God has transmuted the primal curse into a blessing. Labor is a panacea for many ills; and now the fullness of their new life crowded out homesickness and all fainting of the heart among the Pilgrim exiles. They had no time for dreams. The weighty cares of the present exorcised every fevered phantom of regret and apprehension.
Swiftly and pleasantly in the manifold employments of the field passed the glowing, pregnant spring. The exiles knew that they were set to subdue the wilderness, to marry the continent with roads, to dot the forests with schools and churches and hamlets. Daily and nightly they invoked God’s blessing on their infant colony; and with God’s kiss upon their brows, they toiled in the full assurance of success—they knew that hope would be changed to full fruition.
Thus far they had experienced no lack of food. The variety afforded by wild fowl, fish, and the native fruits, together with the stores which they had brought with them in the “Mayflower,” amply sufficed to supply the cravings of hunger.[202] For the future the presage was good. The crops promised well. Six acres had been sown with pease and barley. Twenty acres had been planted with the seed-corn which it had been the good fortune of the exiles to dig out of the subterranean Indian storehouses;[203] this Squanto, the friendly Indian interpreter, had instructed them how to sow and till and manure with fish.[204]
and as the season advanced, native grapes and berries were found in endless variety and inexhaustible abundance. The Pilgrim journalist also records that wild-flowers of various hues and “very sweet” fragrance contributed their beauty and incense to the charming summer scene.[205]
“A visitor to Plymouth, in this first summer of the Puritan settlement, as he landed on the southern side of a high bluff, would have seen, standing between it and a rapid little stream, a rude log-house, twenty feet square, containing the common property of the plantation. Proceeding up a gentle acclivity between two rows of log-cabins, nineteen in number, some of them perhaps vacant since the death of their first tenants, he would have come to a hill, encircled by a plank platform for cannon. And glancing thence over the landscape, he might have counted twenty men at work with hoes in the enclosures about the huts, or fishing in the shallow harbor, or visiting the woods or the beach for game; while six or eight women were busy in household affairs, and some twenty children, from infancy upward, completed the domestic picture.”[206]
The month of June found the colonists so far advanced in the necessary labors of the season, that they gained a little leisure to open the volume of local nature, and to scan its pages more accurately than had been possible in the haste of the initial December days.
Many a lesson was taken by the wondering settlers in New England forestry under the skilful tuition of Squanto or Samoset. “Once,” says the quaint old record, “a party of us got belated in the forest, where the night was spent; in the morning, wandering from the track, we were shrewdly puzzled, and lost the way. As we wandered, we came to a tree, where a young sprit was bowed down over a bow, and some acorns strewed underneath; Stephen Hopkins said it had been fixed to catch deer; so as we were looking at it, William Bradford being in the rear, when he came up looked also upon it, and as he went about, it gave a sudden jerk up, so that he was immediately caught fast by the leg. It was a very pretty device, made with a rope of their own making, and having a noose as artificially fixed as any roper in England could make, and as like ours as can be: this we brought away with us.”[207] This was a pleasant jest to the hunters, in which the gravest of them doubtless indulged in a laugh at their too curious governor, thus caught in the Indian deer-trap. The hint, however, was well worth their study; and often afterwards it served them a good turn, ere their ringing axes frightened the timid deer into following the dusky native hunters beyond the encroaching and ever-widening circle of civilization.
To increase the general stock of information, and to relieve the routine tedium of the settlement, several expeditions were planned during this first summer; and these looked into the continent a few miles distant in the east, the north, and the west.[208]
The first of them took the shape of an embassy to Massasoit. As the warm weather brought the Indians to the sea-shore in search of lobsters and to fish, they proved to be a sad annoyance to the colonists. They were treated with uniform courtesy, and this kindness furnished a motive for frequent visits, so that men, women, and children, were always hanging about the village, clamorous for food and pertinaciously inquisitive. It was partly to abate this nuisance, and “partly,” says the old chronicle, “to know where to find our savage allies, if occasion served, as also to see their strength, explore the country, make satisfaction for some injuries conceived to have been done on our parts, and to continue the league of peace and friendship between them and us,”[209] that Stephen Hopkins and Edward Winslow were now delegated to wait upon the friendly sagamore in his forest home.
In July, 1621, these earliest negotiators of New England set out upon their mission, “not with the pomp of modern diplomats, but through the forest and on foot, to be received, not to the luxuries of courts, but to share in the abstinence of savage life.” Marks of the devastation caused by the pestilence which had preceded their settlement, of “the arrows that flew by night,” were visible wherever the envoys went, and they witnessed the extreme poverty and feebleness of the aborigines.[210]
On, on pressed the Englishmen through the intricate mazes of the woods, and they never ceased to wonder at the ease and certainty with which Squanto, who accompanied them as guide and interpreter, picked out the right path from the labyrinthine tracks.[211] A walk of fifteen miles brought them to an almost “deserted village,” called Namasket, in what is now Middleborough, where the few remaining natives received them with the most gracious rites of Indian hospitality, and gave them “a kind of bread,” and the spawn of shad boiled with old acorns.[212] Here they tarried for an hour in the afternoon. Eight miles farther inland they bivouacked, with the sky for a covering and the trees for blankets. A number of Indians had assembled at this place to fish, but these had erected no shelter. Around them they discerned under the moonlight the evident marks of former extensive cultivation. “Thousands of men had lived there,” says Winslow, the historian of the mission, “who died in the great plague not long since.”[213]
In the morning, rising early, they resumed their journey. Their retinue was swollen by six savages who insisted upon bearing them company, and who bore their arms and baggage. At the various fords the friendly red men carried the Englishmen across dry-shod upon their shoulders,[214] a mark of unprecedented complaisance when coming from the proverbially lazy Indian of the northeast coast.
In due time the envoys reached Pokanoket, the residence of Massasoit. The sachem was not at home. Ere long, however, he returned. The Englishmen received him royally, and saluted him by a discharge of their muskets. Massasoit reciprocated their greeting in true Indian style.[215]
The Pilgrims had been careful to provide their envoys with a plentiful supply of those trinkets which the red men so highly prized; and now, ere any business was opened, these presents were delivered. The sagamore was given “a horseman’s coat of red cotton, decked with a slight fringe of lace,” and a copper chain. When he had put on this scarlet garment, and hung the chain about his neck, he seemed greatly pleased by his unwonted bravery of attire, while his warriors appeared to be equally gratified by the grand appearance of their king.[216]
This ceremony completed, all squatted upon the ground, a circle was formed, and amid deep silence the pipe of peace was smoked, each individual taking a whiff and then passing the pipe to his next neighbor. After this—and it should seem that even among the untamed children of the forest there existed a “circumlocution office,” where there was red tape to be cut—the envoys explained the object of their visit. The sagamore listened courteously to their recital, and was pleased to grant each and all of their requests.
“To the end that we might know his messengers from others,” writes Winslow, “we desired Massasoit, if any one should come from him to us, to send the copper chain, that we might know the savage, and hearken and give credit to his message accordingly.”[217]
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:
The sagamore, as he gazed on the Plymouth settlement, stood grief-stricken to think that his lease of ages of the forests approached its end. He seemed to see in the recent plague a grant of the land to another race, engrossed by the hand of the Great Spirit himself. That rifled burial-mound of the Wampanoags, in which the Pilgrims found their seed-corn, was typical; it was the new tenant entering upon the estate, taking possession in the name of God, and for the common good. Yet