Mayflower

the first to come forward was the man whose corn they had stolen. The Pilgrims arranged to have him visit their settlement, where they promised to reimburse him for his loss.
    It was growing dark by the time the Nauset sachem, Aspinet, arrived with more than a hundred men, many of whom had undoubtedly participated in the First Encounter back in December. Half the warriors remained on shore with their bows and arrows while the others waded out to the boat unarmed. One of Aspinet’s men carried John Billington in his arms. Looking none the worse for his time in captivity, the teenager wore a string of shell beads around his neck. The Pilgrims presented Aspinet with a knife, and peace was declared between the two peoples. From the Pilgrims’ perspective, it was a great relief to have finally righted the wrongs they’d committed during their first anxious and confusing weeks in America.
    But Aspinet had some disturbing news. The Narragansetts were said to have killed several of Massasoit’s men and taken their leader captive. “This struck some fear in us,” Winslow wrote. If the Narragansetts should decide to attack their settlement, it would be a catastrophe: there were only about half a dozen men back at Plymouth. They must return as quickly as possible. If Massasoit had indeed been captured, they were, according to the terms of the treaty they had recently signed, at war with the most powerful tribe in the region.
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    Massasoit had indeed been taken, temporarily it turned out, by the Narragansetts. But they soon learned that the greatest threat was not from the Narragansetts but from the Pokanokets’ supposed allies. For the lesser sachems who had opposed Massasoit’s treaty with the Pilgrims, this was just the opportunity they had been looking for. One sachem in particular—Corbitant from the village of Mattapoisett just to the east of Massasoit’s headquarters at Sowams—was attempting to use the sachem’s troubles to break the Pokanoket-English alliance. Corbitant had arrived at the nearby village of Nemasket and was now attempting to “draw the hearts of Massasoit’s subjects from him.” Bradford decided to send Squanto and Tokamahamon to Nemasket to find out what Corbitant was up to.
    The next day, one of Massasoit’s men, a warrior named Hobbamock, arrived at Plymouth, gasping for breath and covered in sweat. He’d just run the fifteen miles from Nemasket, and he had terrible news. Squanto, he feared, was dead. When Hobbamock had last seen the interpreter, one of Corbitant’s warriors had been holding a knife to his chest. Corbitant quite rightly viewed Squanto as the instigator of Massasoit’s shift toward the Pilgrims. If Squanto was dead, Corbitant told the Indians at Nemasket, “the English had lost their tongue.” Bradford immediately called a meeting of his advisers.
    The Pilgrims were men of God, but this did not mean they were loath to use force. For more than a millennium and a half, Christians had looked to the Scriptures to sanction just about every conceivable act of violence. Moses had led the Jews to the Promised Land, but there had also been Joshua, a warrior king who had fought to uphold his people’s claims. Undoubtedly counseling Bradford to take immediate and forceful action was the Pilgrims’ Joshua, Miles Standish. This was their chance to show the Indians the consequences of challenging the English—either directly or indirectly through one of their emissaries. “[I]t was conceived not fit to be borne,” Bradford wrote; “for if [the Pilgrims] should suffer their friends and messengers thus to be wronged, they should have none would cleave to them, or give them any intelligence, or do them service afterwards, but next they would fall upon themselves.”
    They decided to hit Corbitant quickly and to hit him hard. Standish volunteered to lead ten men on a mission to Nemasket. If Squanto had in fact been killed, they were to seize Corbitant. And since he’d been disloyal to Massasoit, he was to suffer the fate of all notorious traitors in Jacobean England. Standish was to cut off his head and bring it back to Plymouth for public display.
    They left the next morning, Tuesday, August 14, with Hobbamock as their guide. Hobbamock was named for the same mysterious spirit of darkness as Squanto was. But unlike Squanto, Hobbamock was a pniese—a warrior of special abilities and