quick study of the English language and of English greed. Epenow spun tales about gold mines on Martha’s Vineyard, and in 1614 Gorges sent him back across the Atlantic to show Captain Nicholas Hobson where to find them. According to Gorges, when Hobson reached Martha’s Vineyard, Epenow’s “brothers” and “cousins” came aboard and “were kindly entertained.” When they departed, they promised to come back the next day to trade. Hobson sensed trouble. He did not want to lose his Native guide. Three men guarded Epenow, and they dressed him in “long garments, fitly to be laid hold on, if occasion should require.” Occasion required. When his people returned the next day, Epenow jumped overboard, wriggled out of the baggy clothing, and swam to freedom while his cousins and brothers sent a “shower of arrows” at the English ship. A wounded Hobson returned to England without any gold and without his captive. He reported that Epenow was among those Natives his men had slain in the fight.7
While Hobson’s disaster unfolded, John Smith mapped the coastline from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Cod and christened the region “New England.” Five years earlier, Smith had played a pivotal but contentious role in the early years of the Jamestown colony. He had watched its settlers search in vain for precious metals, leaving themselves vulnerable to starvation and attack. Smith now maintained that colonists and traders should turn their attention to New England, which offered less exotic but more readily attainable riches. If fish “seeme[d] a mean and a base commodity” compared to gold or even copper, Smith promised that the sea’s bounty was a living, inexhaustible mine that would reward English industry. The region’s human resources were also promising. He described villages along Massachusetts Bay at peace with one another, “planted with gardens and corn fields,” and eager to trade. Ignoring his experiences in Virginia, Smith imagined that English conquistadors could quickly intimidate and subdue New England’s Native peoples, who would then deliver valuable fish and furs to them. Smith sailed back to England in August 1614. Despite receiving a commission as the “Admiral of New England,” Smith never returned to the region.8
Detail of map of New England drawn by Simon van de Passe, 1616, from notes made by John Smith. The Pilgrims named their settlement Plimouth on the basis of this map. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)
One member of Smith’s expedition tried a more crooked path to profits. Thomas Hunt, captain of a second vessel under Smith’s command, used his own initiative to kidnap around twenty Indians at Patuxet, a community Smith marked as “Plimouth” on his map. A man named Tisquantum, or Squanto, was among the captives. Following the example of Waymouth and others, Hunt lured them aboard through overtures of friendship and trade, then seized them. Hunt also captured some Nauset men on the eastern cape. Unlike Waymouth and Harlow, Hunt brought his captives to the slave markets of Spain. According to Gorges, after Hunt had sold several, “the friars of those parts took the rest from them and kept them to be instructed in the Christian faith.” Squanto somehow ended up in England, living with John Slany, an official of the Newfoundland Company, under whose auspices he sailed back across the Atlantic.9
John Smith condemned Thomas Hunt’s actions, writing that his “treachery among the savages” taught Natives to hate the English. The abductions imperiled English crews and disrupted commerce. Ferdinando Gorges also denounced Hunt’s duplicity and rapacity, noting that “the poor innocent creatures … in confidence of his honesty had put themselves into his hands.” Gorges interpreted Waymouth’s human captives as a gift from God, and Smith raised no objections to the earlier kidnappings. Why did they single out Hunt for denunciation? In their minds, the other abductions were temporary. Gorges intended to transform captives into loyal servants and send them home as cultural mediators between their people and the English. Both Gorges and Smith stressed that Hunt, by contrast, “sought to sell them for slaves.” Gorges and Smith distinguished between Spanish slavery and impressment into English service, a distinction that captives such as Epenow did not accept.10
Meanwhile, in Newfoundland, Squanto met Thomas Dermer, another agent of Ferdinando Gorges. Dermer and Squanto both wanted to go to New England, though for very different reasons. Dermer wanted to fish and trade there; Squanto simply wanted to go home. The pair went to England to confer with Gorges, then returned to Newfoundland in 1619 and headed southwest along the coast toward Cape Cod. Gorges probably had no delusions of gold this time around, and Dermer’s account suggests that he and Gorges secured Squanto’s cooperation by promising him a reunion with his people. Still, the gist of the plan was to use a man the English had kidnapped to repair trading relationships damaged by the abductions.
When Squanto went to Patuxet, all of his people were gone. Those who were not dead had fled. Dermer and other Europeans described the culprit as the “plague” because the results resembled those of the Black Death’s worst outbreaks in Europe. The bubonic plague probably could not have survived the ocean crossing. Historians and epidemiologists have proposed many different explanations, including smallpox, typhoid fever, and—more recently—leptospirosis (a bacteria spread primarily through rodent urine). The precise malady remains uncertain, but it was a disease brought by Europeans for which Natives lacked immunity.11
Squanto helped Dermer establish peaceful contact with several Native communities, including the Pokanokets to Patuxet’s west. At the Pokanoket village of Sowams, Dermer met “two kings,” one of whom was Massasoit. It turned out that there were European captives in the region; Dermer gained the release of two Frenchmen who had survived a shipwreck. After Squanto left to search for Patuxet survivors, though, Dermer fared poorly on his own. When his vessel ran aground off the east coast of Cape Cod, his crew freed it by tossing most of their provisions overboard. Then the Nausets at the southeastern tip of Cape Cod took Dermer prisoner until his men purchased his freedom with several hatchets.
Dermer then went to Martha’s Vineyard. He met Epenow, who, it turned out, had not perished during the fight between his people and Hobson’s crew. Epenow now “laughed at his own escape, and reported the story of it.” The former captive also sensed an opportunity for revenge. Dermer planned to sail to Virginia and then return to New England. Epenow encouraged him to stop again at Martha’s Vineyard when he did. When Dermer came back to the region the following summer, he first went to Sowams and found that the previously friendly Pokanokets now bore “an inveterate malice to the English.” The change might have given Dermer pause about visiting other communities, but he pushed ahead. Again in the company of Squanto, Dermer and his crew went back to Martha’s Vineyard, where they were attacked. Most of Dermer’s men were slain. He was wounded, barely escaped with his life, and headed for Jamestown. Squanto’s role in the attack, and his whereabouts in the aftermath, are unknown.12
Unwittingly, the Pilgrims had come to a place of death and captivity.
The Mayflower passengers confined their explorations to the tip of Cape Cod while the ship’s crew repaired a shallop they had brought from England that had been damaged during the crossing. Men waded ashore to gather firewood, women washed clothes in frigid water, and the Pilgrims surveyed their immediate surroundings. If there had been snow, the Pilgrims would have mentioned it, so it was a drab autumnal landscape. From the boat they saw no people, but they commented on the sandy hills and wide variety of trees: oaks, pines, sassafras, birch, holly, ash, walnut, and juniper, the latter of which they collected and used as a source of firewood.
Myles Standish led an expedition on November 15, joined by Stephen Hopkins, William Bradford, and around a dozen other men. They wore armor and carried muskets and swords. Almost immediately they spotted a small group of Natives, who when they saw the armed Pilgrims disappeared into the woods. Eager to make contact—too eager—the Pilgrims gave chase for about ten miles, slept the night, and then gave up the trail after they plunged into some tough undergrowth. The English pursuit probably convinced the fleeing Indians that the men chasing them were a new group of kidnappers or marauders. The hungry and thirsty explorers restored their strength at springs of fresh water. “[We] sat us down,” Pilgrim leaders wrote, “and drunk our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives.”13
The Pilgrim men found old cornfields and other land “fit for the plow,” and they discovered graves. Of the latter, the Pilgrims excavated some and examined their contents, but they covered the objects back up because they “thought it would be odious unto them [the Indians] to ransack their sepulchers.” Inspired by the Spanish extraction of gold from Inca tombs in Peru, the English had with great excitement opened graves from Baffin Island to Roanoke. Such efforts yielded no gold, and at Jamestown, grave opening and grave looting prompted Powhatan reprisals. The Pilgrims were right to hesitate.14
The explorers also unearthed a substantial cache of corn and a large European-made ship’s kettle. They hesitated again, but they decided to take all they could carry. Bradford compared their bounty to a cluster of grapes that Israelite spies had found on a scouting mission into the promised land. Likewise, the corn was a special providence of God, who thereby preserved the Pilgrims from starvation. They filled the kettle with corn and stuffed their pockets, intending to return the kettle and “satisfy” the Indians for the corn when they could. The Pilgrims were pleased to see other promising sources of food, including caches of nuts and strawberries as well as abundant geese, ducks, and deer. They even found an artfully constructed deer trap, which snagged William Bradford by the leg when he stumbled into it.
Ten days later, after the carpenter had completed the shallop repairs, a larger party set forth. By this time it was snowing, windy, and bitterly cold. After one night ashore, they sailed down as far as the first expedition had reached. They took more corn, and beans as well. After following a few paths, the Pilgrims came upon a larger grave than they had found on their earlier venture. In it, they uncovered a series of objects buried between mats, including a bow, bowls, trays, and other “trinkets.” Eventually, they came to “two bundles,” one large and one small.
The large bundle contained the bones and skull of a man covered with a red powder the Pilgrims presumed was a type of embalmment. The skull had “fine yellow hair still on it,” and some of the flesh remained “unconsumed.” With the corpse were a few objects, including a knife and a large needle. The smaller bundle contained the corpse of a “little child,” strings and bracelets, a little bow, and “some other odd knacks.”
The larger corpse in particular intrigued them. Was it an “Indian lord and king?” The yellow hair suggested it was instead “a Christian.” Had the Indians honored this individual who had died in their midst? Or had they killed him and buried him as a sign of “triumph”? The Pilgrims took “sundry of the prettiest things” and covered up the corpses again.
During the second expedition, after disturbing and looting the above-mentioned gravesite, the Pilgrims entered homes that they could tell had been recently used. Pilgrim writers offered an admiring description of Wampanoag wetus (houses). They were made from “young sapling trees,” bent, stuck into the ground, and tied together to create a dome or arbor. The Wampanoags covered the exterior and interior with mats that kept out rain and kept in heat. The door was only a yard high, but the Pilgrims were impressed that adult men could stand upright within the homes. In the middle, there were stakes, and sticks laid between the stakes held cooking pots. The roof had a hole at the center to let out smoke, though the Pilgrims noted that the opening could be covered in the event of rain. Other colonists praised wetus as better insulated than English houses.15
Within the houses, they found a freshly killed deer head, along with some antlers, eagle claws, pieces of fish, and baskets of acorns. The explorers took “some of the best things,” probably some seeds, baskets, and other household belongings. They intended to bring beads as payment and as a “sign of peace.” The Pilgrims must have made a very poor impression on the Natives of Cape Cod. It is hardly surprising that people who faced possible starvation took food when they found it, but the taking of other objects demonstrates that the Pilgrims had very little respect for the people who had made them.
As the weeks passed, the Pilgrims grew desperate to select a place for their settlement. Some of the passengers had been living on the ship for four months. Their supplies of food were dwindling, and they were running low on beer. They needed to build houses, survive the winter, and plant crops in the spring. They had not found a location they considered suitable on the Cape, but they also did not want to range too far to the north. One of the ship’s pilots, Robert Coppin, recalled “a great navigable river and good harbor” on the other side of the bay. On December 6, around twenty men set out to find it or another place that would meet their needs.
It was now so cold that water froze on their clothes and made them “like coats of iron.” Sailing around fifteen miles to the south, they stopped and made camp after seeing a group of Indians “busy about a black thing,” which the Pilgrims called a “grampus.” It was probably a pilot whale. The next day, they scouted out the area and found it no better than the Cape’s tip. They hunkered down for a second night at a stream now called the Herring River. As they breakfasted at early dawn, they suddenly found themselves under attack. The Pilgrims emerged unscathed from a brief skirmish, and the Nauset attackers apparently suffered no casualties either. The Indians probably intended to warn rather than kill the English interlopers.
Soon they were underway again. Coppin guided the shallop along the southern rim of the bay and then headed north into a biting mixture of rain, snow, and wind. The vessel’s rudder broke, and they had to steer with oars. Next the gale split their mast into three pieces. Finally, they saw the harbor, and the storm blew their vessel into it. Coppin steered the shallop toward a sandy shore. It turned out to be a small island, which the Pilgrims named for John Clarke, another member of the Mayflower’s crew and the first to step ashore.16 With difficulty, the cold and wet Pilgrims made a fire. They spent a day recovering from their ordeal while they observed the Sabbath.
On Monday, December 11, they explored the harbor.17 “We marched also into the land,” Pilgrim leaders wrote, “and found divers cornfields, and little running brooks, a place very good for situation.” On Tuesday, the men excitedly returned to the Mayflower.
Bad news greeted them. Dorothy Bradford had died on December 7, the day after her husband and the others had departed on the shallop. William Bradford did not mention her death in his narrative history. In 1650, when Bradford listed the deaths of Mayflower passengers, he simply noted that his wife “died soon after their arrival.” Historians continue to regurgitate the notion that she committed suicide. The idea stems from an 1869 short story, in which a brokenhearted Dorothy Bradford kills herself because her husband loves another woman. The tale has no more historical value than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, which narrates a love triangle involving Standish, John Alden, and Priscilla Mullins. How, then, did Dorothy Bradford die? In his 1702 history of New England, Boston minister Cotton Mather stated that she “accidentally” fell overboard and “drowned in the harbor.” One imagines that like others who succumbed during these months, she was weakened by malnutrition and disease.18
Dorothy Bradford’s was not the only death. Jasper More, one of the four bastard children taken in by the Pilgrims, died in early December, as did a servant of John Carver. James Chilton, the oldest passenger on the Mayflower, was also dead. No sources specify the cause of their deaths. There was also one addition. Still aboard the Mayflower, Susanna White gave birth to a son she and her husband named Peregrine.19
On Friday, December 15, the Mayflower weighed anchor for the place that the explorers had found. Winds forced them back until the following day, but the ship reached the harbor late on Saturday. Again, the Pilgrims observed the Sabbath, likely with William Brewster delivering a sermon and with respected members of the congregation prophesying in the afternoon. On Monday, December 18, they came ashore and looked at potential places for a settlement. Some proposed Clark’s Island, which would have been easy to defend but had limited potential for farming or fresh water. They instead chose an area on the mainland, bisected “by a very sweet brook,” with cornfields already cleared and a hill on which they could mount their cannon and look far out into the sea. It was Patuxet, Squanto’s old village. They realized that this was the place John Smith had christened “Plimouth,” and so the Pilgrims called their colony “Plimoth Plantation” (Bradford’s spelling) or “New Plymouth.”
Each year, a million people go to Plymouth to see the rock on which the Pilgrims came ashore, undeterred by the fact that the Pilgrims themselves wrote nothing about clambering out of their boat onto a boulder. Regardless of where they took their first steps, the Pilgrims walked into a disaster. The poor nutrition during the crossing left their health fragile, and they lacked sufficient food for the months ahead. Exposure to bitter-cold weather and wading in water did not help matters. Bradford did not describe the illnesses in detail, simply stating that they were “infected with the scurvy and other diseases.” Scurvy develops after a protracted period of vitamin C deficiency, beginning with weakness and irritated skin, progressing to blackened and swollen gums, and ending with fevers, hemorrhaging, and death. Many ship crews in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century suffered from the ailment, as did English colonists on Newfoundland.20
During the first months at Plymouth, many of the Pilgrims remained aboard the Mayflower in cramped quarters. According to Bradford, the few who remained healthy “did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named.” They washed “loathsome clothes” and diseased bodies. They cleaned chamber pots, beds, and the ship’s deck of vomit and diarrhea.21
Bradford contrasted the Christian charity of the settlers with the selfishness of the seamen. The sailors wanted to keep the dwindling supply of beer for themselves and would not give even a small amount to a sick passenger who requested it. Then the sailors also fell ill and “began now to desert one another.” The Pilgrims, though, extended their love to those who had mocked and mistreated them. “You, I now see,” commented a sick crew member, “show your love like Christians indeed one to another, but we let one another lie and die like dogs.” Master Jones relented and sent some beer ashore for the sick Pilgrims there. Not all members of the crew were antagonistic toward the settlers. In February, Giles Heale, the ship’s surgeon, received a book from Isaac Allerton. It was a copy of Henry Ainsworth’s psalter. Presumably Allerton made the gift because of Heale’s care for the settlers, including Allerton’s own ailing wife. Heale carried the volume back to England.22
Deaths mounted as the winter months progressed: eight in January, among them Rose Standish; seventeen in February, including Mary Allerton; Elizabeth Winslow and a dozen others in March. By then, barely half of the passengers remained alive. “The living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Bradford wrote the next fall. Some entire households died, including Christopher Martin, his wife, and two servants, as well as John Turner and his two sons (Turner’s daughter, who had stayed in Europe, later came to New England). Sisters Ellen and Mary More died within months of their brother Jasper; only Richard More survived the winter. Priscilla Mullins was the sole member of her family to survive the winter. She soon married John Alden, a cooper hired by the Pilgrims at Southampton.23
What the Mayflower passengers endured was grim but not exceptional. As had been the case since Christopher Columbus left a group of men behind on Hispaniola in 1492, Europeans who founded new colonies endured initial months or even years of misery. For instance, about two-thirds of the Jamestown settlers died during that colony’s first year.24
None of Plymouth’s settlers wrote letters or journals that reveal much about their emotional state during these months. They were too busy trying to survive, too sick to write. Promotional tracts written by Bradford, Winslow, and Robert Cushman advertised New England’s bounty and glossed over the settlers’ initial challenges. Many years later, though, Bradford reflected on the hardships of the first winter when he eulogized William Brewster in his history. Like the Apostle Paul, Bradford wrote, the Pilgrims had endured “perils among the heathen” and “perils in the wilderness”; they had known pain, hunger, thirst, and cold. How had they persevered? “It was God’s visitation that preserved their spirits,” Bradford asserted. He added that God often preserved his saints “not by good and dainty fare” but through “fears, and many afflictions.” This was standard puritan discourse. What we do not know is how the men, women, and children among the Pilgrims interpreted these afflictions as they unfolded.25
In early Jamestown, settlers recorded stories of despair, madness, and even cannibalism. For instance, a malnourished man named Hugh Pryse came into the “marketplace blaspheming and crying out that there was no God, alleging that if there were a God, he would not suffer his creatures whom he had made and framed to endure those miseries and to perish for want of food.” George Percy, governor of Jamestown at the time, noted that God used the “savages” to smite Pryse. Wolves then ripped apart his corpse. Another man murdered his pregnant wife, ripped their child out of her uterus, threw it in the river, and then “chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food.” Percy described Jamestown’s sick and starving settlers as “so lean” that they looked like last year’s unpicked and now withered fruit. They cried out. They stumbled around. They lost their marbles and their morals.26
Things were just as wretched in Plymouth, and men and women in such circumstances could not have always acted like saints. Phinehas Pratt, who joined the colony a few years later, wrote that during their first winter, the Pilgrims propped ailing men against trees and leaned muskets against them. Fearing the Indians would take advantage of their weakness, they risked the lives of their sick in a false show of strength. Pratt’s secondhand report may or may not be accurate, but disease and death must have shaken and perplexed the Pilgrims. Did they wonder why God in his providence willed that so many of their family and friends should die? Did they conclude that God was chastising them for their sinfulness?27
Yet the Plymouth settlers did not fall out with each other. There were quarrels, but there was no mutiny or blasphemy, let alone murder and cannibalism. Apparently no one begged to return to England on the Mayflower. In order to survive beyond that first winter, however, the settlers needed to do more than take care of each other. They needed help.
During their first weeks at Plymouth, the Pilgrims saw many abandoned houses and some fires in the distances, but no “savages.” Then in mid-February, a settler hid in fear when he stumbled upon a group of twelve Indians. Also, two settlers reported that Natives had stolen some tools left behind in the woods.
In response to the apparent theft, the settlers prepared to defend themselves. They chose as their military captain Myles Standish, who had been acting the part since the Mayflower first anchored off Cape Cod. A few days later, the sailors helped the men drag their cannons up the hill. For the next month, the settlers maintained a heightened state of military preparedness. No attack came.
Then in mid-March, an Indian man strolled into the settlement. He headed straight for the Pilgrims’ common house, but they cut him off before he went inside. “He saluted us in English,” they wrote, “and bade us welcome.” The English understood his name as Samoset. The unexpected visitor was tall, straight; despite the cold weather, he wore only a narrow fringe around his waist. He told them that he was an Abenaki “sagamore,” a minor sachem from the north. He had learned English from fishermen. It is unclear how he had ended up among the Wampanoags; perhaps he had become their captive. Given past English-Native encounters up and down the New England coast, Samoset had probably worked hard to muster courage for his errand. Probably relieved that the Pilgrims had neither killed nor kidnapped him, he now asked them for beer. They had none, but they gave him “strong water” (some type of spirits), biscuit, butter, cheese, pudding, and a piece of mallard duck.28
From their guest, they learned about the Native communities that surrounded them, including the Pokanokets and their great sachem—Massasoit—to the west. Samoset told them about the kidnappings by Thomas Hunt, which helped explain why the Nausets on Cape Cod had attacked them. Finally, the settlers learned why they had encountered so many graves and abandoned houses. Samoset informed them that “an extraordinary plague” had killed the people who had lived here. Everyone had died. “There is none to hinder our possession,” the Pilgrims concluded, “or to lay claim unto it.” Many English writers made the same argument, that New England was a depopulated wilderness, a vacuum domicilium (empty dwelling). The Pilgrims interpreted the epidemics as God’s providential preparation for English settlers.29
The settlers talked with Samoset all afternoon. They were nervous. Was he a spy, sent to gather information about their numbers and defenses? The settlers wanted to send Samoset away at nightfall, but he did not want to leave. Then they tried to take him to the Mayflower for the night, but the wind was too strong. So they put him up with Stephen Hopkins and kept a close eye on him. When he left the next morning, the settlers gave him a knife, a bracelet, and a ring. They told him they wanted to trade. Samoset said he would return with some of Massasoit’s people.
The next day, Samoset was back, with five companions. The Indians brought a few beaver skins, but it was the Sabbath, so the Pilgrims rushed the visitors away as quickly as possible, asking them to come back with more pelts. On March 22, the Plymouth settlers met Squanto, and Samoset told the settlers that Massasoit was nearby. After some negotiations, the Pokanoket sachem came to the settlement, accompanied by his brother Quadequina and around twenty other men. The Pilgrims did their best to impress him. Captain Standish and six armed men greeted Massasoit at the brook. They brought him to a partly built house, in which they placed a green rug and several cushions. Governor Carver entered the building, with a drummer and trumpeter following him, along with several other armed men.
Cyrus E. Dallin, Massasoit, 1920, on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth. (Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress.)
The Pilgrims described Massasoit as a “very lusty [strong] man, in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech.” His face was painted a deep mulberry red, and “he looked greasily” because of oil applied to his head and face. Massasoit wore “a great chain of white bone beads” around his neck. On his back, he kept a small bag of tobacco, which he shared with the Pilgrims. Several years later, a visitor to Plymouth described Massasoit as wearing only “a black wolf skin” upon his shoulder and a five-inch belt of “beads about his middle.” When he first met the Pilgrims, however, Massasoit and his men wore long pants and used deerskins to keep themselves warm.30
Carver and Massasoit quickly formed an alliance. In the treaty recorded by the Pilgrims, there were several provisions, but the one that mattered the most was simple: the Plymouth settlers and Massasoit’s warriors would aid each other in case of attack. Both sides also promised to leave their weapons “behind them” when they visited each other. An exception to this general reciprocity was a stipulation that Massasoit allow the English to punish any Indians who “did hurt to any of ours.” At least in their record of the agreement, the English made no like promise to turn over any settlers who harmed the Indians. They assured Massasoit that if he kept to the treaty’s terms, King James would consider him a friend and ally.31
The Pilgrims’ reasons for concluding the alliance are obvious. They needed security in the midst of their weakness, and they needed food and other help in order to survive. Massasoit for his part needed new allies and wanted trade. The epidemics had devastated Massasoit’s people but had left their Narragansett enemies largely unscathed. For Massasoit, moreover, there was no apparent downside. His village of Sowams lay around forty miles to the west, far from Patuxet. He had no reason to expect that the English newcomers would encroach on his land or authority. Nor did he care about what the Pilgrims wrote down on paper. For Massasoit and his people, friendship and alliances rested on the reciprocal exchange of gifts and expressions of hospitality.
The successful negotiations were the turning point for the fledgling colony. By the time the Mayflower sailed for England in early April, the season of death had loosened its grip. Squanto in particular proved invaluable to the Pilgrims as their principal interpreter and navigator. He caught passels of eels for them and guided them to the best fishing spots. Squanto also showed them how to plant maize and instructed them to fertilize it with fish, which—in addition to creating what must have been a massive stench—produced a fine crop of corn, some English wheat, and meager quantities of English barley and peas. Over the course of the summer, the Pilgrims, like other Europeans who came to southern New England in the seventeenth century, were astonished at what seemed to be the limitless supply of fish, eels, lobsters, deer, turkeys, ducks, berries, grapes, and plums. For a stretch of months, the settlers ate well. They could see what looked like endless sources of timber and firewood. “A better place cannot be in the world,” wrote one settler in a letter back to England.32
If the Plymouth colonists were now dying at a slower rate, the challenges that lay before them remained daunting. With the exception of their new allies, whom they did not trust, they were alone on unfamiliar ground. If they were to survive another year, the settlers needed supplies of food that would last them through the next winter. If the colony was to succeed, they needed commodities that would translate into English profits and attract additional settlers. The Mayflower, however, returned back across the Atlantic without the fish and furs the Pilgrims’ financial backers eagerly anticipated.
John Carver died in April, followed by his wife a few weeks later. As their next governor, the settlers chose William Bradford. Isaac Allerton became his assistant. Despite the winter’s mortality, the colony’s leadership was safely in the hands of the separatist majority, with Bradford and Allerton as magistrates, Standish as military captain, and Brewster as the church’s elder.
Plymouth’s first marriage took place in May, when Edward Winslow married Susanna White. Her first husband, William, had died in February, but her two sons had survived the winter. In keeping with separatist teaching, the wedding was strictly a civil affair. Likewise, burials were simple, with no ceremonies or eulogies. Worship services moved from the ship to the shore to a common house. Elder Brewster preached most Sundays, but other male congregants delivered sermons on occasion, and the church’s leading men prophesied during afternoon worship. With their minister John Robinson still in Leiden, though, church members did not celebrate the Lord’s Supper or present their children for baptism.
In June, Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins traveled the forty miles to Massasoit’s village of Sowams, stopping in other Wampanoag communities along the way. The two were among the very few Europeans who had left the coastal waterways and rivers of New England and followed Native paths through its interior. They saw unburied “skulls and bones” in now empty places of habitation, and they saw tall weeds that had overtaken cleared fields. When they reached the Pokanokets, they slept on a mat in close quarters with the sachem, his wife, and two of his chief men. Between the “bad lodging, the savages’ barbarous singing … lice and fleas within doors, and mosquitoes without,” they were eager to return to Plymouth. Fear, curiosity, and even wonder had characterized the Pilgrims’ emotions during their first interactions with the Indians. Winslow now chronicled extreme discomfort, even revulsion.33
Even so, the visit cemented the alliance. Winslow and Hopkins presented Massasoit with “a horseman’s coat of red cotton,” which he gladly donned, “not a little proud to behold himself.” By this point, the Pilgrims had become annoyed by the constant stream of Wampanoag families who came to Patuxet to enjoy the hospitality of their new allies. Massasoit agreed that his people “should no more pester” them. The sachem then gathered his men and “made a great speech”; he and those present affirmed his authority over some thirty Wampanoag communities. They smoked tobacco and talked about England. According to Winslow, Massasoit declared that “it was King James his country, and he also was King James his man.” If Squanto’s translation and Winslow’s record are accurate, what did Massasoit mean by such statements? Did he assert that his people and the settlers were on equal terms with the English king’s subjects? Or was he simply professing his friendship with the English? Regardless of Massasoit’s intentions, the Pilgrims interpreted such statements as their ally’s acceptance of English sovereignty.34
Later in the summer, Winslow—and probably Hopkins—went on a second errand. John Billington, a boy of around sixteen, had become lost and wandered into Manomet, a Wampanoag village to Plymouth’s south. The sachem there sent Billington east to the Nauset sachem Aspinet, whose people remained aggrieved over the Hunt kidnappings. While going to retrieve Billington, Winslow’s party stopped at a community named Cummaquid, where an elderly woman came before them “weeping and crying excessively.” When the English asked her the reason for her tears, she explained that Hunt had tricked her sons into coming aboard his ship and had then “carried them captives into Spain.” The Pilgrims told her and her people that “Hunt was a bad man.” They would not act like him. It helped their cause that they had with them Squanto, another of Hunt’s victims. When the party finally reached Nauset, the English retrieved Billington and arranged to make restitution for the corn they had stolen the previous fall. They also learned that the Nausets could have easily wiped them out. Even after the epidemics, Aspinet had a hundred men. By releasing Billington, Aspinet demonstrated that he too was nothing like Thomas Hunt.35
Aspinet also conveyed some troubling news. The Narragansetts had seized Massasoit. The alarmed Pilgrims hurried back to Plymouth, where they learned that their ally was free but had been driven from his village. Even worse, a sachem named Corbitant—at Mattapoiset, not far from Sowams, in present-day Swansea—had rebelled against Massasoit because he disliked the Pokanoket sachem’s newfound friendship with the English. At Nemasket, Corbitant had confronted Squanto and Hobomok, a trusted counselor of Massasoit’s who had moved with his family to Plymouth. Hobomok escaped and reported that Corbitant had taken and possibly murdered Squanto.
Myles Standish now sprang into action, leading fourteen men to Nemasket. Hobomok guided them to a house, which the settlers surrounded. The plan was simple. They would let no one out. If Squanto was dead, they would behead Corbitant. They planned to spare the women and children, which implies that they intended to kill all of Corbitant’s men. Standish charged into the house and learned that while Corbitant and Squanto were not there, their friend was alive. The Pilgrims still had their translator. Corbitant soon renewed his fidelity to Massasoit.
After the fall harvest, Governor Bradford decided that the settlers “might after a more special manner rejoice together.” Like other puritans, the Plymouth separatists disliked many forms of entertainment and mirth, especially church fairs, maypole dances, and the theater. But they were not complete killjoys, and they happily celebrated their improved fortunes. Bradford sent men to shoot a prodigious amount of fowl, which may well have included the “wild turkeys” his history mentions. There was probably also duck, eel, and fish. “Among other recreations,” wrote Winslow, “we exercised our arms.” Massasoit and ninety of his men came, probably because they heard the Pilgrims firing their guns. The Wampanoags killed five deer, which added to the bounty. It was not the formal meal of nineteenth-century paintings, not least because the Pilgrims probably had no forks and did not eat around a large table.36
The Pilgrims did not understand these festivities as a “thanksgiving.” In England and its colonies, days of thanksgiving were church- and government-appointed assemblies of prayer and worship. These were solemn affairs, though they might involve a communal feast and recreations after the sermons and prayers were over. The 1588 English victory over the Spanish Armada prompted days of thanksgiving across England and then a national thanksgiving in late November. Other European peoples—Catholic and Protestants alike—also engaged in similar religious rituals. In the sixteenth century, Spanish and French colonists in what are now parts of the United States had observed days of thanksgiving.37
Jennie A. Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914. (Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.)
It is entirely possible that the Pilgrims observed a formal day of thanksgiving after their first harvest, but no records document such an occasion. Rather, the 1621 celebration was more akin to an English harvest festival. Agrarian communities in England and other parts of Europe took part in feasts and recreations after they had brought in the harvest. In England, such festivities were typically parish affairs, often held at or in front of churches. Contrary to the description of some historians, devout English Protestants would not have understood the celebration as “secular,” and there is no reason to doubt that the Pilgrims were unusually thankful for their recent bounty. “By the goodness of God,” Winslow wrote, “we are so far from want.” The festivities were also a “diplomatic event,” a cementing of the alliance Massasoit and John Carver had formed the previous spring.38
The Pilgrims assigned no historical significance to the celebration. Bradford does not mention the occasion in his history, and the single description appears in a letter written by Edward Winslow. The notion of a Pilgrim “First Thanksgiving” did not become widespread until nineteenth-century magazines and novelists popularized the image. The Pilgrims would have objected to the way that later Americans appropriated them for an annual holiday. Like other puritans, the Pilgrims loathed recurrent holidays, especially when imbued with a sacred significance for which they found no warrant in scripture.39
The celebration, however, does not lose its significance when stripped of its mythology. The early history of English colonization in North America was grim, for Native communities but also for English explorers and settlers. Nevertheless, despite the gulfs of language and culture that separated peoples, and despite fears and suspicions, there were moments of concord and mutual enjoyment, often around shared meals. At Roanoke, Natives had refreshed the hungry and weary English settlers with venison, fish, and maize. Bartholomew Gosnold’s men and Natives had likewise feasted together. The Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoags did not always enjoy each other’s company, but on this occasion they did. “We entertain them familiarly in our houses,” Winslow wrote, “and they are friendly bestowing their venison on us.” Such moments serve as reminders that conflict between Europeans and Natives was not inevitable.40
The separatists among the Pilgrims still enjoyed the “liberty of the gospel” dear to them, and they now had some reason to hope that their colony might flourish and entice other godly settlers to join them. Massasoit and his people had found a new ally to help them cast off their subjection to the Narragansetts. Once a captive bound for a Spanish slave market, Squanto was now an invaluable bridge between two cultures. In freeing themselves from starvation, subjection, and captivity, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags had bound themselves in new ways. They had pledged to defend each other from outside attack. At least in English minds, Massasoit had proclaimed himself “King James his man.” Squanto professed loyalty both to Massasoit and to the English. It would not be long before the strength of these new bonds was tested.
