[232] This is undoubtedly a misprint for Auckies, which was a sailor’s corruption for Auks. The Great Auk (Alca impennis) is probably referred to. This bird, now supposed to be extinct, was formerly common on the New England coast. Audubon, writing in 1838, says: “An old gunner, residing on Chelsea Beach, near Boston, told me that he well remembered the time when the Penguins were plentiful about Nahant and some other islands in the bay.” (Am. Ornithological Biog., vol. iv. p. 316.) Professor Orton, alluding to this passage, in the American Naturalist (1869, p. 540), expresses the opinion that the Razor-billed Auk was the bird referred to; but Professor F. W. Putnam adds, in a foot-note, that “the ‘old hunter’ was undoubtedly correct in his statement, as we have bones of the species taken from the shell-heaps of Marblehead, Eagle Hill in Ipswich, and Plum Island.” Dr. Jeffries Wyman found them in the shell-heaps at Cotuit. See Mem. Hist. of Boston, vol. i. p. 12.
There is an elaborate paper on the Great Auk, under the title of “The Garefowl and its Historians,” by Professor Alfred Newton, in the Natural History Review for 1865, p. 467.
[233] Morton would seem to be mistaken in this statement. Between 1614 and 1619 two French vessels were lost on the Massachusetts coast. One was wrecked on Cape Cod, and the crew, who succeeded in getting on shore, were most of them killed by the savages, and the remainder enslaved in the way described in the text. Two of these captives were subsequently redeemed by Captain Dermer (Bradford, p. 98). The other vessel was captured by the savages in Boston Bay, and burned. This is the vessel referred to by Morton as riding at anchor off Peddock’s Island. The circumstances of the capture are described in Phinehas Pratt’s narrative (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iv. pp. 479, 489). All the crew, he says, were killed, and the ship, after grounding, was burned. Pratt’s statement is distinct, and agrees with Bradford’s, that the captives among the Indians were the survivors from the vessel wrecked on Cape Cod, not from that captured in Boston Bay.
[234] Pratt’s account of this survivor among the French crew is to be found in IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iv. pp. 479, 489. He says that “one of them was wont to read much in a book (some say it was the New Testament), and that the Indians enquiring of him what his book said, he told them it did intimate that there was a people like French men that would come into the country and drive out the Indians.” The account given by Mather (Magnalia, B. I. ch. ii. § 6) is curiously like that in the text. After quoting the substance of Pratt’s statement he adds: “These infidels then blasphemously replied, ‘God could not kill them;’ which blasphemous mistake was confuted by a horrible and unusual plague, whereby they were consumed in such vast multitudes that our first planters found the land almost covered with their unburied carcases; and they that were left alive were smitten into awful and humble regards of the English by the terrors which the remembrance of the Frenchman’s prophecy had imprinted on them.”
Pratt, whom Mather followed, claims to have derived his knowledge of these events during the winter of 1622-3 directly from savages concerned in them. The probability is that the tradition of the French captive, and his book and prophecy, was a common one among the settlers both at Plymouth and about Boston Bay. Pratt apparently had a habit, as he grew old, of appropriating to his own account many of the earlier and more striking incidents of colonial history. (Mather’s Early New England, p. 17.)
[235] The mysterious pestilence, which in the years 1616 and 1617 swept away the New England Indians from the Penobscot to Narragansett Bay, is mentioned by all the earlier writers, and its character has recently been somewhat discussed. There can be no doubt that it practically destroyed the tribes, especially the Massachusetts and the Pokanokets, among which it raged. The former were reduced from a powerful people, able, it is said, to muster three thousand warriors, to a mere remnant a few hundred strong. The Pokanokets were in some localities, notably at Plymouth, actually exterminated, and the country left devoid of inhabitants (I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 148; Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 183). Winslow gave a description of the desolation created by this pestilence, and of the number of the unburied dead, very like that in the text (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 183, 206). On this subject, see also, Bradford, pp. 102, 325; Johnson, p. 16; Wood’s Prospect, p. 72; III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 57.
No definite conclusion as to the nature of this pestilence has been reached by medical men. It has been suggested that it was the yellow-fever (Palfrey, vol. i. p. 99, n). As, however, it raged equally in the depth of the severest winter as in summer, this could not have been the case (III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 57; Bradford, p. 325). Other modern medical authorities have inclined to the opinion that it was a visitation of small-pox (Dr. Holmes in Mass. Hist. Soc., Low. Inst. Lect., 1869, p. 261; Dr. Green’s Centennial Address before the Mass. Med. Soc., June 7, 1881, p. 12). In support of this hypothesis Captain Thomas Dermer is quoted, who, sailing along the coast in 1619-20, wrote “we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die” (Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1778). On the other hand, none of the contemporaneous writers who speak of the disease ever call it the small-pox, though all of them were perfectly familiar with small-pox, and a very large portion of them probably bore its marks. Dermer speaks of it as “the plague.” Bradford, when the same pestilence raged on the Connecticut, described it as “an infectious fever.” Dr. Fuller, the first New England physician, then died of it (Bradford, p. 314). He could not but have been familiar with the small-pox and its symptoms; and it would seem most improbable that he should have died of that disease among his dying neighbors, and not have known what was killing him. Moreover, in 1633-4 the small-pox did rage among the Indians, and Bradford, in giving a fearfully graphic account of its ravages, adds, “they [the Indians] fear it more than the plague.” Josselyn also draws the same distinction, saying (Two Voyages, p. 123): “Not long before the English came into the country, happened a great mortality amongst [the Indians]; especially where the English afterwards planted, the East and Northern parts were sore smitten by the contagion; first by the plague, afterwards, when the English came, by the small-pox.”
It would seem, therefore, that the pestilence of 1616-7 was clearly not the small-pox. More probably it was, as Bradford says, “an infectious fever,” or some form of malignant typhus, due to the wretched sanitary condition of the Indian villages, which had become over-crowded, owing to that prosperous condition of the tribes which Smith describes as existing at the time of his visit to the coast in 1614 (III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 109).
[236] “Their houses, which they call wigwams, are built with poles pitcht into the ground of a round form for most part, sometimes square. They bind down the tops of their poles, leaving a hole for smoak to go out at, the rest they cover with the bark of trees, and line the inside of their wigwams with mats made of rushes painted with several colors. One good post they set up in the middle that reaches to the hole in the top, with a staff across before it; at a convenient height, they knock in a pin upon which they hang their kettle. Beneath that they set up a broad stone for a back which keepeth the post from burning. Round by the walls they spread their mats and skins where the men sleep whilst their women dress their victuals. They have commonly two doors, one opening to the south, the other to the north, and, according as the wind sets, they close up one door with bark and hang a deers skin or the like before the other. Towns they have none, being always removing from one place to another for conveniency of food, sometimes to those places where one sort of fish is most plentiful, other whiles where others are. I have seen half a hundred of their wigwams together in a piece of ground and they show prettily; within a day or two or a week they have been all dispersed.” (Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 126). See also Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 144.
[237] Giving in his Key (p. 48) the Indian combination of words signifying “let us lay on wood,” Roger Williams adds: “This they do plentifully when they lie down to sleep winter and summer, abundance they have and abundance they lay on: their fire is instead of our bed-clothes. And so, themselves and any that have any occasion to lodge with them, must be content to turn often to the fire, if the night be cold, and they who first wake must repair the fire.” Elsewhere he says: “God was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit, to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes.” See also Gookin’s Indians, I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 150.