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Founding Plymouth Colony and meeting the Indians
After trekking through snow and water, witnessing the first New England birth, and many tragic deaths, the English founded Plymouth Plantation, a tiny town on a hill with a freshwater creek and 7 houses. After growing increasingly unnerved about the possibility of Indian attack, a man named Samoset quite literally stepped forward – right into the settlement. He told them about the area they were living in, called Patuxet, and its residents, the Poconoquets. It was an area with a long history of contact and conflict with the English, but the locals could tell these settlers were different.
Transcript
It was November, the ground was covered in snow, and the Pilgrims needed to find a settlement site. Miles Standish took the lead, and a group of 10 settlers along with the Mayflower’s captain, Christopher Jones, trekked through water, and then through snow. The sea’s spray froze to their clothes “as if they’d been glazed.” Fortunately, they had plenty of geese and ducks to eat. They trekked miles, and saw their very first glimpses of the locals, who darted into the woods when they saw them.
Introduction
Stephen Hopkins was able to identify a deer trap based on his time in Jamestown. They were thirsty, but quickly found a spring with perfectly clean water to drink. They found some storage pits filled with corn. Low on food, they decided to take the corn, as well as some of the best items from the graves. They planned to compensate the owners with beads and trinkets from England, but forgot to.
Miles Standish would end up taking a central role during his time in Plymouth – simultaneously being one of the colony’s most contentious figures and one of the people the Leiden separatists grew to depend on most – along with Brewster, Bradford and Carver. It’s worth taking a couple minutes to introduce the Plymouth captain. He wasn’t a Pilgrim, but he was in Leiden at the same time the Pilgrims had been, and had worked for the Calvinist leaders of the city. He had certainly met John Robinson, and some other members of his congregation. He was also connected to Pocock’s Honorable Artillery Company, which was how he’d gotten involved in the mission. Standish’s Puritan credentials were strong, and he was well-educated and well-read, but he had a major chip on his shoulder. He was from Duxbury, in Lancashire, just a little north of Manchester, and said he was descended from the House of Standish of Standish, but that he’d been cheated out of his inheritance and forced to seek his fortune as a mercenary in Holland. He was also short enough that he had to shorten his sword blade by four inches to keep it from dragging on the ground, and he was just very proud, and very quick to take offense. And it was this tendency that started to ruffle feathers. John Robinson was very harsh in his assessment of Standish’s character, saying that he didn’t show the Love of God in his interaction with people. John Smith would later lament that the Pilgrims could have avoided a lot of problems if they’d hired him instead of Standish, because Standish wouldn’t even consult his maps while out exploring. As the Pilgrims looked to an uncertain future, though, Standish’s brash and bold style instilled a confidence that they needed.
Christopher Jones became the first person Standish clashed with, though. At the second potential settlement location, they trekked through six inches of snow. When it seemed to be unsuitable, they went and got the rest of the corn they’d found earlier. Jones pushed for them all to return to the Mayflower, while Standish wanted to push ahead. Jones decided to take the corn and the sicker men back to the ship, leaving Standish in charge of the rest for the night. Standish went looking for Indians, but found nothing, and the remaining Pilgrims decided to dig up some of the local graves to investigate them. There, they found the bones of a European sailor and a young child, and they ended up taking some of the best things from the graves, and from a local uninhabited village. Again, they forgot to leave the beads intended for payment. With nothing more to be done at the second failed location, though, they decided to return to the Mayflower.
When they returned to the ship, they were greeted with good news. Peregrine White was born, the second baby born on board the Mayflower, and the first in New England. He was the son of William and Susannah White, likely a Leiden couple, though we’re not 100% sure. A White family was a prominent family around Scrooby, though, and even John Robinson’s wife was named Bridget White. Peregrine White would live until 1704, which just astounds me. He was born on the Mayflower, and his daughter would live to see the outbreak of the French and Indian War. Again, that just amazes me.
Anyway, Standish took ten people out in the shallop to find a new settlement site. These people included Carver, Bradford, Winslow, Hopkins, John Allerton, and John Clark. When they landed, they built a barricade and started to explore the area, which, like all the others seemed abandoned, with just some empty houses and yet-more graves, as well as some wolf-like howling coming from the forest. They set up camp in the evening, explored the next day, camped again, but the next morning, as the sun rose, two men burst through the trees shouting “They are men – Indians, Indians!” Suddenly, the air was full of war cries, shortly followed by arrows. Standish fired a shot back, telling the others not to shoot until they could take aim. The arrows kept coming, and it was clear that they were stronger, faster and more reliable than the English matchlocks. One Indian could have five arrows in the air at once, much faster than a pilgrim could fire off even one bullet. And that was if they had their guns with them, but multiple settlers had left their arms in the shallop overnight as they slept. They ran back to try to get them, and ended up getting trapped behind the boat, but uninjured. Another settler picked up a burning log for light and ran to his comrades caught behind the shallop. This was a brave act, to be sure, but it was one which in reality just made the Pilgrims easy targets in the early morning light. The settlers were forced to take shelter as best they could, shoot as best they could, and wait. One Indian started to approach them, and a Pilgrim took aim, shot, and missed. But, the blast did its job, and the attackers started to leave. Standish took a group of people to follow the man into the woods. They went a quarter mile, stopped, shot off their muskets, collected 18 arrows to ship to England, and decided to move on to a different settlement location.
As they were sailing, a storm hit, drenching the shallop’s passengers with freezing water, and breaking the boat’s mast. With help from the tide, they rowed to a nearby harbor, and then on toward a sound a little ways away. As they made their way to land, they had to decide whether to sleep onboard the boat, or on shore. The question was, were they more afraid of Indian attack or freezing to death? Freezing won, so they went ashore, built a fire, and slept. The next day was nice and sunny, and they found they were safe from attack because they were on a heavily wooded island. They spent the day rebuilding the shallop’s mast, and rested the next day, which was the Sabbath. On Monday, they explored.
Again, there was no evidence of a nearby Indian settlement, though there, as everywhere, unburied human bones showed the area hadn’t always been uninhabited. The harbor was big enough for the Mayflower. A fortifiable hill rose up from the beach, from which you could see 30 miles on a clear day, with a freshwater creek flowing beside it. It was secure. It was navigable. It was uninhabited. It … seemed … perfect. They sailed back to the Mayflower with the good news.
They were greeted with bad news, though. Scurvy had started killing people, including children, and Bradford’s wife had drowned right after he went exploring. They led the Mayflower to the site of the future Plymouth Plantation, though, and started to plan their settlement.
They chose a location on a hill, and chose a town layout based on fortifiable dutch towns, but the houses themselves would be built in the English thatched farmhouse design. Single men would stay with families, so they could reduce the number of houses needed to 19. A cannon-equipped fort would provide security.
On Christmas, they built their first house. People were dying at a shocking rate, though, of 2-3 per day. By the time they completed the town, they only needed 7 houses. Over the next three months, over half the people in the settlement would die. Even of the people left alive, fewer than 10 were healthy enough to tend to the sick, and progress building the houses stopped. By the end of winter, only four families were left with all their members alive – the Billingtons, Hopkins, Brewsters and Cooks.
The Leideners were doing particularly poorly, and multiple entire families of Leideners died. By the end of winter, more than 1/5 of the living children belonged to two families, the Hopkins and the Billingtons, neither of whom were Leideners. They looked to Brewster and Standish more than ever as their sources of strength. On the non-Leidener front, though, Christopher Martin died, and was soon followed by his wife.
Adding to pressures of health and cold, the settlers feared the Indians were waiting for enough of them to die that they could easily finish off the rest. Weeks and months passed with no contact after that first standoff, which was odd, and deeply unnerving. So, they hid the bodies of the dead, which wouldn’t be found for another century, and every so often, they pulled out everyone out, propped the ill against trees, and took out their weapons as a show of strength.
Meanwhile, they were trying to make a life in the wilds of New England. You really get the impression that they were trying to live a normal life in an abnormal situation. In Jamestown, people had been drawn to the exotic and interesting aspects of life in America, but in Plymouth, the focus was on creating town life that was as normal as possible, in an extremely abnormal situation. One day, for instance, two people went out with their two dogs, armed with nothing but sickles. They heard a cougar scream, and the mastiff tried to run after it. They were able to restrain the mastiff, but there they stood, clutching their sickles and their dog, and only returning the next day after getting lost.
Soon, another settler had his first Indian encounter while duck hunting in some cattails. He saw some Indians pass by and heard the noise of more scattered through the forest. He ran to the plantation and sounded the alarm. Everyone dropped their tools, armed themselves and prepared to fight, but the Indians never came. Their tools disappeared, though, and later that night they saw a fire where the duck hunter had seen the Indians. The next day, they elected Miles Standish as their captain, and he went about “whipping the men of the settlement into a fighting force.”
A man named John Billington took the lead in opposing Standish’s plans, and strongly criticized the captain, himself. Billington’s family had already come into conflict with the Pilgrims before. They were Northern English Anglicans who had joined the Mayflower expedition because they were poor and lacked opportunities in England. He himself was crude and rebellious, and his kids always seemed to be getting into trouble of one sort or another. We don’t have any surviving records that tell his side of the story, and we don’t know within the Anglican church whether he tended toward Puritanism or more mainstream ideology, but it’s clear that Billington didn’t get along with the Leideners, or Standish, who he said “looked like a silly boy, and is in utter contempt.”
For Billington’s latest act of insubordination, Carver threatened to tie his hands and feet together in a public display of humiliation, but he never carried out the sentence.
They had their first official military meeting on February 17, and as they were holding the meeting, someone realized that two Indians were standing on top of a hill across the creek about a quarter mile away. The settlers got their muskets and reassembled, and then the two groups stared at each other in silence, until the Indians gestured for the English to approach. The English responded that the Indians should come to them, but the pair refused to approach. Standish and Hopkins decided to honor the request. They took one shared musket and crossed the creek. They laid the musket down as a sign of peace, and immediately the Indians ran to their companions on the other side of the hill. They didn’t see any sign of the locals for the rest of the night.
It was after this confusing and unnerving incident that the English finally mounted their ordinances, six iron cannons. Then, Jones brought a goose, crane and mallard for an impromptu feast after the cannons were installed, and the settlers had their first really pleasant evening since arriving.
Almost exactly a month later, during another military meeting, a lone Indian began to walk slowly but confidently toward the settlement. The Pilgrims sounded the alarm, but he continued forward, and soon he was at the edges of the town, itself, and was about to walk right in. People were beginning to panic, until finally a couple men stepped in his path and signaled that he was not to go in. He saluted them, and spoke the first words most of them had ever heard a Native American say. “Welcome, Englishmen!”
He stood in stark contrast to the English – tall, healthy, dressed in nothing but a loincloth, with hair that was long in back and short in front, and no beard, and carrying a bow and two arrows. The English, on the other hand, tended to be hunched over from sickness and years of manual labor, bearded, and prematurely aged. He stood confidently, even cheerfully, and they stood staring. After the shock wore off, they offered him something to eat, and he requested beer. They gave him some liquor, and then offered some biscuit, butter, cheese, pudding and roasted duck, all of which he liked. He introduced himself as Samoset, a sachem from Maine. He had learned English from the fishermen who frequently passed through his region, but he told the Pilgrims that there was someone from the area they were living in – called Patuxet – who spoke English even better than he did. That man’s name was Tsquantum, and the leader of Patuxet, the sachem, was called Massasoit. Then, he told them more than they could have imagined about the region. Now, not all of what I’m about to tell you came from Samoset’s story, but the basics did and it seems like a good time to really give you the story of New England until this moment from the perspective of the Poconoquets.
The first Englishmen to visit Patuxet had been members of Gosnold and Archers’ 1602 voyage. In fact, Gosnold had presented Massasoit’s father – who was the sachem at that point – with a pair of knives and a straw hat.
After Gosnold, Martin Pring had briefly gone to Cape Cod to harvest sassafrass. He’d left when the locals set fire to his fort, but was followed by Samuel Champlain in 1605. In 1611, Edward Harlow followed in their footsteps. On his visit, he engaged in brutal confrontations with the Indians, and ended up abducting five. One of the captives was named Epenow, and Harlow took him around the London streets to show for money. Epenow started to realize that the English liked gold, so he told Harlow that there was a gold mine in New England that only he could lead them to. They mounted a new expedition, and as soon as the English ship came within swimming distance of North American land, Epenow jumped over the side and escaped. He soon became a sachem.
In 1614, John Smith led his famous mission to explore New England, with several ships, one captained by a man named Thomas Hunt, a Suffolk Puritan. In Patuxet, against Smith’s orders, Hunt took as many native captives as he could hold for sale as slaves in Spain. He tricked 27 people – 20 from Patuxet and 7 from Nauset – onto his ship to be sold as slaves in Malaga. Smith lamented that Hunt had permanently damaged English-Indian relations in New England, and indeed stories of the incident spread quickly around New England. The next English captain to visit the area massacred a trading party of native people, and solidified local concerns about the English.
In Spain, though, Hunt’s captives were rescued by a group of monks. One in particular found his way to London, where he lived for about five years. His name was Squanto, or Tsquantum, and in fact, by the time the Pilgrims set sail, he’d spent more time in London than any of the Leideners except for Brewster or Winslow. He’d stayed in London at the home of John Slany, a leader in the Merchant Taylors who was closely connected to both Jones and Pocock, and who invested in the Mayflower’s mission.
But, the next year, 1616, a French ship wrecked, and the Indians decided to get revenge. They killed all but three or four of the ship’s passengers, and they kept those people as slaves, sending them between towns and making sport with them. One of the Frenchmen learned their language, and told his captors that God was angry with them for their wickedness, and that he would destroy them and give their country to another people.
Then, in the spring of 1619, a man named Thomas Dermer sailed south from Maine in a small boat, on a mission funded by Ferdinando Gorges. He was accompanied by Squanto, who by now had lived in Spain, England and Newfoundland, but was headed home. When Squanto arrived, though, he found the area transformed. Once full of people, Patuxet was now virtually empty, though he did find a handful of survivors, including his own family members, in his village.
Patuxet had suffered a plague in the last three years. It had killed pretty much everyone, especially Massasoit’s people, the Poconoquets. They’d died fast enough that they couldn’t keep up with all the burials. The Poconoquets had once been one of the stronger tribes in the region, with 12,000 people and 3,000 warriors, but 90% of their people had died, warriors included. Meanwhile, the Narragansets didn’t seem to be affected by the disease, so they were at full strength while the Poconoquets could muster only a couple hundred warriors. The Narragansets now considered the Poconoquets to be their subjects, and though Massasoit had allies, he wasn’t strong enough to fight them off. Massasoit’s allies included the Massachusetts to the north, and the Nausets on Cape Cod.
Squanto wanted to learn more about what happened, and the situation in Patuxet, so he got Dermer to take him to Massasoit. Massasoit welcomed the pair, and even gave one of the French captives to Dermer. They were able to rescue another one, and soon they met Epenow, who was now a sachem. Squanto went home to Nemasket, and Dermer went south to spend the winter in Virginia.
It was the most positive interaction the Indians and English had had in years, but over the course of the winter, another English ship had entered Narragansett Bay, invited a bunch of Poconoquets aboard, and shot them down in cold blood. Dermer didn’t know about this, and, expecting the kind of friendly reception he’d enjoyed the previous fall, he returned to Patuxet in spring. He was almost immediately attacked, multiple times, but they were minor attacks, so he continued his voyage. Then, Epenow launched an attack which killed all but one of Dermer’s men, and left him badly enough wounded that he was forced to return to Virginia, where he immediately died. Squanto tried to save Dermer, but was himself taken prisoner, and handed over to Massasoit.
This was the spring before the Pilgrims had arrived, and in addition to hostility and distrust of the English, a political rift had started to emerge in Massasoit’s domain. The Indians knew that the English were likely to remain in the region, and they might even increase their presence. A small handful of them knew English language and customs, though, meaning they had an advantage in dealing with the English. This was a powerful thing, potentially beneficial, but potentially disastrous if wielded by the wrong person.
Both Epenow and Squanto both saw this, and it was for this reason that Epenow held a deep distrust of Squanto. Epenow had just demonstrated his loyalty to his own people by attacking Dermer in retaliation for previous violence, but Squanto kept playing games, and had even protected the English. Massasoit had freed him, and by the time the Pilgrims came Squanto was living freely in Patuxet, though he didn’t trust Squanto much more than Epenow did.
When the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians had initially worried that they had come to avenge the attack on Dermer. When they’d taken corn and raided graves, they’d antagonized the Nausets, who were already hostile to the English after being victims of prior attacks and kidnappings. The Nausets were, of course, Massasoit’s allies, and he was already wary after watching the events of the last decade. His first impulse was to curse the English and push them out.
Squanto persuaded him to wait. Squanto told Massasoit about London, and he said the English could help the Poconoquets establish their independence from the Narragansetts. Furthermore, he told Massasoit that the English had a black powder they could use to spread disease at will. This was, of course, gunpowder, but the English did guard their powder closely enough to lend credence to Squanto’s claims. Even without the black powder, continuing the bloodshed was dangerous.
So, Massasoit avoided meeting the English while he figured out what to do. He knew how many settlers had died, and he also noticed that this group of Englishmen had brought women and children, and made no attempt to trade. After months of waiting, he decided to try to befriend the English, or at least to try to better evaluate them. Squanto offered to act as an interpreter, but Massasoit declined, electing instead to send Samoset, whose English was poorer, but loyalty was surer.
Finally, though, the Pilgrims and the Indians had met. Samoset wanted to spend the night in the town, and the Pilgrims hoped to dissuade him by offering to have him stay on the Mayflower instead. When he happily climbed aboard the shallop, effectively calling their bluff, they said high winds and low tides were preventing them from leaving shore, so they allowed him to spend the night with Hopkins and his family. Neither side was quite sure of the other, but things looked promising.
The next day, Samoset left, promising to return in a few days with Massasoit and his men.