The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

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  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.

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  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 manage
d 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 af
resh 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.