Mayflower (50 page)

On the Peach trial, see
OPP,
pp. 299–301, and two letters written by Roger Williams to John Winthrop in August 1638 in
Letters of Roger Williams,
vol. 1, pp. 110–16. Yasuhide Kawashima writes suggestively about the trial in
Igniting King Philip’s War,
pp. 117–18. James Drake in
King Philip’s War
writes that during the midpoint of the seventeenth century “the Indians and English entered into a period of cultural accommodation and negotiation. If anything, the two groups perceived more similarity between themselves than there really was, in what functioned as a type of mutual misunderstanding,” p. 45.

The 1657 deed in which Massasoit traced a pictograph is at the Plymouth County Commissioners Office, Plymouth, Massachusetts; see also Jeremy Bangs’s
Indian Deeds,
p. 277. For an account of Usamequin/Massasoit’s “other life” as a Nipmuck sachem, see Dennis Connole’s
The Indians of Nipmuck Country in Southern New England,
1630–1750. pp. 65–66, 76, 78. One of the first scholars to be aware of Massasoit/Usamequin’s presence among the Nipmucks was Samuel Drake, who in the
Book of the Indians
cites documents referring to Massasoit/Usamequin’s 1661 complaint to Massachusetts officials concerning Uncas and the Mohegans, pp. 102–3; in a note, Drake writes, “By this it would seem that Massasoit had, for some time, resided among the Nipmucks. He had, probably, given up Pokanoket to his sons.” Interestingly, in a document cited by Drake, John Mason, a Connecticut official sympathetic to Uncas, claims in a letter to Massachusetts officials that “Alexander, alias Wamsutta, sachem of Sowams, being now at Plymouth, he challenged Quabaug Indians to belong to him; and further said that he did war against Uncas this summer on that account,” p. 103. On the relationship of the Nipmucks to other tribes in New England, see Bert Swalen’s “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period” in
Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 15, edited by Bruce Trigger, p. 174. According to a letter dated “28 of the 1st [16]61,” from John Eliot, Massasoit/Usamequin had by that point changed his name once again to Matchippa, MHS
Proceedings,
vol. 3, pp. 312–13. See also Josiah Temple’s
History of North Brookfield,
pp. 42–48, and the April 21, 1638, and March 7, 1644, entries of John Winthrop’s
Journal,
edited by James Hosmer, vol. 1, p. 269, and vol. 2, p. 160. The last reference to Massasoit/Usamequin in the Plymouth Court Records is dated May 4, 1658, in which he and his son are suspected of harboring an Indian guilty of murder,
PCR,
vol. 2, p. 133; there is a 1659 deed with Massasoit/Usamequin’s name on it, but it is unsigned; see Bangs,
Indian Deeds,
p. 293. Richard Smith’s claim that he did not know about the Plymouth ban on purchasing land from the Indians is in Bangs’s
Indian Deeds,
pp. 285–86. Bangs refers to Wamsutta’s refusal to part with a portion of the land his father had agreed to sell to the English, p. 84. On John Sassamon, see Yasuhide Kawashima’s
Igniting King Philip’s War,
pp. 76–87; Kawashima suggests that Sassamon may have urged Wamsutta to acquire English names for himself and his brother; the request is dated June 13, 1660,
PCR,
vol. 2, p. 192. William Hubbard in
The History of the Indian Wars in New England
recounts how Massasoit brought his two sons to John Brown’s house, pp. 46–47.

CHAPTER TWELVE-
The Trial

George Langdon in
Pilgrim Colony
writes, “For the people who left England to settle Plymouth, the working out of this relationship with God in a new world offered excitement and the challenge of great adventure. By 1650 the adventure was over, the spontaneity which had fired the hearts of the early settlers gone,” p. 140; Langdon also writes of the Half-Way Covenant and its impact on Plymouth, pp. 130–33. Joseph Conforti provides an excellent account of the second generation of English in Plymouth Colony in
Imagining New England,
pp. 36–78. The reference to “a strange vine” comes from the
Plymouth Church Records,
vol. 1, p. 151. On the economic development of New England and the impact of the Restoration, see Bernard Bailyn’s
The New England Merchants in Seventeenth Century,
pp. 75–142. Langdon writes of Plymouth’s relative poverty and the teasing prospect of a port at Mount Hope in
Pilgrim Colony,
p. 142. Jeremy Bangs in
Indian Deeds
refers to the reserve tracts of 1640, in which Causumpsit Neck, i.e., Mount Hope Neck, “is the chief habitation of the Indians, and reserved for them to dwell upon,” p. 63. Russell Shorto writes of the fall of New Netherland to the English in
The Island at the Center of the World,
pp. 284–300. Samuel Maverick, who had been one of the first settlers in Massachusetts, was appointed one of Charles II’s commissioners and in a 1660 manuscript account of New England describes Plymouth residents as “mongrel Dutch” and speaks of their “sweet trade” with New Netherland. On Thomas Willett and his relationship to John Brown, as well as the locations of their homes in Swansea (modern Central Falls, Rhode Island), see Thomas Bicknell’s
Sowams,
pp. 134, 141. Langdon discusses Plymouth’s lack of a royal charter in
Pilgrim Colony,
pp. 188–200. In March 4, 1662, Thomas Willett was instructed by Plymouth Court to “speak to Wamsutta about his estranging land, and not selling it to our colony,”
PCR,
vol. 4, p. 8.

For information on Josiah Winslow and his wife Penelope, see Pene Behrens’s
Footnotes: A Biography of Penelope Pelham,
1633–1703. as well as
The Winslows of Careswell in Marshfield
by Cynthia Hagar Krusell. Samuel Drake’s
The Old Indian Chronicle
(
OIC
) provides an excellent account of the events leading up to Alexander’s death, pp. 31–43; Drake judiciously draws primarily on William Hubbard’s
The History of the Indian Wars in New England
(
HIWNE
) and Increase Mather’s
History of King Philip’s War
(
HKPW
). Hubbard in
HIWNE
insists that Alexander’s “choler and indignation” were what killed him, p. 50. Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias cite Maurice Robbins’s reference to a doctor’s theory that Alexander died of appendicitis and that the surgeon’s “working physic” would only have worsened the sachem’s condition, in
King Philip’s War,
p. 24. William Bradford’s belated account of the incident is related in a letter from John Cotton to Increase Mather, March 19, 1677; Cotton also refers to the “flocking multitudes” that attended the festivities surrounding Philip’s rise to sachem, in
The Mather Papers,
MHS Collections, 4th ser., vol. 8 (1868), pp. 233–34. Just prior to the outbreak of war in 1675, Philip and his counselors told John Easton and some others from Rhode Island that they believed Alexander had been “forced to court as they judged poisoned,” in
Narratives of the Indian Wars,
edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 11. George Langdon in
Pilgrim Colony
refers to Winslow’s decision to send his family to Salem and to hire twenty men to guard his home, p. 170.

Philip Ranlet provides a detailed look at the events of 1662–1675 in “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,”
NEQ,
vol. 61, 1998, pp. 79–100, as does Jenny Pulsipher in
Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England,
pp. 69–100. For a description of the geology of Mount Hope, see Shepard Krech III’s “Rudolf F. Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum” in
Passionate Hobby: Rudolf F. Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum,
edited by Krech, pp. 56–57. Yasuhide Kawashima in
Igniting King Philip’s War
refers to the tradition that Philip threw a stone all the way to Poppasquash Neck, p. 54. In
HIWNE,
Hubbard claims that Philip was nicknamed King Philip for the “ambitious and haughty spirit” he displayed during his 1662 appearance before Plymouth Court, p. 52. In
The Book of the Indians,
Samuel Drake quotes an undated letter of Philip’s to a representative of the governor of Massachusetts: “Your governor is but a subject of King Charles of England. I shall not treat with a subject. I shall treat of peace only with the king, my brother. When he comes, I am ready,” book 3, p. 24. Philip’s words to the Plymouth Court in 1662 are recorded in
PCR,
vol. 4, p. 25.

Peter Thomas in “Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use as Factors for Understanding Indian-White Relations in New England” in
Ethnohistory,
Winter 1976, claims that “less than twenty percent of the New England landscape had a high agricultural productiveness,” p. 4. John Demos in
A Little Commonwealth: Family-Life in Plymouth Colony
includes statistics concerning the size of families in Plymouth Colony, p. 192. S. F. Cook in
The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century
writes that between 1634 and 1675 the Wampanoags “had enjoyed as stable an existence as was possible for natives during the seventeenth century,” p. 37. See Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,”
WMQ,
October 1994, on Philip as a hog farmer, pp. 601–2, as well as her book
Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.
John Sassamon’s undated letter to Governor Prence communicating Philip’s desire not to sell any more land for at least seven years is at Pilgrim Hall and reprinted in MHS Collections, vol. 2, p. 40; Jeremy Bangs, who has transcribed the manuscript material at Pilgrim Hall, has assigned the probable date of 1663 to the letter. The deed for Philip’s 1664 sale of land to Taunton is in Bangs’s
Indian Deeds,
pp. 326–27.

Kathleen Bragdon in “‘Emphatical Speech and Great Action’: An Analysis of Seventeenth-Century Native Speech Events Described in Early Sources,” in
Man in the Northeast,
vol. 33, 1987, cites Roger Williams’s reference to how a person of lesser rank approached a sachem, p. 104; see also Bragdon’s
Native People of Southern New England,
1500–1650. pp. 146–48, where she cites Williams’s and Gookin’s remarks concerning a sachem’s relationship to his followers. John Josselyn reported seeing Philip on the streets of Boston in 1671, when, on the urging of John Eliot, he spoke to Massachusetts authorities, in
John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler,
edited by Paul Lindholdt, p. 101. On Philip’s appearance on Nantucket in 1665, see my
Abram’s Eyes,
pp. 118–21, in which I rely primarily on accounts by local historians Zaccheus Macy, whose unpublished account is in the Nantucket Historical Association’s Collection 96, Folder 44, and Obed Macy, whose account is in his
History of Nantucket,
pp. 54–56. Nantucket’s Indians vowed to “disown Philip” at a town meeting in August 1675. S. F. Cook in
The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century
estimates that there were five thousand Wampanoags in 1675, p. 39.

Since Philip’s son was said to be nine years old in 1676, he must have been born in 1667; since the birth of a child often prompts a parent to draft a will, I have postulated that Philip’s rift with Sassamon occurred soon after the birth of his son; by September 1667, Philip had a new interpreter named Tom. On the life of John Sassamon, see Yasuhide Kawashima’s
Igniting King Philip’s War,
pp. 76–87, and Jill Lepore’s “Dead Men Tell No Tales: John Sassamon and the Fatal Consequences of Literacy” in
American Quarterly,
December 1994, pp. 493–97. In
A Relation of the Indian War,
John Easton reported the Pokanokets’ claim that Sassamon “was a bad man that King Philip got him to write his will and he made the writing for a great part of the land to be his but read as if it had been as Philip would, but it came to be known and then he run away from him,” in
Narratives of the Indian Wars,
edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 7; Easton also records Philip’s claim that all Christian Indians are “dissemblers,” p. 10. I refer to Philip’s comparison of Christianity to the button on his coat in
Abram’s Eyes,
p. 120. Philip’s troubles over a suspected French-Dutch conspiracy in 1667 can be traced in
PCR,
vol. 4, pp. 151, 164–66. Philip’s sale of land to Thomas Willett on September 17, 1667, with Tom, the interpreter, listed as a witness, is in Jeremy Bangs’s
Indian Deeds,
p. 382; Bangs also discusses the new pressures that the creation of Swansea put on the Pokanokets, pp. 127–28, and quantifies the accelerating pace of Indian land sales, p. 163.

William Hubbard discusses the strategy Prence and Winslow used to handle the sachems of the Wampanoags and Massachusetts and the disastrous consequences that strategy had with respect to King Philip’s War in
A General History of New England,
pp. 71–72. Jeremy Bangs points to Josiah Winslow’s use of mortgaging Indian property to pay off debt as “tantamount to confiscating land” in
Indian Deeds,
p. 141. When it comes to the subject of Philip’s supposed bravery, Samuel Drake writes, “I nowhere find any authentic records to substantiate these statements. On the other hand, I find abundant proof that he was quite destitute of such qualities,” in a note to Drake’s edition of William Hubbard’s
HIWNE,
p. 59. Philip and his counselors spoke of when Massasoit was “a great man” and the English were “as a little child” to John Easton of Rhode Island in June 1675, in
Narratives of the Indian Wars,
edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 10.

Hubbard in
HIWNE
refers to the “petite injuries” that caused Philip to threaten war in 1671, p. 53. Hugh Cole’s 1671 report of seeing Narragansett Indians at Mount Hope, where the Indians were “employed in making bows and arrows and half-pikes, and fixing up guns” is in Collections of the MHS, vol. 6, 1799, p. 211, and is cited in Richard Cogley’s account of John Eliot’s involvement in Philip’s negotiations with the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts in 1671, in
John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians,
pp. 200–203. Francis Baylies’s
Historical Memoir of…New-Plymouth,
vol. 2, edited by Samuel Drake, provides the most detailed account of what happened between the Pokanokets and the English in 1671, particularly at Taunton; Baylies quotes the reproof Massachusetts-Bay officials sent Plymouth: “[T]he treatment you have given him, and proceedings towards him, do not render him such a subject [of your colony],” p. 23. I have also looked to Samuel Drake’s account of the events of that year in
OIC,
pp. 63–86, and Jenny Pulsipher’s
Subjects unto the Same King,
pp. 94–100. Much of the documentary record from this crucial summer is contained in
PCR,
vol. 5, pp. 63–80. Josiah Winslow refers to Philip’s supposed scheme to abduct and ransom both himself and Governor Prence in a note on a March 24, 1671, letter from Governor Bellingham to Governor Prence, Winslow Papers II, MHS. William Hubbard in
HIWNE
writes of the unnamed warrior who disavowed Philip after the sachem capitulated at Taunton in April 1671: “[O]ne of his captains, of far better courage and resolution than himself, when he saw [Philip’s] cowardly temper and disposition, [did] fling down his arms, calling him a
white-livered cur,
or to that purpose, and saying that he would never own him again, or fight under him, and from that Time hath turned to the English, and hath continued to this day a faithful and resolute soldier in this quarrel,” pp. 58–59. Hubbard in
HIWNE
also describes how the son of the Nipmuck sachem Matoonas “being vexed in his mind that the design against the English, intended to begin [in] 1671, did not take place, out of mere malice and spite against them, slew an English man traveling along the road,” p. 44. William Harris in
A Rhode Islander Reports on King Philip’s War,
edited by Douglas Leach, claimed that Philip’s plan to attack the English in 1671 was prevented “twice at least by great rains, which afterward was made known by some Indians,” p. 21. The September 1, 1671, letter from James Walker to Governor Prence describing Philip’s drunken rant against Sassamon is in MHS Collections, 1st ser., vol. 6, 1799, pp. 196–97.