Mayflower

Sassamon’s undated letter to Governor Prence communicating Philip’s desire not to sell any more land for at least seven years is at Pilgrim Hall and reprinted in MHS Collections, vol. 2, p. 40; Jeremy Bangs, who has transcribed the manuscript material at Pilgrim Hall, has assigned the probable date of 1663 to the letter. The deed for Philip’s 1664 sale of land to Taunton is in Bangs’s Indian Deeds, pp. 326–27.
    Kathleen Bragdon in “‘Emphatical Speech and Great Action’: An Analysis of Seventeenth-Century Native Speech Events Described in Early Sources,” in Man in the Northeast, vol. 33, 1987, cites Roger Williams’s reference to how a person of lesser rank approached a sachem, p. 104; see also Bragdon’s Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650. pp. 146–48, where she cites Williams’s and Gookin’s remarks concerning a sachem’s relationship to his followers. John Josselyn reported seeing Philip on the streets of Boston in 1671, when, on the urging of John Eliot, he spoke to Massachusetts authorities, in John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, edited by Paul Lindholdt, p. 101. On Philip’s appearance on Nantucket in 1665, see my Abram’s Eyes, pp. 118–21, in which I rely primarily on accounts by local historians Zaccheus Macy, whose unpublished account is in the Nantucket Historical Association’s Collection 96, Folder 44, and Obed Macy, whose account is in his History of Nantucket, pp. 54–56. Nantucket’s Indians vowed to “disown Philip” at a town meeting in August 1675. S. F. Cook in The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century estimates that there were five thousand Wampanoags in 1675, p. 39.
    Since Philip’s son was said to be nine years old in 1676, he must have been born in 1667; since the birth of a child often prompts a parent to draft a will, I have postulated that Philip’s rift with Sassamon occurred soon after the birth of his son; by September 1667, Philip had a new interpreter named Tom. On the life of John Sassamon, see Yasuhide Kawashima’s Igniting King Philip’s War, pp. 76–87, and Jill Lepore’s “Dead Men Tell No Tales: John Sassamon and the Fatal Consequences of Literacy” in American Quarterly, December 1994, pp. 493–97. In A Relation of the Indian War, John Easton reported the Pokanokets’ claim that Sassamon “was a bad man that King Philip got him to write his will and he made the writing for a great part of the land to be his but read as if it had been as Philip would, but it came to be known and then he run away from him,” in Narratives of the Indian Wars, edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 7; Easton also records Philip’s claim that all Christian Indians are “dissemblers,” p. 10. I refer to Philip’s comparison of Christianity to the button on his coat in Abram’s Eyes, p. 120. Philip’s troubles over a suspected French-Dutch conspiracy in 1667 can be traced in PCR, vol. 4, pp. 151, 164–66. Philip’s sale of land to Thomas Willett on September 17, 1667, with Tom, the interpreter, listed as a witness, is in Jeremy Bangs’s Indian Deeds, p. 382; Bangs also discusses the new pressures that the creation of Swansea put on the Pokanokets, pp. 127–28, and quantifies the accelerating pace of Indian land sales, p. 163.
    William Hubbard discusses the strategy Prence and Winslow used to handle the sachems of the Wampanoags and Massachusetts and the disastrous consequences that strategy had with respect to King Philip’s War in A General History of New England, pp. 71–72. Jeremy Bangs points to Josiah Winslow’s use of mortgaging Indian property to pay off debt as “tantamount to confiscating land” in Indian Deeds, p. 141. When it comes to the subject of Philip’s supposed bravery, Samuel Drake writes, “I nowhere find any authentic records to substantiate these statements. On the other hand, I find abundant proof that he was quite destitute of such qualities,” in a note to Drake’s edition of William Hubbard’s HIWNE, p. 59. Philip and his counselors spoke of when Massasoit was “a great man” and the English were “as a little child” to John Easton of Rhode Island in June 1675, in Narratives of the Indian Wars, edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 10.
    Hubbard in HIWNE refers to the “petite injuries” that caused Philip