He wrote the passage below in I am now to relate some strange and remarkable passages. There was a company of people [Indians] lived in the country up above in the River of Connecticut a great way from their trading house there…About a thousand of them had enclosed themselves in a fort which they had strongly palisadoed about. Three or four Dutchmen went up in the beginning of winter to live with them, to get their trade…. But their enterprise failed. For it pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness and such a mortality that of a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above ground for want of burial.
Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the Natives had seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett were not intimidated.
Almost instantly, 20 long canoes surrounded the visitors. His reaction was common. Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating a nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in.
Evidence suggests that Indians tended to view Europeans with disdain. The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal hygiene. Much of the time was spent in friendly barter.
But up north the friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied the visitors permission to land; refusing even to touch the Europeans, they passed goods back and forth on a rope over the water. During the century after Verrazzano, Europeans were regular visitors to the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping Natives as souvenirs.
Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about 8. By , one historian has estimated, Britain alone had about vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there.
A year later the British nobleman Ferdinando Gorges tried to found a community in Maine. Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed, killed 11 colonists and drove the rest back home within months. Tisquantum probably saw Champlain and other European visitors, but the first time Europeans are known to have affected his life was in the summer of A small ship hove to, sails a-flap. Out to meet the crew went the Patuxet. Almost certainly the sachem would have been of the party; he would have been accompanied by his pniese, including Tisquantum.
This was Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame. According to Smith, he had lived an adventurous and glamorous life. As a youth, he claimed, he had served as a privateer, after which he was captured and enslaved by the Turks.
He escaped and awarded himself the rank of captain in the army of Smith. Later he actually became captain of a ship and traveled to North America several times. On this occasion he had sailed to Maine with two ships, intending to hunt whales. The party spent two months chasing the beasts but failed to catch a single one. His account is vague, but it seems likely that the Indians were hinting at a limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended cordially enough, and Smith returned to Maine and then England.
He had a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him by asking him to award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he put the maps in the books he wrote extolling his adventures.
Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading the other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smith, Hunt decided to visit Patuxet, and, once there, he invited some Indians to come aboard.
Several dozen villagers, Tisquantum among them, canoed to the ship. Without warning or pretext the sailors tried to shove them into the hold. The Indians fought back. Its crew built a rude shelter with a defensive wall made from poles.
The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the sailors one by one until only five were left. They captured the five and sent them to groups victimized by European kidnappers. Another French vessel anchored in Boston Harbor at about the same time.
The Massachusett killed everyone aboard and set the ship afire. The Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could simply use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but had neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules or horses.
They may have had pigs. To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Only half of the people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter. How did even that many survive?
In his history of Plymouth Colony, Governor William Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food.
After two days of nervous work, the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower , carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living.
English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out. Even when they focused on a warmer place like Virginia, they persistently selected as colonists people ignorant of farming; the hope of fleeing religious persecution uppermost in their minds, the Pilgrims, alas, were an example. Multiplying the difficulties, the would-be colonizers were arriving in the middle of a severe, multiyear drought. The same held true for the adventurers in Plymouth.
Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople. After February, glimpses and sightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But after all the anxiety, their first contact with Indians went surprisingly well. Within days Tisquantum came to settle among them.
And then they heard his stories. Smith took six weeks to cross the Atlantic to England. There is no reason to think Hunt went any faster. There he intended to sell all of his cargo, including the human beings.
In fact, Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians.
In any case, this resourceful man convinced them to let him return home—or, rather, to try to return. He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while maintaining him as a curiosity in his town house. Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel.
He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Micmac and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another. Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult, Tisquantum began looking for a ship to take him to Patuxet.
Dermer contacted Ferdinando Gorges, who despite his previous failures retained his interest in the Americas, and with Tisquantum sailed back to England and met with Gorges. Gorges provided Dermer with a fresh ship, and after touching land in Maine, they set out in May for Massachusetts. What Tisquantum saw on his return stunned him. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries.
Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Looking for his kinsfolk, Tisquantum led Dermer on a melancholy march inland. The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Massasoit told Tisquantum what had happened. One of the shipwrecked French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds.
The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, likely spread by contaminated food, according to a study by Arthur E. His family preserved the manuscript of his history of Plymouth Colony, and later Puritan historians borrowed and copied it. Stolen by the British during the Revolutionary War , the document was rediscovered by American historians in London in , transcribed and finally published for the first time in Bernard Bailyn.
Dorothy Honiss Kelso. Beyond the Pilgrim Story: William Bradford. Pilgrim Hall Museum. Martyn Whittock. Mayflower Lives Pegasus Books, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The political and religious leader Roger Williams c. He is also the founder of the first Baptist church in America. His views on religious freedom Some people, many of them seeking religious freedom in the New World, set sail from England on the Mayflower in September That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts.
A scouting party was sent out, and in late December the In September , during the reign of King James I, a group of around English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower. Two months later, the three-masted The Mayflower Compact was a set of rules for self-governance established by the English settlers who traveled to the New World on the Mayflower. When Pilgrims and other settlers set out on the ship for America in , they intended to lay anchor in northern Virginia.
But after That story is incomplete—by the time Englishmen had begun to establish colonies in earnest, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Dutch and even On May 14, , a group of roughly members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. Famine, disease and conflict with local Native American tribes in the first two years
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