Mayflower (23 page)

One of the graves at Burr’s Hill contained a noticeably richer assortment of objects than the others. Included among the grave goods was a necklace made of copper. In the summer of 1621, Edward Winslow had traveled to Sowams and presented Massasoit with a “copper chain.” Although no one will ever know who was actually buried in the grave, archaeologists have speculated that this might be the Pilgrim necklace.

When the Indians had first come in contact with the English, they had been, by all accounts, awed and amazed by the
things
the Europeans had brought with them. “They do much extol and wonder at the English for their strange inventions,” William Wood wrote. Whether it was an iron plow, a musket, or a windmill, the Indians ascribed to these “strange inventions” a spiritual power known as manit. “[T]here is a general custom amongst them,” Roger Williams wrote, “at the apprehension of any excellency in men, women, birds, fish, etc., to cry out
manitoo,
that is, ‘It is a God.’…[W]hen they talk amongst themselves of the English ships, and great buildings, of the plowing of their fields, and especially of books and letters, they will end thus:
Mannitowock:
‘They are Gods.’”

Massasoit had come to know the English too well to regard them as anything but men and women, but as the objects collected at Burr’s Hill attest, the sachem and his people continued to value the remarkable wealth of material goods the English had brought to America. In the forty years since the voyage of the
Mayflower,
the Native Americans had experienced wrenching change, but they had also managed to create a new, richly adaptive culture that continued to draw strength from traditional ways. The Pokanokets still hunted much as their fathers had done, but instead of bows and arrows they now used the latest flintlock muskets; inside their wigwams made of reed mats and tree bark were English-manufactured chests in which they kept bracelets, signet rings, and strings of wampum beads. Attached to their buckskin breeches were brass bells that tinkled as they walked; and when they died, their loved ones made sure that the mysterious power of these objects went with them to the afterlife.

Given the spirituality of the Native Americans, it was perhaps inevitable that many of them also showed an interest in the Englishmen’s religion. The Pilgrims had done little to convert the Indians to Christianity, but for the Puritans of Massachusetts it was, or so they told themselves, a priority from the start. The colony’s seal, created even before their arrival in the New World, depicted a Native American saying, “Come over and help us.” The Puritans believed a Christian must be able to read God’s word in the Bible, and early on, efforts were made to teach the Indians how to read and write. A handful of Native Americans even attended the newly founded Harvard College. In the 1650s, the missionary John Eliot undertook the momentous task of translating the entire Old and New Testaments into a phonetic version of the Massachusetts language, titled
Mamusse Wanneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God.

Eliot created a series of self-contained Native communities known as Praying Towns. In addition to indoctrinating the Indians in Christianity, Eliot hoped to wean them from their traditional ways. But as was true with their use of Western farm utensils and jewelry, the Indians never wholly abandoned their former identities. Instead, they did as all spiritual people do—they created their own personal relationship with God.

For years to come, Praying Indians on Nantucket Island concluded each Sunday’s meeting with a ritual that dated back to long before the
Mayflower:
“And when the meeting was done, they would take their tinder-box and strike fire and light their pipes, and, may be, would draw three or four whiffs and swallow the smoke, and then blow it out of their noses, and so hand their pipes to their next neighbor…. Andthey would say ‘tawpoot,’ which is, ‘I thank ye.’ It seemed to be done in a way of kindness to each other.” Instead of replacing the old ways, Christianity became, for many Indians, the means by which traditional Native culture found a way to endure.

For a sachem in the seventeenth century, however, Christianity was a tremendously destabilizing influence that threatened the very underpinnings of his tribe’s traditions and his own power and prosperity. As increasing numbers of Indians turned to God, there were fewer left to supply the sachem with the steady stream of tribute on which he had come to depend. At one point, Massasoit ventured out to Martha’s Vineyard and spoke with some of the new converts. According to John Eliot, “he inquired what earthly good things came along with [their conversion], and…one of them replied, ‘We serve not God for clothing, nor for any outward thing.’”

It probably came as no surprise to Massasoit that the Indians on Cape Cod and the islands proved particularly receptive to Christianity. Back in 1623, he had implicated them in the plot against the Pilgrims, and in the traumatic aftermath of the raid on Wessagussett just about every sachem on the Cape had died. By declaring their allegiance to the English god, the Indians from this region succeeded in distancing themselves from the supreme sachem who had once betrayed them.

Massasoit’s distrust of Christianity was so great that he attempted to attach a stipulation to one of his final land sales: that the missionaries stop converting his people. Not surprisingly, the English refused to agree to his terms, and in the end, the aged sachem decided not to “further urge it.”

When it came to borrowing from the English, the Indians had demonstrated tremendous creativity and enthusiasm. The English, on the other hand, were much more reluctant to borrow from the Indians. The American wilderness, they thought, was inimical to the godly virtues of order and control.

Yet despite their best efforts to keep the Indians and their culture at arm’s length, the English inevitably began to adopt Native ways, particularly when it came to food. Ever since the Pilgrims stumbled across a cache of seed on Cape Cod, maize had become an essential part of every New Englander’s diet. It has been estimated that the Indians consumed between 280 and 340 pounds of corn per person per year, and the English were not far behind. Hominy and johnnycakes were adaptations of Native recipes. Over the years, the English pottage that Massasoit had craved on his sickbed had become more like the Indians’ own succotash: a soupy mishmash of corn, beans, and whatever fish and meat were available. When it came to harvesting corn, the English adopted the Native husking bee, a communal tradition in which a young man who came across a red ear of corn was allowed to demand a kiss from the girl of his choosing.

Following the lead of the Dutch in New Netherland, the English used the Indians’ finely crafted shell beads as a form of currency. Wampum consisted of strings of cylindrical beads made either from white periwinkle shells or the blue portion of quahog shells, with the purple beads being worth approximately twice as much as the white beads. To be accepted in trade, wampum had to meet scrupulous specifications, and both the Indians and the English became expert in identifying whether or not the beads had been properly cut, shaped, polished, drilled, and strung. A fathom of wampum contained about three hundred beads, which were joined to other strands to create belts that varied between one and five inches in width. When credit became difficult to obtain from England during the depression of the 1640s, the colonies eased the financial burden in New England by using wampum as legal tender. In this instance, the Indians had provided the English with a uniquely American way to do business.

When the Pilgrims had first settled at Plymouth, there had been forty miles between them and Massasoit’s village at Sowams. By 1655, there were just a few miles between the Pokanokets’ headquarters and the closest English homes clustered at Wannamoisett. There was no “frontier,” no clear-cut division between civilization and wilderness. Instead, the boundaries were convoluted and blurred—particularly in Plymouth, the smallest of the Puritan colonies, where the towns tended to be more “straggling” than in Massachusetts-Bay and Connecticut and where there was a higher concentration of Native Americans. An intimacy existed between the English and Indians that would have been almost unimaginable to subsequent generations of Americans. The English hired their Indian neighbors as farm hands; they traded with them for fish and game. Inevitably, a pidgin of English-Indian languages developed, and it became second nature for an Englishman to greet a Native acquaintance as “netop” or friend.

But Plymouth Colony was, by no means, a utopia of cross-cultural exchange and cooperation. Intermarriage between the two races was virtually nonexistent, and without children to provide them with a genetic and cultural common ground, the Indians and English would always have difficulty understanding each other’s point of view. In the end, the two peoples remained enigmas to one another.

In 1638, Arthur Peach, a veteran of the Pequot War, and three indentured servants attacked and robbed an Indian returning from a trading expedition to Boston. Peach stabbed the Indian with his rapier, and after taking his wampum and cloth, he and his friends left their victim for dead. The Indian lived on for a few days, however, and identified his attackers, who were brought to Plymouth for trial.

According to Roger Williams, the murder put the region in a “great hubbub.” Many of the Narragansetts feared that the attack heralded the beginning “of a general slaughter of the natives,” and one sachem warned “the English [should] be careful on the highway.” The Pokanokets, on the other hand, had a different perspective on the murder. Massasoit pointed out that Peach had once worked for his friend Edward Winslow. Even though Massasoit felt that Peach was guilty, he told Roger Williams that the murderer should be reprieved, “for he was Mr. Winslow’s man.” Massasoit also claimed that since the victim had been a Nipmuck Indian from the interior portion of New England and was therefore less “worthy,” it was wrong that “another man should die for him.”

When the case came to trial on September 4, 1638, Massasoit and several Narragansett sachems, as well as the Indian friends of the murdered man, were in attendance. Bradford reported that some of the English, who were of “the rude and ignorant sort,” grumbled that it was wrong for a white man to die for killing an Indian. But the jury saw otherwise, and Peach and his cohorts were found guilty and hanged, “which gave [the Indians] and all the country good satisfaction,” Bradford reported.

The Indians and English might be strangers to one another, but at the midpoint of the seventeenth century they did the best they could to settle their differences. As they all understood, it was the only way to avoid a war.

In the fall of 1657, a few months after the death of William Bradford, Massasoit, now approaching eighty years of age, signed his last Plymouth land deed. At the bottom of the parchment he sketched an intricate pictogram. What looks to be the upper portion of a man floats above what could be his legs with only a wavy line connecting the two. Whatever it actually portrays, the pictogram conveys a sense of distance and removal. With this deed, Massasoit disappears from the records of Plymouth Colony, only to reappear in the records of Massachusetts-Bay as leader of the Quabaugs, a subgroup of the Nipmucks based in modern Brookfield, Massachusetts, more than fifty-five miles northwest of Pokanoket.

Massasoit’s pictogram from a 1657 land deed

For years, the Pokanokets had maintained a close relationship with the Quabaugs, who lived with other subgroups of the Nipmucks amid the rivers and lakes between the Connecticut River to the west and the English settlements outside Boston to the east. As early as 1637, Massasoit came before officials in Boston as leader of the Quabaugs, and some historians have speculated that twenty years later, in 1657, he took up permanent residence among them. The move not only distanced the old sachem from the unrelenting pressures of Plymouth, it gave his eldest son, Wamsutta, who was approaching forty years of age, a chance to establish himself as the Pokanokets’ new leader.

Wamsutta had already begun to show signs of independence. In 1654, he sold Hog Island in Narragansett Bay to the Rhode Islander Richard Smith without the written approval of either his father or the Plymouth magistrates. Three years later, Smith appeared in Plymouth court claiming that “he knew not any ban…prohibiting him purchasing of the lands of the Natives till of late.” Begrudgingly, the court allowed Smith to keep his island as long he agreed to “stand bound unto the government and court of New-Plymouth.” Massasoit’s belated endorsement of the sale, signed on September 21, 1657, seems to have signaled the old sachem’s departure from the colony.

Just a few months later, his son refused to part with a portion of the land his father had agreed to sell to the town of Taunton. Displaying a contentiousness that came to define his all-too-brief relationship with the Plymouth authorities, Wamsutta proclaimed that he was unwilling to surrender lands that the proprietors “say is granted by the court of Plymouth.” Named as a witness to the document is John Sassamon—an Indian who represented everything Massasoit had come to fear and distrust.