These conditions were confirmed by Captain Thomas Dermer in 1619. Dermer had been associated with John Smith and Ferdinando Gorges in an attempted New England voyage in 1615, and was probably familiar with the coast. He was in Newfoundland in 1618 and there became acquainted with Squanto, who had been living in the household of John Slany in England. Squanto’s European stay was now completed, and someone had brought him out to Newfoundland. Dermer appreciated how valuable he might prove to be in a trading voyage to Massachusetts, and secured permission from Governor John Mason of Newfoundland, and also from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to use him as a pilot for a Massachusetts voyage.
Arrived in Massachusetts Bay, Dermer wrote: “I passed alongst the coast where I found some ancient Plantations, not long since populous now utterly void, in other places a remnant remaines but not free of sickenesse. Their disease the Plague for wee might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who describe the spots of such as usually die.” Reaching Plymouth, which, we remember, was Squanto’s home, he goes on: “When I arrived at my Savages native Country (finding all dead) I travelled alongst a daies journey Westward, to a place called Nummastaquyt [Nemasket or Middleboro], where finding Inhabitants I dispatched a messenger a dayes journey further west to Poconokit, which bordereth on the sea; whence came to see me two Kings; attended with a guard of fiftie armed men, who being well satisfied with that my Savage and I discoursed unto them—gave me content in whatsoever I demanded.” At Poconokit he “redeemed a Frenchman, and afterwards another at Mastachusit,” victims of shipwreck three years before. What a chronicle these two castaways might have added to Massachusetts history had their memoirs been preserved!
Squanto now found himself the only survivor of those two hundred or more natives of Plymouth whom Martin Pring and Champlain and John Smith had encountered. We note that he brought the Englishmen of Dermer’s party into friendly association with the sachems of Poconokit, which was Massasoit’s village at the mouth of the Taunton River. This was the first friendly contact with Massachusetts Indians in five years, the first since the criminal barbarity of Thomas Hunt had aroused the enmity of the natives in 1614. We can read between the lines what a reconciliation the homecoming of Squanto, himself a victim of that barbarous kidnaping, must have produced among the Wampanoags. For Dermer freed Squanto later, in 1619, and he found his way back to Massasoit before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Whether Sir Ferdinando Gorges or Dermer himself was responsible for this peacemaking gesture, we have no way of knowing, but it seems to have cemented again a long-standing peace between the English and the Wampanoags, which was worth a whole battalion of soldiers to the safety of New Plymouth. Captain Thomas Dermer, who probably never heard of the Pilgrims, thus brought them peace. The Indian war was ended.
It is therefore the more tragic that Dermer died of Indian arrow wounds the next year after a battle with Epenow of Martha’s Vineyard, an Indian captive who had not made peace with the English. Had Epenow, instead of Squanto, lived at Plymouth, history might have run quite differently. Captain Thomas Dermer may be considered the first of the Plymouth martyrs, who lost his life after saving a New Plymouth that did not yet exist, though the Mayflower was on its way when he died.
It is a strange commentary on the justice of history that the men who had spent their lives on New England colonization had almost no share in the first successful plantation in Massachusetts. We have seen what an outpouring of futile struggle men like Gorges and Smith and Dermer had expended on the failures that set the stage for the Pilgrims. It was now to fall to the lot of a group of English exiles, who had lived twelve years in the Netherlands, to arrive by accident in Massachusetts at the precise moment when the merchant adventurers, whom they despised, had succeeded in producing the conditions for success. The Pilgrim legend is well founded, in the tribute it pays to the forthright courage and persistence of the forefathers, but it ignores their utter dependence on the maritime renaissance of England as the foundation on which their success rested. The line of succession stemming from the exploits of Drake and Hawkins and the ships that sank the Armada carried directly on into the efforts of Gosnold, Pring, Gorges, Smith, Hobson, and Dermer to set the stage for Plymouth. The fur trade and the fisheries by which New Plymouth finally paid off its creditors had been painstakingly developed by many hazardous years of experiment by small shipowners of Bristol and Plymouth and other smaller havens in the west of England. Faith in New England ventures, so nearly destroyed by the Sagadahoc failure, had been kept alive and sedulously cultivated by a little group of earnest men around Gorges and John Smith, so that money could be available to finance even the risky trading voyages necessary to keep a foothold on the coast. We have seen how recently peace had been made with the Indians.
The Pilgrims ascribed all these blessings to acts of Providence in their behalf. But Providence has a way of fulfilling its aims through the acts of determined men. Any visitor to Plymouth who reveres the Pilgrims should also honor those representatives of the glorious maritime energies of the Old World whose discoveries and explorations prepared the way for permanent settlement. To them also applies the phrase which Bradford used of the Plymouth colonists:
“They were set as stepping-stones for others who came after.”
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.