Mayflower

their need to govern themselves. The tradition of self-government, which had been established in England by the weight of hundreds of years, was being established in America by the force of hundreds of miles.” Boorstin also cites John Quincy Adams’s famous claim that the compact was “perhaps the only instance, in human history, of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government,” pp. 68–69. Robinson’s advice about choosing a leader appears in his farewell letter in OPP, p. 370. The description of John Carver as “a gentleman of singular piety” is in Hubbard’s History, cited in Stratton’s Plymouth Colony, p. 259. The Mayflower Compact appears in OPP, p. 75–77, and MR, pp. 17–18; Nathaniel Morton was the only one to list the names recorded on the original document, which has not survived, in his New England’s Memorial, published in 1669. For a discussion of who signed the compact, see Henry Martyn Dexter’s edition of MR, p. 9, n. 27.
    The estimate concerning the number of ships that could be contained within Provincetown Harbor is in MR, p.16. Bradford speaks of their voyage “over the vast and furious ocean” and the “hideous and desolate wilderness” in OPP, pp. 61–63. The description of the Pilgrims’ first wood-cutting expedition to Cape Cod is in MR, pp. 18–19. The Pilgrims described the wood they cut as juniper, which was, as Dexter points out ( MR, p. 11, n. 32), undoubtedly eastern red cedar, the tallest of the junipers.
    CHAPTER THREE- Into the Void
    As Thomas Bicknell points out in Sowams, Nathaniel Morton describes the location of Sowams, home of the Pokanokets, as “at the confluence of two rivers in Rehoboth, or Swansea, though occasionally at Mont Haup or Mount Hope, the principal residence of his son, Philip,” p. 157. Although Bicknell argues that Sowams is in Barrington, others have maintained that it is in Warren—both in modern Rhode Island. As Ella Sekatau points out in a personal communication, the word Massasoit is a title, not a name. To avoid confusion, I have used it as the Pilgrims used it, as a name. The exact nature of the plague has been the subject of intense speculation and debate. See Dean Snow and Kim Lanphear, “European Contact and Indian Depopulations in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics,” Ethnohistory, Winter 1988, pp. 15–33; Alfred Crosby’s “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” WMQ, vol. 23, 1976, pp. 289–99, and his “‘God…Would Destroy Them, and Give Their Country to Another People,’” American Heritage, vol. 6, 1978, pp. 39–42; Arthur Spiess and Bruce Spiess’s “New England Pandemic of 1616–1622: Cause and Archaeological Implication,” Man in the Northeast, Fall 1987, pp. 71–83; and David Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” WMQ (Oct. 2003), pp. 703–42. On the effects of the disease on population levels, see S. F. Cook’s The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 35–36. Cook writes about “chronic war” further diminishing the Native population in “Interracial Warfare and Population Decline among the New England Indians,” Ethnohistory, Winter 1973, pp. 2–3. All evidence points to Pokanoket, not Wampanoag, being the name that Massasoit’s people called themselves. According to Kathleen Bragdon in Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650. “ Wampanoag, as an ethnonym, now used to designate the modern descendants of the Pokanokets, was probably derived from the name Wapanoos, first applied by Dutch explorers and map-makers to those Natives near Narragansett Bay…. The term means ‘easterner’ in Delaware, and was probably not an original self-designation,” p. 21. Bragdon cites Daniel Gookin’s estimates of the preplague populations of the Pokanokets and Narragansetts, p. 25. In 1661, Roger Williams recorded that before founding the settlement that would become known as Providence, Rhode Island, he contacted the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi, who said that Massasoit “was their subject, and had solemnly himself, in person, with ten men, subjected himself and his lands unto them at the Narragansett.” Williams then went to