Tisquantum (Squanto)

In March 1621, a Native man walked into the new English settlement at Plymouth and spoke to the colonists in broken English. He was Samoset, and he told them of another man, a native of that very place, who had been in England and spoke English better than he did. That man was Tisquantum, whom the English called Squanto.

No one knows when Tisquantum was born; it may have been about 1600. He came from Patuxet, a Wampanoag town on the shore where Plymouth was later built. In 1614 an English ship's master, Thomas Hunt, lured some twenty or more men and boys (accounts differ) aboard his ship and took them to Málaga, Spain, to sell as slaves. Tisquantum got away to England, where he worked for a London merchant, John Slany, and learned English. In 1619 he came home with the explorer Thomas Dermer. He found that an epidemic had killed nearly everyone in his town while he was gone. What disease struck the New England coast between 1616 and 1619 is still debated; scholars have proposed smallpox, plague, yellow fever and leptospirosis, among others.

On March 22, 1620/21 (Old Style; April 1, 1621, in our calendar), Tisquantum came to Plymouth with Massasoit (Ousamequin), the great sachem, or leader, of the Wampanoag, and interpreted as the two sides made a peace. He stayed with the English, showed them how to plant maize with fish in the ground, and guided them along the coast. He also used his position for himself: Bradford wrote that he frightened other Native people and took gifts from them. Massasoit came to distrust him and demanded that the English hand him over, which strained the peace. In November 1622, on a trading voyage along Cape Cod with Governor William Bradford, Tisquantum fell sick of what Bradford called an "Indean feavor," bleeding from the nose, and died within a few days.

The First Winter and Squanto's Corn, from Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, tells his story from the colony's side, written years later. Bradford calls him "a special instrument sent by God" for the colonists' good. Read with Corn, Land, and the Women's Fields, which shows how the Narragansett, neighbors of the Wampanoag, grew corn, and with The Sickness That Followed the English, which records deaths that followed English visits to the coast of what is now North Carolina in 1585 and 1586.