Mayflower

“of a general slaughter of the natives,” and one sachem warned “the English [should] be careful on the highway.” The Pokanokets, on the other hand, had a different perspective on the murder. Massasoit pointed out that Peach had once worked for his friend Edward Winslow. Even though Massasoit felt that Peach was guilty, he told Roger Williams that the murderer should be reprieved, “for he was Mr. Winslow’s man.” Massasoit also claimed that since the victim had been a Nipmuck Indian from the interior portion of New England and was therefore less “worthy,” it was wrong that “another man should die for him.”
    When the case came to trial on September 4, 1638, Massasoit and several Narragansett sachems, as well as the Indian friends of the murdered man, were in attendance. Bradford reported that some of the English, who were of “the rude and ignorant sort,” grumbled that it was wrong for a white man to die for killing an Indian. But the jury saw otherwise, and Peach and his cohorts were found guilty and hanged, “which gave [the Indians] and all the country good satisfaction,” Bradford reported.
    The Indians and English might be strangers to one another, but at the midpoint of the seventeenth century they did the best they could to settle their differences. As they all understood, it was the only way to avoid a war.
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    In the fall of 1657, a few months after the death of William Bradford, Massasoit, now approaching eighty years of age, signed his last Plymouth land deed. At the bottom of the parchment he sketched an intricate pictogram. What looks to be the upper portion of a man floats above what could be his legs with only a wavy line connecting the two. Whatever it actually portrays, the pictogram conveys a sense of distance and removal. With this deed, Massasoit disappears from the records of Plymouth Colony, only to reappear in the records of Massachusetts-Bay as leader of the Quabaugs, a subgroup of the Nipmucks based in modern Brookfield, Massachusetts, more than fifty-five miles northwest of Pokanoket.

    Massasoit’s pictogram from a 1657 land deed
    For years, the Pokanokets had maintained a close relationship with the Quabaugs, who lived with other subgroups of the Nipmucks amid the rivers and lakes between the Connecticut River to the west and the English settlements outside Boston to the east. As early as 1637, Massasoit came before officials in Boston as leader of the Quabaugs, and some historians have speculated that twenty years later, in 1657, he took up permanent residence among them. The move not only distanced the old sachem from the unrelenting pressures of Plymouth, it gave his eldest son, Wamsutta, who was approaching forty years of age, a chance to establish himself as the Pokanokets’ new leader.
    Wamsutta had already begun to show signs of independence. In 1654, he sold Hog Island in Narragansett Bay to the Rhode Islander Richard Smith without the written approval of either his father or the Plymouth magistrates. Three years later, Smith appeared in Plymouth court claiming that “he knew not any ban…prohibiting him purchasing of the lands of the Natives till of late.” Begrudgingly, the court allowed Smith to keep his island as long he agreed to “stand bound unto the government and court of New-Plymouth.” Massasoit’s belated endorsement of the sale, signed on September 21, 1657, seems to have signaled the old sachem’s departure from the colony.
    Just a few months later, his son refused to part with a portion of the land his father had agreed to sell to the town of Taunton. Displaying a contentiousness that came to define his all-too-brief relationship with the Plymouth authorities, Wamsutta proclaimed that he was unwilling to surrender lands that the proprietors “say is granted by the court of Plymouth.” Named as a witness to the document is John Sassamon—an Indian who represented everything Massasoit had come to fear and distrust.
    John Sassamon had been one of the missionary John Eliot’s star pupils. He had learned to read and write English, and in 1653 he attended Harvard College. For years, he had worked in Eliot’s mission, and now he was Wamsutta’s interpreter and scribe. In the spring of 1660, perhaps at Sassamon’s urging, Wamsutta appeared before the Plymouth court—not to ratify a sale of land but to change his name. The record