Mayflower

after leaving Nemasket, the path joined a narrow, twisting river called the Titicut. Known today as the Taunton River, this waterway flows southwest through modern Bridgewater, Raynham, and Taunton till it widens into a broad tidal estuary at the hilltop city of Fall River before emptying into the dramatic expanse of Mount Hope Bay. In 1621, the Titicut functioned as a kind of Native American highway. Whether by dugout canoe or by foot, the Indians followed the river between Pokanoket and Plymouth, and in the years ahead, the Titicut inexorably led the Pilgrims to several new settlement sites above Narragansett Bay.
    But the Titicut was much more than a transportation system; it also provided the Indians with a seasonal source of herring and other fish. Around sunset, Winslow and Hopkins reached a spot on the river where the Indians had built a weir and were harvesting striped bass, and that night they “lodged in the open fields.”
    Six Indians decided to continue on with them the next morning. They followed the riverbank for about half a dozen miles until they came to a shallow area, where they were told to take off their breeches and wade across the river. They were midstream, with their possessions in their arms, when two Indians appeared on the opposite bank. In the aftermath of the plague, the Narragansetts had taken to raiding Pokanoket territory at will, and the two Indians feared that Winslow and Hopkins’s group was the enemy. Winslow judged one of the Indians to be at least sixty years old, and despite their age, both men displayed great “valor and courage” as they ran “very swiftly and low in the grass to meet us at the bank” with their arrows drawn. On realizing that Winslow and Hopkins were accompanied by some of their Indian friends, the old warriors “welcomed us with such food as they had.” Winslow later learned that these were the last two survivors of a once thriving village.

    Edward Winslow, painted in England, 1651
    As the sun reached its height, the traveling became quite hot, and their companions cheerfully offered to carry their guns and extra clothing for them. The grassy fields and open forests were, in Winslow’s words, “like many places in England.” They came upon other Indians along the way, but all proved friendly, and before the day was over they reached Massasoit’s village, known as Sowams. In the years to come, as the Pilgrims began to purchase land from the Pokanoket sachem, they spoke of Sowams as “the garden of the patent”—a fertile sweep of land with two rivers providing easy access to Narragansett Bay. As anyone could plainly see, Massasoit was positioned at a place that made Plymouth seem, by comparison, a remote and hilly wasteland.
    The sachem invited them into his wigwam, where they presented him with the copper chain and horseman’s coat. Winslow reported that once the sachem had “put the coat on his back and the chain about his neck, he was not a little proud to behold himself, and his men also to see their king so bravely attired.” Indeed, the Pokanoket sachem appears to have been pleasantly surprised by Winslow’s and Hopkins’s appearance and readily agreed to all the Pilgrims’ requests.
    The sachem gathered his people around him and began to deliver a long and exuberant speech. “Was not he Massasoit commander of the country about him?” he proclaimed. He spoke of the many villages that paid him tribute and of how those villages would all trade with the Pilgrims. With the naming of each place, his men responded with a refrain about Massasoit’s power over the village and how the village would be at peace with the English and provide them with furs. This went on until thirty or more settlements had been named. “[S]o that as it was delightful,” Winslow wrote, “it was tedious unto us.”
    By this time, Winslow and Hopkins were desperate for something to eat. It had been more than a day since they’d had a decent meal, but the entire village of Sowams appeared to be without any food. Massasoit had only recently returned to the village after an extended time away, and his people had not yet had time to procure any fish or fowl. Unlike the Europeans, who relied on large stores of provisions, the Native Americans tended to follow the food wherever it might be seasonally available, whether it be a lobster-laden beach, an inland-river fishing