THE FIRST SUMMER IN NEW ENGLAND.
“The spring’s gay promise melted into thee,
Fair summer; and thy gentle reign is here;
Thy emerald robes are on each leafy tree;
In the blue sky thy voice is rich and clear;
And the free brooks have songs to bless thy reign—
They leap in music ’midst thy bright domain.”
WILLIS G. CLARK.
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]
“Like the swell of some sweet tune,
Morning rises into noon,
May glides onward into June;”
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:
“Old prophecies foretell our fall at hand,
When bearded men in floating castles land.”
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
“Who shall deem the spot unblessed
Where Nature’s younger children rest,
Lulled on their sorrowing mother’s breast?
Deem ye that mother loveth less
These bronzed forms of the wilderness
She foldeth in her long caress?
As sweet o’er them her wild-flowers blow,
As if with fairer hair and brow
The blue-eyed Saxon slept below.”[229]