Adventures Among the New England Natives, Part I
What new and novel can be written about the relations between the Mayflower passengers and the native populations they encountered? How do these interactions reflect the settlers’ character, morals, and ideals? Such topics have been covered in many volumes and many more will undoubtedly be put to paper. And yet so little of their experience is broadly known, even in the heart of New England.
Most contemporary narratives fall into one of two categories. First comes the children’s tale, a “First Thanksgiving” of cooperation and friendship. Squanto helps the Pilgrims, who in return share the bounty of their autumn harvest. The second narrative, broader in scope, is the nakedly apologist adult tale of colonial aggression. The European settlers disregarded native land rights and corralled the few survivors of innumerable wars onto “reservations” of mostly worthless land. A Trail of Tears instead of Thanksgiving.
Both narratives are grounded in fact, but are viewed through historical telescopes that not only omit many contextual details required to understand both settler and native motives, but also almost two hundred years of history in between.
Zooming out a little, it becomes possible to form a clearer picture, but even then only through the fog of surviving information. For example, the documents recording the Mayflower’s first encounters with native New Englanders, now called Mourt’s Relation, undoubtedly inject the biases of their authors (Edward Winslow and William Bradford), who above all sought to describe both themselves and their new home in a favorable light to investors and future pilgrims alike.
With a grain of salt in hand, the rhetoric nevertheless remains a useful view of, if not how these individuals truly thought and acted, as the very least how they wanted others living at the time to think they did.
They referred to the native inhabitants of their New World as either “Indians” or “savages”. Neither term is inherently derogatory. By the 1600s, the term “savages” had come to mean “living in the lowest condition of development” more than its original definition of “ferocious, wild, and untamed.” In other words, they described how the natives lived, not who they were. Their respect and even admiration for native ingenuity and skill is evident in these first stories.
Also evident from Mourt’s Relation is the settlers’ practical priorities vis-à-vis the natives. They sought neither conquest nor religious conversion, but simple trade and mutual assistance. On 13 Nov 1620, the day the Mayflower passengers first landed near the tip of Cape Cod, a dozen well-armed men went ashore “to see what the land was, and what inhabitants they could meet with.”
Unfortunately, they found no inhabitants nor any habitations, only an empty neck, sandy and narrow, which they likened to the downs of Holland.
The days that followed proved equally disappointing.
The First Discovery
Two days after their first landing, Myles Standish (and, as his counselors, ancestors William Bradford and Stephen Hopkins) led a party ashore armed with muskets, swords, and corslets (body armor). After walking a mile they came upon a half-dozen men walking toward them with a dog. At first, they thought the men were the Mayflower captain and some of his men, who they knew to be ashore. They soon realized, however, the men were strangers.
The natives had no interest in making new friends that day. They ran into the wood as the Englishmen approached, whistling for their dog to follow.
Standish’s party marched after them. They traced the native footsteps through the woods, saw signs where they had stopped to watch their pursuers. Heavily armored as they were, Standish’s party never caught them and after ten miles, with dusk falling, they made camp. The group passed their first quiet but anxious night ashore.
The next day they passed creeks and ponds and stretches of wood with many fowl and deer, but neither natives nor native dwellings. Marching further south, they found a fifty-acre field with signs the natives had once planted corn. They then discovered a second field, recently harvested of corn, with stalk stubble still in the ground. Also many walnut trees full of nuts and a great store of strawberries.
They soon came upon the remains of a house, where they found a ship’s kettle brought from Europe. Whether the kettle had been left there, or traded, or stolen, they did not know. They also found, newly buried in a heap of sand, three or four bushels of corn, some yellow, some red and others mixed with blue. They loaded the European kettle with as much corn as it could carry, and took it with them, intending to compensate the natives when they found them (or so they wrote).
Not far away they found the remains of an old fort, which they determined had been built by “some Christians”. They also saw two canoes, one on each side of a river, but at that point they had been gone more than a day, longer than they agreed, the party turned around and returned to their prior night’s encampment.
It rained all night. In the morning they made for the ship, soaked and more than a little miserable. They then lost their way. Thrashing about, they came upon a tree with a sapling bent over it, and some acorns on the ground. The contraption puzzled most of them, but Stephen Hopkins, the only member of the party with experience in the New World, said it was designed to catch deer. William Bradford came up last and, not seeing it, sprung the trap, which caught his leg in a rope “as artificially made as any roper in England can make, and as like ours as can be.” The men were impressed.
By the end of the day they reached the ship. They met with the ship’s captain and others also on shore, and relayed their tale. Their newfound corn went in with the ship’s stores, to save for planting, and they were happy to have found it, as they didn’t know how else they would come by any. The author restates their desire to meet with inhabitants of that place to compensate them for the corn.
They worried, however, they would only meet natives on unfriendly terms.
The First Encounter
Weeks passed with more exploring along the Cape. They found more evidence natives had lived there but made no human contacts. Meanwhile, winter was coming. The sandy earth froze and became covered in snow. The settlers had seen enough of the bleak and barren Cape to decide they wanted to start their plantation someplace else.
On Wednesday, December 6th, a party of thirty-five men set out in their coastal shallop to explore the coast across the bay. It was not an easy trip. The sea spray froze on their cloaks. Some were already falling ill.
Sailing near shore the first day, they spied ten or twelve natives carving up a dead grampus (a Risso’s dolphin, or possibly an orca). The men ran away when they approached land. Searching the vicinity, the settlers found graves and abandoned dwellings. The natives had disappeared.
They made little progress the next day, and the second night made camp ashore once again. At about midnight, hearing a “great and hideous cry”, their sentinels shouted “Arm! Arm!” and, scrambling, shot off a few muskets. The noise ceased, and they concluded it was a company of wolves or foxes, as one in their company had once heard in Newfoundland.
Then, near five in the morning, they broke camp and prepared to reboard the shallop. They heard a strange cry, which they knew to be the same voices they’d heard the night before. One of their guards then came running, shouting, “They are men! Indians! Indians!” Not wolves at all.
Soon after, arrows flew at them.
The men ran to recover their arms. Captain Standish had readied his snaphance (a type of flintlock rifle) and made a shot. Another followed. The rest waited, shouting “Well! Well!” and “Be of good courage!” to each other. Tense moments.
Then one of the natives standing behind a tree, perhaps their captain, let his arrows fly. They saw him fire three, each time at a man who saw it coming and was able to duck in time. The native followed his arrows with three shots of a musket, then cried out and retreated. The other natives followed.
With no one injured in the attack, which the settlers called it their “First Encounter”. They reboarded their boats and, sailing all day, landed in what is now called Plymouth Harbor.
Liking it far better than the tip of the Cape, the settlers returned and moved the Mayflower across the bay. By late December they had begun constructing shelters for their new plantation.
No one appeared to greet them, or say they were unwelcome. No one offered assistance.
They had to wonder: Where was everyone?
Epidemics, Distrust, and a Long Hard Winter
Estimates of pre-Columbian North American populations range from 750,000 to 15 million, depending on the historian. A recent study suggests that, at their peak, a little over five million native Americans lived in what is now the continental United States when Europeans first arrived on their leaky boats. This is a relatively small number compared to the estimated sixty million Europeans (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) living at that time in an area half the size.
The decline from this pre-Columbian peak was precipitous. By 1800, the native population stood closer to 600,000. By 1900, less than 250,000 remained.
What happened?
Scholars attribute most of this decline to epidemics brought from Europe. Diseases like chickenpox and measles, which for centuries had been endemic but rarely fatal across the Old World, proved deadly to Native Americans.
The tribes of New England were no exception. In the years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, say from 1616 to 1619, an unknown epidemic (smallpox, possibly) swept through the region, wiping out as much of 90% of the Massachusett and Pokanoket tribes. The broader Wampanoag Confederation, which included at least two dozen tribes, suffered steep losses.
The epidemic was so swift, and so complete, many villages were simply abandoned. Shock, hopelessness, and sadness over lost loved ones afflicted the survivors.
Some Europeans brought more problems than sickness. The tribe the Pilgrims first encountered were the Nausets, who a few years before had attempted to trade with an English vessel. The ship’s commander, Captain Hunt, instead kidnapped several dozen men and sold them into slavery. After that the Nausets systematically attacked every European they found.
With good reason, the Nausets thought.
The Mayflower party, knowing nothing of treachery and sickness (especially since they never planned to settle in Massachusetts in the first place), slowly realized they had landed in a ghost town. From time to time that first winter they saw fires in the distance or heard noise in the woods, and seized their muskets in alarm. Nothing ever came of it.
For months they saw no one outside their own party.
Not, it seems, for lack of effort. On January 4th, Captain Standish took several men toward a distant fire to try to meet with the natives. They found some houses, not lately inhabited, but no one home. A few days later Francis (John?) Billington, taking another man, trudged three miles inland to investigate the lake he’d spied from the trees the week before. As with Standish’s party, they found abandoned houses, but no natives.
The only sightings that winter came in mid-February. One of the settlers spied a dozen natives marching toward the plantation and heard, in the woods, the noise of many more. He took a roundabout route to warn the others, who armed themselves, fearing the worst. The natives never appeared (though, in the rush to arms, several men dropped tools in the woods, which disappeared by the time they went back for them).
Two days later a pair of natives appeared on the top of a hill “over against” the plantation. Standish and Stephen Hopkins went to meet them, laying down their only weapon as a sign of peace, but the two native men left before they arrived. From the noise behind the hill, many more than two.
In retrospect, the absence of local contact that first winter is not surprising. The nearby Massasoit members of the Wampanoag Confederation, perhaps sixty in number, must have worried about their own ability to survive the cold and snow without risking interaction with the ill-prepared, but well-armed, latecomers.
By March the worst of the winter had passed. On the 3rd the surviving settlers heard two hallmarks of New England springtime: chirping birds and, later in the day, great claps of thunder. On the 7th they planted the first of their garden seeds.
Four months ashore, and still yet not a single word with a native. But with spring coming, perhaps the natives risk-reward calculus would shift, and at long last their new neighbors would be willing to engage.
To be continued. . .
Sources:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/savage
http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/mourt1.html
https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Demographics
https://moverdb.com/us-states-europe-population
Wicked Moxie 
Absolutely loved all these details! Fabulous. And your writing just keeps getting better and better.
xoxo
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wow!! 41A Heroine in the House
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