1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [28]
Despite Smith’s peculiar appearance, Tisquantum and his fellows treated him well. They apparently gave him a tour, during which he admired the gardens, orchards, and maize fields, and the “great troupes of well-proportioned people” tending them. At some point a quarrel occurred and bows were drawn, Smith said, “fortie or fiftie” Patuxet surrounding him. His account is vague, but one imagines 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 to extol his adventures. In this way Patuxet acquired its English name, Plymouth, after the city in England (it was then spelled “Plimoth”).
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. Taking advantage of the Indians’ recent good experience with English visitors, he invited people to come aboard. The thought of a summer day on the foreigners’ vessel must have been tempting. 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. Hunt’s men swept the deck with small-arms fire, creating “a great slaughter.” At gunpoint, Hunt forced the survivors belowdecks. With Tisquantum and at least nineteen others, he sailed to Europe, stopping only once, at Cape Cod, where he kidnapped seven Nauset.
In Hunt’s wake the Patuxet community raged, as did the rest of the Wampanoag confederacy and the Nauset. The sachems vowed not to let foreigners rest on their shores again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt, lamented Gorges, the would-be colonizer of Maine, “a warre [was] now new begunne between the inhabitants of those parts, and us.” Despite European guns, the Indians’ greater numbers, entrenched positions, knowledge of the terrain, and superb archery made them formidable adversaries. About two years after Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked at the tip of Cape Cod. 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.
Tisquantum was away five years. When he returned, everything had changed—calamitously. Patuxet had vanished. The Pilgrims had literally built their village on top of it.
THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
According to family lore, my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in North America. His name was John Billington. He emigrated aboard the Mayflower, which anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was not among the company of saints, to put it mildly; within six months of arrival he became the first white person in America to be tried for sassing the police. His two sons were no better. Even before landing, one nearly blew up the Mayflower by shooting a gun at a keg of gunpowder while inside the ship. After the Pilgrims landed the other son ran off to live with some nearby Indians, leading to great consternation and an expedition to fetch him back. Meanwhile Billington père made merry with other non-Puritan lowlifes and haphazardly plotted against authority. The family was “one of the profanest” in Plymouth colony, complained William Bradford, its long-serving governor. Billington, in his opinion, was “a knave, and so