Historian
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« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2008, 10:25:46 AM » |
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Despite having ended up many miles from other European settlements, the Pilgrims hardly “started from scratch in a wilderness” as the “origin myth” would have us believe. Throughout Southern New England, Native Indian tribes had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a park-like environment. After first landing at the tip of Cape Cod in what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, the Pilgrims assembled a boat for exploring and began looking around for a site for their new home. They chose Plymouth perhaps because of it’s beautifully cleared fields, recently planted with corn, it’s sheltered harbor, and a brook of fresh water nearby. It was a great site for a town, because before the Plague of 1617, this had been Squanto’s village of the Patuxet tribe.
The new Plymouth colonists did not encounter a wilderness. In fact, in Three Visitors To Early Plymouth: Letters about the Pilgrim Settlement in New England During its First Seven Years by John Pory, Emmanuel Altham, and Isaack deRasieres, edited by Sydney V. James, Plymouth colonist Emmanuel Altham noted in a letter in 1622 that,
“In this bay wherein we live, in former time, hath lived about two thousand Indians.”
In addition, the colonists received help and support from sources not fully known by the majority of Americans today. In his sailor’s journal, written by a colonist on his second full day in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and published in the work done in 1901 by Azel Ames titled, The Mayflower and Her Log, July 15, 1620-May 6, 1621, Edward Winslow writes of he and a companion, saying,
“...we marched to the place where we had the corn formerly, which place we called Cornhill, and digged and found the rest, of which we were very glad. We also digged in a place a little further off, and found a bottle of oil. We went to another place which we had seen before, and digged, and found more corn, viz. Two or three baskets full of Indian wheat, and a bag of beans, with a good many of fair wheat ears. Whilst some of us were digging up this, some others found another heap of corn, which they digged up also, so as we had in all about ten bushels, which will serve us sufficiently for seed”.... “The next morning we followed certain beaten paths and tracks of the Indians into the woods, supposing they would have led us into some town, or houses”.... “When we had marched five or six miles into the woods and could find no signs of any people, we returned again another way, and as we came into the plain ground we found a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen. It was also covered with boards, so as we mused what it should be, and resolved to dig it up, where we found, first a mat, and under that a fair bow”..... “Also between the mats we found bowls, trays, dishes, and such like trinkets. At length we came to a fair new mat, and under that two bundles, the one bigger, the other less. We opened the greater and found in it a great quantity of fine and perfect red powder, and in it the bones and skull of a man”.... “We brought sundry of the prettiest things away with us, and covered the corpse up again. After this, we digged in sundry like places, but found no more corn, nor any thing else but graves.”
In Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s book, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640, published in London by J. M. Dent in 1980, she states that the Pilgrims continued to rob graves for years. However, more help came to the Pilgrims from an even more unlikely source named Squanto, also known as Tisquantum.
In the “origin myth,” Squanto was a solitary member of the Pautuxet tribe, part of the Wampanoag Federation of tribes, who had supposedly learned English from fisherman, and as a “God sent savior”, taught the Pilgrims how to hunt and fish in the new wilderness, which helped them survive their first winter in New England.
According to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a leader of the Plymouth Company in England, around 1605 a British Captain stole Squanto from Massachusetts when he was still a boy, along with four members of the Penobscot tribe, and took them to England. There Squanto spent nine years, three of them in the employ of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. After which, in 1614, he arranged for Squanto to be returned to Massachusetts.
Later in 1614, after skirmishing against and then making peace with the Patuxets, John Smith returned to England, leaving a second ship to fish for cod under the command of one Thomas Hunt. Luring Squanto and about twenty other Wampanoags on board, Hunt kidnapped them and then seized about seven others on Cape Cod before sailing for Málaga, Spain. There Hunt began selling his captives as slaves until some priests intervened and redeemed the rest, including Squanto, in hopes of converting them to Christianity. Squanto's movements are unclear for the next three years until 1617, by which time he had somehow managed to get to London. Living in the home of John Slany, the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company, Squanto became immersed in the English language and culture, and he began to see in the colonial ambitions of Slany and his associates the means by which he could return home.
Squanto's plans moved closer to realization when, on an expedition to Newfoundland, he became reacquainted with Thomas Dermer, an officer under John Smith in 1614. Like Smith, Dermer had left Patuxet before the fateful kidnapping. Dermer took Squanto back to his former employer, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, then the most determined colonizer of New England. Although he had already failed in several attempts to use kidnapped Indians to advance his endeavors, Gorges was persuaded by Squanto's evident knowledge of the region, his apparent standing among his people, and his professed loyalty. So with Thomas Dermer at the helm, Squanto finally sailed for Massachusetts in the spring of 1619.
Now Squanto set foot again in Massachusetts and walked to his home village of Patuxet, only to make the horrifying discovery that he was the sole member of his village left alive. All others having perished in the Plague epidemic two years earlier.
By the winter of 1620, struggling to survive, half the unprepared Plymouth colonists succumbed to starvation and disease during the harsh winter. Finally in March of 1621, members of the Pokanoket and Nemasket tribe convinced Samoset, a visiting Abenaki with ties to English traders, to sound out the beleaguered colonists. Finding them receptive, Samoset returned a few days later with Squanto, whose knowledge of the English and their language exceeded his own.
As translator, ambassador and technical advisor, Squanto was essential to the survival of the Plymouth Colony in it’s first two years. In the book edited by Samuel Morrison in 1981 titled Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647 the first Governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford called Squanto,
“...a special instrument sent of God for our good beyond expectation. He directed us how to set our corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities, and was also our pilot to bring us to unknown places for our profit.”
Their “profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. Contrary to the myth, religious freedom was only a secondary motive. Squanto was not the only advisor for the Pilgrims either. As critical as he was to Plymouth's fortunes, Squanto's usefulness was limited because he had no power base among the remaining Wampanoags or other local natives. In the summer of 1621 the colony invited a second Indian, a Pokanoket named Hobbamock, to live among them, and he stayed for several years serving as a guide and ambassador. In fact, Hobbamock helped the Plymouth colonists to set up fur trading posts at the mouth of the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers in Maine, along the Aptucxet River in Massachusetts, and along the Windsor River in Connecticut.
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