One of the main points of dramatic tension in the Thanksgiving myth hinges on the Wampanoags avoiding the Mayflower passengers for months even as the English searched desperately for them in hopes of trading for food and, the myth would have it, to make friends. Aside from one minor military confrontation shortly after the colonists’ landing, the Natives appear only sporadically and always at a distance, fleeing as soon as the English become even slightly aware of their presence. No cause is given for their trepidation, but the implication is that this was a first contact episode and that they were intimidated by the mere appearance of strangers with such odd clothing and technology and fearful that they might be gods or demons. Yet even the most superficial versions of this tale contain evidence that the Wampanoags already had a history with Europeans. Midway through the story, an Indian named Samoset approaches the colonists to utter the famous words, “Welcome Englishman,” in the English language. Soon he is followed by another friendly English-speaking Indian, Squanto, beginning several rounds of diplomacy that culminate in the Wampanoag-English alliance and the Thanksgiving feast. No explanation is given for how Samoset and Squanto acquired their English-language skills or why the Natives had suddenly become so hospitable. It is as if God had intervened so the colony would survive.
Moving beyond the stock characters of the Thanksgiving myth in favor of a history peopled by three-dimensional Wampanoags reveals a much more dynamic and dramatic story. The real suspense in this historical encounter had nothing to do with whether the Wampanoags were innately friendly or hostile. Rather, it resulted from an informed debate within the Wampanoag ranks about whether to wipe out the strangers before they became a threat or to seek their trade goods and possibly military support. How could the Wampanoags not have been conflicted? After all, for decades, if not longer, one group of foreigners after another had appeared on the coast to peddle their wares only to begin murdering and slaving at the slightest provocation or nothing at all. The epidemic had deepened this well of distrust because there were good reasons to believe that Europeans had caused it and might very well do so again. At the same time, the depopulated Wampanoags needed allies to fend off the Narragansetts. The Mayflower band, armed with guns, swords, daggers, and potentially even weaponized disease, represented one possible answer. The Wampanoags also weighed the counsel of figures like Tisquantum and Epenow, who had been to England and back and therefore better understood the potential risks and rewards of reaching out to these people. The Thanksgiving myth is true to some degree: yes, the Wampanoags did initially shrink from the appearance of the Pilgrims. However, that was not because they were overawed by the mere appearance of strangers—quite the contrary. Based on experience, they were tending to their defenses, biding their time, watching, and calculating their next move.
The Thanksgiving myth also distorts history by making the famous feast the seal of the Wampanoag-English alliance and a symbol of colonial America. Yet, to the historical actors, the event was a minor affair compared with other milestones in their relationship. English records running hundreds of pages dedicate only a handful of lines to the legendary First Thanksgiving, and then only in passing. The Wampanoags do not appear to have put much stock in it either. Though Ousamequin’s son Pumetacom later shamed colonial authorities for violating the principles of friendship they had pledged to his father, he never invoked the great dinner. Coming to terms with the deficiency of the Thanksgiving myth as history means acknowledging the relative unimportance of its main act. The alliance between the Wampanoags and Plymouth took shape around other, usually less palatable episodes in which the participants were always acutely aware of how quickly it could all degenerate into bloodshed.
STRANGERS AND THEIR STRANGE BEHAVIOR
The Wampanoags of Paomet and Nauset on the eastern reaches of Cape Cod would not have been surprised at the appearance of the Mayflower. After all, they had more experience with Europeans than any other Indians in southern New England. Yet this latest arrival would have struck them as odd in several respects. For one, the time of year was late. Typically, European vessels came in summer, when the Wampanoags had resettled along the coast to fish and plant. The Mayflower, by contrast, reached the Cape in November 1620, as winter was setting in, a month or so after most of the Wampanoags had left the exposed seashore for the shelter of inland tree stands and hills. Those Wampanoags still active on the coast probably had been tracking this ship since it entered their waters and would have wondered why it dropped anchor near Paomet after failing to pass through the shoals off Monomoyick. The Mayflower’s passengers included not only the usual array of men in their twenties, thirties, and forties but also women and children, the first Europeans of this sort the Wampanoags would have ever seen aside from the occasional cabin boy. While the Mayflower was moored, these women and children occasionally made appearances on the beach to wash clothing and stretch their sea legs while the men probed inland for fresh water and somewhere to settle. Up to this point, Wampanoags other than Tisquantum and Epenow could be forgiven for wondering if Europeans had any women.
Though the Mayflower carried a different cross section of Europeans than the usual roughnecks, there was no way for the Wampanoags to have known the religious impulse behind its mission. Most of the 102 passengers were a type of reformed Protestant known as Separatists. Though they certainly hoped to make a living in America, and perhaps even to strike it rich, their main purpose was to create a society where they and like-minded Christians could worship as they saw fit. They would have preferred to follow this course back home in England, but they could no longer do so because, as their denominational name alluded, they had disassociated with the Church of England, the only legal form of Christianity in the country. Their issues with the state church rested on two principles. First, Separatists believed that every congregation should be a completely self-governing voluntary association. This meant that it would consist only of believers dedicated to participation in a religious community, rather than of everyone living in the parish. The congregation itself, not any outside authority, would decide who its minister would be, how its services would be run, who could join, and how it would discipline its members. Separatists entrusted their congregations with these responsibilities because they limited membership to “visible saints,” people who had evinced through word and deed that they were among the few precious souls God had chosen for salvation. Godly people were to be the foundation for a godly church.
The Church of England did not work this way at all. Its power flowed down from the king, through the archbishops and bishops he appointed and the ministers they appointed. All Englishmen and Englishwomen belonged to the church regardless of their religiosity and were bound by law to attend its services. The holy ordnance of the Lord’s Supper remained open to everyone except the most egregious sinners, despite the risk of profanation. To Separatists, these features meant that the Church of England was not a true church. As they saw it, its organization was a violation of the biblical model of congregational independence practiced by the apostles; state control meant religious issues would be determined by politics, not biblical truth; and its lack of discipline made it so full of wickedness that there was hardly any room left for the godly. It was, in short, an offense to God rather than a monument to him.1
The Separatists’ other issue with the Church of England was that, though it was Protestant, it retained too many features of the Catholic Church, which distracted from what they wanted to be the focus of their services: the biblically based sermon. Like other reformed Protestants, Separatists held up the scriptures as the very word of God. They expected all lay Christians, male and female, to be literate and well read in the vernacular Bible so as to guide themselves and their families by its teachings. Yet they also contended that a true understanding of the Bible required regular preaching by a university-trained minister, lest the uneducated go astray through ignorance or the devil. To this end, Separatists made the ministerial sermon the centerpiece of their worship. Anything that diverted attention from it had to go. This meant their meetinghouses and ministerial outfits were plain, without stained glass, statues, incense, crosses (which they considered false idols), or priestly vestments. There were to be no liturgies or set prayers as in the Church of England, for Separatists thought that these rote exercises deadened the spirit. Instead, Separatists favored “prophecying” in which congregants shared extemporaneous thoughts about their faith and asked follow-up questions to the minister’s preaching. They certainly did not want government interference in what their ministers and the laity could and could not say in service, yet such was always a danger in any state church.
The Separatists felt the need to separate from the Church of England because they feared that continuing to adhere to its wooden rites alongside churchgoers and church officials demonstrating no more grace than a stump was a likelier ticket to hell than heaven. The very fate of their souls hung in the balance. In favoring such a clean break, they diverged from their reformed Protestant compatriots, the puritans, or Congregationalists, who went on to found Plymouth’s neighboring colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. Congregationalists subscribed in principle to the goal of continuing to try to reform (or purify) the Church of England from within, though in practice they bucked its authority in ways great and small. Otherwise, puritans and Separatists agreed about most particulars, especially once they arrived in America and escaped the shadow of the king’s ecclesiastical authorities.
America was not the first place the Separatists looked to pursue their religious experiment. In 1609 the core of the Mayflower group had fled religious persecution in the English midlands for the safety of the Dutch Republic, stopping temporarily in Amsterdam before relocating to the textile-manufacturing town of Leiden. Like so many other religious refugees from throughout western Europe who found sanctuary in the Netherlands, for several years they enjoyed freedom of worship while toiling for little profit in the cloth trades, carpentry, and printing, among other employments. Yet within a decade they had grown weary of Leiden and skeptical about their future there. A twelve-year truce between the Protestant Netherlands and Catholic Spain was scheduled to end in 1621, and with it the likelihood of a renewal of the terrible religious wars that had previously devastated the Low Countries. Within the Netherlands, factions of the Dutch Reformed Church were taking their theological disputes into the streets and threatening to drag resident foreigners into the fray. Not least of all, James I was using his influence over the Netherlands (for England was its main source of military support) to harry the Separatists overseas, including a crackdown on their printer and church elder William Brewster. Thus the Separatist leadership began exploring opportunities to leave Europe altogether, considering sites such as Guyana, Virginia, and even a proposed Dutch colony on the Hudson River later known as New Netherland. Ultimately, they contracted with a group of investors (called Adventurers) in London led by the merchant Thomas Weston to relocate to the Hudson under the title of the Virginia Company, the same entity behind the Jamestown colony. The terms were far from ideal: for the first several years of the colony, the migrants would have to turn over most of the profits from their work to their sponsors; additionally, they were required to bring along several “strangers”—most of them other English Separatists and their sympathizers—to bulk up their meager numbers. However reluctantly, the Leiden congregation agreed to this deal because it was the best one they could get and they were impatient to begin.2
The drawn-out negotiations and some false starts delayed their departure well into August, thus guaranteeing that they would arrive in America with the winter chill. And that was before the debacle that began their journey. Setting sail from Southampton, England, they made it just seventy-five miles before they had to put in for repairs at the port of Dartmouth, where contrary winds kept them stranded for days even after their transports were seaworthy again. Their next attempt carried them but two hundred miles into the Celtic Sea, when one of expedition’s two ships, the Speedwell, began leaking so badly that it had to be abandoned. The Mayflower accompanied it all the way back to Plymouth, England—a mere fifty miles west of Dartmouth—so it could squeeze as many of the stranded Speedwell passengers as possible into what was already a crowded vessel. It was early September before they could shove off again, and with their numbers reduced to just 102, the remaining voyagers knew that they had received a double blow to the chances of their colony surviving. Packed in cheek by jowl, they tumbled for two months across waters so violent that the ship’s mast cracked and had to be held together by a screw for the rest of the crossing. It was as if God were testing whether the self-proclaimed saints had as much faith as they claimed.
Adam Willaerts, Inscheping van een militaire eenheid aan een rivieroever [Embarkation of a Military Unit on a Riverbank], 1620. Courtesy of RKD—Netherlands Institute for Art History.
This painting by the Dutch artist Adam Willaerts is thought to depict English Separatists leaving their refuge in the Netherlands for England in preparation for their voyage to America, where they would found Plymouth colony.
Still, they persevered, only to make landfall well north of the Hudson at Cape Cod, where they had no authorization to settle. They tried to continue south toward their chartered bounds, but after encountering the ship-eating shoals of Pollock Rip near Monomoyick, they decided to turn back and end their exhausting journey there, dropping anchor on November 11 in Provincetown Harbor at the northeast tip of the Cape. Bobbing up and down, with the vast ocean to one side and a sweeping expanse of sand dunes and scrub trees to the other, they huddled together to give thanks to God for their safe arrival. Yet all the while they must have been stalked by the fear that they had sent themselves on a suicide mission.
The Wampanoags probably knew they were there from the beginning. When the English sent out a small exploratory party on November 15, they immediately spied five or six Wampanoags and a dog walking along the beach at a distance. The Natives must have been there to keep an eye on this latest ship to reach their shores. Yet they had no interest in meeting these newcomers face-to-face and exposing themselves to the risk of being hauled off into overseas captivity or worse. Instead, when the English hailed them, they ran in the opposite direction, prompting a chase that lasted nearly ten miles before the newcomers finally gave up. Nothing the colonists did over the next few days gave the Indians any reason to regret their decision. Trudging through the Wampanoags’ summer villages and burial grounds, these strangers rummaged houses, unearthed graves, and picked through the funerary offerings, even though, as the English admitted, “we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchers.” Just what they hoped to accomplish with this desecration is unclear. Probably they were looking for evidence of the country’s wealth and confirmation of their prejudices about Indian idolatry. Whatever the case, they consoled themselves that putting everything back where they found it would ease the affront.3
Aerial view of Provincetown Harbor. Courtesy of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This modern aerial photograph of Provincetown Harbor, where the Mayflower first anchored in America, captures the stark maritime landscape even four centuries later.
Their consciences did not prevent them from defiling yet more graves a few days later. This time the cemetery was more clearly marked, and one of the burials was “much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen. It was also covered with boards, so as we mused [wondered] what it should be … resolved to dig it up.” The English were astonished at what they found. Under several layers of woven mats and goods was a bundle made out of “a sailor’s canvass cassock, and a pair of cloth britches,” or, in other words, European material. Inside was “a great quantity of fine and perfect red powder” made of ochre to symbolize rebirth into the afterlife, along with “a knife, a pack needle, and two or three old iron things.” Yet the greatest surprise, which must have produced a collective gasp, was a skull with “fine yellow hair on it, and some of the flesh unconsumed.” It would appear that some European, whether one of the aforementioned shipwrecked French sailors or a refugee from one of a dozen other expeditions, had received his burial rites from the Natives. And he was not alone. An accompanying package contained “the bones and head of a little child.” Probably the mystery European had lived with the Cape Wampanoags and sired a son with one of their women before his death, thus earning the privilege of having his remains treated respectfully. The English, however, were uncertain how to explain what they were seeing. “Some thought it was an Indian lord and king,” their account relates. “Others said the Indians have all black hair and never any was seen with brown or yellow hair. Some thought it was a Christian of some special note, which had died among them, and they thus buried him to honor him. Others thought they had killed him, and did it in triumph over him.” The anxiety in this conversation is palpable even at the distance of four centuries. Given that the English had already shown their contempt for Wampanoags alive and dead, they had good reason to be nervous.4
Days before, this company had stumbled on another sign of previous European activity in the form of “the remains of an old fort, or palisade, which as we conceived had been made by some Christians.” They would have known the difference between a European palisade made with iron-edged tools for defense by gunners and a Native one fashioned with stone instruments for bowmen. After all, their ranks included Miles Standish, who had extensive military experience in the Netherlands, and Stephen Hopkins, who had lived briefly in Jamestown in close contact with the Powhatan Indians. What they did not know was that this fort had probably been left by the 1603 Pring expedition after the Wampanoags set fire to the woods to drive the English away. It was yet another sign of the already deep and troubled history of Wampanoag-European relations of which the Mayflower passengers were about to become a part.5
If the English had been less conditioned to see the Wampanoags, as William Bradford put it, as “savage people, who are cruel, barbarous, and most treacherous,” they might have taken a moment to consider what the dual symbols of the Pring fort and the European burial meant for the colony’s future. There was no way to tell, of course, whether the blond-haired skull had belonged to an unwilling captive or a grateful rescue from a shipwreck. However, he clearly had become part of the community in the last phase of his life, forming a romantic relationship with one of the people’s women, fathering a son with her, and becoming part of her family. In other words, playing by the Wampanoags’ rules and contributing to their well-being were steps toward becoming kin with them. The rotting palisade, by contrast, was an artifact of an expedition gone wrong. Initially, Pring’s men had participated in trade and even shared music making and dancing with the Wampanoags, but eventually they bullied their Wampanoag hosts as if Europeans’ imaginary distinction between civilized and savage people was real. Pring’s abandoned fortification was but one of many pieces of evidence from the recent past in which the Wampanoags gave lie to European claims of superiority, including the right to act as if the Natives’ country were their own. The Pilgrims should have taken it as a warning.6
Instead, their next move was to loot the Wampanoags’ stockpiles of food. Finding several heaps of sand interspersed among the Natives’ planting fields and house sites, the English set to digging and discovered underground storage pits containing “diverse fair Indian baskets filled with corn, some in ears, fair and good, of diverse colors,” amounting to three or four bushels. They carried away as much as they could in one of the Indians’ copper kettles, which they also stole, then returned to the place two days later to thieve another seven bushels. The English credited “God’s good providence” for this supposed discovery, explaining that because they had nothing to plant the next year, “they might have starved” if they had not taken this measure. Presumably, such a justification would not have satisfied the Wampanoags, who had devoted numerous hours of labor to producing this seed corn for their own people’s use. Now they would have to go hungry so the English could eat. Certainly they also resented the English rifling their abandoned summer homes. The English mentioned sorting through the Wampanoags’ “wooden bowls, trays and dishes, earthen pots, handbaskets made of crab shells wrought together, also an English pail or bucket.” Worse still, “some of the best things we took away with us, and left the houses standing still as they were,” as if restraining themselves from stealing the structures somehow mitigated the theft of what was inside. Just days into their American venture, the English had already established themselves as rotten guests.7
No wonder, then, that two and half weeks later, when the Mayflower sent out another armed expedition to look for a place to settle, a band of Wampanoags attacked. Amid “very cold and hard weather,” ten Englishmen in a shallop sailed south along the inner Cape and landed somewhere near the so-called First Encounter Beach in modern Eastham. They had hoped to communicate with ten or twelve Wampanoags they had spied carving up some stranded blackfish (or pilot whales) for blubber, but the Indians were gone by the time they made it to shore. With the hour getting late, the English decided to spend the night camped on the beach behind a makeshift three-sided barricade of logs and branches, and then continue their search the next day. The Wampanoags, however, had different ideas. Sometime around midnight “a hideous and great cry” startled the newcomers awake, prompting the sentinel to shout “Arm! Arm!” and the men to fire their muskets blindly into the dark. Yet, by the time the gun smoke drifted away, there was nothing more to be heard than breaking waves. Breathing a sigh of relief, the English convinced themselves that the sound had been just “a company of wolves or such like wild beasts.”8
They were dead wrong. At daybreak, the “dreadful” howl arose again, this time followed by a shower of arrows. “Men, Indians! Indians!” the English hollered as they rushed to fire and reload their muskets and strap on their armor. Most of the attackers dispersed when the English rushed out of the barricade, swords at the ready, but one “lusty man, and no less valiant” continued launching arrows at them from behind a tree just some twenty-five yards away. He stood his ground as three musket balls whizzed by him until a fourth shot “made the tree fly about his ears, after which he gave an extraordinary shriek and away they went, all of them.” Apparently, none of the Wampanoags were hurt, nor were any of the English, though “sundry of their coats … were shot through and through.” This terrifying incident, combined with the lack of a deepwater harbor on the Cape, was enough to convince the English to look elsewhere to establish their settlement. Once again, a Wampanoag show of force was shaping the course of colonial development, contrary to the mythology of European dominance.9
CONJURATIONS AND SALUTATIONS
If the Wampanoags assumed that they had repulsed another reconnaissance of their territory, they were mistaken. The English did not abandon Wampanoag country but merely shifted their attention to another part of it, the site of the village of Patuxet, from which Tisquantum hailed, just north of the Cape. The suggestion to look there came from an unidentified pilot of the Mayflower who had visited New England previously. He remembered Patuxet as a place of good anchorage and by the name of “Thievish Harbor … because that one of the wild men with whom they had some trucking [trade] stole a harping iron [harpoon] from them.” The Separatists also might have made their decision after consulting Thomas Dermer’s report of his 1619 journey to New England, which appeared just before the Mayflower began its voyage. In it, Dermer told that Patuxet’s open fields, freshwater sources, defensible hills, and good anchorage were free for the taking because the recent epidemic had all but wiped out the inhabitants. “The first plantation might here be seated,” he emphasized, with just “the number of fifty persons or upwards.” Dermer proved correct. The Pilgrims found the harbor to be lined with “a great deal of land cleared, and hath been planted with corn three or four years ago.” Sure enough, no one was there to contest this place. A coastal march of seven or eight miles turned up “not an Indian nor an Indian house.” If the English wanted to settle where they would not have to fight for a beachhead, this so-called Thievish Harbor looked like the spot. They immediately gave it the new name of “Plymouth” rather than suffer a constant reminder of their own thievish behavior on the Cape.10
Patuxet might not have hosted a Wampanoag village any longer, but in warmer weather the people continued to resort there for fishing and shellfishing, and the surrounding country was more populated than the English appreciated. In other words, “Plymouth” remained very much a part of Wampanoag territory. Nevertheless, the Wampanoags generally steered clear of the new colonial settlement during its first couple of months, which was fortunate for the English because they were in no condition to defend themselves. Malnutrition and disease took a terrible toll on them over the winter, sweeping away half of their number and rendering a portion of the survivors too weak to perform basic labor. At times, there were just six or seven people capable of tending to all the rest under conditions that offered no comfort. Most of the colonists still had to spend nights on the drafty Mayflower, anchored out in the harbor, while others huddled in what few rudimentary structures they had been able to erect onshore, with nothing else to defend them in the event of an Indian raid. At the same time, Plymouth, like most infant colonies, faced the real prospect of starvation unless the Indians supplied it with food, and fast. Yet how likely were the Wampanoags to do so voluntarily? After all, this English band, never mind its predecessors, had already desecrated the Wampanoags’ graves, plundered their houses, stolen their seed corn, and fired on their men. The sick, shivering, and hungry colonists were left to wait out the seemingly endless New England winter tormented with doubt about whether their own ill-advised behavior toward the Natives had already doomed their experiment and perhaps their lives.11
The Wampanoags were equally frightened of the colonists, if also drawn to them by the potential for trade and alliance. Many years after the fact, Wampanoags recalled that the appearance of the Mayflower renewed a debate begun during the plague about the meaning of a curse put on them by one of their French slaves: “that God was angry with them for their wickedness, and would destroy them, and give their country to another people.” Some Wampanoags already blamed the Frenchman’s sorcery for the terrible sickness. Now, with the appearance of the English, “several of the Indians began to mind the Frenchman’s words, thinking him to be more than an ordinary man.” Some Wampanoags, as they later admitted, favored wiping out the newcomers before they turned into the conquerors of the prophecy. Dissenters probably countered that there was no way of knowing what horrors a rash attack might unleash, and that it was best to proceed cautiously to discover just who these people were, what they wanted, and what they had to offer.12
The moderates got the better of the argument, prompting the Wampanoags to keep the colony under constant watch from a safe distance, of which the English were all too aware. On December 24 and 25, Plymouth’s watch sounded the alarm after hearing “a cry of some savages” in the distance. Just a couple of days later, there were “great smokes of fire made by the Indians about six or seven miles from us.” Then, in February, the Wampanoags grew considerably bolder. On the ninth, an Englishman went ashore from the Mayflower and discovered “a good deer killed” with its antlers removed. The following week, a colonist stalking fowl from a camouflage of reeds observed “twelve Indians marching towards our plantation, and in the woods he heard the noise of many more.” The hunter rushed back to warn the others, but when the English sent a party to search the area, there was no one to be found, though some of the colony’s tools had gone missing. The very next day, two Wampanoags appeared on a nearby hill, about a quarter of a mile off, and signaled for the English to come to them. Yet, when Standish and Hopkins took up the invitation, with Standish laying his musket on the ground as a sign of peace, the Native envoys lost heart and withdrew behind the hill, where “a noise of a great many more [Indians] was heard.” Clearly, the Wampanoags were testing this odd winter settlement of foreigners.13
Bradford’s understanding was that before the Wampanoag sachem, Ousamequin, finally reached out to the English, all the pawwaws from around the country gathered in a “dark and dismal swamp” for a three-day ceremony “to curse and execrate them [the English] with their conjurations,” but his interpretation must be taken lightly. After all, Bradford considered the pawwaws to be “horrid and devilish” agents of Indian idolatry, which blinded him to the meanings of their actions. He could not have known that the Wampanoags considered swamps portals for shapeshifting spirits to pass back and forth through the three layers of the universe, underworld, earth, and sky. The pawwaws’ own tutelary spirit, the horned underwater serpent, and its alter ego, the panther, would have been especially strong in such a place. True, this force gave the pawwaws’ the ability to curse, but also to prognosticate and protect, services that any Wampanoag leader would have wanted to employ before undertaking a risky diplomatic mission to unpredictable strangers. There is no way to know what these shamans intended when they met in advance of Ousamequin’s outreach to the English. The only certainty is that the Wampanoags saw the mission as rife with double-edged spiritual and political possibilities. The image of friendly Indians in the Thanksgiving myth ignores the angst of Wampanoag councils in the run-up to this famous moment. Rather than treat the Wampanoags as lifelike figures struggling with a historic decision, the myth reduces them to an unthreatening caricature, the better to have them hand off America to the English and then get out of the way.14
The Thanksgiving myth also distorts history in its depiction of the Wampanoags as naive, for when they finally made direct contact with the English on March 16, 1621, every step they took was informed by their previous encounters with dangerous, unpredictable Europeans. Take, for example, their first ambassador to the English, named Samoset. Samoset was not a resident of Wampanoag country at all but a visitor from the Abenakis around Boothbay Harbor and Monhegan Island in Maine, a people with decades of experience hosting European fishing and exploratory vessels. Apparently, Samoset had expertise as a point man in Abenaki relations with Europeans, which involved brokering trade and diplomacy and guiding visiting ships around Maine’s rocky shoals. It is possible that he was one and the same with Sassacomit, one of the Abenakis taken captive to England by George Waymouth in 1605, then captured again on a return journey home, this time by the Spanish, before finally being redeemed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and sent back to Maine. If so, such a background might help explain what Samoset was doing with Ousamequin in March 1621, insofar as the sachem might have sent for him to help deal with the strangers. Consider also the chance that Samoset was Wampanoag or Massachusett in origin, given that the English understood Sassacomit to have been a “servant”—that is, captive—of the Abenakis when Waymouth seized him. Whatever the case, during his shadowy past Samoset had developed some facility in the English language. His name might not have been of Abenaki origin at all but an Algonquian pronunciation of an English nickname, Somerset, which he used when dealing with Europeans. (At the same time, the opposite might be true, that the English called him Somerset because it approximated his indigenous name, Samoset.) Having become, in effect, a professional intercultural emissary, he showed little hesitation in dealing with the strangers at Patuxet, as he walked “boldly” into the colonists’ settlement and then “saluted us in English, and bade us welcome.” The English sat there, mouths agape, and “marveled at it” before they were able to gather their wits and return the greeting. It was finally time for the two peoples to talk.15
PEACE OR WAR?
The equipment Samoset carried, “a bow and two arrows, the one headed and the other unheaded,” contained a question and a warning. It meant to ask if the English intended peace or war and to emphasize that the Wampanoags were ready for either likelihood. Yet Samoset was too skillful a diplomat to broach the issue directly. Instead, he put the newcomers at ease by asking for beer but settling for some “strong water” and a characteristically English meal of cheese, butter, pudding, and fowl. Only after a stiff drink did the conversation begin flowing. Samoset explained that he hailed “from the east, where the English fish,” and could even “name various of the fishermen.” For reasons he did not divulge, he had been in Wampanoag country for the past eight months—or, in other words, from around the time that Epenow sprang his assault on Dermer, raising the possibility that Samoset was there to advise Ousamequin during the fallout. Samoset claimed to know all the sachems and their followers, including Tisquantum, “who had been in England and could speak better English than himself.” As to the question of where all these Indians were, Samoset “told us the place where we now live is called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague.”16
Nevertheless, the colony was still surrounded by Wampanoags in diminished but significant numbers. Their most important sachem was Ousamequin, or Massasoit, whose people, according to Samoset, were “sixty strong.” Just what he meant by that number is uncertain. It probably referred to the matawaûog of Ousamequin’s local sachemship of Pokanoket, rather than the full array of bowmen the sachem could call on from other localities. The Nausets, from the outer Cape, were reportedly “a hundred strong,” a point Samoset emphasized because they were “much incensed and provoked against English” after years of violent clashes with explorers. Political niceties kept Samoset from addressing the colonists’ theft of the Nausets’ corn and desecration of their graves as additional causes of the people’s anger. However, no one missed the hint when he mentioned that the Nausets recently “slew three Englishmen” in an incident (probably the attack on Dermer) that drove two of the English survivors to Samoset’s own Monhegan Island. The colonists, lest they appear intimidated, retorted that they were aggrieved, too, by the Wampanoags’ theft of their tools and that if the items were not returned “we should right ourselves.” They must have known, however, that in their weakness they had no chance of forcing their will on the much more numerous Wampanoags. The colony’s only hope of survival rested on productive diplomatic relations.17
The key, of course, was for Samoset to arrange a meeting between the English and Ousamequin. To that end, the colonists reluctantly conceded to the interpreter’s wish to spend the night with them, all the while keeping him under close watch. The next morning, they presented him with a knife, bracelet, and ring to deliver to the sachem. Samoset returned a day later, this time accompanied by “five other proper tall men” (who must have been stationed nearby the entire time), all dressed in deerskins, one with a wildcat fur draped over one arm. The emissaries signaled their desire for “friendship and amity” by leaving their weapons outside the settlement and greeting their counterparts with a song and dance, which were basic features of Indian protocol, however strange the English found them. Furthermore, they returned the colonists’ stolen tools and presented four or five beaver skins to trade. The English were not ready to conduct business at this very moment, but they promised that soon they would buy all the furs the Wampanoags had. The Wampanoags’ offer was the first sign that the colony might become economically viable.18
Despite the Wampanoags’ overtures, their men’s face paint cautioned the English about the fine line between peace and war. “Some of them had their faces painted black,” the colonists observed, “from the forehead to the chin, four or five fingers broad.” The color black, as the symbol of death, was a pigment for men who had ritually entered a warrior state. Like Samoset’s two arrows, one sharply tipped and the other blunted, it was meant to emphasize the fragility of these negotiations.19
Fragile indeed. Samoset stayed with the English for the next five days, claiming to be too ill to travel, even as his Wampanoag colleagues departed to report back to the sachem. Once Samoset recovered, he left to fetch Tisquantum, with whom he returned the next day. Yet, during his absence, two Wampanoags appeared outside the English settlement and “made a semblance of daring us,” in which they “whetted and rubbed their arrows and strings, and made a show of defiance,” only to retreat when confronted by Standish at the head of an armed English party. Over and over again, the Wampanoags were asking: Peace or war?20
Handing over the reins of interpretation to Tisquantum, Samoset made his exit and apparently returned home, but it would not be the last time he entered the historical record. Three years later, the English naval officer Christopher Levett told that during his exploration of Boothbay Harbor on the Maine coast, he encountered one “Somerset, a sagamore [or sachem], one that has been very faithful to the English, and has saved the lives of many of our nation, some from starving, others from killing.” True to form, Samoset took the lead in brokering Levett’s relations with the coastal Abenakis. It was just a glimpse of what must have been a much larger role played by Samoset during an earlier period of Indian-European contact in Maine, but otherwise lost to the vagaries of the historical record.21
Back in Wampanoag country, Tisquantum picked up where Samoset left off, arriving at the colony on March 22 along with three other Wampanoags who carried beaver to trade and dried herring as a gift. They told that Ousamequin, his brother Quadaquina, and their men would arrive soon. The English were just as stunned by Tisquantum’s life story as they had been with Samoset’s, learning of his enslavement and escape, and his contacts with men like Dermer and John Slaney, whom some of the colonists knew personally. At this point, Tisquantum struggled with his English-language skills, but they returned in force as he exercised them over the next several months. Bradford viewed him as “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond expectation,” which is how the Thanksgiving myth portrays him. Yet eventually Tisquantum had greater ambitions than to serve as a mere translator between Wampanoag and English leaders. He wanted his own seat at the table, which would prompt both the English and Ousamequin to question whether divine blessings had anything to do with his role.22
If the colonists had been more attuned to Wampanoag culture, Tisquantum’s very name might have tipped them off that he was even more than he appeared, which was saying something. Tisquantum was one of the names the Wampanoags used for their god of the dead, also known as Cheepi and Hobbamock, whom the English associated with the devil. Precisely what the name signified in Tisquantum’s case is uncertain, but it might have represented that he was a Wampanoag pniese, a special class of warrior who guarded the sachem, collected his tribute, and counseled him, particularly on matters of war. A young man became a pniese in the same manner that one became a pawwaw, by experiencing a vision of the god of the dead. Thereafter, he boasted special spiritual protection against bodily wounds and demonstrated “courage and wisdom … and boldness, by reason whereof one of them will chase almost a hundred men.” Pnieseosok (the plural of pniese) were also known for being exceptionally “discreet, courteous, and humane,” or, as the English might have put it, gentlemen. Tisquantum’s name might also have reflected his transformative crossing of the Atlantic, the watery threshold of the god of the dead, and miraculous return home. He had become a new man, boasting linguistic and cultural skills that enabled him to pass back and forth between different human societies, like the shapeshifting horned underwater serpent and panther alternating between water, earth, and sky. Whatever the case, Tisquantum’s name, like his brief career with Plymouth, suggested that he drew on special sources of power. The colony would soon find itself dependent on his talents.23
ENTER OUSAMEQUIN
With Ousamequin’s arrival, it became clear that the colonists, regardless of their claims to sovereignty in America, were guests of the much more numerous and powerful Wampanoag people. An hour after Tisquantum’s introduction to the English, Ousamequin appeared atop a nearby hill accompanied by sixty armed men. The sachem was dressed no differently from the others except that he wore “a great chain of white bone [or shell] beads about this neck” to represent light, truth, and peace. The paint on his face was not black like the members of the earlier delegation, but “a sad [or deep] red,” symbolizing blood, intense emotion, and the animating forces of life and war. Along similar lines, around his neck hung “a great knife on a string,” ready for combat. The other men had their faces painted, too, “some red, some yellow, and some white, some with crosses, and other antic [grotesque] work.” The lot of them, the English could not help but notice, were “all strong, tall, all men in appearance.”24
American Native American Sachem, ca. 1700. Gift of Mr. Robert Winthrop 48.246. Photography by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
There are no contemporary images of Ousamequin, his sons Wamsutta and Pumetacom, or any other New England sachems during the seventeenth century. However, this unidentified portrait from around the year 1700 clearly depicts someone of high status, as indicated by the subject’s wampum headband, earring, and necklace, and the fact that someone judged him important enough to memorialize. English sources mentioned the Wampanoag sachems wearing similar adornments.
For some time, the two sides just stared at each other, with Ousamequin unwilling to demean himself by approaching first, and the Plymouth governor, John Carver, likewise standing his ground. Eventually, Tisquantum broke the stalemate, bringing the English word from the Wampanoag camp that they should send someone to parlay with the sachem. Their choice was Edward Winslow, who apparently qualified for this mission by virtue of his experience as a printer who had published other Europeans’ narratives about their contacts with exotic overseas people. Wisely, he began with an offer of gifts, including two knives and a copper chain with a jewel in it for Ousamequin, and a knife, a jewel, a pot of liquor, and some biscuit and butter for Quadaquina. English speeches followed, to which Ousamequin paid close attention, though it appeared that “the interpreters did not well express it.”25
Nevertheless, these exchanges had generated enough mutual confidence to proceed with formal talks. Each side produced hostages as a guarantee of peaceful behavior, with Winslow staying under Quadaquina’s watch, and six or seven Wampanoags placing themselves still under English guard. Meanwhile, Ousamequin and the rest of his men set aside their bows and arrows and entered the settlement, with Standish and an armed escort leading them to one of the houses under construction. The English did their best to create some sense of majesty under their modest circumstances, sitting the sachem down on a green rug and some cushions, then having trumpeters and drummers announce the arrival of Governor Carver. Given that the colonists were inexperienced in diplomacy and improvising each step, these displays must have come off as awkward. Carver did all he could to communicate his warm intentions, kissing the sachem’s hand (which Ousamequin reciprocated), then serving him strong drink and meat. Soon, Ousamequin began trembling, which the English attributed to fear instead of realizing that this was probably the first time he had ever consumed alcohol. For his part, Ousamequin offered the colonists some of his tobacco from a bag hanging around his neck, a strain of the weed that was much more potent than any Caribbean leaf the English would have tried back in Europe. A few draws of the smoke, presumably from Ousamequin’s stone council pipe, must have made them dizzy, too.26
Traditional accounts emphasize that this meeting produced a written treaty of seven principles, but one must be careful not to assume that Ousamequin understood the agreement as the colonists did. The English themselves worried that Samoset and Tisquantum were incapable of interpreting their words as precisely as one would want in a diplomatic setting. Another issue was that what the colonists recorded and published was intended for readers back in the home country so they would contribute money, people, and political capital to the colony. Thus one might assume that they cast these negotiations in a light most favorable to them. Finally, there was the basic matter that political terms such as “confederate,” “friend,” “ally,” “subject,” and the like are culturally specific. Therefore, the Wampanoags and English probably attributed different meanings to these words, however literally translated.
Consider, then, how the parties might have interpreted the following clauses of their “agreement.” The first was “that neither he [Ousamequin] nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people.” It would seem obvious for Ousamequin to agree to this principle, though doubtlessly he insisted that the colonists should also refrain from injuring or hurting any of the Wampanoags, a provision that did not make its way into print. The second point was “if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him.” It is inconceivable that Ousamequin assented to this condition knowingly or at least with any intention of abiding by it. The English, after all, were guests in his country, not he in theirs. Furthermore, sachems did not wield the authority to extradite their people to foreigners. Any sachem who dared to make such an attempt would at best drive away his alienated followers to another leader or lose his title. At worst, it would get him killed. Following this treaty, there was not a single case of Ousamequin ever turning over fellow Wampanoags to face English justice. Yet there are multiple examples from throughout seventeenth-century New England of sachems insisting that they alone had the right to punish the wrongdoings committed by their people—that is, unless the crime was committed in an English settlement. The first time the English demanded Indians to hand over their own kind to answer for crimes committed in Indian territory, it led to the Pequot War of 1636–37. They did not press the issue again for another forty years, but when they did by arresting, trying, and executing three Wampanoags without the consent of their sachem, Ousamequin’s son Pumetacom, it became the last straw leading to the bloody King Philip’s War of 1675–76. Thus there is no chance that Ousamequin ever intended to abide by the extradition clause of his treaty with the English, and it is unlikely that he ever agreed to it in the first place. It was telling of the actual balance of power that Plymouth did not dare put the matter to the test until everyone who had been present at the signing of the treaty was long since dead and gone.27
The remaining treaty terms are also a mix of seemingly straightforward points of agreement mixed with miscommunication. The third clause committed the Wampanoags and English alike to restore any goods stolen from the opposite party, which seems simple enough. Equally clear-cut is the fourth clause, that “if any did unjustly war against him [Ousamequin], we would aid him; if any did war against us, he should aid us.” In addition to establishing trade, this mutual defense pact was the fundamental diplomatic goal for both parties, vulnerable as they were to rival tribes and European nations alike. Ousamequin said frankly that he was “willing to have peace with us” largely “because he has a potent adversary in the Narragansetts, that are at war with him, against whom he thinks we may be of some strength to him, for our pieces [guns] are terrible to them.” He also wanted English weaponry for his own men, as when he gestured to Winslow to give him his sword and armor. The answer for the meantime was no, but eventually the arms trade became one of the colonists’ most important services to the Wampanoags. That possibility did not mean that the English held the advantage in negotiations. Ousamequin had also demonstrated that he was “the greatest commander amongst the savages bordering upon us,” as the English put it, capable of mobilizing dozens of matawaûog on short notice. Just as he wanted to employ the colonists’ guns in his defense, so would the colonists benefit from the Wampanoags’ protection. At the same time, if the English proved unfriendly, Ousamequin might turn his men against them, as everyone at Plymouth was fully aware. They also knew how badly the colony of Jamestown had fared during its early years because of hostility with the Powhatans. They did not want their tiny settlement to suffer the same fate or worse.28
The fifth clause had implications beyond what the English understood. It obligated Ousamequin to “send to his neighbor confederates, to certify them of this [agreement], that they might not wrong us, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.” The English did not fully grasp that Ousamequin was not a “king” with the authority to dictate to his confederate sachems or, for that matter, his own followers. Certainly, he received their deference by virtue of his lineage, personal achievements, and special abilities, particularly when it came to foreign affairs and war, but local sachems retained the option of going their own way when they disagreed with him, just as Ousamequin had the choice of trying to force them into compliance. In other words, what Ousamequin agreed to do was try to persuade other Wampanoags to honor his policy of rapprochement with the English. The English could not conceive what a challenge that would be for him.29
The two final clauses were equally fraught. The sixth obligated the Wampanoags “that when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces [guns] when we came to them.” The Wampanoags did not need this stipulation. It was already their custom to put their weapons aside in any diplomatic setting, both as a symbol of peaceful intentions and as a safeguard against heated disagreements turning bloody. The English were the real issue, as evident in their soldiers remaining armed and at the ready during these negotiations. Afterward, Quadaquina expressed his offense at this breach of etiquette, saying “he was very fearful of our pieces, and made signs of dislike, that they should be carried away.” The English complied for the time being, but this issue continued to plague their relations with the Wampanoags in the future.30
The final article pronounced that because of Ousamequin’s consent to this treaty, “King James would esteem of him as his friend and ally.” Of course, Ousamequin did not know King James personally and had no understanding of the European concept of kingship. Whatever information Ousamequin had about James would have come from Tisquantum, who probably would have likened him to a great sachem across the ocean. Given that friendship with James seemed to carry no real risk or obligation, but did seem to curry favor with the English colonists, Ousamequin might be forgiven if he assumed there was no risk in giving his assent. Little did he know that over the course of his lifetime and especially those of his sons, Wamsutta and Pumetacom, the English would try to redefine friendship with the king as subjection to his colonists. For now, however, that threat was as inconceivable as it was remote.31
A written treaty, which was entirely alien to the Wampanoags, would have meant less to them than demonstrations of friendship by the English. In this, the colonists did not get off to a good start. They denied not only Ousamequin’s request for them to give him Winslow’s sword and armor, but also Quadaquina’s wish to have two of his men spend the night in Plymouth while the rest of the Wampanoags camped a half mile off. These issues, combined with the colonists’ display of arms, revealed that these newcomers still had little trust for their hosts.
SLEEPOVER
Thus, much was at stake in July 1621 when the English sent a delegation consisting of Winslow and Hopkins, escorted by Tisquantum, to visit Ousamequin’s village of Sowams and present the sachem “with some gratuity to bind him the faster unto them [the English],” including “a suit of clothes and a horseman’s coat with some small things.” At the same time, they also hoped to negotiate an end to the stream of Wampanoags who had been dropping by Plymouth ever since the March treaty. Not only did these visitors stress the colony’s food supplies, but the English also feared them as a potential security threat. Different cultural expectations were also at play in this issue. Whereas the Wampanoags thought of the treaty as part of a more general friendship between entire peoples that entitled both parties to hospitality at the other’s settlements, the English considered it an agreement between leaders restricted to the official terms. In an attempt to restrict the number of Wampanoags who made unannounced visits to Plymouth to just Ousamequin or his agents, Winslow and Hopkins intended to present the sachem with a copper chain for his ambassadors to wear whenever they came on diplomatic business. Finally, the colony wanted to ask Ousamequin to help them make satisfaction for their theft of their corn and beans the previous winter, before any trouble came of it.32
This was the first time any of the colonists had journeyed deeply into Wampanoag country, and, as such, it served as an education for them. The first stop was Nemasket, an inland village at the confluence of the Nemasket and Taunton Rivers and one of the best shad fishing sites in the region. The English had assumed this village was located close to Plymouth because its residents visited so frequently, particularly when they were heading to and from the harbor to collect lobsters. As it turned out, Nemasket was twelve miles away. Staying at the village overnight, Winslow and Hopkins delighted their hosts by firing their gun at a crow some eighty yards off, after which the Wampanoags would not leave them alone until they did it again. The next day, following a road southwest along the Taunton, Winslow and Hopkins confronted the haunting evidence of the 1616–19 epidemic in the form of empty fields and abandoned homesteads. Yet they also witnessed the Wampanoags carrying on with their lives, fishing at a great weir in the river, hauling baskets of shellfish from the seashore, feasting on meals of corn, cornbread, and shad. Through such experiences, some Englishmen were beginning to see their Wampanoag neighbors as something more fully human than just savages of the wilderness. Unfortunately, there would always be too few colonists enlightened in this way.33
This journey also began to reveal that Tisquantum had ambitions beyond serving as an interpreter and go-between in Wampanoag-English relations. When the travelers arrived at Sowams, Ousamequin was out fishing and so had to be summoned back. Tisquantum advised Winslow and Hopkins to welcome the sachem home with an honorary salute from their muskets. Tisquantum had learned during his travels abroad that it was customary for Europeans to greet their leaders with gunfire and trumpets. Yet he also knew that the Wampanoags, at this juncture, were terrified of firearms. Already, at least a score of them had fallen to the shots of European explorers. The explosion, flash, and smoke of the weapons were alarming. It is also possible that the Wampanoags associated this strange technology with disease. The Narragansett word for gun, pésckunk, translates as “thunderstick,” meaning that these tools contained the power of the Thunderbird, the analog of the underwater serpent who gave pawwaws the ability to implant poisonous objects in their enemies, like a fired musket ball. The Wampanoags would not have failed to notice that the plague struck them during those years in which they had several battles with gun-wielding Europeans. It is suggestive that during the short life of the English colony of Roanoke in the mid-1580s, the surrounding Indians attributed epidemic disease to the colonists’ arms, charging “that it was the work of our God through our means, and that we by him might kill and slay whom we would without weapons, and not come near them.” The Wampanoags and their neighbors harbored similar fears. In this case, all Winslow or Hopkins had to do was begin loading his musket for the women and children to scatter in terror “and could not be pacified till he laid it down again.” The salute to Ousamequin would not be the last time Tisquantum exploited the Wampanoags’ association of guns and disease for his own ends.34
For the meantime, however, Ousamequin basked in the honors the English paid to him. Taking the delegates into his house, he received their messages and promised he would send to the Cape Wampanoags to arrange for a reconciliation. He also pledged to coordinate the colonists’ trade for Wampanoag corn, seed, and furs, thereby making himself the point man in potentially lucrative and prestigious relations between the two groups. In turn, the English presented him with gifts symbolizing their friendship. According to Winslow, “Having put the coat on his back and the chain about his neck, he was not a little proud to behold himself, and his men also to see their king so bravely attired.”35
For Ousamequin, the purpose of this diplomacy was to translate his control of the English into prestige and authority among the Wampanoags and dread among his enemies. The sachem told the delegates that he wanted Plymouth to impede trade between the French and Narragansetts on Narragansett Bay, having already grasped that the French and English were distinct peoples on poor terms. Of course, this request had nothing to do with the French and everything to do with weakening the Narragansetts. He flattered Winslow and Hopkins that Narragansett Bay “was King James his country, and he also was King James his man.” Certainly the sachem did not mean to resign his authority to a king he had never seen. Instead, he was trying to convince the English that they had a duty as the subjects of a king allied with him to serve, effectively, as Wampanoag proxies. The sachem also wanted the Wampanoags to acknowledge that the colonists gave him a new source of power, and the English to know that his power was already great. He had his people gather round as he made “a great speech” with the English at his side, asserting “was not he, Massasoit, commander of the country about them? Was not such a town his, and the people of it? And should they not bring their skins unto us?” With each question, the people answered in the affirmative, a drawn-out, ritualized process that Winslow and Hopkins found “tedious.”36
The English were about to discover just how much tedium they could stand. As the Wampanoags had communicated several times during their appearances in Plymouth, they expected political allies to treat each other as kin, which included day-to-day generosity, mutual visiting, and perhaps eventually intermarriage. In this particular instance, Ousamequin had Winslow and Hopkins spend the night at his house under conditions they found uncomfortably intimate and foreign. “He laid us on the bed with himself and his wife,” the two men recounted, “they at one end and we at the other, it being only planks laid a foot on the ground, and a thin mat upon them.” If this arrangement was not disquieting enough for the visitors, shortly they were joined by additional bedmates, as “two more of his [Ousamequin’s] chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us,” or, in other words, cozied up to them. Worse yet, the guests then discovered that it was the Wampanoags’ custom to sing before bedtime, which, combined with “lice and fleas within doors, and mosquitoes without, we could hardly sleep all the time of our being there.”37
The two Englishmen made a hasty exit the next day, citing their desire to keep the Sabbath at home but really because they were so tired and hungry, Ousamequin having had little food to provide them because he had not been expecting their arrival. Yet the Wampanoags, and especially the sachem, must have considered this visit a success. The English had conformed to the Wampanoag expectation of mutuality as part of the alliance. For at least a day, they had lived as the Wampanoags lived. They had smoked tobacco and conversed together, exchanged gifts like friends, met the Wampanoags’ wives and children, listened to their songs, and partook of their food, however meager. The English had once again demonstrated their utility, particularly on the second day when the Wampanoags prevailed on Winslow and Hopkins “to see one of us shoot at a mark.” With a flash, explosion, and burst of smoke, the shooter peppered the target with hail shot, at which the audience “wondered to see the mark so full of holes.” Putting such weapons to Wampanoag use was part of how Ousamequin envisioned this alliance working.38
TESTING THE ALLIANCE
Mutual good feeling was one thing, but translating it into action was quite another. Shortly after Winslow and Hopkins’s return to Plymouth, a series of minor crises gave both parties the chance to test the other’s commitment to the alliance. One such incident involved the colonist John Billington, a sixteen-year-old troublemaker from a troublemaking family, getting lost in the woods for five days before stumbling into the Wampanoag sachemship of Manomet, just southeast of Patuxet along the coast. The obvious thing for the Manomet sachem, Canacum, to do would have been to return the boy straightaway to the English. Instead, he delivered Billington to the sachem Aspinet of Nauset on Cape Cod, whose community the Mayflower passengers had ransacked in the weeks after their landing. Canacum appears to have had two goals in mind. For one, he was challenging Ousamequin’s policy of rapprochement with the English. A sizable portion of the Wampanoags distrusted the strangers, considering them even more of a threat than the Narragansetts. Making Billington’s recovery difficult was an indirect way to signal that discontent to Ousamequin and the colonists alike. Canacum and his fellow dissidents also might have been trying to take some shine off Ousamequin’s luster. When they were ready to announce Billington’s whereabouts, they broke the news to Ousamequin, not Plymouth, which basically forced him to go tell the English that if they wanted the boy back, they would have to go all the way to Nauset to get him. In turn, Ousamequin’s reputation among the English as a powerful sachem capable of ruling over his people took a bit of a hit. For the dissidents, it was a double victory that the English would have to return to the site of their landing and confront the people whose corn they had stolen and graves they had desecrated.
The pilgrims would also have to answer for the crimes their countrymen had committed against the Wampanoags even before their arrival. Sometime in either late June or late July 1621 (the two extant accounts disagree on the date), Plymouth sent out an expedition in the Mayflower’s shallop to fetch Billington. It consisted of ten Englishmen, or half of the adult males in the colony, and two Wampanoag intermediaries, Tisquantum and Tokamahamon, “a special friend” appointed by Ousamequin to live with and assist the colonists and, presumably, serve as his eyes and ears. The English were justifiably nervous about how the Cape Wampanoags would receive them. On their way east across Cape Cod Bay, they put in for the night at Cummaquid, today’s Barnstable Harbor, and were relieved to find the local sachem, Iyanough, “very personable, courteous, and fair conditioned … his cheer plentiful and various.” Yet the sachem’s pleasant demeanor could not shield the colonists from a “very grievous” confrontation with an elderly woman, who, at the sight of the English, began wailing because the English captain Thomas Hunt had enslaved three of her sons back in 1616. She calmed down after the colonists apologized for Hunt’s behavior and gave her some “trifles” as gifts, but the episode clearly left them fearful about what lay ahead.39
They knew that they were sailing into potential trouble at Nauset, though they deflected responsibility for it. “We had least cause to trust them,” Winslow explained, “being they had only had formerly made an assault upon us in the same place, in time of our winter discovery for habitation.” Thus the English stood on their guard at anchor, even as the Natives gestured for them to row ashore. Eventually, the colonists permitted two Wampanoags to come aboard their vessel, including a man who claimed that it was his family’s corn the colonists had stolen. The English promised him restitution, though they fell short of a full-throated apology by requiring him to travel to Plymouth to claim it. Nevertheless, this gesture appears to have been enough to convince the Nausets to relinquish Billington, for afterward the sachem Aspinet, at the head of a “great train” of at least a hundred people, led the boy to the beach. Wampanoag bowmen kept their distance, and everyone handling the exchange left their weapons behind. Another positive sign was that Billington was “behung with beads,” doubtlessly white wampum, to represent peace. In exchange, the colonists gave knives to Aspinet and the head of Billington’s host family, whereupon the two groups parted without the English visiting Aspinet’s village or Aspinet inviting them. The tone of the encounter was standoffish, but it must have come as a relief to everyone that at least it was not actively hostile.40
The extent of Ousamequin’s involvement in this affair is unclear. Perhaps after learning Billington was at Nauset, he had warned Aspinet not to do the English any harm and just return the boy, which would have demonstrated the reach of his influence to the outer limits of Cape Cod. Yet it is also possible that the exchange was a Nauset production independent of the Pokanoket sachem, which would have at once asserted Aspinet’s autonomy while showing solidarity with Ousamequin’s approach to the English. There is simply no way of knowing. The only thing certain is that this affair was about more than just the Nausets and the English. It was also about different Wampanoag sachems across a stretch of nearly a hundred miles negotiating the balance of power between them. That shadowy dynamic was always influencing Wampanoag-Plymouth relations, even if the colonists were often unaware of it.
The rift that Ousamequin’s English alliance opened between him and other Wampanoags was far from closed, as became evident even before the Billington swap was done. While the colonists were at Nauset, an Indian runner arrived with the message “that the Narragansetts had spoiled some of Massasoit’s men and taken him,” which led the English to hurry their exit lest they come under attack, too. They rushed back to Plymouth to discover the news was true, “that Massasoit was put from his country by the Narragansetts.” More alarming still was intelligence that Corbitant, the sachem of Pocasset, just to the east of Pokanoket, was challenging Ousamequin’s authority from within the Wampanoag ranks. As the English understood it, Corbitant had grown “conversant with the Narragansetts” and was touting their support as he traveled through Wampanoag country trying “to draw the hearts of Massasoit’s subjects from him, speaking also disdainfully of us, storming at the peace.” Corbitant also railed against the colonists’ growing roster of Wampanoag interpreters and go-betweens, which now included not only Tisquantum and Tokamahamon but also a new figure, Hobbamock. Hobbamock, like Tisquantum, carried one of the names of the Wampanoag god of the dead. He was also a fearsome pniese (or warrior-counselor) who fled to the English after a falling-out with Ousamequin, or so he claimed. It would take little time before Ousamequin and the English were glad to have him managing their affairs from inside Plymouth.41
The three Wampanoag go-betweens set out to investigate and attempt to negotiate an end to the crisis, only to walk into a hornet’s nest. When Corbitant heard that Tisquantum and Hobbamock were at Nemasket looking for Ousamequin, he had his supporters take them prisoner, boasting that without the interpreters “the English had lost their tongue.” Hobbamock managed to escape despite being held at knifepoint, true to his courageous reputation as a pniese, and then rushed back to Plymouth to announce breathlessly that Tisquantum was probably dead.42
As Ousamequin would have hoped, the English sprang to his defense. They quickly assembled fourteen colonists and Hobbamock under Miles Standish to march on Nemasket and, if the rebels had indeed killed Tisquantum, bring back Corbitant’s head and arrest another sachem, Nepoeof, “who was of this confederacy.” The mission got off to a rough start, as the plan for a nighttime raid had to be scrapped when the men got lost in the woods. Yet, as daylight broke, the troopers recovered their bearings and managed to sneak into Nemasket undetected, permitting a surprise assault on the house where Tisquantum had previously been held. Amid the fray, Hobbamock shouted that the English were there only for Corbitant, not anyone else, but that did not prevent some of the inhabitants from trying to escape or the adrenaline-filled English from injuring them in the process. To the colonists’ credit, afterward they sent two of the injured Wampanoags back to Plymouth to receive medical care, though they did not mention whether these people gave their consent or had any idea what the English were going to do with them.43
Once order was restored, the expedition learned that Corbitant and his men had already left town, but Tisquantum was still there and very much alive. So, instead of launching a futile and hazardous manhunt, Standish pronounced that if anyone rose up against Ousamequin again or intimidated his followers, particularly Tisquantum and Hobbamock, the English “would revenge it.” To punctuate the warning, Plymouth sent an armed party to the sachem Obbatinewat on the southern shore of Massachusetts Bay, who “had often threatened us (as we were informed)” even though he was supposed to be under Ousamequin. The intimidation worked, as the sachem treated the embassy “kindly.”44
Ousamequin’s backing by English defenders, who, despite their small numbers, wielded intimidating firearms, swords, and armor, was enough to quell the resistance temporarily. After the strike, in September 1621, a series of Wampanoag and Massachusett sachems put their marks to another treaty in which they pledged themselves “to be the loyal subjects of King James,” which was to say, on good terms with Plymouth colony. The roster even included former dissidents such as Epenow of Martha’s Vineyard and their purported ringleader, Corbitant. From this point on, Corbitant did not create any more trouble for Ousamequin that came to the attention of the English. Indeed, sometime later, Ousamequin wed his two sons, later known as Wamsutta and Pumetacom, to Corbitant’s two daughters, Namumpum (or Weetamoo) and Wootonekanuske, respectively, thus creating marriage bonds that firmed up the authority of Ousamequin and his successors.45
The Narragansetts had no intention of permitting the English to prop up their rival unchallenged. In mid-November 1621, shortly after Plymouth received its first shipload of new colonists (thirty-seven) and fresh supplies, rumors arose that the Narragansetts “began to breathe forth many threats against us … insomuch as the common talk of our neighboring Indians, on all sides, was the preparation they made to come against us.” An ambassador sent by the Narragansett sachem, Canonicus, to Plymouth only heightened these tensions. Speaking through the novice interpretation of Tokamahamon, this representative asked if Tisquantum was there, appeared relieved to learn that he was not, and then delivered “a bundle of new arrows wrapped in a rattlesnake’s skin.” Mission accomplished, the visitor promptly turned to leave, but William Bradford, now governor of the colony, ordered him detained until the meaning of the parcel could be discerned. Tokamahamon reached the obvious conclusion that the Narragansetts were trying to say “they were enemies to us.” Later, Tisquantum agreed, adding that it was a dare the English needed to answer. To that end, Bradford, probably at Tisquantum’s suggestion, stuffed the snakeskin with gunpowder and shot and had the messenger return it to his sachem, unaware that Indians associated these substances with plague or at the very least powerful magic. Whether out of honor or fear, Canonicus rejected the bundle and sent it back to Plymouth unopened, leading Bradford to speculate that “it was no small terror to this savage king.” The English then got to work erecting a defensive palisade around their settlement, just in case the terror wore off.46
GIVING THANKS
Despite the Narragansett threat looming over the colony, the English had good reason to pause for celebration in late November 1621. The colony had survived a terrible first winter and the death of half its population. The leadership had forged an alliance with Ousamequin, the most powerful sachem in the immediate area, and both parties had demonstrated their commitment to defending the other. In turn, other Wampanoag and Massachusett sachems seemed to have reconciled themselves to Ousamequin’s policy, despite their distrust of the English. The colony was now capable of sustaining itself, partly through its own labor, partly through trade with the Wampanoags. Tisquantum had taught the colonists how to cultivate maize for the first time in their lives, including planting the seeds in holes made with digging sticks, forming hills around the stalks as they grew, and fertilizing each plant with herring from nearby streams, Wampanoag-style. Combined with produce from additional crops of barley and peas, fish from surrounding waters, and game from the wetlands and forest, there was finally enough to eat. Additionally, the colonists had erected seven dwelling houses and four public buildings and received their first shipload of reinforcements. Given all these developments, Plymouth had reasonable hopes for a better winter ahead—that is, if the Narragansetts did not attack.
Having passed through one crisis after another, Plymouth’s leaders decided that sometime in late September or early October, after the harvest was in, the people should set aside some time to “rejoice together.” It is this event that posterity has lionized as the First Thanksgiving, though the participants did not think of it as a thanksgiving. That would have meant engaging in prayerful contemplation while fasting. Rather, they planned to feast and indulge in some “recreations,” including militia drill and target practice. After a session of drinking beer, “strong water,” and perhaps wine, the men’s uninhibited boasting probably also led to contests of (staggered) speed and strength. Modern Americans tend to imagine the Pilgrims as stern and joyless. They could be both of these things, but not on this occasion.47
The people’s meals during these festivities bore only scant resemblance to the modern Thanksgiving spread. Before the fun began, Bradford sent out four men to go “fowling,” and they brought back enough to feed the people for nearly a week. Their catch likely included wild turkey, for Bradford noted that Plymouth “took many” that autumn, despite how challenging it was for inexperienced shots to bag this surprisingly fleet creature. Yet turkey was probably not the only bird served. Accompanying it would have been “water fowl” such as ducks and geese, which “began to come in store … as winter approached.” Venison, roasted or stewed, also would have been on the menu, given that it appears on Bradford’s inventory of the colony’s larders that season. Certainly there was fish aplenty, including cod and bass, “of which every family had their portion,” and shellfish such as clams, mussels, oysters, lobsters, scallops, and crabs. To the surprise of many modern people, there also would have been eels, for according to Winslow “in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter”—that was another skill Tisquantum had taught them. In other words, the legendary First Thanksgiving meal consisted largely of wild game and seafood.
Indian cornmeal in various forms also would have featured prominently at the feast. The English had spent much of the previous year trading for, raising, and harvesting maize, to the point that Plymouth finally had enough in storage to distribute “about a peck of meal a week to a person.” Following the colonists’ months of exposure to Indian foodways, they had likely begun preparing their own versions of the customary Wampanoag dish called nasaump, consisting of boiled coarse cornmeal mixed with various combinations of vegetables, fruits, and meats. Years later, John Josselyn wrote of an innovation New England colonists made to the Wampanoag recipe by cooking it with milk, something Plymouth colonists could not have done in 1621, as they did not yet have cattle or goats. Nevertheless, their preparation of nasaump would have followed the basic steps outlined by Josselyn. He explained that cornmeal “is light of digestion, and the English make a kind of loblolly [porridge] of it to eat with milk, which they call sampe; they beat it in a mortar, and sift the flower out of it; the remainder they call hominey, which they put into a pot of two or three gallons, with water, and boil it upon a gentle fire till it be like a hasty pudding; they put of this into milk, and so eat it.” Maize, cornmeal, and nasaump were just three of the many gifts for which the colonists owed the Wampanoags thanks.48
A number of the “traditional” foods that modern Americans associate with Thanksgiving were unavailable. For instance, there were no white or sweet potatoes. The Wampanoags did not raise these tubers, which were indigenous to South America and the Caribbean but not North America, and Europeans had not yet incorporated them into their diets. Children today will be heartened to learn that neither Winslow’s nor Bradford’s account mentions vegetables, though there must have been some. Yet they will be saddened that there were no pies, as the colonists did not have supplies of butter, wheat flour, or sugar. As an alternative, the English might have served fruits, for Winslow noted, “here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas [raspberries], etc. Plums of three sorts.” Wild cranberries were also available, but the English do not appear to have used them. If there was dessert, it probably consisted of cornmeal fry cakes with fruit or honey, such as the Wampanoags prepared.49
These options reflected how far the English had come from the first winter of starvation, disease, and desperation. Though their accounts do not specify them offering prayers of thanks as part of their celebration, doubtless they did. As Winslow explained to readers back in England, conditions at Plymouth had not been “always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you [to be] partakers of our plenty.” He forgot to mention that their bounty was by the goodness of the Wampanoags, too.50
To the colonists’ surprise, they would be joined by more Wampanoag guests than the total population of Plymouth itself. While the English were enjoying some target practice and other military drills, suddenly Ousamequin “with some ninety men” appeared at the palisade gate unannounced. Wampanoag tradition is that this force rushed to the scene out of concern that Plymouth was under attack because of the sound of gunfire from the colonists’ sporting. Ironically, the English initially feared that these armed Wampanoags were the real threat. Yet the two peoples possessed just enough trust in each other that no one overreacted. They had forged an alliance through diplomacy, trade, and mutual assistance in the face of emergencies. Their leaders now knew each other personally and called each other friends. In almost any other time and place, a surprise encounter like this between so many armed colonists and Indians would have cost lives. Instead, both sides let down their guard. For the next three days, the two peoples “entertained and feasted” together in what amounted to something in between a state dinner and the kind of casual mingling that the Wampanoags considered basic to the alliance. A few of the Wampanoags even went out on a short hunt to make a contribution of five deer, “which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.” That passage closes the primary source record of this so-called First Thanksgiving.51
The Thanksgiving myth promotes the idea that this event involved Indians gifting their country bloodlessly to Europeans and their descendants to launch the United States as a great Christian, democratic, family-centered nation blessed by God. Yet nothing of the sort took place in the fall of 1621. The Wampanoags’ alliance with Plymouth was not about conceding to colonialism. Their hope was that the English would provide them with military backing, martial supplies, and trade goods that would enable them to fend off the Narragansetts while they tried to recover from their losses to the epidemic of 1616–19. Once they returned to strength, they certainly expected to continue exercising dominion in their country over anyone living there, the English included. On a more personal level, Ousamequin wanted his control of the English and their goods to buttress his claims to authority over the far-flung, sometimes contentious network of Wampanoag sachems.
The English, for their part, had decidedly more modest plans than laying the foundations for the modern United States. They could hardly have even imagined the number of thriving English colonies that would develop in their neighborhood over the next few decades. Some of Plymouth’s leaders had ambitions that, someday, someone from among their ranks would begin propagating the gospels among the Indians as a step toward Christ’s Second Coming. Everyone’s most pressing concern, though, was merely to create a small, stable community of fellow believers capable of earning a competent living. The alliance of peace, trade, and mutual protection with the Wampanoags was a means to that end.
Rather than the beginning of a grand American experiment, the so-called First Thanksgiving was instead a gesture to continue a friendship the two people had already established through such means as the treaty of seven articles, Winslow and Hopkins’s embassy to Ousamequin, the return of Billington, the Nemasket strike, and Plymouth’s exchange of threats with the Narragansetts. Yet, for the alliance to survive, such mutuality would have to become routine. The English could not expect peaceful, productive relations if they walled themselves off from the general Wampanoag population and restricted communication to the leaders. The only way the Wampanoags were going to permit them to continue living in Wampanoag country was if they continued to prove their value and show respect for the ways of their hosts. Those expectations included them shoring up Ousamequin against his rivals, internal and external. Plymouth was now an inextricable part of volatile relationships within the Wampanoag paramount sachemship and between the Wampanoags and other tribes. That position, along with continued widespread Indian hostility toward the English, meant that the future of the alliance was not between war and peace, between a pointed or blunted arrow, but who would be sacrificed for whose gain.