The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Then, on June 8, four days after the abductions, two canoes appeared from the east, carrying seven Wapánahkis, including the sagamore who had refused to act as a hostage during the earlier standoff involving Griffin. This was clearly a formal delegation. The emissaries were done up in careful style, some with their faces painted all black or red, others with blue stripes painted over their lips, noses, and chins. One warrior wore a headdress of white bird skins, another a roach of red-dyed deer hair, which “he so much esteemed . . . as he would not for anything exchange” it.

  They carried a specific invitation from the Bashabes to come to pαnáwαhpskek to trade for furs and tobacco. Waymouth arrogantly brushed them off. If the Bashabes wanted to come to him, fine, but the Archangell would not go there. Then, giving the Indians gifts of food and knives, the Englishmen ushered them off the ship, for “we had then no will to stay them long abord, least they should discover the other Salvages which we had stowed below.” How Waymouth kept the captives from crying out Rosier does not say, but it’s easy to imagine they were gagged.

  In fact, Waymouth had every intention of going right to the Bashabes’s doorstep. Weighing anchor on June 11, the Archangell sailed up the western side of Penobscot Bay, passing one excellent harbor after another. Rosier described the passing landscape with a string of superlatives. He declared the Penobscot “the most rich, beautifull, large & secure habouring river that the world affoordeth.” Crewmen who had been with Sir Walter Raleigh when he discovered the Orinoco River of South America said this was better. It surpassed the Rio Grande, the Seine, and the Loire, Rosier said, and although “I will not prefer it before our river of Thames, . . . yet it is no detraction from them to be accounted inferiour to this.”

  Waymouth led a party on foot several miles inland toward the Camden Hills, passing through open land “having but little wood, and that Oke like stands left in our pastures in England.” It was, Rosier said, a “parching hot” day, and the men were broiling inside their Elizabethan armor, but Waymouth eagerly eyed the “notable high timber trees, masts for ships of 400 tun”—the eastern white pines that are to this day known as “Weymouth pines” in England.

  Back at the ship, they were met by the same sagamore as previously, now openly begging them to send one man with him to the nearby village of the Bashabes, who would then come to trade “many Furres and Tabacco.” Waymouth and Rosier, realizing that their abductions were by now common knowledge, were convinced it was a trick to get an English hostage for exchange, and so they refused. After loading the light horseman with armored men and “shot both to deffend and offend,” they rowed twenty miles up the river itself. Rosier described a “great store” of Atlantic salmon leaping from the water and scenes that “did so ravish us with all variety of pleasantnesse.”

  With that, the Archangell turned east for England. Belowdecks, the five Wapánahki captives would not have seen their homeland sink and vanish below the horizon. Back in Mawooshen, the five were being mourned, and word of the abductions and presumed deaths spread far and wide. A few weeks later, farther east along the Maine coast, Samuel de Champlain heard from a man with whom he was trading that the English had “killed five savages . . . under cover of friendship.”

  During the month that it took the ship to return to England, Rosier spent a great deal of time with the Indians, whose names he spelled phonetically as “Tehánedo” (Ktə̀hαnəto, whose name is also spelled Tahanedo, Bdahanedo, and Dohannida), Amóret, Skicowáros, Maneddo, and Sassacomit. The class-conscious Rosier called Ktə̀hαnəto “a Sagamo or Commander.” He considered Amóret, Skicowáros, and Maneddo “Gentlemen,” while referring to Sassacomit as a “servant.” How accurate these descriptions are isn’t known, but if he was right, it’s possible four of the men were local leaders. Some scholars suggest that Sassacomit may have been a prisoner from another tribe, taken by the Wapánahki in war and held in servitude.

  According to Rosier, the five captives adapted quickly to their situation:

  First, although at the time when we surprised them, they made their best resistance, not knowing our purpose, nor what we were, nor how we meant to use them; yet after perceiving by their kind usage we intended them no harme, they have never since seemed discontented with us, but very tractable, loving & willing by their best meanes to satisfie us in any thing we demand of them, by words or signes for their understanding: neither have they at any time beene at the least discord among themselves; insomuch as we have not seene them angry, but merry; and so kinde, as if you give any thing to one of them, he will distribute part of every one of the rest.

  Just how “merry” the five were is impossible to know, but there is evidence that at the very least, the men ultimately made the best of their bad situation. And thanks to the same cold-blooded calculation that led Waymouth to take them captive in the first place, they were treated reasonably—one might even say surprisingly—well once they reached England.

  Ktə̀hαnəto was sent to the London home of Sir John Popham, England’s lord chief justice and a keen advocate of colonization of the New World. Most northeastern Indians considered Europeans as a lot to be rather homely, but Popham must have been a real eyeful, as he was described even by fellow Englishmen as “a huge, heavy, ugly man.”

  Skicowáros, Maneddo, and Sassacomit were taken in by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a knight in Plymouth who, with Popham, successfully lobbied for a royal charter to colonize the land Waymouth had explored. Amóret’s whereabouts are unclear; he may have wound up in the London household of John Slany, a merchant active in Newfoundland ventures.

  The five were pumped for information, which Gorges compiled into a book, The Description of the Countrey of Mawooshen, Discovered by the English, in the Yeere 1602—a remarkably detailed document that sketches the nine river drainages from what is now Mount Desert Island to the Saco River, listing by name twenty-three villages, head counts of adult men per settlement, and the twenty-one sagamores who oversaw them. If the counts are correct, Mawooshen had a population of about ten thousand, all giving some degree of fealty to the Bashabes, their “chiefe lord.”

  Historian Alden Vaughan has suggested that the Wapánahki’s cooperation may have grown out of their Algonquian understanding of the responsibilities of a captive to his captor. However they viewed themselves, the five were hardly guests in the normal sense—Gorges later referred to at least one of the Indians as his servant—but their treatment over the next several years appears to have been considerably better than that afforded to many earlier captives.

  There was, even by 1605, a long tradition of hauling Natives from North America back to Europe, either as mere curiosities and proof that an explorer had reached a distant and exotic land or, like the fifty Indians that the Portuguese explorer Gaspar Côrte-Real rounded up in Newfoundland or Labrador in 1501 and sold into slavery, as assets on the voyage’s balance sheet. By 1620, as many as two thousand Natives from the Western Hemisphere had made the trip to Europe, two-thirds of them as Spanish and Portuguese slaves, although this practice fell off dramatically after 1500.

  The Indians who crossed the Atlantic were often treated as chattel or performing animals, but they certainly were not mindless cargo. They were people, who reacted to the circumstances in very different ways. Some even went willingly, such as Essomericq, the son of a Guarani chief from Brazil, who around 1503 volunteered to return to France with Binot Paulmier de Gonneville to learn artillery and weapons making. He was baptized during the voyage, was adopted by Gonneville, and eventually married the Frenchman’s daughter. Essomericq was among the first of a long series of Indians who—at least in their own eyes—were traveling to Europe as emissaries of a sovereign nation.

  Others, ripped out of their daily lives and having no choice in the matter, bore captivity with profound stoicism during the brief and undoubtedly terrifying period before ill use and disease ended their lives. Notable in this regard was an Inuit hunter kidnapped by Martin Frobisher from Baffin Island in 1576. The m
an’s distress was so acute that he bit his tongue in two and died only a few weeks after being delivered to London. Undeterred, Frobisher did the same thing the following year, this time grabbing an Inuit man, who suffered smashed ribs when a Cornish sailor flattened him with a wrestling trick, and an unrelated woman and her infant son. In the month before his punctured lung “putrified” and killed him, the man demonstrated his skills at kayaking and throwing a harpoon for spectators along the Avon River. The woman died four days later, after breaking out in what may have been measles, a disease that would later prove fatal to many North American natives. Her son died shortly thereafter, despite the efforts of a wet nurse.

  Still others adapted with alacrity to their new situations. Around 1502, three Natives from “the New Found Island,” kidnapped by an unknown ship, were presented to Henry VII, “clothed in beast skins and eat[ing] raw flesh and speak[ing] such that no man could understand them, and in their demeanor like to brute beasts.” Two years later, the same anonymous—and doubtless amazed—chronicler met two of the same Natives “apparelled after Englishmen in Westminster Palace, which at that time I could not discern [them] from Englishmen until I was learned what men they were, but as for speech I heard none of them utter one word.”

  The two sons of a prominent St. Lawrence Iroquois chief visited France in 1534, having been duped aboard Jacques Cartier’s ships. They were returned to Canada on Cartier’s second voyage in hopes that they would serve as go-betweens, but they maintained an understandably suspicious attitude that the French considered treasonous. Cartier grabbed them a second time in 1536, along with their father and several others, and all eventually died in France.

  More often than not, attempts to force Indians into unwanted roles as guides and intermediaries ended badly. In 1561, the Spanish kidnapped a coastal Algonquian along Chesapeake Bay, where they were trying to establish a foothold. Held in Cuba and later in Spain, he was given a Spanish name, Don Luis; learned the language; and was adopted by the viceroy of New Spain. But when he was enlisted as an interpreter for a Jesuit mission on the Virginia coast, he bolted back to his people, who wiped out the settlement not long thereafter.

  Just as the Europeans saw the “Salvages” as crucial pawns in their imperial plans, it is clear that many of the Indians who made first contact along the eastern seaboard also sized up the newcomers with a calculating eye to enhancing the positions of their own people. In 1584, two Indians from what is now North Carolina agreed to visit England with Captain Philip Amadas. One of them, Manteo, was described as a werowance, a title literally meaning “he is rich” and that referred to a regional chief of considerable power.

  The two men spent the next year in England before returning to the Carolina coast. Manteo made a second roundtrip to England in 1586–87. By this point, he was apparently as comfortable in fashionable taffeta as in a loincloth and fur mantle, according to a German who observed him in London. As a werowance, Manteo would have been skilled in diplomacy, which may explain his success in working closely with Sir Walter Raleigh and others planning the Roanoke settlement, which despite the werowance’s best efforts would end in failure and mystery as the “Lost Colony.”

  Why would an Algonquian diplomat help establish an English colony, especially after seeing the seething hordes of English citizens crowding London? Certainly, it wasn’t because Raleigh—half-serious, half-mocking—bestowed the title “Lord of Roanoke and Dasamongueponke” on Manteo. No doubt Manteo’s cooperation was at least partly due to commercial interest. The hairy men from over the sea might smell bad, but they were conduits for new and highly desirable goods, which rapidly found their way along the sophisticated trade networks that stitched together far-flung corners of the continent.

  But more than commerce, leaders such as Manteo understood the political and military advantages of partnering with these strangers. Displays such as the firing of the Archangell’s guns may have temporarily frightened the unsuspecting Wapánahkis, but the value of having such firepower on one’s side against traditional enemies must have been instantly apparent to any Indian seeing such a demonstration.

  When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, for example, they were aided by Massasoit of the Wampanoag—not because the sachem (as southern Algonquian leaders were known) was especially kindhearted, but because disease had left the once-powerful Wampanoag vulnerable to attack by their enemies the Narragansett, and Massasoit saw an opportunity to bolster their prospects through an alliance. (Fifty-six years later, the obvious threat posed by an endless flow of English immigrants would drive some Narragansetts to join a bloody but ultimately futile rebellion led by Massasoit’s son Metacom, better known as King Philip.)

  Raleigh’s success with Manteo may have been at least partly behind Waymouth’s intent to kidnap the Wapánahkis, although he and others ignored Raleigh’s example of peaceful cooperation. The English also spirited away Natives from across “Virginia,” and at times there must have been an Algonquian babel in Ferdinando Gorges’s home, where Wapánahkis such as Sassacomit mixed with Wampanoags such as Epenow and Sakaweston, captured in 1611 on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, respectively. Epenow was exhibited throughout London. (Historians suspect that this unusually tall Indian was also unusually well-endowed. He was the talk of the town among the ladies of London, and the Indian with a “great tool” described in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII was probably based on him.)

  Epenow was also obviously canny. Once he learned enough English, he sold his captors on the notion of a rich gold mine on his home island, to which he alone could lead them. An expedition set sail in 1614, with particular care taken to make sure their guide didn’t escape. Epenow was kept under close guard when they arrived off Martha’s Vineyard, where Wampanoags paddled around the ship in excitement. But just as Rosier and the Archangell’s crew had been able to openly discuss their abduction plans in front of their Wapánahki victims, knowing they understood no English, so was Epenow presumably able to communicate with his friends and relatives in Wampanoag.

  The next day, another large flotilla of canoes swarmed around the ship where Epenow was held, dressed in a long, heavy gown that the English knew would make escape difficult. With the crew distracted, Epenow broke free, shed the cloak, and dove into the water as musket balls splattered around him. Meanwhile, the Indians showered the ship with arrows, wounding many of the crew.

  In stark contrast to Epenow’s dramatic escape, his fellow captive, Sakaweston, took a very different route—going native, in a sense. Having lived for years in England, he eventually joined the army and went off to fight the Muslims in Bohemia, his fate unrecorded.

  Like Epenow, Waymouth’s five captives were unusual in that most eventually made it back home, although the route was sometimes torturous and painful. In 1606, Gorges and Popham dispatched the ship Richard with enough men to garrison a fort along the Maine coast. They were guided by John Stoneman, who had been Waymouth’s pilot, and by Sassacomit and Maneddo, who were to act as go-betweens with the Indians. But the Richard’s captain took a risky southerly route through the Caribbean, and in thick fog he found himself surrounded by eight Spanish warships. Although the English offered no resistance, the Spanish boarding party laid into them with cutlasses. “They wounded Assacomoit [Sassacomit] . . . most cruelly in severall places on the bodie, and thrust quite through [his] arme,” Stoneman recounted.

  All aboard the Richard were taken to Spain and imprisoned. Gorges, no doubt seeing a linchpin of his colonial plans snatched from him, expended a great deal of effort in retrieving the Indians from Spanish slavery. He eventually ransomed Sassacomit, who returned not to Mawooshen but to Plymouth. It appears, from fairly oblique references by Gorges and others, that Sassacomit finally returned to his homeland, but not until about 1614. The records are mute about Maneddo, who most likely died in Spanish hands.

  Ktə̀hαnəto, probably with his brother Amóret, returned to Mawooshen on a second ship sent out shortly after the Richard and that was su
pposed to rendezvous with it once there. We know little about this voyage except that it safely made landfall, probably in Waymouth’s Pentecost-harbour. When the Richard failed to appear, the crew explored for a month and then departed, having repatriated Ktə̀hαnəto and Amóret, whose reappearance more than a year after their presumed deaths must have seemed a miracle to the Wapánahki.

  The last of the five Waymouth captives, Skicowáros, came home in 1607, when the ships Gifte of God and Mary and John disgorged more than a hundred Englishmen at the mouth of the Kennebec River to start a colony at Sagadahoc, which stands with Jamestown as the oldest English attempt to settle the New World. As the Englishmen entered Ktə̀hαnəto’s village, the sagamore gave a loud cry, and armed men rushed at the intruders before Skicowáros intervened. The two men embraced, then Ktə̀hαnəto made the Englishmen “much welcomme, and entertayned them with much Chierfulness.”

  Initially at least, the former captives’ cooperation was all that Gorges and the other Plymouth Company investors could have hoped for, with Ktə̀hαnəto offering to expedite trade. But relations soon became strained. Instead of playing the loyal company interpreter, Skicowáros—not surprisingly—seemed more interested in remaining with his people than with his erstwhile English employers. In fact, it’s unlikely that he even saw himself as fulfilling any formal role. And the English soon grew frustrated by what they viewed as unreliability among the Indians as a whole—disappearing for long periods, skipping appointments, living their own lives instead of being at the colonists’ beck and call. What kind of servant was that?

  When they met another sagamore, named Sabenoa, who claimed to control the lower Kennebec where the English had settled, the encounter came within a whisker of bloodshed. Rejecting “some Tobacco & Certayne smale skynns” that the Indians offered to trade—a breach of etiquette—the English commander, Raleigh Gilbert, ordered his nineteen men to their shallop, matchlocks at the ready. Firing the cumbersome guns required a lighted match, which one of the soldiers held casually in his hand, “as if he would light a pipe.” But Gilbert had underestimated his opponents. The Wapánahkis perceived the Englishmen’s weak link, and one of them leapt into the boat, grabbed the match, and tossed it into the water. The English captain, in turn, ordered one of his men to rush the shore and snatch a lighted stick from the Indians’ campfire. A tussle broke out as some of the Wapánahkis nocked arrows in their bows and others lunged for the shallop’s anchor line, while the soldiers raised their muskets. Only at the last minute did cooler heads prevail.