When the English captain Thomas Dermer set sail for the New England coast in the spring of 1619, he knew that he was heading to a place with a growing reputation for violence between Indians and European explorers, if also for lucrative trade. Harrowing stories of the two peoples capturing and killing each other had been in circulation among sailors for years, and some accounts had been published to raise financial and political capital for colonial ventures. To get the kind of Native perspective missing in these narratives, Dermer had only to turn to one of his passengers, a Wampanoag man named Tisquantum, or Squanto for short, and ask him to recount his captivity at English hands and the subsequent nearly five-year odyssey that had at least twice carried him across the North Atlantic and was now about to bring him home, or so he thought. In surviving his ordeal and having the chance to tell his tale, Tisquantum was unique, but he was hardly alone in his suffering. He was just one among scores of other Wampanoags and Atlantic coast Indians seized by Europeans and carried across the ocean into fates lost to history. When Tisquantum shared the story of his life, in some ways he spoke for them all.1
He would have remembered how, in 1614, an English captain, Thomas Hunt, had anchored his ship in the harbor of Tisquantum’s community of Patuxet, the very site of the future colony of Plymouth, and invited curious Wampanoags onboard. This was no first contact episode. The Wampanoags had been dealing with shipboard European explorers intermittently since at least 1524 and nearly annually since 1602. Though these meetings tended to degenerate into bloodshed, the lure of trade was too enticing for either party to resist. Europeans sought furs, particularly beaver pelts, to sell back home and fresh food to relieve them from the heavily salted fare of their lengthy overseas journey. The Wampanoags, for their part, wanted to pick through the strangers’ merchandise. First and foremost there were goods made of exotic metals like iron, brass, and tin. They included axes, knives, kettles, awls, scissors, needles, fishhooks, and combs. Certainly the Wampanoags already had their own perfectly serviceable versions of such items made out of wood, stone, and bone, but the Europeans’ metal tools were sharper, more durable, and attractive by virtue of their novelty. The Europeans also carried kettles, earrings, necklaces, pendants, bracelets, and rings made of copper with a redder shine than indigenous copper, which Native people prized because they associated the color red with fire, the sun, blood, and animation. Then there were newcomers’ translucent glass beads in numerous colors and patterns; brightly colored bolts of woolen cloth; shirts, pants, and stockings; mirrors that enabled the people to see themselves for the first time without looking into water; pigments of red, black, and yellow. Yes, these strangers could be dangerous, but some Native people judged that their exotic goods made dealing with them a worthwhile risk. And so Tisquantum and some of his people went aboard Hunt’s vessel. They paid a terrible price.2
Hunt double-crossed them, seizing twenty of their men, then binding their limbs and stuffing them belowdecks. Soon seven other Wampanoags farther east at Nauset (modern Eastham) fell into the same trap and joined their tribesmen in the ship’s hold for the beginning of a horrific oceanic journey toward a destiny they could barely imagine. Their greatest fear probably was that their captors intended to torture and eat them, but it would have come as cold comfort when they discovered Hunt’s actual plan. Viewing his prisoners as savage pagans unworthy of the dignity of civilized Christians, he carried them all the way to Málaga, Spain, a Mediterranean port, to sell them as slaves alongside his catch of fish. That is the last we hear of most of these unfortunate souls, who disappeared into Iberia’s mass of bound laborers that included Islamic Moors from North Africa, Indians from every corner of Spain’s vast American dominions, and sub-Saharan Africans swept up in the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade.3
Tisquantum very nearly shared this tragic end but for two astonishing strokes of good fortune. First, a group of friars blocked his sale, doubtlessly citing a Spanish law that had been in effect since 1542, though it was routinely ignored, that American Natives should not be enslaved. Then, after a time lag that might have been just months or more than a year, Tisquantum somehow made contact with one of Málaga’s many English merchants, who agreed to transport him to London so he could try to find a way home. The prospect of returning to Patuxet was not so far-fetched. A number of Englishmen who did business in Málaga trafficked in salt cod from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, which put them in touch with other sailors on exploratory probes of northeastern North America. Such networks led Tisquantum to the doorstep of the London merchant John Slaney, treasurer of the Newfoundland Company, a joint-stock syndicate that underwrote fishing voyages to the North Atlantic and aspired to found a colony on its namesake island. Slaney was just as interested in training Tisquantum as an interpreter and guide as Tisquantum was in him. It was still a long shot, but through this connection Tisquantum saw the possibility of reuniting with his people.4
Slaney’s first assignment for Tisquantum, in the summer of 1616, was to work for Captain John Mason at the company’s settlement at Cupids Cove in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, a place tantalizingly closer to Patuxet than Spain or England, but still more than eight hundred miles distant by water. The key was to find some captain who would agree to carry him on the next leg, which was a reasonable possibility given that Newfoundland annually attracted some 250 fishing vessels from England alone and had become a rendezvous for explorers of the northern Atlantic coast. Yet Tisquantum’s window of opportunity had closed by the time the autumn chill set in. With no one to carry him south, he returned to London, doubtlessly torn between hope and disappointment at the interruption of his quest to return to his country.5
A panorama of London by Claes Van Visscher, 1616.
The era of early Indian-European contact was one of mutual discoveries, which involved Indians traveling from America to Europe and sometimes back. Usually these visits were not of the Indians’ own choosing, as European explorers often seized coastal Natives for sale into slavery or training as guides and interpreters. However, occasionally the kidnapping victims managed to return, as in the cases of the Wampanoags Epenow and Tisquantum. Their visits to London and other European sites positioned them to interpret and broker diplomacy between their people and the first generation of colonists.
There is an intriguing possibility that, during Tisquantum’s second stint in London, he met face-to-face with Pocahontas, the other famous Native American traveler of the Atlantic. In 1616 Pocahontas was in England at the behest of the Virginia Company of London, which wanted to use her growing celebrity status to generate investment for the Jamestown colony. After all, over just a few short years this daughter of Chief Powhatan (or Wahunsonocock) had gone from being a wartime captive of the English to the Christian wife of the colonist John Rolfe and the key to a truce in the long-running conflict between her and Rolfe’s peoples. Pocahontas had her own reasons for pursuing this course, but to the English she symbolized the possibility of Native Americans consenting to colonization, and so they feted her throughout her visit to the capital. In between meeting the king, having her portrait painted, and reconnecting with John Smith, she lodged just a few hundred yards down the street from the house of Slaney, where Tisquantum was staying. Furthermore, the handlers of both Indians had mutual business interests. Given these circumstances, it seems likely that a meeting took place. If so, Tisquantum and Pocahontas would have spoken to each other in English rather than their Native tongues, which, though both part of the broad Algonquian language family, were mutually unintelligible.6
Might Pocahontas have whispered to Tisquantum about the numbers of English who had invaded her people’s country and the years of bloodletting that followed? Such a conversation would have heightened Tisquantum’s anxiety to get back to Patuxet so he could help his people when the English began arriving there, too, for he would have already heard his handlers discussing such plans. One also wonders if Tisquantum learned that Pocahontas died in England in March 1617 before she had a chance to return home and tend to her people’s fragile peace with Virginia. In her absence, by 1622 the Powhatans and English were furiously killing each other again.7
Then in 1618 it happened. During another stint in Newfoundland, Tisquantum was introduced to Captain Dermer, an associate of John Smith of Jamestown fame. In fact, back in 1614, Dermer had been part of the very exploring and fishing expedition in New England in which Thomas Hunt went rogue and kidnapped Tisquantum. By this point, Tisquantum had developed enough skill in the English language to offer his services to Dermer in exchange for passage back to Wampanoag country. As it turned out, Dermer was just the right person to whom to make such an overture.
Dermer’s employer, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, was a prime mover of English exploration and colonization schemes for southern New England during the early seventeenth century and, as such, an avid collector of Indians who could serve as interpreters, guides, and cultural brokers. In 1605, for instance, Gorges had acquired five Indians taken in Maine by Captain George Waymouth, two of whom he returned in 1607 as part of an attempt to establish a colony at Sagadahoc, at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Sagadahoc failed after just one year partly because these former captives warned their countrymen to keep the English at arm’s length. Yet that setback gave Gorges no pause. It took only until 1611 for him to acquire five more Indians, including two Wampanoags from Martha’s Vineyard, after Captain Edward Harlow went on a captive-taking rampage stretching from Monhegan Island in Maine south to Cape Cod and the islands.8
Three years later, one of those prisoners, named Epenow, worked within the limits of his captivity to reclaim control of his fate. Described by Gorges as “a goodly man of brave aspect, stout and sober in his demeanor,” and by Smith as a person of “wit, strength, and proportion,” Epenow managed to orchestrate a homecoming by promising to lead the English to his island’s fictional gold reserves. The ship carrying him home reached Vineyard waters just days after Hunt’s kidnapping of Tisquantum. This time, however, the Wampanoags had the last laugh. Epenow hailed his people and, right there in front of his captors, devised a plan with them in his natal language, which the English could not understand. It would take only until the next day for the Natives to reveal what they had discussed. As designed, a flotilla of canoes surrounded the ship, whereupon Epenow jumped overboard and swam to safety while his tribesmen pinned down the ship’s crew with arrows. With no one left to serve as a guide, the expedition had to return home with nothing. Yet Gorges had not yet soured on using Indians to tap into America’s riches. After summoning Dermer and Tisquantum back from Newfoundland to England for a face-to-face meeting, Gorges concluded that this latest Wampanoag was worth a bet. In 1619 Gorges financed an expedition by Dermer to bring Tisquantum home and see what they could accomplish together. Tisquantum’s heart must have been ready to burst with relief at the prospect of his years of exile coming to an end. Then the worry set in.9
Doubtless Tisquantum had already heard through the grapevine of English sailors that a terrible disease had struck the Wampanoag coast during his absence, but there was no way for him to prepare for what he saw when Dermer’s ship finally reached familiar waters. Landing at Monhegan Island and then continuing south to Massachusetts Bay, the ship skirted a coastline that was usually crowded with people tending cornfields and waving furs at passing ships to signal their eagerness to trade. This time, however, there was no one to be seen or heard. Clearly something dreadful had happened. Tisquantum’s anxiety must have built with every moment until the ship finally reached Plymouth Harbor, when the grim truth finally emerged. According to Nathaniel Morton, who visited the place in 1622, Patuxet and the surrounding country had turned into “sad spectacles of … mortality” insofar as they exhibited “many bones and skulls of the dead lying above the ground,” like inverted cemeteries. The exuberant homecoming Tisquantum had been imagining for years had instead uncovered a tragedy of epic proportions.10
Desperate to locate any remaining family and friends, Tisquantum led Dermer inland toward the Taunton River community of Nemasket, twelve miles west of Patuxet, where he finally came upon a group of shell-shocked survivors. Those people must have been as stunned to see Tisquantum again as he was relieved to find them, for they would have assumed he was dead or captive in some far-off place after his years-long absence. Dermer failed to record the high emotions of this reunion, but, given his purpose to learn how coastal Indian society worked, he was keenly interested in Nemasket’s quick decision to send news of Tisquantum and the English to Pokanoket, the tribal seat, thirty-five miles to the southwest at the river’s mouth on Narragansett Bay. Two or three days later, there arrived “two kings,” as Dermer characterized the Wampanoag sachems, “attended with guard of fifty armed men.” Everyone must have been on edge, the English especially, given the Wampanoags’ advantage in numbers. Yet Dermer was relieved to find that the sachems “gave me content in whatsoever I desired,” including the release of a Frenchman “who three years since escaped a shipwreck at the northeast of Cape Cod” only to become a captive of the Wampanoags. Dermer also managed to redeem this Frenchman’s crewmate, who was being held by the Indians of Massachusetts Bay. The official narrative of these events tries to convey the sense that Dermer was in command, but the French captives were a portent that he and his crewmates might become the next ones the Wampanoags took.11
They very nearly were. After this meeting the men returned to their ship and continued their journey, including a stop at the Cape Cod sachemship of Satucket (modern Brewster), where Tisquantum disembarked to reconnect with friends. Unwisely, the English pushed on without him, rounding the wrist of Cape Cod and proceeding down the outer arm of the peninsula to its elbow (modern Chatham), where the Wampanoag community of Monomoyick was located. Little did Dermer know that thirteen years earlier the men of Monomoyick had clashed with a French expedition led by Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt, and apparently the harsh memories ran long. In an exchange that probably began with offers of trade, armed Wampanoags suddenly took Dermer hostage and demanded a ransom for his return. However, Dermer managed to escape and turn the tables—“after a strange manner” is the extent of how he described it—capturing the sachem and two of his men, then hauling them aboard the ship. As the English began to weigh anchor, the captive chief began screaming in panic to his men onshore to return the hatchets the English had paid for Dermer’s release plus an extra canoe-load of corn. Upon receipt, Dermer set the sachem free (he did not say what he did with the other two prisoners) and sailed off. The violence of this encounter could only have reinforced the Monomoyicks’ distrust of Europeans. Just a year and a half later, the Mayflower landed thirty-five miles to the north at the edge of what had effectively become a war zone between the Wampanoags and one ship crew after another.12
Dermer had little time to marvel at his unlikely deliverance because even greater peril lay ahead. Anchoring at Martha’s Vineyard, the crew was stunned to be greeted by a Wampanoag who spoke “indifferent good English.” It was none other than Epenow, who just five years earlier had managed to hoodwink Gorges into sending him home and then orchestrated his dramatic overboard getaway from the clutches of Captain Nicholas Hobson. Dermer naively believed Epenow had overcome any resentment about his former captivity, insofar as he “laughed at his own escape and reported the story of it.” Indeed, in broken English drawn from the recesses of his memory, he invited Dermer to return to the Vineyard to trade for furs after the captain completed his long voyage down the coast to Virginia. This was precisely the kind of profitable exchange that Gorges and Dermer had hoped to cultivate with the Indians when they launched the expedition. Their greed led them right into Epenow’s snare.13
Dermer should have realized he was in danger when he returned to southern New England in June 1620, not only because it stood to reason that Epenow might be yearning for revenge, but also because the Wampanoags as a whole had turned hostile toward Europeans. Reuniting with Tisquantum at Nemasket, Dermer found that the people who had treated him so hospitably the year before now “would have killed me … had not [Tisquantum] entreated hard for me.” The reason for their belligerency, Tisquantum explained, was that while Dermer was away in Virginia, an English vessel had anchored off Pokanoket, invited “many” of the people aboard, and then “made a great slaughter with their murderers [either daggers or small cannons], and small shot,” even though the Wampanoags “offered no injury on their parts.” The identity of the captain who committed this outrage went undocumented, like the traces of so many other voyages. To the Wampanoags, it hardly mattered. He was just one more in a string of vicious plunderers and slavers who left them with “an inveterate malice to the English”—all of them. Dermer and his crew had Tisquantum to thank for helping them to escape Nemasket with their lives—that is, at least until they made their way back to Martha’s Vineyard.14
If Tisquantum warned the English that they were bound to meet more trouble on the island, Dermer paid him no heed. Eager for riches, the captain went “ashore amongst the Indians to trade, as he used to do, was betrayed and assaulted by them, and all his men slain, but one that kept the boat [the smaller trading shallop].” Dermer himself was mortally injured, suffering some fifteen wounds before escaping to the mother ship, and died after sailing back to Virginia for medical treatment. Tisquantum somehow emerged from the fray alive, but the Vineyard Wampanoags seem to have taken him captive and sent him to Ousamequin, the sachem of Pokanoket. The great leader knew this bilingual globe-trotter would be useful whenever the strangers returned.15
Just months later, the Mayflower appeared off Cape Cod, bringing to Wampanoag country a different sort of Englishmen and a whole new host of dangers and opportunities. When it did, figures like Epenow and Tisquantum, who had been to the strangers’ country, who understood their language and something of their ways, would prove invaluable to shaping the Wampanoags’ response. The Thanksgiving myth casts the Wampanoags in 1620 as naive primitives, awestruck by the appearance of the Mayflower and its strange passengers. They were nothing of the sort. Their every step was informed by the legacy of the many European ships that had visited their shores and left behind a wave of enslavement, murder, theft, and mourning.
HOGGERY AND FLOATING ISLANDS
In later years, coastal Indians who recounted their first encounters with European ships always emphasized the violence. Two colonists from early New England, Phineas Pratt and William Wood, separately recorded allegories told by the Massachusetts Indians in which their ancestors unassumingly “took the first ship they saw for a walking island, the mast to be a tree, the sail white clouds, and the discharging of ordnance [cannons] for lightning and thunder, which did much trouble them.” Native men took to their mishoons to investigate this walking island and “pick strawberries” (which might refer metaphorically to trading for European goods, particularly beads), whereupon the sailors opened gunfire on them. “Hoggery!” (hoglike behavior), the Indians cried before they paddled back to shore, or so the telling went. Of course, Indians in the early contact period knew nothing of hogs. Yet precise details had nothing to do with the moral of the story, which was that the people should be wary of the treachery of Europeans, however tempting the strawberries on their walking islands.16
Mi’kmaq petroglyph, Kejimkujik National Park. Courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum.
Apparently sometime during the early contact period, the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia carved this petroglyph of a European sailing vessel. Contrary to common assumptions, Indians were less awed by Europeans and their ships than torn between, on the one hand, the desire to trade with them and, on the other, wariness of their patterned violence.
Just when the Indians of southern New England experienced their first contact with Europeans is difficult to tell, but lengthy intertribal trade networks meant that encounters taking place even hundreds of miles away sometimes brought European materials to Wampanoag country. Ever since John Cabot’s 1497 exploration of Atlantic Canada, and quite possibly earlier, western European fishermen had plied Newfoundland’s Grand Banks for the cod that fed royal armies in times of war and Catholics during the 165 meatless days of Rome’s calendar. Shortly, these voyages extended to Nova Scotia and Maine, and the sailors began drying and salting the fish on American shores before delivering it to Europe. In turn, there arose an incipient trade with coastal Beothuks, Mi’kmaq, and other Wabanakis in which the Indians exchanged their furs for the fishermen’s metal tools and utensils, glass beads, cloth, clothing, and liquor. When the summer fishing season ended and the Europeans returned home, the Indians received an additional haul of metal by ransacking the mariners’ coastal drying stations, pulling apart entire buildings to salvage nails, door hinges, and hooks. This material then entered down-the-line intertribal networks from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Bay of Fundy all the way to Wampanoag country. At this point, intertribal trade rarely involved the exchange of intact European metal items such as kettles. Rather, Indians dismantled these objects for their raw material to use in crafting the same kinds of ornaments they customarily fashioned out of American copper, such as beads, earrings, pendants, and bracelets. Not until southern New England Indians were in sustained direct contact with Europeans beginning, apparently, in the early 1600s, would they begin to acquire and keep the foreigners’ merchandise in its original forms.17
The first documented contact between Indians and Europeans in southern New England took place in 1524, involving the French-employed Italian captain Giovanni da Verrazzano and the Indians of Narragansett Bay, meaning either the Narragansetts or Wampanoags or both. Verrazzano’s voyage had taken him from the Carolina coast to the island of Manhattan, and east across Long Island Sound before he reached Narragansett Bay and Aquidneck Island, site of the modern city of Newport. Without a history of violent encounters at such an early date, the Natives seemed intrigued if a bit wary when the ship appeared. Twenty mishoons of men went out to greet the vessel while keeping a safe distance. Yet the French managed to entice them closer by tossing out bells, mirrors, and beads, “which they took and looked at, laughing, and then confidently came on board.” It was just the beginning of much more elaborate exchanges, initiated by the appearance of two “kings,” or sachems, one judged by Verrazzano to be forty years of age, the other about twenty-four. The Indians were already making it clear that any foreigner wishing to explore their country was going to have to work through official channels and offer the people something of value in return.18
Recycling of a copper kettle. Courtesy of the New York State Museum, Albany, NY.
Native people often dismantled European kettles so they could use the raw metal to manufacture other tools and ornaments, as illustrated here.
The Natives’ preferences in trade surprised Verrazzano. When the crew “showed them some of our arms, they did not admire them, nor ask for them, but merely examined the workmanship.” The captain was equally puzzled that “they do not value gold because of its color; they think it the most worthless of all, and rate blue and red above all colors.” Indeed, the Indians were most interested in “little bells, blue crystals, and other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck.” Blue was an especially difficult color for Indians to produce, as their only source of blue pigment was crushed robins’ eggs. Yet they prized blue as a symbol of water, sky, and the spirits of those places. With Verrazzano’s appearance, now the Indians had blue goods in unprecedented amounts. By contrast, Wampanoags already possessed an abundance of ocher, copper, and plant dyes in the color red, which symbolized blood and vigor. Whether the Europeans’ goods came in rare or common hues, the Wampanoags wanted them in the same ornamental forms with which they already adorned themselves, which is precisely what they got. In exchange, they supplied the crew with fresh provisions and guided the ship through local waters. Verrazzano was mightily impressed with Narragansett Bay, dubbing it “Refugio,” but once he realized that it did not lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, which Europeans imagined to cut through the North American continent to the Pacific, he decided to head back to sea and continue his search elsewhere.19
Subsequent contacts between southern New England Indians and Europeans, including the next leg of Verrazzano’s journey, are too shadowy to discern their contours and consequences. For instance, as Verrazzano headed north to Maine, he spent enough time scouting Cape Cod to sketch an accurate map of the place, but he did not mention if he had interacted with the Wampanoags there. The following year, 1525, the Portuguese captain Estevão Gomez, who was also in search of the Northwest Passage, traced southern New England from Point Judith at the southwest entrance of Narragansett Bay, past Cape Cod, where he appears to have treated the Wampanoags or Massachusett Indians to gifts of bells, combs, scissors, and cloth. If this interaction took place without incident, it was only by dint of the Indians’ sheer luck, for farther up the coast Gomez seized more than fifty Natives from either Maine or Nova Scotia to sell in Spain as slaves.20
Given that two European vessels had visited southern New England in two consecutive years, the Wampanoags might have assumed that this was the start of a trend; but there are no surviving records of any additional contacts until 1580, and even then the details are cloudy. That year the English navigator and colonial promoter Sir Humphrey Gilbert, inspired by Verrazzano’s account, sent ten men to reconnoiter Narragansett Bay in anticipation of forming a colony there. This expedition was part of a burgeoning English effort to challenge Spanish dominance in the Americas, which included English activity in Newfoundland, the lost Roanoke colony of the 1580s, and the founding of Jamestown in 1607. It is likely that Gilbert’s men made contact with the Narragansetts and Wampanoags of the bay, but they left no record of it despite anecdotal evidence that they returned home with a favorable impression of the place. As to whether other Europeans had visited the area between 1525 and 1580, the possibility seems high. There were about three hundred ships a year working the Newfoundland fishery by 1550, and five hundred ships by 1580. Combined with explorations of other parts of the North American coast by the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, it is likely that other, unrecorded encounters occurred. Yet the fact that southern New England archaeological sites dating back to the sixteenth century show a marked lack of intact metal goods, which is widely accepted as an index of sustained contact, suggests that any meetings of this sort were sporadic and brief.21
The Englishman Bartholomew Gosnold’s expedition of 1602 was the turning point at which European visits became annual affairs, and usually violent ones at that. Searching for profitable commodities and a favorable place to establish a settlement, Gosnold’s ship Concord made landfall in Maine and then turned south only to receive a startling lesson about the resourcefulness of the area’s indigenous peoples and their already lengthy history with Europeans. Just off of Maine’s Cape Neddick, near the modern town of York, Gosnold’s ship was approached by a “Basque shallop” (a light sailboat for coastal waters) with a six-man crew. The men of the Concord reasonably assumed that these sailors were “Christians distressed,” which was to say, Europeans. Not only were sailing vessels a European technology, but also the shallop’s captain “wore a waistcoat of black work, a pair of britches, cloth stockings, shoes, hat, and band,” and one of the crew sported blue britches. Yet, when the mystery boat pulled alongside the Concord using a grappling hook and its sailors “came boldly aboard us,” the English were astonished to find that the men were Indians. Clearly this was no first contact episode for the Natives. In addition to the Indians’ sailing equipment and clothing, they carried an intact copper kettle and “a few [other] things made by some Christians,” and “spoke diverse Christian words, and seemed to understand much more than we, for want of language, could comprehend.” They were either Mi’kmaq or other Wabanakis who had worked for and bartered with cod fisherman on Cape Breton or Newfoundland, enabling them to transform themselves into cosmopolitan, maritime middlemen in Indian-European exchange. Their encounter with Gosnold probably interrupted one of their trading expeditions along the Gulf of Maine. At a later date they also became amphibious raiders who spread terror to the northern edge of Wampanoag country.22
Farther south, amid the Wampanoags of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Buzzards Bay, Gosnold’s crew encountered a much different scene. The Natives possessed no sailboats, hats, britches, or any other identifiable English goods. However, copper abounded. The passenger John Brereton remarked that the Wampanoags “have chains, earrings, or collars of this metal; they headed some of their arrows herewith much.” One man had “about his neck a plate of rich copper in length a foot, in breadth half a foot for a breastplate.” Several others had fashioned long copper tubes and strung them on necklaces, “four hundred pieces in a collar, very fine and evenly set together.” Others displayed stone pipes with copper-encased stems and mouthpieces. Wishing to know where the people acquired this material, Brereton “made signs to one of them (with whom I was very familiar) who, taking a piece of copper in his hand, made a hole with his finger in the ground, and withal pointed to the main[land] from whence they came.” In other words, the Wampanoag signaled that copper came from under the earth and that his people had obtained it from the interior. However, that response missed the thrust of Brereton’s question, which was whether the metal originated from some nearby mine. The answer would appear to have been no. There was so much copper among the Wampanoags at the time of the Concord’s visit that it could not have all come from the cold hammering of an exposed American vein, the closest of which was hundreds of miles away in another people’s territory. Yet that is not to say that the Wampanoags acquired their copper directly from Europeans. The small, ornamental forms in which this copper appeared seemed to indicate that it originated with the coastal trade of Nova Scotia and Maine and arrived through Indian middlemen. One reason the Wampanoags ran excitedly along the shore “as men much admiring at us” when the Concord appeared was the rare opportunity to obtain such European materials firsthand.23
Yet the ease with which some of the Wampanoags dealt with the English suggests that there had been other, more recent contacts than surviving documents report. At Martha’s Vineyard, thirteen armed men approached the Concord “without any fear,” as if they had experience with such situations. “More rich in copper than any [Indians] before,” they showed a cultivated taste for European goods, including “knives, points, and such like.” Much to Gosnold’s disappointment, they had no furs to trade, but they did offer up their tobacco, deerskins, and fish with “great familiarity.” A history of unrecorded contacts is also suggested by the behavior of Wampanoags from the mouth of the Acushnet River near where the city of New Bedford now lies. There, the people not only seemed unsurprised by the English but also had a wide array of furs ready for barter. These Wampanoags knew what they wanted in return. One of them was drawn to a pair of knives, which he “beheld with great marveling, being very bright and sharp,” contrary to the subdued Indian response to Verrazzano’s metal wares decades earlier. Yet, if the Wampanoags already had some of their own metal cutting tools, Gosnold’s chroniclers took no notice of it. The European strangers were not quite as strange as they had been back at the time of Verrazzano’s appearance, but visits by ships like the Concord were still rare.24
Though the Wampanoags welcomed trade with the Concord, they knew enough through hard experience or just intuition to be circumspect of these visitors. After all, Gosnold’s party was composed entirely of men, and armed ones at that, which suggested hostile intent. Their initial behavior was also unfriendly. Making camp on the thin Elizabeth Island chain extending between Martha’s Vineyard and the mainland, the English quickly erected a palisade as if expecting an attack or preparing to make one. They also stole a mishoon belonging to four Wampanoags who fled on foot at the English approach. Despite these warning signs, adventurous Wampanoags reached out to the newcomers. A family on the Elizabeth Islands, including two women, visited the English and showed “much familiarity with our men, although they would not admit of any immodest touch.” Likewise, when Gosnold took the shallop to visit mainland Wampanoag communities along Buzzards Bay, he received warm welcomes everywhere from “men, women, and children, who with all courteous kindness entertained him, giving him certain skins of wild beasts.” If the Wampanoags had anticipated violence, they would not have exposed their women and children to the newcomers. At the same time, they probably assumed that unless their leadership got involved, eventually somebody would get hurt.25
After a week of these informal encounters, the English finally received a visit from the Wampanoags’ “lord or chief commander” with an entourage of fifty armed men. It was unclear to everyone whether the opposite party had come to barter or battle, so Captain Gabriel Archer tried to pose the question through signs. While the ranks of Englishmen and Wampanoags stood opposite each other, staring and fingering their weapons, Archer pointed to the sachem, then “moved myself toward him seven or eight steps, and clapped my hands first on the sides of mine head, then on my breast, and after my musket with a threatening countenance.” Precisely how the sachem interpreted these motions is impossible to know, but when he awkwardly mimicked them, Archer took it as a friendly gesture and thus “stepped forth and embraced him.”26
With this, everyone let down their guard and trading commenced, followed by some good-natured, cross-cultural ribbing. The sailors found it hilarious that when the Wampanoags sat with them to share a meal of cod, mustard, and beer, “the mustard nipping them in the noses they could not endure; it was a sport to behold their faces being bitten therewith.” The Wampanoags responded in kind. The English, unaware that the Natives found facial hair disgusting, fell under the false impression that “they make beards of the hair of beasts” because one of them jokingly offered a sailor a beaver pelt “for his that grew on his face.” In another exchange, a Wampanoag parroted an Englishman’s speech, saying to him “How now (sirrah) are you so saucy with my tobacco?” with such precision “as if he had [long] been a scholar in the language.” It was all in good fun, as indicated by the Wampanoags sending up “huge cries and shouts of joy unto us” when they took to their mishoons at the end of the day, and the English responding “with our trumpet and cornet, and casting up our caps into the air.”27
Yet even this favorable start turned violent. During the trading, the English made unmistakably angry threats after a shooting target went missing, which the Wampanoags returned with “fear and great trembling.” The sailors’ attempted “immodest touch” of Wampanoag women certainly did not improve relations. Even after a day of successful barter, the Wampanoags still would not go aboard the Concord, as if they feared being kidnapped. Recall also the English theft of a mishoon from four Wampanoags. It might not have been a coincidence that a week after the end of trading, four Wampanoags ambushed two Englishmen who had strayed from the camp to gather shellfish. An arrow struck one of the English in the side, but before the attackers could finish him off, another sailor, “a lusty and nimble fellow, leapt in and cut their bowstrings, whereupon they fled.” Gosnold’s initial plan had been to leave twenty of his men behind in New England as a holding party for a longer-term settlement while he returned to the mother country for reinforcements and supplies. After the Wampanoag attack, the sailors refused, perhaps having heard that a similar advance group had gone missing in 1586 at Roanoke on the North Carolina coast amid tensions with the local Indians. Instead, Gosnold loaded his ship with cedar and sassafras, the latter thought to be a cure for syphilis, raised sails, and headed for home. It would not be the last time that a Wampanoag show of force would alter colonial plans.28
THREE SONS
The Wampanoags understood Gosnold’s visit less as a warning that Europeans would soon establish year-round colonies than as the beginning of an era in which seemingly nomadic, seafaring traders and raiders might appear at any time and then sail off, leaving behind not only a trail of coveted exotic goods but bloodshed and kidnappings as well. At once enticing and terrifying, the arrival of one of these floating islands was akin to people elsewhere in the world having horse-mounted barbarians storm through their country. These strangers had valuable gifts to offer, to be sure, but the people always had to be on guard. The Wampanoags quickly learned to shoot first and ask questions later.
Nearly every European voyage to Wampanoag country ended in violence. In 1603 the Englishman Martin Pring sailed the Discoverer into New England waters expecting to reman Gosnold’s Elizabeth Island station. Along the way, he stopped at the tip of Cape Cod (modern Provincetown), erected a defensive barricade, and sent his crew out grubbing for sassafras. Initially, relations with the Wampanoags were as cordial as those that inaugurated Gosnold’s stay. In one colorful episode, the Wampanoags plied a young sailor with “tobacco, tobacco pipes, snakeskins of six foot long … fawns’ skins, and such like” to get him to play his cittern (a stringed instrument) while they danced around him “using many savage gestures, singing Io, Ia, Io, Ia, Ia, Io.” Yet the English would not leave well enough alone. “When we would be rid of the savages company,” Pring mentioned nonchalantly, “we would let loose the mastiffs,” giant dogs of war, “and suddenly with outcries they [the Indians] would flee away.” After weeks of such treatment, the Wampanoags began to show up for trade well armed and in large numbers, which the English interpreted as a threat. This escalation reached the breaking point when an estimated 140 Wampanoags appeared outside the palisade one afternoon, whereupon the English twice shot off their ordnance and again released the dogs. As designed, the Wampanoags withdrew, but no sooner had they departed than they set fire to the woods around the English camp. If their point was to drive the newcomers away, it worked. Pring ordered his men to set sail for home while two hundred Wampanoags gathered on the shore to prevent their return.29
Yet the Europeans kept coming, and soon blood started flowing. In the summer of 1605 Pierre de Gaust, sieur de Mons, lieutenant general of the French colony of Acadia, launched the first of two expeditions to explore southern New England for the site of a new colony. He arrived just weeks after Captain George Waymouth had stopped briefly on the outer forearm of Cape Cod before sailing to Maine and kidnapping five Etchemins (or Maliseet-Passamaquodies) from Pemaquid to take to England for grooming as interpreters and guides. Samuel de Champlain, who founded Québec a few years later, went along with Mons as cartographer and log keeper, producing invaluable charts and drawings of the region’s harbors and the Indian settlements lining them. His sketches included Tisquantum’s natal community of Patuxet, where fifteen or sixteen mishoons of Wampanoag men rowed out to the French at anchor to express “great signs of joy” and deliver “various harangues, which we could not in the least understand,” though the welcome was clear. This friendly reception emboldened a handful of Frenchmen to go ashore and meet with a sachem named Honabetha, to whom they presented knives “and other trifles,” much to his delight. For their part, the Wampanoags treated their weary visitors generously to fresh provisions. At this early date, before the horrors of foreign diseases had struck, Patuxet impressed the French as bountiful and busy with its “great many little houses, scattered over the fields, where they plant Indian corn … a great many cabins and gardens.” However, full as Patuxet was with people who considered it home, the French decided to look elsewhere for a place to settle. Imagine, for a moment, how difficult it would be for the Thanksgiving myth to include the French visiting a well-populated Patuxet fifteen years before the English arrived to establish Plymouth.30
Danger lay ahead for the French. On July 20 they spied “a bay with wigwams bordering it all around” at Nauset on the far east side of Cape Cod. This majestic harbor was a hard place to overlook. A narrow break through a thin strip of barrier beach introduced a lagoon of the bluest water into which the surrounding upland seemed to melt through a confluence of streams, salt ponds, marshes, coves, and dunes. Initially, the people were welcoming, too. Once the French passed through Nauset’s sandbars and made landing, “men and women visited us and ran up on all sides dancing,” leading to three days of peaceful exchange and a visit to the Wampanoags’ settlement by Mons and nine or ten of his men. Yet a fight broke out on the fourth day, when some Natives killed the French carpenter while robbing him of a kettle. “They are as swift afoot as horses,” Champlain bristled after the attackers fled at the sound of ineffective French gunfire. The French did, however, manage to seize one Wampanoag who had been aboard their ship when the conflict began onshore. (Several other Indians had leapt overboard and swum to safety.) Under similar circumstances, other European commanders might have treated this prisoner harshly as an example. In this case, Mons showed uncommon diplomatic tact by releasing the Indian in hopes of restoring peace, and it worked. Soon, Wampanoag ambassadors approached, signaling, as far as the French could tell, that the perpetrators of this violence were not their own people. Both sides’ refusal to overreact kept this incident from spiraling out of control, but it was an indication of how fragile these encounters could be. Unwilling to test his luck any further, Mons ordered his men to raise anchor for Maine two days after the murder. Perhaps it was not just for the breakers that the French named the place Mallebare (“Bad Bar”).31
Port St. Louis (Plymouth Harbor), from Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de Sieur de Champlain Xaintogeois (Paris: Jean Berjon, 1613).
Samuel de Champlain charted a number of harbors containing Wampanoag settlements as his French expedition cruised southern New England in 1605 and 1606 looking for a place to colonize. One of those sites was Patuxet (which Champlain called Port St. Louis), the village of Tisquantum. As one can see from the houses and cornfields depicted here, Patuxet was a thriving place before the epidemic of 1616–19 wiped it out. The Mayflower passengers built Plymouth at this exact spot.
The wisdom of Mons’s retreat from Nauset became readily apparent in the fall of the next year when the French resumed scouting Cape Cod under the command of Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt. After brief, seemingly uneventful stops at Barnstable Harbor and Wellfleet, the expedition rounded the southern tip of the Cape, barely escaping a series of ship-eating shoals, but damaging the rudder in the process. Led to safe waters by an Indian guide, the French anchored off what is now the town of Chatham, and found themselves amid an estimated five hundred to six hundred Monomoyick Wampanoags packing up their things for the move inland to winter quarters. The French, though, suspected that the Indians were sending away their noncombatants so the men could spring an attack. Keeping their eyes open and their weapons visible, the sailors spent several days exploring the area, periodically distributing bracelets and rings to Wampanoag women and hatchets and knives to the men “to keep them quiet and free from fear.” Yet it was the French who were the most jittery. When a hatchet went missing, the French fired on the Monomoyicks randomly, which only sped up the Natives’ preparations to leave. Now the French were doubly sure that the Wampanoags had hostile intentions.
Fight at Port Fortuné (Monomoyick), from Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de Sieur de Champlain Xaintogeois (Paris: Jean Berjon, 1613).
Samuel de Champlain’s drawing depicts several violent incidents that occurred when the French visited the Monomoyick Wampanoags (of modern Chatham, Massachusetts) during the summer of 1606. Such encounters tended to turn bloody, usually when Europeans took Native people captive or overreacted to perceived Indian threats and Indian thievery. In this case, the Monomoyicks succeeded in driving off the French and convincing them to look elsewhere to found a colony.
The French also readied their own exit, but not soon enough. Early on the morning of October 15, five sailors who had spent the night near a bread oven they had constructed on the beach (they were French, after all) came under surprise attack by hundreds of Monomoyick bowmen. Shouting to their mates on the ship, “Help! They are killing us,” three of the French fell dead on the spot, while another died shortly from his wounds despite musketeers rushing to his aid. Then, to add insult to injury, the Wampanoags mocked the French while they were stranded in the harbor at low tide by tearing down a cross the French had erected on the beach, unearthing the fresh grave of one of the dead sailors, and parading about in his shirt. “Besides all this,” the French fumed, “[the Wampanoags] turning their backs toward the [French] barque, did cast sand with their two hands betwixt their buttocks in derision, howling like wolves, which did marvelously vex our people.” When the tide rolled in and the French returned to shore to repair the damage, the Wampanoags set fire to the woods to drive them away. Suffice it to say, the French thought better of founding a settlement on Cape Cod, choosing instead to focus on the St. Lawrence River valley. If the Wampanoags had not defended their territory so stoutly, the French, not the English, might have been the first European nation to try to colonize the area, and Plymouth might never have happened. For the Wampanoags, it was a fraught proposition either way.32
Indians to the north also beat back would-be European colonies, of which the Wampanoags were likely informed given their connections to these people. In 1607 Gorges sent three of Waymouth’s Etchemin captives back to Maine as part of an English effort to establish a fur trade colony at Sagadahoc at the mouth of the Kennebec River. The English expectation was that the redeemed Indians would convince their tribesmen to feed and trade with the colony. Instead, they advised the Etchemins to keep a guarded distance, which, combined with a brutally cold winter, forced the English to abandon the colony after less than a year. The failure of Sagadahoc was yet another example of how European violence toward Indians served less to awe the Natives than to make enemies of them and thus undermine the possibilities for trade and settlement. It probably also reinforced the impression of coastal Indians that Europeans were brutes.33
That lesson of Sagadahoc was not lost on Europeans, but they continued to behave more like raiders than traders, with Gorges instructing his ship captains to kidnap Indians to serve as cultural brokers, and his sailors routinely overacting to real and imagined Indian threats. In turn, a decade’s worth of Wampanoag clashes with English explorers, quick on the heels of their battles with the French, proved to them that Europeans as a whole, whatever their national distinctions, were aggressive and treacherous. In 1611 Captain Edward Harlow seized three Abenakis from Monhegan Island, one of whom escaped by leaping overboard, then led his friends to cut one of the tenders (or dinghies) from the side of the ship and get it to shore. Unsatisfied with just two captives, Harlow and his men proceeded to Cape Cod, where they battled the Wampanoags and suffered three men “sorely wounded with arrows.” Harlow complained, with no sense of irony, that the Cape Wampanoags were “very false and malicious, in which respect you must be more cautious in how you deal with them.” The Wampanoags might have said the same of the English. Harlow attacked Wampanoags again at the “Isle of Nohono,” or Nantucket. Though forced to retreat, his crew managed to capture a man named Sakaweston, who went on to live for many years in England and then serve as a soldier in central Europe among Christian forces supporting the Habsburg Empire against the Ottoman Muslims. Finally, Harlow’s rampage tour reached Martha’s Vineyard, where the crew seized two more Wampanoags, Coneconam and the fateful Epenow. This was the same Epenow who years later would connive his way home and orchestrate an escape in which, according to Gorges, the Vineyard Wampanoags “wounded the master of our ship and diverse others in our company” while suffering “the slaughter of some of their people, and the hurts of others.” In 1619 Epenow would exact another measure of revenge against an unwitting Thomas Dermer. He would also emerge as an enemy of Plymouth colony, providing yet another example of how the violence of this era had a long, consequential afterlife.34
The period between Epenow’s return to Martha’s Vineyard in 1614 and Dermer’s voyage of 1619 were the most active and probably the bloodiest of the precolonial era. John Smith claimed that during these years at least twenty-two voyages set sail for New England from London and Devon, though records for most of these expeditions are sparse. What accounts do exist trace an escalating pattern of European-Indian clashes. In this, Smith was no exception. His lengthy experience with the Powhatans of Virginia had convinced him that if Englishmen wanted Indians’ cooperation, they had to assert the upper hand immediately. He applied this principle during a 1614 voyage to New England intended to prospect for mines and hunt whales, but which spun off into a trading, fishing, and slaving expedition. At a narrow passage leading out of Little Harbor, Cohasset, in Massachusetts Bay, an unspecified “quarrel” led Indians standing on shoreline rocks to shoot arrows at the passing ship while the English onboard returned gunfire. Just thirty miles south at Patuxet, Smith and his crew were at it again, for “upon some small occasion, we fought also with forty or fifty of those [Indians],” and “though some were hurt, and some slain,” he claimed that “within an hour after, they became friends.” By “friends,” Smith meant that after the Wampanoags had spent their arrows, the English seized six or seven of their mishoons, which the Natives ransomed for beaver pelts. It was an odd definition of friendship.35
The treachery of Captain Thomas Hunt, who accompanied Smith in a separate ship, produced the most lasting damage to the English relationship with the Wampanoags. Gorges denounced Hunt as “worthless fellow” for kidnapping more than two dozen Wampanoags and selling them into Spanish slavery “for rials of eight,” but he did not grasp the half of it. The victims of Hunt, dismissed by Smith as just “silly savages,” of course meant a great deal more to the Wampanoags. They were cherished family members and neighbors lost to an unknown but certainly terrible fate. Surely the people back home mourned this loss, but with no sense of closure because they did not know whether their loved ones were alive or dead or would ever return. Gorges complained that, because of Hunt, “a war [was] now begun between the inhabitants of those parts and us.” He was right about the effect, though his accounting for the cause overlooked that Hunt was just the worst in a string of European marauders. By the time the Mayflower arrived, the Wampanoags were already “incensed and provoked against the English” and still cursing Hunt’s name. Poignantly, during the colonists’ first year in New England, they met an elderly woman from Cummaquid (modern Barnstable) on Cape Cod who, upon seeing them, broke into a “great passion, weeping, and crying excessively” because she had lost three sons to Hunt’s villainy, “by which means she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age.” Three sons she would never see again.36
THEY WEPT MUCH
Though the English were the most numerous explorers of southern New England, the Wampanoags continued to encounter Europeans from other nations, sometimes with equally terrible results. Dutch activity in the region spiked after Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage up his namesake river revealed that inland Indians had rich stocks of beaver pelts to trade. By 1614 at least five Dutch ships from four different companies were trading on the Hudson and exploring and charting the nearby coast. These ventures included Adriaen Block’s expedition, during which he noted that the “Wapenoks,” or Wampanoags, and “Nahicans,” or Narragansetts, lived on opposite sides of Narragansett Bay. Proceeding to Buzzards Bay, Block found the Wampanoags to be “somewhat shy,” which he mistakenly attributed to them not being “accustomed to trade with strangers.” Little did he know that their guardedness was a response to their turbulent history with Europeans.37
The French also remained active in southern New England despite the bloodshed that marred their voyages of 1605 and 1606. Not only did they continue to work the Newfoundland fishery, but in 1608 they also founded Québec up the St. Lawrence River, followed by fur trade posts, missionary stations, and small agricultural and fishing settlements in Nova Scotia and Maine. Occasional voyages to southern New England were an extension of these enterprises. Smith complained that when he landed north of Massachusetts Bay in 1614, French traders had already been in the area for six weeks collecting the Indians’ finest beaver pelts. Yet within a couple of years two French crews met fates as dire as those suffered by the Wampanoag captives of Thomas Hunt. According to a story told in the 1620s by a Massachusetts Bay Indian named Pecksuot, in 1616 the Wampanoags enslaved some French sailors who had made it to shore after their fishing vessel wrecked off Cape Cod. (Pecksuot said the number of sailors was two, but another version says three or four.) “We made them our servants,” Pecksuot boasted. “They wept much.” The Wampanoag and Massachusett Indians abused the French mercilessly, stripping them of their clothes, feeding them only “such meat as our dogs ate,” and transferring them from sachem to sachem “to make sport with them.” One of the sailors died under such treatment. Another lasted long enough that his master permitted him to take a wife, with whom he bore a child still living after the founding of Plymouth. The others remained slaves until Dermer redeemed them in 1619.38
What the Massachusett Indians remembered most about these French captives were the curses one of them uttered before he died, which to them augured the arrival of epidemic diseases and the first colonists. Pecksuot told that when the Indians asked this Frenchman about a book he read, he shot back, “It says, there will [be] a people, like Frenchmen, come into this country and drive you all away.” Turning to the English colonist Phineas Pratt, to whom he related this account, Pecksuot foreboded, “We think you are they.” Another version of the story, recorded by Smith and Nathaniel Morton, recalled the Indians ridiculing the Frenchman for his Christianity. Their taunts included a sachem dragging the Frenchman to the top of a hill before all his supporters below, then demanding to know whether the Christian God had the power to destroy such a great people. The Frenchman was said to have answered: “Yes, and [God] surely would [kill them], and bring in strangers to possess their land, so long as they mocked him and his God.” Shortly, a terrible disease laid the people low, followed by the arrival of the Mayflower.39
In the meantime, however, the Indians remained powerful and populous, as other Frenchmen soon discovered the hard way. Shortly after the wreck of the French fishing boat, another French vessel entered Massachusetts Bay laden with goods and eager for trade. Pecksuot remembered proposing a scheme to his sachem by which “you shall have all for nothing.” According to his instructions, the sachem’s men rowed out to the ship with knives hidden under piles of beaver pelts, which they offered to the French for cheap. Then, while the sailors were absorbed with these riches, the Indians drew their blades. “We killed them all,” Pecksuot gloated, “then our sachem divided their goods and fired their ship and it made a very great fire.” Morton’s account of this event contends that the Indians spared a few of these Frenchmen to keep as slaves and that they were the ones who made the terrible hexes about the plague and colonial invasion remembered years later by the Massachusett Indians. The confusion about which French slaves made which curses speaks to the viciousness of everyone during this period of contact.40
The few surviving accounts of the captive French differ about particulars, but they share another broader point that Indians remained fully sovereign over southern New England even amid their victimization at the hands of Hunt and men of his ilk. The Indians not only suffered raids, captivity, and enslavement but themselves raided, captured, and enslaved Europeans in turn. The strangers did not awe them then, nor would they when the Mayflower appeared. Indians took the initiative to engage with shipboard explorers, knowing the risk, because they wanted trade as much as Europeans did. Despite the curses of the angry French captives, there was every reason to believe that the Natives would continue to control their own fate indefinitely—that is, until the plague came. Then the real mourning began.