Notes on 17th Century Massachusetts

BIBL Brief Narration of Our Plantations in America…Ferdinando Gorges, 1624:

“And so it pleased our great God that there happened to come into the harbor of Plymouth (July 1605), where I then commanded, one Captain Weymouth, that had been employed by the Lord Arundel of Wardour for the discovery of the North-west passage but falling short of his course, happened into a river on the coast of America, called Pemmaquid (Penobscot) from whence he brought five of the natives, three of whose names were Manida, Skettwarroes, and Tasquantum, whom I seized upon. They were all of one nation but of several parts and several families.

" This accident must be acknowledged the means under God of putting on foot and giving life to all our plantations….

“After I had those people some time in my custody, I observed in them an inclination to follow the example of the better sort, and in all their carriages manifest shows of great civility, far from the rudeness of our common people. And the longer I conversed with them, the better hope they gave me of those parts where they did inhabit, as proper for our uses; especially when I found what goodly rivers, stately islands and safe harbors those parts abounded with, being the special marks I leveled at, as the only want our nation met with in all their navigations along that coast.

"And having kept them full three years, I made them able to set me down what great rivers ran up into the land, what men of note were seated on them, what power they were of, how allied, what enemies they had, and the like.”

“Those credible informations ….made me (August 1606) send away a ship furnished with men and all necessaries, under the command of Captain Henry Challoung (Challons) …sending two of them (the natives) with him…( ship was captured by the Spaniards)…and both my natives lost.”…The affliction of the captain and his company put the Lord Chief Justice Popham to charge and myself to trouble in procuring their liberties, which was not suddenly obtained.

“The Lord Chief Justice dispatching Captain Prin from Bristol…brings with him the most exact discovery of that coast that ever came to my hands since; which with his relation of the country, wrought such an impression in the Lord Chief Justice and us all that were his associates, that (notwithstanding our first disaster) we set up our resolutions to follow it with effect…

“His Lordship and others to be petitioners to His Majesty for settling two Plantations upon the coasts of America, by the names of First and Second Colony; the first to be undertaken by certain noblemen, knights, gentlemen and merchants in and about the city of London; the second by certain knights, gentlemen and merchants in the Western parts.

“This being obtained (1606) theirs of London made a very hopeful entrance into their design, sending away (June 2, 1609) under the command of Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Summers, and many other gentlemen of quality….Gates in the bay of Jessepick…Summers cast away upon the isle of Bermathaes since called the Summer Islands.

“By the same authority, the Lord Chief Justice, friends and associates of the west Country sent from Plymouth Captain Popham, with Capt Rawley Gilbert in three ships, with 100 men…left May 1607 …landed August 1607 and sent Gilbert with Skittawarres as guide to discover the rivers and habitations of the natives…

”by whom he was brought to several of them, where he found civil entertainments and kind respects, far from brutish or savage natures, so as they suddenly became familiar friends, especially by the means of Dehamda (sent by Lord Chief Justice) with Prin, and Skittawarres, sent by me; so as the President (=Popham) was entreated by Sassenow, Aberemet and others the principal sagamores to go to the Bashabas, who it seems was their king…Popham hindered by foul weather…The Bashabas sent his own son to visit him, and to beat a trade with furs.

“Death of Lord Chief Justice…ships sent to refurbish the poor planters “that had had their storehouse and most of their provisions burnt the winter before.”

Death of Captain Popham + death of Rawley Gilbert’s father prompted them to abandon the plantation and return to England…

“by which all our former hopes were frozen to death; though Sir Francis Popham could not give it over, but continued to send thither several years after in hope of better fortunes, but found it fruitless, and was necessitated at last to sit down with the less he had already undergone.”

“…the country itself was branded as over-cold and not habitable by our nation…they undertook it to be a task too great for particular persons to undertake, though the country itself, the rivers, havens, harbors upon that coast might in time prove profitable to us.

“(Gorges)…Finding that I could no longer be seconded by others, I became an owner of a ship myself, fit for that employment, and under color of fishing and trade, I got a master and company for her, to which I sent Vines and others my own servants with their provision for trade and discovery…

I was forced to hire men to stay there the winter quarters at extreme rates, and not without danger, for that the war had consumed the Bashaba and most of the great sagamores, with such men of action as followed them, and those that remained were sore afflicted with the plague (1616-1617) so that the country was in a manner left void of inhabitants.

Notwithstanding, Vines and the rest with him that lay in the cabins with those people that died, some more, some less mightily, (blessed be God for it) not one of them ever felt their heads to ache while they stayed there.

And this course I held some years together, but nothing to my private profit, for what I got one way I spent another; so that I began to grow weary of that business, as not for my turn till better times.

“…there comes Captain Henry Harley to me with a native of the island of Capawick (Martha’s Vineyard), whose name was Epenowe…This man was taken upon the maine with some 29 others by a ship of London that endeavored to sell them for slaves in Spain…How Captain Harley came to be possessed of this slave, I know not; but I understood by others how he had been showed in London, for a wonder. It is true he was a goodly man, of a brave aspect, stout, and sober in his demeanor, and had learned so much English as to bid those who wondered at him “Welcome! Welcome!” this being the last and best use they could make of him, that he was now grown out of the people’s wonder.

The captain, falling further into his familiarity, found him to be of acquaintance and friendship with those subject to the Bashaba, whom the captain well knew, being himself one of the Plantation sent over by the Lord Chief Justice.

“At the time this new savage came to me (Epenow) I had recovered Assacumet one of the natives I sent with Captain Chalownes in his unhappy employment, with whom I lodged Epenaw who at first hardly understood one the other’s speech…till after a while I perceived the difference was no more than that as ours is between Northern and Southern peoples.

“Captain Hobson set sail in June 1614 ? carrying Epenow, Assacomet, and Wenape, another native of those parts sent me out of the Isle of Wight.

“Epenow’s escape… “was no sooner in the water but the natives sent such a shower of arrows, and came withal desperately so near the ship that they carried him away in despite of all the musketeers aboard, who were for the number as good as our nation did afford…And thus were my hopes of that particular made void and frustrate.”

“…Sir Richard Hakings departed in October 1615… but the war was at its height and the principal natives almost destroyed; so that his observation could not be such as could give account of any new matter…

“About this time I received letters from Captain Dermer out of New-England, giving me to understand that there was one of my savages sent into those parts, brought from Malaga in a ship of Bristol…

The wounding of Dermer by Epenow and his people + death of Dermer … “the loss of this man much troubled me, and had almost made me resolve never to intermeddle in any of these courses.

“A Patent of Incorporation be granted to the Adventures of the Northern Colony in Virginia dated 23rd July 1620… By this instrument forty noblemen, knights and gentlemen were incorporated by the style of “The Council established at Plymouth, in the county of Devon, for the planting, ruling, ordering and governing of New England in America.”… “it was undertaken for the advancement of religion, the enlargement of the bounds of our nation, the increase of trade, and the employment of many thousands of all sorts of people.”

“…so many adventures had been made, and so many losses sustained and received that all or the most part that tasted thereof grew weary, till now it is found by our constant perseverance therein that some profit, by a course of fishing upon that coast may be made extraordinary…”

(Gorges in reply to summons to Houses of Parliament…): “…that the mischief already sustained by those disorderly persons, are inhumane and intolerable; in their manners and behavior they are worse than the savages, impudently and openly lying with their women, teaching their men to drink drunk, to swear and blaspheme in the name of God, and in their drunken humor to fall together by the ears, thereby giving them occasion to seek revenge. Besides, they cozen and abuse the savages in trading and trafficking, selling them salt covered with butter instead of so much butter, and the like cozenages and deceits, both to bring the planters and all our nation into contempt and disgrace; that they sell unto the savages, muskets, fowling pieces, powder, shot, swords, arrowheads, and other arms, wherewith the savages slew many of those fishermen, and are grown so able and apt, as they become most dangerous to the planters.”

… “That I had been drawn, out of my zeal to my country’s happiness, to engage my estate so deeply as I had done; and having but two sons I adventured the life of one of them (who is there at this present) for the better advancement thereof…”

“…(ref to Pilgrims)… “to draw into those enterprises some of those families that had retired themselves into Holland for scruple of conscience, giving them such freedom and liberty as might stand with their likings… “ after they hastened away their ship with order to the solicitor to deal with me, to be a means they night have a grant from the Council of New England’s affairs to settle in the place; which was accordingly performed to their particular satisfaction and good content of them all, which place was after called New Plymouth, where they have continued ever since very peaceable

“Robert Gorges sent to "Bay of Massechewset" in August 1623”

“…in 1621, after the Parliament that then sat brake off in discontent, I was solicited to consent to the passing of a Patent to certain undertakers who intended to transport themselves into those parts, with their whole families. The liberty they obtained thereby, and the report of their well being, drew after them multitudes of discontented persons of several sects and conditions, insomuch that they began at last to be a pester to themselves, threatening a civil war before they had established a civil form of government between themselves. And doubtless had not the patience and wisdom of Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Humphreys and Mr. Dudley, and others their assistants, been the greater, much mischief would suddenly have overwhelmed them, more than did befall them.

BS E.E. Hale : “The effort to settle North America had been made again and again, for a century and had failed. The Huguenots had made it and had failed; the Spaniards had made it and had failed; the French had made it in Canada and had failed; the renegades that came out with Popham had made it and failed; the people who settled at Jamestown had made it and, as we think, had failed…The failure was steady from 1492 till 1620; the attempt to colonize the North American continent north of Florida was a failure, and why?

It was a failure because always when Ralph Lane came over, when John Smith came over, the men came alone. With the first winter they were inevitably disappointed and in the next spring they returned to England. They returned to England because they had not brought their homes with them because their Rose Standish stayed at home, while our Rose Standish came here, though she came here to die.

It was the women of Plymouth who made the colony of Plymouth the first permanent colony. Rose Standish and the women who came with her stand for the success of Protestant colonization. Protestant colonization depends on the transfer of homes…

We hear a great deal about their bigotry. They were men of strong will; they were men who meant to have the right to go forward; they were men, as has been rightly said, who believed in God and meant to keep their powder dry. It is convenient for those persons on whose toes they trod to say that they were a narrow, bigoted self-satisfied set of men. The truth is, this little body of pilgrims who settled here on this hill, embraced it is true, the church which had been formed first in England, then transferred to Leyden, then here. It embraced such covenanters as Miles Standish. It took in men that did not belong to that church. It took them in with the toleration, the generosity, with the catholicity which belonged to the character and ought to belong to the church of the new born people."

BS J31 …”Edward Gibbons, lieutenant of the Boston Company, one time rum drinking companion of Tom Morton Of Mare Mount.”

BIBL Massasoit by Alvin Weeks:

“In 1910 while serving as Great Sachem of the Improved Order of the Red Men of Massachusetts….” – “The Improved Order of Red Men is a patriotic society deriving its descent from the Sons of Liberty and limiting its membership to American citizens.” (NB: In 1910, Indians not American citizens.)

Challenge of Canonicus of Narragansetts to Pilgrims = a bunch of arrows bound in a rattlesnake’s skin. ( Canonicus, born 1562, died 1647 at age 85)

Indians kidnapped:

1497: Cabots seized three natives to be exhibited as curiosities in the court of Henry VII (Sebastian Cabot: “codfish were so closely packed in north waters, his ships had difficulty sailing through them.”)

Verrazano captured a young Indian boy who never saw New England again

1500 Corte Real sold a number into slavery

1602 Gosnold “these people are exceedingly courteous, gentle by disposition, and well conditioned” – Ship’s dory rowed out to meet him manned by Indians

1605 Weymouth – "our best hold was by their long hair on their heads" – captures five Indians: Maninda, Skettawaroes, Dehamda, Asssacumet, Squanto (born 1575-1580).

Squanto – Patuxet = Plymouth

Squanto three years with Gorges, picked up English manners and customs X 1608 released and then re-captured by Hunt

John Smith b 1579 “a liar, if you will, but a thoroughly cheerful and generally harmless liar, and a valiant Christian gentleman withal. A practical adventures with a touch of austerity.”/ “A prince’s mind imprisoned in a poor man’s purse”

1614 Smith left vessel with Thomas Hunt to complete loading of fish, furs and oil – Hunt took 27 captives sold at Malaga as slaves

NB … “100 year-old squaw whose three sons were captured by Hunt”

Squanto x with help of friar escaped to England x with Dermer to Patuxet, where most of his people killed by epidemic

Smith “ they were silly savages” “they were very kind, but in their fury no less valiant. For upon a quarrel we had with one of them, he only with three others, crossed the harbor to Quannohasset – Cohasset – to certain rocks where we must pass, and there let fly their arrows for our shot till we were out of danger.”

Smith estimated that 3000 people lived on the Boston islands alone – “great troop of well-proportioned people”/ “Many isles planted with corn, grapes, mulberries, native gardens, and good harbors”

1614 When Smith visited the Massachusett were at the peak of their power – Smith x Jamestown, but spent 17 years of his life trying to establish colonies in New England

1614 Massachusetts Bay x massacre of Captain Finch = after the Hunt kidnappings?

“where I had seen 100/200, now scarce 10”
measles, pneumonia, influenza, smallpox

Sir John Popham – Kennebec
BS – EE Hale – George Popham to New England 1607: “It seems that the scheme originated in Weymouth’s kidnapping of Indians, that Gorges got possession of three of these wretches, and on their information suggested the plan. The venerable Sir John Popham then undertook the enterprise as a scheme for sending out convicts “that he might maintain in New England those who could not live honestly in Old.

Such a colony having been brought together of 100 men led by several men of standing, who had adventure enough to try a few months as explorers, a landing was made at Sagadahoc, and a fort built.

More than half returned at once – forty five remained till Spring, quarreled with the Indians, had their store houses burned, lost their leader, and then all embarked for home. Nothing was founded. It is idle to talk of founding a colony.
Harlow and capture of Indians.

1621 Standish to Obbatinewat, sachem of Shawmut – "Obbatima," one of nine names on Standish treaty – although he lived in Massachusett country, he was a tributary of the Wampanoag – This is the last time that Obbatinewat or tribe appear in any of the early records. Their fate remains one of the mysteries of the North East Indians

“…of nine who signed probably not one of them knew what he had done or dreamed that he had entered the town a prince, a ruler of his people, and left it a slave, for that is what the colonists tried to make of them.”

Squanto’s account of England told to Massasoit
Massasoit restored to health by Winslow
Massasoit chiefly responsible for ultimate success of the Puritan colony

“A new generation interested in him and his people only as possessors of the land they coveted.”

Before his death in 1662, Massasoit’s sphere of influence extended from Narraganset Bay as far north as the Charles River in Boston
His main village was at Pokanoket = Bristol, RI
For 54 years, he conducted the affairs of the federation
Son = Metacomet or Phillip

Powwows used magic in effort to drive off Pilgrims – worked spells in swamps for three days and failed.

Thanksgiving obscures long and fatal resistance to the settlers.

Charles River = Algonquin “Quineboquin” = twisting or circular
60 mile-course from Echo Lake, Hopkinton

“Ousamequin” = ousa “yellow” and mequin “feather”

“?whether the whites were not guilty of a deliberate attempt to arouse and exasperate the natives, as to lead them to acts of open hostility to be seized on as an excuse for exterminating the race.”

“pniese” = chief men of valor

RUM: "what more is needed to efface whatever progress a thousand years had seen – the wrongs of 100 years coupled with the white man’s rum transformed the “silly savage, kind, courteous and hospitable into the bloodthirsty savage beginning with death of Miantonomo.”

Mohican: "past masters of torture."

Sassafras: A plant for the French pox. Plague and many other maladies

Pilgrims

One reason they left Leyden was that they had no wish to have their children distracted from the strict tenets of Puritanism by contact with the liberal-thinking fun-loving Dutch.

Strict religious-based laws versus Indian sensibilities.

Samoset of the Monhegan of Maine who landed at Plymouth “Welcome Englishmen”

“Thousands of men have lived here who died in the great plague that befell these parts – Pilgrims 1621

Squanto: Tisquantum – “ironically his detention abroad may have given him immunity to the plague. He returned to find his Patuxet village eliminated.”

Pilgrim expedition x 20 men reconnoitering found ruins of a fort and grave of a man with long silky blonde hair and a wealth of goods buried with him

A lingering dread of a native uprising (1622, Virginia Indian uprising) – No war like Spanish conquistadors, instead manipulate the natives wherever possible under a mantle of legality and the pretext of fairness.

Indentured servants work debts off at 12 pence a day in winter and six pence in summer.

1621, 29 September: Miles Standish entered Boston harbor in a shallop, a large open sailboat with 10 Europeans and three Indians “ to explore country in and about Massachusetts Bay as Boston harbor was called.” – Standish “ a man of very small stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper.” Born Lancashire in 1584. A soldier by profession serving in the Netherlands when Mr. Robinson, with his Pilgrim flock settled there. – Captain Shrimpe (Morton)

Anchored off Varren’s Island in “the bottom of the Bay,” First named Trevore, after one of their number, an English sailor. Connected with Squantum Headland opposite which they anchored their boat. Crossing northern channel which divided Varren’s from this island, Standish landed at the foot of a bold, rocky cliff which is still so striking a feature. (= Squaw Rock or Squantum Head) Squanto as guide. Found lobsters on shore. Morning meal. Woman given something in return.

“Some deserted wigwams were seen in various places. Traces of lingering presence on the banks of the Charles and Mystic River.” – Standish: First sight of white men seemed always to alarm Indians, inclined to run away.

Shawmut depopulated by the plague. Much of the forest had been cleared for planting, but abandoned fields now gave way to blueberry bushes.

Three miles up the country in the direction of Medford and Winchester came to an abandoned village. Another four miles brought them to the place where the sachem Nanepashemet had lived. Wigwam deserted. It was on a hill and consisted of a wide scaffolding of planks raised six feet above ground on posts and on this stood the hut. In a swamp not far distant, they found the dead sachem’s stronghold. A palisaded enclosed of forty to fifty feet diameter. A bridge crossing two ditches. Sachem buried in center of the palisade.

Six miles from the starting point, another hill stronghold in which two years before Nanepashemet had been surprised and killed. ?Rock Hill, Medford.
Sent their guides to find the natives. Women with corn finally approached.
Squaw Sachem was inland visiting a tribe of Nipmucks
Squanto suggested plundering these for they are “a bad people and have often threatened you.”
Squaws returned to boats and traded with them.
Standish party traveled 44 miles each way: 18 to 20 hours.

Obbatinewat professed allegiance to Massasoit and was in such terror of the Tarrantines that he did not dare remain long in one place – on shores of Neponset maybe at Savin Hill, Obbatinewat also in terror of the Squaw Sachem of Massachusett, widow of Nanepashemet. Obbatinewat offered to guide the party to the Squaw Sachem, who lived on the Mystic in the vicinity of the Wachuset.

Squaw Sachem
Nanepashemet = The New Moon = Massachusett Great Sachem in 1614 when Smith visited. Killed in 1619 …Squaw Sachem returned to bury her husband

Boston tribes had joined the Passonagesset Federation.

When Puritans settled at Naumkeg (Salem) x 1628 = Wenepoyken, youngestr son of Nanepashemet and Squaw Sachem, b 1616 = Sagamore George / George Rumneymarsh/ George No-Nose/
Rumneymarsh = Revere and Chelsea

Three daughters – The Little Feathers – reported to be the loveliest girls in all New England = Cicely Sarah and Susannah = Petagunsk, Wattaquattinose, Petaguonaquash
Squaw Sachem and Edward Gibbons x bequest of lands in 1639 – ? Squaw Sachem met Edward Gibbons at Mare Mount

Wenepoyken sold lands – never paid. Long and bitter battle. As 60-year-old Wenepoyken joined Indian patriots – captured and sold into slavery in West Indies. Eight years as a slave . Eliot paid money to free him and sent back to Boston. Died in 1884 in Gibbon’s House.

Mass Bay Company early on agreed not to recognize Indian claims on any lands granted them by the king – Winthrop’s English could lawfully take all land not needed by Indians

“Come Over and Help Us.” – seal of the Mass Bay Colony showing a native American

SQUAW SACHEM from Henry Smith Chapman's, History of Winchester Massachusetts: http://www.winchestermass.org/sachemp3.html

From the Mural Painting by Aiden L. Ripley, a Lexington artist, in the Winchester Public Library. Painted in 1924, the mural was funded by the U.S. government’s Public Works of Art project during the Great Depression.

The town of Winchester lies within a pleasant valley at the head of the Mystic Lakes. The eastern wall of this valley is formed by the rocky ridge of the Middlesex Fells, still largely covered by forest growth, and now one of the most picturesque parts of the beautiful Metropolitan Park system. To the southwest and west the valley is enclosed by the tumbled cluster of hills, which, under various names-Myopia Hill, Andrews Hill, Turkey Hill, Indian Hill and Zion's Hill-stretch in the direction of Arlington Heights and Lexington; by the rounded summit of Horn Pond Mountain and the ledges of Blueberry Hill in Woburn. Northward the floor of the valley slopes gradually upward to the higher ground on which Woburn stands. Southward it is prolonged toward the sea by the trough in which lie the Mystic Lakes and the course of the Mystic River.

Properly speaking, this is a part of the Mystic Valley, though the narrow and placid stream that winds through it, to fall into the twin lakes, bears in Winchester the name not of the Mystic but of the Aberjona River. A characteristic and very charming feature of the region is the number of attractive bodies of water that lie in and around it. Besides the Mystic Lakes, the natural beauty of which is comparable to that of many famous lakes that Americans travel far to admire, there are Horn Pond, Wedge Pond, Winter Pond and Black Ball Pond, all on the valley floor, while on the heights above the town and in the Middlesex Fells are Long Pond and the three artificially created reservoirs that supply Winchester with water. It is no wonder that the first white men who visited the spot, and saw the gleam of water on every side shining through the trees of the primeval forest, gave it the lovely name of Waterfield, which might well have been preserved as the name of the town that grew up there.

(Note: This is a copy of Chapter 1 of the first volume of Henry Smith Chapman's, History of Winchester Massachusetts, published by the Town of Winchester in 1975. The material which appears in the first volume is substantially the same as that which originally appeared in the 1936 edition by Henry Smith Chapman, a work commissioned and funded by the Town of Winchester.

History of Winchester, vol. 1, Henry Smith Chapman,
Published by the Town of Winchester (Original edition: 1936).
History of Winchester, vol. 2, Bruce Winchester Stone, Published by the Town of Winchester, 1975.
These two volumes are available at the Winchester Public Library or at local bookstores.

The webmaster has added links to further explanatory material, especially the definitions of "squaw" and "sachem", because of the recent (1999-2000) controversy in the Town of Winchester over the public use of these words.)

Winchester itself lies some eight miles from the salt water of Boston Harbor, but so gradual is the descent thereto that the center of the village is scarcely twenty-five feet above sea level. The hills that lie about the town rise some two hundred feet above it; in the case of Horn Pond Mountain about four hundred feet.† The houses of the town fill most of the level floor of the valley, which varies from a mile to a mile and a half in width, and they creep up the hillsides as well, especially on the side toward the Middlesex Fells. Those which stand on the high ground of Highland Avenue or of Myopia and Andrews Hills command prospects as wide and as attractive as can be found anywhere in the immediate neighborhood of Boston. In the Fells themselves the people of Winchester share with those of the neighboring towns and cities of Melrose, Stoneham, Malden and Medford the advantage of having at their very doors a lovely forested park, whose striking beauties of hill and dale, bold ledges of rock, sparkling ponds and melodiously running brooks have been, as far as is possible, preserved for the enjoyment of those who love the charm of nature unspoiled by the artifices of man.

This Mystic Valley of which we speak has a very interesting geological history. Thousands upon thousands of years before any man, white or red, looked upon it, it was the course of the great river which today we call the Merrimac, then a much wider and deeper stream than it is today.† There was then no great bend at Lowell; the river flowed in a nearly straight line southeastward from the mountains and lakes of New Hampshire. It poured its flood of water right down the valley where Winchester now stands, through the bed of the present Mystic Lakes, and then directly across the ground where Cambridge, Allston and the south end of Boston were later built, and so into Boston Harbor and the sea, the shores of which lay several miles further to the eastward than they do today. Geologists can trace that old river bed through almost every foot of its course by the deposits of gravel and silt that the water laid down.

Then-perhaps forty thousand years ago-came the Ice Age. All this part of New England was buried for ages under an immense sheet of ice. Eventually conditions changed again; the glaciers melted and disappeared; but as they did so they left behind enormous quantities of "glacial drift"-gravel and clay and loose boulders of rock which they had scraped up and carried southward with them, frozen into the ice. The drift was so thick in the old bed of the Merrimac that the river, released at last from its prison of ice, found its former path to the sea completely blocked. Accordingly it turned eastward at the present site of Lowell and scoured out for itself a new course to the sea at Newburyport. Only the diminished stream of the Aberjona remained to occupy the lordly valley of the ancient river.

But if the Ice Age took away the river it left something beautiful in its place. All the charming lakes and ponds, so characteristic of Winchester scenery, were born of the departing glacier. In some cases their beds were scooped out of the existing soil by the ploughing masses of ice; in others they were formed by great blocks of ice which became detached from the retreating glaciers and were buried under the drift of sand and gravel. When in time these fields of ice melted, the gravel that covered them slumped in, causing more or less rounded depressions in which the water gathered. When underground springs were present, or when there was sufficient drainage from the surrounding slopes, these ponds, so formed, became permanent. They are called "kettle ponds " from a fancied resemblance of their basins to the inside of a kettle. Winter Pond is a perfect example of a kettle pond. Wedge Pond and Horn Pond were very likely formed in the same way, at least in part.

To the valley thus devastated and reshaped by the forces of nature, vegetation began to return; first the hardier grasses and shrubs and then, as the climate continued to moderate, the trees that are the glory of New England-pine and spruce and hemlock, oak, ash, birch, maple and elm. Forests covered the land of which our Winchester valley was a part, from the high places to the shores of the ocean, except in low-lying spots along the coast or in the interior where marshes and swamps gathered and formed ground too wet for tree growth. It was this wide-spreading forest, dark, shadowy, inhospitable, yet rich in the timber that was to be one of their earliest sources of wealth, that faced the English colonists on every side when they first stepped on the shores of New England.

We read, however, that there was, here and there, open country among the trees; meadows and grass lands, which required little labor to make them fit for the plough. There is reason to believe that a part of the Winchester west side, which lies level beneath the slopes of Andrews Hill, was one of these open, grassy areas. There were also clearings which the Indians had made for the growing of corn or other purposes. Thomas Morton of Merrymount remarks that " the savages are accustomed to set fire of the country in all places where they come, and to burn it . . . at the Spring and at the fall of the leaf.... Otherwise it would be so overgrown with under-weeds that it would be all a coppice wood and the people would not be able to pass in any wise through the country out of a beaten path.'' (1) Yet the prevailing aspect of the country was that of a great forest wilderness, "an uncouth wilderness," yet "full of stately timber," as the first settlers of Charlestown described it.

While we are speaking of the return of vegetation to the plains and hills that lie within the borders of Winchester it is interesting to note that little Winter Pond is remarkable for certain very rare plants that are found growing upon its shores. These plants are southern species nowhere else found as far north as the latitude of Winchester, while one of them, at least, has not been found any nearer to our town than northern Georgia or central Illinois. Among these plants are the Coreopsis Rosea, the nut rush (Scleria Reticularis), the rattle box (Crotalaria Sagittalis) and the wild sensitive plant (Cassia Nictitans). All of these are rarely seen farther north than Cape Cod and Rhode Island, and never north of Winter Pond. The most exceptional specimen of our Winchester flora, one that is so unusual that it apparently has no common name, and is known only by its botanical name, Scirpus Halli, grows near Winter Pond, but nowhere else within a thousand miles. (2)

All these plants are believed to be of preglacial origin, driven southward by the advancing ice, and not sufficiently hardy to regain a foothold in their former territory when the glacier retreated. Why Winter Pond should prove so much more hospitable to these declining species than many hundreds of ponds similar to it in every observable respect is a question even the botanists cannot answer.

(1) New English Canaan.
(2) Lyman B. Smith, instructor in botany at Harvard. Article read before the Winchester Historical Society, 1934.

The time came at last when the land was again fit for human habitation, and at some unknown period in the past Indian tribes, migrating undoubtedly from the west or southwest, came to occupy the forest country of our New England states. They were all of the Algonquin race, a people at once less intelligent and less warlike than some other redskins-the Iroquois for example-and far less advanced than their distant cousins who lived in Mexico or in our own Southwest. They were not without their native virtues, however, for they were a tall, well-proportioned race, skillful hunters and fishermen, and good enough farmers to raise corn and pumpkins on ground that they had cleared and burned over for the purpose. They were stone-age people, of course, and seem to have known nothing of metals. Their arrowheads of chipped flint, their stone axes and gouges and pestles were scattered widely over the country around Winchester, and in the early days were often turned up by the plough. Several interesting relics of this sort are to be seen today in the room of the Winchester Historical Society in the Public Library building. (1)

The Indians who dwelt hereabouts belonged to a tribe whose members called themselves Pawtuckets.† This tribe seems to have been the head of a loose confederacy of wandering natives, which, under varying names, occupied not only the territory that now forms Essex and Middlesex counties in Massachusetts but southern New Hampshire as far as the sites of Concord and Portsmouth, and perhaps a bit of southern Maine as well. The early settlers used a confusing number of designations to describe these Indians. They were often called Aberginians, which is manifestly a name of English rather than Indian manufacture, but the origin of which is obscure. Some writers have tried to connect it with the name of our placid Winchester river, the Aberjona, which seems likewise more English than Indian in composition. This name appears very early-at least as early as the settlement of Woburn-but without any explanation of its derivation; and it has been a sad puzzle to the antiquarians ever since. The learned Mr. Cutter, (2) to whom we are indebted for so much valuable research into the

(1) A most interesting Indian relic is to be seen on the summit of Horn Pond Mountain. It is a deep bowl-like depression in a ledge of rock, either artificially made or, if natural originally, adapted to their purposes by the Indians. They certainly used it as a mortar for grinding their corn into meal. A much smaller rock mortar is to be seen in the woods near the foot of the North Reservoir.
(2) William R. Cutter of Woburn.
† See Notes and Comments

history of our own and neighboring towns, convinced himself that the first part of the word was the Celtic "aber" which is common in Scottish and Welsh place names, and is said to mean " the place where a small river flows into a larger, or into the sea." It seems unlikely that settlers from the eastern countries of England should have imported a word which was unfamiliar in their native districts; but even if Cutter is right in this he had to confess himself unable to account for the "jona." Nor has anyone else ever been able to do so.

The Pawtuckets regarded the Charles River as their southern frontier. Beyond that, around the head of Boston Bay and to the southwest thereof, lived the Massachusetts, a kindred tribe that seems to have differed from the Pawtuckets only in the region they inhabited. Both these groups of Indians were once comparatively numerous. When Captain John Smith explored the coast of Massachusetts in I6I4 he found the shores along which he passed "all a long, large corn-field," and saw "great troops of well-proportioned people" on every hand. (1) Thomas Morton, the gay and lively pioneer of Merrymount, whose lack of seriousness and piety so scandalized the Pilgrim Fathers that they felt obliged to break up his settlement, relates that the Indians of the region were wont to boast that "they were so many God himself could not kill them." (2)

But a few years before fate led the white men to their shores, these complacent redskins fell upon evil days. For some obscure reason they incurred the hostility of the Tarrantines, a related "nation " that lived along the eastern coast of Maine.† The Tarratines proved to be the better fighters. They overran the whole region from the Kennebec to the Charles. The slaughter of the Pawtuckets was, as Sir Ferdinando Gorges reports, " horrible to be spoken of." (3) Nanepashemet, the great sachem of the Pawtuckets, hastily removed his home from the borders of the great marshes between Lynn and Revere to the high land at the southern extremity of the Middlesex Fells, which could be more easily defended. His last palisaded fort was probably on Rock Hill in Medford, only a mile or so from the present borders of Winchester.

Its remains were seen by Englishmen in 162I, as we shall learn in the next chapter.(1)

Following this disaster came a worse one in the shape of a mysterious pestilence which carried off most of those who had escaped the tomahawks of the Tarratines. This plague seems to have descended on the unhappy red men about 16I6 or 16I7, and it ravaged all the Indian tribes of eastern Massachusetts. Cotton Mather heard it said in after years that "nine parts in ten, yea nineteen parts in twenty" died of this mysterious plague, which some believe to have been smallpox. Thomas Morton draws a horrid picture of the piles of bones and skulls that he himself saw in the abandoned villages in the neighborhood of Merrymount. Another writer of a later day was told by the Indians that the Pawtuckets, who formerly numbered three thousand warriors, besides women and children, were reduced by this pestilence to two hundred and fifty fighting men.

The tribe thus enfeebled was finally attacked once more by the implacable Tarratines, and the great sachem Nanepashemet was killed defending his Rock Hill stockade. Contrary to the usual custom among the red men the authority over the remnants of the Pawtuckets fell not to another warrior but to his widow. This was the famous Squaw Sachem-we know her by no other name -whose relations with the settlers of Charlestown and of so many other of the Middlesex towns form so peculiar and picturesque a feature of early Massachusetts history. Nanepashemet had left three sons, whom the white men later came to know as Sagamore John (of Charlestown), Sagamore James (of Lynn) and Sagamore George (of Salem). But they were only boys at the time of his death, and the slaughter among the warriors had perhaps been so great that no ambitious brave cared to assume the responsibility of restoring the confederacy, shattered by war and pestilence, to its former importance.

(1) Many years later (in 1862), the skeletons of five Indians were uncovered in a field belonging to Edward Brooks in West Medford by laborers who were digging there. One skeleton seemed to be that of a chief, for near it lay a soapstone pipe with a copper mouthpiece, a rare and valuable possession for a redman. It has been suggested that these may have been the bones of Nanepashemet, for they were found not far from the Rock Hill stronghold where he met his death. The skeletons were all sent to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

Nevertheless the Squaw Sachem, though she may have owed her rule to extraordinary and unhappy conditions, must have been a woman of parts and character to have retained, as she did, her authority for some thirty years. She it was with whom Governor Winthrop, Increase Nowell and the Rev. John Wilson dealt when the settlement of this part of the country was undertaken, and they always treated her and spoke of her with respect. She married, after Nanepashemet's death, the chief powwow or medicine man of the tribe, whose name was Webcowet, but seemingly surrendered to him none of her prerogatives.

The Squaw Sachem and her three sons were from the first friendly and hospitable to the white man; they deeded land generously to them, and often visited their growing villages at Charlestown and Lynn. Sagamore John ( to whose memory a simple but dignified monument was erected not many years ago at the "ancient Indian burial place" which is now on Sagamore Avenue in West Medford, near the shores of Mystic Lakes) was a particular admirer of the white men's ways, and became, after a fashion, a Christian. He died of smallpox only three years after the settlement of Charlestown, but he made, as the Puritan chronicles tell us, an edifying end, and left his infant son to be brought up by the Rev. Mr. Wilson of the church in Boston. This child died soon after his father, it is believed, for nothing more is heard of him.

It was perhaps true that it was the good fortune of the colonists of Massachusetts Bay to have come upon the scene when the savage spirit of the Pawtuckets was broken by their misfortunes and when they were ready to welcome the newcomers as possible allies and protectors against foes of their own race. Both Cotton Mather and Sir Ferdinando Gorges did not hesitate to entertain the pious belief that it was by a special interposition of Providence that so many savages were cleared out of the way to make room for "God's people."

Whatever the reason, however, it is pleasant to record the cordial relations that always existed between our forefathers and the gentle, friendly Squaw Sachem. Her memory is especially worthy of perpetuation among Winchester folk, for her favorite place of residence, as we learn from many early sources, was on the western shore of Mystic Lake within the present limits of our town.

Her own particular lands, which she reserved for herself when she deeded so much territory to the settlers of Charlestown, stretched all the way up and down the lake shore, but her wigwam stood oftenest on the land of the old Swan farm, now the property of the Winchester Country Club, perhaps near the ever-running spring, which still bears the name of the Squaw Sachem Spring.(1) There may be no better place than this, before proceeding to the story of the settlement of Winchester and Woburn by the people of Charlestown, to narrate briefly the story of the further relations of the Squaw Sachem and her family with the white men.

Many years before her death-as early as 1636 in fact-the "Indian Queen of Misticke" had executed a deed, which is still to be seen among the records of Middlesex County,(2) providing that those personal lands of hers spoken of above should after her death be the property of Jotham Gibbons, the young son of that Major Edward Gibbons who was among the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later attained to the dignity and title of Major General. The deed makes it clear that the transaction was a gift and not a sale: "This I do without seeking to of him or any of his; [i.e. without solicitation by him;] but I receiving many kindnesses of them, am willing to acknowledge their many kindnesses by this small gift to their son." What these kindnesses were that had awakened so lively an emotion of gratitude in the Sachem's breast there is unfortunately nothing to show.

(1) This spring is on the property of Mr. John Abbott, adjacent to the Country Club. A tradition, probably without any foundation, has it that the Squaw Sachem met her death (about 1650) by drowning in the brook that is fed by this spring.
(2) Registry of Deeds, Book I, page 174.

The land in question stretched, as we have said, all along the western shore of the Mystic Lakes. Its northern boundary was a little south of the present line of Everett Avenue in Winchester; on the south it was bounded by Sucker Brook in Arlington (or Menotomy as it then was), just south of the present Summer Street in that town. Already in 1636 one Captain Cooke had built a gristmill on that stream, which is frequently referred to in the records of the time. At the Winchester end the Sachem's land ran some half mile up the slopes of Myopia Hill to its summit. At the other end it narrowed to a few rods in width at the brook.

The Squaw Sachem remained undisturbed mistress of this plot of land until her death in I650.(1) Then, after some delay, Major General Gibbons took possession of the land in behalf of his son Jotham, who was then living in Bermuda. Presently we find Jotham, pressed for money, mortgaging the property to a well-to-do Boston merchant, Joshua Scottow. Then we learn that the land had been "redeemed" by Captain Samuel Scarlett, which means that he took over the mortgage. Scarlett was a sea captain and, as events proved, a friend of the Gibbons family. When Jotham Gibbons died, still a young man, in 1658, without having been able to pay off the mortgage, Scarlett became the virtual owner of the land, which was for many years known as " Scarlett's Farm."

But Scarlett was no farmer; he was off at sea the greater part of the time, and he leased the farm in 1658 to one Thomas Gleason. From that time, for several years, the property was in almost constant litigation. We find Gleason suing Henry Dunster, president of Harvard College and an executor of the estate of Captain Cooke (of the grist-mill), for trespass in sending men to cut hay on land along Sucker Brook to which Gleason laid claim. A little later he is bringing suit against Richard Gardner for encroaching on the " Squaw Sachem " land at the Winchester end. He won both suits, but was soon involved as defendant in a more difficult case. The town of Charlestown, through two of its citizens, Captain Francis Norton and Nicholas Davidson, undertook to dispossess Scarlett and Gleason entirely, and to get possession of the land for the town.

(1) For this date see a deposition by Richard Church in the lawsuit of Scarlett and Gleason vs. Gardner
her life. The first, signed in 1636, to which we have already referred, disposed of her land to the Gibbons family upon her death. The other, signed April 15, 1639, was that in which she and her husband Webcowet released to Charlestown "all the land granted them by the Court excepting the farms and ground on the west of the two great ponds called Misticke ponds, from the south side of Mr. Nowell's lot, near the upper end of the lakes, unto the little runner that cometh from Captain Cooke's mill.... and after the death of Squaw Sachem she doth leave all her lands from Mr. Mayhew's house to near Salem to the present Governor John Winthrop, Sr., Mr. Increase Nowell, Mr. John Wilson and Mr. Edward Gibbons to dispose of . . . and for satisfaction from Charlestown we acknowledge to have received in full satisfaction twenty- and one coats, nineteen fathoms of wampum and three bushels of corn."(1) A few months later the four men named in the deed made over all their interest in the land thus conveyed to the town of Charlestown, for which they had acted as agents. This deed, as we learn from the testimony of Rev. John Wilson, was signed "at the wigwam of the Squaw Sachem," which was almost certainly on land now in Winchester, either near the spring already mentioned, or, as Frothingham suggests in his History of Charlestown, near "Gardner Row," which was a later name for that part of Cambridge Street between Church Street and the upper Mystic Lake.

Now the representatives of Charlestown asserted that this deed was the legal one, since the earlier one had but one witness and was improperly drawn and dated, and they held that the land occupied by Gleason on lease from the Gibbons heirs was part of the grant here made to Winthrop, Nowell, Wilson and Gibbons in trust for the people of Charlestown. When the case came to trial in 1662 it appeared that there was still a third deed made by the Squaw Sachem and her husband November 13, 1639. This document confirmed that of 1636, named young Jotham Gibbons as heir to the land in dispute, (2) and was accompanied by an explanation

(1) Middlesex Deeds, Book I, page 175. It is the negotiation of this transfer of land, which included all of the present town of Winchester, that is commemorated by the mural painting in the Winchester Public Library.
(2) Middlesex Deeds, Book I, page 176.

that this land was no part of that conveyed to Winthrop, Nowell, Wilson and Gibbons. This explanatory writing was sworn to in the presence of such distinguished men as Governor Winthrop himself, John Endicott and Richard Saltonstall. There was also a statement from the venerable John Wilson that he had never considered the Gibbons land to be any part of the territory conveyed by the Sachem to the Charlestown men.

It is hard to see how Charlestown had any case at all. Yet it won two decisions in the County Court. But Gleason was a fighter. Though he was only a lessee, the land belonging to Captain Scarlett who was far away at sea, he carried his case to the Governor and Assistants sitting as a court of last appeal. This time he won and saw his persecutors assessed forty shillings for the costs of the appeal. This just judgment was rendered October 20, 1663; it put an end to all disputes regarding the true ownership of the Squaw Sachem land.

It is disappointing to learn that Thomas Gleason, who, although only a tenant of the farm, had put up so sturdy a fight against those who wished to spoil his absent landlord of his possessions, within two years got himself into a dispute with Scarlett over the cutting down of some trees, and had to move off the land in consequence.

The proof of Scarlett's friendly association with the Gibbons family and of his purchase of the mortgage on the Squaw Sachem farm to prevent it from falling into less considerate hands is found in the provisions of his will. He was killed in 1675 by an explosion on board his ship, then lying in Long Island Sound. When his will was probated, it was learned that he had bequeathed the farm to Love, the only daughter of Jotham Gibbons. She was still living in Bermuda, the wife of a man named Prout, and by a second marriage she became the wife of the Rev. John Fowle, also of Bermuda. The farm remained in her possession or that of her husband until 1706, when it was equitably divided among her eight children. They lost little time in turning it into cash, and through various transfers that part of it which lay in Winchester found its way into the hands of the Swan, the Gardner, the Wyman and the Reed families.

The only one of the Squaw Sachem's sons who survived her was Sagamore George, "No Nose," as we hear him called in later years, though whether the deformity suggested was his from birth or was the result of accident we have no way of knowing. His Indian name was Wenepoykin; you will find him made a central figure in John Greenleaf Whittier's poem, "The Bridal of Pennacook," though he is there only by virtue of the fact that his name fitted the verse-maker's needs better than that of his brother Montowampate (otherwise Sagamore James), who was the real hero of the story. Wenepoykin had reason to regret the generosity of his mother and brothers to the palefaces, for we find him again and again petitioning the General Court and bringing suits at law to get possession of certain lands in Saugus which he claimed should have come to him on his brother John's death, but which various white men (among them Robert Keayne, first captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company) had seized and occupied.

He never got any satisfaction, and that so far soured him toward the white men that he went on the warpath at the time of King Philip's War, was taken prisoner and sold into slavery in the West Indies. Somehow or other he got his freedom, for we find him back in Massachusetts among the "praying Indians" of Natick at the time of his death in 1684. He was the last sachem of the Pawtuckets. His people, reduced in numbers as we have seen by war and pestilence, had before this been pushed quite aside and dispersed by the expanding colony of Massachusetts Bay. Few were left alive after the bloodshed of King Philip's War, and they were wanderers, and in the thrifty Puritan phrase "vagabonds," without homes or tribal association. It is a familiar story.

In like manner the red men were everywhere vanishing before the advance of European civilization. But there is no little pathos in this ending, in obscurity and wretchedness, of the line of that dignified and attractive figure, the Squaw Sachem, who wished to be known as the "friend of the white man."

For many years after the dissolution of the Pawtuckets as a tribe, single Indians or small bands of them were familiar sights in the vicinity of Winchester. Even as late as the early part of the last century parties used to appear in the summer time, paddling up the Mystic River and the lakes to visit the scenes that had been familiar to their ancestors. They were particularly attracted to the vicinity of the Squaw Sachem's last home, and we have it from one of the Swan family that they often paid pathetically friendly visits to the farmhouse which stood so near the Sachem's spring. Sometimes they spent two or three months encamped on the shores of Horn Pond. Where they wandered to when winter came on is not known.

The last of the Indians to live hereabout was an old squaw who went by the name of Hannah Shiner. Brooks, the Medford historian, says that she lived at one time in West Medford in the same house with a mulatto man "of high character" who was called Tobey.(1) In later years, however, she lived by herself in a hut beneath an overhanging rock on the edge of Turkey Swamp in the Middlesex Fells. Her old dwelling place is now covered by the waters of Winchester's South Reservoir.

In this secluded spot she existed, one hardly knows how; her only means of support what she could beg or make by the sale of the grass baskets she wove with no little skill. It is said that at one time she had her home in a shanty-like house near the corner of Church and Bacon Streets in Winchester(2) and was a familiar figure in the streets of the village.

Hannah had, unluckily, an extravagant fondness for rum. She met her death while under the influence of that fiery liquor, in December 1820, having fallen from a bridge over the Aberjona at Winchester center, and drowned. The bridge was doubtless that on Main Street where the Converse bridge now is; there was then no other in existence in that vicinity. The poor woman's body was found and taken into the house of Abel Richardson, which stood hard by, and she had a funeral at which the Rev. Mr. Chickering preached from the text "And hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon the earth," (3) a sentiment to which Hannah Shiner, had she been able to hear it declaimed, might have thought her white neighbors had been a little slow in subscribing.

With her interment the last Indian, so far as we know, disappeared from the Mystic Valley.

(1) Brooks, History of Medford. Medford Hist. Register, Vol. XIII, No. I.
(2) Cooke, Winchester Record, Vol. I, page z74.
(3) Medford Hist. Register, Vol. XIII, No. I.

The Squaw Sachem Sells Her Land to John Winthrop

The community that developed into Winchester was founded in peace between two cultures.

The Squaw Sachem, whose land this was, saw enough troubles in her lifetime before the English came.

She lived through fierce, repeated, and deadly attacks upon her people by their mortal enemies, the Tarratines (Abnakis) of Maine, which, according to the traditional story, drove her and her four surviving children inland and killed her husband.

She survived a devastating plague that killed a horrifying number of her tribespeople.

She led her people while other tribal enmities and skirmishes continued.

Then the English came. Her eldest son and other sachems accepted the offers of friendship and the protection that alliances brought with them.

But again misfortune struck when her two eldest sons and more of her people were struck down by smallpox.

By the time the Squaw Sachem of the Massachusetts sold and gave her land to the English, the way had been prepared for the colonists. The more zealous Puritans called it Providence. Others would call it calamity. Either way, her people had been reduced to a fraction of their former size, were much weakened, and continued to be threatened by war and pestilence.

It is not surprising that the Squaw Sachem kept open the friendly door which her son Wonohaquaham had opened to the English and opted to share her land in peace with them.

Queen

In Winchester, Squaw Sachem has been called "Queen of Mysticke" ever since Luther R. Symmes delivered a paper in 1884 to the Winchester Historical and Genealogical Society using that name, taken from one of her deeds.

But she was queen of much more–of Salem, Concord, and other communities from Charlestown to Marblehead. Locally, she is most associated with Myopia Hill, because, while deeding other land now in Winchester to the English, she reserved the land west of the Mystic Lakes for herself and probably died there.

The term 'queen' was not an honorific. Sachems were royalty. This queen's own name (unlike her husband's and children's) has not come down to us, just her Indian title, Squaw Sachem.

According to William Wood (1634), "if there be no sachem the queen rules." Reportedly, there were other squaw sachems known to the colonists: three in Connecticut, two in Rhode Island, one other in Massachusetts.

Up to 1619 Nanepashemet had been sachem (see part 1). At his death, his sons were too young to rule in his stead. His widow, therefore, became leader.

After about a decade, however, the two eldest sons were old enough that the English recognized them as chiefs in Charlestown and Saugus (see part 2). But they both died in 1633, leaving their lands to their younger brother, still a minor.

Again there was no sachem. The settlers' deeds were executed with the Squaw Sachem. In some of those documents, her name is joined with that of her second husband, Webcowit. According to the colonial writer, Thomas Lechford, "commonly when (the king) dies the Powahe (powwow) marries the Squa Sachem, that is, the queene." Widowed in 1619, the Squaw Sachem married Webcowit sometime before 1635.

Sale of land

The land now Winchester (and surrounding communities) was never stolen or fought over. The colonists had established laws for proper, legal relations with the Indians, including land acquisition, and acted within those laws.

The Squaw Sachem began selling her lands to the colonists after her two eldest sons and a number of other Massachusett Indians succumbed to the smallpox.

Concord was sold in 1637, according to depositions taken in 1684, for "wampumpeage," hatchets, hoes, knives, cotton cloth, and shirts, plus a new cotton suit, hat, linen band, shoes, stocking, and great coat for Webcowit.

In 1637 Squaw Sachem and Webcowit signed a deed, to be effective after her death, giving the land west of the Mystic Ponds "as a small gift" to Jotham Gibbons, son of Edward Gibbons, "to acknowledge their many kindnesses." That year, they received from Edward Gibbons "36 shillings for land between the Charlestowne and Wenotomies River."

In 1638 Charlestown granted its citizens permission to settle land to the north (including Winchester). In April 1639 Squaw Sachem and Webcowit sold them the land (except the Myopia Hill parcel). After her death, the deed said, more land "to neere Salem" was to go to men of Charlestown. For this they received 21 coats, 19 fathoms of wampom, and three bushels of corn.

Although colonial documents record that the Indians "acknowledged themselves to bee satisfied" with their compensation, the selling prices today may seem cheap,. But the Indians also benefited from the alliance with a people who could and did assist the natives and who had established their military strength, particularly during the Pequot War of 1637.

Additionally, the Indians received help and goods from the settlers. In May 1640, Cambridge was ordered to give the Squaw Sachem a coate every winter for life. In 1641, Cambridge was enjoined to give her 35 bushels of corn and four coates (for two years). In 1643, the court granted her gunpowder and shot and ordered "her piece to be mended."

There were advantages to being friends with the English. There were also disadvantages, for, in exchange for the privileges they offered, the English were gradually taking over the government, not only of their own people but of the natives as well. In 1644 the Squaw Sachem and four other sachems signed a treaty of submission, agreeing to abide by the government and jurisdiction of the English colony and promising willingness to be instructed in their religion.

In addition, as the number of the English colonists continued to grow, so did their desire for land. Where there appeared to be unlimited land, collectively the English began to push the natives aside. One deed even specified "all Indians to depart" following the death of the Squaw Sachem.

Death of a Queen

For perhaps 10 years, the Winchester area was shared by a few settlers and Squaw Sachem, Webcowit, and perhaps a few others.
The queen died in 1650. Although stories have been written that, in the end, she was deaf and blind and died by drowning, there is no documentary evidence. Only her death date is known since, in that year, lawsuits over the land began.

From then on, Winchester was English land. Indians passed through and camped temporarily, but they were not integrated into the growing community of settlers. After 1650 the surviving Massachusetts relocated to other homes.

http://www.winchestermass.org/sachemp3.html

Thomas Weston:

May 1622 10 sent by Thomas Weston, a London merchant/ironmonger to Wessagusset on south side of the bay (in Weymouth). Weston purely an adventurer of Smith type interested only in commerce. “the very scum, of the streets and docks of the English trading ports.” “rude fellows” “products of a large city ignorant of how to survive in the wilderness” “parasites” They settled on the south of the Bay for the single reason that there were the fewest natives about. It would seem that at this time not more than four score of the wretched remnant of the Massachusett about.

Main party of 60 from London in Charity and Swan to Plymouth. “rude and profane fellows”

Richard Greene, Weston’s brother-in-law in charge. Died during the summer at Plymouth and succeeded by Saunders. Winter failure…First begging and then stealing from the natives.

Starving. some left the stockade and went to live with the Indians for a warm place to sleep and food in return for performing those tasks considered to be beneath the dignity of a male Indian

Of original 60, 10 dead and only 20 in stockade…Now Indians stole from them

Indians planned to destroy Wessagusset and Plymouth. Wituwamet despised Europeans and tortured captives.

An old man who was sick to be hanged: tricked thief by telling him it was only a mock hanging

1623 April Standish and a force of eight companions. Seven natives who came into the Wessagusset stockade were surprised and massacred. – Standish invited them to dine and slew them while they ate.

Pecksout and Wituwamet killed + youth hanged in full view of his friends.

Winslow present at massacre per his Relations –“It is indescribable how many wounds these two braves received.”

“a piece of cannon was discharged” – cannon rarely mentioned in fights with Indians

http://members.aol.com/calebj/mayflower.html

Next day the settlement was abandoned and all whites removed excepting three stragglers who wandered off among the natives and were put to death by them.

Fernando Gorges:

Fernando Gorges and young son, Robert, patent for trading company “Council for New England,” all of New England and New Brunswick and New York – “A palatinate or feudality all of his own.”

To Nahant and East Boston shore and inland.
Gorges x 14 years before short-lived settlement on the Kennebec

Robert Gorges left England in mid-summer of 1623, specially favored by King James and numbered among patrons and associates the most powerful noblemen of England.

Every reason to suppose that Rev William Morell, the ecclesiastical head of the new government was accompanied by at least one Cambridge graduate, WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. Among others in party were Captain Hanson and Samuel Maverick, a young man of means and education in his 22nd year

“traders and tillers of the soil – respectable and well-to-do persons”

landed mid-September - onset of winter – sought protection at Weston’s deserted blockhouse. Party landed at Wessagusset…as place was never again wholly abandoned, the permanent settlement about Boston harbor must date from that time = September 1623

Robert Gorges and Weston confrontation. Arrest warrant for Weston and vessel. Weston passed the winter of 1623/24 at Wessagusset. Then reached agreement and left for Virginia.

Robert Gorges returned to England the next year in poor health and died. When Robert and portion of followers returned, others including Rev. Morrell stayed at Wessagusset.

Spring 1625, Robert followed by Morrell who left a poem as much charmed by the region about Boston as he was disgusted by its aboriginal inhabitants.

Wessagusset was a poor site, unfavorable for planting and building houses and for trade. “a wilderness devoid of natural ways and interspersed with swamps.” – almost from the outset Hull was regarded as its seaport

Remaining settlers split up: BLACKSTONE to Shawmut, MAVERICK to Noddles, WALFORD to Mystic across the Bay. Jeffrey and Bursley stayed.

1625 – These loners indicated absence of a threat from Indians.

1625 Two additional settlements – “Natascot,” as Hull was called
Three men, Thomas and John Gray and Walter Knight purchased Nantasket from Chickataubut + John Lyford “a clergyman of doubtful moral character and a mischief-maker” expelled from Plymouth and John Oldham “an energetic self-willed and passionate private adventurer” Lyford and Oldham went elsewhere in 1626; the others stayed,

1623: even then a fleet of no less than 50 vessels traded annually along the coast and their appearance in Boston Harbor was a matter of such ordinary appearance as to have long ceased to excite surprise among the natives.

Independent traders along the shore: “besides beastly demeanors, tending to drunkenness and debauchery, the reckless traders were frequently selling arms and ammunition to the savages.”

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/deetz/Plymouth/wampanoag.html

Chapter II
"Life and Letters of John Winthrop"
by: Robert C. Winthrop
published in 1867

The arrival of Governor Winthrop, with the Massachusetts Company and the Charter of the Colony, has sometimes been assumed by chronologists and historians as the date of the permanent colonization of Massachusetts. And it would certainly be difficult to over-estimate the influence of that event, not only in promoting and multiplying settlements where they had never before been attempted, but in giving security and permanence to those which already existed. No one can be ignorant, however, that local plantations had been previously commenced at various points which are now included within the limits of Massachusetts; and though some of them had already died out, and others were in a weak and precarious condition, more than one of them has happily vindicated its claim to be regarded as having been permanent, by surviving to this day.

First of all, there was the ever-honored Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth in 1620, which is estimated to have contained about three hundred inhabitants, of all ages and sexes, when Winthrop arrived. This was a Colony by itself, under rulers of is own, and continued such until it was united with the Massachusetts Colony in the year 1692.

Next there was the Wessagusset or Weymouth settlement, by Weston's Company, in 1622; but this never numbered more than fifty or sixty persons, and was broken up in the following year. The same site was soon afterwards occupied by a second company, under the lead of Robert Gorges, a son of Sir Ferdinando Gorges; but it had been again abandoned long before the arrival of Winthrop.

Then there was the Nantasket attempt, by Conant, Lyford, and Oldham, in the year 1623 or 1624; which was abandoned, in 1625, for a fishing settlement at Cape Ann, over which Roger Conant presided, under a charter, as has recently been alleged, from Lord Sheffield.

Still again, there was the "Merry Mount" settlement, in 1625, under Morton and Wollaston; which consisted only of about thirty persons at the outset, and which was thoroughly disgraced, if not wholly dispersed, in 1630.

And lastly, and more important than all save that at Plymouth, there was the plantation at Naumkeag, now Salem, commenced originally by Roger Conant and others in 1626, and renewed and re-enforced by Endicott and those who came with him in 1628, and by Higginson and his associates in 1629.

There were also, or had been, scattering settlements elsewhere: among others, that of William Blackstone at Shawmut, now Boston; that of Thomas Walford at Mishawum, now Charlestown; and that of Samuel Maverick on Noddle's Island.

There is some discrepancy between the accounts which have come down to us of the number of persons by whom Endicott was accompanied. White, in his "Planter's Plea," published in 1630, says as follows:-

"Master Endicott was sent over Governor, assisted with a few men; and arriving in safety there in September, 1628, and uniting his own men with those which were formerly planted in the country into one body, they made up in all not much above fifty or sixty persons."

But Higginson, in his "New England's Plantation," estimated the number of persons in the Colony previous to his own arrival at about one hundred. He brought two hundred persons with him; and was thus able to say, in September, 1629, "There are in all of us, both old and new planters, about three hundred, whereof two hundred of them are settled at Nehum-kek, now called Salem, and the rest have planted themselves at Massachusetts Bay, beginning to build a town there, which we do call Cherton or Charlestown."

The entire population of the plantation may thus, perhaps, be estimated at not very far from three hundred persons, when Governor Winthrop and the Massachusetts Company came over; though, as will presently be seen, the intervening winter had made somewhat serious inroads upon their number.

Roger Conant had presided over the Salem Plantation until 1628, and had been succeeded by Endicott on his arrival. Endicott was sent over, at first, under the patent obtained from the Plymouth Council, March 19, 1628. In the following year, after the Royal Charter had been obtained (March 4, 1629), a commission was made out for him as "Governor of London's Plantation in the Mattachusetts Bay in New England."

In the exercise of this commission, he was subordinate to "the Governor and Company of the Mattahcusetts Bay in New England," by whom he was deputed, and who, from time to time, sent him elaborate instructions for the regulation of his conduct. The Instructions of the Governor and Company to Endicott, dated 17th of April, 1629, and 28th of May, 1629, are among the most interesting and valuable of our early colonial papers, and show clearly the relation which existed between the plantation at Naumkeag and the Governor and Company in London.

On the arrival of Governor Winthrop, all this double machinery was abolished. The chief government, as we have seen, was transferred; and the local government was, of course, absorbed in it. Winthrop came over at once as Governor of the Company, and to exercise a direct and personal magistracy over the Colony. Nor was the change a mere nominal or formal change. He brought with him a Company to be governed.

Not less that a thousand persons were added to the Colony about the period of his arrival. Seven or eight hundred persons came with him, or speedily followed, as a part of his immediate expedition. Two or three hundred more arrived almost simultaneously, though in ships not included in the Company's fleet. A second thousand of inhabitants was soon afterwards added, under the same influence and example.

Winthrop was, in a word, the chosen leader of "the great Suffolk emigration", as it has been called, whereby that which had been hitherto regarded as a precarious plantation was at once transformed into a permanent and prosperous Commonwealth. He came, with his companions, "to continue and inhabite", agreeably to the compact which had been signed at Cambridge (Eng); and henceforth, instead of two or three hundred pioneer planters, thinly scattered around the Bay, looking to a Governor and Company across the wide and wintry ocean for their authority and instructions, two or three thousand inhabitants are to be seen, with a Governor and Legislature upon their own soil, and of their own selection; erecting houses, building ships, laying out villages and towns; establishing churches, schools, and even a college; and laying broad and deep the foundations of an independent Republic.

Such was the result of that transfer of the chief government, which Matthew Cradock, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Company in Old England, moved on the twenty-eighth day of July, 1629, and which John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Company in New England, was the honored instrument in carrying out to its completion on the twelfth (twenty-second) day of June, 1630. On that day the transfer was consummated, and the consequences soon began to develop themselves.

Governor Winthrop, however, commenced his administration in New England under no very hopeful circumstances, "We found the Colony" (says Dudley in his letter to the Countess of Lincoln) "in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of then being dead the winter before, and many of them alive weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst them all hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch that the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them, we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them, by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were put in; and they who were trusted to ship them in another failed us, and left them behind: whereupon necessity enforced us, to our extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about £s;16 or £s;20 a person, furnishing and sending over."

It would thus appear, that no less than one hundred and eighty of the residents under Endicott were the bond-servants of the planters that were to follow, and that one of the first acts of Winthrop's administration was to emancipate all of them who were living; not, indeed, from any consideration of abstract philanthropy, but from absolute inability to provide for their sustanence. The whole Colony was evidently in a weak and almost starving condition when the Arbella (flag ship of the Winthrop Fleet) arrived. It is not surprising, therefore, that Dudley speaks of the "too large commendation of the country, and the commodities thereof;" and adds, "Salem, where we landed, pleased us not."

The famous Captain John Smith, "sometimes Governour of Virginia, and Admirall of New England" (as he styles himself, in his "Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New England, or any where; Or, the Pathway to experience to erect a Plantation," published in London in 1631), gives a fearful account of the condition of things in New England when the Massachusetts Company arrived.

"It is true" (says he) "that Master John Wynthrop, their new Governour, a worthy gentleman both in estate and esteeme, went so well provided (for six or seven hundred people went with him) as could be devised; but at Sea, such an extraordinarie Storme encountered his Fleet, continuing ten daies, that of two hundred Cattell which were so tossed and brused, three-score and ten died, many of their people fell sicke; and in this perplexed estate, after ten weekes, they arrived in New England at severall times, where they found three score of their people dead, the rest sicke, nothing done, but all complaining, and all things so contrary to their expectation, that now every monstrous humor began to shew itselfe." After describing some of these "mostrous humors" Smith continues:

"Notwithstanding all this, the noble Governour was no way disanimated, neither repents him of his enterprise for all those mistakes, but did order all things with that temperance and discretion, and so releeved those that wanted with his owne provision, that there is six or seven hundred remained with him and more than 1600 English in all the Country, with three or foure hundred head of Cattell."

An original "Narrative concerning the Settlement of New England," on the files of Her Majesty's Public Record Office, in London, throws additional light on this early period of the Colony. Under date of 1629, it says as follows:- "This yeare there went hence 6 shippes with 1000 people in them to the Massachusetts, having sent two yeares before betweene 3 & 400 servants to provide howses and Corne against their coming, to the charge of (at least) £s;10.000: these Servants through Idleness & ill Government neglected both theire buildinge & plantinge of Corne, soe that if those 6 shippes had not arived the plantation had ben broke & dissolved. Now so soone as Mr. Winthrop was landed, perceiving what misery was like to ensewe through theire Idlenes, he presently fell to worke with his owne hands, & thereby soe encouradged the rest that there was not an Idle person then to be found in the whole Plantation, & whereas the Indians said they would shortly returne as fast as they came, now they admired to see in what short time they had all housed themselves and planted Corne sufficient for theire subsistence."

Still another contemporanious account of the Colony and of its Governor is found in the following passage from a letter of Thomas Wiggin to "Sir John Cooke, knt. principall Secretary to his Ma'tie and one of his highnes. most honl'ble privie councell," dated Nov. 19, 1632:- "For the plantation in the Mattachusetts, the English there being about 2000 people, yonge & old, are generally most industrious and fitt for such a worke, having in three yeares done more in buyldinge and plantinge then others have done in seaven tymes that space, and with at least ten tymes lesse expence."

"Besides I have observed the planters there, and by theire loving just and kind dealinge with the Indians, have gotten theire love and respect, and drawne them to an outward conforming to the English, soe that the Indians repaire to the English Governor there and his deputies for justice, and for the Governor himselfe, I haue observed him to be a discreete and sober man, givinge good example to all the planters, wearinge plaine apparrell, such as may well beseeme a meane man, drinking ordinarliy water, and when he is not conversant about matters of justice, putting his hand to any ordinarye labour with his servants, ruling with much mildness, and in this particular I observed him to be strict in execution of Justice upon such as have scandalized this state, either in civill or eccleseasticall government, to the great contentmt of those that are best affected, and to the terror of offenders."

No worthier testimony to Winthrop's character and services could be furnished than that supplied by these representations of him. Waiving all considerations of official dignity, and working with his own hands, he gave an example, more forcible than any exhortations to others could have been, of that industry, humility, self-denial, and devotion, by which alone the infant Colony was to be rescued from ruin, and reared up into a prosperous and noble Commonwealth.

It was, doubtless, in view of such accounts of the Governor's "self-denying and self-neglecting carriage," that John Humfrey wrote to him so earnestly from London, imploring him not to be prodigal of his life and health; telling him, that, while some needed the spur, he needed therein; and bidding him take heed lest his "bodie, not accustomed to hardnes of unususal kindes, & not necessitated unles by a voluntarie & contracted necessitie, should sinke under his burthen, & fall to ruine for want of a more conscionable tenaunt."

Thomas Weston had no sympathy for the religious views of the Pilgrims of Plymouth whom he had substantially aided in their adventure, its a business enterprise; for be was undoubtedly a firm adherent of the Church of England. But it is apparent that he made no adequate provision for religious influences in the settlement he attempted at Wessagusset in 1622.

There may have been such services as the Episcopalian prayer book allowed laymen to conduct, but there is no record. Moreover, the members of his company were not all Episcopalians. Without the sanctions of religion, or with marked differences of faith and practice, the settlement was necessarily inharmonious, the sense of moral obligation was weak, and stability and thrift could not be made effective. Such a community is foredoomed to failure from the start.

Following close upon the dissolution of the Weston settlement, Capt. Robert Gorges' Company came under very different auspices. In fact, one object of this company, in addition to its commercial plans, was to introduce and establish the control of the Church of England throughout this region. For this purpose Rev. Morrell came with the company, holding a commission which authorized him to exercise supervision of all the churches there might be in the colony. With him came a young clergyman, William Blackstone, who was apparently to become his assistant in local and supervisory duties.

It does not appear that there was an organized body of church members at first, nor is there any evidence that a church was fully established by Mr. Morrell. Whatever records were kept were probably quite meager and kept by Mr. Morrell himself, and, if preserved, would be retained by him. Nevertheless, he had charge of the religious interests of the settlement while he remained.

Mr- Morrell appears have been a scholarly gentleman, suited to ministry in a staid English parish rather than to the tough pioneer life of adventurers amidst natives in a wilderness forty miles from a civilized community, and that composed of nonconformist Pilgrims. The prospect was no more pleasing to him than to Captain Gorges, and when the latter abandoned the enterprise, Mr. Morrell journeyed to Plymouth and lived there over a year, probably hoping some way would open whereby he might yet organize an Episcopal church and find opportunity to exercise his clerical authority.

But though the Pilgrims were tolerant enough to allow him to abide with them, they offered no encouragement for his church plans. Indeed, he did not deem it prudent to disclose his ecclesiastical authority until he departed for England.

Mr. Blackstone also appears to have left the settlement soon after, but instead of going to Plymouth, or returning to England, he became a recluse and settled first on the site of the future cityof Boston, arid afterward migrated to some place in or near Rhode Island.

Wessagusset was thus left without a religious leader, and as far as is certainly known, did not have another for eleven years. The statement that, in 1624, a company "of another sort" came from Weymouth, Eng., with a non-conformist minister, Rev. Mr. Barnard, who remained with them eleven years, until his death, is not well substantiated.

Prince's Annals, a most trustworthy account written more than a hundred years after the reputed coming of this company, states, with reference to Mr. Barnard (page 150), "nor do I anywhere find the least Hint of Him, but in the Manuscript Letters, taken from some of the oldest People at Weymouth."

The entire absence of any other evidence of the sailing of such a company, or of its members or membership, or management; the failure of the Plymouth Colony to make any mention of a non-conformist movenient at Wessagusset; the neglect of the Bay Colony to defend their interest in such a settlement from the Episcopalian company of 1635; and the fact that in 1633, Wessagusset was described as " but a small village," -these facts indicate that the whole Barnard story is only art unsupported tradition arising from the confused memories of very old people.

After the departure of Captain Gorges and many of the people, who went in different directions, - some to England, some to Plymouth, some to Virginia, and some to other places, - the settlement was so reduced in numbers, that, although there were various additions of a few at a time during the years from 1624 to 1635, it seems highly improbable that there was any clergyman there, unless Mr. Blackstone visited them occasionally, or that any regular religious services were maintained.

The coming of Rev. Joseph Hull in 1635 with a company of about a hundred people caused at once a revival of religious activity, and during the next ten years there was excitement, turmoil and di\ ision in religious matters quite in keeping with the disturbances

REVEREND WILLIAM BLAXTON

Savage:

"WILLIAM, Boston 1625, or 6, was bred at Emanuel, often call. the [[vol. 1, p. 199]] Puritan College. Cambridge, where he had his degr. 1617, and 1621, and was prob. ord. in Eng. but had no known cure, came in unknown ship at uncertain time for undiscovered cause, and sat down, alone, on the peninsula now the chief part of Boston, where he continued some four or five yrs. after the arr. of the Gov. and company and was adm. freeman 18 May 1631, having requested that benefit in Oct. preced.

He removed around 1634, or 5 (and was the earliest perman. civiliz. resid. in the unborn Col.) to the neighb. of Providence (as it was soon after nam.), prob. from dissatisfact. with the puritan rigidity of Mass., built his ho. on meadow at Study hill, as he nam. the beautiful seclusion near the bank of a river, since call. Blackstone, as our Secr. prefer. to spell his name, wh. is restored now to the true form, in wh. I saw it writ. by hims. on the University books.

His new resid. was at the place since call. Cumberland; but he came to Boston once more to m. 4 July 1659, Sarah, wid. of John Stephenson, had only s. John, and d. 26 May 1675, a few weeks only bef. the gr. Ind. war, in wh. his planta. was destroy. Right to admin. on his est. and give guardiansh. to his s. was assum. by Plymouth Col. wh. reckon. their bounds to include that spot, and the discretion of the governm. of R. I. prevent. controv. a. jurisdict. It is presum. that the fam. name is not extinct, tho. for many yrs. by many writers the supposit. was confident. entertain. Very respect. descend. have for five or six generat. enjoy. an est. at Branford, wh. was prob. acquir. by his gr.s. Diligent research by L. M. Sargent, Esq. ten yrs. since was crown. with satisfact. result, and his regard for the character of the emigrant was exhibit. in copious publicat. of the process of inq. See Holmes, Ann. I.; Winthrop I. 44 and 5; 2 Mass. Hist. Coll. X. 170; and 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. VIII. 247; Bliss, Hist. of Rehoboth; Daggett's Hist. of Attleborough, 29."

1623 – involved in first attempt to settle Weymouth
1625 – to Shawmut – western slope of Beacon Hill – Beacon and Spruce Streets
“Library and seeds” – purchase of 50 acres by Winthrop for 30 pounds for use as “Common” – cattle and militia

Blaxton, Anglican: “I left England on account of the bishops. I fear I may have to leave here on account of the brethren”

1632 left for Rhode Island…After this “Blaxton” became Blackstone

1625 or 1626 William Blackstone settled at Shawmut – “like a sensible man, Blackstone chose the sunny southwest slope of Beacon Hill for his residence” – Two landmarks existed to fix the site of Blackstone’s house, namely the orchard planted by him, the first in New England, and his spring. The orchard is represented on the early maps; in mentioned in 1765 as still bearing fruit; and is named in the deeds of subsequent possessors. The spring which must have determined to some extent the location of the house was probably near the junction of Beacon Street with Charles, although others existed in the neighborhood. The spring seems to have been known early on.

1628 Blackstone taxed by Plymouth Colony twelve shillings, on account of expenses incurred by the colony in the capture of Thomas Morton at Mount Wollaston (Drake)

Blackstone is supposed to have come over with Robert Gorges in 1623. But what induced him to withdraw to such a distance from the settlements remains a mystery. The nature of Blackstone’s claim to the peninsula is doubtful, though recognized by Winthrop’s company. Mather grumblingly alludes to it thus in his Magnalia: “There were also some godly Episcopalians; among whom has been reckoned Mr. Blackstone; who by happening to sleep first in an old hovel upon a point of land there, laid claim to all the ground whereupon there now stands the Metropolis of the whole English America, until the inhabitants gave him satisfaction.” This concedes only a squatter’s title to Blackstone.

He seems to have had a kind heart capable of feeling for the suffering of his fellow-men, for, hearing of the vicissitudes of Winthrop’s infant settlement at Charlestown by disease and death, he invited them over to Shawmut in 1630. Water, the great desideratum of a settlement, was very scarce at Charlestown, and Blackstone “came and acquainted the Governor of an excellent spring there, withal inviting him and soliciting him thither.” If seclusion was Blackstone’s object, it gave way to his interest in the welfare of his fellow colonists. (D)

Beside the spring or springs near Blackstone’s house, mention is made in the early records of the “great spring” in what is now Spring Lane. The latter was filled up, but people now living have seen it bubble out of the ground after heavy Spring rains. Opinions are divided as to which spring Blackstone had reference, when he invited the thirsty Charlestown company to Shawmut, but the fact of so many people located by the site of the “great spring,” and Isaac Johnson in the immediate vicinity, is convincing. (D)

Blackstone = 50 acres round Louisburg square…apples and roses on slope toward the Charles
35 year old shy young clergyman
“A Puritan Robinson Crusoe”
Rode a steer broken to saddle

Wollaston:

1625: Captain Wollaston, trading venture. Three or four men with means and 30-40 servants who had sold their services for a term of years.

THOMAS MORTON, a lawyer of Clifford Inn, gent, though the grave elders of Plymouth saw “a pettifogger of Furnival’s Inn.”
Some reason for thinking that Morton was of Weston’s company.

It was Morton who in all probability guided Wollaston to Boston Bay. Selected Passonagesset as site, two miles in a direct line from Wessagusset. Prior to the Great Plague, it was the home of sachem Chickataubut.

Passonagesset = Mt. Wollaston = Quincy. Close by an extensive treeless plain called Massachusetts Fields where Chickataubut, the greatest sagamore in the country lived before the plague. Northern part of what is now Quincy and almost surrounded by swamps and marshes bordering on the Bay and Neponset River.

MERRYMOUNT
1625-1626 Winter: Wollaston seeing little profit left for Virginia leaving Radsell in charge. Sold servants in Virginia. Told Radsell to bring more and turned over plantation to Fitcher. Ten left. Thomas Morton incited a species of mutiny and took control. Changed the name to Merry Mount – “Mine host of Mare Mount” but Plymouth called him “Lord of Misrule.”

Bagnall, a wicked fellow – Great Wot
Morton: “sold their clothes for corn”

1627 May Day celebration. “dancing and frisking together.”
1628, Spring – Standish sent to arrest Morton. End of May and early June when most of settlement inland looking for furs. Morton found at Wessagusset and captured. Escaped to his own house. “ludicrous attempt at resistance by Morton and his followers.” Morton taken to Plymouth, and sent to England.

1628, Sept 6 Endicott had landed at Salem – Colony of Massachusetts Bay which included Merry Mount in its charter came into existence. One of Endicott’s first acts had been to visit Mount Wollaston where he cut down the Maypole and sternly admonished remnants of the party who still lingered about the place.

1629, Morton returned with Isaac Allerton, agent of Plymouth Colony and found way back to Wollaston.

1629 Autumn: Morton reoccupied his old house, where he lived till the arrival of Winthrop. He attended one of the earlier General Courts at Salem but according to his own account, he was a thorn in the side of the authorities and escaped arrest a second time by concealing himself in the woods.

BIBL Merry Mount, Atlantic Monthly May/June 1877

BIBL New England Canaan Morton – entered for copyright in Nov 18, 1633

NEW ENGLAND CANAAN

“all that wrong and rapine had left me to bring from thence.”
“divers persons (not so well affected to the public weale) out of respect to their own private ends have labored to keep both the practice of the people there and the real worth of that eminent country concealed from public knowledge.”
Sir Christopher Gardiner, knight
F.C. Armiger
“ a matchless mirror that shows the humor of the Separatists”
“ to whipping, stocking, and full bent to plotting Mischief against the Innocent, burning their houses as if by fate.”

“A cruel way to found a Church, noe
Tis not their zeale, but fury blinds them so
And pricks their malice on like fire to joyne
And offer up the sacrifice of Kain
Jonas, thou has done well to call these men
Home to repentance with thy painful pen” – Armiger

“the natives, their manners and customs, with their tractable nature and love toward the English”
“temperature somewhere between the hot and the cold”
“golden meane” – Zona temperate – “the temperature of the climate, sweetness of the aire, fertility of the soil, and small number of the natives (which might seem a rubb in the way of an effeminate mind), this country of New England is by all judicious men, accounted the principal part of all America for habitation and the commodiousness of the sea, ships there not being subject to wormes, as in Virginia, and not to be paralleled in all Christendom – it is nothing inferior to Canaan of Israel, but a kind of parallel to it in all points.”

“noble minded gentleman, Sir Ferdinando Gorges”

“And herein this, the wondrous wisdome and love of God is shone by sending to this place his minister to sweepe away by heapes the savages and also giving him length of days, to see the same performed after his enterprise was begun, for the propagation of the Church of Christ

“Some have gone for their conscience sake (as they profess)”

“I will ask no long time, no more, but until the Brethern have converted one savage, and made him a good Christian” – reference to failure to convert Indians

“In 1622, it was my chance to land in New England, where I found two sortes of people, the one Christians and the other Infidels, these I found most full of humanity and more friendly than the other.”

“In month of June 1622, it was my chance to arrive with 30 servants and provision of all sorts for a plantation. And while our houses were abuilding I made a survey of the country. The more I looked the more I liked it…In mine eye ’twas Nature’s masterpiece; her chiefest magazine of all, where lives her store. If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor.”

Swans on the Merrimac
Geese – “I have often had 1,000 before the mouth of my gunne”
Turkeys – 48 pounds a piece
Taffels are short-trussed buzzards. The taffel gent (?) is an ornament for a person of estimation among the Indians to wear in the knot of his lock, with the traine upright, the body dried and stretched out.
A hummingbird no bigger than a giant beetle, which he eateth and catcheth among the flowers.

Codfish: 300 sayle of ships from divers parts yearly. 15-22 pounds share for a common man
A commodity better than the gold mines of Spanish Indies, for without dried cod, the Spaniard, Portugal and Italian would not be able to vittel a ship for sea.
Oyle from livers of cod.
Mackerels are baite for bass.
Sturgeon in England is regalia pisces; in New England every man may catch what he will.
Shads or allizes ( alewives) – 1,000 an acre for dunge
Dung their grounds with Cod.
Lobsters, an infinite store in all parts of land. The [savages] will meet 500 to 1000 at a place where lobsters come in with the tide to eat and save dried for storage. Abiding in that place, feasting and sporting for a month to six weeks together. ??POPULATION
Oysters: I have seen an oyster bank a mile in length.

At Mare-Mount there was a water (by me discussed) that is most excellent for the cure of melancholy.
Squanto’s Chapel ( a placed so called by us), a fountain that cause a dead sleep for 48 hours. Powwows at set time use it and reveal strange things to the vulgar people.

Deer: natives take in traps made of hemp rope, hoisted up by the leg
Acceptance of a black wolf skin is assurance of reconciliation between princes
40 beaver skins for one black wolf skin.
Bear will run away from man as fast as a little dog. Savages will drive him to their homes and kill him there to save carrying him there.
Muskrat “stones” – a most delicate perfume
Rattlesnake bite: salet oil (?)
Rats…the country is troubled with none.

A gold mine found by Captain Littleworth – “if he gets a patent of it to himself, he will surely change his name”

“Opinion of some men that the “natives of New England may proceed from the race of Tartars, and come from Tartaria into those parts across the frozen sea. – I see no probability for such conjecture…It may perhaps be granted that natives might originally have come from the scattered Trojans…Brutus did depart from Latium…storm… then they might sayle God knoweth where, and so might be put on this coast.”

Natives of New England : “gleanings of all nations.” – Approbation of Sir Christopher Gardiner, an able gent that lived among them and of David Varren, a Scottish gent, both scholars and travelers bold of conduct … “from the Trojans, after some time as Brutus departed from Latium.”

Population: 12,000

Sir William Alexander would grant that these people are “fine fide, fine legs, and fine rege…”
No religion: “It is absurd to say that they have a kind of worship…I am more willing to believe that elephants do worship the moon.”
Though without religion, law or king, they are not without knowledge of God.
Creation and flood stories
Heaven: House of Kytan toward the setting sun
Some touch of the immortality of the soul
They erect something over grave in the form of a hearse cloth.
Mourning: Keep annals and come to bewail their friend during mourning period. Afterwards they abandon the place because they suppose the sight their will renew their sorrow.

“Build their home much like the wild Irish.”

“They are no niggards with their vittels, for they are willing that anyone shall eat with them
“They use not to winter or summer in one place for that would be a reason to make fuel scarce”
“fire instruments”
Burn country twice a year at Spring and at the fall of the leaves.
Hunting and fishing places: In the spring they have their meetings from several places where they exercise themselves in gaming and playing and juggling tricks, and all manner of revels.

Apparel/description:
Needles made of splinter bones of a Cranes leg.
Threads of Indian hemp, furs and seals
Skins of very good leather, some that come from their neighbors. – The hairy side in winter they were next to their bodies; in warm weather they wear the hair outward.
Coats of feathers of turkeys woven together very prettily.
Moose skin mantles…dress bare and make them wondrous white and stripe them with fize, round about borders like lace
Shoes of “moose skins”
A good deerskin must have the tail on…This when they travel is wrapped around their bodies.
“Handsomer than when they are in English apparel”
Women: mantle they use to cover their nakedness is much longer than men’s. Two deerskin sewed together like a great ladies’ train.
“As much modesty as civilized people – to hide their secrets of nature”
Women wear a red cap at the ripeness of their age for all men to take notice of them that have mind to a wife.
Custom of some of their sachems to have first say or maidenhead of the females.
Pregnant: With burthens of their backs enough to load a horse, yet do they not miscarry but make a faire delivery. Very lusty after delivery and in a day or two will travel or trudge about.
“A bath of walnut leaves” for babe, as will stain skin of infants born white as our own nations.”
Cradleboard
Well proportioned, not one of them crooked backed or wry legged.

Reputation

“I told the father that his son was a bastard – a young infant whose eyes were gray”

Respect for elders: “The young men’s opinion shall be heard but old men’s council and opinion embraced and followed.
Powwow : “juggling tricks” “go under water to the far side of a river” “in the heart of summer make ice appear in a bowl.” “by Satan his consort.”
An Englishman cured of swelling with the help of the devil (as may be conjectured.)

“These savages are not apt to quarrel with one another, yet such hath been occasion that a duel hath occurred. A bow and arrow duel until one or both be slain. “I hath been shown places where such a duel took place and have found trees marked as a memorial to the combat. Survivor’s scars: “if on the arm and those are in most danger, they will always wear a bracelet upon that place on the arm, as a trophy of honor to their dying day.” M

Sachem of Saugus, daughter of Papafiquineo, sachem of territories near Merrimac. After wedding, she went to visit her father. At end of visit, he sent ambassadors to her husband to send for her. He replied that her father should provide escort. Old sachem was enraged. Young man refused to stoop so low. “When I came out of the country, the young lady remained still with her father. Neither would budge for sake of reputation.”

“Lye and steal”: these are with them capital crimes.

Wampum:
white = silver; violet = gold – “natives have known the counterfeit beads from those of their own making.”
Dainty maple bowls of high value among them
Salt: These people have begun to use salt. Many of them would beg salt of me to carry with them. Salt I would willingly give them though I sold them all things else.
Strong liquor: They will pawn their wits to purchase it. Yet in all the commerce I had with them I would hardly let any have a dram unless he were a sachem, a rich man ( winnaytue) or sagamore.
A drunken savage shot himself, barrel to breath, trigger with foot
Our beggars unwilling to go from the good ale tap.

“According to human reason, guided by the light of nature, these people lead the more happy and freer life, being void of care. Which torments the minds of so many Christians.”

Beaver tail = aphrodisiac – is of such masculine virtue that if some of our ladies know the benefit thereof, they would desire to have ships sent for the tail alone.

“These people are not dull or slender-witted, but very ingenious and very subtle.”
Perfection in use of their senses: “the sense of seeing so far beyond any of our nation that one would almost believe they had intelligence by the devil. Sight a ship at sea two hours sooner than any English man. Eyes black as jet.
I think they excel us in all the rest
Smell: distinguish between a Spaniard and a Frenchman by smell of hand only.
Trackers – deer path – digs up earth with knife and smells it.

Chickataubut told Morton and his people that the Narragansett had come to spy on Merry Mount – 100 Narraganset had come into Chickataubut’s dominions to fish and hunt – When Morton’s men put on armor, he sent for the Narraganset and “gulled them.”
“The English look like lobsters, all clad in harness.”

Lake of Erocoife to the west, 300 miles from Massachusetts, circumference of 200 miles at least, from this lake northward is derived the River of Canada. And from this lake south trends that goodly river called by the natives Potomak…from which it is navigable by shipping of great burthen up to the Falls (which lie in 41.5 deg north) = 42-43 deg north.)
Natives make report of three great rivers that flow out of this lake, the Potomak, the Canada, and may not the third which they describe tend westward, which is conceived to discharge into the South Sea? (Mississippi?) natives have seen in this river four-masted ships, which have taken for their lading earth which is conjectured to be mineral stuff.

Great herds of well-grown beasts that live by this lake such as the Christian world hath not been acquainted with: ?
“A discovery of those parts is undertaken by Henry Joseline and Captain John Mason, a true foster father and lover of vertue. (Seems like he is writing of a planned expedition.)

David Varren – Varren’s Island – A Scottish gentleman, a traveler and a scholar “quite observant of the habits of the Indians.” He was associated with Gorges. Came over in November 1622 bringing wife and four servants to New Hampshire. In 1626, he moved to MA. He died in 1628 leaving a wife, who was one of those who contributed to the expense of Standish’s arrest of Morton. Infant son to whom island occupied by father was granted.

Morton on the ‘people’: His men were no Separatists but men made choice of, at all adventurers “fit to have served for the furtherance of Mr. Weston’s undertaking.” When the Plymouth men began to find that Master Weston’s men’s store of provisions grew shorter with feasting, then they hastened them to a place called Wessagusset, in a weak case and there left them fasting.

Plymouth men defaced monument of the dead at Passonagesset by taking away the hearse cloth, which was two great bearskins sowed together at full length and propped up over the grave of Chickataubut’s mother.
Sachem’s oration re vision of mother and appeal re desecration.
To arms! Plymouth boat landing – “battle” forced them to leave. Chickataubut shot in elbow and fled. All followed.

Theft by a young Weston man of a cap of corn. native owner to plantation at Wessagusset. Trial. A felony punishable by death. “Let the sick person be hanged in his stead.” Young man’s clothes on one that was old and sickly and cannot escape death. Approached this man and by jest got him fast bound, and then hanged him hard by in good earnest. Edward Johnson was a special judge in this business. The victim was “a person that in his wrath seemed to be a second Sampson.”

After the end of that “parliament,” some of plantation went to live with Chickataubut and had good quarter – Plymouth men came and feasted with natives and then slaughtered them. (Standish)
Three who had gone to Chickataubut brained as they slept. Plantation was destroyed.

The natives of Massachusetts did from that time call the English planters wotawquenange or cutthroats, a name taken by those who came after, for good, not knowing the significance of it, until a Southern Indian who know English well told me what it meant many years later.

Weston arrived back to find his men dead/sick or at Plymouth. Plymouth entertained him and commiserated on the disaster at his plantation, blaming the natives.

And this as an article of the new creed of Canaan, would they have received of every newcomer, that the salvages are a dangerous people, subtle, secret, mischievous, and that it is dangerous to live separated, but rather together and to be under their lee that none might trade for beaver but at their pleasure.
But I have found the Massachusetts Indian more full of humanity than the Christians and have had much better quarter with them.
The more native the better quarter, the more Christian, the worse.”

Plymouth planters seeing Weston’s excellent trade goods resolved to cheat him out of them by confiscating his ship. Piracy. Weston to Virginia. – “The Brethren had it spread by and amongst his friends that he was mad.”

Oldham made to run gauntlet between musketeers and receive a “boss upon the bumme”/ With Layford (Lechford) to Wessagusset…

Country of New Canaan could show more children living that have been born there than in 27 years could be shown in Virginia. Yet there are but a handful of woman landed to those in Virginia.

“Master Bubble,” whose oratory lulled his adversary fast asleep. Running with his breeches on his head to escape the natives arrows, he was pitifully scratched.

Passonagesset to Mare Mount to set up a Maypole on the feast day of Philip and Jacob
80 foot pine and pair of buckhorns nailed near the top. A barrel of beer and a case of bottles.
A fair sea mark for directions how to find Mine Hoste of Ma-re-Mount.
A poem fixed to the maypole which puzzled the separatists most pitifully.
A lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists who lived at New Plymouth
An idol, the called it, the Calf of Hareb at Mount Dragon
“Lasses in beaver coats come away
You shall be welcome to us night and day.”
Separatists envying the prosperity of the plantation at Ma-re-Mount conspired together against Mine Host accounting of him a Great Monster.
Mine Host was a man that endeavored to advance the dignity of the Church of England.
Their great leader, Captain Shrimp (Standish)
Mine Host who was the son of a soldier capitulated to save bloodshed.

Pilgrims “translated out of Holland from whence they had learned to work all to their own ends and make a great show of religion, but no humility.”

Morton marooned on an island, where he stayed a month at least and was relieved by natives that took notice that mine host was a sachem of Passonagesset and would bring bottles of strong liquor and unite themselves in a brotherhood with mine host.
Sailed to England, where no man being able to taxe him of anything, he returned.
“Baccanall Triumphe!”

“A Puritan Doctor, born a butcher, sent to Salem. He made a great cure for Captain Littleworth…he cured him of a disease called a wife. A fitting plant for heaven.

Morton asks for a qualifier: “So as nothing be done contrary to the laws of England.”

“Temperwell” Winthrop… “These are the men that came to ride the land of all pollution.”
Arrival of seven ships: “They make of it a miraculous thing for these seven ships to set forth together and arrive at New Canaan together.”

A court is called for purpose of mine host: he there convened and must hear his doom before he go: nor will they admit him to capitulate, and know wherefore they are so violent to put such things in practice against a man they never saw before.
Morton’s neighbors: “The harmless savages did come, grievous poor silly lambs …came to speak for him in front of Winthrop.”
Burnt down his house… “this seat of cruel schismaticks.”
That he should first be put in the billbowes, his goods should be all confiscated, his Plantation should be burned to the ground, because the habitation of the wicked should no more appear in Israel and his person banished from those territories.
Mine host that afar on board ship did behold this woeful spectacle – all was burned to the ground.
“Great Joshua Temperwell”

A Punishment: to have his tongue bored through, his nose slit, his face branded, his ears cut, his body to be whipped in every plantation of their jurisdiction, and a fine of 40 pounds imposed with perpetual banishment.
Charity: I cannot perceive that the Separatists do allow of helping out the poor though they magnify their practice in contributing to the saints.

Morton’s offer to hunt for venison for poor refused “Such good must not come from a carnal man.”
But when “Shackles wife” (Deacon of Charlestown) was sick, he was provided with weapons to hunt.
“They are such antagonists to those that do not comply with them and seek to be admitted, to be of their church that in scorn they say :You may see what it is to be without.”
There is among these people a deaconess made of the sisters that uses her gifts at home in an assembly of her sex, by way of repetition, or exhortation.
The pastor must disclaim his former calling to the ministry as heretical, and take a new calling after their fanatical inventions.
There was one pastor who was expected to exercise his gifts in an assembly that stayed his coming (in the middle of his journey), falls into a fit which they term a zealous meditation) and was four miles pat the place appointed before he came to himself and did remember where about he went…

Unfitness to be messengers, as with Louis XI of France appointing his barber to a place of honor
A grocer, a saylor, a tapster, a cobbler

12 Tenets including 1) civil marriage 2) ‘ring” of the devil – no child baptism unless parents in church. Book of Common Prayer as an idol. Affirmation and not an oath…”in the manner of praying, they winke when they pray, because they think themselves so perfect in the highway to heaven that they can find it blindfold.”

After burning Mare-Mount, they couldn’t find a ship to carry mine host and were forced to be troubled with his company. They stood between Hawke and Buzzard…Shackles was employed in the burning of my house.

Sir Christopher Gardiner …in a short time they found the means to pick a quarrel with him… The Word is their means…and then this man is a spotted unclean leper. He must out lest he pollute the land and them that are clean. If this be one of their gifts, then Machiavelli had as good gifts as they:

Stick candles against a Virgin walls white back
If they’ll not burn yet at least they’ll black

I cannot but conclude that these Separatists have special gifts for they are given to envy and malice extremely.
Sir Christopher – they destroyed his house – was gone to lead a [savage] life.
“A separatist among the separatists.”

Timeline Background

1524 Giovanni da Verrazano explored North American coast for France. Narragansett Bay Native People visited with his crew
Late 1500s - early 1600s Native Peoples of eastern Massachusetts were allied in conflict against the Narragansett confederacy. Eastern Massachusetts groups were located at the endpoint of extensive trade network involving the French, Micmac, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy, and Eastern Abenaki.
1552: Casas, The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies, a protest against the treatment of Indians
1565: Smoking of tobacco introduced into England by John Hawkins
1568: Bernal Diaz del Castillo writes The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (1632)
1577 According to Hakluyt there were 150 French, 100 Spanish, 50 Portuguese ships fishing off the coast of Newfoundland but only 15 English vessels
1584: Sir Walter Raleigh sends a reconnaissance fleet under Captains Amadas and Barlow to the future Croatoan Sound, North Carolina. Based on their glowing account, he sends out a colonizing expedition the next year of 100 men who settle on Roanoke Island, among them artist John White and surveyor Thomas Harriot. Sir Francis Drake later takes the colonists back to England at their request.
1584 Richard Hakluyt wrote A Discourse Concerning Western Planting at the request of Raleigh for Queen Elizabeth I. Although she read it, it was not published until almost three centuries later by the Maine Historical Society.
1584 First book printed in Peru
1587: Raleigh sends out a fresh colony of 117 men, women, and children in three ships, with John White as governor.
1587: Virginia Dare, born at Roanoke Island
1588 Second English colony on Roanoke Island disappears, known as the Lost Colony/ English fleet defeats Spanish Armada
1590: White returns to find that settlers have disappeared, leaving "Croatoan" carved on a tree
1590 Shakespeare completes Henry VI, parts 2 and 3/part 1 is written in 1591
1594 JOHN WHEELWRIGHT, born, Lincolnshire, the son of Robert and Katherine Wheelwright of Saleby. Married, first Mary Storer, who died in 1629. He married second Mary Hutchinson, daughter of Edward and Mary Hutchinson. She was baptized in Alford , Lincoln on Dec 2 1605.
“His ancestors, no doubt, were of respectable standing in society, for he inherited a considerable real estate, which he disposed of in his last will. His parents had the good sense to bestow a portion of their wealth in giving their son a learned education. He had bright parts, and in youth was remarkable for the boldness, zeal and firmness of mind he displayed on all occasions. He was educated for the ministry, but embracing the Puritan sentiments, he necessarily incurred the censure of the church for non-conformity.” (Judge Smith)
1597 English Parliament orders workhouses built to house and feed paupers. Convicted criminals are transported to the colonies
1598: Don Juan Oñate establishes the colony of New Mexico by taking over a pueblo, which he renames San Juan, near modern-day Santa Fe. In retaliation for an attack on the settlement, he destroys the Acoma pueblo, killing 800 and capturing 500.
1600 English East India Company founded to carry out the spice trade with Asia
1602 Bartholomew Gosnold explored Vineyard Sound, Elizabeth Islands, Buzzards Bay region. First known attempt to establish a trading post in Wampanoag territory (Cuttyhunk Island) failed. Crew harvested sassafras for European market (Europeans believed it to have been a cure-all.)
1603 Martin Pring explored lower Cape Cod (Truro-Provincetown area); harvested sassafras and traded with Natives. Antagonized Natives with large dogs (mastiffs). Dogs, Foole (?) and Gallant
1603 Monopoly of the fur trade granted for 10 years to Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, by the King of France. The English and Dutch were far behind in developing fur trade.
1603 Champlain sails up the St. Lawrence River
1603 James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, becomes King James 1 of England.
1603 Bubonic plague breaks out in England, more than 30,000 people die in London – James 1 announced tolerance for Catholics in England.
1604 Galileo proves his law of gravity. Supposedly after dropping weights from the leaning Tower of Pisa
1605 MARY HUTCHINSON, born, Alford, Lincoln, baptized Dec 2, 1605
1605-06 Two voyages of Frenchmen, accompanied by Samuel de Champlain, reached as far south as Cape Cod. Several maps produced of Wampanoag settlements. Some trading and skirmishes occurred.
1605 Guy Fawkes and others are arrested for planning to blow up the English Parliament
1606 Colonial charters granted to the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth. Grants extended from Cape Fear, NC to St Croix R. The London Company was permitted to establish settlements in a tract between 34 and 41 degrees north latitude. The Plymouth Company was granted an equal tract between 38 and 45 degrees north latitude. The overlapping territory was a neutral zone where both companies could establish settlements.
1607: Establishment of Jamestown on the river of Powahatan, first permanent English colony inNorth America. Dispatched by the London Company. 100 colonists.
1607 Captain John Smith and two companions captured. Smith spared by the intercession of Pocahontas.
1607 Conspiracy against the Council of Jamestown. George Kendall, leader, shot.

1608 Colony of Quebec is established. Captain John Smith’s written account of the Virginia colony is considered the first American book.

1607/8 Virginia Company x Plymouth group formed a settlement near mouth of the Sagadahoc River in what is now Maine. Lasted for barely a year between the summers of 1607-1608.
1609/1610 Only 60 of the original 500 settlers survived the winter at Jamestown, some apparently by resorting to cannibalism
1610. Santa Fe is established as the new capital of New Mexico, with Pedro de Peralta as the governor of the new colony. William Strachey writes of a New World settlement in the area of the Bermudas. Some scholars think that shakespeare used this for The Tempest
1611 Edward Harlow captured five Natives in the Cape Cod region. Epenow, a sachem from Capowack (Martha's Vineyard), was one of them. He was later given to Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Plymouth, England.
1611: First Presbyterian congregation at Jamestown, VA, by Rev Alexamder Whitaker, a volunteer from the Cambridge Puritan community.
1611: As early as May 1611, the men of Jamestown played a game of BOWLS in the street, the first such event on record.
1611 James I dissolved parliament. Except for the Addled parliament of 1614, he rules without one until 1621. 1611 Authorized version of the Bible, called the King James Bible
1612-1613 John Smith’s expeditions in Massachusetts Bay
1612: Foundation of New York was laid when Dutch sent two ships to trade with Indians on the Hudson River. One year later a permanent settlement was established.
1612 John Rolfe discovers a method of curing tobacco so that large amounts can be exported. In 1614 large scale cultivation begins in Jamestown, VA.
1612 Two Unitarians are burned at the stake, the last hereitics to be burned in England

1613 The original Globe Theater burned down when a cannon was discharged during a performance. Rebuilt the following year

1613 Pocahontas baptized by Whitaker and given the name of Rebecca. – On August 14, she married the young planter Rolfe. On trip to England, John Smith introduced her to the royal court.

1614 ROBERT NANNY, born

Baptism at St. Dunstan’s Church, Stepney, Middlesex (now East London):
“Robert, sonne of ROBERT NANNYE of London, Grocer, borne in the house of Austine JAUNIE (?) of Mylend, was baptised the second daye of this month November 1614.”

“It was customary for the baptism to take place quite soon after the birth, usually within a few weeks or even within a few days. The reason for this was because the infant mortality rate was very high during the 1600s and so the parents usually wished the child to be baptised quite soon to prevent the possibility of the child dying unbaptized. This in the case of Robert Nanney junior I would imagine that he was born in September or October of 1614, or even on 1st or 2nd November.”

Mylend = Mile End, a hamlet in the parish of Stepney

ROBERT, SR = one of the sons of Hugh and Anne Nanney
Hugh Nanney (c 1546-1623) who was known as Hugh Nanney Hen

1614 Adriaen Block explores Long Island, Connecticut River and Narragansett Bay/Fur-trading post at Fort Nassau, near Albany
1614 Capt. John Smith explores the coast of New England, hoping to start a settlement/English colonists destroy the French colony at Port Royal, Nova Scotia
1614 June, Epenow escaped from English ship commanded by Nicholas Hobson. He had tricked them into bringing him back to Capowack under the pretense that he knew where gold ore was to be found. John Smith explored the coast from Monhegan Island (Maine) as far as the tip of Cape Cod. Thomas Hunt captured 20 men from Patuxet (including Tisquantum) and 7 men from Nauset to sell as slaves in Spain. Tisquantum taken to England on a Bristol ship. Wampanoag became hostile towards Europeans. Adriaen Block, Dutch, mapped the southern New England coast from the Hudson River to eastern Massachusetts.
1615 Franciscan friars arrive in Quebec and begin French missionary activity
c1616 A European epidemic started in Eastern Abenaki country (Maine). French ship wrecked off of Cape Cod; crew attacked and most killed. Three or four captives taken and dispersed to several Native towns (including Namasket and Massachusett). About this time another French ship attacked in Massachusetts Bay near Peddock's Island. Entire crew killed and the ship burned.
1616: John Smith, A Description of New England
1617: Women started to arrive in Virginia. Unlike the Puritans in the North, Virginia settlers came over “not as men, but more as soldiers sent out to occupy an enemy’s country.” Tobacco becomes the main industry in the New World. 50,000 pounds are exported to England.
1618 The epidemic reached Wampanoag country causing mass depopulation. Warfare with Narragansetts was interrupted. About this time Massasoit of Pokanoket submitted to Canonicus of Narragansett.
1618: In a move to compel church attendance, Gov Samuel Argall of Virginia declared that all who failed to attend would be imprisoned in the guardhouse…and be a slave for a week. Sunday dancing, fiddling, card playing, hunting, and fishing were also forbidden.
1618 Raleigh returns to England after failing to find gold on the Orinoco. He is executed under the old sentence of treason as redress to Spain.
1618 Puritans in England object to the playing of popular sports
1619 Thomas Dermer explored coast from Monhegan Island to Martha's Vineyard with Tisquantum as his guide. He met with Epenow on Capowack.
1619 First slaves arrived in Virginia, Dutch ship, selling 20 blacks at Jamestown.
1620 Thomas Dermer continued exploration of Wampanoag country. He was almost killed at Namasket in retaliation for murders of Wampanoag by Englishmen. August, Dermer attacked by Epenow's people on Capowack; most of the landing party killed, Dermer severely wounded and sailed to Virginia where he died. Tisquantum and Samoset, his guides, captured.
1620 November, Mayflower made landfall at Cape Cod – Mayflower Compact drafted and signed by 41 adult males; English skirmished with Nausets; later settled at Patuxet by late December. November 21
1620, December 26: Mary Chilton stepped from Mayflower, first person to set foot on Plymouth Rock 12 John Carver elected first governor. Plymouth Hill fortified.
1621 March 16, Samoset came to Plymouth; March 23, Massasoit and Quadequina made a treaty with Plymouth. Hobbamock moved with his family to Plymouth. July, Winslow and Hopkins visited Pokanoket with Tisquantum as guide; Massasoit agreed to trade relations with colony. August, Nausets returned John Billington, Jr. to colonists. Massasoit attacked by the Narragansetts; Conbatant incited Natives against the English, but failed when English supported Massasoit. Narragansetts sent peace offers to Plymouth. Epenow made peace with Plymouth. October, Pokanokets and others feasted with the colonists.
1621 First Thanksgiving, at Plymouth. First church built/ Dec 25: game playing on Christmas day halted by Governor William Bradford scandalized at the settlers playing such games as “pitching the barr” and “stoole ball”/ confiscated the equipment needed to play the games
1622-23 Settlement at Wessagussett (Weymouth)
1622 January, Narragansetts threatened Plymouth due to miscommunication. Plymouth sent counter-challenge. March, Tisquantum plotted against Massasoit and the plot was exposed by Hobbamock. Englishmen arrived to settle at Wessaguscusset (Weymouth). After settling there they antagonized the Massachuseuck by stealing their corn. December, Tisquantum died while on a corn trading voyage to Manamoyik (Cape Cod).
1622: First Indian massacre, led by Powhatan’s brother, almost wiped out the settlements outside Jamestown, VA, which was itself heavily fortified
1622: Province of Maine granted to John Mason and Ferdinando Gorges. It included land between the Merrimac and the Kennebec Rivers.
1622: Journal of William Bradford and Edward Winslow published, compiled from their notes and memoranda by George Morton – Mourt’s Relation

1622 Richelieu is made cardinal and puts down Protestant uprising in France. Parliament rebukes James 1 of England for meddling in affairs of state; James dissolves Parliament. Catholic League with Imperial Forces defeats revolutionary forces in the Palatinate

1623-1631 John Wheelwright was vicar of Bixby.

1623 Miles Standish conducts first organized war against the Indians while the men of Dorchester establish a fishing post on Cape Ann
1623 February, Massachuseuck began to solicit allies against the English. March, Massasoit ill and near death; Winslow and Hobbamock traveled to Pokanoket to see him; Winslow cured the sachem. Massasoit revealed to Hobbamock the plot against the English; Hobbamock relayed the information to the colonists. Standish took soldiers with Hobbamock to Wessaguscusset; killed Wituwamet, Peksuot, and five others. English dispersed from Wessaguscusset. July, Hobbamock witnessed Plymouth's prayers for rain that ended a six-week drought; he became interested in Christian religion. August, Massasoit, four other sachems, and 120 men invited to Gov. Bradford's wedding. November-December, Hobbamock accompanied Emmanuel Altham's voyage on the Little James to trade with the Narragansetts and others to the southward. The voyage was unsuccessful due to the Dutch West India Company's better trade goods.
Between 1624-1627 Plymouth became involved in the wampum trade to the southward.
1623 English build settlements at Dover and Portsmouth, New Hampshire
1623 The first single volume containing all of Shakespeare’s undisputed plays is published. By Heminges and Condell. This is referred to as the First Folio

1624 Establishment of New Netherlands
1624 Dutch West India Company established trade on the Hudson River at Fort Orange (Albany). Mohawks began war with the Mahicans, Sokokis, and Pocumtucs over trade with the Dutch.
1624: First Swedish colony in America was authorized by charter to the South Company of Sweden. No colony was established until 1638, New Sweden Company Charter
1624: The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles by John Smith
1624 Mar: First cattle brought to New England. Three heifers and one bull from Devon by Edward Winslow.

1625 Plymouth began trading surplus corn to the eastern Abenaki on the Kennebec River (Maine) for furs
1625 Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan, or Manhattes Island. 1626: Indians sold Manhattan Island for $24
1625 First child born in the Dutch settlement
1625 Charles 1 becomes King Of England succeeding his father, James I

1626 Plymouth built a pinnace at the Manomet River (Aptucxet) with a house to maintain it. The pinnace was used to voyage to Narragansett Bay to seek for the wampum trade.

1627 August, Plymouth and New Netherland made direct contact. October, Isaack de Rasiere visited Plymouth and sold them wampum to keep them from exploring for sources to the southward. Plymouth traded wampum on the Kennebec.
1627 1500 kidnapped children arrived in Virginia (?) A six year old kidnapped by a sailor and sold in Ame5rica, married his master’s daughter, inherited his fortune and bought the sailor, by then a prisoner. (Carruth)
1627 English established settlement in Barbados. French, Dutch and English begin settling the West Indies region and fighting for control of the islands

1622 Weston settles at Wessagusset
1623 Gorges at Wessagusset
1625 Blackstone to Shawmut, Maverick to Winnisimmet, now Chelsea. Thomas Walford and wife at Mishawum, and thus became the first white settlers of Charlestown. Morton and Wollaston at Wollaston Lyford and Oldham banished from Plymouth.
1626 Conant founds Salem
1626 Thomson settles Thomson’s island
1629 Salem colonists start community at Mishawum (Charlestown)
1630 June 12 Old Style John Winthrop lands at Salem
1630 July 1 about – Puritans settle at Charlestown.

Adams, CF : Three episodes of Massachusetts History

“savages died like rotten sheep”
Attack on French ship…”several years later one of those involved. Pecksuot by name, excitedly recounted its details to some half-starved, trembling settlers.

Squantum’s Rock…derivation of name far fetched…An Indian woman was supposed to have put an end to herself by springing from the bold crag which forms the peninsula’s eastern extremity and is still known as Squaw Rock. Even John Adams speaks of the high-steep rock from whence the squaw threw herself who gave the name to the place.”

Ferdinando Gorges, b 1566-1569
Captain in force sent to relieve Sluys when that place was besieged by the Duke of Parma
Prisoner of war at Lisle
In 1589 engaged in siege of Paris and was said to have been borne wounded from the beach by Henry of Navarre himself.
Two years later he was one of the officers sent over by Elizabeth under Earl of Essex to assist the Huguenots and took active part in the siege of Rouen.

A few years later he was made military governor of Plymouth
In 1597, when Ferrol expedition sent against Spain, Gorges was appointed one of the controller of Essex, with rank of sergeant major. In charge of the Dreadnought
Fleet dispersed by a gale and returned. He stayed home because of ill-health.
Gorges and Essex conspiracy and trial. “It was this darling, this protector of Puritans that Gorges was thought to have portrayed.”

Robert Gorges settlement…”Not impossibly, though it is a mere surmise unsustained by evidence Blaxton may originally have been deigned to task charge of the Plymouth pulpit while Morrell himself was to minister at the Bay.

Landed at Wessagusset and occupied the buildings abandoned by the Weston settlers.
“Locked up in a desert of ice and snow – inhabiting a log hut on the edge of a salt marsh, with a howling, unexplored forest behind and about them.”
Robert left in Spring taking with his personal friends and relations and leaving Morrell in charge.
Weston “ a coarse English huckster” and Gorges “an ambitious and apparently brainless boy”
Spring 1625 Morrell also returned to England
Indians:
“They’re wondrous cruel, strangely base and vile,
Quickly displeased and hardly reconciled.
Themselves they warm, their ungirt limbes they rest
In straw, and houses, like to sties.

With the Indian women he was more favorably impressed and gives a pretty picture of their baskets wrought with art and line and the straw hangings in which they wove “Rare stories, princes, people, kingdoms, towers
In curious fingerworke, or parchment flowers.”

In preface Morell writes of the unsuitability of place…”never so fruitless or inconvenient for planting, building houses, boats or stages, or the harbors never so unfit for fishing, fowling, or moving their boats.”

Morton “with a keen love of nature he found himself for a whole season rambling in virgin wilderness, Passionately fond of sport…He had come to the bay while it shone with the freshness of June, and roamed it during July and August and had gone away in autumn leaving with Andrew Weston.

A couple of miles north of Wessagusset, on the other side of the Monatoquit and within limits of what is now Quincy was a place called by the Indians, Passonagesset. It was a spacious upland, rising gently from the beach, and eight of a mile or so from it, swelling into a hill. It lay at the mouth of a creek which emptied into a quiet tidal bay formed by two promontories a couple of miles apart. But there was no deep water and accept at the flood of tide, it could be approached only in boats. Nevertheless among and behind the neighboring islands, there were god and ample anchorage grounds, and so far as planting was concerned, they spot they had chosen, lying as it did close to the MA Fields, had some years before been cleared of trees by the sachem Chickataubut, who had made his place of dwelling there until the pestilence, when he had abandoned it. As Passonagesset, he had buried his mother.

There is evidence that Blaxton paid the tax of 12 shillings toward the expense of arresting Morton…

Lyford made to walk the gauntlet at Plymouth and leave the country”
“This happened at about the time of Wollaston’s arrival; and not improbably during the same season Blaxton and others of the Wessagusset settlement moved across to the north side of Boston Bay.”

Summer 1629, arrival of Mary and John to drop off about 100 passengers at Hull… Report of Roger Clapp
“We went in the boat to Charlestown, where we found some wigwams and one house; and in the house there was a man that had a boiled bass, but no bread that we see. But we then went up the Charles river until the river grew narrow and shallow, and there we landed our goods with much labor and toil, the bank being steep and the night coming on, we were informed that there were by us three hundred Indians. One Englishman that could speak the Indian language (an old planter) went to them , and advised them not to come near us in the night; and they harkened to his counsel and came not….”
The old planter who could speak the Indian tongue was probably Blaxton, though it may have been Walford….place they landed was at the arsenal in Watertown.

In May 1646, Fernando Gorges died at Long Ashton. H did not own the place but for 16 years had lived there as husband of Dame Elizabeth, relict of Sir Hugh Smith, who married Sir Ferdinando in 1629.

HORNCASTLE: Education in a market town J.N. Clarke 1976

There have been schools in Horncastle since the early 14th century, and probably before that. In the archives of Lincoln Cathedral is a document showing that in 1329, the Dean and Chapter appointed one John of Beverley as headmaster of the school of Horncastle.

In 1571, Queen Elizabeth granted a charter for a new grammar school. It is important to note that this was for a free school as the Lent Assizes held at Lincoln in 1746 confirmed: The said letters patent extended only to such boys to be free of the said school whose parents lived within the said Towne and Soke of Horncastle and not to boys who were sent to be boarded there. The inclusion of five yeoman in the first board of governors as approved by the charter shows that the school was intended to cater for children from all classes of society.

Gove Hopkins in his account of Providence : “William Blackstone came and settled by the side of the Pawtucket River…at this, his new plantation, he lived uninterrupted for many years and there again raised an orchard, the first that ever bore apples in the colony of Rhode Island; he had the first of that sort, called yellow sweetings, that were ever in the world, perhaps the richest and sweetest apple of the whole kind; many of the trees he planted about one hundred and thirty years ago are still pretty thrifty bearing fruit (1765).

Tradition that a grandson of William fell at the siege of Louisburg.

1675 Plymouth Court re land to step son John Stevenson…(?) son in law? – “and forasmuch as the personal estate of the said William Blackstone is so small and inconsiderable that he cannot be relieved out of it….” Wife’s son, who was 14 when he married her.

DA Costa:

“Blaxton as John the Baptist…”.

“And this place was called Boston…which it must be remembered was from Boston or “Botolph” …Thus the colonists who hated saint worship out themselves under the guardianship of St Botolph, whose bones were carried in procession at Bury, when the people wanted rain.

Sept 7, 1630, the Court of Assistants formally ordered that “Trimountain be called Boston” Oct 19m Blaxton was admitted as a freeman but the ext year it was voted that only those should be freeman who joined the Church,…

Johnson in Wonder Working Providence ….speaking of the distress that prevailed in 1629: “All this while little likelihood there was of building the temple for God’s worship, there being only two that begun to hew stones in the mountain, the one named Mr. Bright and the other Mr. Blaxton, and one of them began to build, but when they saw all sorts of stones would not fit in the building, as they supposed, the one betook himself to the Seas again, and the other to till the land, retaining no symbol of his former profession but a canonical coat.”

Bright came like the Browns, expecting to enjoy a free church in a free state. The Browns at Salem reproached Skelton and Higginson for their course, and they were put on a ship back to England. Bright was more careful and came to Charlestown… Mather says that Blaxton and Bright began to hew while Bright began to build…

Blaxton was in advance of his age. Within and without the church, he saw intolerance, and feeling his inability to contend, he sought a home in the New World, whither he did not expect intolerance to follow. He was willing to be sequestered if thereby he could maintain his consistency and independence. He also possessed a taste for the contemplative life…He stood as regard the high handed tyranny of the bishops, where every churchman stands today….”

Horncastle: Lincolnshire in the 17th and 18th centuries…
“The spread of Puritan doctrines resulted in the suppression of church ales, revels, Sunday dancing and the acting of plays….In 1606 the churchwarden of Pinchbeck were in trouble for allowing stoolball play on the Sabbath. Later it was complained that….Thomas Gibson, the Vicar of Horncastle, had many times on the Lord’s Day gone shooting in the afternoon and urged his neighbors to do the like.

Pack horses: fine strapping broad-chested Lincolnshire animals were these pack horses bearing on either side their packs of merchandise to the weight of half a ton.”

Rude surroundings bred rude people…Arthur Young described the cottage at Leake and Wrangle as a lawless set, and stated that the Wildmore Fen between Boston and Horncastle produced a race as wild as the fen.

Horse races at Toynton, near Horncastle

John Wesley….two of his staunchest adherents who saved him from the mob at Horncastle…

Oatmeal was the chief food of the poor in the neighborhood of Horncastle in 1627

It will be remembered that in 1662 two thousand clergymen seceded from the Cof E rather than submit to the act of uniformity. These were called Non-Conformists as in fact were any who after the advent of Protestantism refused to submit fully to the customs and practice of the Episcopal Church in England.

------------

Bradford’s journal: “and also Mr. Thomas Weston, a merchant of London, came to Leyden about the same time (who was well acquainted with some of them and a furtherer of them in their former proceedings) having much conference with Mr. Robinson and others, persuaded them to go on and not to meddle with the Dutch or too much to depend on the Virginia Company…And not so much for himself as for the satisfying of such friends as he should procure to venture in this business, they were to draw such articles of agreement and make such propositions as might the better induce his friends to venture.

Patent in the name of John Wincop, one of three clergymen brothers, was a tutor or chaplain in the house of Thomas Fiennes-Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, who died 15 January 1619…

And by this time they also heard from Mr. Weston and others, that sundry Hon Lords had obtained a large grant from the king of the more northerly parts of that country, derived out of the Virginia patents and wholly secluded from their government, and to be called by another name, viz New England.

“You know right well we depended on Mr. Weston alone.”

Argument with Weston at Southampton re refusal to accept revised conditions. He refused to pay L100 needed for final supplies…”they were forced to sell off some of their provisions to cover gap.” Fifth and ninth items re seven years and division of assets etc

“As for Mr. Weston, except grace do greatly sway him, he will hate us ten times more than he ever loved us, for not confirming the conditions.

“Landfall Nov 9 below Chatham…turns round… Being thus arrived at Cape Cod Nov 11….Standish and 11 set forth on 15th…clash with the Indians

Monday 11/21 Dec 1620 landing at Plymouth Rock

Jan and Feb “The Starving Time”…Trouble with the crew of the Mayflower.. For they that before had been boon companions in drinking and jollity in the time of their health and welfare began now to desert one another in this calamity, saying they would not hazard their lives for them.

Indians skulking about but about the 16 March an Indian came and spoke to them in broken English.. Samoset
Then came Massasoit and Squanto….

Spring…Mayflower sent home, no word in diary about trade goods etc. Winslow visit to Massasoit…came home hungry…

April 1621 Carver dies and Bradford become gov…

21 Sept they sent their shallop to the Massachusett.. first mention of TRADE:

“to discover and view that bay and trade with the natives. The which they performed and found kind entertainment….They returned in safety and brought home a good quantity of beaver, and made report of the place, wishing they had been there seated.” - f. “fur trade began in summer of 1621 under guidance of Squanto”

November arrival of Fortune with 35 persons…”most of them were lusty young men, and many of them wild enough”…Weston sends letter which Bradford “cuts”…re empty ship etc. “We have procured you a charter, the best we could, which is better than your former, and with less limitation” (Peirce Patent…signed and sealed by Dukes of etc….AND Sir Ferdinando Gorges.)

Quickly filled Fortune with clapboard and two hogsheads of beaver otter etc worth L500

(Later, though the Fortune robbed by pirates, Weston writes that the potential offered by the cargo greatly “animates the Adventurers..” In same letter, he says he has sold his venture and debts and is out of the company..” He advises them to break off their own joint stock-holding and go it alone…”most of them are against the sending of them of Leyden, for whose cause this business was first begun, and some of the most religious (as Mr. Greene by name) excepts against them” …Greene and Pickering letter attacks Weston…”the company are very glad they are rid of him” Alleges that Andrew Weston is on his way to steal any shipload of goods they have ready etc. …Weston intercepted letter and sent it to Bradford + his reply.

Cushman letter re Weston fleet of three ships… I fear these people will hardly deal with the natives as the should. I pray you therefore signify to Squanto that they are a distinct body from us and we have nothing to do with them, neither must be blamed for their faults… YET it was Standish and the Plymouth company who treacherously massacred the Indians at Wessagusset.

But Bradford says Weston forsook them before he heard of the ship and her cargo…And replies re the loss of life of greater value than any freighting of the ship…Accuses people of lying to Weston re ‘discoursing and consulting”

? To now virtually nothing said about their worship in America

Christmas Day: Forbidding playing of stool-ball etc.

Sparrow sent to fish by Weston arrives with 7 passengers.. end May 1622

Letter from Weston re more settlers – Complaints about having to feed them from Bradford…But what other purpose the making of a settlement? Or was it because they were “strangers” not “saints”?

But “partly in regard of Mr. Weston himself”???? they received his company of seven + 60 and victualed them as their own….”They stayed here the most part of the summer till the ship came back again from Virginia…Then they removed into the MA Bay…yet they left all their sick folk here till they were settled and housed….but of their victuals they had not any, though they were in great want, nor anything else in recompense of any courtesy done them.”…

SM fn. “Weston’s 60 lusty men sponged on the Pilgrims until September 1625, the sick ones still longer…” And what of Christian charity??

News comes of the Virginia massacre…Building of fort…? Surely it would have made sense to keep ranks filled with as many able bodied men as possible.

Next entry talks of those among them stealing corn…”and though many were well whipped when they were taken for a few ears of corn, yet hunger made others, whom conscience did not restrain, venture..” This after dismissing the Weston people as disruly etc.

“Weston’s men sent Swan per “condescension of Bradford”…He used it to go south and trade for 26-28 hogsheads of corn and beans…”

Winter….And messenger from Mr. Saunders who was left chief of Mr. Weston’s men who brought a letter showing the great wants they had fallen into…and he would have borrowed a hogshead of corn of the Indians, but they would lend him none…and he desired advice whether he might take it by force…” They had their own patent…WHY would he ask permission?

1623 “Sad straits of Weston’s men and the Great Indian Conspiracy”

“great disorder…they spent (food) excessively whilst they could get it; and wasted part away among the Indians; for he that was their chief was taxed by some among them for keeping Indian women, how truly I know not. And when they came into want, many sold away their clothing and bed coverings; others (so base were they) became servants to the Indians; and would cut them wood and fetch them water for a capful of corn; others fell to plain stealing…”

“in the end their were fain to hang one of their men who they could not reclaim from stealing to give the Indians content.”

All that he says about massacre of Indians… “cut off some few of the chief conspirators” No more…

“Shortly after Mr. Weston came over under the guise of a blacksmith and with another name.”…pillaged and stripped by the Indians at Merrimac? To Plymouth: “A strange alteration there was in him, to such as had seen and known him in his former flourishing condition…” 100 beaver skins “thus they helped him when all the world failed him”

Now John Pierce cheats the Pilgrims”

The Plantation/ Francis West

Anne, Little James latter lost at sea…Anne was 140 tuns.. 60 for the General…And besides there came a company that did not belong to the General Body but came on their Particular and were to have lands assigned them and be for themselves, yet be subject to the general government; which caused some difference and disturbance among them as will appear after

Letter from adventurers: “being honest men they will be a strengthening to the place and good neighbors to you.”

Two things we should advise you a) the trade for skins to be retained for the general until the dividend; their setting by you with such distance of place as is neither inconvenient for the lying of your lands, nor hurtful to your speedy and easy assembling together.”

“And seeing by God’s providence that place fell to your lot, let it be accounted as your portion, and rather fix your eyes on that which may be done there than languish in hopes after things elsewhere. If your place be not the best, it is better’ you shall be the less envied and encroached upon; and such as are earthly minded will not settle near your border. If the land afford you bread and the sea yield fish, rest you a while contented. God will one day afford you better fare.
Let it not be grievous to you that you have been instruments to break the ice for others who come after with less difficulty; the honor shall be yours to the world’s end…”…This letter was subscribed with the names of 13 Adventurers.

Drought and a miracle prayer for rain…

“on the other hand, the Old Planters were afraid that their corn, when it was ripe, should be imparted to the newcomers whose provisions which they brought with them they feared would fall short., as indeed it did.”

Who were these who came on their Particular??? Agreement with the Newcomers etc…”that they are to be wholly debarred from all grade with the Indians, for all sorts of furs and such like commodities, till the time of the communality be ended.

SEM: note now “Wessagussett deserted by Weston’s beachcombers!”

About the middle of September arrived Robert Gorges with sundry passengers and families…and pitched upon the place Mr. Weston’s people had forsaken. He had a commission from the CNE to be general governor of the country, and they appointed his counsel and assistance, West, the aforesaid admiral, Capt Levett Esq. And the gov of Plymouth for the time being etc.

He gave them notice of his arrival by letter…left eastward…storm to Plymouth where “ he and his men were kindly entertained; he stayed here 14 days

Weston comes in the Swan and is summoned before Court…charged with disturbing peace etc. Weston said he was not present. Second charge was re selling arms in Europe

Brief paragraphs re the Gorges settlement… The governor and some that depended on him returned to England, having scarcely saluted the country in his government, not finding the state of things here to answer his quality and condition. The people dispersed themselves, some were for England; some for Virginia; some few remained and were helped with supplies from here.

The Governor brought over a Minister with him, one Mr. Morrell, who about a year after the governor returned took shipping from here. He had I know not what power and authority of superintendency over other churches granted him, and sundry instructions for that end, but he never showed it or made any use of it. (It should seem he saw it was in vain.) He only spoke of it to some here at his going away. This was in effect the end of a second plantation at this place.

There were also in this year some scattering beginnings in other places, as at Piscataqua by Mr. David Thompson, at Monhegan, and some other places.

BUT “Some of those that still remained here on their particular began privately to nourish a faction, and being privy to a strong faction that was among the Adventurers in England, on whom sundry of them did depend. By their private whispering they drew some of the weaker sort of the company to their side, and so filled them with discontent as nothing would satisfy them except they might be suffered to be in their particular also.

Then the Governor turned to Mr. Lyford and asked if he thought he had done evil by opening and reading his letters…Lyford’s letters basically accused them of intolerance, which they denied.. “That the church would have none to live here but themselves; that if there came over any honest men not of the separation, they will quickly distaste them…that they utterly sought the ruin of the Particulars.. This they denied “ did lend and give to them when they wanted” (?)

Lyford confessed in tears….allowed back as a teacher but then fell to his old ways and was expelled along with Oldham.

Lyford new letter to Adventurers… "here I propose not to abide unless I receive better encouragement from you than from the church ( as they call themselves)….My min d was not to enlarge myself any further, but in respect of divers poor souls here, the care of whom in part belongs to you, being here destitute of the means of salvation. For howsoever the church are provided for to their content, who are the smallest number in the Colony, and so appropriate the ministry to themselves, holding this principle, that the Lord hath not appointed any ordinary minister for the conversion of those that are without. So that some of the poor souls have with tears complained of this to me, and I was taxed for preaching to all in general. Though in truth they have had no ministry here since they came, but such as may be performed by any of you by their own position, whatsoever great pretences they make.
“Respectfully yours, John Lyford, Exile

That if God in his providence had not brought these things to their hands…IE the purloined letters….they might have been thus abused etc.

Spring 1625 Oldham and Lyford disposed of:

It pleased God…Oldham storm, sick and finally murdered by Indians

Lyford…wife spoke out against him revealing his bastards etc. “she feared to fall into the Indians’ hands and so be defiled by them as he had defiled other women.” Lyford raped young woman in Ireland while helping her decide on her fiancé??? For though he satisfied his lust on her, yet he endeavored to hinder conception.

BRADFORD:

In the meantime, it makes the Indians of these parts rich and powerful and also proud thereby, and fills them with pieces, powder and shot, which no laws can restrain, by reason of the baseness of sundry unworthy persons, both English, Dutch and French, which may turn to the ruin of many. Hitherto the Indians of these parts had no pieces nor other arms but their bows and arrows, nor of many years after; neither durst they scarce handle a gun, so much were they afraid of them. And the very sight of one (though out of kilter) was a terror unto them. But those Indians to the east parts, which had commerce with the French, got pieces of them, and they in the end made a common trade of it. And in time our English fishermen, led with the like covetousness, followed their example for their own gain. But upon complaint against them, it pleased the King's Majesty to prohibit the same by a strict proclamation, commanding that no sort of arms or munition should by any of his subjects be traded with them.

[Thomas Morton of Merrymount]

About some three or four years before this time, there came over one Captain Wollaston (a man of pretty parts) and with him three or four more of some eminency, who brought with them a great many servants, with provisions and other implements for to begin a plantation. And pitched themselves in a place within the Massachusetts which they called after their Captain's name, Mount Wollaston. Amongst whom was one Mr. Morton, who it should seem had some small adventure of his own or other men's amongst them, but had little respect amongst them, and was slighted by the meanest servants.' Having continued there some time, and not finding things to answer their expectations nor profit to arise as they looked for, Captain Wollaston takes a great part of the servants and transports them to Virginia, where he puts them off at good rates, selling their time to other men; and writes back to one Mr. Rasdall (one of his chief partners and accounted their merchant) to bring another part of them to Virginia likewise, intending to put them off there as he had done the rest.

And he, with the consent of the said Rasdall, appointed one Fitcher to be his Lieutenant and govern the remains of the Plantation till he or Rasdall returned to take further order thereabout. But this Morton abovesaid, having more craft than honesty (who had been a kind of pettifogger of Furnival's Inn) in the others' absence watches an opportunity (commons being but hard amongst them) and got some strong drink and other junkets and made them a feast; and after they were merry, he began to tell them he would give them good counse1.

"You see," saith he, "that many of your fellows are carried to Virginia, and if you stay till this Rasdall return, you will also be carried away and sold for slaves with the rest. Therefore I would advise you to thrust out this Lieutenant Fitcher, and I, having a part in the Plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociates; so may you be free from service, and we will converse, plant, trade, and live together as equals and support and protect one another," or to like effect. This counsel was easily received, so they took opportunity and thrust Lieutenant Fitcher out of doors, and would suffer him to come no more amongst them, but
forced him to seek bread to eat and other relief from his neighbors till he could get passage for England.

After this they fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained (as it were) a School of Atheism. And after they had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess (and, as some reported) LL10 worth in a morning. They also setup a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days` together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices o£ the mad Bacchanalians.

Morton likewise, to show his poetry composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idol maypole.' They changed also the name of their place, and instead of calling it Mount Wollaston they call it Merry mount,' as if this jollity would have lasted ever. But this continued not long, for after Morton was sent for England (as follows to be declared) shortly after came over that worthy gentleman Mr. John Endecott, who brought over a patent under the broad seal for the government of the Massachusetts. Who, visiting those parts, caused that maypole to be cut down and rebuked them for their profaneness and admonished them to look there should be better walking. So they or others now changed the name of their place again and called it Mount Dagon.

Now to maintain this riotous prodigality and profuse excess, Morton, thinking himself lawless, and hearing what gain the French and fishermen made by trading of pieces, powder and shot to the Indians, he as the head o£ this consortship began the practice of the same in these parts. And first he taught them how to use them, to charge and discharge, and what proportion of powder to give the piece, according to the size or bigness of the same; and what shot to use for fowl and what for deer. And having thus instructed them, he employed some of them to hunt and fowl for him, so as they became far more active in that employment than any of the English, by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body, being also quick sighted and by continual exercise well knowing the haunts of all sorts of game. as when they saw the execution that a piece would do, and the benefit that might come by the same, they became mad (as it were) after them and would not stick to give any price they could attain to for them; accounting their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison of them.

And here I may take occasion to bewail the mischief that this wicked man began in these parts, and which since, base covetousness prevailing in men that should know better, has now at length got the upper hand and made this thing common, notwithstanding any laws to the contrary. So as the Indians are full of pieces all over, both fowling pieces, muskets, pistols, etc. They have also their moulds to make shot of all sorts, as musket bullets, pistol bullets, swan and goose shot, and of smaller sorts. Yea some have seen them have their screw plates to make screw pins themselves when they want them, : with sundry other implements, wherewith they are ordinarily better fitted and furnished than the English themselves.

Yea, it is well known that they will have powder and shot when the English want it nor cannot get it; and that in a time of war or danger, as experience hath manifested, that when lead hath been scarce and men for their own defense would gladly have given a groat a pound, which is dear enough, yet hath it been bought up and sent to other places and sold to such as trade it with the Indians at 12d the pound. And it is like they
give 3s or 4s the pound, for they will have it at any rate. And these things have been done in the same times when some of their neighbors and friends are daily killed by the Indians, or are in danger thereof and live but at the Indians' mercy. Yea some, as they have acquainted them with all other things, have told them how gunpowder is made, and all the materials in it, and that they are to be had in their own land; and I am confident, could they attain to make saltpeter, they would teach them to make powder.

O, the horribleness of this villainy! How many both Dutch and English have been lately slain by those Indians thus furnished, and no remedy provided; nay, the evil more increased, and the blood of their brethren sold for gain (as is to be feared) and in what danger all these colonies are in is too well known. O that princes and parliaments would take some timely order to prevent this mischief and at length to suppress it by some exemplary punishment upon some of these gain thirsty murderers, for they deserve no better title, before their colonies in these parts be overthrown by these barbarous savages thus armed with their own weapons, by these evil instruments and traitors to their neighbors and country! But I have forgot myself and have been too long in this digression; but now to return.

This Morton having thus taught them the use of pieces, he sold them all he could spare, and he and his consorts determined to send for many out of England and had by some of the ships sent for above a score. The which being known, and his neighbors meeting the Indians in the woods armed with guns in this sort, it was a terror unto them who lived stragglingly and were of no strength in any place. And other places (though more remote) saw this mischief would quickly spread over all, if not prevented. Besides, they saw they should keep no servants, for Morton would entertain any, how vile soever, and all the scum of the country or any discontents would flock to him from all places, if this nest was not broken. And they should stand in more fear of their lives and goods in short time from this wicked and debased crew than from the savages themselves.

So sundry of the chief of the straggling plantations, meeting together, agreed by mutual consent to solicit those of Plymouth (who were then of more strength than them all) to join with them to prevent the further growth of this mischief, and suppress Morton and his consorts before they grew to further head and strength. Those that joined in this action, and after contributed to the charge of sending him for England, were from Piscataqua, Naumkeag, Winnisimmet, Wessagusset, Nantasket and other places where any English were seated.' Those of Plymouth being thus sought to by their messengers and letters, and weighing both their reasons and the common danger, were willing to afford them their help though themselves had least cause of fear or hurt. So, to be short, they first resolved jointly to write to him, and in a friendly and neighborly way to admonish him to forbear those courses, and sent a messenger with their letters to bring his answer.

But he was so high as he scorned all advice, and. asked who had to do with him, he had and would trade pieces with the Indians, in despite of all, with many other scurrilous terms full of disdain. They sent to him a second time and bade him be better advised and more temperate in his terms, for the country could not bear the injury he did. It was against their common safety and against the King's proclamation. He answered in high terms as before; and that the King's proclamation was no law, demanding what penalty was upon it. It was answered, more than he could bear -- His Majesty's displeasure.

But insolently he persisted and said the King was dead and his displeasure with him, and many the like things. And threatened withal that if any came to molest him, let them look to themselves for he would prepare for them.
Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by force; and having so far proceeded, now to give over would make him far more haughty and insolent. So they mutually resolved to proceed, and obtained of the Governor of Plymouth to send Captain Standish and some other aid with him, to take Morton by force. The which accordingly was done. But they found him to stand stiffly in his defense, having made fast his doors, armed his consorts, set divers dishes of powder and bullets ready
on the table; and if they had not been over armed with drink, more hurt might have been done.

They summoned him to yield, but he kept his house and they could get nothing but scoffs and scorns from him. But at length, fearing they would do some violence to the house, he and some of his crew came out, but not to yield but to shoot; but they were so steeled with drink as their pieces were too heavy for them. Himself with a carbine, overcharged and almost half filled with powder and shot, as was after found, had thought to have shot Captain Standish; but he stepped to him and put by his piece and took him. Neither was there any hurt done to any of either side, save that one was so drunk that he ran his own nose upon the point of a sword that one held before him, as he entered the house; but he lost but a little of his hot blood.

Morton they brought away to Plymouth, where he was kept till a ship went from the Isle of Shoals for England, with which he was sent to the Council of New England, and letters written to give them information of his course and carriage. And also one was sent at their common charge to inform their Honors more particularly and to prosecute against him. But he fooled of the messenger, after he was gone from hence, and though he went for England yet nothing was done to him, not so much as rebuked, for aught was heard, but returned the next year. Some of the worst of the company were dispersed and some of the more modest kept the house till he should be heard from. But I have been too long about so unworthy a person, and bad a cause."