Mayflower

discipline, a community where shared religious beliefs and family ties had united the Leideners from the start and where two years of strong leadership on the part of William Bradford had convinced even the Strangers that it was in their best interests to work together. Some twenty miles to the north, at Wessagussett, an entirely different community had come into being.
    Wessagussett was more like early Jamestown—a group of unattached men with relatively little in common. In the beginning, their energies were directed toward building a fort. But once that was completed, they were unprepared to face the rigors of a hard New England winter. As in Jamestown, a state of almost unaccountable languor quickly descended on the inhabitants. Suffering from a deadly combination of malnutrition and despair, the colonists appeared powerless to adapt to the demands of the New World.
    It was quite possible, the Pilgrims insisted, for Weston’s men to survive. Even without corn and migratory birds, there were still shellfish (including oysters, which were not available at Plymouth) along the water’s edge at Wessagussett. There were also groundnuts, fleshy potatolike tubers that grew in clusters beneath the ground. Rather than give up, they must strive to feed themselves.
    But to seek food required them to leave the safety of their fortress, and unlike Plymouth, where the closest Indian village was fifteen miles away, Wessagussett was set right beside a Massachusett settlement. Not only was the threat of attack greater, but there was also an even more powerful form of temptation. The Indians possessed stores of corn that they were saving for the spring. Why spend the day rooting for clams in the cold mud when there was so much corn for the taking?
    In February, John Sanders, the settlement’s leader, wrote to Governor Bradford, asking if it was right to steal a few hogsheads of corn, especially if they promised to reimburse the Indians once they’d grown their own corn in the summer. This was, of course, almost exactly what the Pilgrims had done two years before, but Bradford urged them to leave the corn alone, “for it might so exasperate the Indians…[that] all of us might smart for it.”
    In desperation, Sanders sailed to the east in hopes of securing some provisions from a fishing outpost on the island of Monhegan. He left his plantation in a state of misery and disorder. One morning they found a man dead in the tidal flats, waist deep in muck and apparently too feeble to extract himself. As the sufferings of Weston’s men increased, the Indians, who were already resentful of the English interlopers, began to harass them unmercifully. They scoffed at their weakness and even snatched from their hands what few clams and groundnuts they had been able to gather. Some of the English resorted to trading their clothes for food until they were reduced to naked, trembling skeletons of wretchedness; others contracted themselves out as servants to the Indians; one man, according to Winslow, willingly became an Indian.
    About this time, Miles Standish traveled to Manomet, just fifteen miles to the south of Plymouth, to pick up some of the corn Bradford had secured during his trading voyage with Squanto. Standish was being entertained by sachem Canacum when two Massachusett Indians arrived with word from sachem Obtakiest at Wessagussett.
    One of the Indians was a warrior of immense pride named Wituwamat, who bragged of having once killed several French sailors. Wituwamat possessed an ornately carved knife that he had taken from one of his victims. Soon after his arrival, he presented the knife to Canacum and began “a long speech in an audacious manner.” Without the assistance of an interpreter, Standish was not sure what Wituwamat was saying, but he did know that once the Indian had completed his speech, he—not Standish—became Canacum’s favored guest and Wituwamat’s “entertainment much exceeded the captain’s.”
    Standish was not the sort to overlook a social slight. Where Bradford was willing to give even a potential traitor the benefit of the doubt, Standish was quick to take offense. He objected vehemently to his treatment by Canacum and chastised the two Massachusett Indians for their refusal to pay him the proper respect.
    In an attempt to pacify the captain, Canacum insisted that Standish invite his three English compatriots, who were then loading the