The savages in and about Plymouth Harbor, so named by Captain John Smith some six years earlier, did not exactly welcome the Mayflower’s passengers. Their experience with white men had been none too rewarding over the years and these new arrivals were proving no exception. From their hiding places the natives watched the very first exploring parties that came ashore from the ship steal caches of Indian corn and rifle the graves of the dead.
Small wonder it is, therefore, that almost before the Pilgrims laid eyes on a savage they were treated to thievery in kind and the weird shrieks, or war whoops, with which these same “Skraelings” had challenged the invading Vikings centuries earlier. But when the attacks came they were easily repulsed by English firearms.
In the meantime, after the landing at Plymouth in that winter of 1620-21, some of the natives were enticed out of hiding by offers of bright baubles and other gifts. On one occasion “a pot of strong water” was employed. Then, with thunder-making cannon mounted ashore to awe their wild hosts, the Pilgrims were finally able to enter into negotiations for beaver skins and food supplies under a kind of armed truce.
But the Indians of this section were very poor and very few. A pestilence originally spread among them by Frenchmen had all but wiped them out in fact. It was necessary for the Pilgrims to look abroad for the pelts which they had quickly realized would be their chief means of support if they were to survive in this strange land.
Beaver skins would pay their debts, buy for them in England the additional supplies they needed, even serve as a medium of exchange in obtaining corn and beans from the savages themselves. In the guise of exploration, therefore, military commerce was commenced as soon as possible with neighboring tribes along the coast.
In this the diminutive military commander at Plymouth, Captain Miles Standish, had an invaluable aide—an Indian named Squanto who had come to the fort and offered his services as ally and interpreter.
Squanto spoke English almost as fluently as the white men. Twice he had been to England, once having dwelt for some time with a London merchant. He was first taken there by Captain George Weymouth in 1605. Returned to his native land nine years later by Captain John Smith, Squanto had been no more than set free when he was kidnapped along with some other natives by an English captain named Hunt and sold in the Spanish slave market at Malaga. However, through the intercession of local friars, he managed to get to London again. Captain Thomas Dermer then returned him once more to Cape Cod, not many months before the Pilgrims arrived.
Finding his own people wiped out by the pestilence, Squanto sought refuge with a neighboring tribe. But when he learned of the presence of the Englishmen at Plymouth he went to them, to be gratefully acknowledged as “a speciall instrumente sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”
Guided by this Indian the Pilgrim traders went farther and farther afield. In September ten armed men sailed up to Boston Harbor in a shallop and obtained a quantity of beaver from the Massachusetts Indians. So successful was the barter that the women of the tribe impulsively removed their beaver coats to exchange them for the bright baubles of the white men. Giggling maidens, bedecked only with strings of beads we are told, were left behind by the “sober-faced” Pilgrims when they sailed away.
By November, when the first “supply” ship, the Fortune, arrived from England, the colony at Plymouth had acquired enough beaver and otter skins to pack two great hogsheads worth 300 pounds sterling for export. These pelts represented over sixty per cent of the total value of the vessel’s return cargo, the remainder consisting of clapboard. By this one shipment the Pilgrim Fathers estimated they were paying off almost half of their debt to Weston and his partners and insuring the prompt return of the additional supplies they so much needed by then.