The year before he left for Leiden, Edward had been working in London when Princess Pocahontas and her train were received in great state by James I. Perhaps he even glimpsed her black hair and slim acrobatic figure accompanied by her half-naked retinue. Indians were the most fascinating cultural topic of the day, the vogue in England since the late sixteenth century. Indian relics were collected as excitedly as American plants. American Indians had occasionally been seen in England before, often freed from slavery as Squanto had been. But the arrival of Pocahontas was electrifying. Already a legend, she was the princess who had saved John Smith’s life in the early years of the Jamestown colony.
The Tradescants, the father and son who were the most influential English travellers and collectors of the first half of the seventeenth century, had a vast piece of skin said to be the mantle of Pocahontas’s father, the emperor Powhatan. It is covered with nearly 20,000 shells forming a design of two beasts of prey and a human. (The Tradescant Collection forms the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where the mantle remains.)
Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492 created a flood of fascinated commentary and speculation, and travel books became hugely popular. Like the invention of the Internet, discovering the Americas altered everything. European philosophers, writers and theologians stretched their minds to fit the new continent and its novel inhabitants into a Christian Eurocentric chronology. What had happened to the New World during the Flood? Were the Indians the original inhabitants of the world who had survived it? Such matters were of great interest to Edward. As he got to know the Indians and became Massasoit’s personal friend, he believed it was his duty to show they were cultured and moral people.
Whether the Indians had a recognisable ‘civilisation’ was a question informing the development of colonisation in England and Spain. The growth of the Spanish Empire organised under the encomienda system – where the indigenous peoples were forced into labour in exchange for protection and enlightenment by their Christian conquerors – led to strenuous public discussion. The Valladolid Debate of 1550–1 at the theological college of San Gregorio saw the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defend the right of Conquest over a people whom he defined as natural slaves. Like the Salamancan School philosopher Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas – the Spanish friar who was Bishop of Chiapas in Mexico – insisted on native rights: the Indians’ government and customs showed they were rational beings, whose property and lives should be sacrosanct. Educated English people were aware of these debates. Las Casas’s A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) had been circulating in translation in England since the 1570s. It was hugely influential, fodder for the English patriotic legend of the dastardly Spanish.
Amongst most English colonisers in the early seventeenth century it was a given that the Indians descended from Adam. As the Virginian minister Alexander Whitaker put it in 1613: ‘One God created us, they have reasonable souls and intellectual faculties as well as we. We all have Adam for our common parent.’
The Renaissance rediscovery of classical texts had profound effects on English colonisers, who adopted views first propounded by Tacitus, that the ancient Britons and Germans provided an instructive lesson in the manly valour, courage, martial vigour and civic virtue that corrupt Imperial Rome lacked. They favourably compared the Indians to the ancient Britons. The other side of the coin was that English colonisers were to be to the Indians what the Romans had been to the ancient Britons, bringing them civilisation and the Gospel. As Whitaker enquired, ‘What was the state of England before the Gospel was preached in our country?’
The classical comparisons which colonisers invoked were also made by Edward himself. Were the temples of the Indians not similar to that of Diana at Ephesus? Such ideas of course made the Indians less alarming and more familiar, and suggest why the Pilgrims were unafraid of peoples quite unlike themselves.
Edward’s first encounters with Massasoit indicated that the Indian king had the sort of rugged virtue admired by Tacitus. From very first the Pilgrims were impressed by the Indians’ valour and bravery. They also hoped that Massasoit might be the key to the fur trade. (From the late sixteenth century technological advances made beaver fur very valuable. It was boiled down to make the felt for hats. Now that they had recovered their health, the Pilgrims recognised the necessity of repaying their backers. The debt was around £1,600 at the time of their departure, but it grew exponentially. The investors proved costive and unimaginative about sending what the colonists needed to support themselves in the early years, such as supplies and draught animals.)
So it was with mounting excitement Edward made the first visit to Massasoit’s home, Sowams. A king was a king to these merchants, and indeed to the court of King James I. The historian David Cannadine has shown that when the English first encountered the native peoples of North America, they did not see them as ‘a race of inferior savages … these two essentially hierarchical societies were seen as coexisting, not in a relationship of (English) superiority and (North American) inferiority, but in a relationship of equivalence and similarity: princes in one society were the analogues to princes in another’.
Pocahontas herself had been treated as the daughter of a great emperor on a state visit by James I. She and twelve Indians with her were received by Queen Anne at Whitehall. She attended a masque by Ben Jonson for the king and sat in a position of honour on his right hand. The artist Simon de Passe made an engraving of her, in court dress with a ruff. Round the portrait runs the legend that she is the ‘filia potentiss. princ. Powhatani imp. Virginiae’ – ‘the daughter of the most powerful prince Powhatan, the emperor of Virginia’. Recent historical investigations have countered the long-held assumption that the early British Empire was underpinned by racist assumptions about the natural inferiority of the races they ruled. The English were not racist in the sense that they believed the Indians were really white people. The theory was that the Indians were born white – as is voiced very clearly by John Smith in 1612: they were ‘of a colour brown when they are of any age, but they are born white.’
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Going to see Massasoit was meant to be an intelligence-gathering operation. The Pilgrims wanted to enquire how to repay the tribe whose corn they had taken on Cape Cod. This had been on their consciences, and they hoped to exchange some of Indians’ corn for other seed, to experiment with what suited the ground best. They were curious to find out how great the Indians’ numbers were, and wished to indicate they were very much up for trading in skins, in addition to making money by fishing.
As Edward and Stephen Hopkins travelled, accompanied by Squanto as guide and interpreter, Edward mentally noted every detail for posterity. Stephen was a fairly good fellow who was on all the early exploratory expeditions. As he got older, drink made him obstreperous. Pleasant if rather loud company, and one of the leading figures of the colony as a well-to-do merchant, he was unafraid of the Indians. He remained a specialist on trade with them for many years. But he did not have Edward’s hunger for knowledge of them, nor was he especially popular. A fondness for getting the better of people meant he had a reputation for dishonesty when he traded in goods and beer (most of the colony sold things to one another). Perhaps the Indians found him too much of a hard bargainer, a little dishonest and a little coarse.
But Edward was not interested in getting the better of the Indians. Of an intellectual bent, he was uplifted to experience at first hand what he had read about these marvellous denizens of the New World. Squanto was used to English ways. As their guide on the forty-mile walk to Massasoit’s home, he showed the Pilgrims alewives, a seventeenth-century word for shad or herring, and the best places to catch deer. The Indians had their own agricultural methods: for 5,000 years they had grown beans, squash and maize together and kept the undergrowth down by burning it.
Passing a group of Indians fishing in the Pilgrims’ bay, Edward wrote: ‘As the manner of them all is, where victual is easiest to be got, there they live, especially in the summer … our bay affording many lobsters, they resort every spring-tide thither.’ These Indians accompanied the party as they travelled west to Massasoit, who lived near what is now Bristol, Rhode Island. At what they understood to be the Indian settlement of Nemasket (now Middleborough, Massachusetts) the inhabitants entertained them ‘with joy, in the best manner they could, giving us a kind of bread called by them maizium, and the spawn of shads, which then they got in abundance, insomuch as they gave us spoons to eat them’.
As the colonists journeyed deeper into the interior, Squanto showed them the tracks through the undergrowth. It became a piece of New England folklore that Indian paths were no wider than a ‘cart’s rut’. Relaxed by having an experienced guide, Edward took time to itemise the trees – ‘much good timber, both oak, walnut tree, fir, beech and exceeding great chestnut trees’. The terrain was well watered, full of meadows and small hills, but rocky too. Though the country was ‘wild and overgrown with woods, the trees were not thick, and easy to pass through’. At night, Edward and Stephen slept in the open fields with their Indian friends, wrapping their mantles round them. The two colonists were not soulmates, but Stephen was good company and resourceful.
* * *
As they got closer to Massasoit’s kingdom, the countryside became more open and flat. Its position inland from Narragansett Bay offered a sheltered respite from the constant wind and spray of Plymouth’s seashore, but there were dark swamps with trees twisting out of them, which were hiding places for Indians. They looked as though they could swallow the unwary. For Edward, such an adventure was a diversion from the tedium and back-breaking work of establishing the colony. It may also have been his way of escaping the sadness of Elizabeth’s death. It was only a month after marrying Susanna that he had his first proper immersion in the Indian culture. Chopping down trees and dividing small areas of land were not going to be enough to stop him brooding.
The Indians they met were solicitous. Occasionally the colonists shot off a couple of rounds from their muskets to amuse them. They crossed many little brooks, passing Indians fishing. They were offered bass from the Indians’ manufactured weirs – stakes sticking up in the rivers – which they had been making for thousands of years. Sometimes the Indians carried the Englishmen across rivers. Edward noted the Indians never drank water except at the source of a river. He was impressed by the ‘valour and courage’ of two spindly old men, who challenged them as they neared Massasoit’s domain: they ‘ran very swiftly and low in the grass, to meet us at the bank, where with shrill voices and great courage, standing charged upon us with their bows; they demanded what we were, supposing us to be enemies and thinking to take advantage on us in the water’.
Edward was struck by the way so much of the land along the river approaching Massasoit’s territory had been cleared for corn, as well as the visible evidence of the plague that had devastated the Wampanoags. So many had died they had not been able to bury everyone. Edward and Stephen looked with horror at the many places where skulls and bones were still lying above ground. It was ‘a very sad spectacle to behold’, with ‘so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same’. Ahead, notifying them they were drawing near, was a hill called Mount Hope. About 300 feet high, it was an unusual stone outcrop in what was otherwise a flat, lush area. Mainly used as a gathering place for the tribe, it offered unparalleled views over Wampanoag territory which was useful in time of war. It was covered with giant boulders from the glacial period and Massasoit took refuge in its secret caves in times of danger. But with the powerful English on his side, perhaps he would need to do so less often.
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There was a warm welcome when they finally arrived at Massasoit’s, having eaten roasted crab offered by Indians on the way. The great king was pleased by the gifts they brought, including a horseman’s red cotton coat like the one that the Pilgrims had thrown around the naked Samoset. There was also a heavy copper chain, which could be sent with messengers as a sign they came from him, ensuring that the Pilgrims would not be obliged to entertain any Indians except Massasoit’s envoys.
Previous explorers such as William Strachey and John Smith had already printed some Indian vocabulary, so speaking to the king was a less daunting obstacle than it might have been. Massasoit was excitingly informal, considering he was a ‘great sagamore’ and ‘the greatest commander’. Even though his tribe had been greatly reduced, he still ruled about 500 square miles from Rhode Island and Narragansett Bay to Cape Cod. The Pilgrims were naturally respectful of rank, and their accounts are littered with expressions of awe for the formidable kings of the Indians.
Massasoit made a rousing speech before a gathering of his men: ‘The meaning whereof was (as far as we could learn)’, wrote Edward, ‘Was not Massasoit commander of the country about them? Was not such a town as his, and the people of it? And should they not bring their skins unto us? To which they answered, they were his, and would be at peace with us, and bring their skins to us. After this manner he named at least thirty places, and their answer was as aforesaid to every one, so that as it was delightful, it was tedious unto us.’ After this he lit tobacco for them. Massasoit was just as curious about his fellow monarch in England as was James about Indian kings. After Edward and Stephen revealed that James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark, had recently died (in 1619), Massasoit ‘fell to discoursing of England, and of the King’s Majesty, marvelling that he would live without a wife’. The English must not allow the French to land nearby ‘for it was King James his country, and he also was King James his man’.
That night, the two colonists found themselves sharing the royal bed, at the monarch’s insistence – Edward and Stephen at one end, Massasoit and his wife at the other. The bed was only planks laid a foot from the ground with a thin mat over them, but it was better than the open fields. They got little sleep because two of Massasoit’s men slept alongside them and the Indian custom was to sing themselves to sleep. They were bitten by ‘lice and fleas within doors, and mosquitoes without’. But such discomforts were a familiar concomitant of seventeenth-century life in England – even if mosquitoes were a novelty.
The next day, the colonists dined on two enormous fish that Massasoit had shot with an arrow. They were so large that they fed forty. Most of Massasoit’s petty governors gathered with their warriors to meet the English. To the Indians’ delight Edward and Stephen showed off their marksmanship with muskets.
And a couple of days later they were home, having sent messages that they were on their way in case the other colonists were worried. The two English travellers felt exultant and perhaps relieved. ‘God be praised’, wrote Edward, ‘we came safe home that night, though wet, weary and surbated [bruised].’ Despite the fascination and allure of the Indians, they were still an unknown quantity.
The friendship with Massasoit had an immediately helpful effect: his intelligence system located one of the Billington boys who had been missing for five days. The Nauset Indians across the bay at Eastham were said to have seen a child living on berries in the wood. Although the Nausets were the people who had attacked the Pilgrims at First Encounter Beach, Massasoit’s system of alliances cast a magic cloak of safety around the settlers. Iyanough, chief of the Mashpee Indians at Barnstable – ‘a man not exceeding twenty-six years of age, but very personable, gentle, courteous, and fair-conditioned, indeed not like the savage, save for his attire’ – guided them there and back. Massasoit’s protection meant that no ill will was directed at them, even though at Barnstable there was a very old woman ‘who came to see us because she never saw English, yet could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively’; her three sons had been stolen by the slaver Hunt at the same time as Squanto, depriving her of the comfort of children in her old age. The Pilgrims told her ‘we were sorry that any Englishman should give them that offence, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same; but for us, we would not offer them any such injury though it would gain us all the skins in the country’.
On the way home, leading them in the dark, Iyanough took the water he carried round his own neck to give to the thirsty Pilgrims. His tribe provided an escort: the women joined hand in hand, dancing before the settlers’ shallop. The Nausets were friendly too: an amazed but happy young John Billington, hung all about with beads, was borne through the water by about a hundred braves.
* * *
The great Massasoit was not as powerful as he gave out. His neighbour, the aloof and majestic Narragansett chief Canonicus, was displeased by Massasoit’s alliance with the English. On the way back to Plymouth the Pilgrims got word that Massasoit had been kidnapped. Since the strongest men were on this trip, they were terrified that the Narragansetts might attack their own colony while it was weakly guarded.
A sachem from Rhode Island, Corbitant, the head of the Pocasset tribe, was deployed to execute the kidnap. He too was suspicious of the English because he did not like them on Wampanoag hunting grounds. Though he was Massasoit’s ally he captured him near what is now Middleborough, hunting with Squanto and Massasoit’s brave, Hobbamock. Hobbamock managed to escape with the news. There was a rumour Squanto was going to be executed. Corbitant was related to have said pithily that if Squanto were dead ‘the English had no tongue’.
Despite their desire to be peaceable, the anxious Pilgrims felt they must assert themselves on behalf of their ally or they too might be attacked. Captain Standish set out to avenge Squanto. In fact Squanto was alive and he rescued him. The grim spirit in which the Pilgrims attacked meant Massasoit was released. The Pilgrims delivered a firm warning to Corbitant that if he tried this again ‘we would revenge it upon him, to the overthrow of him and his’ – though they took the wounded home with them to be tended by Samuel Fuller.
Worried that the peace treaty with Massasoit was not enough, the Pilgrims made approaches to other sachems in the area. By mid-September a series of parleys had led to a remarkable treaty between the colonists and the Indian nations nearby. They included Corbitant, who had no wish to be left out in the cold. He asked Massasoit – who bore no malice to him, as kidnappings happened all the time amongst the Indians – to put in a good word for him, and he was one of the nine chiefs who signed the treaty. The Narragansetts retained an enigmatic silence. They would watch and wait.
September 13, anno Dom. 1621
Know all men by these present, that we whose names are underwritten, do acknowledge ourselves to be the loyal subjects of King James, king of Great Britain. In witness whereof, and as a testimonial of the same, we have subscribed our names or marks, as followeth: Ohquamehud, Cawnacome, Obbatinnua, Nattawahunt, Caunbatant [i.e. Corbitant], Chikkatabak, Quadequina, Huttamoiden, Apannow.
The Pilgrims were on a roll. Nevertheless, there were worrying rumours that the Massachusett tribe to their north were also hostile – yet they had the best beaver skins as they had access to the Indians coming down from Hudson Bay. (The colder the weather, the thicker the fur.) The Pilgrims believed they had to make peace and trade with them. On 18 September 1621 ten of the colonists in the faithful shallop caught the midnight tide north and came upon an immense bay so large it contained around fifty islands. (Ten years later it became Boston harbour.) Led by Squanto, they found a territory in a state of upheaval. They discovered the tomb of the Massachusetts’ fearsome leader in the fort he had defended in a recent war. The warriors were nowhere to be seen, though the Pilgrims sent messengers that they meant no harm. The fact the women had pulled down their houses and were surrounded by their corn in heaps suggested the tribe was on the point of fleeing. Squanto urged them simply to seize some skins but the Pilgrims insisted on paying. Edward noted approvingly some of the women tied branches of trees round them having sold the furs from their backs to the colonists. It was done ‘with great shamefacedness, for indeed they are more modest than some of our English women are’.
The ladies fed them on boiled cod and eventually some braves appeared. The king’s widow, the Squaw Sachem, was nowhere to be seen, but the males agreed to trade and showed them two rivers nearby (later named the Mystic and Charles rivers). They seemed peaceable enough.
Edward’s account of the first Thanksgiving in Mourt’s Relation tells how what he calls the Indians’ ‘greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men’, were part of the festival. For three days they feasted ‘and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others’. He wrote to the investors that though their lives were not always so abundant, ‘yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty’.
It is hard not to feel a sensual, prelapsarian contentment in the accounts in Mourt’s Relation. When Plymouth Colony began to live intimately with the Indians it was an astonishingly rewarding experience. New England did indeed appear full of enchantments and mystery. On 11 December in a letter home Edward wrote: ‘We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us; we often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them.’ It had pleased God ‘so to possess the Indians with a fear of us, and love unto us, that not only the greatest king amongst them, called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us, so that seven of them at once have sent their messengers to us to that end’. As a result there was peace amongst all the tribes. A little over-optimistically, he believed that would not have happened but for the English.
‘We for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us.’ The profusion of food and fruit the land suddenly produced that summer, after the ghastly suffering of the first winter, gave America an Eden-like quality. Almost exactly a year to the day after they landed, Edward wrote in high excitement: ‘if we have once but kine [cows], horses and sheep, I make no question but men might live as contented here as in any part of the world. For fish and fowl we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us’, he boasts, for ‘in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night’.
There were mussels, and the Indians brought them oysters. ‘All the spring time the earth sendeth forth naturally very good salad herbs. Here are grapes white and red, and very sweet and strong too.’ There were native strawberries, gooseberries and raspberries, and three sorts of plum – one variety was ‘almost as good as a damson’ – and there was an ‘abundance of roses, white, red and damask; single but very sweet indeed’. The weather was similar to England though it was hotter in summer. ‘Some think it to be colder in winter, but I cannot out of experience so say; the air is very clear and not foggy, as hath been reported.’
* * *
Edward basked in the Indians’ poetic, elemental civilisation. In his second report for investors* he was determined to do his new friends justice, and wrote a long and detailed account of them.
‘The people are very ingenious and observative [sic]; they keep account of time by the moon, and winters or summers; they know divers of the stars by name; in particular they know the north star and call it maske, which is to say, the bear; also they have many names for the winds. They will guess very well at the wind and weather beforehand by observations in the heavens … Instead of records and chronicles … where any remarkable act is done, in memory of it, either in the place, or by some pathway near adjoining, they make a round hole in the ground, about a foot deep, and as much over; which when others passing by behold, they enquire the cause and occasion of the same, which being once known, they are careful to acquaint all men, as occasion serveth, therewith; and lest such holes should be filled or grown up by any accident, as men pass by, they will oft renew the same; by which means many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory.’
Edward recorded their customs with admiration: the manhood rituals of young boys; their strong moral code and laws which were strictly enforced against evil-doers and thieves; and their religion. Their god was called Kiehtan ‘who dwelleth above in the heavens, whither all good men go when they die, to see their friends and have their fill of all things. This habitation lieth far westward in the heavens, they say; thither the bad men go also, and knock at his door, but he bids them quatchet, that is to say, walk abroad for there is no place for such; so that they wander in restless want and penury.’ Their deep mourning rituals, when they sang doleful tunes in turn, drew tears from their eyes, ‘and almost from ours also’.
Their wampum, the strings of shells they used as a medium of exchange and diplomacy, also had a spiritual dimension. Frequently a gift in itself, wampum was woven into complex symbolic belts because it had numinous powers, as did everything in the Indians’ poetic, mysterious world. A golden place lacking greed or envy and full of naturally civilised and moral shepherds has always had a hold on western European thought. The generous and kindly Massasoit seemed to reinforce the idea that the world could begin afresh in America. The Indians’ strange unearthly appearance, the fact they did not seem to feel the cold (whatever the weather they were largely naked), their astonishing eyesight and hearing, their helpfulness and simplicity and lack of guile – all seemed to represent the sort of uncorrupted ideal all civilisations yearn for.
The last half-century has seen a drastic reassessment of historians’ knowledge and understanding of the Indians. In the past, the lack of written records meant American history was written largely from a European perspective, but advances in archaeology and ethnohistory have opened up the Indian point of view. They reveal, for example, a sophisticated society with its own methods of warfare and charitable provision, and we now know far more about Indian attitudes to the Europeans.
The Vietnam War generated narratives which saw equivalence between the Americans’ brutal treatment of the Vietnamese in the twentieth century and the Indians in the seventeenth century. It is undeniable that the English colonists in America, fearful of losing their identity, defined themselves fighting the Indians in the decades after the landing of the Mayflower. The Indians came to represent a satanic degeneracy when the Puritan settlers had started to doubt their own mission.
But when the Pilgrims landed in 1620, their intentions towards the Indians – as outlined by John Robinson and emphasised by Edward himself – were peaceful. John Robinson intended there to be a native church in line with English colonising literature’s focus on the intelligence and natural civility of the Indians. Edward’s experience confirmed it. In his view there was a solemn pact between his community and the Indians worthy of the name of Covenant. Indians, he said, were rational human beings with whom he embarked on animated religious discussions. Their gods were worthy of comparison to the Greeks’ ‘of former ages’. They also wished to be close to the earth. They believed her to be a living god – literally their mother earth from whom the human race had been created.
* * *
The Pilgrims waited for John Robinson in vain, because the Adventurers remained anxious about the effect his radicalism might have on the reputation of the colony. From the Green Gate in Leiden, Robinson wrote melancholy letters, accurately foreseeing that the backers would never arrange for him to be transported across the Atlantic.
In November 1621, Robert Cushman – who had taken would-be members of the colony off the Speedwell back to Leiden – finally made the sea voyage to Plymouth on a ship named the Fortune. He brought with him the permission known as the Second Peirce Patent. The First Peirce Patent had given them permission to settle in a different geographical area entirely. If they were going to remain in Plymouth legally, they needed a patent that gave them permission to be there. Cushman also came with his teenage son Thomas, who remained in the colony, becoming the ward of William Bradford, and thirty-five other new colonists. It was with joy that Edward and Gilbert greeted their brother John; while William Brewster and his wife welcomed their son Jonathan. Jonathan was extraordinarily excited to have arrived in the New World, which held such promise to ardent millenarians like himself.
The colonists did not mind sharing their food and clothing with members of their own Leiden community, but the newcomers also included seventeen men who had little to offer. Not only did they have no religious commitment, they put pressure on the already limited accommodation. By December 1621 the Pilgrims had built only seven separate dwellings, and four communal buildings which were probably warehouses. People were already sleeping five to a room in the single-storey houses. Some families were sleeping among the stores in the warehouses, which now also had to accommodate the new arrivals.
In an attempt to improve the atmosphere, Cushman felt moved to preach a lay sermon to the colonists to revive the community-minded esprit de corps that had borne them across the ocean. They must stop being grudging about the newcomers. He said this was not a time for self-love, to ‘pamper the flesh, live at ease’, it was a moment to ‘open doors, vessels, chests, and to say “brother, neighbour, friend, what want ye, any thing that I have?”’ They should remember Israel was seven years in Canaan before the land was divided into tribes. Cushman stayed only two weeks in Plymouth before returning with a final assent to the agreement with the Adventurers, and the first description of the colony, Mourt’s Relation.
Whatever Cushman said, the colonists felt it was all very well for him to preach about unselfishness. Many had a distressing sense of impermanence. They could not put down roots when the houses did not belong to anyone. The Pilgrims managed to lay out their plots and gardens, or what they called ‘meersteads’, but the houses would belong to the company for another seven years until the debts were renegotiated or paid off. This added to the feelings of anxiety.
At least the Fortune could return home with an impressive load of ‘wainscot and walnut’ and ‘two hogshead of beaver and otter skin’, to convince the Adventurers that the colony continued to be worth supporting. Down in the hold lay heaps of clapboard or planed timber, heaved on board, made from the tall white pines on the rocky coast. In future years they became a superb source of masts for the English. There was probably £500 worth of goods, enough to pay back about a third of the debt. As the ship left, Bradford ruminated on the change that had overcome these former weavers, wool combers and ribbon makers. They had become fur traders. Thinking of the dishevelled, anxious and powerless group that had set off from Southampton, Bradford wrote fondly: ‘neither was there any amongst them that ever saw a beaver skin till they came here and were informed by Squanto’.
Disastrously, the Fortune steered too near the French coast and the whole cargo was seized. Cushman was allowed to keep only Mourt’s Relation. The Fortune ’s capture dealt a fatal blow to the joint enterprise. The Merchant Adventurers could not afford to underwrite a colony and get no returns. They started to pull out.
Then, at the beginning of 1622, the colony began to run out of food. Edward was one of those who headed for Maine, literally to beg for bread from passing ships.
The need for Indian help was paramount as it became increasingly clear that, if they wanted to keep the angry Adventurers on board, they were going to have to go further afield to get fur. Meanwhile the Narragansett chief Canonicus sent a symbolic gift of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth. William Bradford had the witty brainwave of sending the skin back full of powder and shot. No more was heard from the Narragansetts, but it was ominous, especially as in the spring came news that no less than a quarter of the settlers of Virginia had been massacred.
Suddenly anxious, the Plymouth colonists constructed a huge palisade. But the labour of cutting down trees left less time for planting. The colonists were inexperienced with Indian corn, and weakness from lack of food meant they did not tend it as they should have done. The Pilgrims had to ask the still friendly Massachusett Indians to plant some corn for them, and to sell them some of their own corn and beans. The local Indians began to mock them, making insulting speeches ‘and giving out how easy it would be ere long to cut us off’. To Edward’s chagrin, even Massasoit became distant with them, ‘and neither came or sent to us as formerly’.
Squanto’s death that autumn shook the colony. He started bleeding heavily from the nose, which the colonists noticed was often a sign of impending death amongst the Indians. According to Bradford he ‘desired the Governor to pray that he might go to the Englishman’s God in heaven, bequeathing divers of his things to sundry of his English friends, as remembrances of his love; of whom we had great loss’.
Providentially in late August the arrival of Captain Thomas Jones’s ship, the Discovery, there to map the harbours between New England and Virginia for the Virginia Company, brought the colonists a supply of beads and knives to trade for corn and beaver skins. For all Plymouth’s grave situation, one of its passengers, Brewster’s old friend John Pory (the secretary of the Virginia Colony), found much to admire. He felt Virginia could have done well to emulate the unique feature of Plymouth, its friendship with all its neighbours. But of that the Pilgrims were becoming less certain.
The short-tempered merchant Thomas Weston had been the driving force behind the Pilgrims actually getting out of England. He had helped obtain their patent and he had hired the Mayflower. He had more belief in the potential for colonies in the New World than the other investors, so much so that he decided he should establish his own plantation and come and live there, particularly as the group of Merchant Adventurers had lost faith in the Pilgrims’ enterprise and wished to dissolve the company. As part of this plan Weston had sent out sixty young men in the summer without Plymouth’s permission and without provisions, at a time when Plymouth itself was running short of food. (Weston himself arrived later that year.) The Plymouth planters shared their increasingly short commons, but the new colonists were frequently seen at night tiptoeing into the storehouse to steal more.
Weston’s men – to Plymouth’s great relief – removed themselves to a plantation further up the coast at a place the Indians called Wessagusset (now Weymouth). Then they started stealing from the Indians. Weston’s men were too idle and feckless to support themselves. At the end of February 1623 they had completely run out of food and were planning to attack the successful corn famers, the Massachusett Indians. Plymouth was also desperate for food, having very little corn left. Living on groundnuts, clams and mussels, they were scarcely recognisable they were so weather-beaten and skeletal.
When Myles Standish went to retrieve corn from a friendly Nauset sachem on Cape Cod, he narrowly escaped being killed in the night. He was troubled by the behaviour of some Massachusett Indians who came calling, particularly one named Wituwamat, ‘a notable insulting villain’, who liked to boast of the way he had dipped his hands in the blood of the French and English and laughed about their weakness. ‘They died crying,’ he said, ‘more like children than men.’ Standish sensed that Wituwamat was up to no good but could not understand enough of what was being said.
* * *
In March 1623 the Pilgrims heard that Massasoit was dying. Despite relations being less warm than before, they decided they must visit him. They were much influenced in this, Edward wrote, by ‘it being 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 to send some acceptable persons to them; therefore it was thought meet, being a good and warrantable action, that as we had ever professed friendship, so we should now maintain the same by observing this their laudable custom’.
Edward’s action saved the colony. At a time of plots and rumour, Indians less favoured by the English were stirring up trouble. Edward brought Hobbamock with him to guide him to the chief’s house and to pay his last respects. After Squanto’s death, Hobbamock had taken over as the colony’s guide in the wilderness. He and his family lived on land between John Howland and the Hopkins family for the next twenty years. He was to be the Pilgrims’ faithful friend.
As they travelled Hobbamock became quite unexpectedly overwhelmed with sorrow at the thought of his beloved king’s death, and he started a long lament for Massasoit, which Edward recorded: ‘My loving sachem, my loving sachem! Many have I known, but never any like thee.’ Then he told Edward that ‘whilst I lived I should never see his like amongst the Indians; saying, he was no liar, he was not bloody and cruel, like other Indians; in anger and passion he was soon reclaimed; easy to be reconciled towards such as had offended him, ruled by reason in such measure as he would not scorn the advice of mean men; and that he governed his men better with few strokes than others did with many; truly loving where he loved’.
When they arrived they found chanting men and women, rubbing the king’s arms and legs to keep him warm. The Europeans had to fight their way through to reach the bedside. Though he was so ill and his sight was gone, Massasoit put out his hand to Edward, saying twice, almost under his breath: ‘“Keen Winsnow”* which is to say “Art thou Winslow?” I answered “Ahhe”, that is “Yes”. Then he doubled these words; “Matta neen wonckanet namen, Winsnow!” that is to say “Oh Winslow, I shall never see thee again.”’
One cannot but feel Edward’s own emotion and deep attachment to Massasoit at this scene.
The chief had not eaten in two days. To the amazement of those present, Edward managed to get some preserves on the point of a knife through Massasoit’s teeth. Edward wrote: ‘I desired to see his mouth, which was exceedingly furred, and his tongue swelled in such a manner, as it was not possible for him to eat such meat as they had, his passage being stopped up. Then I washed his mouth and scraped his tongue and got abundance of corruption out of the same. After which I gave him more of the confection, which he swallowed with more readiness.’ When Massasoit vomited blood Edward washed his face, ‘and bathed and suppled his beard and nose with a linen cloth’.
For two days Edward nursed the apparently dying king, then his health returned. Massasoit now demanded Edward make him some ‘English pottage, such as he had eaten at Plymouth’.
Edward had to invent a soup without fowl, ‘which somewhat troubled me, being unaccustomed and unacquainted in such businesses, especially having nothing to make it comfortable, my consort being as ignorant as myself; but being we must do somewhat, I caused a woman to bruise some corn, and take the flour from it, and set it over the grit, or broken corn, in a pipkin, for they have earthen pots of all sizes’. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, his invention was such a success that he was called on to cure the whole village. When a messenger returned with chickens from Plymouth for the soup, Massasoit said they should be kept for breeding instead of being slaughtered.
News of Edward’s kindness – and perhaps magic powers – spread quickly all over the area because the tribes had gathered at what they thought was the great leader’s deathbed. ‘To all that came one of his chief men related the manner of his sickness, how near he was spent, how amongst others his friends the English came to see him, and how suddenly they recovered him to this strength they saw, he being now able to sit upright of himself.’
It was proof that establishment of the Plymouth Colony was a good event in the history of the Wampanoag tribe – or so it seemed in the 1620s.
* * *
Now that the English had saved his life, Massasoit saved theirs by revealing a plot against them.
On his sickbed he had been encouraged by all the Indians round Cape Cod to rise up and attack the English. The ringleaders were Wituwamat and an aggressive faction within the Massachusetts – who previously had been on such good terms in that they grew corn for Plymouth and traded with them in skins. The Indians had used many arguments to try to persuade Massasoit to withdraw his affections. But Massasoit said (as Edward put it), ‘Now I see the English are my friends and love me; and whilst I live, I will never forget this kindness they have showed me.’
Massasoit gave Edward very pointed advice. The colony was on the verge of being destroyed: if he wanted to save his countrymen they must kill the Massachusetts’ leaders in a pre-emptive strike. When Edward protested that their way was not to strike until they had been attacked, Massasoit was blunt: if they waited until the new colonists at Wessagusset were killed, it would be too late to save their own lives because there were so many Indians now hostile to them. He counselled without delay ‘to take away the principals, and then the plot would cease’.
With this urgent message for Governor Bradford, Edward set off for Plymouth. The journey was too long to travel in a day, and at the earnest request of Corbitant, Edward and Hobbamock spent the night with him. Corbitant was pleasingly friendly and anxious to interrogate Edward and get to the bottom of the nature of the English. Were they friendly? Were they good? Despite Edward’s urgent mission to get back and warn the colony, the night passed in intense conversation:
Amongst other things he asked me, if in case he were thus dangerously sick, as Massasoit had been, and should send word thereof to Patuxet for Maskiet, that is, Physic, whether then Mr Governor would send it? And if he would, whether I would come therewith to him? To both which I answered yea, whereat he gave me many joyful thanks. After that, being at his house he demanded further, how we durst being but two come so far into the Country? I answered, where was true love there was no fear, and my heart was so upright towards them that for mine own part I was fearless to come amongst them. But, said he, if your love be such, and it bring forth such fruits, how cometh it to pass, that when we come to Patuxet, you stand upon your guard, with the mouths of your pieces presented towards us?… But shaking the head he answered, that he liked not such salutations.
Further, observing us to crave a blessing on our meat before we did eat, and after to give thanks for the same, he asked us what was the meaning of that ordinary custom? Hereupon I took occasion to tell them of God’s works of Creation, and Preservation, of his Laws and Ordinances, especially of the Ten Commandments, all which they hearkened unto with great attention, and liked well of: only the seventh Commandment they excepted against, thinking there were many inconveniences in it, that a man should be tied to one woman: about which we reasoned a good time.
In his account of his adventures Edward was anxious to do justice to Corbitant’s sophistication. He was ‘a notable politician, yet full of merry jests and squibs, and never better pleased than when the like are returned again upon him’.
As the travellers arrived back at Plymouth, a Wessagusset man ran in. The Indians had moved their encampment right up against their plantation and were creeping all around. They were waiting for the snow to melt so they could fall on Plymouth after destroying Wessagusset. He had pretended to be hoeing to put them off their guard and then spent the next two days dodging them to get to Plymouth.
The plot had been confirmed by another Indian, a Massachusett. The peace-loving community reluctantly decided to attack first. It was grievous to them ‘to shed the blood of those whose good we ever intended and aimed at, as a principal in all our proceedings’, but there was no other choice. Because of the Massachusetts’ large numbers they decided to take Massasoit’s advice and cut off the leaders. Wituwamat was the chief troublemaker. He must be killed and his head brought back ‘that he might be a warning and terror to all of that disposition’.
Although this has been seen as a barbarous action and a genocidal attack on the Indians, it is anachronistic to view it as such. Even a hundred years later in England, beheading traitors was a commonplace punishment for enemies. In 1745 the Hanoverian government impaled the heads of Jacobite rebels on the walls of the City of London. The year the Pilgrims left Europe Habsburg troops placed the heads of the ten Czech nobles on poles round Prague. It was perfectly normal by the standards of the day and not an example of heinous treatment of the Indians.
Captain Standish went to the territory of the Massachusetts, trapped Wituwamat and others in a room, killed them and brought Wituwamat’s head back to stick on the walls of Plymouth. But he did not exceed his orders and did not steal any furs from the Indian women, ‘nor suffer the least discourtesy to be offered them’.
The killing of Wituwamat worked as a deterrent. The other tribes which intended to attack them, alongside the Massachusetts, were now frightened of them: Edward wrote: ‘if God had let them loose, they might easily have swallowed us up, scarce being a handful in comparison of those forces they might have gathered together against us’. Many of the hostile tribes fled. There were depressing and hideous scenes, as Edward reported: ‘they forsook their houses, running to and fro like men distracted, living in swamps and other desert places, and so brought manifold diseases amongst themselves, whereof very many are dead’. Amongst them was Iyanough, the young chief of the Mashpee, who had been so helpful in the search for the Billington boy and was such an impressive figure to the Pilgrims. Before he died he said he thought that the God of the English was offended with them and would destroy them in his anger. Edward reiterated ‘for our parts, it never entered into our hearts to take such a course with them, till their own treachery enforced us thereunto; and therefore they might thank themselves for their own overthrow’.
One person, however, was disgusted by his flock’s behaviour: John Robinson. He would have been even more displeased had he seen Wituwamat’s head on top of the Pilgrims’ fort, and the piece of linen stained with his blood serving as a flag. In December 1623 a furious letter arrived from Robinson: ‘Concerning the killing of those poor Indians … Oh! how happy a thing it had been, if you had converted some before you had killed any! Besides, where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after. You will say they deserved it. I grant it; but upon what provocations and invitements by those heathenish Christians [i.e. Weston’s men].’ Robinson pointed out that Plymouth were ‘no magistrates over them’, they were emphatically not the Indians’ rulers.
The dwellers at Plymouth had been called back to the highest standard of behaviour Robinson expected. But Robinson was safely in Leiden, not living in a small and vulnerable town of fewer than 200 people, perched on the edge of the American continent.
Massasoit himself saw no genocidal impulses in a course of action he had urged on the colony. Six months after the killing of Wituwamat, in an extraordinary scene, he danced merrily at Governor Bradford’s second wedding ‘with such a noise that you would wonder’. Above the settlement walls were the ghastly remains of the head of his fellow Indian. Little did Massasoit or Edward imagine that one day it would be the head of Massasoit’s own son which would hang there.
* * *
Thanks to Massasoit vouching for him Edward was guided by the Indians miles up the coast to eastern Maine, piloted round forests and unknown valleys in canoes. Edward became the chief go-between and negotiator.
At a time of bitter political and religious strife, pastoralism, or the simple life of noble shepherds, had got a hold on the English literary imagination, whether in Edmund Spenser’s imitation of Virgil’s Eclogues, The Shephearde’s Calendar, or Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. Plymouth seemed to have many of its elements. Yet as the New World historian J. H. Elliott has written, ‘The dream was a European dream which had little to do with American reality.’ The Indians were not naïve Arcadians in a fairyland idyll. Nevertheless it took some time for the realities of two opposing ways of life to distinguish themselves. There was a uniquely tender friendship between Massasoit and Edward. At the growing settlement above Plymouth shore a warm welcome to friendly Indian visitors was guaranteed.
Nowadays historians including Karen Kupperman emphasise the symbiotic nature of Indian and English life, and talk more of a middle ground than a battleground. Indians are no longer seen as doomed passive victims. They were as cunning as their English neighbours, but lacked their technology – which they were keen to obtain. Some ethnohistorians have seen Massasoit encouraging the Pilgrims to attack Wituwamat as a betrayal of other Indians’ interests, questioning whether there really was a conspiracy amongst the Indians. Some believe that Massasoit manipulated the situation for his own ends, exploiting his relationship with Plymouth to escape paying tribute to the Narragansetts, and rebuilding his power. Tribes that had previously strayed returned to his rule. Ethnohistorians have shown that New England Indian power struggles were as vicious as anything at a Tudor court.
Appropriately, when in time the English started trying to make the Indian kings obey them instead of treating with them, the Indians were absolutely furious. They did not regard the English settlers in any way as the equivalent of their own kings. The only person who was their peer, who they would deal with, was the king of England, whoever he might be.
In the south the Virginia massacre changed the Virginia Company’s attitude to the Indians. In a dramatic volte-face Governor Wyatt was told to end the policy of peaceful coexistence with what were now described as a cursed people. The settlers should be ‘burning their Towns, demolishing their Temples, destroying their Canoes, plucking up their weirs’ and carrying away their corn. It was the end of the literature delighting in their ways and customs.
Yet this made no difference to Edward. In fact, in a show of the mental strength and independence which would become such a beguiling characteristic, in his new pamphlet to investors, Good News from New England, he continued to extol the Indians and the highly moral quality of their way of life. He seems to have had an enviable ‘judge not that ye be not judged’ attitude.