* * *
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 inten
ded 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’.
The Mayflower Page 12