Partakers of plenty

by James Deetz; Jay Anderson

This first Indian to come among the Englishmen was Samoset, whose home was in Maine. He told the Pilgrims of yet another English-speaking Indian, Squanto by name, who had more fluency in the language than he. Small wonder that he did, for Squanto had been kidnapped by one Thomas Hunt in 1614, sold into slavery in Spain only to escape to England, where he found a home with the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company. He made at least one round trip to America and back before returning again in 1618; jumping ship, he made his way back to his home at Plymouth only to find that his people had been wiped out by the disease of the year before. The role of these two Indians in the first years of the Pilgrims’ life in America was immense. Before March had run its course, they had arranged a meeting between the English and Massasoit, the chief of the local Wampanoags, which resulted in the concluding of a treaty of peace and mutual assistance. It was Squanto who instructed the Pilgrims in the ways of planting corn with herring taken from the local brooks where they ran thick in the spring. This first corn crop was to assume a critical role in their life before the year was out.

The Pilgrims were genuinely surprised that the Indians wished to live at peace with them. Their reasons for doing so were doubtless complex. In the first place they were not the fearsome people the Pilgrims had been led to believe inhabited the land. The history of European-Indian relations before the coming of the Pilgrims is marked by trust and friendliness on the Indians’ part, all too often betrayed. Yet, although stories of the Europeans’ actions had circulated among the Indians over all of northeastern North America, it seems that not all Indians were ready to believe the worst. But there was more to it than that. The epidemic of 1617 had upset the balance of power that had prevailed among the native American population for years. The Indians who had suffered most were those along the coast, where the disease had had its most drastic effect. Not far inland were Narragansets and further west Pequots, neither of whom had felt its effects. It would be insulting to the intelligence of Massasoit and his Wampanoags to believe that they did not perceive the advantage English allies would give them in opposition to their western neighbors. In the words of one of the Pilgrim chroniclers of the time:

“We cannot yet conceive but that he [Massasoit] is willing to have peace with us, for they have seen our people sometimes alone two or three in the woods at work and fowling, when as they offered them no harm as they might easily have done, and especially because he hath a potent adversary the Narragansets, that are at war with him, against whom he thinks we may be some strength to him, for our pieces are terrible unto them.”

And so it was that by the late spring of 1621 the surviving fifty Pilgrims had cause to hope. Their fears of conflict with the Indians had been at least temporarily calmed. Eleven houses had been built along a narrow street. Hardly well appointed, they were sturdy structures built in the timber-framed tradition of their homeland and afforded shelter and comfort to the small band. The sickness had passed, and judging from what William Bradford was to write years later, the food supply did not present a critical problem. By the summer of 1621, nature was favoring the Pilgrims with wild foodstuffs:

“... others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want.... And besides waterfowl there was a great store of wild turkey, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person....”

The meal could only have been the remains of the stores brought on the Mayflower, for Bradford added, “or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.” But with the memory of the past winter painfully fresh, the Pilgrims could ill afford to rest and rely on providence to supply them. It was critical that they produce a crop to insure an adequate surplus for the coming winter. To this end they planted their fields with a mixture of English and Indian crops. Twenty acres were put into Indian corn, after the planting advice tendered by Squanto, and also some six acres of peas and barley. As the summer progressed, the troubles that had earlier dogged the company seemed to threaten a return. The barley failed to measure up to expectations. Worse, the peas were a total disaster. “They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.”

After the total failure of July’s pea crop and the disappointment with August’s “indifferent good barley,” the Pilgrims faced a real threat of starvation. This may at first seem strange, considering their assessment of wild foods:

“For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels ... all the earth sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as damson....”