The sagamore seemed well content to renew the alliance with the English. He promised to promote the traffic in skins, to furnish a supply of corn for seed, and to ascertain the owners of the underground granaries which the conscientious Pilgrims had rifled in the preceding winter, and for which they were anxious to make restitution.[218] He also warned his allies to beware of the Narragansetts, a powerful and warlike tribe, inimical to him, seated on the borders and in the vicinity of Narragansett Bay.[219] Massasoit said that the Narragansett warriors had not been thinned by the pestilence, and that they carried on an extensive trade with the Dutchmen in the west.[220]
Having thus by skilful diplomacy reduced the future political intercourse between the nascent New England republic and the Indian sachem to some degree of certainty and mutual confidence, the ambassadors remained to partake of the hospitality of the forest lords.
They did not think very highly of Massasoit’s housekeeping. The brave sagamore chanced to be out of provisions, so his guests were obliged to go supperless. When they expressed a wish to sleep, they were conducted into a wigwam, and, as a mark of special honor, allowed to sleep in the same bed with the sachem and his squaw—one end of a hard, rude-looking bed, covered with a coarse, thin mat, and raised three or four inches above the earthen floor, being assigned to them, while their Indian majesties reposed at the other extremity.[221] Like other royal favors, this proved somewhat irksome to the recipients, who had to complain of very straitened accommodation, and record that they “were worse weary of their lodgings than of their journey.”[222]
The next day the colonial ambassadors had no breakfast, but the morning was taken up in receiving visitors—rumors of their presence having collected several subordinate sachems to do them honor and cement a friendship—and in witnessing the Indian games, which had been gotten up for their entertainment.[223]
About noon, Massasoit, who had gone hunting at dawn, returned, bringing with him two fishes; these were soon boiled and divided among forty persons;[224] this was the first meal taken by the envoys for a day and two nights.[225]
Heartily sick of Indian entertainment, in the gray dawn of the following day they set out for Plymouth. The chief was sorry and ashamed that he had been able to receive them in no better style; but while friendship was in his heart, abundance was not in his cabin.[226] After a dismal and stormy jaunt, they reached the welcome settlement on the fifth day of their absence. Hard and uncouth as it was, after their recent experience, it seemed to them an elysium. So severe had been the hardships incident to their mission, so faint and giddy were they from hunger and want of sleep and over-exertion, that several days’ repose was required to recruit them back to health and strength.[227]
In the course of the excursion just happily ended, the Pilgrims had acquired considerable knowledge of their Indian neighbors—of their habits, their motives of action, their social forms. They saw that rivalry, and enmity begotten of rivalry, stirred constant feuds among the tribes by whom they were surrounded. The sight of a strange Indian never failed to fill their dusky guides with alarm and watchfulness; among the red men, in the most literal sense, “eternal vigilance” was “the price of liberty.”[228]
The first settlers of Plymouth generally dealt honorably and amicably with their Indian allies, more so than the later colonists of New England, as the treaty with Massasoit, unbroken for fifty years, amply proves. Trade was of course an object with them; but it was not selfishly paramount. This fair dealing begot in its turn corresponding friendship and good feeling among the red men; it put kindliness into their hearts at a time when a revengeful temper might have led them to combine and sweep the feeble handful of usurping interlopers, weakened by disease and decimated by death, into the Atlantic on whose verge they stood.
We can never be sufficiently thankful that God moved both colonists and savages to cement so long and fair a peace. Yet from the very outset the Indian recognized the superiority of the white man; he made a reluctant yet irrepressible obeisance to civilization. Dryden has well expressed this innate consciousness: