Mayflower

wasn’t just that Squanto had spent some time in England that set him apart. He also possessed a strong relationship with the Indians’ spirit world. The cosmology of the Pokanokets included as many as thirty-eight gods and spirits, most of them linked to various aspects of the physical world—the sun, moon, sea, fire, and a wide range of animals. First and foremost in this pantheon was the god they regarded as their creator, Kietan, who, as Edward Winslow later wrote, “dwelleth above in the heavens, wither all good men go when they die, to see their friends, and have their fill of all things.” Kietan was the one who had provided the Indians with their corn and beans, and sachems such as Massasoit called on him for support.
    On the opposite end of the spectrum was the spirit known as Hobbamock or Cheepi. Unlike Kietan, who was benign and remote, Hobbamock was very much a part of this world: an ominous spirit of darkness who appeared at night and in swamps and assumed a variety of disturbing forms, from eels to snakes. The Pokanokets’ spiritual leaders or shamans, known as powwows, looked to Hobbamock to cure the sick, cast a curse, or see into the future. And as it turned out, in addition to Hobbamock and Cheepi, there was a third name for the spirit Massasoit’s people associated with death, the night, and the bitter northeast wind: Tisquantum, or Squanto for short. By assuming the spirit’s name, Squanto was broadcasting his claim to an intimate relationship with an entity that the Pilgrims later equated with the devil.
    Massasoit shared Epenow’s distrust of Squanto, and by the fall of 1620, Squanto had been moved from the Vineyard to Pokanoket, where he remained a prisoner. When the Mayflower arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims would do little to change that assumption.
    In the meantime, Squanto waited for his chance.

CHAPTER FOUR
Beaten with Their Own Rod
    T HE . M AYFLOWER HAD ARRIVED at Provincetown Harbor on Saturday, November 11. Since the next day was a Sunday, the Pilgrims remained aboard ship, worshipping God under the direction of Elder Brewster. As Puritans, they believed that the entire Sabbath must be devoted to worship—both a morning and an afternoon meeting along with personal and family prayers throughout the day. Work and especially play on a Sunday were forbidden.
    On Monday, the four battered pieces of the shallop were taken ashore, where the carpenter and his assistants began to put the vessel back together. As the workers hammered and sawed, the passengers enjoyed their first day ashore. After more than two months at sea, there was what they termed a “great need” for washing, and the women found a small freshwater pond near the present site of Provincetown. For generations to come, Monday would be wash day in New England, a tradition that began with the women of the Mayflower.
    At low tide, amid the barnacles and seaweed, they found abundant supplies of blue mussels—bivalves that grow up to four inches in length and attach themselves in clumps to shoreside rocks. Passengers and sailors alike enjoyed the first fresh food any of them had tasted in a very long time, only to fall victim to the vomiting and diarrhea associated with shellfish poisoning.
    But there was other evidence of nature’s bounty. The harbor contained untold numbers of ducks and geese—“the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw.” But it was the whales that astounded them. “[E]very day we saw whales playing hard by us,” they wrote. These were Atlantic right whales, huge, docile creatures that feed on plankton and other sea organisms by straining seawater between the large plates of baleen in their mouths. Jones and one of his mates, who had experience hunting whales in Greenland, claimed that if only they’d had some harpoons and lances they might have taken between three thousand and four thousand pounds’ worth of whale oil and baleen.
    For the Pilgrims, who were expected to provide the Merchant Adventurers with a regular supply of salable goods, it was frustrating in the extreme to be surrounded by all this potential wealth and yet have no way of capturing any of it. One day a whale, apparently enjoying the afternoon sun on her dark blubbery back, lay on the water’s surface within only