Mayflower

“Squanto and Massasoit: A Struggle for Power” in NEQ, vol. 60, no. 1, speculates that Samoset’s two arrows symbolized war and peace, p. 56. In Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, Karen Ordahl Kupperman states that “the name [Samoset] gave to the Pilgrims was probably ‘Somerset,’ given him by the fishermen,” p. 185.
    Bradford tells of the three-day meeting in “a dark and dismal swamp” in OPP, p. 84. Quoting from William Wood, William Cronon writes of swamps: “The Indians referred to such lowlands as ‘abodes of owls,’ and used them as hiding places during times of war,” in Changes in the Land, p. 28. According to Kathleen Bragdon in Native People of Southern New England, Indians “retreated to deep swampy places in times of war, where they were not only harder to find but had stronger links to their other-than-human protectors,” p. 192. On the role of powwows, I have looked to the chapter “Religious Specialists among the Ninnimissinuok” in Bragdon’s Native People of Southern New England, pp. 200–216 as well as William Simmons’s “Southern New England Shamanism: An Ethnographic Reconstruction,” Papers of the Seventh Algonquian Conference, 1975, edited by William Cowan, pp. 217–56. The description of Passaconaway’s ability to “metamorphise himself into a flaming man” and his remarks concerning his inability to injure the English appear in William Simmons’s Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. pp. 61, 63.
    Neal Salisbury in “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, edited by David Sweet and Gary Nash, states that Squanto’s “most potent weapon was the mutual distrust and fear lingering between English and Indians; his most pressing need was for a power base so that he could extricate himself from his position of colonial dependency. Accordingly, he began maneuvering on his own,” p. 241; Salisbury also cites Phineas Pratt’s claim that Squanto assured Massasoit that if he sided with the English, “enemies that were too strong for him would be constrained to bow to him,” p. 238. Bradford in OPP speaks of Squanto’s insistence that the Pilgrims possessed the plague, as does Thomas Morton in New England Canaan: “And that Salvage [Squanto] the more to increase his [Massasoit’s] fear, told the Sachem that if he should give offense to the English party, they would let out the plague to destroy them all, which kept him in great awe,” p. 104.
    In GNNE, Edward Winslow writes of the “wicked practice of this Tisquantum [i.e., Squanto]; who, to the end he might possess his countrymen with the greater fear of us, and so consequently of himself, told them we had the plague buried in our store-house; which, at our pleasure, we could send forth to what place or people we would, and destroy them therewith, though we stirred not from home,” p. 16. Neal Salisbury in Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 comments on Quadequina’s insistence that the Pilgrims put away their guns, p. 120.
    On the Mayflower ’s return to England and her eventual fate, see Sears Nickerson’s Land Ho!— 1620. pp. 34–35. I’ve also relied on the information compiled by Carolyn Freeman Travers in 1997 and posted on the Plimoth Plantation Web site at http://www.plimoth.org/Library/mayflcre.htm. Although some have argued that Squanto learned to use fish as a fertilizer from English farmers in Newfoundland, this claim has been authoritatively refuted, at least to my mind, by the late Nanepashemet in “It Smells Fishy to Me: An Argument Supporting the Use of Fish Fertilizer by the Native People of Southern New England,” Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 1991, pp. 42–50. On Native agriculture, see Kathleen Bragdon’s Native People of Southern New England, pp. 107–10. The duel between Edward Doty and Edward Leister is mentioned in Thomas Prince’s Chronological History of New England, vol. 3, p. 40.
    CHAPTER SEVEN- Thanksgiving
    Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from MR, pp. 59–87, and OPP, pp. 87–90. According to the genealogist Robert Anderson in a personal communication, “Three months was the average interval between the death of a