Mayflower

thereby their strength, power, and tribute would be diminished.”
    Philip was also expected to conduct himself with the dignity befitting a supreme sachem. In addition to dressing more elaborately than the common people, he possessed a larger wigwam than most and traveled with an entourage of warriors and wives. When a person of lesser status greeted him, that person must say, “Cowaúnckamish,” meaning, “My service to you,” as he stroked both of the sachem’s shoulders.

    An elm bowl attributed to King Philip
    By all accounts, Philip looked the part. One admiring Englishman who saw the sachem on the streets of Boston estimated his clothing and large belts of wampum to be worth at least £20, approximately $4,000 today. But if Philip was to maintain himself as sachem of the Pokanoket without continuing to rely on the sale of Indian land, he needed to find an alternative to the fur trade that had once supported his father.
    Ever since the Pilgrims had watched the gambols of whales around the anchored Mayflower, the English had sought to exploit these large sea mammals as a source of oil and baleen. Nowhere were there more whales than in the waters surrounding Nantucket Island—a fifty-square-mile sandbank twenty-four miles off the south shore of Cape Cod. Massasoit had long since determined the rules by which the Nantucket Indians divided up the whales that washed up on the island’s shore. As whale oil became an increasingly sought-after commodity in New England, it was crucial that Philip reassert his father’s claims over the Indian whalers of Nantucket.
    In 1665, Philip received word that a Nantucket Indian named John Gibbs had broken a Native taboo: he had spoken the name of Philip’s dead father. Philip decided he must personally oversee Gibbs’s punishment, and he set out on an expedition that might also help to strengthen his influence on the island.
    In 1665, the Indian population on Nantucket was huge—somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 at a time when the total number of Pokanokets and their allies, including those on Nantucket, is estimated to have been about 5,000. The island’s English population, on the other hand, barely reached one hundred. On Nantucket, Philip would experience what it had been like in 1621 when the Indians had still been the overwhelmingly dominant force in New England.
    By canoe, it was about sixty-five miles from Mount Hope to Nantucket. Philip landed on the west end of the island and then used the sand cliffs along the south shore to conceal his progress east to Gibbs’s home near a pond that still bears his name. Soon the Indian was in Philip’s custody. But as the sachem prepared to execute the transgressor, some members of the English community offered to pay for his release. Gibbs was a special favorite of the island’s interpreter, Peter Folger, and would soon become a minister to Nantucket’s Christian Indians. Philip named a price, but the English were unable to meet it. A standoff ensued as Philip refused to lessen his offer, using “threatening language,” the island historian Obed Macy later reported, “pronounced with an emphasis which foreboded no good.”
    Philip appeared to be in control of the situation, especially given that the English were outnumbered by more than ten to one. But as may have become increasingly clear to Peter Folger (whose daughter Abiah would have a son named Benjamin Franklin), Philip did not have the support of the local Indians in this matter. The English “concluded,” Macy wrote, “to put all to risk. [T]hey told [Philip], that, if he did not immediately leave the island, they would rally the inhabitants, and fall upon him and cut him off to a man.”
    Both sides knew it was an empty threat, but it was Philip who backed down. With £11 in hand, he “happily took the alarm, and left the island as soon as possible.”
    Instead of Philip, it had been the English who had proved their loyalty to the local Indians, and in the years ahead more and more of those Indians would turn to Christianity. With the outbreak of war a decade later, the Indians of Nantucket became one of the first Native groups in New England to “disown” Philip. For a young sachem seeking to assert his authority over one of the most populous and potentially lucrative portions of his territory, the voyage to Nantucket had been a disaster.
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