Mayflower

further vengeance on him.”
    The Massachusetts were not the only Indians in the region to have taken flight into the wilderness. All throughout Cape Cod—from Manomet to Nauset to Pamet—the Native inhabitants had fled in panic, convinced that Standish and his thugs were about to descend on their villages and kill every Indian in sight. “[T]his sudden and unexpected execution…,” Edward Winslow wrote, “hath so terrified and amazed them, as in like manner they forsook their houses, running to and fro like men distracted, living in swamps and other desert places, and so brought manifold diseases amongst themselves, whereof very many are dead.”
    Huddled in swamps and on remote islands, fearful that to venture back to their villages meant certain death, Indians throughout the region were unable to plant the crops on which their lives depended. By summer, they had begun to die at a startling rate. “[C]ertainly it is strange to hear how many of late have, and still daily die amongst them,” Winslow wrote. Just about every notable sachem on the Cape died in the months ahead, including Canacum at Manomet, Aspinet at Nauset, and the “personable, courteous, and fair conditioned” Iyanough at Cummaquid. Word reached Plymouth that before he died, the handsome young sachem had “in the midst of these distractions, said the God of the English was offended with them, and would destroy them in his anger.” One village decided to send some gifts to the Pilgrims in hopes of establishing peace, but the Indians’ canoe capsized almost within sight of the plantation, and three of them drowned. Since that incident, not a single Indian from Cape Cod had dared to approach the settlement. Among the Massachusetts, the Pilgrims had earned a new name: wotawquenange—cutthroats.
    Standish’s raid had irreparably damaged the human ecology of the region. Not only had the Pilgrims proved unexpectedly violent and vindictive, but Massasoit had betrayed his former confederates. By siding with the Pilgrims against the Indians of Massachusetts and Cape Cod, the Pokanoket sachem had initiated a new and terrifying era in New England. It was no longer a question of Indian versus English; it was now possible for alliances and feuds to reach across racial lines in a confusing amalgam of cultures.
    It took some time before a new equilibrium came to the region. In the immediate aftermath of the Wessagussett raid, the Pilgrims were astonished to discover that they had, at least temporarily, ruined their ability to trade with the Indians. “[W]e have been much damaged in our trade,” Bradford wrote to the Merchant Adventurers, “for there where we had [the] most skins the Indians are run away from their habitations, and set no corn, so as we can by no means as yet come to speak with them.” Without furs as a potential source of income, the Pilgrims looked to codfishing—with the usual disastrous results.
    The people who had been helped by the attack were the Pokanokets. With the death of the most influential sachems on Cape Cod, a huge power vacuum had been created in the region. Prior to Wessagussett, Aspinet, sachem of the Nausets, had commanded more warriors than Massasoit. But now Aspinet was dead, and his people had fled in panic. Over the next few years, Massasoit established the Indian nation we now refer to as the Wampanoag—an entity that may not even have existed before this crucial watershed.
    It was exactly the scenario Squanto had envisioned for himself the year before. But it had been Massasoit who had pulled it off. Just a few words, delivered from what had almost been his deathbed, had unleashed a chain of events that had completely reinvented the region in his own image. The English had served him well.
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    The Pilgrims knew that there were those back in England who would criticize them for launching what was, in essence, an unprovoked attack on sachem Obtakiest and the Massachusetts. In the months ahead, Edward Winslow wrote Good Newes from New England. As the title suggests, Winslow’s account puts the Wessagussett raid in the best possible light. The Pilgrims, Winslow points out, had been operating in a climate of intense fear since learning about the massacres in Virginia the previous spring. Given the dramatic and apparently irrefutable nature of Massasoit’s disclosure of the plot against them, there was little else they could have