cape, where the water was so shallow the landing party had to wade through three quarters of a mile of freezing muck to reach the beach. The passengers were so pent and eager to reach land that they made this slog repeatedly in the five weeks it took them to find the Plimoth anchorage. Because of the exposure, a large portion caught colds and pneumonia, and at least 40 died as a result. The folk historical image of a landing on Plymouth Rock is so far from the fact that it seems like a psychological expression of re- pressed guilt.
FEARING THE “WILD MEN”
Worse than the blundering around Cape Cod Bay was the lack of regard for the Na- tives who happened to live in the area. The Mayflower passengers sustained themselves in the first weeks by digging up corn stored by the inhabitants for the winter. They then wondered why none of the locals came out to greet them. Their initial policy for first con- tact was shaped by self-interested prejudice. Beyond their ignorance of the land-
scape, the Plimoth settlers seemed to have limited prior knowledge about the “wild men” they would encounter and very little interest in acquiring any. In their discus- sions at Leiden about relocation was only a slight, ambiguous mention about “con- verting the Natives” to Christianity, a sa- lient motive for apologists for the Virginia Company colonizers at Jamestown in the preceding decade. The Pilgrims settled on a location where
it seemed easiest to dispossess the original inhabitants. According to Bradford:
Wampanoag tribesmen and English settlers recreate trading in New Plimoth at the Plimoth Patuxet Museum. Formerly the Plimoth Plantation, this living museum and Smithsonian Affiliate changed its name in 2020 to reflect its growing emphasis on the Wampanoag Indian side of its history.
“The places they had thoughts on they would land were some of those unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitfull and fit for habitation being devoid of all civ- ill inhabitants, where there are only salvage and brutish people, which range up and down little otherwise than the wild beasts.”
Those who objected to the plan focused
on Indian ferocity, with blood-curdling tales of their tortures (apparently gleaned from Champlain). For those settlers who survived the difficult sea voyage, Bradford wrote:
“Should yet be in continual danger of the salvage people, who are cruel, bar- barous, and treacherous, most furious in their rage and mercilous where they overcome, not being content only to kill and take away life, but delight to tor- ment men in most bloody manner that may be, flaying men alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the joints and mem- bers of others by piecemeals, and broil- ing them on the coals, and causing men to eat the collops of their flesh in their sight while they lived.”
Left: Railroad construction in the mid-19th century tore up a burial site at the former Wampanoag village of Sowams, near Warren, Rhode Island., turning up funerary objects such as this pipe. Wampanoag scholars established these objects’ connection with Ousamequin, the Massasoit who made a treaty with the English settlement at Plimoth in 1621. The repa- triated pipe was reinterred at the original site in May 2017, along with the remains of Ousamequin. Right: A reproduction of the Massasoit pipe made by Ramona Peters (Mashpee Wampanoag) was the model for the 2011 Native American $1 coin, which celebrates the Wampanoag peace treaty with the Plimoth settlement.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 27
PHOTO COURTESY OF WAMPANOAG CONFEDERACY
IMAGE COURTESY OF U.S. MINT
COURTESY OF PLIMOTH PATUXET
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