And he that speaks doth gripe the hearer’s wrist;
Whilst he that hears makes fearful action
With wrinkled brows, with nods, and rolling eyes.”
Shakspeare.
One short twelvemonth witnessed the birth and the death of Weston’s colony. Its cradle was its grave. The Westonians, by their own wickedness and folly, beckoned ruin and blood to be their guests. The ears of the Pilgrims ached with listening to the Indians’ complaints of their injustice and robberies. Not a day passed which did not witness some woful scene of outrage.[397] Bradford and his coadjutors talked themselves hoarse in denunciation; messengers ran themselves footsore in carrying protests of warning, of expostulation, of appeal.[398]
“Once,” says Cotton Mather, “in preaching to a congregation there, one of the Pilgrims urged these settlers to approve themselves a religious community, as otherwise they would contradict the main end of planting this wilderness; whereupon a well-known individual, then in the assembly, cried out, ‘Sir, you are mistaken; you think you are preaching to the people at Plymouth bay: our main end was to catch fish.’”[399]
The scoffers were soon to learn, under the bitter tuition of experience, that fish are a slippery foundation for a colony to build on—not so firm and sure as open Bibles and common schools.
The loose morality and vicious courses of their mischievous neighbor-colonists caused the Pilgrims infinite trouble and unfeigned grief. And now, in the midst of their anxiety on this account, a report gave voice to the dangerous sickness of Massasoit;[400] it was said that the great sagamore, who had been their faithful friend, could not survive.[401] The Plymouth settlers were profoundly sad; they were also somewhat alarmed, for Corbitant, their former open foe, would, so they were told, clutch Massasoit’s sceptre and wear his mantle on the chieftain’s death.[402] The Pilgrims at once decided to send ambassadors to visit Massasoit, see if haply something might not be done for him, and, in case of his decease, to negotiate a new peace with the succeeding sachem.[403]
For this service Winslow and Habbamak were selected; and a gentleman who had wintered in Plymouth, and who was desirous of seeing the Indians in their wigwam-homes, Mr. John Hampden,[404] was, at his urgent solicitation, permitted to bear them company.[405]
They set out at once, but had not gone very deep into the forest ere some Indians, whom they met at a river-ford, told them that Massasoit was dead. The envoys were shocked; and Habbamak began to wail forth his chief’s death-song: “Oh, great sachem, Oh, great heart, with many have I been acquainted, but none ever equalled thee.” Then turning to his pale-face friend, he said, “Oh, Master Winslow, his like you will never see again. He was not like other Indians, false and bloody and implacable; but kind, easily appeased when angry, and reasonable in his requirements. He was a wise sachem, not ashamed to ask advice, governing better with mild, than other chiefs did with severe measures. I fear you have not now one faithful friend left in the wigwams of the red men.”[406] He would then break forth again in loud lamentations, “enough,” says Winslow, “to have made the hardest heart sob and wail.”[407]