The Mayflower | The Thanksgiving Myth | 5

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1:14In our series on the Mayflower, we traveled with a group of desperate religious dissidents as they sailed from England to the Netherlands and then to Plymouth in what would eventually become known as New England. But it wasn't called that by the people who lived there at the time, the Wampanoags. They knew the place where the Pilgrims settled as Patuxent, and much to the surprise of the newly arrived English colonists, they had prior experience with Europeans. In this episode, I speak with David Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University. He's the author of This Land is Their Land, The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.

1:50David will take us back to 1620 to imagine what the encounter with the pilgrims might have been like from the Wampanoag perspective. Our conversation is next.

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3:19David Silverman, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. So before we head to the early 17th century, I'd like to ask you a bigger picture question about why you wanted to write about the Wampanoags and the pilgrims. What did you think was in their story that hadn't already been told? Back in 2005, I wrote my first book about the Wampanoag people of Martha's Vineyard and how they managed to survive colonialism. And in the course of doing that research, I had numerous conversations with modern day Wampanoag people. And what kept coming up in these conversations was how difficult Thanksgiving was for them, and particularly for the kids.

3:59What they say is the mythical Thanksgiving of Native people welcoming the English into their country so that they can form the United States makes light of the Wampanoag people's own colonization. Their dispossession, right? What's more, they say that in the schools, teachers who are teaching about this mythical first Thanksgiving say repeatedly that the Native people who welcomed the pilgrims are now all gone. And Wampanoag kids have heard these lessons while they're sitting there in the classroom. And so I wanted to write a book that put Wampanoag people at the center of this history and that connected that history to their long-term struggles with colonialism up to this very day.

4:46Second reason I wrote this book is that almost every secondary teacher in the country addresses the first Thanksgiving. It's usually the one cameo that Native people make in the secondary school and even primary school history curriculum. Yet most of the teachers who address this subject don't know much about it. And so I figured if I wrote a book that was accessible to them, I could reach millions and millions of school kids with a much more accurate history. One of the things that happens often when I've been exploring this early colonial history is we are introduced to characters who know the English through some sort of prior interaction before the colony started.

5:27This is true in Jamestown and it's true in Plymouth. In our series, we meet Squanto, who had encounters with the Europeans and the English and spoke English. Can you speak a bit to the Wampanoag experience with Europeans prior to the pilgrims arriving in 1620, including, I guess, what happened to Squanto before then? Sure. You allude to a bigger point, which is that in almost every early colonial founding, what we imagine as a first contact is nothing of the sort. You know, the Wampanoags are in contact with Europeans for a full century before the arrival of the Mayflower. The first documented contact between them and Europeans is 1524.

6:07Plymouth is founded in 1620. That's a long time. And these encounters are happening regularly, several times a year in some cases. Generally, when the two parties meet, they're interested in trade. The Wampanoags and all coastal Native people are deeply interested in acquiring the goods that these Europeans carry. And here I think it's important to note, Native people did not have metal. They didn't have metal tools. They're effectively a Stone Age people in that respect. and Wampanoags want metal goods, copper kettles, steel axes, scissors, knives, weaponry, cloth, glass beads, and like. Europeans want furs, fox, martin, beaver pelts above all.

6:54They fetch a high price in Europe. Fresh food and water. So the two parties are drawn together. Problem for the Wampanoags is that the Europeans also want people and they very often will capture native people sometimes because they want to bring them back to Europe to train as interpreters and guides, but at other times they're capturing them with the intent of selling them into slavery back in Europe. So in the case of Squanto, the key interpreter and mediator between Plymouth and the Wampanoags, he's taken captive in 1614 by an English captain named Thomas Hunt. And this is not the first time this has happened.

7:33It had happened multiple times before, and indeed in 1611, a Wampanoag named Epanow is captured by the English, brought to England, and three years later, he manages to connive his way back by promising to lead the English to gold on the island of Martha's Vineyard. There's no gold on the island of Martha's Vineyard. In the case of Squanto, how exactly he came into Thomas Hunt's possession, we're not sure. What we suspect is that Hunt had lured him on board or to the shoreline under the pretense of trade and then clasped him in irons. And Squanto was just one of more than 20 native people along the coast who Hunt captures during this dragnet.

8:12Hunt then sails across the Atlantic and sells his human catch to Malaga, Spain. Squanto alone among these two dozen plus Wampanoags goes free. We don't exactly know how. We suspect a Spanish friar had freed him. Indian slavery was officially illegal in the Spanish Empire, but Spaniards routinely broke the law. But in any case, Squanto manages to go free, and somehow, we don't know how, he falls into contact with English merchants in Spain, manages to get to London, and then falls into the possession of an Englishman named John Slaney, who was involved in colonization efforts in Newfoundland. Over the next several years, Squanto is thoroughly involved in Slaney's enterprises.

9:01Twice Squanto travels to Newfoundland and back. He might have even gone to Virginia during this period of time, during the early English colonization of that place. And ultimately, Squanto manages to convince a captain named Thomas Dermer, who was a close associate of Slaney's, to bring him back to New England as a means of promoting English colonization schemes in the area. And so Squanto ends up back in Wampanoag territory in 1619, just six months before the arrival of the Mayflower, after years abroad. I'm curious what you think native cultures learned about the English on their travels. They were pressed into service by the English to learn about native culture.

9:46What did the native cultures learn about European culture? Well, they learn that these people are incredibly numerous, that they're organized on a scale that utterly eclipses the social organization of Native America. When the Wampanoags met as a polity or tribe, the largest Native American polities were at most 30 ,000 people. Native people who return home routinely comment on the vast inequalities that they witnessed in European society. And, you know, let's keep in mind, most of these Native people are traveling in pretty elite social circles. Squanto is living with John Slaney while he's in London, and he's operating in some of the highest ranks of English society.

10:32So he sees the wealth and the grandeur of the English elite. He also can see the masses of teeming poor outside the gates of the places where he's staying and undoubtedly made an impression on him, just as it made an impression on most Native people who traveled to Europe during this period of time. They comment that such inequality would be totally inexcusable in their own society, and they don't understand how the poor of these societies don't set fire to the elite's homes and slit their throats. They simply cannot grasp it. What they also grasp, and I told you this anecdote about the Wampanoag captive Ipanau, who manages to make it home in advance of Squanto doing the same thing.

11:14Ipinau has figured out that a lust for gold makes these people mad with ambition. So they've learned some really important things about these people, but they've also learned one other thing, which makes Native people covetous. These folks have incredible military technology, which if Native people can harness themselves, will make them powerful in their own intertribal affairs. And so that's a real appeal of contact with these otherwise ruthless people. So Squanto, after years away, finds Captain Thomas Dermer, who agrees to take him back to the Cape Cod area. And as you mentioned, this is just before the Pilgrims land.

11:56What did Squanto find when he finally got home? Squanto undoubtedly was anticipating a warm homecoming, a reunion with family and friends. And instead, he wanders into an apocalypse. There's really no better way to express it. Between 1616 and 1619, an unidentified European epidemic disease starts knifing its way through native people in southern New England, from the Saco River of Maine on the north to the east side of Narragansett Bay in modern-day Rhode Island in the south. And the two groups of people who suffer the most are the Wampanoags of what's now southeastern Massachusetts and the Massachusetts people of Massachusetts Bay, right around the modern-day city of Boston.

12:49The identity of the disease, we don't know. I strongly suspect it was smallpox. What we do know is that this disease eviscerated numerous communities. And when I say eviscerated, I mean completely wiped them out. And any survivors scattered to neighboring communities and probably communicated the disease in the course of doing so. The entire Taunton River Valley, which was the main artery of the Wampanoag people, it stretches from just west of modern day Plymouth into Narragansett Bay where Providence, Rhode Island is located today. By all accounts, it had once been full of native villages, and later English colonists can tell because the woods were all cleared for cornfields.

13:33It was empty of people. And among the communities that's wiped out is Squanto's home community of Patuxent. Now, I'm not suggesting everyone from Patuxent was dead. We know from the records of the Mayflower passengers that Squanto actually managed to find some of his relatives in nearby communities. But some of his relatives is not all of his relatives. Unquestionably, most of his family and friends and acquaintances were now dead. So as Squanto is approaching the shoreline for his homecoming, we have to assume he's full of hope and anxiety. Hope because he's been away for years, right? And he desperately wants to reconnect with loved ones.

14:13Anxiety because he probably would have heard that a terrible disease had struck the coast. Englishmen had already commented on that point. So when he finally lands at Patuxent, what does he see? Well, according to English eyewitness accounts, and we have multiple of them, the place was like an inverted graveyard. The bones, the skeletons, the skulls of the dead were littered all over the landscape. And that tells you something profound. That tells you that the people fled in a panic because Native people treated the remains of their dead with great respect. They would never just leave them standing there.

14:50You know, in other words, Squanto knows that just a tragedy of epic proportions has struck his people, and now he's desperate to find if there are any survivors, to hear about what had happened, and where his place in the world is going to be.

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17:07So Squanto manages to return to Patuxek just before the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Talk about how the Wampanoags approached the Pilgrims initially after their landing. Well, the Wampanoags are conflicted about what to do with these Mayflower passengers. When the Mayflower first lands off of Cape Cod, one of the things that strikes the English is they can't find any Native people. Now, part of that has to do with the fact that in that part of Cape Cod, Wampanoags would live out there during the warm months of summer, during planting season, but would withdraw inland to the forest during the cold weather for hunting season.

17:47But that's not the only factor here. They're wary of these newcomers. They don't know quite yet what to do with them. And so they're biding their time. There are a few furtive encounters during the first couple of weeks that the English are on the scene. The English go exploring, they find a Wampanoag summer camp, and they ransack the place. Indeed, they disinter a burial, a couple of burials, in fact, which is a really lousy way to introduce yourself to foreigners by desecrating their graves. They steal some buried seed corn that will become the basis for the first harvest that the English enjoy.

18:25But they can't find any people. The English send out some exploring parties to probe the territory. And they do encounter a couple of Wampanoag men walking on the beach with their dogs and try to hail them down and the Wampanoags take off. They're almost certainly afraid that these Englishmen are going to clasp them in chains and ferry them away somewhere. Later on, the English are camped on a beach, the exploring party that is, and they come under attack by a small band of Wampanoag warriors. The hostility and trepidation that the English meet from the few Wampanoags that they encounter on Cape Cod is one of the reasons that they decide to find a new place to settle.

19:05They choose Plymouth, ultimately, because the native people have been wiped out there and the land is already cleared for planting. And here it's important to set the intertribal context in the run-up to the Pilgrim's arrival. The Wampanoags might have suffered enormously from the epidemic of 1616 to 1619, but their Narragansett rivals to the West did not contract the disease. And so in the wake of the Wampanoags' devastation, the Narragansetts began conquering the Wampanoags and subjugating them to the status of tributaries. In other words, requiring them to pay an annual tribute to Narragansett leaders and contribute warriors to the Narragansett's own military campaigns.

19:51So when the Mayflower passengers arrive off of Cape Cod, the Wampanoags are facing a couple of choices. On the one hand, they know that these English people have a long history of kidnapping and killing Wampanoag people. And as such, many Wampanoag people are in favor of wiping out these newcomers. They say this is not a danger worth risking. On the other hand, Wampanoag people have seen the potency of English weaponry and English soldiers. Squanto has been to England and back and can say, look, this is a formidable people. If we can win them to our side, that would be to our advantage. And ultimately, the debate is, should we try to ally with these people against the Narragansetts, or should we push them back into the sea and accept subjugation to the Narragansetts?

20:46Ultimately, allying with these people wins out. That's a position that the Wampanoag's leader, Usamequin, or Massasoit, as he's better known, makes. But it is not a decision that all Wampanoags agree with. I'm interested in the politics of the Wampanoag. You mentioned that some people didn't agree with the ultimate decision to ally with the English. But talk to us about how these decisions are made. And I guess this gets into an introduction to the sachem, Massasoit. Well, we don't have any eyewitnesses on the scene. But we know enough about how native polities in general worked and how the Wampanoag polity sometimes worked to make some educated guesses.

21:26So Massasoit or Usamequin should be considered first among equals among other Wampanoag leaders. Every village community or sachem ship had a chief or a sachem. When a series of local sachem ships banded together in confederacy, usually to meet a foreign emergency, they would defer to the leader of what we might call a paramount sachem or a great chief. That's Usamequin or Massasoit. When Usamikwin or Massasoit is making a decision about what to do with the English, what he would do is call the sachems from other communities together in council, and the people would talk about it. They would consult their shamans, known as powwows.

22:15That's where the word powwow comes from, and try to divine the best way forward. Decisions weren't made by majority vote. The goal was always to achieve consensus. So as a result, there's constant fissures. So when Ussamico under Massasoit manages to achieve a rough consensus about what to do with the English, he is always aware that there are dissidents within the ranks who might try to break away. And indeed, over the next several years, there are constant minor rebellions within the Wampanoag polity by local sachems who want to side with the Narragansetts and wipe out this young English colony.

22:55So one of the advantages that both the English and Massasoit had in these early relations is Squanto as translator. But was he a good translator? There was suspicion growing. Was he a good diplomat for his people? My sense is that Squanto's English is very good. The question was always whether he was faithfully translating between the two peoples or whether he was tailoring the message to his own political ends. Usa Mikro and a Massasoit suspects very quickly that what Squanto is trying to do is set himself up as a great sachem and a rival to Massasoit. We just don't know. What we do know, because eventually there's more than just Squanto who can speak both languages, is that Squanto has been spreading some whoppers of lies to try to terrify the Wampanoag people and claiming that only he can handle the emergency.

23:55So in particular, what he says is playing on Wampanoag fears of the previous epidemic, that the English have a disease buried in a box in their storehouse and that they can release this disease whenever they want and that only Squanto himself can influence them to keep it buried. What he's probably referring to is gunpowder. What the English would do is keep gunpowder buried in the event that there was a fire and they don't want it to ignite. At other points, Squanto spreads false rumors among the English that Massasoit had been taken captive by the Narragansetts. And he's constantly trying to stoke crises so that he himself can bring them to a resolution, thus raising his reputation among both the Wampanoags and the English.

24:46Eventually, Usa Mekwa or Massasoit is calling for Squanto's head. He demands the English to either execute him themselves or to hand him over so that Massasoit can execute him. Before this emergency comes to a head, Squanto dies of a disease, though the possibility exists that Massasoit had him poisoned. So Squanto is the perhaps unreliable diplomat for the Wampanoag, but the English had their own Edward Winslow. They chose him as a representative to deal with and visit the Wampanoags. What skills did he bring to the job? Winslow was a printer back in England and had read a number of narratives by Englishmen and other Europeans about their adventures in America.

25:30So he had a knowledge base to prepare him for this kind of sensitive intercultural diplomacy. Other than that, it's just personal characteristics. He's a brave man. There's no other way to put it. He visits Wampanoag communities. These are places that are utterly foreign to him and that within his worldview are permeated by devil worship, which he deeply, deeply fears. He views Wampanoag powwows as minions of Satan, as witches. He's constantly afraid that these folks are going to stick a knife in his back. And yet he develops a quick rapport with Massasoit. They seem to genuinely like and respect one another.

26:11Indeed, Massasoit contracts the same disease that eventually kills Squanto. And while he's seemingly on his deathbed, he sends a messenger to Plymouth for Winslow to visit him. For me, I think the most illustrative moment of Winslow's abilities, his diplomatic abilities, comes during that bout of disease that Massasoit suffers. So Winslow shows up in Massasoit's village, and the entire community is in a state of ritual mourning, believing that Massasoit is about to die. And so Winslow enters the Weetoo or the Wigwam where Massasoit is ailing and immediately begins doctoring him. He tends to Massasoit's bowels, empties his chamber pot.