Mayflower

information on the differences between English and American felling axes, see volume 3 of New England Begins, edited by Jonathan Fairbanks and Robert Trent, p. 543. My account of the impaling of Plymouth is indebted to discussions with Pret Woodburn and Rick McKee, interpretive artisans at Plimoth Plantation, who brought the existence of the Jamestown trenching tool to my attention. In a note in OPP, Samuel Eliot Morison speaks of stool ball, p. 97. On the importance of boundaries and enclosures to the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, see Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s America’s Founding Food, pp. 148–49.
    Karen Ordahl Kupperman makes note of the irony that the Pilgrims found themselves trusting two Indians, Squanto and Hobbamock, who were named for the god that the Pilgrims considered to be the devil, in Indians and English, p. 185. Bradford’s unwillingness to surrender Squanto to Massasoit may have had something to do with what Leon and Rebecca Grinberg have called in Migration and Exile the immigrant’s need for “a familiar someone” ; this longing for “a trustworthy person who can take over or neutralize the anxieties and fears he feels toward the new and unknown world can be compared to that of a child who is left alone and desperately searches for the familiar face of his mother…. Onemodel that comes close to this idea is the ethnologist’s notion of ‘imprinting,’” pp. 76–77. Eric Johnson talks about Indian assassinations in “Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings”: “How frequent they were is not known; but several assassinations or attempted assassinations were reported, although not all can be proved,” p. 194. Whatever the case may be, the similarities between Massasoit’s possible assassination of Squanto and his son Philip’s reputed assassination of the interpreter Sassamon fifty-three years later are striking. In Early Encounters: Native Americans and Europeans in New England, Sears Nickerson claims the Indian skeleton that was “washed out of a hill between Head of the Bay and Crow’s Pond” at Monomoyick around 1770 was probably Squanto’s, p. 200.
    CHAPTER NINE- A Ruffling Course
    Unless otherwise noted, my account of the Wessagussett attack and the events leading up to it is based on OPP, pp. 116–19; GNNE, pp. 23–56; and Phineas Pratt’s account of his days at Wessagusett, written in 1668 and titled “A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People that First Inhabited New England,” MHS Collections, vol. 4, 4th ser., 1858, pp. 474–87. On the lethal malaise that overtook the English settlers at Jamestown, see Karen Kupperman’s “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” Journal of American History, June–September 1979, pp. 24–40. On the use of groundnuts as food, see Howard Russell’s Indian New England before the Mayflower, p. 156. As Kupperman points out in “Thomas Morton, Historian” in NEQ, vol. 50, 1977, pp. 660–64, Morton’s New English Canaan provides a probing account of the Wessagussett raid that is very different from those of Bradford and Winslow.
    The description of typhus comes from Roger Schofield’s “An Anatomy of an Epidemic” in The Plague Reconsidered, p. 121. My thanks to Carolyn Travers, research manager at Plimoth Plantation, for bringing this reference to my attention. In New English Canaan, Morton claims that Standish and his men “pretended to feast the Salvages of those parts, bringing with them pork and things for the purpose, which they set before the Salvages,” p. 110. Morton also accuses Standish and company of having no real interest in saving any of Weston’s men: “But if the Plimoth Planters had really intended good to Master Weston or those men, why had they not kept the Salvages alive in custody until they had secured the other English? Who, by means of this evil managing of the business, lost their lives,” p. 111. Morton makes the claim that after Wessagussett, the Pilgrims were known as “stabbers” or “cutthroats” by the Massachusetts, p. 111. Bradford and Isaac Allerton write of their inability to trade with the Indians after the Wessagussett raid in a September 8, 1623, letter reprinted in the American Historical Review, vol. 8, 1903, p. 297. In Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early