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By Root 1847 0

In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them remained the dying, “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. “And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle,” Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed to be “a new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where executions took place in Roman Jerusalem.

The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are well placed. Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces. As the writer and historian Paula Gunn Allen put it,

The idea that the realm of the spirits or the supernatural was powerfully engaged in the day-to-day life of nations as well as of villagers was commonly held on both sides of the Atlantic…. Both [Indians and Europeans] predicted events by the position of certain stars on the ecliptic plane around earth as much as by visionary techniques, and both assumed the reality of malicious as well as beneficent supernaturals.

The only real question in the minds of either side was whether Indian spiritual forces could affect Europeans, and vice versa. (As an experiment, Cotton Mather, a celebrated New England minister, tried to exorcise the “daemons in a possessed young woman” with incantations in Massachusett. To his satisfaction, the results demonstrated empirically that Indian magic had no effect on Christian devils.) Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, came to the obvious logical conclusion: “their deities had allied against them.”

The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives…that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession thereof, from when we may justly conclude, that GOD made the way to effect his work.”

Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands in one of Europe’s richest cities, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they lived in balance with an intelligible world. On top of that, the massive death toll created a political crisis. Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit’s people were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.

In this engraving taken from a John White watercolor of an East Coast village, the palisaded wall suggests that warfare was common enough to merit the considerable labor of cutting down many trees with stone tools, but the forces were not large enough to require moats, stone walls, earthen embankments, or any other big defensive fortification.

After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum first returned with Dermer to southern Maine. Apparently concluding he was never going to meet Rowcraft, Dermer decided in 1620 to make another pass at New England. Tisquantum returned, too, but not with Dermer. Instead he walked home—the long, risky journey he had wanted to avoid. In the interim, yet another English expedition had attacked the Wampanoag, killing several without apparent provocation. Understandably enraged, Indians attacked Dermer several times on his journey