ALIEN ABDUCTIONS


Pages showing navigational aids from Jewell of the Arte, unpublished manuscript by Captain George Waymouth, presented to King James I of England in 1604 in a quest for employment. James Rosier, in his account of Waymouth's 1605 expedition to the coast of Maine, describes the captain taking readings with his instruments, but he kept the results secret. Two copies of Waymouth's book have survived. This one is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.


B


THE RICHARD AFFAIR 1606,


the


y the end of the next summer, in August


two Abenaki


lodged with Gorges sailed from Plymouth on a ship called the Rich-


ard, captained by Henry Challons and bound for “North Virginia,” their home Mawooshin. (The account printed in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625 spells their names Mannido and Assa- comoit, but they are still clearly the people in question.) Popham and Gorges, with a group of West Country investors, stocked the ship with 12 months of supplies and men willing to stay in America. It was their bid to beat Jamestown as the first permanent English set- tlement in North America, and the Abenakis’ chance to go home, but it ended in a complex diplomatic disaster. The trouble began when the captain ig-


nored Gorges’ instruction to take the direct northern route used by Waymouth. (Gorges argued that the Indian passengers could serve as pilots along the Maine coast.) Like more timid mariners, Challons sailed south to the


38 AMERICAN INDIAN FALL 2015


Canaries and then west to the Caribbean be- fore coasting North. The route was much lon- ger and fraught with delays. After adventures in the West Indies, the Richard headed north in a great storm, and on a foggy morning in November suddenly found itself in the middle of a Spanish fleet. With three sails to the wind- ward and more ships emerging from the mist to the lee, Captain Challons had no chance to flee. As Spanish fire shredded his mainsail, he hove to and instead sought to explain himself to the Spanish admiral. Even though Spain was then formally at


peace with England, the Spaniards were in no mood to listen. A boarding party armed with swords and half-pikes roughed up the English sailors. Assacomoit took the worst wounds. He was stabbed “most cruelly several places in the body and thrust quite through the arme,” reported John Stoneman, pilot of the Richard. Panicked and baffled, “the poor creature” had tried to hide under a locker. As the Spaniards stabbed at him, “he cried still, ‘King James,


King James, King James his ship, King James his ship!’” Assacomoit had apparently been mis-


informed about the extent of the English monarch’s influence. The Spaniards seized the ship’s supplies as spoils. They divided the 30 crewmen among their own vessels and took them back to Seville, commencing months of protests, lawsuits and pleas for the release of the English, and the Abenaki. Gorges wrote an over-optimistic letter to


Captain Challons in March, urging him not to accept a settlement of less than 5,000 pounds for damages. “For you knowe that the journey hath bene noe smale Chardge unto us that first sent to the Coast and had for our returne but the five salvadges whereof two of the principall you had with you.” But as the affair dragged on, Challons and Gorges lost touch with the Abenaki. “The Indians ar taken from me and made slaves,” Challons replied in June. Weeks later, the captain wrote Popham that he was forbidden to speak “with the naturals.”


IMAGES COURTESY BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY


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