(c. 1590-1622)
Wampanoag translator, guide, and emissary for the early Plymouth Colony
Squanto was born in the Wampanoag community of Patuxet, a village of about two thousand inhabitants on present-day Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts. Patuxet was linked by kinship, ethnicity, and political alliance to other Wampanoag communities between the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay and the tip of Cape Cod and on the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
As Squanto entered adulthood, European explorers began frequenting Patuxet and adjacent shores in search of trade, sites for settlements, and a passageway to the Pacific. The best documented of these visits were made by the French colonizer Samuel de Champlain in 1605 and 1606. The Patuxets began producing surpluses of maize and furs for exchange with friendly visitors while warding off those who were hostile. Although Squanto's position among his people at this time is unknown, he was almost certainly a person of prominence, perhaps a sachem or potential sachem.
A visit in 1614 by the English colonizer John Smith set in motion the events that changed Squanto's life. After skirmishing against and then making peace with the Patuxets, Smith returned to England, leaving a second ship to fish for cod under the command of one Thomas Hunt. Luring Squanto and about twenty other Wampanoags on board, Hunt kidnapped them and then seized about seven others on Cape Cod before sailing for Málaga, Spain. There Hunt began selling his captives as slaves until some priests intervened and redeemed the rest, including Squanto, in hopes of converting them to Christianity. Squanto's movements are unclear for the next three years—until 1617, by which time he had somehow gotten to London. Living in the home of John Slany, the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company, he became immersed in the English language and culture, and he began to see in the colonial ambitions of Slany and his associates the means by which he could return home.
Squanto's plans moved closer to realization when, on an expedition to Newfoundland, he became reacquainted with Thomas Dermer, an officer under John Smith in 1614. Like Smith, Dermer had left Patuxet before the fateful kidnapping. Dermer took Squanto back to England to meet Sir Ferdinando Gorges, then the most determined would-be colonizer of New England. Although he had already failed in several attempts to use kidnapped Indians to advance his endeavors, Gorges was persuaded by Squanto's evident knowledge of the region, his apparent standing among his people, and his professed loyalty. With Dermer at the helm, Squanto finally sailed for home in the spring of 1619.
During Squanto's absence the New England coast from Cape Cod northward had been ravaged by one or more epidemics of European origin to which Indians lacked adequate immunity. As a result, Patuxet and most other Wampanoag villages had been abandoned, and the survivors, 10 to 25 percent of the earlier population, had joined together in a few smaller communities. These communities were hard-pressed to defend themselves against tribute demands by Narragansetts and attacks by Micmacs, both of whom had avoided the epidemics, as well as hostile English and French expeditions. Squanto therefore confronted a very different world from the one he had been torn out of five years earlier.
Although native hostility to the English was intense, Squanto at first smoothed the way for Dermer with the Wampanoags, including the Pokanoket sachem, Massasoit, now the most prominent Wampanoag leader. But returning the following year, the expedition was attacked at Martha's Vineyard, the center of anti-English sentiment. Dermer was mortally wounded, while Squanto was captured and turned over to the Pokanokets.
The second turning point in Squanto's life came the following November, when about a hundred English settlers arrived at Patuxet aboard the Mayflower to establish Plymouth Colony. Struggling to survive, half the unprepared colonists succumbed to starvation and disease during the harsh winter. Finally in March, the Pokanokets and Nemaskets dispatched Samoset, a visiting Abenaki with ties to English traders, to sound out the beleaguered colonists. Finding them receptive, Samoset returned a few days later with Squanto, whose knowledge of the English and their language exceeded his own.
Squanto's first contributions to the English were to teach them how to use fish fertilizer with their crops and to help arrange a treaty of alliance binding the Pokanokets and Nemaskets to Plymouth. As a reward for the latter, the Pokanokets allowed him to live among the English, at the site of his native Patuxet. While Massasoit and the Pokanokets welcomed the treaty, the Nemaskets resisted the paramount authority it accorded the English and the supremacy among Indians claimed by the Pokanokets. Some Nemaskets seized Squanto, who had to be rescued by heavily armed Plymouth soldiers. Squanto then helped the Plymouth colony secure treaties with some Wampanoag villages on Cape Cod and some Massachusett Indians north of Plymouth.
As critical as he was to Plymouth's fortunes, Squanto's usefulness was limited because he had no power base among the remaining Wampanoags or other local natives. In the summer of 1621 the colony invited a second Indian, a Pokanoket named Hobbamock, to live among them. Squanto attempted to undermine the Pokanokets by telling Wampanoag audiences that he alone had the ear and loyalty of the colony's leaders and that they should abandon Massasoit's leadership for his. He also attempted to mislead the English into thinking that Massasoit, with the Narragansetts and Massachusetts, was conspiring against them. His effort backfired when the English and Pokanokets discovered the truth. Because of his past services to them, the English protected Squanto from Massasoit's wrath, but for his own safety he thereafter remained close to the English at all times. A few weeks later, he was stricken by a severe fever and died.
Squanto's historical reputation rests largely on his role in helping the Plymouth Pilgrims establish their colony. The actual story of his life reveals a man who adapted heroically to new circumstances and indeed aided the English, but at the price of alienating himself from most other Wampanoags. Seeking to establish or reestablish himself as a native political leader, he ended his life a stranger in his own land.
Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians and Europeans, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Neal Salisbury, Struggle and Survival in Colonial America "Squanto: Last of the Patuxets," ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Neal Salisbury
Smith College
