Squanto was the last survivor of the tribe of the Patuxet, who had once farmed the coastal land west of Cape Cod Bay. According to a comment later made by Squanto, the Patuxet once numbered some two thousand men, women, and children. They spoke a dialect of what we now call Eastern Algonquian, which was spoken by all the peoples living between the Plymouth area and Narragansett Bay to the west. At some time in the past it seems that the Patuxet had been brought into the orbit of the Pokanokets, over whom Massasoit was the chief. This group of native peoples we now remember as the Wampanoag confederacy, although the name was not actually used until the 1680s. Like many of the peoples of the East Coast, they had split the year between winter in the forested areas of the interior and summer at the cornfields on the coast, where they also fished. Edward Winslow wrote of how Squanto was skillful at catching fat, sweet-tasting eels with his feet. Like the other tribes in the area, they would have been ruled over by a sachem (usually male but it could be a woman) who might have lesser sachems below them and higher ones acting as their overlords. Massasoit was just such an overlord. The English referred to him as a “king.” It was due to his authority that Massasoit could order Squanto to go and live among the Pilgrims.
Among the Pokanokets and others in the Wampanoag confederacy, in addition to the sachems (who were sometimes referred to as sagamores), there were warriors called pnieses, who collected tribute for the sachems and who were renowned as elite, hardened fighters. Another Native American, named Hobbomock—who was also to live among the Pilgrims—might have been a pniese. In addition, there were leaders known as pau waus (the English called them pow-wows) who were believed to be able to mediate between ordinary people and the native god of healing (known as Abbomocho).
It is now hard to work out exactly what the status of Squanto was, but we can piece together how he came to know English so well and also how he came to be the only survivor of his once populous tribe.
According to some historians, Squanto was first captured as a young boy way back in 1605, by an Englishman named Captain George Weymouth. Weymouth was investigating the coastal lands of Maine and Massachusetts for a wealthy patron named Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who himself never actually made it to North America but who was promoting the setting up of colonies there. However, Maine was not Squanto’s home (as revealed by other evidence), and his name does not appear among those stated as taken then, in an account written by one of the Englishmen involved. In fact, it would be some fifty years, until 1658, before Gorges wrote a pamphlet, entitled A Brief Narration of the Original Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations into the Parts of America, where he mentioned Captain Weymouth kidnapping a Native American named Tisquantum from the coast of Maine in 1605. By this time, the fame of Squanto seems to have caused him to be annexed to the story; a literary kidnapping to mirror the actual one. The actual event that caused Squanto to be able to speak English almost certainly occurred about ten years later.
In the year 1614 an English expedition, consisting of two ships under Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame, sailed into Massachusetts Bay and also explored as far north as Maine. They were collecting fish and furs and mapping the area around Cape Cod. Smith had an interest in eventually founding a colony in New England. Engaging local tribes in trade would facilitate that and perhaps avoid something of the conflict that was brewing at Jamestown (albeit prompted by Smith’s own heavy-handed treatment of indigenous peoples). Smith eventually returned to England and left an associate named Thomas Hunt to continue the exploration in a second ship. Hunt’s job was to continue fishing and then transport the catch to Málaga, in Spain, where there was a high demand for dried fish.
However, Hunt was an entrepreneur of an antisocial kind and decided to add to the value of the voyage with some human cargo. It was this that brought him to what would later be known as Plymouth Harbor in order to “trade” with the Patuxet. Having recently gotten wise to the valuable trade goods that could be had in exchange for furs, Native Americans were only too keen to trade with Hunt. This fur trade, first started by Newfoundland fishermen and then developed by French and English merchants, had destabilized the traditional trading networks of the tribes on the northeastern coast of North America. Now, instead of varied local products, one item dominated everything: animal pelts, and especially beaver fur. The Patuxet were finally plugging into the network. It was a decision they came to regret.6 As a result of their desire to trade, Hunt was able to lure about twenty of the Patuxets, including the man we would come to know as Squanto, aboard his vessel. Once on board they were kidnapped. Then the duplicitous Hunt sailed across Cape Cod Bay and stole seven more people from among the Nauset. He then sailed to Málaga with his wretched cargo of stolen human beings. This act explains the hostility of the Nauset tribe to the Pilgrims, which is remembered today as the First Encounter.
Echoes of this human trafficking later united the three threads of the Nausets, the Pilgrims, and Squanto, since he later translated during a meeting between the Pilgrims and the Nauset on Cape Cod. There the English met an old woman, whom they thought was at least one hundred years of age, who could not look at the visitors “without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively.” Hunt had taken her three boys, and, as a consequence of his slaving, “she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age.”7 This meeting took place at what was then called Cummaquid, but now Barnstable, Massachusetts, on the southern shore of Cape Cod Bay. They were fed by the local sachem, who was less than twenty-six years old and—in the rather patronizing tones frequently used by the settlers, even of those Native Americans they liked—“very personable, gentle courteous . . . indeed not like a savage, save for his attire.”8 Incidentally, the Pilgrims and their translators were seeking a boy from the colony who had gotten lost in the woods. The fact that they were received in a friendly fashion and that the boy was soon returned by the Nausets, safe and sound, shows how much things had improved since the terrible damage done to relationships by the earlier actions of Hunt.
When he finally heard of Hunt’s actions, John Smith disapproved and later commented that Hunt had acted
most dishonestly, and inhumanely, for their kind usage of me and all our men, carried them with him to Málaga, and there for a little private gain sold those silly savages for rials of eight [Spanish coins].9
There is a later tradition that Spanish friars, looking to spread the Christian faith, rescued Squanto from this captivity and converted him to Roman Catholic Christianity, but the evidence for this is thin. We do not know how long Squanto lived in Spain, what he did there, or how he made it to England. However, from what he told the Pilgrims, we know that he eventually ended up living in the district of Cornhill in the City of London. He lived there with one Master John Slanie, who was one of the Merchant Adventurers hoping to make a profit from colonizing North America and who earlier had invested money in the East India Company. By the time Squanto arrived, Slanie was heavily involved in funding English settlements in Newfoundland, an area famed for its abundant sea fish stocks. So, there is a possibility that this may explain how Squanto got from Málaga to London. Slanie was, no doubt, on the lookout for natives who could provide translation assistance, and he might have been the one responsible for getting Squanto from Spain to London. So it was that a native of the Patuxet village by the sea ended up in the busy, noisy, and smelly city of London, by way of Málaga in Spain. It reads like a novel, but it really happened. What he made of the place is anyone’s guess. We would like to know, but his thoughts are lost to us.
The reality of this trade in human beings can be witnessed in the same Shakespearean play we came across with regard to Stephen Hopkins. This provides evidence that by 1611, the sight of Native Americans on public display in England was sufficiently commonplace to cause Shakespeare to make a joke of it in The Tempest (act 2, scene 2, lines 31–33). The Londoners, he says, are so entertained by the sight of the exotic and so hardened to human suffering that
when they will not give a doit [small Dutch coin] to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.10This is not a happy insight into the attitudes to be found among many in 17th-century London, but it is all too believable. And it was among them that Squanto now found himself. There on Cornhill he lived on one of the three low hills that dominated the ancient City of London, the others being Tower Hill, where the Tower of London is sited, and Ludgate Hill, where St Paul’s Cathedral stands. In Charles Dickens’s story A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit, the underpaid clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge, slides down Cornhill twenty times in celebration of Christmas Eve. But all that lay far in the future when Squanto lived there. When he went out the door it was just a short walk to the bustling markets of The Poultry or the merchants parading down Lombard Street. As a member of the household of a leading Londoner he would have been expected to attend church with his master’s household and so would have been an exotic sight at either St Michael, Cornhill, or St Peter upon Cornhill. It was all a long way from the lobster and eel fishing of Cape Cod Bay, the cleared fields of corn, catching migrating wildfowl in the fall, and deer hunting in the winter woods. Did Squanto dream of returning to that lost world? It is reasonable to think that he did. And he was shrewd enough to know that if that ever was to occur, then making himself useful to a London businessman who had a financial interest in North America might make the dream a reality. For if Master John Slanie was intent on using Squanto, then Squanto might also have hoped to use his master’s curiosity in order to get home. In this way, the stolen Native American was not quite as powerless as his predicament indicated. When Slanie sat beside his evening fireside and quizzed his servant Squanto about the furs, woods, fisheries, and peoples of New England, the familiar landscape formed once again in Squanto’s mind and memories peopled it with those he knew and loved, and once had thought lost forever. For what had seemed utterly stolen as he’d cowered in the fetid hold of Hunt’s ship now appeared graspable again as he answered the questions of the London merchant. Home might yet be attainable if he was patient and if he was useful.
However, while Squanto was away in Spain and then in England, a disaster occurred among the Patuxet. A killer epidemic devastated the southern part of New England. Today nobody is entirely sure which disease or combination of diseases struck, but we may be absolutely sure that it was an unintended consequence of European exploration. The Native Americans were collateral damage in the European trading obsession with fur and also with whale oil and cod. English explorers observed the horrors at the time without understanding what had caused them. In Maine, one of Ferdinando Gorges’s employees, named Richard Vines, spent the winters of 1616 and 1617 there among the native peoples, but he and his companions seemed immune to the crippling headaches that accompanied an illness that left the countryside “void of inhabitants.” A man named Thomas Dermer—also in the employ of Gorges—sailed down the New England coast in 1619, towards the colony in Virginia, having sent a shipment of furs and fish back to London. In an account of what he found there, he recorded seeing “the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die.” In 1692 one who had conversations with some very old native people concluded that from their memories of the events of their distant childhood, “the bodies all over were exceedingly yellow.”11 Headaches, sores, jaundice, fever, and bleeding from the nose were all described by those who witnessed the horrors. Yellow fever, smallpox, bubonic plague have all been suggested as possible causes.12 At present, we can only guess.
The coastal devastation stretched from the Kennebec, in the north, to southwest of Cape Cod. The tribes who lived in the vicinity of what would one day be New Plymouth—the Pennacook, Massachusett, and Pokanoket—suffered very badly indeed. That the disease did not impact on the Narragansetts, to the west of the Pokanokets, was probably because the former traded with the Dutch, whereas the latter and those to their northeast traded with the French, who were probably the ones who inadvertently introduced the contagion. No wonder, as we shall shortly see, that Massasoit of the Pokanoket was so eager to do a deal with the Pilgrims, having seen his people crushed by disease and now reduced to living in the shadow of his traditional enemies, the Narragansetts.
When Edward Winslow later made his first journey inland to the village of the Pokanoket, he saw the appalling evidence left behind by the disease:
Thousands of men have lived there, which died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.13
Not many years later, in 1625, Thomas Morton walked the forests around Boston Harbor and saw how
in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left a live, to tell what became of the rest, the livinge being (as it seemes) not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites, and vermin to prey upon. And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations, made such a spectacle after my comming into those partes, that, as I travailed in that Forrest nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new-found Golgotha.14Later 17th-century traditions would claim that the cause was the enslavement of French traders who brought the diseases into the Native American settlements to which they were taken. The Puritans who later recounted the tradition claimed that this demonstrated the actions of God against the heathens who had seized the Frenchmen. In 1702, the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather considered the epidemic—which he reported took away nineteen out of every twenty Native Americans—to be the divine means by which “the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for a better growth.”15 It was not a kind assessment of the suffering experienced by fellow human beings, but, sadly, it was par for the course among many of the settlers in New England.
Return to North America
William Bradford’s journal, Of Plymouth Plantation, corroborates the version now accepted by most historians, that after Spain and London, Squanto was taken to Newfoundland, in 1617. He worked there for the governor of the Newfoundland Colony, before being taken back to England, in about 1618, in order to act as an interpreter for Captain Thomas Dermer, an employee of Gorges, who was tasked with further exploration of the coast of New England in order to exploit the resources of beaver fur. The employment of Squanto offered the possibility of reestablishing constructive relations with the tribes there, which had been so badly damaged by Hunt’s kidnapping exploits.
In 1619, Gorges sent Squanto with Dermer on a trip to New England to trade with local Native Americans. We have already heard Dermer’s account of the impact of disease, but now Squanto was about to discover how that disease had had an impact on his own plans to get home to his people. For, as Dermer and Squanto sailed along the New England coast towards Squanto’s village, Dermer recorded his findings in his journal:
[We] passed along the coast where [we] found some ancient [Indian] plantations, not long since populous now utterly void, in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness . . . When [we] arrived at my savage’s native country [we found] all dead.16What a homecoming after such a terrible adventure. Looking around him at the skeletal scenes of devastation, Squanto must have wondered which was worse: to have been enslaved for all those years but to have been spared the pestilence? Or to have remained at home and so to have died with all his family and friends? It was a bitter homecoming indeed. It would soon transpire that Squanto was the last of the Patuxet.
While Squanto left Dermer in an effort to track down any survivors from his village (he failed to do so), Dermer had three run-ins with Native Americans who clearly distrusted his intentions. And he lacked his native guide to persuade them otherwise. He was finally taken prisoner by the Nauset in the vicinity of Cape Cod, only to be released as a result of Squanto’s intervention. But things continued to go badly for him. On Martha’s Vineyard he was again attacked by a local sachem named Epenow, who himself had once been kidnapped by the English and exhibited in London before being brought back to North America in the hope that he would lead his English captors to sources of gold. However, he had escaped. And it was now payback time. Most of the English crew were killed, and Dermer was seriously wounded, although he escaped and later died at Jamestown.
In the meantime, Squanto had been taken in by the tribe of the Pokanokets. It is unclear to what extent he was a free man who had been admitted to the tribe, or a man distrusted by his fellow Native Americans and a virtual captive due to his suspiciously close associations with the English. But in one capacity or the other, this is where he was in the fall of 1620 when the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived at Cape Cod. So it was that in March 1621, Massasoit, of the Pokanokets, and the leader of the Wampanoag confederacy, put Squanto’s English language skills to the test with the newcomers who had set up home among the abandoned fields of the Patuxets, Squanto’s former tribe.
Whether a free agent among the Wampanoags or a virtual prisoner up to this point, Squanto was now allowed to have free access to the Pilgrims so that he could act as a guide and interpreter for the colony. In fact, he lived in the colony for almost two years after his initial meetings with the Pilgrims. He was soon regarded as an integral member of the Plymouth Colony, engaged in both translating and negotiating between Plymouth’s early governors (John Carver, then William Bradford) and local tribal leaders. All in all, things seemed better because of his involvement: peace was made with the Nausets and with other groups within the Wampanoag confederacy. As a guide, he took settler ambassadors through unfamiliar territory and helped them establish trading relations with their Native American neighbors. This played a vital role in linking them into the highly profitable fur trade. It was on such a foray in August and September 1621—to what we would now call the southern shore of Boston Harbor—that they gained considerable numbers of furs from the Massachusett people and ascertained that disease now prevented this tribe from posing any threat to the colony at Plymouth. Squanto recommended taking the pelts by force from those he considered “a bad people,” but in this instance, the English were more diplomatic than their translator and traded fairly with the depleted Massachusetts. Incidentally, some of the colonists also looked enviously at the deep water anchorage and concluded they had settled in the wrong place! But that is another story.
Squanto is also recorded as giving the Pilgrims practical advice on survival in New England. This included instructions on how to plant Indian corn and other local plants and how to fertilize the seed by planting it with a dead fish. It is an image that appears in school textbooks and is now woven into the mythology of Plymouth Colony. The English clearly believed that this practice of fertilizing with fish was a local tradition, although some historians have suggested that Squanto learned it in Europe or Newfoundland. With his assistance, the Pilgrims grew enough food to survive the winter of 1621–22, and they invited Massasoit, along with ninety of his tribe, including Squanto, to the first Thanksgiving feast in the fall of 1621, following a successful harvest that saw them stocked up for the coming winter. If the tradition about the Catholic friars being responsible for Squanto’s conversion is true, then it was a Roman Catholic who helped make possible the Puritans’ Thanksgiving.17 Though how far Squanto understood the rivalries between Protestants and Catholics, and the fact that he had signed up to one side or the other in the quarrel, is rather open to question.
Looking back, William Bradford referred to Squanto as “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”18 They even launched a rescue mission, led by Myles Standish, to rescue him when his life was in danger because a jealous tribal rival named Corbitant (a sachem formerly subservient to Massasoit) held him prisoner and might even have been intent on overthrowing Massasoit, the ally of the Plymouth colonists.
However, life can be very complex, and in time, Squanto gained a reputation for being manipulative and self-serving. Rumors reached the Pilgrims, via another of Massasoit’s people who lived at Plymouth, that all was not as it seemed with regard to Squanto. The informant was Hobbomock, whom we referred to a little earlier. Both Edward Winslow and William Bradford record their mounting concerns at what they heard about Squanto’s secret strategies. The accusation was that over the winter of 1621–22, Squanto had been claiming that he alone could decide if the English were inclined towards peace or war and that only if he was rewarded by other Native Americans would he protect them from the newcomers. It seems that he hoped to gain power as a native leader; he might also have been motivated by a desire for revenge against Massasoit and others among the Wampanoags for holding him prisoner in the past. He was very aware that the local tribes feared both the guns of the settlers and the diseases that struck in the wake of the newcomers. Seeing how the settlers stored their gunpowder underground, he came up with the ingenious claim that this was, in fact, where they stored their stock of diseases, and unless he was rewarded, he would get the English to release the plague against his enemies.
In March 1622, Squanto went a step too far. He began spreading a rumor that Massasoit was conspiring with both the Narragansetts and the Massachusetts to wipe out Plymouth Colony. The end game for Squanto was clear: out of the ruins of Massasoit’s power, he hoped to elevate himself to become the key player in the inter-ethnic politics of the bay area. But he was found out when the colonists investigated the matter. And Massasoit was, understandably, beside himself with anger. He invoked the March 1621 treaty of mutual assistance and demanded Squanto’s life. He was not too concerned how this was achieved, for while he preferred it if the traitor was handed over to him, he told Bradford that it was acceptable if the colonists did the job and simply sent him the head and hands of the slippery Patuxet survivor!
William Bradford was reluctantly close to turning Squanto over for execution, when a ship appeared. In the resulting alarm over whether it was “friend” (English) or “foe” (French), the matter of Squanto was put to one side. It turned out that it was the shallop of a ship called the Sparrow that was bringing the advance party of a new (and it transpired, poorly equipped) group of settlers to start a second colony at nearby Wessagusset (in present-day Weymouth, Massachusetts). That venture turned out very badly indeed, and we will hear more of them under the Mayflower Life of Myles Standish. What is relevant here is that the disturbance caused by its unexpected arrival got Squanto off the hook—or in this case, the “knife” sent by Massasoit. Besides which, Squanto was needed more than ever as a translator in order to settle the new arrivals through negotiations with nearby sachems. Massasoit was angry, but he accepted the inevitable and was reconciled with Plymouth when—in March 1623—Edward Winslow visited him and tended him during a serious illness.
Despite Squanto’s duplicity, the alliance with the Wampanoag confederacy had survived this rocky patch. The Wampanoags and the English of Plymouth Colony maintained a friendship until Massasoit’s death in about 1660. It was an alliance that Squanto had helped establish, even if later he almost ruined it. Only in the next generation would it fall apart in bloody warfare.
As for Squanto, as Edward Winslow later recollected, there was now no future for him (or assurance of safety) outside the boundaries of Plymouth. He was shunned by all of the Wampanoags and totally dependent on the Pilgrims, to whom he continued to offer service as a translator, if a chastened one.
In November 1622, with the arrival of yet more English settlers who were badly prepared for the oncoming New England winter, food was again an issue in the colony. So, Squanto guided an expedition led by William Bradford, to trade with Cape Cod communities for additional supplies of corn and beans. They traveled south on the ocean side of Cape Cod and sailed into Manamoyick Bay (now Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod) because bad weather was approaching. It was to be his last mission for the Pilgrims, for he soon fell ill, with what William Bradford described as an “Indian fever,” suffering from bleeding from the nose. He informed Bradford that this was a sure sign of death among his people. He asked Bradford to pray for him so that he could go to the Englishman’s God in Heaven, so it seems that his days among the Christian godly (perhaps also the Spanish friars too?) had impacted on his outlook and beliefs. Then he asked Bradford to distribute various items as gifts to his English friends back home in Plymouth. He died within just a few days. Tisquantum, known affectionately to the Pilgrims as Squanto, was buried in an unmarked grave, in an unknown location. He passed from history into legend.
What was his legacy? In the mythology of Plymouth Colony he is remembered as the one who brokered peace with the Wampanoags and helped the colonists grow crops in an alien land. As such, he plays a key part in explaining how the Pilgrims survived their first, critical year. On the other hand, his attempts to manipulate the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags came close to undermining the peace between them.19 This leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth and means that his legacy is mixed. But what might Squanto have said if he had been given free voice instead of forever having his words “spoken” by others? Perhaps it might have been something like this:
I was stolen from my people and my land. The same people that stole me then stole my people from me by pestilence. They made me utterly powerless and, even when I was finally back among those who spoke the language of my birth, I was regarded as an outsider, an alien, one without a people. This was because all that would have challenged that status had been stolen from me. But I survived. With only myself to rely on, I survived. By my wits I survived. Others I assisted, but knew that there was no one to look out for me. For always I was the last of the Patuxet and alone. And only if you have traveled the road I traveled, could you judge me. . . .
One of the striking ironies of the life of the interpreter we know as Tisquantum is that all his thoughts have been communicated to us by others. They have become his interpreters, and we always have that nagging doubt that something essential about the man has been lost in translation.
MAYFLOWER LIVES
Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience
MARTYN WHITTOCK
