Mayflower (24 page)

John Sassamon had been one of the missionary John Eliot’s star pupils. He had learned to read and write English, and in 1653 he attended Harvard College. For years, he had worked in Eliot’s mission, and now he was Wamsutta’s interpreter and scribe. In the spring of 1660, perhaps at Sassamon’s urging, Wamsutta appeared before the Plymouth court—not to ratify a sale of land but to change his name. The record reads:

From that day forward, Massasoit’s sons were known, at their own request, by Christian names. It was a new era.

Except for his son’s mention of his death in the Plymouth records, we know nothing about the circumstances of Massasoit’s passing. It is difficult to believe that he could be buried anywhere but Pokanoket. One thing we do know is that late in life he began to share Governor Bradford’s concerns about the future. At some point before his death, he took his two sons, still known by their Native names of Wamsutta and Metacom, to the home of John Brown in nearby Wannamoisett. There, in the presence of Brown and his family, Massasoit stated his hope “that there might be love and amity after his death, between his sons and them, as there had been betwixt himself and them in former times.”

It was somewhat unusual that Massasoit had chosen to make this pronouncement not in the presence of Bradford’s successor as governor, Thomas Prence, but in the home of an English neighbor. But as the sachem undoubtedly realized, if conflicts should one day arise between his people and the English, it was here, in the borderlands between Plymouth and Pokanoket, where the trouble would begin.

T
HE
P
ILGRIMS HAD BEEN DRIVEN
by fiercely held spiritual beliefs. They had sailed across a vast and dangerous ocean to a wilderness where, against impossible odds, they had made a home. The purity of the Old Comers’ purpose and the magnitude of their accomplishments could never again be repeated.

From the start, the second generation suffered under the assumption that, as their ministers never tired of reminding them, they were “the degenerate plant of a strange vine.” Where their mothers and fathers had once stood before their congregations and testified to the working of grace within them, the children of the Saints felt no such fervor.

By 1660, church membership in Massachusetts-Bay had so lapsed that a group of ministers instituted the Half-Way Covenant, an easing of the requirements for membership intended to boost the number of communicants. The Plymouth church did not adopt the Half-Way Covenant until the following century (in part because its rules concerning church membership were less stringent than the Puritans’ requirements in Massachusetts-Bay). The fact remained, however, that as Governor Bradford had complained, the spiritual life of Plymouth, along with all the colonies of New England, had declined to the point that God must one day show his displeasure. For the children of the Saints, it would be impossible not to see the calamities ahead as the judgment of the Lord.

Instead of the afterlife, it was the material rewards of
this
life that increasingly became the focus of the Pilgrims’ children and grandchildren. Most Plymouth residents were farmers, but there was much more than agriculture driving the New England economy. The demand for fish, timber, grain, and cattle in Europe, the West Indies, and beyond was insatiable, and by the midpoint of the century, New England merchants had established the pattern of transatlantic trade that existed right up to the American Revolution.

To take full advantage of this lucrative trade, a colony needed a port, and Boston quickly emerged as the economic center of the region. The Pilgrims’ decision to remain at their shallow anchorage doomed Plymouth to becoming the poorest of the New England colonies. But there was always the teasing possibility of economic redemption. On the west shore of the Mount Hope Peninsula, just to the south of the Pokanoket village of Sowams, was a large, deep, and well-protected harbor. However, back in 1640, Plymouth officials had set aside the entire Mount Hope Peninsula, along with the territory known as Pocasset on the east shore of Mount Hope Bay, as an Indian reserve. At least for now, the future site of Bristol, Rhode Island, was off-limits to the English.

Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, New England had been left to do pretty much as it pleased. Unlike Virginia, there had never been a royal governor in the northern colonies, and with the outbreak of the English civil war, Puritan New England had enjoyed the benefit of a sympathetic government back in the mother country.

Then, in 1660, New England’s long-standing autonomy suddenly seemed in jeopardy. With the downfall of the Cromwell regime came the restoration of King Charles II. Since his father had been beheaded by Puritan revolutionaries, the new monarch was not inclined to look favorably on New England. But Charles’s initial interest in America lay elsewhere. The collapse of the wampum trade in America combined with the recent defeat of the Dutch navy in Europe had left the Dutch colony of New Netherland vulnerable, and Charles dispatched royal commissioners to oversee the conquest of the rival colony in 1664.

Several merchants in Plymouth traded with the Dutch colony but none was more closely linked with New Netherland than Thomas Willett. Willett had served his apprenticeship at the Plymouth trading post in Penobscot, Maine. He had then married the daughter of Massasoit’s confidant John Brown and moved with his father-in-law to Wannamoisett. In addition to being experienced in working with the Indians, Willett, who had immigrated to America from Leiden, was fluent in Dutch. By the 1660s he had established a lucrative trade with New Netherland, and one of the king’s commissioners may have had him in mind when he referred to the inhabitants of Plymouth Colony as “mongrel Dutch.” It was not surprising, then, that once New Netherland became New York in a bloodless takeover in 1664, Willett became Manhattan’s first English mayor.

The increasing amount of time Willett spent in Manhattan soon became a problem for Massasoit’s son and heir, Alexander. Since he lived so close to the Pokanokets, Willett had no choice but to develop a good relationship with the Indians, and he appears to have become for Alexander what Edward Winslow had been for Massasoit: the Englishman he trusted above all others.

Willett had inherited Miles Standish’s role as the colony’s chief military officer. But by 1662, he had been replaced by Edward Winslow’s thirty-three-year-old son Josiah. Despite his young age, Josiah was well on his way to becoming Plymouth’s most distinguished citizen. One of the few Plymouth residents to have attended Harvard College, he had married the beautiful Penelope Pelham, daughter of Harvard treasurer and assistant governor of Massachusetts Herbert Pelham. A portrait painted in 1651 when Josiah was visiting his father in England depicts a young man with a handsome, somewhat supercilious face and a shoulder-length shock of reddish brown hair. By the 1660s, Josiah and Penelope had taken up residence in Careswell, the Winslow family estate in Marshfield that was named for the home of Josiah’s great-grandfather back in England.

Winslow had the polish of an English gentleman, but he had been born in America. Being Edward Winslow’s son, he had come to know the Indians well. But from the beginning of his public career, Josiah had a very different relationship with the leadership of the Pokanokets.

By the 1660s, the English no longer felt that their survival depended on the support of the Indians; instead, many colonists, particularly the younger ones, saw the Indians as an impediment to their future prosperity. No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims’ children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

Penelope and Josiah Winslow in 1651

For his part, Alexander had demonstrated a combativeness of his own. Even before his father’s death, he had ignored Massasoit’s agreement with the colony and sold Hog Island to the Rhode Islander Richard Smith. Then, in the spring of 1662, word reached Plymouth that Alexander had done it again. He had illegally sold land to yet another Rhode Islander.

Ever since Master Jones’s decision to sail for Cape Cod instead of the Hudson River, Plymouth’s patent had been less ironclad than its magistrates would have liked, despite repeated efforts to secure a new charter from the king. But even if Plymouth’s paperwork had all been in order, she would still have been subjected to the border disputes that plagued all the colonies. It was true that the United Colonies of New England had been created, in part, to address this problem, but Rhode Island was not part of the confederation. Plymouth could not allow Alexander to continue selling land to Rhode Islanders and summoned him to appear.

There were also unsettling rumors that the sachem had spoken with the Narragansetts about joining forces against the English. When Alexander failed to appear in court as promised, Governor Thomas Prence instructed Major Josiah Winslow to bring him in.

Winslow headed out in July of 1662 with ten well-armed men, all of them on horseback, trotting along the same old Indian trail that their forefathers had once walked to Pokanoket. They were in the vicinity of Nemasket, fifteen miles inland from Plymouth, when they learned that Alexander happened to be just a few miles away at a hunting and fishing lodge on Monponsett Pond in modern Halifax, Massachusetts.

It was still morning when Winslow and his men arrived at the Indians’ camp. They found the sachem and about ten others, including his wife Weetamoo, eating their breakfast inside a wigwam, with their muskets left outside in plain view. Winslow ordered his men to seize the weapons and to surround the wigwam. He then went inside to have it out with Alexander.

The Pokanoket sachem spoke to Winslow through an interpreter, John Sassamon’s brother Rowland, and as the exchange became more heated, the major insisted that they move the conversation outside. Alexander was outraged that Plymouth officials had chosen to treat him in such a condescending and peremptory manner. If there had been any truth to the rumor of a conspiracy would he be here, casually fishing at Monponsett Pond?

Winslow reminded the sachem that he had neglected to appear, as promised, before the Plymouth court. Alexander explained that he had been waiting for his friend Thomas Willet to return from Manhattan so that he could speak to him about the matter.

By this point, Alexander had worked himself into a raging fury. Winslow took out his pistol, held the weapon to the sachem’s breast, and said, “I have been ordered to bring you to Plymouth, and by the help of God I will do it.”

Understandably stunned, Alexander was on the verge of an even more violent outburst, when Sassamon asked that he be given the chance to speak to his sachem alone. After a few minutes of tense conversation, it was announced that Alexander had agreed to go with Winslow, but only as long as “he might go like a sachem”—in the company of his attendants.

It was a hot summer day, and Winslow offered Alexander the use of one of their horses. Since his wife and the others must walk, the sachem said that “he could go on foot as well as they,” provided that the English maintained a reasonable pace. In the meantime, Winslow sent a messenger ahead to organize a hasty meeting of the magistrates in Duxbury.

The meeting seems to have done much to calm passions on both sides. What happened next is somewhat unclear, but soon after the conference, Alexander and his entourage spent a night at Winslow’s house in Marshfield, where the sachem suddenly fell ill. One contemporary historian claimed that it was Alexander’s “choler and indignation that…put him into a fever.” More recently, a medical doctor has hypothesized that the sachem may have been suffering from appendicitis. Whatever the case, a surgeon was called for and gave Alexander a “working physic,” a strong purgative that would only have exacerbated his condition if he was indeed suffering from an irritated appendix. The sachem’s attendants asked that they be allowed to take him back to Mount Hope. Permission was granted, and Alexander’s men carried him on their shoulders till they reached the Taunton River in Middle-borough. From there he was transported by canoe back to Mount Hope, where he died a few days later.

It was an astonishing and disturbing sequence of events that put into bold relief just where matters stood between the English and Indians in Plymouth Colony. In 1623, Edward Winslow had earned Massasoit’s undying love by doing everything in his power—even scraping the sachem’s furred mouth—to save his life. Thirty-nine years later, Winslow’s son had burst into Alexander’s wigwam, brandishing a pistol. Within a week, the Pokanoket leader was dead.

In years to come, the rumors would abound: that Alexander had been marched unmercifully under the burning summer sun until he had sickened and died; that he had been thrown in jail and starved to death. In an effort to counter such hearsay, one of the men who’d accompanied Winslow—William Bradford’s son William junior—provided an account of the incident in which he insisted that Alexander had accompanied Winslow “freely and readily.”

Alexander’s younger brother Philip, on the other hand, became convinced that Winslow had poisoned the sachem. Indeed, Philip’s hatred of the Plymouth military officer became so notorious that once war did erupt, Winslow felt compelled to send his wife and children to Salem while he transformed his home at Marshfield into an armed fortress. Intentionally or not, Winslow had lit the slow-burning fuse that would one day ignite New England.

For days, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Indians gathered at Mount Hope to mourn the passing of Alexander. Then the despair turned to joy as the crowds celebrated Philip’s rise to supreme sachem of the Pokanokets.