The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (26 page)

Wamsutta had already begun to show signs of independence. In 1654, he sold Hog Island in Narragansett Bay to the Rhode Islander Richard smith without the written approval of either his father or the Plymouth commissioners. Just a few months later, Wamsutta refused to part with land his father had agreed to sell to the town of Taunton. Displaying a disregard for the Plymouth authorities, Wamsutta proclaimed that he was unwilling to surrender lands that the owners “say is granted by the court of Plymouth.” Named as a witness to the document is John sassamon—an Indian who represented everything Massasoit had come to fear and distrust.

John sassamon had been one of the missionary John Eliot's star pupils. He had learned to read and write English, and in 1653, he attended Harvard College. For years, he had worked in Eliot's mission, and now he was Wamsutta's interpreter and scribe. In the spring of 1660, perhaps at sassamon's urging, Wamsutta appeared before the Plymouth court—not to approve a sale of land but to change his name. The record reads:

From that day forward, Massasoit's sons were known, at their own request, by Christian names. It was a new era.

 

◆◆◆ Except for his son's mention of his death in the Plymouth records, we know nothing about the circumstances of Massasoit's passing. It is difficult to believe that he could be buried anywhere but Pokanoket. One thing we do know is that late in life he began to share Governor Bradford's concerns about the future. At some point before his death, he took his two sons to the home of John Brown in nearby Wannamoisett. There, in the presence of Brown and his family, Massasoit stated his hope “that there might be love and amity after his death, between his sons and them, as there had been betwixt himself and them in former times.”

It was somewhat unusual that Massasoit had chosen to make this pronouncement not in the presence of William Bradford's successor as governor, Thomas Prence, but in the home of an English neighbor. But as the sachem undoubtedly realized, if conflicts should one day arise between his people and the English, it was here, in the borderlands between Plymouth and Pokanoket, where the trouble would begin.

TWELVE

THE PILGRIMS HAD
been driven by deeply held spiritual beliefs. They had sailed across a vast and dangerous ocean to a wilderness where, against impossible odds, they had made a home. The second generation of settlers grew up under very different circumstances. Instead of their spiritual beliefs, it was the economic rewards of
this
life that increasingly became the focus of the Pilgrims' children and grandchildren. Most Plymouth residents were farmers, but there was much more than agriculture driving the New England economy. The demand for fish, timber, grain, and cattle in Europe, the West Indies, and beyond was huge, and by the 1650s, New England merchants had established the pattern of transatlantic trade that existed right up to the American Revolution.

By the early 1660s, one of the foremost citizens of Plymouth Colony was Josiah Winslow, son of
Mayflower
passenger Edward Winslow. Josiah was one of the few Plymouth residents to have attended Harvard College, and he had married the beautiful Penelope Pelham, daughter of Harvard treasurer and assistant governor of Massachusetts Herbert Pelham. In 1662, even though he was only thirty-three years old, Josiah had taken over Miles standish's role as Plymouth's chief military officer.

Being Edward Winslow's son, Josiah had come to know the Indians well. By the 1660s, many colonists, particularly the younger ones like Winslow, felt that their survival no longer depended on the support of the Indians. Forgetting the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have survived their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims' children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once offered Massasoit.

◆
Penelope and Josiah Winslow in 1651.

For his part, Massasoit's son Alexander had shown a combativeness of his own. First he had ignored Massasoit's agreement with the colony and sold Hog Island to the Rhode Islander Richard smith. Then, in the spring of 1662, word reached Plymouth that Alexander had done it again. He had illegally sold land to yet another Rhode Islander. There were also unsettling rumors that the sachem had spoken with the Narragansetts about joining forces against the English. so the Plymouth authorities summoned him to appear before them. When Alexander failed to show up, Governor Thomas Prence instructed Major Josiah Winslow to bring him in.

◆◆◆ Winslow headed out in July of 1662 with ten well-armed men, all of them on horseback, trotting along the same old Indian trail that their forefathers had once walked to Pokanoket. They were about fifteen miles inland from Plymouth when they learned that Alexander was nearby at a hunting and fishing lodge on Monponsett Pond in modern Halifax, Massachusetts.

It was still morning when Winslow and his men arrived at the Indians' camp. They found the sachem and about ten others, including his wife, Weetamoo, eating their breakfast inside a wigwam. Their muskets were left outside in plain view. Winslow ordered his men to seize the weapons and to surround the wigwam. He then went inside to have it out with Alexander.

The Pokanoket sachem spoke to Winslow through an interpreter, John sassamon's brother Rowland, and as the conversation became more heated, the major insisted that they move outside. Alexander was outraged that Plymouth officials had chosen to treat him in such a rude manner. If there had been any truth to the rumor of a conspiracy with the Narragansetts would he be here, casually fishing at Monponsett Pond?

Winslow reminded the sachem that he had neglected to appear, as promised, before the Plymouth court. Alexander explained that he had been waiting for his friend Thomas Willett, a Plymouth resident with close ties to the Indians, to return from Manhattan so that he could speak to him about the matter.

By this point, Alexander had worked himself into a raging fury. Winslow took out his pistol, held the weapon to the sachem's chest, and said, “I have been ordered to bring you to Plymouth, and by the help of God I will do it.”

Understandably stunned, Alexander was on the verge of exploding, when sassamon asked that he be given the chance to speak to his sachem alone. After a few minutes of tense conversation, it was announced that Alexander had agreed to go with Winslow, but only as long as “he might go like a sachem”—in the company of his attendants.

It was a hot summer day, and Winslow offered Alexander the use of one of their horses. since his wife and the others had to walk, the sachem said that “he could go on foot as well as they,” provided that the English kept a reasonable pace. In the meantime, Winslow sent a messenger ahead to organize a hasty meeting of the magistrates in Duxbury.

The meeting seems to have done much to calm tempers on both sides. What happened next is somewhat unclear, but soon after the conference, Alexander and his entourage spent a night at Winslow's house in Marshfield, where the sachem suddenly fell ill. The sachem's attendants asked that they be allowed to take him back to Mount Hope. Permission was granted, and Alexander's men carried him on their shoulders till they reached the Taunton River in Middleborough. From there he was taken by canoe back to Mount Hope, where he died a few days later.

It was an astonishing and disturbing sequence of events that showed just where matters stood between the English and Indians in Plymouth Colony. In 1623, Edward Winslow had earned Massasoit's undying love by doing everything in his power—even scraping the sachem's tongue—to save his life. Thirty-nine years later, Winslow's son had burst into Alexander's wigwam, waving a pistol. Within a week, the Pokanoket leader was dead.

In years to come, the rumors would grow: that Alexander had been marched unmercifully under the burning summer sun until he had sickened and died; that he had been thrown in jail and starved to death.

In an effort to stop the rumors, one of the men who'd accompanied Winslow—William Bradford's son William Jr.—provided an account of the incident in which he insisted that Alexander had accompanied Winslow “freely and readily.” But Alexander's younger brother Philip became convinced that Winslow had poisoned the sachem. Intentionally or not, Winslow had lit the slow-burning fuse that would one day ignite New England.

 

◆◆◆ For days, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Indians gathered at Mount Hope to mourn the passing of Alexander. Then the despair turned to joy as the crowds celebrated his brother Philip's rise to supreme sachem of the Pokanokets.

◆
The “Seat of Philip” at the eastern shore of Mount Hope.

On the eastern shore of Mount Hope is the huge rock from which the peninsula gets its name. More than three hundred feet high, Mount Hope provides panoramic views of Narragansett and Mount Hope bays. There is a legend that Philip once stood upon the top of Mount Hope and, turning west, hurled a stone all the way across the peninsula to Poppasquash Neck, more than two miles away. It is a tradition that reflects the sense of power and strength that many Pokanokets may have projected upon their new leader, who was just twenty-four years old in August 1662. That summer, the “flocking multitudes” at Mount Hope caused the Plymouth magistrates to fear that Philip had gathered a council of war. Only a few weeks after hauling his brother into court, Governor Prence made the same demand of Philip.

The young sachem who appeared at Plymouth on August 6, 1662, was not about to bow before the English. As Philip made clear in the years ahead, he considered himself on equal terms with none other than King Charles II. All others—including Governor Prence and the lying Major Josiah Winslow—were “but subjects” of the king of England and unfit to tell a fellow monarch what to do. Philip's “ambitious and haughty” attitude at the Plymouth court that day moved one observer to refer to him mockingly as “King Philip”—a nickname he never claimed for himself but that followed the sachem into history.

No matter how confident Philip appeared that day in court, he knew that now was not the time to accuse the English of murdering his brother. so instead of accusing Winslow of the deed—something he did not say openly to an Englishman until near the outbreak of war thirteen years later—Philip told the members of the court exactly what they wanted to hear. He promised that the “ancient covenant” that had existed between his father and Plymouth remained unchanged. He even offered his younger brother as a hostage if it might ease the magistrates' concerns, but it was decided that this was not necessary. As far as Governor Prence was concerned, relations with the Indians were once again back to normal.