The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* by Nathaniel Philbrick Page B

toward the English” after Hunt had abducted twenty or so of their men back in 1614. He also said that there was another Indian back in Pokanoket named squanto, who spoke even better English than he did.
    With darkness approaching, the Pilgrims were ready for their guest to leave. As a practical matter, they had nowhere for him to sleep; in addition, they were not yet sure whether they could trust him. But samoset made it clear he wanted to spend the night. Perhaps because they assumed he’d fear abduction and quickly leave, they offered to take him out to the Mayflower. samoset cheerfully called their bluff and climbed into the shallop. Claiming that high winds and low tides prevented them from leaving shore, the Pilgrims finally allowed him to spend the night with stephen Hopkins and his family. samoset left the next morning, promising to return in a few days with some of Massasoit’s men.
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    â—†â—†â—† All that winter, Massasoit had watched and waited. From the Nausets he had learned of the Pilgrims’ journey along the bay side of Cape Cod and their eventual arrival at Patuxet. His own warriors had kept him updated as to the progress of their various building projects, and despite the Pilgrims’ secret burials, he undoubtedly knew that many of the English had died over the winter.
    For as long as any Indians could remember, European fishermen and explorers had been visiting New England, but these people were different. First of all, there were women and children—probably the first European women and children the Indians had ever seen. They were also behaving unusually. Instead of attempting to trade with the Indians, they kept to themselves and seemed much more interested in building a settlement. These English people were here to stay.
    Massasoit was unsure what to do next. A little over a year before, the sailors aboard an English ship had killed a large number of his people for no reason. As a consequence, Massasoit had felt compelled to attack the explorer Thomas Dermer when he arrived the following summer with squanto at his side, and most of Dermer’s men had been killed in fights on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. squanto had been taken prisoner on the Vineyard, but now he was with Massasoit in Pokanoket. squanto had told him of his years in Europe, and once the Mayflower appeared at Provincetown Harbor and made its way to Plymouth, he had offered his services as an interpreter. But Massasoit was not yet sure whose side squanto was on.

    â—† Early-twentieth-century painting of Massasoit.
    Over the winter, Massasoit gathered together the region’s powwows, or shamans, for a three-day meeting “in a dark and dismal swamp.” swamps were where the Indians went in time of war. They provided a natural shelter for the sick and old; they were also highly spiritual places, where unseen spirits mixed with the hoots of owls.
    Massasoit’s first impulse was to curse the English. Bradford later learned that the powwows had first attempted to “execrate them with their conjurations.” Powwows communicated with the spirit world in an extremely physical manner, through what the English described as “horrible outcries, hollow bleatings, painful wrestlings, and smiting their own bodies.” Massasoit’s powwows were probably not the first and certainly not the last Native Americans to turn their magic on the English. To the north, at the mouth of the Merrimack River, lived Passaconaway, a sachem who was also a powwow—an unusual combination that gave him extraordinary powers. It was said he could “make the water burn, the rocks move, the trees dance, metamorphise himself into a flaming man.”
    But not even Passaconaway was able to injure the English. In 1660, he admitted to his people, “I was as much an enemy to the English at their first coming into these parts, as anyone whatsoever, and did try all ways and means possible to have