Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  In hollows in the forest lie pond after pond—Darby Pond, Ricketts Pond, Trockle Pond, and many others with no name on the map—and since one pond, ridge, and thicket looked very much like another, the risk of losing their way again was simply too great. Even the native guides sometimes strayed off course, in the dark or when the weather was poor.

  If there was a clue to the topography, perhaps it lay in the fact that a watershed existed on a belt of high ground rising to two hundred feet, about three miles west of Billington Sea. A man could find his way out of the maze simply by following brooks downstream: except that the streams lose themselves in swamps.

  If you chose the wrong one, you would end up far off course, in the river valleys leading over into Rhode Island. Nor was the water safe to drink. Winslow noted that the native people took it only from the headwaters near a spring, because the gradients were shallow and animal droppings could easily poison a sluggish stream.

  Fifteen miles of country such as this separated the colony from Nemasket, now known as Middleborough, the first stop on the trail that led inland. Winslow called it “a town under Massasaoit,” but the name Nemasket seems in fact to refer to a tract of land, not a settlement. It was defined not by ownership or title but by its physical character and resources. It means a fishing place, and indeed Nemasket was a low-lying spot, surrounded by meadows and swamps, in the basin of the Taunton River, which flows into Narragansett Bay. The Pilgrims first saw it on the afternoon of July 3, on their way to a second meeting with Massasoit, at his summer base forty miles from Plymouth, between the sites of modern Providence and Newport.

  By now, Bradford was worried about the corn harvest. So he would have been at Austerfield, since midsummer was the time in England when grain and bread prices peaked, as the last season’s corn was exhausted. Tisquantum had shown the settlers how to plant and fertilize maize the Native American way, in small mounds mingled with nitrogen-fixing beans and squash, manured with fish. However, the harvest was still a month or so away, and Bradford feared that he would be unable to pay debts to the native people who came to trade at New Plymouth. So he decided to send Winslow on a mission to Massasoit to explain the situation politely, and to ask him to limit the number of visitors to those who brought skins. He also wanted help in finding the Cape Cod people from whom the Pilgrims had taken corn in November, so that they could also repay that debt.

  The visit was successful, a matter of gift giving, tobacco smoking, singing, games, and a demonstration of skill with firearms by Winslow’s men. Massasoit willingly agreed to do as they asked, and Winslow went home, arriving back at New Plymouth on July 7. The wider significance of the episode lies in the superb description of the country given by Winslow, and published the following year as part of Mourt’s Relation.

  In England, narratives of travel had become popular, and Winslow had served his apprenticeship with a printer called John Beale, who specialized in the genre. Beale counted among his authors Thomas Coryate, who walked all the way from Constantinople to the court of the Great Mogul at Agra and then sent his journals home on an East India Company ship. Perhaps Beale’s most prestigious title appeared in 1617, when Winslow was still with him. The work of another travel writer, it was a magnificent edition of the journeys of Fynes Moryson. It was from this book that Winslow learned that the Irish wore trousers.* Moryson served as a soldier in Ireland under Queen Elizabeth, rising to become secretary to the English commanding officer against the Earl of Tyrone. His account of Ireland remains a leading source for Irish history, not least because it describes the Gaelic way of fighting a guerrilla war in bogs and forests.

  Hence, when Winslow came to tell his story, he knew the value of precise observation of military affairs, an alien culture, and a foreign landscape. Ireland’s pattern of settlements, its land tenure, its language, and its mobile cattle farming differed radically from England’s. At Nemasket, and then later around the Mystic River north of Boston, Edward Winslow encountered another highly distinctive way of life, as odd to English eyes as that of the Irish. Like Moryson, he took copious notes recording its characteristics.6

  Guided by Tisquantum, Winslow reached Nemasket after a six-hour trek. The first thing he noticed was the agriculture. Maize was growing in abundance—from eighty yards, one of his party shot a crow that was damaging the crop—but besides corn bread the native people gave him shad roe and acorns. At sunset he saw men catching bass at a fish weir on the Taunton River. The following day they reached the tideway, and Winslow carefully recorded this too. It was essential to know how easily a ship or a shallop could ascend the river, since French skippers were known to use Narragansett Bay and might either attack Massasoit or compete for his friendship.

  Farther downstream, they came upon more food, men and women carrying baskets of crabs and shellfish, and at the next settlement the people gave them oysters. Winslow soon recognized that despite the variety of things to eat, at this season calories and protein were in relatively short supply. At Massasoit’s settlement, some forty people, including the English, had to dine on two large fish caught by the sachem himself.

  However, Winslow could see equally well that they could tolerate a period of shortage before the harvest, provided all the resources of the land were mobilized. The men and women whom he met were living active, energetic lives with few signs of hardship. And in due course, when the harvest came, the Pilgrims discovered that the outcome was much better than they could have expected.

  They found that an acre of maize produced far more nutrition than an acre of wheat or rye in the environs of a place like Austerfield. In the spring, they planted only twenty acres of maize, and another six of English barley and peas, the latter with seeds imported on the Mayflower. In England, even before allowing for rents and tithes, a plot of land this size sown with wheat would barely feed twenty people, at most, and the farmer required additional meadow and pasture to feed his livestock. In America, using the methods learned from Tisquantum, the Pilgrims achieved maize yields that were high enough to satisfy nearly three times that number of settlers. Tithes, rents, and landlords were blissfully absent.

  “Our corn did prove well,” said Winslow, describing their first harvest with British understatement. They had every reason to celebrate in the autumn, with the festivities commemorated by today’s Thanksgiving. Soon the abundance of New England became a common theme in accounts of the new colonies. So much so that thirty years later, in 1651, an English writer called for farmers at home to copy the techniques used across the Atlantic, because of the high yields extracted from “Indian Corne” by using fish fertilizer on spring-sown crops.

  He gave a long list of American produce—pumpkins, squashes, watermelons, and whortleberries—that he wanted to see grown in old England.

  Cranberries he liked best of all, a fruit “as big and red as a cherry … very good against the scurvy and very pleasant in tarts.” However, all of this had to be learned from experience, and abundance had to be re-created anew each year: the native people they met could only live as they did because of centuries of effort and self-education.7

  Even in southern New England the quality of the soil varied immensely from place to place, and some spots were far less fertile than others. The wide belt of land behind Billington Sea was a case in point, a place where the sandy earth drains far too rapidly, creating a thin reddish brown topsoil, far too dry and too acidic for farming. Because of distance and the topography, it was impractical to fetch fish to fertilize the ground, or cartloads of crushed oyster shells to neutralize its chemistry, techniques available on the coastal strip. Inland this could not be done, and so the forest remained wilderness, a wide buffer zone between the Pilgrims and Massasoit.

  During the months that followed Winslow’s mission to Massasoit, the Pilgrims began to learn that the land they had entered consisted of a mosaic of environments. They often varied profoundly from each other, but they also differed in their combination of contrasts and similarities with landscap
es at home in the old country. At Nemasket and around the Taunton River, they entered a region that would have made a far better place to settle, thanks to its waterways and the diversity of food sources available in the estuaries feeding down into Narragansett Bay. This was country an Englishman could recognize.

  It had affinities with the wetlands Bradford knew from eastern England, where in 1620 there still existed a way of life not unlike the customs of Massasoit and his people. Eels, cockles, and Whitstable oysters, as any Londoner could tell you, were for centuries a staple of the eastern English diet as well. All the same, and attractive though it was, the estuarine zone west of New Plymouth was off-limits, the domain of Massasoit. It was also insecure, because of the proximity of the hostile people beyond him.

  As they continued to explore, the Pilgrims ventured as far as Nauset, near the elbow of Cape Cod. That too was territory they could not use, but for different reasons. In July, the teenage John Billington, from an English family of fen dwellers, made the mistake of trying to explore alone the enveloping tract south of New Plymouth. The boy wandered off and lost his way. He survived for five days on berries, until he met some native people. They bundled him off to the east, along Cape Cod, and deposited him with Aspinet, the sachem of the country around the modern towns of Orleans and Eastham.8

  By way of Massasoit, word reached the Pilgrims of his whereabouts, and so a party set out from New Plymouth by boat to find him. Pausing along the way at Cummaquid, the place now known as Barnstable, they heard more stories of the crimes of Thomas Hunt when they met a weeping old woman whose three sons had been among his captives. It was a time for inadequate apologies from the English—“we gave her some trifles, which somewhat appeased her,” as Mourt’s Relation puts it—and a moment for recognizing that diplomacy had its limits.

  When they reached Aspinet, they encountered suspicions that could not be allayed entirely. These were the people from whom they had taken corn the previous November, and with whom they had clashed at Wellfleet. As they beached their boat on the shore, the Pilgrim delegation found themselves surrounded by warriors, including a man who had owned some of the stolen corn. They promised to pay him back after the harvest, but their attempts to trade for fur yielded very little.

  As night fell, down to the water came Aspinet, escorting the young John Billington. With him came a band numbering one hundred, half of them armed with bows and arrows and half of them not. The armed men cautiously kept their distance, while the unarmed contingent accompanied Aspinet to the boat, where they handed over the boy, his neck adorned with beads. In return the Pilgrims gave English knives to Aspinet and to one of his people who had looked after the youth. There the matter ended, among promises of peace but little warmth. Off the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth, stopping again at Cummaquid to refill their water bottles and cement their relations with the local sachem.

  The Nauset affair had another implication. Evidently, the Pilgrims could not expect to enjoy here the amicable alliance they had built with Massasoit. Over and above that, Aspinet had also barred them from the excellent habitat that existed beyond the beach. To the east, behind Eastham and Orleans and on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod, lies Nauset Harbor, a place of great natural beauty that the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain had surveyed many years before.

  It was a locale so appealing that many years later, in 1644, the Plymouth Colony very nearly decided to move there, deserting entirely the Town Brook and Burial Hill. Defensible and sheltered by a barrier beach, the harbor at Nauset possessed resources like Narragansett Bay, if on a smaller scale: freshwater from ponds and streams inland, bay scallops, plenty of clams and mussels, and soil richer than elsewhere on the Cape. This too, however, lay off-limits to the Pilgrims in 1621, securely held as it was by Aspinet.

  At Nauset they also learned that their ally Massasoit had difficulties of his own. Just as in Ireland chieftains like Tyrone were not absolute rulers, but men first among equals, so Massasoit was in reality the leading man among a confederation of sachems. They owed him loyalty but not obedience. He did not rule his territory from a capital. Instead, he and his people moved as and when they needed to, with seasonal settlements made up of houses that could be dismantled and shifted as rapidly as they were built.

  From Aspinet, and then at New Plymouth, the Pilgrims heard two extra pieces of news, alarming but informative, adding more detail to the picture they were assembling of the land they had entered. First, they learned that the Narragansett had invaded Massasoit’s territory and toppled him—or so it seemed, since Massasoit had disappeared. Second, they heard that another sachem of the Wampanoag, a man called Corbitant, had staged a coup d’état at Nemasket. He seized Tisquantum and two other men friendly to the Pilgrims, Hobbamock and Tokamahamon, holding a knife to Hobbamock’s chest. Somehow, Hobbamock escaped and fled the fifteen miles to New Plymouth, where he brought word that Tisquantum was most likely dead.

  On August 14, amid pouring rain, Standish marched out of the colony with a rescue party of between ten and fourteen armed men. His orders were simple: capture Corbitant, and cut off his head if it turned out that he had killed Tisquantum. About three miles from Nemasket they halted and rested until nightfall, planning to surprise Corbitant by surrounding his house at midnight. Hobbamock was guiding them, but in the dark and in the rain he lost the path. When they picked it up again, they were so tired, wet, and dispirited that Standish fell his men out to eat the thin rations in their packs. Rested and refreshed, they pressed on, reached the house, and encircled it.

  Standish forced an entry, only to find the house full of men, women, and frightened children. In the confusion, three of them slipped away and received sword or bullet wounds from the men outside. On the inside, two of the English panicked and let off their firearms, terrifying the occupants, who screamed for mercy while the women among them clung to Hobbamock.

  As the smoke cleared, and Standish searched the house, Hobbamock explained that all they wanted was Tisquantum and Tokamahamon. It soon became clear that neither was dead. Corbitant had done no more than threaten them. Hobbamock climbed onto the roof and called out for both men, who soon appeared. Meanwhile, Corbitant’s men had fled, and he was nowhere to be found.

  It also emerged that reports of Massasoit’s defeat had been exaggerated. His whereabouts were still unclear, but he was alive and remained the grand sachem of the Wampanoag. Chaotic though the incident was, the affair at Nemasket served its purpose by making it plain that Tisquantum and others under Pilgrim protection were untouchable, by force of English arms. On September 13, Corbitant was one of nine sachems, from as far away as Martha’s Vineyard, who apparently signed a treaty at New Plymouth making peace with the Pilgrims and swearing allegiance to King James. We have to say “apparently” because, again, we cannot know what this treaty signified to men such as Corbitant, or how they would have defined loyalty to a distant English king. Neither Bradford nor Winslow mentions this treaty specifically, and the only record comes from a book published nearly fifty years later, in 1669, by Bradford’s stepson. No text in Corbitant’s language exists.

  And yet something important had clearly occurred, the passing of another landmark, whatever it meant to those involved on the native side. Immediately afterward, the Pilgrims felt confident enough to send an expedition northward. They intended to make peace and to trade for beaver fur with the native people of “the place by the great hills,” the meaning of the word “Massachusetts,” the people among the marshes and estuaries surrounding the modern city of Boston, and along the valley of the Mystic River. This was an episode filled with meaning, for what it revealed by way of tragedy and anticipation.

  THE GRAVE OF NANEPASHEMET

  On October 21, 1862, on a farm in what is now the Boston suburb of West Medford, some workmen were removing topsoil when, less than three feet down, they uncovered human bones. They found the remains of four adults and a child, buried on gently sloping land not far from the body of water now known as Lower Mystic
Lake. At that time, the Middlesex Canal ran for twenty miles between the Mystic River and the Merrimack, linking Boston to the mill town of Lowell. The canal passed close to the spot where the graves were found.

  One of the skeletons far surpassed the others in the quantity and richness of the goods buried alongside it. The bones were those of a man of about sixty, crouched on his side in the familiar, fetal position, his head facing westward. Among the items beside him were an iron arrowhead, a stone knife, and a soapstone pipe nearly six inches long, with a mouthpiece made of finely rolled and beaten copper. Nearby lay a matted bunch of deer’s hair, all that survived from a tobacco pouch. It contained a substance that still smoked when they applied a lit match.

  The farm belonged to a family called Brooks, Massachusetts politicians and heroes of the Revolutionary War. Among them was the Reverend Charles Brooks, a minister and local historian. He swiftly recognized the importance of such a discovery in this spot. Around Medford, farmers often plowed up stone drills and arrowheads, and Brooks knew that just before the arrival of the Pilgrims the valley of the Mystic was densely inhabited by native people. They were the Pawtucket, led by a great sachem called Nanepashemet.

  His name meant “Moon Spirit.” At his death in 1619 or thereabouts, Nanepashemet commanded allegiance across a great swath of land that stretched as far west as the Connecticut valley at Deerfield. His influence extended from the Charles River in the south as far as the Piscataqua River and New Hampshire in the north. Before the epidemics, tens of thousands of people had made their home here, owing loyalty to the Moon Sachem.