Mayflower

he could be there but pressing business had required him to remain at Plymouth. In his stead, he had come with some medicines and foods “most likely to do [the sachem] good in this his extremity.” Massasoit had eaten nothing in a very long time, and Winslow attempted to feed him some fruit preserves, administered on the tip of a knife. Once the sweetened fruit had dissolved in Massasoit’s mouth, he swallowed—for the first time in two days.
    Winslow began to examine the interior of the sachem’s mouth. It was “exceedingly furred,” and his tongue was so swollen that it was little wonder he had been unable to eat anything. After scraping the “corruption” from his mouth and tongue, Winslow fed him more of the preserves.
    Massasoit may have been suffering from typhus, probably brought to the village by the recently departed Dutch traders. Spread by infected lice, typhus was known as “pestilential fever” in the seventeenth century and was most common in winter and spring. Typhus thrived in the crowded, unsanitary conditions typical of an Indian or, for that matter, English village of the time, and there were also several other Pokanokets suffering from the disease. According to a modern description of typhus, symptoms include “fever and chills, vomiting, constipation or diarrhea, muscle ache and delirium or stupor. The tongue is first coated with a white fur, which then turns brown. The body develops small red eruptions which may bleed.” In severe cases, the mortality rate can reach 70 percent.
    Within a half hour of receiving his first taste of Winslow’s fruit preserves, Massasoit had improved to the extent that his sight had begun to return. Winslow had brought several bottles of medicines, but they had broken along the way. He asked Massasoit if he could send a messenger to get some more from the surgeon back in Plymouth, as well as a couple of chickens, so that he might cook up a broth. This was readily agreed to, and by 2 A.M. a runner was on his way with a letter from Winslow.
    The next day, Massasoit was well enough to ask Winslow to shoot a duck and make an English pottage similar to what he had sampled at Plymouth. Fearing that his stomach was not yet ready for meat, Winslow insisted that he first try a more easily digested pottage of greens and herbs. Neither Winslow nor John Hamden had any experience in making such a concoction, however, and after much hunting about they were able to find only a few strawberry leaves and a sassafras root. They boiled the two together, and after straining the results through Winslow’s handkerchief and combining it with some roasted corn, they fed the mixture to Massasoit. He drank at least a pint of the broth and soon had his first bowel movement in five days.
    Before fading off to sleep, the sachem asked Winslow to wash out the mouths of all the others who were sick in the village, “saying they were good folk.” Reluctantly the Pilgrim envoy went about the work of scraping the mouths of all who desired it, a duty he admitted to finding “much offensive to me, not being accustomed with such poisonous savors.” This was a form of diplomacy that went far beyond the usual exchange of pleasantries and gifts.
    That afternoon Winslow shot a duck and prepared to feed Massasoit the promised pottage. By this time, the sachem had improved remarkably. “Never did I see a man so low…recover in that measure in so short a time,” Winslow wrote. The duck’s meat was quite fatty, and Winslow said it was important to skim the grease from the top of the broth, but Massasoit was now ravenous and insisted on making “a gross meal of it”—gobbling down the duck, fat and all. An hour later, he was vomiting so violently that he began to bleed from the nose.
    For the next four hours the blood poured from his nose, and Winslow began to fear that this might be the end. But eventually the bleeding stopped, and the sachem slept for close to eight hours. When he awoke, he was feeling so much better that he asked that the two chickens, which had just arrived from Plymouth, be kept as breeding stock rather than cooked for his benefit.
    All the while, Indians from as many as a hundred miles away continued to arrive at Pokanoket. Before Winslow’s appearance, many of those in attendance had commented on the absence of the English and suggested that they cared little about Massasoit’s