Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  As so often, at first the site seems unremarkable, just a small wooded dell behind some houses. To find Wessagussett, simply head east from the town of Quincy, across the steel girders of the Fore River Bridge. After half a mile, turn left at the next Dunkin’ Donuts. Climb over the crest of a low ridge, which runs from west to east parallel with the shore, about fifty feet above the beach, and look down across the river, toward the ocean. Between the ridge and the high-water mark was a flat strip of land about two hundred yards wide, and on it they established the Weston colony. Today white suburban houses cover the slopes and obscure the view inland, while a low concrete seawall defends the houses from the tide. But the ridge screens out the noise from the highway, and so with the help of old maps and a little imagination it is possible to appreciate the qualities of the place.

  It was defensible, because North Weymouth is a peninsula between the curves of the Fore and Back rivers. Marshes and swamps left only a narrow neck of dry land along which it could be approached on foot. Wessagussett had excellent access by sea, because the Fore River made a good natural harbor. Sheltered from storms by islands and by the promontory of Hull to the east, the river has a gray sandy bottom, ideal for anchors. At low tide a wide expanse of mud and sand offered shellfish for the taking, and Wessagussett was renowned for oysters and mussels. The islands were rich with berries, and lobsters filled the bays and coves. Besides the availability of food, the site had a fourth attraction, freshwater. The dried-up bed of a stream can be found straying down through the dell to the sea.

  In many ways Wessagussett outshone New Plymouth as a place to live. It was also far closer to the Charles, Mystic, and Merrimack rivers, which led inland toward opportunities for trade. But unlike New Plymouth, Wessagussett was not an empty space. Its qualities rendered it ideal as a village site for the people of the Massachusetts, and some of them already lived nearby. Most visible among them were Wituwamat and Pecksuot: tough and courageous men, determined to protect their domain, but occasionally brutal too. They made short, cruel work of the ship’s company of two French vessels that had ventured into the adjoining waters.

  When the first ship ran aground, the warriors made servants of her crew. They forced the Frenchmen to eat food fit only for dogs, until they wept and died. When the second ship arrived, hoping to trade, the warriors pretended to bring a bundle of beaver skins, and then with hidden knives they murdered her crew as well. The master of the ship put up a fight, hiding in the hold, and so they burned him out, butchered him too, and incinerated his vessel.

  Settling in this dangerous location, Weston’s men swiftly built houses and a palisade, but they had arrived too late in the year to plant corn. So, that November, the Pilgrims and the new arrivals used the Swan to make a joint expedition in search of corn and beans, paying for them with knives, scissors, and beads. They intended to sail around the elbow of Cape Cod, south through the shoals, and then westward toward Buzzards Bay, but the weather was bad, and the shoals as baffling and treacherous as before.

  Then, as they traded near the modern town of Chatham, the Pilgrims lost Tisquantum.

  In the words of William Bradford, he “fell sick of an Indyean feaver, bleeding much at ye nose (which ye Indeans take for a simptome of death) and within a few days dyed there.” It has been argued that Tisquantum was poisoned, but this is no more than conjecture. His was only one of many bleak deaths in 1622, in what seems to have been another epidemic. According to another source, the native people suffered another “great plague,” Standish went down with a fever but survived, and Weston’s brother-in-law, one of the new settlers, died suddenly at New Plymouth. Massasoit himself fell gravely ill soon afterward, with a similar nose-bleeding symptom.

  Whether or not Tisquantum died of natural causes, his death removed the man who knew the English best, thanks to his period in London, a city where he had probably spent more time than any of the surviving Pilgrims, bar Winslow and Brewster. Indeed, if we wish to speculate, it is not impossible that as a business venture the voyage of the Mayflower was partly Tisquantum’s idea. At the house of John Slany and at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, Tisquantum would have been very conspicuous. It is inconceivable that he would have escaped the attention of the investors who backed the voyage.

  It also appears from the Newfoundland Company’s papers that Slany was a sympathetic host who would have listened carefully to what Tisquantum had to say. But this is a guess, and no more. We do know that in losing Tisquantum, the Pilgrims lost their finest translator and their best intermediary. When he passed away, they abandoned the trading expedition to the south.

  Instead, less ambitiously, the Swan sailed back to the north, to trade in Boston Harbor, and then along the inside of Cape Cod Bay between the modern towns of Barnstable and Eastham. So they spent the autumn and the winter. Standish and Bradford made more forays in search of corn, by boat or overland, as far west as the northern shore of Buzzards Bay. And as they did so, it became increasingly clear that they and Weston’s men had antagonized the native people of the region. The most alarming incident occurred in March 1623. It involved Miles Standish.

  Recovered from his sickness, in a small boat Captain Standish rounded the headland that forms the southern end of Plymouth Bay, on his way to the native settlement of Manomet. His task was to collect corn that Bradford had purchased. Standish found the corn, but not the cordial welcome he expected. He walked up from the beach to the house of the local sachem, taking with him two or three of his men but prudently leaving the rest with his boat. He had been at the house only a little while when in came two warriors from Wessagussett.

  One of them was Wituwamat, the killer of Frenchmen. He took the English dagger he carried around his neck, a dagger confiscated from Weston’s men, and he gave it to the sachem. Then he spoke at length, in riddling language that Standish could not comprehend but that the sachem greeted with enthusiasm. As Winslow tells the story, Miles Standish knew that an insult was intended, and most likely something far worse. Among the guests that night was a warrior from the Pamet River, a man who in the past had treated him as a friend. On this occasion, he boasted that he had a great kettle “of some six or seven gallons.” He said that he would happily give it to the Englishman, as though the colonists were poor inferiors.

  Refusing their invitation for his men to come up to the house, Standish hurried back to his boat, paying women from the village to carry the corn down to the water. The man from the Pamet insisted on coming with him, to sleep with the English. Fearing an assassin’s knife, Standish remained awake, pacing up and down throughout a freezing night, in the orbit of his campfire. The following morning Standish sailed straight back to New Plymouth with the corn. It seemed that a crisis was approaching. In the eyes of William Bradford, the blame lay fairly and squarely with Weston’s men at Wessagussett.

  That winter, they began stealing food from the native people who lived nearby, digging up their storage pits at night. How many thefts there were is a matter for controversy. Bradford and Winslow suggest that there were several. Thomas Morton mentions only one, when a settler found a native barn in the woods and took a capful of corn. But even a single case of theft would be enough to gravely damage the reputation of the Pilgrims. Far from showing them to be rich and powerful, endowed with special skills, it would suggest that the English were small, shabby men, forced to barter or to steal. Worst of all, stealing was the opposite of giving; and for the native people of the coast, the surest sign of honor was generosity.

  A decade or so later, somewhere in this region, the English radical Roger Williams witnessed a nickommo, a ritual feast or dance. At its heart lay the making of gifts, and it was the act of giving and not of receiving that brought good fortune. As Williams wrote, the hosts of the nickommo would “give a great quantity of money, and all sorts of their goods, according to and sometimes beyond their estate … and the person that receives this gift, upon the receiving it, goes out, and hollows thrice for the health and prosperity of th
e party that gave it, the master or mistress of the feast.”6 We can begin to see what the warrior from the Pamet was saying when he boasted about the great kettle that he said he would give to the English soldier. He was taunting Standish about the poverty of the colonists, and about their lack of means to make ritual donations.

  He mentioned a kettle because kettles made of brass or pure copper had long been some of the most-sought-after European goods. A document in the British National Archives serves to make the point. The ship’s master who warned the Pilgrims about the native uprising in Virginia was John Huddleston, a man employed in taking emigrants to Jamestown and bringing back tobacco to the Thames. Sailing to America in 1619, he carried a hefty consignment of copper, weighing “four hundredweight and four score pounds,” in the form of bars and “rundletts,” meaning large kettles, mainly used at home for distilling brandy.7

  In native America, copper was more than just another mineral, and a kettle was more than a kettle. Some five thousand years ago, native peoples began smelting copper and using it to make knives, fishhooks, and ornaments, in locations close to Lake Superior, where copper ore lay not far beneath the soil. Copper resists corrosion, it can be worked easily, and it shines with a luster that does not fade. Most precious of all was its color, recalling the red of blood, making it a symbol of life, healing, and fertility. Copper kettles were versatile, with many uses, for cooking, as urns for the bones or ashes of the dead, or as a raw material. Melted down or cut into strips, kettles could be refashioned entirely, as they were by the Kennebec, in villages such as Naragooc.8

  New England and the St. Lawrence lay far away from the copper of the Great Lakes, and so here copper had an extra scarcity value. Once again, the French were far ahead of the English in recognizing its potential. From the archives of provincial France, the Quebec historian Laurier Turgeon found that as early as the 1580s, French and Basque ships’ masters were bringing across the Atlantic copper kettles in their hundreds. Trading goods needed to be rich and plentiful, and so too did the gifts the Europeans were expected to make. But, as Bradford and Winslow frankly admitted, their stock was scanty, and poor in quality, compared with the ample French supplies of kettles, hatchets, and clothing. As we shall see, it was only when the Atlantic ports of France were closed by war that the English were free to take the lead in North America.

  For the time being, in the spring of 1623, the survival of the Plymouth Colony remained anything but guaranteed. The previous autumn, into the bay had come a ship called the Discovery. Her master sold the Pilgrims what stock he had, but many years later Bradford still ruefully recalled the high prices he charged for knives and beads, and the very low price he gave them for beaver pelts. Worse still, Weston’s men at Wessagussett squandered their own supplies. They used them to trade with the native people, paying too much and bidding up the price of corn.

  In perhaps his finest piece of narrative, William Bradford remorselessly depicted the squalid failure of their settlement. They sold their clothes for food, they sold their bedding, and at their worst, they abandoned their huts and scattered like nomads among the woods and along the shore, to live on clams and groundnuts. Weakened by hunger, one man was unable to free himself from the mud of the beach where he was foraging for shellfish. He was found dead, from exposure or drowned by the tide. Their leader took native women as concubines, or so it was said. Losing all fear of the English, and all respect, Wituwamat’s people took what little food the colonists had found and stripped them of what blankets they had left.

  Bradford wrote in what he calls a “plain style,” but this did not mean that he lacked artistry. A technical, literary term, “plain style” referred to a mode of writing based on Latin models, and especially Seneca, a favorite author in the Plymouth Colony. Developed by authors such as Sir Francis Bacon, the plain style influenced the composition of essays such as those of John Robinson. It was a type of prose intended to convey some moral or religious lesson as forcefully as possible, using the familiar, material language of everyday life. So, in the long passage that describes the collapse of Wessagussett, Bradford writes with unusual power and intensity, filling three manuscript pages with long, loose sentences, the longest stretching to nearly two hundred words.

  Written in Jacobean plain style, the sentences tumble and unwind through a maze of semicolons and subordinate clauses, their wandering syntax imitating the dissolution of the company of men at Wessagussett. Bradford gives these straggling paragraphs shape and coherence by framing his account with phrases from Scripture. As always, we have to read him with the Bible at our side. Without it, we risk missing entirely the point Bradford wishes to make.

  “It may be thought strange that these people should fall to these extremities,” he writes in his opening sentence, and the word “fall” takes us straight to the book of Genesis. We remain in that territory when Bradford describes with contempt the behavior he found most humiliating: the readiness of Weston’s men to enslave themselves. “Others (so base were they) became servants to ye Indeans, and would cutt them woode, & fetch them water,” he writes, adapting verses from the book of Joshua that describe the bondage of the Canaanites. Nearly one thousand words later, Bradford rounds off the narrative with a proverb, the moral of the story, and one that again uses the same motif: “A man’s way is not in his own power, God can make ye weake to stand; let him that standeth take heed lest he fall.”

  These sentences condense two verses from the letters of Saint Paul to the Romans and the Corinthians, while concealed inside them lies another hidden allusion to the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land. Bradford quotes almost verbatim from the tenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, where Paul referred to the sinful Israelites who ignored the law of Moses and turned to idolatry and fornication, suffering death as a result. When Bradford likened the journey of the Pilgrims to the crossing of the Red Sea, his message conveyed praise and celebration, overlaid with awe. The affair at Wessagussett was its wicked opposite.

  An unholy, inverted image of the Pilgrim passage to America, the fate of the Weston colony served only to prove that its victims were outcasts, sinners damned to exclusion from the ranks of the elect. Since Bradford was a Calvinist, he believed that their fate was predestined, an episode of retribution that made manifest God’s unswerving justice.

  Does all this make William Bradford unreliable as a historian? Not really, since Bradford never pretended to be anything but a follower of Calvin, and we have other accounts of the same events, by Edward Winslow and by one of the Wessagussett men, Phineas Pratt. If anything, these narratives and Morton’s make the Wessagussett story still more distressing. Morton dwelled at length on a notorious incident when Weston’s men hanged one of their own number for stealing corn from the native people, in the hope of placating them. Bradford only mentions this in passing, but this was characteristic. For Morton, and even more so for Winslow, detail mattered for its own sake, or for the sake of the reader: for William Bradford, details took their significance from the spiritual lesson they taught.9

  THE HEALING OF MASSASOIT

  In the spring and summer of 1623, the Pilgrims drew back from the edge of catastrophe by restoring their prestige in the eyes of the native people. The means they used were a combination of humanity, violence, and faith. While the humanity was Edward Winslow’s, the violence belonged to Miles Standish. The gesture of faith was a gamble, but it succeeded.

  While Standish was at Manomet, the Pilgrims heard perhaps the worst news they could imagine. Word arrived that Massasoit was ill and close to death. Winslow recognized this as a moment of definition, when the colonists had to take the initiative, either to help their friend or to salvage something from the disaster that his death would mean. With Hobbamock at his side, he swiftly traveled on foot the forty miles to Massasoit’s village. There he found that sickness had struck not only the sachem, but also his people.

  Edward Winslow was not a physician, and this was just as well. An English doctor would have
opened Massasoit’s veins and bled him, a painful, upsetting, and useless process that could only have hastened his end. Instead, Winslow tried to feed Massasoit. For two days the sachem had neither eaten nor slept, and he had temporarily lost his sight. A practical man, Winslow happened to have with him what he calls “a confection of many comfortable conserves.” These, one guesses, were pickled fish, pilchards possibly, used by the English as seamen’s rations. With the point of his knife, Edward Winslow pried open the clenched teeth of Massasoit and shoved the pickles into his mouth.

  Winslow would have liked to give him liquor too, brandy most likely, the universal remedy of Jacobeans. Sadly, he had dropped the bottle on the way. Instead, he dissolved some pickles in water and gave the sachem that instead. It worked. Within thirty minutes, the stricken sachem revived, and his sight returned. Massasoit gave orders for his men to fetch more supplies, chickens and another liquor bottle from New Plymouth. In the meantime, Winslow improvised again. Massasoit wanted game stew, but Winslow felt that his patient was not yet ready for it.

  A man of brilliant intuition, Winslow concocted an odd bouillon of corn flour, strawberry leaves, and sassafras and fed a pint of it to the grateful sachem. Soon Massasoit was happily sitting on his latrine, where he deposited three small turds. Winslow counted them carefully, telling his English readers about them in the book he published the following year. Relieved from his burden, the sachem went to sleep.