In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and
murmurings arise amongst some, and mutinous speeches and carriages
[deportment] in other; but they were soon quelled and overcome by the
wisdom, patience, and just and equal carriage of things, by the Governor
and better part, which clave faithfully together in the main.Cleaving faithfully together did not protect them from the bitter cold;
within three months half of them were dead. At first they could make no
contact with the local Indians, who had suffered grievously from earlier
contacts with whites; but at the end of winter one Indian came to their little
settlement. To their astonishment, since they did not know about the fish-
ermen who had frequented those shores, the man spoke understandable
English. He offered to bring them another man, named Tisquantum
(Squanto, as the Pilgrims pronounced it), who had been kidnapped and
taken to England and so could speak better English. Tisquantum became
their mentor. First, he introduced the local chief, with whom a peace agree-
ment was made that would last twenty-four years. Then he “directed them
how to set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities,
and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit,
and never left them till he died.” Most important of all, Tisquantum acted
as their agent in what became their economic salvation, the trade in beaver
and otter furs.
Despite their good relations with the nearby Indians, these settlers
received a declaration of war—a bundle of arrows bound by snakeskin—
from the more distant, numerous, and warlike Narragansett Indians, who
had learned to hate the visiting whites. So, as quickly as the colonists could
muster the manpower to do so, they constructed a “good strong pale,
and... flankers in convenient places with gates to shut, which were every
night locked, and a watch kept.”
It was not only the Indians the Pilgrims learned to fear: it was also one
another. Despite the high moral and religious principles that had driven
them to abandon their native land and venture into the “wilderness,” they
found disturbing evidence of sin. Much of their first harvest was stolen
“both by night and day before it became scarce eatable, and much more
afterward. And though many were well whipped, when they were taken for
122 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA