1491 by Charles C. Mann, Peter (nrt) Johnson Page A

time that their main trading partners were other English people. Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging an incursion. Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before Massasoit had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its former communities, the best option seemed to be allowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.
     
    MACHINATIONS
     
    Tisquantum worked to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him the colonists sent out a military expedition to get him back. They did not stop to ask themselves why he might be making himself essential, given how difficult it must have been to live in the ghost of his childhood home. In retrospect, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.
    Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit, who had held him captive. To accomplish these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.
    The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit sent one of his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. (Hobamok, like Tisquantum, apparently adopted a new name in his dealings with the British; “Hobamok” was the source of evil in Wampanoag cosmology.) Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when Hobamok and Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims negotiate a treaty with the Massachusett to the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Bradford promised to pay back the losses caused by their earlier grave robbing.
    By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.
    All the while, Tisquantum covertly tried to persuade other Wampanoag that he was better able to protect them against the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with an equal number of Indian troops—and the Pilgrims, who might be able to intimidate the enemy. He evidently believed that the Narragansett did not have enough experience with European guns to know that they were not as fearsome as they first appeared. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other Indians that the foreigners had hidden away casefuls of the agent that caused the epidemic, and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.
    Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment Indian distrust of Massasoit, he told the colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack on Plymouth with the Narragansett. And he attempted to trick the Pilgrims into attacking the sachem.
    In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum accompanied a delegation to the Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they left, Bradford later recalled, one of the surviving Patuxet “came running in seeming great fear” to inform the settlers that the Narragansett “and he thought also Massasoit” were planning to attack. The idea clearly was that the colonists, enraged by the putative assault, would rise up and smite Massasoit. Tisquantum would be away, so his hands would seem clean.