1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useles...

How did they survive? In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food.

The Pilgrims were typical in their lack of preparation. Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out.

Decades after first touching the Americas, London’s venture capitalists still hadn’t figured out that New England is colder than Britain despite being farther south.

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woods-people; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington, my ancestor’s son, climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around.

No record survives of Tisquantum’s first journey across the Atlantic, but arithmetic gives some hint of the conditions in Hunt’s ship. John Smith had arrived with two ships and a crew of forty-five. If the two ships had been of equal size, Hunt would have sailed with a crew of about twenty-two. Because Hunt, Smith’s subordinate, had the smaller of the two vessels, the actual number was surely less. Adding twenty or more captured Indians thus meant that the ship was sailing with at least twice its normal complement.

Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed that “Indians themselves indeed are true men” and should not be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our service like brute animals.”)

He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while maintaining him as a curiosity in his townhouse. Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi’kmag and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another.

Dermer, excited by Tisquantum’s promise of easy wealth, contacted Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges, a longtime, slightly dotty enthusiast about the Americas, promised to send over a ship with the men, supplies, and legal papers necessary for Dermer to take a crack at establishing a colony in New England. Dermer, with Tisquantum, was supposed to meet the ship when it arrived in New England.

One Edward Rowcraft captained the ship sent by Gorges from England. According to Gorges’s principal biographer, Rowcraft “appears to have been unfit for such an enterprise.” This was an understatement. In a bizarre episode, Rowcraft sailed to the Maine coast in early 1619; promptly spotted a French fishing boat; seized it for supposedly trespassing on British property (North America); placed its crew in chains aboard his own ship; sent that ship back to Gorges with the prisoners; continued his journey on the smaller French vessel, which led to a mutiny; quelled the mutiny; stranded the mutineers on the Maine coast; discovered that a) without the mutineers he didn’t have enough people to operate the captured ship and b) it was slowly filling up with water from leaks; and decided to sail immediately for Britain’s colony in Jamestown, Virginia, which had the facilities to repair the hull—a course that entailed skipping the promised rendezvous with Dermer.

At Jamestown, Rowcraft managed, through inattentiveness, to sink his ship. Not long afterwar...

Incredibly, Dermer failed to execute his part of the plan, too. In orthodox comedy-of-errors style, he did not wait for Rowcraft in Maine, as he was supposed to, but sailed back to England, Tisquantum in tow. (The two ships more or less crossed paths in the Atlantic.) Dermer and Tisquantum met personally with Gorges.* Evidently they made an excellent impression, for despite Dermer’s proven inability to follow instructions Gorges sent h...

What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimaginable. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries.

Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social world had vanished.

One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia.

The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. 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.

Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces.

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.”

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.”

Dick

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.

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.

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 south; he was eventually slain on Martha’s Vineyard by another former Indian abductee.

As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he extolled the English, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of their cities, their great numbers, their powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a colonist who knew him, that if the sachem “Could make [the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yt weare to[o] strong for him”—in other words, the Narragansett—“would be Constrained to bowe to him.”

The Wampanoag observed them suffer through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit concluded that he possibly should ally with them—compared to the Narragansett, they were the lesser of two evils.

Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.

As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more than noisemakers.

Even for a crack shot, an unrifled, early seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a l...

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal.

Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear.

In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory rowed by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British...

Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping t...

Although the sachem doubtless relished the prestige of foreign firepower, he probably wanted more to confront the Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of attacking one group of English people at the same time that their main trading partners were other English people.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

In a move that Tisquantum apparently had not anticipated, Bradford dispatched Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s home to find out what the sachem was doing.

Massasoit was furious—at Tisquantum. He demanded that the Pilgrims send their translator to him for a quick execution. Bradford refused; Tisquantum’s language skills were too vital. Tisquantum is one of my subjects, Massasoit said. You Pilgrims have no jurisdiction over him. And he offered a cache of fur to sweeten the deal. When the colony still would not surrender Tisquantum, Massasoit sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off Tisquantum’s hands and head. To make his displeasure manifest, he summoned Hobamok home and cut off contact with the Pilgrims.

Massasoit shepherded his people through the wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth lasted for more than fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being pushed around by colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps an inevitable attack. Indians from many other groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New England.

after the war Massachusetts sold more than a thousand Indians into slavery—perhaps one out of every ten native adults in the region. Most went to the Caribbean, but a few ended up as far away as North Africa.

The English sailors who kidnapped and sold Tisquantum had been succeeded by English colonists who were willing to do the same, especially if the Indians involved had done something viewed a...

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Indians were not entirely hapless victims. Most slaves were prisoners of war, seized in intertribal conflicts and sold by enemy Indian groups to the English in exchange for guns, pots, and axes. Nonetheless, the simple existence of the Indian slave trade—thousands of native men and women working in bondage...

Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the ...

another, bigger part of the reason for the foreigners’ triumph was that by the 1670s the newcom...