Hero Tales from History

by Smith Burnham

This “hideous and great cry” was the first Indian warwhoop the Pilgrims ever heard. It must have curdled the blood of those quaint old Puritans who had never heard a modern college yell! The white men’s matchlocks and snaphances seem to have scared the Indians even more than their warwhoop and arrows—tipped with brass, buckhorn, and eagles’ claws—frightened the white men. So the red men ran away and lived to fight another day.

The Indians who first fought with the Pilgrims proved to be the Nausets, an unfriendly tribe living on Cape Cod. The white men named this place, “The First Encounter.” The Lookout Committee went on after this until they reached the main land and soon found the site they had been searching for so long. Bradford’s diary contains the record:

“On the Sabbath day we rested; and on Monday we sounded the harbor, and found it a very good harbor for shipping. We marched also into the land and found divers cornfields and little running brooks—a place very good for situation. So we returned to our ship [Mayflower] again with good news to the rest of our people, which did much comfort their hearts.”

Though Bradford did not then think it worth mentioning, there was a big boulder in the edge of the harbor upon which these men sprang out of the shallop. This happened on the 21st of December, 1620, and is known as the Landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. December 21st is celebrated now, more than three hundred years after that event, as Forefathers’ Day. This place was marked Plymouth on Captain John Smith’s map of New England, and the Pilgrims, who had sailed from Plymouth, England, were glad to give their new-found settlement that name.

Four days after this landing, the Mayflower sailed from the end of Cape Cod and came to anchor in Plymouth harbor. The first thing the Pilgrims did was to build a common house of logs to be used later as a sort of town hall. Then they erected a square cabin on top of the hill for both church and fort. On its flat roof they mounted three brass cannon. Christmas Day came while they were building their first cabin, but they worked all that day, for they were too strict even to celebrate Christmas. While they were building their village of log cabins with thatched roofs, some of them stayed in their quarters on the Mayflower.

It seemed a long time before they saw Indians again. But one day while the grave and reverend Pilgrims were holding a council in their common house, a tall red man came stalking up to their door, saying: “Welcome, Yankees! Welcome, Yankees!” “Yankees” was the nearest the Indian could pronounce “Englishmen”! From this, the people of New England are still called Yankees.

This Indian’s name was Samoset. He had learned a little English from some fishermen farther north on the New England coast. He came again to Plymouth bringing another red man named Squanto, who, years before, had been carried away with other savages by an English captain and sold into slavery. Squanto had been taken to London and learned to speak English. He was glad to stay with the Pilgrims and talk for them to the tribes around Plymouth, for while he was away a slave in foreign lands, his own people had been taken with a dreadful disease called a plague, and when he came back they had all died, and poor Squanto was left alone in the world.

The Pilgrims elected Myles Standish, who was the only soldier in the company, their captain. But about the first work Captain Standish had to do was to take care of the sick, and he did so, according to the poet Longfellow, “With a hand as gentle as woman’s.”

In the spring there were only fifty-one of the Pilgrims—just one-half the number that had landed on Plymouth Rock. Among the first to die was Rose Standish, the Captain’s beautiful wife. Although they were not attacked that winter, they knew the Indians were lurking about, so the Pilgrims did not make mounds of the graves in their poor little burial ground on the hill for fear the savages would see how few white men were left, and attack them while they were all so ill. At one time only two men were well enough to nurse all the rest and bury them as fast as they died.

In April the men were well enough to plant corn and do other work. It was so hot that Governor Carver, the oldest of all the Pilgrims, was prostrated by the heat and died. William Bradford was elected Governor in his place.