Mayflower

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    The Native peoples of southern New England left no known contemporary narrative of what happened to them after the arrival of the Mayflower. But that does not mean that no Indian accounts exist. Instead of the written word, the Native Americans relied on oral traditions, and almost as soon as the English came to America they began recording the Indians’ stories and legends.
    The Indians on Cape Cod and the islands, who came to be known as the Wampanoags, told the legend of Maushop, a mythical giant who had many of the characteristics of a Native leader. In the beginning Maushop was a generous friend to his people, but as the years passed, he underwent a troubling change. He began to extort unreasonable amounts of tribute and created discord where he had once helped make peace. He also began to quarrel with his own family. “He would beat his old woman for nothing,” one version of the legend claimed, “and his children for a great deal less.”
    One day, while his five children were playing on the beach near their home on Aquinnah, on the west end of Martha’s Vineyard, Maushop drew his huge toe across the sand. Seawater rushed toward his four sons and one daughter, and as the ocean rose around them, the boys lifted up their sister in a desperate attempt to save her. Just as they were about to drown, Maushop turned them into killer whales and commanded his sons to look after their sister.
    Maushop’s wife was disconsolate, and her incessant weeping so angered the giant that he picked her up and threw her all the way to the rocky shore of Sakonnet, where she lived out the rest of her life begging for help from those who passed by in their canoes. Eventually she changed into a stone, and when the English arrived, they broke off her head and arms. By that time, Maushop had disappeared, “nobody knew whither.” His wife, on the other hand, remains in Sakonnet to this day—a disfigured rock at the edge of the sea.
    By the time this legend was first recorded in the eighteenth century, the Indians of Cape Cod and the islands had been reduced to several hundred people, most of them living on reservations in the towns of Mashpee on the Cape and in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard. Despite Benjamin Church’s efforts to provide for them, the Sakonnets had dwindled from an estimated four hundred in 1700 to just six men and nineteen women by 1774.
    In the years ahead, the legend of Maushop, like the legend of the Pilgrim Fathers, would soften into a benign and upbeat version of what had originally been a far more disturbing story. The early versions of the legend, recorded between 1792 and 1829, reflect the anger, fear, dislocation, and loss the Indians of the region felt in the wake of a war that had forced them to fight against their own people.
    In the nineteenth century, the Indians of southern New England preferred to remember King Philip’s War as a strictly Indian-versus-English conflict. But for those who actually experienced the war or knew those who had, it was not a question of us against them; it was more like being part of a family that had been destroyed by the frightening, inexplicable actions of a once trusted and beloved father.
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    In 1741, the ninety-five-year-old Thomas Faunce asked to be carried in a litter to the Plymouth waterfront. Faunce had heard that a pier was about to be built over an undistinguished rock at the tide line near Town Brook. With tears in his eyes, Faunce proclaimed that he had been told by his father, who had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, that the boulder was where the Pilgrims had first landed. Thus was born the legend of Plymouth Rock.
    In 1769, a group of Plymouth residents formed the Old Colony Club and designated December 22 as Forefathers’ Day in celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims on the Rock. Their first meeting was held at Thomas Southworth Howland’s tavern on Cole’s Hill, but as political differences came to the fore in the years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, the club’s membership, most of whom were Loyalists, decided to disband. It was left to the opposing faction, the Sons of Liberty, to seize upon, literally it turned out, Plymouth Rock.
    Despite Faunce’s tearful testimony, a solid-fill pier had been built over the Rock. A small portion of the boulder, however, still poked above the sandy surface of the wharf, and on Forefathers’ Day in 1774 Colonel Theophilus