This Land Is Their Land

Sometimes silences in the historical record can speak as loudly as words. When a significant event has occurred and there is only one surviving perspective about it, or none at all, it might mean that the powerful have suppressed or censored the voices of their opponents or the weak. A lack of evidence might also mean simply that records have been lost to the vagaries of war, natural disaster, fire, or clerical incompetence. In the case of the seventeenth-century Wampanoags, interpreting silences is infinitely more problematic. In the early seventeenth century, the Wampanoags did not yet possess the skill of writing. Therefore, most of what we know about them comes from sources produced by European men, predominantly the English, whose focus was on those aspects of Wampanoag life that affected their own security, profits, and religious interests. Curious gaps about Indians in their documents typically have to do with the colonists’ indifference and hostility toward Native people’s culture or simple ignorance about it.

None of these explanations, however, accounts for the paucity of Indian statements about the epidemic of 1616–19, one of the worst in Native American history. That silence speaks volumes. The English were intrigued by this disaster, partly because of its spectacle, but also because they believed it was a sign of God’s omnipotence. Though the English recorded what the Indians had to say about the symptoms of the disease, and even some of their theories about its cause, that is where the conversations ended. It would appear that Native people did not want to recount how it had ripped through their communities, how the people’s healers and religious specialists had struggled futilely against it, how those who could had fled in terror as the pestilence spread, and how a pall of mourning had blanketed the survivors. To dwell too deeply on these horrors would come too close to reliving them.

The historian Francis Jennings wrote poignantly that the Mayflower landed not in a virgin land but a widowed land. Epidemic disease had already nearly emptied a long stretch of coastline that once thronged with people. Every survivor, which is to say, practically every living person, had lost someone, and some people lost everyone. The colonist Thomas Morton used an equally powerful metaphor to describe this disaster zone in which “there hath been but one left alive to tell what became of the rest” and where unburied human remains “were left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon … It seemed to me,” he reflected, to be “a newfound Golgotha.” By Golgotha, he referred to the biblical hill outside Jerusalem where the Romans crucified Jesus amid the rotting remains of the empire’s other victims. He meant to evoke both the macabre scene and his belief that saving grace, in the form of the English Christianity, would arise from it. He did not muse on what it meant for Wampanoags to live amid this devastation. It is hard to imagine that they saw anything redemptive in it.1

Morton claimed that there were no survivors to tell the tale of this disaster, but that was not true. Thousands of people had escaped the affliction, while others had convalesced, but they were not recounting it in great detail, certainly not to the English, and perhaps not even to each other. They had suffered and continued to struggle with what might be characterized as social trauma, a harsh blow to their confidence that society could protect them in the world. Unable to determine what had happened to them and why, they had diminished faith in their ceremonial leaders, healers, and the spirits they marshaled. In daylight, flashbacks of the calamity plagued them. In sleep, nightmares. Depressed, terrified, and unmoored, they clung to life trying to reconstitute some semblance of normalcy. Their psyches were too fragile for them to conjure up the misery of their ordeal through conversation. Some of them never would be ready. Nor were they willing to risk hauntings from the ghosts of the dead by speaking their names. Their silence, it would seem, was a desperate attempt to forget, to bury unspeakable memories and emotions in place of the unburied remains littering their Golgotha. The apparent goal was to create collective amnesia in order to cope, although they would probably never fully heal.2

Yet it was difficult to forget when no one knew for certain what had happened. The Wampanoags had no history with the disease that struck them. There was no name for it. No one knew if it would return. Most important, no one knew who or what had caused it. All of this is to say that if the initial shock of the epidemic had ebbed by the time the Mayflower appeared in Wampanoag country, the terror of it lingered and would continue to do so until the people determined what produced their suffering and how to prevent it from happening again. The urgency of finding those answers meant that it was impossible for the Wampanoags to exorcise their unspeakable demon. They remained constantly on alert, eyes and ears open, searching for clues, petrified about what they might find.

When the Pilgrims waded ashore, they entered the shroud of this dread mystery. Wampanoag survivors still outnumbered the hundred-odd English newcomers by a factor of sixty or more, which on the surface would suggest that the colonists did not represent much of a threat. Yet the Wampanoags’ overwhelming superiority in population cannot account for the fact that they were shaken to their core and wary that the colonists might be necromancers capable of infecting the people again. Thus, to the Wampanoags, the English represented more than just potential traders, raiders, or slavers, like previous European visitors. The Natives probed to determine if these strangers had the power to revive the scourge or to protect against disease and the political threats that had arisen in its wake. The early history of the Wampanoags and Plymouth took place against this dark background of mourning, suspicion, desperation, and fear. It is the most basic element missing from the Thanksgiving myth.

The Wampanoags of the Thanksgiving myth are friendly Indians whose welcome enables the Pilgrims to establish themselves in the wilderness and plant the seeds for what would become a Christian, democratic country. There is no accounting for why the Natives extended this helping hand, no sense that their behavior was a strategic response to their historical circumstances. The story becomes much grimmer, but also much more understandable, when it acknowledges that they were reeling from their losses to an unforgiving epidemic and under relentless pressure from neighboring tribes. Only such conditions would lead them to look for help from English strangers whose nation had a lengthy track record of attacking and enslaving the people. It was not innate friendliness or a directive from God to assist Christians that drove the Wampanoags to reach out to the English. Rather, they were desperate.

“ANCIENT PLANTATIONS … NOW UTTERLY VOID”

Wampanoag country was an entirely different place right before the epidemic broke out, full of Native people wedded to the land by history, ceremony, spiritual relationships, and day-to-day living. In the summer of 1614, a mere two years before the people began falling ill, John Smith remarked that the southern New England coast was “so planted with gardens and corn fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong, and well-proportioned people” that he judged it “an excellent place both for health and fertility. And of all the four parts of the world that I have yet seen not inhabited [by Europeans],” he extolled, “could I have but means to transport a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere.” Nothing he saw presaged the disaster to come.3

The region was not only populated and cultivated but also commercially interconnected and politically organized into increasingly large intertribal confederacies, which would play critical roles as disease vectors. With the assistance of his Indian interpreters, Dohoday and Tatum, Smith discerned that “language and alliance” bound together the Wampanoag communities of Chawum, Paomet, and Nauset on Cape Cod, while to the north “the others are called Massachusetts, of another language, humor, and condition.” The Wampanoag and Massachusett Indians had once been at odds, “but now they are all friends, so far as they have society, on each other’s frontiers.” Decades later, in the 1670s, Indian sources told the English missionary Daniel Gookin that before the epidemic of 1616–19 the Massachusetts Bay Indians held dominion over communities as far west as the Connecticut River and could boast three thousand warriors. They also agreed with Smith’s sources that the Massachusetts “held amity, for the most part, with the Pokanokets,” or Wampanoags.4

One reason for this friendship might have been the Massachusett Indians’ need for trade partners and military allies to address opportunities and threats to their northeast. As Smith understood it, “Sometimes [they] have wars with the Bashabes [i.e., the sachem Bashaba] of Penobscot.” For several years, the Mi’kmaq and Penobscots had used their newly acquired sailing vessels to cruise down to Massachusetts Bay and exchange European tools, metal, and furs for locally raised crops. This food permitted them to spend the fall and winter trapping for beaver pelts to trade to the French instead of having to devote that time to hunting deer and moose for meat. For their part, the Bay Indians acquired coveted foreign wares from still-distant sources. Initially, the alliance between the Massachusett and Wampanoag peoples might have involved the Wampanoags contributing some of their corn to this trade in return for a portion of the goods. However, the relationship became a military alliance as the Mi’kmaq and Penobscots ceased bargaining for the southern Indians’ produce in favor of plundering it in murderous amphibious raids. Apparently, the Massachusett Indians looked to the Wampanoags for protection against this threat.5

The Wampanoags had their own need for the alliance in the form of the Narragansett threat to their west. At stake were control of Narragansett Bay’s islands and tribute from the Shawomet and Coweset communities in the contested Narragansett-Wampanoag border region. Though the Wampanoags’ territory was vast, Gookin’s informants said that in the early 1600s they could muster only some three thousand matawaûog to answer the Narragansetts’ five thousand or six thousand fighting men. Support from the Massachusett Indians more than addressed the Wampanoags’ disadvantage, at least for the meantime.6

All of these relationships, from the Wampanoag-Massachusett alliance, to the down-the-line trade of the Gulf of Maine, to Smith’s interactions with the coastal Natives, were links in a growing commercial and political chain. There had been long-distance ties between indigenous communities up and down the coast and into the interior for countless generations, but this was the first time that their networks included foreigners from across the Atlantic. The point of forging these associations was to increase the wealth and security of the people. Little could they have known that the inherent risks of dealing with strangers would include the introduction of devastating illnesses to this vibrant country.7

Just five years after Smith marveled at the robust condition of southern New England Indians, Thomas Dermer cruised the same waters and encountered an entirely different scene. “I passed along the coast,” Dermer recounted, “where I found some ancient plantations, not long since populous, now utterly void, in other places, a remnant remains, but not free of sickness.” A “great mortality” that the Indians “never heard of before” had slashed its way across the land, after which “the twentieth person was scarce left alive,” in the estimation of the Plymouth colony historian Nathaniel Morton. “Sad spectacles of that mortality” were evident throughout the country in the form of the “many bones and skulls of the dead lying above the ground.” When Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins traveled from Plymouth to Pokanoket in 1622, they noticed that the entire route down the Taunton River to its mouth was lined by formerly cleared fields being reclaimed by the woods, indicating that once “thousands of men have lived there,” but no more. Those thousands, they understood, had “died in a great plague not long since.” Once thronging, now empty, villages with undergrowth creeping into their recesses; skeletal remains lying aboveground right where death occurred—to the people who had survived the epidemic and lived constantly with the memories of loved ones they had lost, the place probably was haunted.8

In all likelihood, neither the Wampanoags nor most of the rest of Native North America had ever experienced disease on this scale. For millennia, their separation from the rest of the world had been a boon to their health because it spared them from a host of ailments that festered among the crowds, filth, and close human-animal contacts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The most lethal Eurasian diseases developed largely because people and domestic animals lived right on top of one another, sometimes literally. Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, and measles all evolved from the disorders of animals. Overall, people share fifty sicknesses with cattle, forty-six with sheep, forty-two with pigs, thirty-five with horses, thirty-two with rodents, and twenty-six with poultry. Native Americans had few domestic animals, only the dog in most cases, and the llama and turkey in a few limited areas of South America. Native American health also benefited from the people living usually in small, dispersed settlements. Elsewhere in the world, illnesses festered in densely populated towns and cities because of the easy communicability, open sewage, spoiled drinking water, and concentration of humans, rodents, and their disease-carrying fleas, lice, and ticks. American Indians had few urban societies outside what is now Peru, Mexico, and the Mississippi River valley. Too often, ancient Native Americans’ geographic isolation and small-scale social organization are seen as having cut them off from the supposed progress enjoyed by their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Among the problems with such a view is that these conditions had spared countless generations of Indians from the very crowd diseases that made life elsewhere in the world so nasty, brutish, and short. Yet what had once been a blessing soon became a curse.9

The single greatest reason that Indians contracted European ailments at such high rates and died in such staggering numbers is that none of the adults had developed resistance through exposure in childhood and therefore nearly everyone became ill at the same time without anyone left to provide care. In other parts of the globe, most adults carried lifetime immunities to lethal killers such as smallpox and chicken pox after contracting them in childhood. But in America these maladies became “virgin soil epidemics,” diseases to which the populations at risk had no previous contact and therefore had not developed immunological resistance. This point, above all, explains the sheer scale of the carnage. Parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all languished together. Those who otherwise might have recovered with some basic nursing died miserably without food, water, and cleaning because nobody was available to provide essential care. William Bradford’s description of a smallpox outbreak among Indians in the Connecticut River valley in 1633–34 probably comes closest to capturing the wretchedness of the epidemic of 1616–19. He wrote that the Indians “fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, not to make a fire nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not to be able to get in again.”10

The lucky few who did survive remained weak, malnourished, and psychologically frayed, thus rendering them vulnerable to additional illnesses. Consider the better-documented parallel case of the Huron or Wendat Indians of southern Ontario, who were some of New France’s earliest fur trade partners and hosted Jesuit missionaries. The Hurons had not even recovered from a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1634, when they were also struck by measles in 1635, the flu in 1636–37, and smallpox again in 1639. Whether the Indians of southern New England experienced a similar disease cycle from 1616 to 1619 is unknown, but it remains a distinct possibility given their ongoing contact with European explorers and traders. Smith believed as much, contending that there had been “three plagues in three years successively near two hundred miles along the seacoast,” but he stood alone in making this claim. More certain is that the survivors were stalked by famine because, during their convalescence, narrow seasonal opportunities for hunting, fishing, planting, or harvesting had come and gone without being exploited. The breakdown of society meant that there was little food.11

Over the next two centuries, foreign diseases would wreak such devastation among Indians throughout the continent that their introduction should be ranked among the most significant disasters in modern times. However, the New England outbreak of 1616–19 was unusual insofar as the shocking mortality appears to have been unrelated to other colonial pressures on indigenous society. In many other times and places, the rates at which Indians contracted and died from such diseases had much to do with the people being physically and psychologically stressed by forces related to European expansion. Take, for instance, intertribal wars fought to obtain indigenous slaves or animal pelts for the colonial market, and Indian-colonial wars over land and jurisdiction. Such conflicts often left Native people malnourished because of their inability to hunt and plant in safety or the enemy’s destruction of their fields and food stores. Additionally, in wartime the people often clustered in unsanitary fortified settlements where viral diseases ran riot. In other words, virgin soil conditions alone rarely account for the vastness of Indian depopulation. Rarely, that is, but not never. Southern England in 1616 appears to have been one of those exceptional times and places.12

No one knows what disease, or diseases, struck the New England coast between 1616 and 1619. The only firsthand accounts come from the Englishmen Richard Vines and Dermer, both of whom referred to it as “the plague,” a term that sometimes referred to epidemics generally and at other times specifically to bubonic plague. The Vines expedition was among the Abenakis of the Saco River, Maine, when the illness broke out in 1616, and though the Englishmen “lay in the cabins with those people that died … not one of them ever felt their heads to ache while they stayed there.” The recollection of Vines’s sponsor in England, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, was that the Maine Indians had been “sore afflicted with the plague, for that country was in a manner left void of inhabitants.” Dermer arrived on the scene three years later and found that most of the people had been wiped out, though “in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness.” He pronounced that “their disease is the plague,” but added “for we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die.” Bubonic plague is not usually accompanied by sores and spots but instead swollen lymph nodes.13

Later accounts by colonists separated from the event by time or distance are scarcely of more help in explaining what had happened. Edward Johnson, who arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 and published an account in 1654 of the colony’s first years, characterized the epidemic as “consumption, sweeping away whole families, but chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase.” The English naturalist John Josselyn, who visited his brother in Maine in 1638–39 and again from 1663 to 1671, understood that “not long before the English came into the country, [there] happened a great mortality amongst them [the Indians], especially where the English afterwards planted, the East and Northern parts were sore smitten with the contagion; first by the plague, afterwards, when the English came by the smallpox [probably referring to the outbreak of 1622 or 1633–34].” John Eliot, a missionary who began proselytizing the Massachusetts Bay Indians in the mid-1640s, said his charges were among the lucky few who had survived “the plague and pox,” while Eliot’s contemporary, William Wood, wrote that the Abenakis of Maine were previously unafraid of the formidable Mohawks—that is, until they lost their male protectors to “the sweeping plague.” Years later, in 1671, Gookin asked some Native elders to identify the disease, but they could only say “that their bodies all over were exceedingly yellow, describing it by a yellow garment.” Gookin conceded, “What this disease was … I cannot well learn,” though “doubtless it was some pestilential disease.” The only points on which everyone agreed was that Indians died in heaps from this ailment and Europeans seemed resistant to it.14

There is no scholarly consensus on which disease corresponds most closely to these symptoms, the pattern of communicability, and the staggering death toll. Proposed culprits have included a combination of smallpox and measles, measles alone, yellow fever, typhoid, chicken pox, typhus, and cerebrospinal meningitis. Bubonic plague (and its outgrowth, pneumonic plague) is widely discounted as a possibility. There were no reported outbreaks of plague in English or French ports in or around 1616 from which the disease might have passed to New England, though the Netherlands was a potential vector. Even in the unlikelihood that a European or black rat carrying the plague traveled on one of the ships that visited the coast in 1616, the fleas and ticks that transmitted the disease from rats to humans and between humans were unlikely to survive New England’s bitter winters. Additionally, Europeans were also susceptible to the plague, and the sources are clear that Europeans did not contract the disease of 1616–19. The epidemic was a plague in the general sense, but probably not the plague like the Black Death, which swept off a third or more of Europe’s population in the mid-fourteenth century.15

A recent argument that the epidemic was leptospirosis is intriguing but unpersuasive. Humans contract leptospiral bacteria from water or food contaminated by rat and mice urine. As recently as 2017, there was an outbreak on the island of Puerto Rico in the wake of a devastating hurricane and an inept recovery effort by the U.S. government. There is no doubt that European sailing ships were responsible for introducing rats to southeastern New England, where they were previously unknown. However, it is unlikely that so many rats had infested southern New England by 1616 that they were capable of spoiling the people’s supplies of drinking water and freshwater swimming places. To be sure, there is a documented case from the Missouri River valley in the nineteenth century in which rats infested the underground storage barns of Mandan Indians, which raises the possibility that rats did the same thing among Abenaki, Massachusett, and Wampanoag horticulturalists, poisoning them in the process. Additionally, the reported symptoms of the 1616–19 epidemic—headache, jaundice—align closely with those of leptospirosis. Yet there is one major problem with this theory. Why, if the disease was conveyed by rats, did it not affect the Narragansetts, who lived a short distance west of the Wampanoags? The fact that the disease spread among allied peoples stretching from Wabanaki to Wampanoag country but halted suddenly at the boundary between two hostile groups suggests that it passed from human to human, not from rodent to human.16

The strongest case is for malignant confluent smallpox. Its symptoms not only include the headache, spots, and sores (or pox) associated with the 1616–19 outbreak but also the yellowing of the skin as dense clusters of lesions break and matter together. Furthermore, this type of smallpox has been shown to kill 70 to 80 percent of its victims, never mind when those people came from a virgin soil population. Its airborne human-to-human transmission would explain why the disease corresponded to the tight-knit French-Wabanaki-Wampanoag trade network. At the same time, there are sound arguments against the smallpox theory. Gookin’s informants in the 1670s did not identify the disease as smallpox, though by that time they certainly knew the disease by name and experience. An outbreak of smallpox in 1633–34 carried off large numbers of coastal Indians, including from some of the communities that had suffered the epidemic of 1616–19, which might indicate that the people had not experienced smallpox before and developed immunities to it. At the same time, it is possible (1) that most of the victims had been born in the seventeen-year interval between these epidemics, and (2) that some of the survivors of the 1616–19 outbreak might not have developed a sufficient immunological defense to smallpox during their first infection or lost it rapidly, both of which are known to occur.

If the epidemic was indeed smallpox, the victims would have suffered incredibly. The disease begins with flu-like symptoms such as splitting headaches and backaches, fever, vomiting, and intense anxiety. After a day or two, the fever abates briefly, then on the fourth day returns along with the first sores in the mouth, throat, and nose. For the next twenty-four hours, the sores spread, sometimes internally, causing bleeding from orifices like the eyes and nose. In such cases, the pain is excruciating and eating and drinking are difficult. More commonly, the rash spreads all over the outer skin, particularly the hands, soles of the feet, face, neck, back, and forearms. The sores produce agony even when they remain separated. When they break open, ooze into each other, and congeal, the patient’s suffering becomes unbearable.17

Aztecs suffering smallpox, from Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (ca. 1585), Book 12, Folio 54.

This depiction of the Aztecs of Mexico suffering smallpox in 1520 during the Spanish conquest is one of the only colonial-era illustrations of its kind. There are no such graphics of this deadly scourge among New England Indians, though they suffered a devastating attack of smallpox in 1633. The unidentified “plague” of 1616–19 also might have been smallpox.

At this point, the likelihood of secondary infection and death skyrockets. The risk of mortality remains high as scabs begin to form, sometimes coating the body in a shell that rips open with the slightest movement. During the 1633–34 smallpox outbreak, Bradford was horrified at the “lamentable condition” of Indians infected with the disease who “lye on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving (by reasons thereof) to the matts they lye on; when they turn them a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will all be a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.” After about a month, those who have survived this torment will begin to shed their scabs, remaining contagious until the last one is gone. Yet even then, the danger of spreading the infection lingers, for not only is the disease contracted by inhaling infected droplets or even dust but the pustules themselves are also potent vectors, including those shed onto clothing and bedding, where the virus can stay potent for several weeks. There it sits, hidden in ambush, ready to strike unsuspecting victims who might have assumed it had already run its course.18

FUTILE MEDICINE

There are no recorded eyewitness accounts of how the Wampanoags and their neighbors attempted to deal with this epidemic, but later sources about their religious, medical, burial, and mourning customs suggest what happened. Wampanoags believed that when someone grew seriously ill, and particularly when an entire community became sick, it was no accident. Someone or something caused it. Spirits punished people occasionally for their neglect of rituals, violation of taboos, or misinterpretation of directives issued through dreams. A sorcerer driven by jealousy or enmity might conjure up disease. The key was to identify the source and divine a cure. And for those purposes, the people turned to their shaman healers, known as pawwaws.

Normally when people fell sick, they took the mere appearance of a pawwaw as “an undoubted sign of recovery,” and no wonder. Pawwaws boasted various abilities to cure and curse, uncover hidden information, influence the weather, and organize rituals. Their powers came from any one of a number of guardian spirits, but the main font was the god of the dead, known as Cheepi, Abbomocho, or Hobbamock. Cheepi was the analog of Kiehtan, whom the Wampanoags associated with the southwest, horticultural crops, pleasant weather, and the sun. Cheepi, by contrast, evoked the color black, cold, the moon, night, and the northeast wind. He shapeshifted between the forms of a serpent, a black panther, and a dead man; his very name was related to the Wampanoag word for death. His stronghold beneath the waters made Wampanoags especially leery of death by drowning and respectful of the power of swamps, where trees served as dangerous portals between Cheepi’s underworld, the earthly habitations of people, and the sky. Wampanoags sought Cheepi’s power because of, not despite, their fear of it. Sometimes a Wampanoag couple would have their son apprentice with a pawwaw in the hope that he would “fall into a strange dream wherein Cheepian [sic] appears unto them as a serpent.” According to the colonist Matthew Mayhew, the preparation involved “observing certain diet, debarring sleep, etc.,” though it worked only for a select few. At other times, Cheepi appeared to someone unexpectedly “by immediate revelation.” Whatever the case, a vision of Cheepi gave the seer access to secondary tutelary spirits, which thereafter inhabited the seer’s body, and their stunning array of powers, such as healing, prognostication, and cursing. A young man’s or woman’s transformation into a pawwaw (there is one recorded mention of a female pawwaw) was a momentous event, and “for two days after the rest of the Indians dance and rejoice for what they tell them about this serpent.” It was to such people that the Wampanoags would have turned when they started feeling ill in the fateful year of 1616.19

To identify the origin of the sickness and how to combat it, the pawwaws would have fasted, danced, and thrashed themselves into ecstatic trances while “sometimes roaring like a bear, other times groaning like a dying horse, foaming at the mouth like a chased boar, smiting on his naked breast and thighs with such violence as if he were mad.” These grunts and growls were the sounds of one of the pawwaw’s two souls communicating with other spirits across space and time in search of answers. Meanwhile, friends and relatives of the patient gathered around, giving “attentive audience to [the pawwaw’s] imprecations and invocations.” Occasionally, the pawwaw would come to a stop, lead the bystanders in a chant, and then proceed as before in his “bellowing and groaning,” which, Wood marveled, “thus will he continue sometimes half a day.”20

In the worst cases, the pawwaws exited the trance to deliver the terrible news “that Kiehtan is angry, and sends them [the disease], whom none can cure.” English observers were struck that, on such occasions, the patient seemed resigned to die. Maladies from other sources were treatable, as when Cheepi had sent the affliction “for some conceived anger against them,” or when a necromancer had implanted a poisonous charm in the patient’s body in the form of “a piece of leather like an arrowhead, tying a hair thereto; or using some bone, as of fish.” If Cheepi was the cause, the pawwaw led the people in “calling upon him,” whereupon “[he] can and doth help them.” In the event of sorcery, the pawwaw would lay his hands on the patient and use a tube to suck out the impurity. One pawwaw explained to Plymouth’s Edward Winslow that it was not he who performed the extraction “but a Skooke, that is the Snake, or Wobsocuck, that is the Eagle, [which] sat on his shoulder and licks the same. This none see but the pawwaw, who tells them he did it himself.” Though the spirit was invisible to everyone else, when a pawwaw “had done some notable cure, [he] would show the imp,” that is, a figurine of the spirit, “in the palm of his hand to the Indians; who with much amazement looking on it, deified them.” Another possibility was that an ailing person suffered from possession by a hostile spirit, as in a case from Martha’s Vineyard, when a pawwaw healed a woman by using a deerskin to capture the soul of an Englishman who had drowned in nearby waters. It required potent spiritual protectors like those wielded by the pawwaws to guard against such an array of threats.21

Curing ceremonies like these, held at first in individual households, then expanding into community-wide affairs, must have characterized the beginning of the epidemic of 1616–19. Yet it would have taken little time before the participants realized that their efforts were in vain. Johnson’s understanding was that “their pawwaws … were much amazed to see their wigwams full of dead corpses and that now neither Squantum nor Abbamocho [other names for Cheepi] could help … and also their pawwaws themselves were oft smitten with death’s stroke.” At a loss for what else to do, the people could only mourn and pray that the contagion spared those who were left.22

There was no mistaking when southern New England Indians were in mourning. They blackened their faces with soot, mangled their hair, sometimes cut themselves, and broke out spontaneously into sobs and abject prayers. When a “strange disease” afflicted Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard in 1643, the English saw them “run up and down till they could no longer, they made their faces as black as coal, snatched up any weapon, spoke great words, but did no hurt.” Roger Williams, who had been taught to accept death as God’s will, was struck during his many visits to the Wampanoags and Narragansetts that “bewailing is very solemn among them in morning, evening, and sometimes in the night they bewail their lost husbands, wives, children, brethren, or sisters.” He was witnessing people who shared the agony of losing their loved ones with family and friends, giving them emotional release and human solidarity.23

There was to be no levity during bereavement. Southern New England Indians considered it “a profane thing either to play (as they much use to do) or to paint themselves for beauty, but [only] for mourning.” No fleeting obligation, people remained in this pitiful state “sometimes a quarter, half, yea a whole year or longer, if it be for a great prince.” When children died, the mood grew even more downcast. “Their affections, especially to their children, are very strong,” wrote Williams, “so that I have known a father take so grievously the loss of his child, that he has cut and stabbed himself with grief and rage.” Williams also “heard a poor Indian lamenting the loss of a child at break of day, call up his wife and children, and all about him to lamentation, and with abundance of tears cry out, ‘O God, thou hast taken away my child! Thou art angry with me! O, turn thine anger from me, and spare the rest of my children.’ ” Amid the epidemic, anguished cries of this sort must have filled the air.24

Under normal circumstances, burial would have come next. Whether the Wampanoags, like the Narragansetts, had specialists who prepared the dead for interment is unknown. The only eyewitness account of their funeral rites, by Winslow, explained that “when they bury the dead, they sew up the corpse in a mat, and so put it in the earth. If the party be a sachem, they cover him with many curious mats, and bury all his riches with them, and enclose the grave with a pale [or fence]. If it be a child, the father will also put his own most special jewels and ornaments in the earth with it; also will cut his hair, and disfigure himself very much, in token of sorrow. If it be the man or woman of the house, they will pull down the mats and leave the frame standing, and bury them in or near the same, and either remove the dwelling or give over house-keeping.” Friends and relatives remained with the deceased’s family “to mourn for them … many days after the burial in a most doleful manner,” a responsibility they considered “solemn.” From this point on, no one was to mention the deceased’s name, lest the ghost hear it and return to haunt the living. As Williams explained: “the dead sachem. The dead man. The dead. A dead woman. He that was here. He that was prince here. These expressions they use, because they abhor to mention the dead by name.”25

Given these customs, imagine the scene as the epidemic of 1616–19 began to knife through person after person, house after house, community after community. Everyone still living would have been painted black and dressed in tattered clothing. The frames of empty houses with their mats or bark siding removed would have cast skeletal silhouettes against the sky, particularly at dawn or dusk. Day and night would have been filled with the sounds of pawwaws bellowing, ritual chanting and drumming, and mourners sobbing and calling on the spirits for relief. People would emerge from their dwellings to bury the dead, then return inside to continue their desperate efforts to heal the sick. Everyone would have been terrified that they were next. By and large, they were.

It is difficult to know what to make of the remains of the unburied dead so often remarked on by Europeans who arrived on the scene after the catastrophe was over. Perhaps it was as they surmised: as the epidemic grew out of control, those still standing fled the scene in horror despite the guilt and anxiety of leaving ailing loved ones to fend for themselves and die alone. Yet such a scenario is difficult to square with Winslow’s observation that it was “a commendable manner of the Indians, when any (especially of note) are dangerously sick, for all that profess friendship to them, to visit them in their extremity, either in their persons, or else to send some acceptable persons to them.” Williams’s understanding was that the Indians’ practice was to stay with the sick and dying “unless it be an infectious disease,” in which case, “all forsake them and fly … the living not able to bury the dead: so terrible is their apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but the houses and the whole town takes flight.” It is possible, however, that what Williams interpreted as a time-worn custom was actually a new response to what the people had learned about communicability during previous epidemics.26

Consider, too, that the unburied dead might have been war captives without any relatives to tend to them. Indians in southern New England, as throughout North America, ranked captive taking among their primary war aims. Whereas they executed most adult male captives, the women and children would have been spared and adopted after a period of debasement and slavery. Such a population of enemy captives or their descendants might help explain Mayhew’s statement in the 1690s that the Wampanoags included “many families” considered “strangers or foreigners, who were not privileged with common right,” such as attending the sachem’s communal hunts or having their family heads attend the sachem’s council. These people were “in some measure subject to the yeomanry,” or common people, which was to say, of a lesser rank than them. It is impossible to know if Mayhew accurately understood what he was seeing and if it reflected the state of Wampanoag society eighty years earlier during the epidemic of 1616–19. At the same time, it is a distinct possibility that the Wampanoag response to pestilence was not to leave all their dead unburied, but just captives without kin, for in such close-knit societies, to lack family was to lack protectors and even social identity. Whatever the reason for these remains, they became ghoulish monuments to a disaster the survivors wanted to forget and skeletal sentries warning travelers to stay away from where the unimaginable had happened.27

But what had happened? One of the worst aspects of this tragedy was that no one could say for certain. It was not as if the Wampanoags and other Indians had no previous experience with disease or premature death. Generations of them had experienced venereal syphilis, tuberculosis, hepatitis, parasites, polio, and respiratory disorders like viral influenza and pneumonia. In all likelihood, their infant and childhood mortality rates were high and average life expectancies were low by modern American standards, compounded by the risks of childbirth to women and warfare to men. But whatever had stricken them in this instance was entirely unknown. Not only did it have no name, but it also tormented survivors with the question of why it had occurred. Given the Wampanoags’ understanding of how disease worked, those questions could be restated as who was responsible or what had they done to deserve this.28

EXPLAINING A DISEASE WITH NO NAME

As the epidemic began taking its toll despite the pawwaws’ incantations, some people would have begun to wonder if one or more of the pawwaws had bewitched them. As one pawwaw explained of the powers his guardian spirit had given him, “his god, which appeared to him in the form of a snake,” enabled him “to kill, wound, and lame such whom he intended mischief to.” In at least one recorded case, a Wampanoag family threatened to lynch a pawwaw who had failed to cure their relative after they became convinced that he was the actual source of the trouble. Thomas Mayhew Jr.’s impression was that the Wampanoags widely feared “the pawwaws’ power to kill men, and there were many stories told of the great hurt they had done by their witchcraft [in] many ways.” When the Hurons experienced their sequence of deadly epidemics in the 1630s and early 1640s, they responded by executing at least half a dozen suspected witches. Whether the Wampanoags conducted a similar purge amid the epidemic of 1616–19 is unknown, but clearly they harbored the same dread.29

A better-documented Indian explanation connected the epidemic to clashes with European explorers and fur traders. Some Massachusetts Bay Indians recounted that one of their French slaves threatened his abusers that his God “would be angry at them for it, and that he would in his displeasure destroy them.” They did not think it was happenstance that shortly “the hand of God fell heavily upon them.” Generations later, in 1792, a sixty-year-old Aquinnah Wampanoag named Thomas Cooper explained that his people formerly cured epidemics with a ritual in which a “sprightly young man” would burst out of a burning wetu and fall into a trance as if dead. When he awoke, he would tell of a vision in which he traveled “high up in the air” to meet with “a great company of white people.” Only “after much persuasion,” he would “obtain a promise” from them “to have the distemper laid,” which, fortunately, “never failed.” In other words, the people associated with Europeans the power to cause and cure epidemics, like Cheepi himself.30

Ritual protection was the most common explanation for why the Narragansetts had been spared the disease while their neighbors to the east died in droves. Wampanoags told Winslow that they had grown “more and more cold in their worship to Kiehtan” in the years preceding the epidemic, that “in their memory he was much more called upon.” By contrast, the Narragansetts “exceed in their blind devotion” to this potent spirit. That devotion took the form of a ceremony in which the Narragansetts erected “a great spacious house” that remained off-limits to anyone but the pawwaws until an invitation went forth for everyone to convene for a spectacular destruction of wealth. Gathering up “almost all the riches they have,” such as “kettles, skins, hatchets, beads, knives, etc.,” the pawwaws cast these goods “into a great fire that they make in the midst of the house, and there consumed to ashes.” Those who contributed the most to this sacrifice won the esteem of their people and, for that matter, drew the envy of some Wampanoags. Winslow’s Wampanoag sources approved of this ritual “and wish their sachems would appoint the like” among them “because the plague hath not reigned at Narragansett as at other places about them, [which] they attribute to this custom there used.”32

Comet over Augsburg, from the title page of Elias Ehinger, Ludicium Astrologicum. Von dem newen Cometa welcher den 1. Decemb. 1618 am Morgen vor vnd nach 6 Uhren zu Augspurg von vilen Personen gesehen worden (Augsburg, Ger.: Johann Schultes, ca. 1621).

Some Native New Englanders associated the epidemic of 1616–19 with a comet seen throughout the world in late 1618 and early 1619. The comet, with its bright colors and long tail, also sparked fear and inspired art throughout Europe, including this German image.

In a world full of spirits and magic, there was no way other than supernatural causes to explain the epidemic, and, in this, the Wampanoags were hardly alone. The English also widely believed that their Lord had smote the Indians to make way for Christians. Smith stood in awe that “God had laid this country open for us, and slain the most part of the inhabitants by cruel war and a mortal disease,” and Johnson agreed that “by this means, Christ … not only made room for his people to plant; but also tamed the hard and cruel hearts of these barbarous savages.” The devastation was so biblical in scale, and so obviously to the benefit of Englishmen attempting to invade the Indians’ country, that John Winthrop characterized it as “a miraculous plague.” God’s providence seemed to be at work on behalf of his supposedly chosen people.33

Yet, whereas the English could use this interpretation to strengthen their faith, the epidemic left the Wampanoags spiritually adrift, uncertain of who or what had sent this terrible punishment and why, and what they should do to prevent it from happening again. The very religious leaders they counted on to handle such emergencies had failed miserably, yet it was equally unnerving that many of them and their carefully guarded knowledge had been swept away, too. As the historian James Merrell explains, “The collected wisdom of generations could vanish in a matter of days if sickness struck older members of a community who kept sacred traditions and taught special skills. When many of the elders succumbed at once, the deep pools of collective memory grew shallow, and some dried up altogether.”34

Is it any wonder, then, that early colonists found among “those that are left … their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrightened”? Sociologists have used case studies of disasters involving far less mortality than the epidemic of 1616–19, and stemming from better-known causes, to contend that sometimes communities as a whole experience collective trauma, meaning “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of community … a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared.” In such cases, entire populations feel dazed and listless yet prone to lash out at a moment’s notice. As Kai Erikson explains, “traumatized people often scan the surrounding world anxiously for signs of danger, breaking into explosive rages and reacting with a start to ordinary sights and sounds, but at the same time all that nervous activity takes place against a numbed gray background of depression, feelings of helplessness, and a general closing off of the spirit as the mind tries to insulate itself from further harm.” Nevertheless, trauma victims cannot escape the memories of their ordeal, which return over and over again in flashbacks, daydreams, nightmares, and even hallucinations. In the most extreme cases of social trauma, of which the epidemic of 1616–19 would certainly qualify, the people suffer “not only a loss of confidence in the self but a loss of confidence in the scaffolding of family and community, in the structures of human government, in the larger logics by which humankind lives, and in the ways of nature itself.” It is as if everything has fallen apart.35

REALIGNMENT

Societies crumble, but people pick up the pieces. All was not lost as long as some of the Wampanoags survived and had other kinfolk who could take them in and help them recover some semblance of normalcy and security. According to Johnson, during the epidemic, a number of Wampanoags deserted their country “for fear of death, fleeing more west and by south, observing the east and northern parts were most smitten by the contagion.” Though the Wampanoags were at odds with the Narragansetts, certainly some of their people were related and therefore received assistance. A migration northwest into Nipmuc country also rings true because the Wampanoags and Quabaug Nipmucs maintained a close relationship throughout the seventeenth century. Some Wampanoags might have stayed away permanently, choosing to merge into their host societies despite all the associated challenges of starting anew. Yet the fact that there remained sizable, if diminished, Wampanoag communities throughout Cape Cod and eastern Narragansett Bay at the time of the Mayflower’s arrival, containing thousands of inhabitants altogether, indicates that most of the survivors either returned or stayed put in the first place. In this, the Wampanoags were spared the fate of so many other Native North Americans, who after suffering catastrophic losses from epidemic disease had to abandon their ancestral territories and join foreign peoples just to remain viable. The plague of 1616–19 came as close to annihilating the Wampanoags as any disaster could, but once it lifted they retained enough of a population to attempt reconstituting their lives among their own kind in their own country amid their own dead.36

Yet the Narragansetts, the Wampanoags’ enemies living on the west side of Narragansett Bay, were not going to make this recovery easy. The Narragansetts and Wampanoags had contended with each other for years before the epidemic, from at least the time of Ousamequin’s father, according to Ousamequin himself. As discussed earlier, their rivalry might have centered on any number of issues: control of Narragansett Bay’s lucrative European trade; competition for tribute payers; domination of wampum production for trade with the Iroquois; expansion onto fresh planting grounds; or even just revenge for violating the taboo of mentioning a dead sachem’s name. Whatever the case, the epidemic dramatically altered the balance of power. Bradford noted that whereas the epidemic had hobbled the Wampanoags, the Narragansetts “were a strong people, and many in number, living compact together, and had not been at all touched by this wasting plague.” Furthermore, the Narragansetts had actually gained some population during the epidemic by taking in survivors, which makes it even more remarkable that they did not contract the disease. The Narragansetts used this newfound advantage to expand north from their base at the southwest entrance of Narragansett Bay, which was evident in “the great destitution of wood all along near the sea [bay] side” where they located their communities and planting grounds. They not only forced the Wampanoags from the head of the bay and the islands but also reduced the paramount Wampanoag sachem to their authority. As the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomo told Williams, “Ousamequin was their subject, and had solemnly, himself in person, with ten men, subjected himself and his land to them at Narragansett.” Ousamequin “acknowledged it to be true,” but he qualified “that he was not subdued by war, which himself and his father maintained against the Narragansetts; but God, he said, subdued us by a plague, which swept away my people and forced me to yield.”37

The Wampanoags’ Massachusett Indian allies were of no help in this contest because they had been hit even harder by the epidemic, which reduced them from tens of thousands of people to just a few hundred. Reports reaching Smith in England told that after the epidemic, “where I had seen 100 or 200 people” years earlier, “there is scarce ten to be found. From Pembrock’s [Penobscot] Bay to Harrington’s [Casco] Bay there is not 20 from thence to Cape Ann, some 30; from Taulbut’s Bay [Gloucester Harbor] to the River Charles, about 40.” The depopulated Charles River basin mentioned by Smith fell squarely in the Massachusett people’s territory.38

Not only was their population thinned to the bone, but they, too, were under pressure from rival tribes. When the English established Plymouth, the Massachusett Indians said that they “were much afraid of the Tarrentines [Mi’kmaq],” who in their swift sailing vessels “used to come in harvest time and take away their corn, and many times kill their persons.” In 1631, during the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the English had an opportunity to witness one of these strikes firsthand. That August, Mi’kmaq fighters stormed the Massachusett community of Agawam while it was hosting a delegation from the Pawtucket people of the Merrimac River valley just to the north. The marauders killed seven people, wounded numerous others, including three sachems, and seized one of the sachem’s wives. Those who managed to escape fled to safety among the English, whom they lauded as “walls to them from their bloody enemies.” Meanwhile, the Narragansetts pressed the Massachusett Indians from the south, making incursions into their hunting grounds and trading with Europeans in their territory without permission. Just years earlier, the Massachusett people had been numerous and formidable. Now they found themselves, like the Wampanoags, nearly wiped out by a strange disease and their survivors at risk of being crushed in a vise of intertribal enemies.39

REMEMBERING THE DEAD

If the Wampanoags are as much our fellow Americans as the descendants of the Pilgrims, and if their history can be as instructional and inspirational as that of the English, then why continue to tell a Thanksgiving myth that focuses exclusively on the colonists’ struggles rather than theirs? There is no question that the colonists showed remarkable fortitude and faith in braving the dangerous Atlantic and then establishing a settlement in wintertime despite their own losses to disease and famine and the danger posed by surrounding Indians. Yet the challenges facing the Wampanoags were infinitely greater. They had suffered thousands of deaths during the epidemic of 1616–19 to the colonists’ mere fifty-two in that first winter. They were subject to actual Narragansett raids compared with the colonists’ speculative Indian threats. If the English viewed their tribulations as tests of faith, the Wampanoags’ trials were all the more so. The English, after all, had the option of pulling up stakes and returning home to Europe, albeit to the Netherlands instead of England given the religious politics of the era. The Wampanoags already were home, fighting for the very survival of their people.

Those struggles would continue for generations to come, partly because epidemics continued to take an awful, if lesser, toll, but mostly because of Wampanoag exploitation by the colonists and their descendants. Given time and access to the natural resources that were their birthright, the Wampanoags likely would have been able to rebuild their numbers and reconstitute some semblance of life as they had once known it. But English colonization, celebrated by the Thanksgiving myth, did not permit this recovery. The colonists’ engrossment of Wampanoag land, attacks on Wampanoag sovereignty, warfare against Wampanoags who resisted, and then reduction of Wampanoag survivors to servitude, near landlessness, and political impotency meant that the epidemic of 1616–19 was just the first of a relentless succession of blows that would have destroyed a less resilient people. The stunning losses of Indians to disease tell us something about why Europeans and their descendants managed to conquer not only New England but the rest of North America between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries. Yet disease does not come close to explaining it all. The introduction of epidemics to Native America was an accident. The bloody work of colonialism was not.40

There’s a Wampanoag joke that goes: “Good thing for the English, or we’d all be speaking Narragansett right now.” The dark humor, of course, is that, in the long term, life under English rule proved far worse for the Wampanoags than subjugation to the Narragansetts ever would have been. Furthermore, ultimately the Wampanoags and Narragansetts found themselves in the same colonial predicament, to the point that there were hardly any fluent Wampanoag- and Narragansett-language speakers left by the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet no one in 1620 could have envisioned this distant future. Their concerns were more immediate and their short-term choices, including Ousamequin’s outreach to the colonists of Plymouth, made sense under those urgent pressures. Getting beyond the sanitized Thanksgiving myth to tell a more accurate history of that encounter involves reckoning with a point made by many Wampanoags today: that their storied welcome to the English was a terrible mistake, born out of the horror of a disease without a name.