Mayflower

weir, or, come fall, a forest full of deer. By arriving unannounced, Winslow and Hopkins had unintentionally placed Massasoit in a difficult and potentially embarrassing situation. He was happy, even ecstatic, to see them, but he had no food to offer.
    Once he’d completed his speech, Massasoit lit his pipe and encouraged all of them to smoke as he “fell to discoursing of England.” He said he was now “King James his man.” As a consequence, the French were no longer welcome in Narragansett Bay. When he learned that the English king had been a widower for more than a year, Massasoit expressed wonder that James had chosen to live “without a wife.”
    It was getting late, and it was now clear to the Pilgrims that there was nothing for them to eat. So they asked to go to bed. Much to their surprise, the sachem insisted that they share the wigwam’s sleeping platform with himself and his wife, “they at the one end and we at the other.” What’s more, two of Massasoit’s warriors crowded onto the platform with them.
    That night, neither Winslow nor Hopkins slept a wink. Not only were they starving, they were kept awake by the Indians’ habit of singing themselves to sleep. They also discovered that the dirt floor and reed mats of the wigwam were alive with lice and fleas even as voracious mosquitoes buzzed around their ears.
    The next day, several minor sachems made their way to Sowams to see the two Englishmen. The increasingly crowded village took on a carnival atmosphere as the sachems and their men entertained themselves with various games of chance, in which painted stones and stiff reeds were used, much like dice and cards, to gamble for each other’s furs and knives. Winslow and Hopkins challenged some of them to a shooting contest. Although the Indians declined, they requested that the English demonstrate the accuracy of their muskets. One of them fired a round of small shot at a target, and the Natives “wondered to see the mark so full of holes.” Early that afternoon, Massasoit returned with two large striped bass. The fish were quickly boiled, but since there were more than forty mouths to feed, the bass did not go far. Meager as it was, it was the first meal Winslow and Hopkins had eaten in two nights and a day.
    Their second night at Sowams proved to be as sleepless as the first. Even before sunrise, the two Englishmen decided that they best be on their way, “we much fearing,” Winslow wrote, “that if we should stay any longer, we should not be able to recover home for want of strength.”
    Massasoit was “both grieved and ashamed that he could no better entertain” the Pilgrims, but that did not prevent the visit from ending on a most positive note. Squanto, it was decided, would remain at Pokanoket so that he could go from village to village to establish trading relations for the Pilgrims, who had brought necklaces, beads, and other trade goods to exchange with the Indians for furs and corn. It may have been that Massasoit also wanted the chance to speak with the interpreter alone. Until Squanto returned to Plymouth, Tokamahamon would serve as the Englishmen’s guide.
    Two days later, on the night of Saturday, July 7, after a solid day of rain, Winslow and Hopkins arrived back at Plymouth. They were wet, weary, footsore, and famished, but they had succeeded in strengthening their settlement’s ties with Massasoit and the Indians to the west. It would be left to a boy—and a Billington at that—to do the same for the Indians to the east.
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    Back in January, fourteen-year-old Francis Billington had climbed into a tree near the top of Fort Hill. Looking inland to the west, he claimed he saw “a great sea.” Like his father, the Billington boy had already developed a reputation as a troublemaker. When the Mayflower had still been at anchor in Provincetown Harbor, he had fired off a musket in his family’s cabin that had nearly ignited a barrel of gunpowder that would have destroyed the ship and everyone aboard. Given the boy’s past history, no one seemed to take his claim about a large inland sea very seriously. Eventually, however, someone agreed to accompany the teenager on an exploratory trip into the woods. About two miles in, they came upon a huge lake that was “full of fish and fowl.” Even Bradford, who had no great love of the Billington family, had to admit that the