Mayflower (15 page)

Massasoit’s influence in the region was apparently not as dominant as he had led Winslow and Hopkins to believe. The plagues that had decimated the Pokanokets appear to have had less of an impact on the Nausets. Even if sachem Aspinet was Massasoit’s ally, he now commanded a larger number of warriors. By turning the Billington boy over to the Nausets instead of the Pokanokets, Canacum made a conscious effort to defer to a neighbor whose relative strength had increased dramatically since the plagues. It may also have been a way for Canacum to express his displeasure with Massasoit’s decision to make peace with the Pilgrims. With the boy in their possession, the Nausets were able to send an unmistakable message to the English: “You stole something of ours; well, now we have something of yours.”

It took awhile for Bradford to discover what had happened to the boy. Eventually word filtered back from Massasoit that Billington was alive and well and living with the Nausets. The Pilgrims had no choice but to return to the scene of the crime.

Well aware that they were venturing back into potentially hostile territory, Bradford ordered a party of ten men—more than half the adult males in the settlement—to set out in the shallop with both Squanto, who had recently returned from his trading mission in the region, and Tokamahamon as guides. Not long after departing from Plymouth, they were socked by a tremendous thunderstorm that forced them to put in at Cummaquid, a shallow harbor near the base of Cape Cod known today as Barnstable.

At dawn the next morning they found themselves hard aground on the tidal flats. They could see several Indians collecting lobsters, and Squanto and Tokamahamon went to speak with them. The Pilgrims were soon introduced to the Indians’ sachem, Iyanough. Still in his twenties, he impressed them as “very personable, courteous, and fair conditioned.”

At Cummaquid they encountered disturbing evidence that all was not forgotten on Cape Cod when it came to past English injustices in the region. An ancient woman, whom they judged to be a hundred years old, made a point of seeking out the Pilgrims “because she never saw English.” As soon as she set eyes on them, she burst into tears, “weeping and crying excessively.” They learned that three of her sons had been captured seven years before by Thomas Hunt, and she still mourned their loss. “We told them we were sorry that any Englishman should give them that offense,” Winslow wrote, “that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same.”

Iyanough and several others offered to accompany them to Nauset, about twenty miles to the east. Unlike the winter before, when the shores of Cape Cod had been empty of people, the Pilgrims found Indians almost everywhere they looked. They now realized why the Nausets had felt compelled to attack them; by setting up camp near First Encounter Beach, they had ventured into the very “midst of them.”

They brought the shallop to within wading distance of shore and were soon approached by a huge number of Indians. Given their past history in this place, the Pilgrims ordered the crowd to back away from the boat. They could only hope that their alliance with Massasoit ensured their safety. Keeping their muskets ready, they insisted that only two Indians approach at a time. One of the first to come forward was the man whose corn they had stolen. The Pilgrims arranged to have him visit their settlement, where they promised to reimburse him for his loss.

It was growing dark by the time the Nauset sachem, Aspinet, arrived with more than a hundred men, many of whom had undoubtedly participated in the First Encounter back in December. Half the warriors remained on shore with their bows and arrows while the others waded out to the boat unarmed. One of Aspinet’s men carried John Billington in his arms. Looking none the worse for his time in captivity, the teenager wore a string of shell beads around his neck. The Pilgrims presented Aspinet with a knife, and peace was declared between the two peoples. From the Pilgrims’ perspective, it was a great relief to have finally righted the wrongs they’d committed during their first anxious and confusing weeks in America.

But Aspinet had some disturbing news. The Narragansetts were said to have killed several of Massasoit’s men and taken their leader captive. “This struck some fear in us,” Winslow wrote. If the Narragansetts should decide to attack their settlement, it would be a catastrophe: there were only about half a dozen men back at Plymouth. They must return as quickly as possible. If Massasoit had indeed been captured, they were, according to the terms of the treaty they had recently signed, at war with the most powerful tribe in the region.

Massasoit had indeed been taken, temporarily it turned out, by the Narragansetts. But they soon learned that the greatest threat was not from the Narragansetts but from the Pokanokets’ supposed allies. For the lesser sachems who had opposed Massasoit’s treaty with the Pilgrims, this was just the opportunity they had been looking for. One sachem in particular—Corbitant from the village of Mattapoisett just to the east of Massasoit’s headquarters at Sowams—was attempting to use the sachem’s troubles to break the Pokanoket-English alliance. Corbitant had arrived at the nearby village of Nemasket and was now attempting to “draw the hearts of Massasoit’s subjects from him.” Bradford decided to send Squanto and Tokamahamon to Nemasket to find out what Corbitant was up to.

The next day, one of Massasoit’s men, a warrior named Hobbamock, arrived at Plymouth, gasping for breath and covered in sweat. He’d just run the fifteen miles from Nemasket, and he had terrible news. Squanto, he feared, was dead. When Hobbamock had last seen the interpreter, one of Corbitant’s warriors had been holding a knife to his chest. Corbitant quite rightly viewed Squanto as the instigator of Massasoit’s shift toward the Pilgrims. If Squanto was dead, Corbitant told the Indians at Nemasket, “the English had lost their tongue.” Bradford immediately called a meeting of his advisers.

The Pilgrims were men of God, but this did not mean they were loath to use force. For more than a millennium and a half, Christians had looked to the Scriptures to sanction just about every conceivable act of violence. Moses had led the Jews to the Promised Land, but there had also been Joshua, a warrior king who had fought to uphold his people’s claims. Undoubtedly counseling Bradford to take immediate and forceful action was the Pilgrims’ Joshua, Miles Standish. This was their chance to show the Indians the consequences of challenging the English—either directly or indirectly through one of their emissaries. “[I]t was conceived not fit to be borne,” Bradford wrote; “for if [the Pilgrims] should suffer their friends and messengers thus to be wronged, they should have none would cleave to them, or give them any intelligence, or do them service afterwards, but next they would fall upon themselves.”

They decided to hit Corbitant quickly and to hit him hard. Standish volunteered to lead ten men on a mission to Nemasket. If Squanto had in fact been killed, they were to seize Corbitant. And since he’d been disloyal to Massasoit, he was to suffer the fate of all notorious traitors in Jacobean England. Standish was to cut off his head and bring it back to Plymouth for public display.

They left the next morning, Tuesday, August 14, with Hobbamock as their guide. Hobbamock was named for the same mysterious spirit of darkness as Squanto was. But unlike Squanto, Hobbamock was a pniese—a warrior of special abilities and stamina (it was said a pniese could not be killed in battle) who was responsible for collecting tribute for his sachem. From the start, Standish and Hobbamock had much in common, and the two warriors quickly became good friends.

Soon after they left Plymouth, it began to rain. About three miles from Nemasket, they ventured off the trail and waited for dark. In the summer rain, Standish briefed his men on his plan. Hobbamock was to lead them to Corbitant’s wigwam around midnight. Once Standish had positioned them around the dwelling, he and Hobbamock would charge inside and take Corbitant. The men were instructed to shoot any Indians who attempted to escape. For those with no previous military experience, it was a terrifying prospect, and Standish did his best to instill some confidence in his ragtag commando unit. Soon “all men [were] encouraging one another to the utmost of their power.”

After a last, quick meal, it was time for the assault. In the starless dark, Hobbamock directed them to the wigwam. The dwelling was probably larger than most, with a considerable number of men, women, and children inside, sleeping on the low platforms built along the interior walls. By this late hour, the central fire had dwindled to a few glowing embers. The drum of rain on the wigwam’s reed mats masked the sounds of the Pilgrims taking their positions.

Standish burst in, shouting Corbitant’s name. It was very dark inside, and with Hobbamock acting as his interpreter, the Pilgrim captain demanded to know where the petty sachem was. But the people inside the wigwam were too terror stricken to speak. Some leaped off their sleeping platforms and attempted to force their way through the matted walls of the wigwam. Soon the guards outside were shooting off their muskets as the people inside screamed and wept. Several women clung to Hobbamock, calling him friend. What had been intended as a bold lightning strike against the enemy was threatening to become a chaotic exercise in futility.

Gradually they learned that Corbitant had been at Nemasket, but no one was sure where he was now. They also learned that Squanto was still alive. Hobbamock pulled himself up through the wigwam’s smoke hole and, balancing himself on the roof, called out for the interpreter. Tokamahamon, it turned out, was also alive and well.

The next morning, they discovered that Corbitant and his men had fled, probably for their home at Mattapoisett. Standish delivered a message to the residents of Nemasket: “although Corbitant had now escaped us, yet there was no place should secure him and his from us if he continued his threatening us.” A man and a woman had been wounded in the melee that night, and the Pilgrims offered to bring them back to Plymouth for medical attention. The following day the settlement’s self-taught surgeon, Samuel Fuller, tended to the Indians’ injuries, and they were free to return home.

Over the next few weeks, Bradford began to learn of the reaction to Standish’s midnight raid. Just as his military officer had predicted, the show of force—no matter how confused—had won the Pilgrims some new respect. Several petty sachems sent their “gratulations” to Governor Bradford. Epenow, the Martha’s Vineyard sachem who had attacked Dermer, made overtures of friendship. Even Corbitant let it be known that he now wanted to make peace. By this time, Massasoit was back in Sowams, and with the Pilgrims having proven themselves to be loyal and resolute supporters, “a much firmer peace” existed throughout the region.

On September 13, nine sachems—including Corbitant, Epenow, Massasoit’s brother Quadequina, and Canacum, the sachem who had sent John Billington to the Nausets—journeyed to Plymouth to sign a treaty professing their loyalty to King James. About this time, Bradford determined that an exploratory expedition should be sent north to the land of the Massachusetts. Squanto had warned them that the Massachusetts, who lived in the vicinity of modern Boston, “had often threatened us.” It was time to bring them into the fold as well.

They soon discovered where they
should
have settled. As they sailed their shallop across the island-speckled immensity of modern Boston Harbor, they were filled with envy. Instead of the shallow reaches of Plymouth Harbor, here was a place where ships of any size could venture right up to land. Instead of little Town Brook, there were three navigable rivers converging at an easily defensible neck of high ground known as Shawmet.

This was a place where an English settlement might blossom into a major port, with rivers providing access to the fur-rich interior of New England. Not surprisingly, the Indians in the region, who had been devastated by both disease and war with the rival tribes to the north, possessed many more furs than the Pilgrims had so far found among the Pokanokets.

But the thought of relocating themselves after so much loss and sacrifice was too much to bear. They decided to stay put. It would be left to others to transform this place into the “city on a hill” called Boston. The Pilgrims’ ambitions were more modest. They were quite content with a village by a brook. The important thing was their spiritual life, and for that to flourish as it once had in Leiden, they needed their minister, John Robinson, and the rest of the congregation to join them there in the New World.

We do not know the exact date of the celebration we now call the First Thanksgiving, but it was probably in late September or early October, soon after their crop of corn, squash, beans, barley, and peas had been harvested. It was also a time during which Plymouth Harbor played host to a tremendous number of migrating birds, particularly ducks and geese, and Bradford ordered four men to go out “fowling.” It took only a few hours for Plymouth’s hunters to kill enough ducks and geese to feed the settlement for a week. Now that they had “gathered the fruit of our labors,” Bradford declared it time to “rejoice together…after a more special manner.”

The term Thanksgiving, first applied in the nineteenth century, was not used by the Pilgrims themselves. For the Pilgrims a thanksgiving was a time of spiritual devotion. Since just about everything the Pilgrims did had religious overtones, there was certainly much about the gathering in the fall of 1621 that would have made it a proper Puritan thanksgiving. But as Winslow’s description makes clear, there was also much about the gathering that was similar to a traditional English harvest festival—a secular celebration that dated back to the Middle Ages in which villagers ate, drank, and played games.

Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other’s hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement with five freshly killed deer. Even if all the Pilgrims’ furniture was brought out into the sunshine, most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages—stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown—simmered invitingly.