"He
directed them how to set their corn…"
Imagine being kidnapped and taken in
chains across the ocean. Six years later when you finally make your way back
home, you find that in the interim your civilization has been annihilated, your
villages littered with skeletons. This is what befell a Wampanoag Indian known
as Squanto or Tisquantum. His name was spelled differently by different
settlers, and it would seem unlikely that Tisquantum was the name he was given
at birth. It means "the Wrath of God."
History records that without his
aid, the Pilgrims might not have survived their first year in the New World. The
Governor of the Plymouth Colony William Bradford said Squanto was "a
special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation."
He lavishly praised Squanto, writing
that "He directed them how to set their corn, where to take
fish, and to procure other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them
to unknown places for their profit….Squanto stood them in great stead, showing
them both the manner how to [plant corn], and after how to dress and tend
it."
While
Squanto did indeed do those things (and took part in the first Thanksgiving),
history is complex, as were Squanto's motives, and it is worth considering the
deprivations and horrors that he had endured up to that point—and the
precarious position he found himself in. Indeed, both the Indians and the
Europeans were suffering.
Consider
the plight of the Pilgrims in early 1621. The
facts of their 65-day storm-tossed voyage from Plymouth, England, are
astounding. To begin with, their passage took twice the usual sailing time. The
Mayflower was a cargo ship unsuited for the tempestuous north Atlantic.
The Worst Possible Time
Equally dreadful were the ship’s
crowded conditions. These families of religious separatists (and other
settlers) had planned to travel in two ships, but when the Mayflower’s leaky
companion vessel the Speedwell had to return to port, so did the Mayflower, and
all 102 travelers (none of whom were farmers), 30 crewmen, and livestock had to
cram together below decks.
Besides its fitful voyage and
delayed departure, to make matters worse, the Mayflower went off-course.
Instead of landing at its planned destination—the warmer Virginia Colony, the
Mayflower instead arrived at Cape Cod at the worst possible time—early November
1620, months later than they had planned.
Lack of provisions and the icy cold
forced the settlers to winter aboard the ship. As spring approached, only about
half the passengers and crew remained alive, and they were starving.
As bad off
as the Pilgrims were, Squanto and the Indians' condition was worse.
In
1614, the year that he was kidnapped, more than 100,000 Indians lived in New England.
The Wampanoag called the New England coast where they lived Dawnland, and they
knew themselves as "The People of the First Light" as they lived
where the sun rose.
Explorers such as Verrazzano in the
1520s could smell their fires from hundreds of miles away at sea. During the
early 1600s, literally hundreds of ships from Spain, Italy, Portugal, France,
and England sailed to the New England area to fish and trade.
In 1614 Capt. John Smith landed in
present day Massachusetts and was given tour an Indian community by Squanto. (This
is the same John Smith who led settled Jamestown in 1607, returned to England,
and had now voyaged again to New England.)
After he sailed on, his lieutenant
kidnapped Squanto and nearly two dozen other Indians to sell them as slaves.
This act so outraged the Indians that instead of welcoming future traders they
killed them on sight.
Catholic priests from Spain bought
him, took him to Spain, and converted him to Christianity, as the Pope had
decreed that Indians were to be treated humanely.
Months later, Squanto convinced the
priests to let him try to make his way back home. He traveled to London and
worked there as a shipbuilder before finally sailing to Newfoundland and
finding passage to Dawnland.
What he found upon his return was a
land "utterly void" of human life as another one of Smith's
lieutenants put it. "Neere two hundred miles along the Sea coast, that in
some places there scarce remained five of a hundred," wrote Capt. Smith.
"Crowes, Kites and vermin"
An unknown disease—possibly
smallpox, plague, or viral hepatitis—had burned through the villages, reducing
the Wampanoag population from about 20,000 to about 1,000 between 1614 and
1620. (A smallpox epidemic in 1633 would further reduce their numbers to as low
as 500.)
Skeletons lay in heaps in Indian
villages. So rapidly had the holocaust done it work that "the
living being (as it seemes) not able to bury the dead, they were left for the
Crowes, Kites and vermin to prey upon," wrote one English settler. "And
the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations, made such a
spectacle after my coming into those partes, that, as I travailed in the forest
nere the Massachussets, it seemed to mee a new found Golgotha."
Now in March 1621, three Indians
approached the Pilgrim's feeble settlement. They were Massasoit, the leader of
the local Wampanoag coalition of tribes; Samoset, the leader of a tribes to the
north; and Squanto, their prisoner, under suspicion because of his lengthy
contact with Europeans.
Imagine the Pilgrims' astonishment
when one of the Indians spoke English and could serve as an interpreter. The
two groups had good reason to be wary of each other. The Europeans feared
Indian attacks, and the Indians resented the Europeans' presence, but because Massasoit's
tribes had been decimated by the plague, he feared that enemy tribes would
finish off his people. He wanted to strike an alliance with the Europeans.
Gov. Bradford summed up the
arrangement: “If
any did unjustly war against him [Massosoit], they [the Pilgrims] would aid
him; if any did war against them, he should aid them.”
Thus, Squanto was the right man in the
right place at the right time. Massasoit freed him, and Squanto became the
Pilgrims' teacher, guide, and interpreter.
Massasoit and Squanto engaged in a
power struggle, and two years later Squanto "sought his own ends and
played his own game," Gov. Bradford wrote. Squanto told the colonists that
Massasoit was conspiring with other tribes against them, while at the same time
telling the Indians that the Pilgrims were plotting their demise.
Squanto and Bradford travelled
together to Cape Cod to negotiated a new peace treaty with Massasoit. Despite
the enmity he helped created, Squanto, now distrusted by both sides, was
successful. While returning to the Pilgrims' settlement, a fever came upon him, and he died. His peace lasted 50 years.
MORAL: Give thanks.
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