After the Sagadahoc failure, the pattern of English activity on the New England coast reverted for five years to the former state of occasional trading and fishing voyages. The only events that touched even remotely on Plymouth history were Cape Cod visits of three men from different areas of activity. In 1609 Henry Hudson landed briefly on Cape Cod on his way from Maine to his explorations of the Hudson River which led to the Dutch claims in that region. Samuel Argall from Virginia in 1610 likewise saw Cape Cod on a voyage designed to supplement Jamestown’s failing food supplies with New England codfish. And in 1611 Captain Edward Harlow, sent on an exploring voyage to the Cape Cod region by the Earl of Southampton, seems to have had five skirmishes with Indians on Cape Cod and the Vineyard. Harlow’s vessel was attacked by canoes while at anchor, and lost a long boat being towed astern to the Indians, who thereupon beached her, filled her with sand and successfully prevented the English from retaking her. Harlow returned to England with little except five captured natives. Among them was Epenow, an Indian whose treachery later accounted for the death of Captain Thomas Dermer.
In 1613 the French fur-trading activities on the Bay of Fundy were supplemented by an ambitious project to establish a Jesuit missionary colony in that region. But this second French attempt to colonize Maine was nipped in the bud after only a few weeks by Sir Samuel Argall’s armed cruiser, sent from Virginia for the purpose. This ended the threat of France as a colonial power in New England except for occasional incursions into eastern Maine.
The year 1614 opened with a visitor to Plymouth from a new quarter. Dutch fur traders, following in the wake of Henry Hudson’s 1609 discoveries, were already at work in the Hudson River. Two of them, Adrian Block and Hendrick Christiansen, were about to weigh anchor from Manhattan and depart for the Netherlands with a cargo of furs in the fall of 1613 when one of their ships caught fire and burned to the water’s edge. Both crews therefore stayed over the winter on Manhattan Island, and there built a new “yacht,” the Onrust, which they felt must be given a shakedown cruise before attempting the Atlantic crossing. Block therefore sailed her eastward, the first passage of Long Island Sound by a European, and explored the Connecticut shore and rivers, Narragansett Bay and the Cape Cod region, to all of which he laid claim for the Dutch as “Nieu Nederlant.” Contemporary Dutch accounts offer us little of interest about the Massachusetts phases of this voyage except some sailing directions in Massachusetts Bay that suggest that Adrian Block sailed from a place called Pye Bay, usually identified with Salem, to the Lizard on the English Channel. But the Figurative Map which he published in 1616 as a part of his report to the States General of the Netherlands contains many additional details to which Dutch names are applied, including a wholly unmistakable outline of Plymouth Harbor, here called Cranes Bay. From this it seems obvious that Block did visit Plymouth in the spring of 1614, and may be considered as yet another of its explorers. It would be interesting to know whether any of the Leyden Pilgrims, living in the Netherlands for four years after the map’s publication, ever saw it before setting out for the New World. In view of the controversy over whether the Pilgrims were indeed headed for the Hudson River, it is interesting to note that this map of Adrian Block’s would have been the most accurate one available to them as a guide to the New York region, yet there is nothing in the Pilgrim chronicles to suggest that they had it with them on the Mayflower.
Also in 1614 there came sailing into Plymouth Harbor a man whose map and writings were used by the Pilgrims, though he said that they refused his advice and his leadership. Captain John Smith would like to have been the founder of New England, but had to be content to be its Hakluyt. He named New England, and “Plimouth,” and Massachusetts, and the Charles River and Cape Ann—at least he was the first to publish these names. He produced the best known map of New England of that early period. He spent the last seventeen years of his life writing the history of New England voyages and pamphleteering for its settlement. Yet a succession of misfortunes prevented him from ever revisiting the coast for which he developed such enthusiasm during his three months’ voyage in 1614. Smith had already been governor of Virginia and had experience in what it took to plant a successful colony. His writings had unquestionably a strong influence on the Massachusetts colonial undertakings, particularly since he was not afraid of Indians and since he recognized the difference between the bleak coast of Maine and the relatively better-situated Massachusetts area as a site for colonial development.
John Smith arrived at Monhegan Island in Maine in April, 1614, with two vessels. In the smaller of these he spent his time exploring and mapping the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod, much as Champlain had done nine years earlier. Thomas Hunt in the larger vessel remained at Monhegan, fishing. Reaching “the Countrie of the Massachusetts, which is the Paradise of all those parts,” Smith entered Boston Harbor. “For heere are many Iles all planted with corne: groves, mulberries, salvage gardens, and good harbours: the coast is for the most part high clayie, sandie cliffs. The Sea Coast as you passe, shews you all along large corne fields and great troupes of well proportioned people; but the French, having remained heere neere six weeks left nothing for us.” At Cohasset he wrote: “We found the people in those parts verie kinde, but in their furie no lesse valiant. For upon a quarrell we had with one of them, hee onely with three others, crossed the harbor of Quonahassit to certaine rocks whereby wee must passe; and there let flie their arrowes for our shot, till we were out of danger,—yet one of them was slaine, and another shot through his thigh.” His description of Plymouth, which was variously known as Patuxet or Accomack, immediately follows the Cohasset episode quoted above: “Then come you to Accomack, an excellent good harbor, good land, and no want of anything except industrious people. After much kindnesse, upon a small occasion, wee fought also with fortie or fiftie of those; though some were hurt, and some were slaine; yet within an hour after they became friends.” In another passage he adds, “we tooke six or seven of their Canowes which towards the evening they ransomed for Bever skinnes.” Apparently Smith supplied a motive for the resumption of friendship, knowing that the Indians could be bought off. This was the kind of Indian policy Myles Standish used at times; in fact there is a certain resemblance between the two men. In any case Smith left for England with a cargo of beaver, and the Indians of Plymouth got back their canoes.
But the next visitor to Plymouth, still in 1614, did not leave as good an impression. With Smith departed for England, Thomas Hunt appeared in Plymouth Harbor in Smith’s larger vessel. Not content with a hold full of Monhegan codfish, Hunt now kidnaped twenty or more Plymouth natives, stowed them below decks, and sailed away to Spain, where he sold them into slavery at Malaga, “for £20 to a man.” This was a typical seaman’s private venture, or side bet to the profits of the codfish cargo. John Smith wrote that “this wilde act kept him [Hunt] ever after from any more emploiment in those parts.” Samuel Purchas termed Hunt’s “Savage hunting of Savages a new and Devillish Project.” One can imagine what bitterness grew toward the English among Massachusetts Indians after this demonstration of European barbarism.
The quirks of history are at times worthy of the most fantastic fiction. Thomas Hunt’s universally condemned crime happened to produce one result which proved of great advantage to the Pilgrims. Among the twenty wretched Plymouth natives whom Hunt sold at the “Straights of Gibralter” was an Indian named Squanto. Then began a five-year European education which trained Squanto for his irreplaceable services to the Pilgrims as their interpreter. Squanto was rescued by good Spanish friars, “that so they might nurture [him] in the Popish religion.” In some unknown manner he reached England and continued his education for several years in the household of one John Slany, an officer of the Newfoundland Company. His subsequent travels will appear in our discussion of Thomas Dermer’s voyage in 1619. It is sufficient at this point to note that perhaps the greatest blessing ever bestowed upon the Pilgrim Fathers was the gift of a treacherous English shipmaster, a Spanish Catholic friar, and an English merchant adventurer.
Things were going badly in another area of Massachusetts during that eventful year of 1614. As though the expeditions of Block, Smith, and Hunt were not sufficient for one year, Nicholas Hobson now made his appearance at Martha’s Vineyard. Sent out by Sir Ferdinando Gorges in an attempt to establish a fur-trading post in that region, Hobson was using the Indian, Epenow, captured by Harlow’s expedition in 1611, as his pilot through the shoals of Nantucket Sound. Epenow cleverly contrived his escape, and a full-scale battle ensued. “Divers of the Indians were then slain by the English, and the Master of the English vessel and several of the Company wounded by the Indians.” Hobson’s party “returned to England, bringing nothing back with them, but the News of their bad Success, and that there was a War broke out between the English and the Indians.” Increase Mather later remarked that “Hunt’s forementioned Scandal, had caused the Indians to contract such a mortal Hatred against all Men of the English Nation, that it was no small Difficulty to settle anywhere within their Territoryes.”
It was at this point in history that another strange series of events took place, of much more far-reaching significance. With English expeditions defeated and sent back to England empty-handed, with an Indian war “broke out,” fate, or Providence, or whatever you call that destiny which seems at times to intercede for civilization in its remorseless quest for progress, now took a hand. Some European disease, to which the natives had no resistance and the Europeans complete immunity, swept the coasts of Massachusetts clear of Indians. Suddenly it appeared in all the river villages along the Mystic, the Charles, the Neponset, the North River, and at Plymouth. No one knows what it was—whether chicken pox or measles or scarlet fever. The Indians believed it was the product of a curse leveled at them by one of the last survivors of a French crew wrecked on Boston Harbor’s Peddock’s Island in 1615. By analogy with what later happened to other primitive races in the Americas and the Pacific islands, it was probably one of the children’s diseases. The Indians died in thousands. A population of a hundred thousand shrank to five thousand in the area from Gloucester to New Bedford. “They died on heapes,” Thomas Morton wrote, “and the living that were able to shift for themselves would runne away and let them dy and let there Carkases ly above the ground without buriall.... And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my comming into those parts that as I travailed in that Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new-found Golgotha.”
Overnight the Indian war had vanished. Overnight the coast from Saco Bay in Maine to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island lay wide open to European settlements. The cleared fields along the rivers and salt marshes grew up to weeds, ready for the spade of the English planter. For twenty miles inland the land was cleared of the Indian menace in precisely the area where they had been most agricultural, in what John Smith had called the “Paradise of all those parts.” The choicest sites for plantations, at the river mouths and along the tidal reaches of Boston Bay, Salem, Gloucester, and Plymouth, were stripped of opposition. Beaver, deer, and codfish multiplied unhindered. Smith’s description of Plymouth, “good harbor, good land and no want of anything but industrious people,” was now doubly true of the whole mainland shore of Massachusetts Bay.