[446] Wood’s statement here referred to is found on the first page of the Prospect, and is as follows: “The Place whereon the English have built their Colonies, is judged by those who have best skill in discovery, either to bee an Island, surrounded on the North side with the spacious River Cannada, and on the South with Hudsons River, or else a Peninsula, these two Rivers overlapping one another, having their rise from the great Lakes which are not farre off one another, as the Indians doe certainly informe us.”
[447] In 1631 no less than 15,174 skins, the greater portion beaver, were exported from the New Netherlands, valued at about £12,000. (O’Callaghan’s New Netherland, p. 139.)
[448] The Nipmucks, or Nipnets, inhabited the present county of Worcester. (Hist. of Worcester County, vol. i. p. 8.)
[449] This is a confused, rambling account of the familiar Indian incidents which took place during the first year after the landing at Plymouth. There is nothing of historical value in it, and nothing which has not been more accurately and better told by Bradford, Winslow, Mourt and Smith.
[450] Captain Thomas Hunt, who commanded one of the vessels of Smith’s squadron, in his voyage of 1614. (Bradford, p. 95.)
[451] Morton, in this chapter, confounds Samoset with Squanto. It was Squanto who was kidnapped by Hunt and had been in England, but it was Samoset who walked into the Plymouth settlement, on the 26th of March [N. S.], 1621, and saluted the planters with “wellcome in the English phrase.” Squanto was a native of Plymouth, but Samoset belonged at Pemaquid, in Maine. (Mourt, Dexter’s ed., note 295, p. 83.) Hence Morton speaks of his having been detained by Massasoit as a captive. He apparently came to Massachusetts the year before on Captain Dermer’s vessel, in company with Squanto. Dr. Dexter is seriously in error in his account of Squanto in note 315 of his edition of Mourt. Squanto could not have been one of the Weymouth captives of 1605.
[452] This is the familiar anecdote of Squanto. (Bradford, p. 113; Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 292.)
[454] The most connected account of Thomas Weston and his abortive plantation at Wessagusset, already referred to (Supra, [2]), is that contained in Adams’s Address on the 250th Anniversary of the Settlement of Weymouth, pp. 5-22. Winslow in Young’s Chron. of Pilg., Bradford, and Phinehas Pratt (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iv.) are the original authorities.
[455] This is a wholly confused and misleading account of the skirmish which took place between the Plymouth party, under command of Miles Standish, and the Massachusetts Indians living near Wessagusset, immediately after the killing of Pecksuot and Wituwamat, in March, 1623. The correct account of the affair is in Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 341. Why Morton speaks of it as a battle between the English and the French is inexplicable.