Mayflower

and the Dutch. Selling guns and ammunition was a highly profitable business, and Plymouth magistrates eventually came to sanction the exchange.
    From Governor Bradford’s perspective, the arming of the Indians was just another symptom of the alarming complacency that had gripped his colony. New England was headed for a fall. And it was the gun-toting Indians who would be “the rod” with which the Lord punished his people:
    For these fierce natives, they are now so fill’d
    With guns and muskets, and in them so skill’d
    As that they may keep the English in awe,
    And when they please, give unto them the law.
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    The last days of Bradford’s life were spent in what might seem a strange pursuit for the governor of a New England colony: studying Hebrew. He yearned to have as direct a connection as possible with the word of God, and to do that, he must learn the language in which the Bible was originally written. The initial pages of his Plymouth history are filled with a doodlelike scrawl of Hebrew words and phrases. “Though I am grown aged,” he wrote, “yet I have had a longing desire to see with my own eyes, something of that most ancient language and holy tongue, in which the law and oracles of God were written…. And though I cannot attain tomuch herein, yet I am refreshed, to have seen some glimpse hereof; (as Moses saw the Land of Canaan afar off).” The community of Saints he had hoped to create in New England had never come to be, but Bradford had earned at least a glimpse of another kind of Promised Land.
    In the winter of 1657, Bradford began to feel unwell. His health continued to decline until early May, when a sudden and marvelous change came upon him. All God-fearing Puritans were in search of evidence that they were among the elect. On the morning of May 8, Bradford’s doubts and worries were answered with a startling certitude: “[T]he God of heaven so filled his mind with ineffable consolations,” Cotton Mather wrote, “that he seemed little short of Paul, rapt up unto the unutterable entertainments of Paradise.” Here at long last was proof that his journey through life was to be crowned by redemption. That morning he told those gathered around his sickbed that “the good spirit of God had given him a pledge of happiness in another world, and the first-fruits of his eternal glory.” He died the next day, “lamented by all the colonies of New England, as a common blessing and father to them all.”
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    In 1913, a gravel-mining operation in Warren, Rhode Island, uncovered an Indian burial ground. Known as Burr’s Hill, the site was in the vicinity of the Pokanokets’ ancestral village at Sowams and contained forty-two graves, many of which dated back to the middle of the seventeenth century. The artifacts collected from the graves provide fascinating evidence of the degree to which Western goods had become a part of the Indians’ lives. Accompanying the dead, who were buried on their sides with their heads pointed to the southwest, was a stunning array of objects: in addition to traditional Native artifacts such as arrowheads, amulets, and steatite pipes were wine bottles, muskets, spoons, iron axes, kettles, bells, wool blankets, combs, scissors, hammers, horseshoes, locks, keys, hinges, knives, pewter bowls, swords, leather shoes, and a Jew’s harp.
    One of the graves at Burr’s Hill contained a noticeably richer assortment of objects than the others. Included among the grave goods was a necklace made of copper. In the summer of 1621, Edward Winslow had traveled to Sowams and presented Massasoit with a “copper chain.” Although no one will ever know who was actually buried in the grave, archaeologists have speculated that this might be the Pilgrim necklace.
    When the Indians had first come in contact with the English, they had been, by all accounts, awed and amazed by the things the Europeans had brought with them. “They do much extol and wonder at the English for their strange inventions,” William Wood wrote. Whether it was an iron plow, a musket, or a windmill, the Indians ascribed to these “strange inventions” a spiritual power known as manit. “[T]here is a general custom amongst them,” Roger Williams wrote, “at the apprehension of any excellency in men, women, birds, fish, etc., to cry out manitoo, that is, ‘It is a God.’…[W]hen they