by Michael Totten

Created on: November 03, 2009

The best known story of how the Pilgrims interacted with Native Americans is the story of Squanto and the first Thanksgiving. That comes later in this tale. Less well known is that unbeknownst to the Pilgrims, they had ventured into an area where early English exploration had resulted in a few incidents of armed conflict and enslavement. For the Pilgrims, this history turned out to be both a curse and a blessing in disguise.

Upon landing at Provincetown Harbor, the Pilgrims were starving and sick with scurvy. It was late in the year, too late to plant the wheat they had brought with them. By the time the Mayflower exploration party could reconcile their distance from the land grant area and begin building houses, it was already Christmas Day. Baskets of maize discovered in native caches and burial mounds fended off winter starvation and gave some seed to replace the wheat, which turned out not to be viable for the local soil and climate.

The exploration area along the tip of Cape Cod was inhabited by the Nauset and Pokanoket peoples. The Nauset people had been trading peacefully with English explorers and fishermen for several decades. Unfortunately for the Pilgrims, the English explorer Thomas Hunt had kidnapped 7 Nauset people and another 20 from the Wampanoag village of Patuxet a few years earlier. Another group of English adventurers had taken several of the Pokanoket captive, then shot them. The Nauset remembered. They shot arrows at the Mayflower exploration party during their third expedition. The Mayflower exploration party shot back. There is no record of anyone being killed, but the Nauset retreated into the woods and could not be found again. The Pilgrims also chose to leave that area, preferring not to make a bad situation worse.

For the next 4 months, the only contact with natives would be a tense standoff from a distance. Although disease and starvation meant that only 7 residences out of a planned 19 could be built that winter, all 5 cannon had been placed defensively on Fort Hill.

It was not until March 1621 that the Wabanake Indian Samoset walked into the fledgling colony. By that time, half of the Pilgrims had already died from starvation, exposure, and disease. Out of the original 102 passengers of the Mayflower, only 53 people had survived, including just 5 adult women. Only 7 people in the colony had escaped illness entirely.

Samoset spoke English, but poorly. He returned the next day with an older native companion who was much more fluent.

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