Mayflower

arrived from the mainland for the purposes of trade. It was apparent to Gosnold that one of the Indians was looked to with great respect. This may have been Massasoit’s father. It is possible that the sachem’s son, who would have been in his early teens, was also present.
    Gosnold presented the sachem with a pair of knives and a straw hat, which he placed experimentally on his head. Then the Indians “all sat down in manner like greyhounds upon their heels” and began to trade. With the exception of mustard ( “whereat they made a sour face” ), the Indians appeared to enjoy all the strange foods the English had to offer. For their part, Gosnold and his men took an immediate fancy to the Indians’ tobacco, a dried green powder that when smoked in carefully crafted clay pipes proved addictively pleasant.
    Gosnold was at a loss to understand the Natives’ language, but the Indians proved to have an unnerving ability to mimic the Englishmen’s speech. At one point, a sailor sat smoking beside an Indian and said, “How now, sir, are you so saucy with my tobacco?” The Indian proceeded to repeat the phrase word for word, “as if he had been a long scholar in the language.”
    But Gosnold’s enchanting introduction to the area and its people turned as sour as his mustard. While foraging for food, two of his men were attacked by four Indians. No one was hurt (in part because one of the Englishmen had the presence of mind to cut the strings of the Natives’ bows with his knife), but Gosnold decided to abandon his plan for establishing a year-round trading post and sailed for England.
    It was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again in the years ahead. Soon after Gosnold returned to England with word of his discovery, the explorer Martin Pring sailed for Cape Cod and built a fort of his own in the vicinity of modern Truro. After a summer of harvesting sassafras, Pring also began to wear out his welcome with the local Natives. When an Indian-lit fire almost consumed his fort, Pring took the hint and sailed for home.
    Beginning in 1605, the Frenchman Samuel Champlain began an extensive exploration of the Cape and produced detailed maps of several harbors and inlets. In 1611, the year that Shakespeare produced The Tempest, the English explorer Edward Harlow voyaged to the region. By the time he returned to London, he had abducted close to half a dozen Indians and killed at least as many in several brutal confrontations. One of his Indian captives was quite tall, and Harlow helped defray the cost of the voyage by showing him on the city streets “as a wonder.”
    The Indian’s name was Epenow, and he soon realized that there was nothing the English valued more than gold. He told his captors that back on Martha’s Vineyard, an island just to the south of Cape Cod, there was a gold mine that only he could lead them to. An expedition was promptly mounted, and as soon as the English ship came within swimming distance of the island, Epenow jumped over the side and escaped.
    Around this time, in 1614, Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame led a voyage of exploration to the region. There were several vessels in Smith’s expedition, and one of the commanders, Thomas Hunt, decided to take as many Native captives as his ship could hold and sell them as slaves in Spain. As Smith later lamented, Hunt’s actions grievously damaged Indian-English relations in New England for years to come.
    The following year, a French ship wrecked on the north shore of Cape Cod, and the Indians decided to do to the French what the English had done to them. Indians from up and down the coast gathered together at the wreck site, and William Bradford later learned how they “never left dogging and waylaying [the French] till they took opportunities to kill all but three or four, which they kept as slaves, sending them up and down, to make sport with them from one sachem to another.”
    One of the Frenchmen was of a religious bent. He learned enough of the Natives’ language to tell his captors that “God was angry with them for their wickedness, and would destroy them and give their country to another people.” Scorning the prophecy, a sachem assembled his subjects around a nearby hill and, with the Frenchman beside him on the hilltop, demanded if “his God had so many people and [was] able to kill all those?” The Frenchman responded that