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John Billington Gets Lost: A Window to Plymouth Colony’s Early History

In the summer of 1621, the Plymouth colonists finally had reason for optimism — until 16-year-old John Billington wandered off and got lost in the woods.

While we commemorate 1620 as the year of the Mayflower, in 1621 many of the key events occurred that led to the survival and success of Plymouth Colony. It was the “make or break” year in modern parlance. In March, the colonists made a peace agreement with Massasoit, the sachem and leader of the Wampanoag confederation. Then in June, colonists Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins traveled to Pokanoket to solidify the agreement. The harsh winter that had claimed the lives of one-half of the Mayflower passengers had also ended. Work was also well underway to plant crops and build the settlement at Plymouth.

Landing of the Pilgrims by Currier & Ives

Then, the unexpected occurred. At some point in June or July (the primary sources differ on the date), young John Billington got lost.

John Billington, Jr.

Billington wandered for five days before stumbling into the Wampanoag sachemship of Manomet, just south of Plymouth. The sachem Canacum delivered the boy to Aspinet, the sachem at Nauset on the elbow of Cape Cod. Then he notified Massasoit, who notified Gov. William Bradford of John’s whereabouts. Bradford then directed a party of 10 colonists (about one-half of the colony’s adult male population at the time) to travel by boat to Nauset to recover the boy. Squanto joined them as a guide and interpreter. Tokamahamom, who Winslow described as a special friend, came along, too.

After a stop at Cummaquid (present day Barnstable), the recovery party arrived in Nauset. Nauset warriors presented them with the boy “behung with beads.” They returned to Plymouth, mission accomplished.

Edward Winslow

More Than Meets The Eye

The story stands by itself as a tale of the recovery of a lost boy. However, a deeper look reveals several threads of historical significance. Those threads shed considerable light on the events of 1621 so critical to the survival of Plymouth Colony.

When the Pilgrims learned that John had been sent to Nauset, it must have given them great pause. There the Nausets had attacked a Mayflower exploratory party on a beach in present-day Eastham about seven months earlier. Furthermore, Samoset, an emissary sent by Massasoit, advised them of the Nausets’ great animosity toward the English.

The nefarious deeds of Capt, Thomas Hunt in 1614 caused their antipathy. He had kidnapped seven Indians from Nauset along with 20 from Patuxet (Squanto among them) to sell into slavery in Spain. If that weren’t enough, the Pilgrims would have known, or strongly suspected, that their earlier theft of corn had been detected. The recovery party must have felt great trepidation when it set out in the shallop for Nauset.

After departing Plymouth, the recovery party sailed into present day Barnstable Harbor to escape a storm. The next morning, they saw two natives on the beach looking for shellfish. The party sent its two native interpreters ashore to inquire as to the status of the boy, and were told that he was well and at Nauset. The Cummaquid natives then invited the party ashore. They took them to their sachem Iyanough, who they found very friendly and agreeable. In fact, Iyanough joined the recovery party and travelled with them to Nauset to assist.

Statue of Iyanough in Hyannis

History Comes Back to Haunt

While at Cummaquid, the Pilgrims received a poignant reminder of the deep wounds that Capt. Thomas Hunt inflicted with his 1614 kidnappings. In the words of Edward Winslow in Mourt’s Relation:

One thing was very grievous unto us at this place. There was an old woman, whom we judged to be no less than a hundred years old, which came to see us because she never saw English, yet could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively. We demanding the reason of it, they told us that she had three sons who, when Master Hunt was in these parts, went abroad his ship to trade with him, and he carried them captives into Spain by which means she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age.

We told them we were sorry that any Englishman should give them that offense, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that had heard of it condemned him for the same; but for us, we would not offer them any such injury though it would gain us all the skins in the country. So we gave her some small trifles, which somewhat appeased her.

While the receptiveness and hospitality of Iyanough and his tribe was reassuring, this reminder from the old woman of the animosity of the Nausets must have heightened the Pilgrims’ anxiety as they continued on their mission.

Map of Southern New England, 1620-22

John Billington Recovered

Upon their arrival at Nauset, Iyanough and Squanto went ashore to inform Aspinet of the reason for their visit. Then the Indians came to the shore. In Winslow’s words, they were “very thick amongst us, and were earnest with us to bring in our boat.” The Pilgrims hesitated. According to Winslow, “because we had least cause to trust them, being they only had formerly made an assault upon us in the same place, in time of our winter discovery for habitation.”

When their boat came aground on the tidal flats, a large group of Indians approached. The Pilgrims allowed two to board. One was the man who owned the corn that the Pilgrims had taken during their explorations of Cape Cod. The Pilgrims agreed to repay the debt, which ameliorated the Nausets’ animosity over the theft.. Thus, the recovery of John Billington resolved a major point of contention between the Nausets and the colonists.

After sunset, Aspinet appeared with a party of about 100 warriors through the water. One bore the Billington boy “behung with beads.” Aspinet and about half of his party, unarmed, approached the shallop while the remainder stood by with bows ready. John was returned to the Pilgrims, and a peace agreement was made with Aspinet, thus extending the agreement made with Massasoit in March. Notably, relations between the Pilgrims and the Cape Cod tribes remained peaceful, even throughout King Philip’s War later on.

Questions About The Episode

Like many episodes in history, this one has some loose ends. While the story resonates with positive and improving relations between the Wampanoags and the Plymouth colonists, there is also some potentially conflicting evidence. When Billington came into the Indian village at Manomet, why didn’t the sachem Canacum return him directly to Plymouth, or at least to Massasoit? Why send him to Nauset, the site of much animosity toward the colonists? Historians have wrestled with this question.

Perhaps Massasoit’s leadership was not quite as dominant as he had led the Pilgrims to believe. His decision to pursue peaceful relations with the new settlers did not sit well with all of the tribes. The Billington incident may reflect this. Moreover, the great plague had dramatically altered the balance of power among the tribes. The Nausets appear to have survived that ordeal with far fewer losses. The 100 warriors who accompanied Aspinet to greet the recovery party at Nauset was larger than Massasoit’s 60 warriors at Pokanoket. Canacum’s decision to send the boy to the Nausets may have been a deferral to a more powerful neighbor.

forefathers-day-massasoit-statue-plymouth

Statue of Massasoit in Plymouth

Silence on John Billington

The historical record is silent on the kinds of communications, if any, took place between the various tribes on this matter, as well as on the motivations of the various actors. The Indians did not have a written language, and the English accounts that have survived were written from their perspective and from the limited knowledge that they had. Notwithstanding this, it can be reasonably concluded that the end result of this story represents a net positive result on the relations between the Wampanoags and the colonists, particularly on Cape Cod.

No account of the Billington recovery would be complete without some background on the infamous Billington family. Young John travelled on the Mayflower with his father, John Sr., his mother Ellen, and his younger brother Francis. They were not members of the separatist Leiden congregation, but were among the “strangers” placed on the voyage by the backers of the voyage to help insure the financial viability of the endeavor. The family was problematic from the start.

Signing the Mayflower Compact 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

A Troublesome Family

It has been proposed that John Billington, Sr., was one of the “mutinous voices” that Bradford described which led to the Mayflower Compact. In March of 1621, Billington Sr. was tried and convicted for refusing a lawful order from Captain Standish to perform sentry duty. In 1630, he was hanged for murdering a fellow colonist in Plymouth’s first execution. Bradford wrote of him in a 1625 private letter “he is a knave, and will so live and die.”

Bradford also described the Billingtons as “one of the profanest families among them; they came from London and I know not by what friends shuffled into their company.” Young Francis contributed his share to the family’s reputation when he almost ended the Mayflower story before anyone came ashore. He fired a musket in the passenger quarters of the ship, very near the location that the ship’s supply of gunpowder was stored.

Some historians speculate that John Billington, Jr., did not wander off and get lost in the summer of 1621. They suggest he deliberately ran away to escape his family, his father in particular. Instead, he chose to cast his lot with the Indians. While this theory is plausible given what is known, there is no factual support for it in the historical record. Bradford’s account indicates that John, Jr., “lost himself.” As a postscript, John Billington, Jr., died sometime between 1627 and 1630 in his mid-twenties, cause of death unknown.

Thus, the recovery of a lost boy tested the commitment of both sides to the peace treaty that Massasoit and Gov. John Carver agreed on a few months before. In addition, the Pilgrims paid the corn debt. They also addressed the practice of kidnapping American natives by English explorers.

Sometimes, a seemingly small story stands at the crossroads of history.

End Notes

The author of this story, Ron Petersen, is the chair of the Orleans Massachusetts Historical Commission. He has also served on the Orleans Community Preservation Committee, as chair of both the Orleans Historical Markers Committee and the 1918 Attack on Orleans Committee. He is a former board member and officer of the Orleans Historical Society, and is a board member and historian for the Orleans Firebirds of the Cape Cod Baseball League. Ron has written numerous published articles on regional history, and has lectured throughout Cape Cod on various historical topics.

Images: Map of Southern New England By AnthroMimus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56851919. Statue of Iyanough in Hyannis By Kerowyn – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17797930. Landing of the Pilgrims N. Currier. Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth 11th De. Plymouth Massachusetts, None. [New york: lith. & pub. by n. currier, 2 spruce st., between 1838 and 1856] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/95503144/.

Bibliography

Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation, (Morison ed.), New York: The Modern Library, 1657, 1952.

Bunker, Nick, Making Haste from Babylon, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010.

Goodwin, John A., The Pilgrim Republic, Boston, Ticknor and Company 1888

Johnson, Caleb H. The Mayflower and Her Passengers, Xlibris Corp. 2006.

Mack, Jonathan, A Stranger Among Saints, Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 2020.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Story of the Old Colony of New Plymouth, New York: Alfred A Knoph,1956

Morton, Nathaniel, The New-England Memorial, Plymouth, MA, Forgotten Books, 1669

Prince, Thomas, A Chronological History of New England, Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1736

Silverman, David, This Land is Their Land, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Stratton, Eugene Aubrey, Plymouth Colony, Its History and People, Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing Company, 1986

Vaughn, Alden T. New England Frontier, Puritans and Indians 1620-1675, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

Winslow, Edward and Bradford, William, Mourt’s Relation, 1622

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The Four Women Who Cooked the First Thanksgiving

The four women who cooked that first Thanksgiving probably didn’t feel all that thankful when their husbands invited 90 guests, all Wampanoag men, to eat with them.

They were the only women left after the first deadly winter that killed half of Plymouth Colony. They died of exhaustion, starvation, pneumonia, scurvy and cold. By springtime, 14 women had perished. Remarkably, the four women left managed to feed 143 people without kitchens, ovens, wheat, spices or butter.

This 1899 painting, The First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris has a number of inaccuracies. It shows the four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving with smiling faces.

Their dinner guests may have shown up unexpectedly, as the Native people had a tendency to appear when food was served. Or perhaps their menfolk had invited them to seal a peace deal. The meal itself – or rather meals, because they stayed for three days – served as more of a harvest celebration than a Thanksgiving.

The Four Women Who Cooked the First Thanksgiving

The women faced another challenge: getting along with each other. Cooking for so m any people required cooperation among the four, who had different backgrounds and aspirations. They included a Saint, a Goodwife, a Traveler and a Troublemaker.

The colonists referred to themselves as “Saints” and “Strangers” or “Travelers.” The devout Saints wanted to separate from the Church of England and crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom. Strangers came for adventure and opportunity. That both Saints and Strangers signed the Mayflower Compact shows the inclusiveness of the colonists.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

That first Thanksgiving was cooked by two Saints, Mary Brewster and Susanna Winslow, and two Strangers, Elizabeth Hopkins and Eleanor Billington.

But they probably all deserved sainthood for cooking all that food. The men just “feasted and entertained,” according to one of their husbands.

Goodwife Susanna Winslow

That husband, Edward Winslow, had married Susanna White in May, about five months earlier. He would serve as Plymouth’s governor and diplomat, and together they would prosper.

Edward Winslow, husband of one of the four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving

So at 29, Susanna Winslow was a rising figure in the little colony, a goodwife who would grow into a mistress.

Historians can’t tell for sure whether Susanna arrived as a Saint or a Stranger. Her first husband had a common name, and women didn’t leave much of a record. So no one seems to really know which Englishman named William White boarded the Mayflower.

Susanna and William brought their young son, Resolved, about five years old. Susanna was pregnant, and gave birth to their second son, Peregrine, below decks on the Mayflower as it lay at anchor in Massachusetts Bay. Odd as “Resolved” and “Peregrine” may seem, their names were typical of the Puritans. They suggest Susanna was a Saint.

William died in February and Elizabeth Winslow in March. Forty-eight days after Elizabeth died, Edward married Susanna. He brought to the union a daughter, Margaret, about three years old.

Edward and Susanna had practical and emotional reasons for marrying so soon after their spouses died. As Martyn Whittock points out in Mayflower Lives, “Shared faith, shared history, mutual respect, and, no doubt, physical as well as emotional attraction drew them together. And there is plenty of evidence for loving physical union enhancing partnership in the godly marriages.”

A portrait of Edward Winslow suggests a happy marriage. In his hand he holds a letter. The last three lines read, “From your loving wife, Susanna.” The portrait was painted in 1651, 30 years after their wedding.

Mary Brewster, Saint

Puritans believed in social hierarchy, so one can easily guess who took charge of the cooking operation:

52-year-old Mary Brewster, wife of the Saints’ spiritual leader, William Brewster.

William Brewster

Mary probably wished she had the help of her two daughters, Patience, 21, and Fear, 15, to cook for all those people. But the Brewsters left their daughters behind. They believed, like many of the colonists, that the weaker sex might not survive the journey. That explains why so few women cooked the first Thanksgiving.

That Mary joined her husband tells us something about her grit, her courage and her deep religious faith.

The Brewsters did bring their two boys with them, Love and Wrestling, about 11 and 7 at the first Thanksgiving. They would have helped prepare the meal, along with little Resolved White and Margaret Winslow. Richard More, their seven-year-old servant, would have helped, too.

Richard had come with three siblings, all dead by the time of the first Thanksgiving. Known as one of the Mayflower Love Children, Richard’s legal father had sent the children to America when he discovered he was not their biological father.

Patience and Fear arrived in Plymouth a few years later, along with older brother Jonathan.

Fear married another saint, Isaac Allerton. Her great-great-great-grandson, Zachary Taylor, served as the 12th president of the United States.

Elizabeth Hopkins, Traveler

Two years before boarding the Mayflower, Elizabeth Hopkins, married one of the most interesting Plymouth colonists, Stephen Hopkins. She was 33, he a 36-year-old widower with three children. He had already survived a shipwreck in the Caribbean and taken part in the settlement of Jamestown before returning to England. His adventure as a castaway on a Caribbean island probably inspired Shakespeare to create the character Stephano in The Tempest.

stephen-hopkins-caliban-stephano-trinculo

Calilban, Stephano and Trinculo from the painting The Tempest by Johann Heinrich Ramberg

Stephen, a rough-and-ready sort, planned to return to Virginia with his family. His family included Constance, 14, and Giles, 12, the two surviving children from his first marriage. Little Damaris, about three, may have been conceived before the marriage. Elizabeth was pregnant at the outset of the voyage.

She probably hoped to have her baby on land, but crosswinds and storms extended the unpleasant Mayflower voyage. She gave birth to Oceanus in a dark, cramped berth below the decks of the gyrating vessel.

Stephen, though a Traveler, held a position of importance in the colony. Because of his time in Jamestown, he could hunt and he knew about Native Americans. When the English-speaking Native American Samoset came to Plymouth, Elizabeth and Stephen put him up that night in their tiny house (the 1749 Court House Museum in downtown Plymouth stands on the site).

The house had at the very most three rooms, cramped quarters four adults, three children and the Hopkins’ two servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister. The crowding probably didn’t help anyone’s temper. The two servants had fought and wounded each other in a sword-and-dagger duel a few months before that Thanksgiving.

Stephen was not the godly sort, and we can imagine Elizabeth wasn’t, either. They would have five more children, run a tavern and occasionally get into trouble with the authorities. Stephen had to pay fines for allowing drinking and shuffleboard on Sunday, for overserving and for overcharging customers.

But theirs seems to have been a successful partnership. When Stephen died in 1644 his will directed he be buried as close as possible to Elizabeth.

Eleanor Billington, Troublemaker

Eleanor Billington, on the other hand, was a troublemaker from a troublemaking family. The younger of her two sons, Francis, nearly burned down the Mayflower as it lay anchored in Plymouth Harrbor in December of 1620. He’d set off some homemade fireworks with his father’s gunpowder.

Eleanor had a hard time controlling her sons, if she even tried. Both tended to wander off unsupervised. In one case her older son John roamed into a camp of Nausets, who had clashed with the colonists upon their first arrival.

William Bradford

Gov. William Bradford described Eleanor’s husband, John Billington, as “a knave.” Billington contemptuously challenged Capt. Myles Standish’s orders during a militia drill in March 1621.Had he not begged forgiveness, the Plymouth authorities would have punished him. In 1630, he did get punished – hanged for murdering a neighbor.

Bradford then described the Billingtons as one of the “profanest families among them.” He could not understand how the Pilgrims had allowed them to join them from London.

Eleanor Billington also caused trouble. In 1636, she went to the stocks and received a whipping for slandering another Plymouth citizen, John Doane.

But troublemakers have to eat, too, and Eleanor Billington undoubtedly pitched in to make that giant feast.

The Others

Five teenaged girls survived the winter, and they would have worked alongside the four Thanksgiving cooks. Mary Chilton was 14 when she came ashore from the Mayflower, the first woman to set foot on Plymouth soil.

The oldest, Priscilla Mullins, at 19 had lost her mother, father and brother during the winter. She would soon marry John Alden after a courtship immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, their descendant. Other descendants include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Marilyn Monroe and Calvin Coolidge.

Illustration of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins

Constance Hopkins (13 or 14), Elizabeth Tilley (14 or 15) and Dorothy, an unnamed maidservant, perhaps 18 or 19, would have helped prepare the meal as well.

They probably also had to keep an eye on the children, who included Bartholomew, Mary and Remember Allerton, Humility Cooper, Samuel Eaton and Desire Minter. The older ones would have helped.

Perhaps they minded fires, turned spits, carried water, plucked wildfowl or shucked shellfish. Maybe the lucky ones got the easy job of setting the tables – rough boards covered with cloth. They had just knives and spoons, as the first fork wouldn’t arrive in America until 1633. Tableware would have included pewter or wooden trenchers, tankards and lots and lots of napkins. Since they ate roast meat with their hands, napkins were a must.

Football, But No Pumpkin Pie

While the women cooked, the men entertained their guests. They showed off their military drills for the Wampanoags. And they probably played a version of football on the beach with the Natives, using a deerskin ball stuffed with deer hair.

At least they’d brought food. Bradford ordered four (probably including Stephen Hopkins) to shoot wildfowl. They blasted their muskets for the benefit of the Wampanoags, who outnumbered them.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

They may have shot some turkey, but they most likely got duck, geese, swans and maybe even carrier pigeon. The women would have plucked, trimmed and trussed them, then spit-roasted the small birds and boiled the larger ones.

They may have stuffed the birds with onions and herbs from their garden, and maybe chestnuts from the woodss. The next day, they would have taken the leftover meat and made a broth or a potage in their Dutch ovens.

The Wampanoags killed five deer and brought them as gifts. The women would have also cooked them on spits outdoors. Vegetables like corn, turnips, cabbages and carrots went into Dutch ovens on the hearths.

They would have eaten lobster, mussels and clams without butter, because cows didn’t arrive until later. Cod, bass and eels likely appeared on the tables.

They probably also served native fruit—cranberries, wild plums, melons and grapes – as well as walnuts, beechnuts and chestnuts.

Pumpkin, called pompion, undoubtedly would have appeared on the menu. The early colonists ate vast quantities of the stuff. In fact, the first American folk song is a lament about how much pumpkin they ate.

The four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving most certainly did not make pumpkin pie. With no flour, sugar or baking ovens, they probably just stewed it.

But at least they had football.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Wellfleet Oyster: A Brief History of the Precious Mollusk

Diamond Jim Brady once spat out an oyster served him at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant. “That’s not a Wellfleet oyster!” exclaimed the Gilded Age gourmand.

Discriminating diners have long prized the Wellfleet oyster for its merroir—the flavor that comes from the clear air and salty, plankton-rich seawater it ingests. Plump and clean, the Wellfleet oyster has a briny sweetness with an undertone of seaweed.

For centuries, the tasty meat and the hard gray shell of the Wellfleet oyster attracted an indigenous settlement, which gave way to a town. From Wellfleet’s immense oyster beds, fortunes were made, a culture developed and commercial networks spread along the Eastern seaboard. Wellfleet oysters wrapped in copper wire traveled across the Atlantic to royal tables. In tin cans they rumbled overland in covered wagons to the prairies and mountains of the West. They even contributed to the epic U.S. victory in the 1980 Olympics.

But in the centuries since the English, the French, the Africans and the Finns came to Wellfleet, the oyster has gone through dark days. Pre-Revolutionary gluttons doomed the wild Wellfleet oyster to extinction. The beds recovered, but so many oysters slid down so many gullets that they nearly disappeared again.

Wellfleet Oyster

Wellfleet lies just above the elbow of Cape Cod, and wraps like a fishhook around harbor, five miles long, two miles wide and open to the south.

Estuaries, clear and cold, feed into the harbor and the Atlantic. The Herring River, Blackfish Creek and Duck Creek carry diatoms and protozoa from the rich salt meadows along the border. Big, fast moving tidewaters feed the oysters twice a day, and at low tide the oysters are exposed to air, which makes them hardy.

Thousands of years ago, a year-round Native American community lived near the immense Wellfleet shellfish beds. Unlike most coastal New England Indians, the Native people didn’t migrate to the interior during the winter. They called themselves the Pononakanet, a branch of the Nausets, and in 1979 a discovery of 56 Native skeletons in an ossuary dated their bones to the 11^th century.

They piled shells along the forest edge to protect against storms and make it easier to get to the shore. Henry David Thoreau saw Native shell middens in nearby Truro during a visit to Cape Cod. He found oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes, and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds. “I picked up half a dozen arrowheads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them.”

Europeans Arrive

Samuel de Champlain sailed into Wellfleet Harbor in 1606, and the tremendous oyster beds so impressed him he called it Port aux Huistres.

A decade after Champlain’s visit, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast. When the Plymouth colonists arrived they found so many indigenous people had died they couldn’t bury their dead. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor.

The Mayflower had sailed past Wellfleet before anchoring in Plymouth Harbor, but soon enough the colonists discovered the oyster beds. They reminded them of Billingsgate, the London fish market famous for its foul-mouthed fish wives. So “Billingsgate” it was.

Billingsgate fish market in 1736 by Arnold van Haecken .

By 1644, the Plymouth settlers set their sights for another settlement on the Lower Cape from Truro to Chatham, the wrist to the elbow. They called it Eastham.

‘Then I do’

Bradford, the story goes, looked out to Billingsgate Island and asked the Pononakanet sachem, George, “Who owns that?” “No one,” replied George. “Then I do,” Bradford said.

William Bradford

Over time, the Europeans edged out the indigenous people. Some of those who survived the white man’s diseases converted to Christianity and moved to a Praying Indian town.

The last of the tribe, Delilah Sampson Gibbs, a widow, died sometime after 1838.

Billingsgate Bivalves

The European settlers learned how to tong for oysters. They’d lean over the side of a flat-bottomed boat with clumsy, 20-foot poles and grab them with the gripping teeth at the end.

In 1665, a randy Portuguese whaler and oysterman named Jacobus Loper started hauling Billingsgate oysters in his sloop. He had an easy sail from the protected harbor to Boston and Salem, and oysters travel well. Unlike scallops and soft-shelled clams, they can live for long periods in the shell outside of water.

Others quickly caught on to the oystering business. In the decades before the American Revolution, the burgeoning towns along the coast consumed vast quantities of the cheap, nutritious and highly portable Wellfleet oyster.

The town jealously guarded its beds from interlopers. By 1674 Eastham Town Meeting voted to apprehend any out-of-towners taking oysters from Billingsgate Bay.

Wellfleet Oysterman

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing made their famous trek along the Lower Cape and learned about the extinction of the Wellfleet oyster.

They stayed at the home of John Young Newcomb and his family. Thoreau mistook the 87-year-old oysterman for a scarecrow. He immortalized him as the Wellfleet Oysterman in the posthumously published Cape Cod.

John Young Newcomb house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

The merry old man loved to talk. His conversation, coarse and plain, would have suited Rabelais, Thoreau noted. He told story after story, ejecting his tobacco juice right and left. The old man’s shots seasoned breakfast of eels, applesauce and green beans.

Newcomb was born in 1762, when Billingsgate still belonged to Eastham. He remembered hearing the guns at Bunker Hill and seeing George Washington ride down a Boston street, bowing gracefully to the crowd.

When Newcomb was a year old, Billingsgate broke off from Eastham. Billingsgate chose to change its name to “Wellfleet” after the famous “Wellfleet” or “Wallfleet” oysters of England’s Blackwater Bay. The revolution loomed as Newcomb reached his teens, but the town was more concerned about the disappearance of the oyster.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

In 1773, the town voted to regulate the oyster fishery.“ That meant keeping outsiders off the beds.

Some people said the split caused the oysters to go away. Others blamed God’s wrath, ground frost, or pollution from a stranding of pilot whales.

Newcomb said Wellfleet’s quarrel with the neighboring towns about gathering oysters, yellow specks appeared in them. Providence then caused them to vanish. At least that was the most common explanation.

The real reason the oysters went away: probably the harvesters who stripped the beds. They didn’t realize juvenile oysters needed to attach themselves to something hard, like a shell, to survive. Instead, they burned the oyster shells for fertilizer and plaster. They also cut down the forest, which caused blowing sand to smother the young oysters.

American Revolution

After the Wellfleet oyster disappeared, the town’s population fell to 1,113 in 1790, down from 1,235 when the American Revolution broke out.

But Wellfleet’s oyster industry gradually recovered with the help of oysters from away. Aquaculture had gone on since the Romans did it in the first century, and Wellfleetians found they could do it too.

Oystermen began bringing oysters from Buzzard’s Bay and Narragansett Bay, fattening them up in Wellfleet’s estuaries and giving them time to acquire that special Wellfleet relish. Then they started bringing oysters in coastal schooners from the Chesapeake Bay.

jonathan carnes corners the pepper market

Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market.

In 1802, 40-year-old John Young Newcomb bought a share in the schooner Lydia, and then opened an oyster shop in Salem.

By the time Thoreau came to visit in 1849, Wellfleet natives supplied and kept nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts. Newcomb told him the business was still good and improving.

Wellfleetians positioned themselves throughout the oyster industry even beyond Massachusetts. There were Atwoods, Dyers, Holbrooks and Freemans working in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Providence, Dover, N.H., Lewiston and Saco, Newburyport and Lynn.

The Golden Age of the Wellfleet Oyster

“In the palmy days of the Wellfleet oyster business, forty or fifty sail of vessels were engaged each winter in transferring the product to the Boston market,” wrote historian Simeon L. Deyo.

From 1830-1870, Wellfleet monopolized the oyster business in New England. And what a business it was, thanks to the tin can and a widespread frenzy for oysters.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French invented canning so they could feed their armies on the march. Canning then found its way to Boston by the 1840s. There, the William Underwood Company canned large volumes of Wellfleet oysters. Union Army soldiers during the Civil War developed a taste for them; so did the pioneers migrating west.

Mawhinney Oyster Saloon in Philadelphia

By then, oystermania had taken hold of America. Starting around 1820, oyster cellars, oyster bars, oyster lunchrooms and oyster parlors sprang up all over the Eastern seaboard. Many were just plain eating dens with big heavy tables and floors covered with sawdust. They served booze and cheap oysters, raw or roasted on the half shell, oyster stew, maybe some clams, some toast or some pie.

Oyster cellars, a few steps down from street level, meant adult fun– beer, nightlife, the demimonde, the sporting life, prostitution. Charles Dickens relished his visit in 1842 to an oyster cellar in New York’s seedy Five Points neighborhood.

Ever-ready Resource

In 1848, Boston had 69 oyster houses and oyster peddlers went door to door. According to Rambles in Old Boston,

Oystermen usually appeared in the evening, carrying their heavy burden, in the shell, on their shoulders in a kind of saddle-bag, crying, “Oys! Finey Oys! Buy any Oys?” They opened the bivalves at the purchaser’s door, throwing the shells into another part of the bag.

In 1857, an Englishman named Charles MacKay visited the United States and commented on the only class difference in America: Some people washed down their oysters with champagne, some with beer.

Elegant restaurants served oysters, but so did housewives of modest means. They were cheap and nutritious. Homemakers viewed them as “the ever-ready resource” because of their “suitableness for all occasions.”

Fresh oysters were shipped west, first in wagons full of ice and then in train cars. In Illinois, a congressman named Abraham Lincoln used to hold oyster orgies in which huge quantities of the bivalve were consumed.

Big Business

In 1826, Hawes Atwood opened Atwood’s Oyster House on Union Street – still in business as the Union Oyster House. Daniel Webster often ate there, downing six dozen Wellfleet oysters at a sitting. Atwood built an imposing house in Everett, a town he helped found.

Union Oyster House

In New York City, Wellfleet’s Libby family established the famous Libby’s Oyster House on Fulton Street in 1839. It lasted more than a century. Unpretentious, Libby’s had chefs and waiters described as “despotic and opinionated but highly skilled.” It served Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, served New England clam chowder every day and had a hard-and-fast rule: No Manhattan Clam Chowder served in here.

Isaac Rich, born poor in South Wellfleet in 1801, built a fortune on oysters. He started off with an oyster stall on Boston’s City Wharf, then moved into warehousing, shipping and banking. In 1869, Rich cofounded Boston University.

The oyster also gave Brigham and Women’s Hospital its start. Peter Brigham, a Vermonter, began selling oysters and fish in Boston while still in his teens. Eventually he amassed enough money to leave $1.3 million for a new hospital after his death.

Oyster Wealth

The Wellfleet oyster made Wellfleet a real town. Local businessmen built Commercial, Enterprise, Mercantile wharves to service the vessels along the busy waterfront.

First Congregational Church

The Duck Creek Shipyard produced schooners, The white clapboard Congregational Church went up in 1850 with a town clock that still chimes ships’ time. Houses floated over to Commercial Street from Chequasset Neck, Griffin Island and Bound Brook. Tradesmen built shops along the long main street. Timothy Daniels ran a store across from Uncle Tim’s Bridge – a favorite motif of plein air painters – connecting Hamblen Island to the village.

There were still oil works for rendering oil from the pilot whales that washed ashore, saltworks to make salt for cod, chandleries to supply the ships.

Aquaculture

Then in 1870, the Old Colony Railroad opened to Wellfleet. The town gathered, celebrated, listened to speeches and poems. One speaker said the railroad would do for the Cape’s fisheries what it had done in Chicago for midwestern grain.

It didn’t. The railroad instead carried Wellfleetians to the mainland — to stay. The population declined along with the oyster beds.

That year, Wellfleet selectmen took notice. They began requiring permits to work the beds. Then in 1876, they adopted the grant system, leasing sections of flats to people who then cultivated and bedded oysters.

It got harder to bed oysters from the south, as northern oyster dealers had caught on to the idea. They found it cheaper for them to bed their own oysters nearby than to pay for freight from Wellfleet.

Wellfleetians then tried to plant oysters – that is, deposit seed, or spat, onto a bed of cultch. E.P. Cook got the first grant. He scattered shells along the sandy bottom, then caught and planted spat. He moved the young oysters around to different water depths to enhance their growth.

Oyster spat

But oyster planting was an inexact science, and often it failed.

In 1878, S.R. Higgins deposited seed from the Taunton River, and it lived and thrived. Oyster planting slowly increased. In 1889, Wellfleet had 30 acres of grants. Twenty years later, it had 2,400.

It wasn’t enough. Simeon Deyo in 1890 wrote, “the oyster and the oysterman are, so far as these shores are concerned, slowly, but surely, passing away.”

The harbor filled in. People moved away, as they had been every decade since 1840. The fish began to disappear.

In 1898, Fred Snow brought the last load of fish aboard the schooner Pleiades into Wellfleet Harbor.

Sealshipt

In 1911, a big, modern oyster company called Sealshipt came to Wellfleet.

Actually, it was a trust, and in 1910 the New York Times reported that the Sealshipt Oyster System was trying to monopolize the Atlantic Coast oyster business.

Sealshipt had developed a sanitary container for shipping oysters and marketed it heavily through its 25,000 retail agents. That was a big deal at the time. Exposes of adulterated and unsanitary food had riled the public, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Sealshipt employed up to 125 people, who worked six days a week from 7 am to 5 pm. Another 600 worked at the Sealshipt office in Boston. They only got Thanksgiving and Christmas off, worked by the light of kerosene lamps and shipped 50 barrels of oysters a day.

Things were looking up for the Wellfleet oyster. In 1909, 22,500 bushels of Wellfleet oysters were harvested from the flats – about a fifth of the haul during the palmy days of the Wellfleet oysters. Still, an improvement.

Sealshipt lasted three years. In 1914, the business was sold at foreclosure.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

Lorenzo Dow Baker, the Banana King, came into this world on Bound Brook Island in 1840. He founded the Boston Fruit Company, which evolved into United Fruit, which evolved into Chiquita Banana.

Baker envisioned a different future for his hometown, one based on tourism and aquaculture.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

In 1886, he built the luxurious 62-room Chequasset Inn on Mercantile Wharf, which had served the now defunct mackerel fleet. Baker brought his Jamaican staff in the summer north from his Titchfield Inn, which he ran in Jamaica in the winter. He billed the Chequasset as a cruise without the seasickness.

Sportsmen and their families came for the duck hunting, fishing, tennis and billiards. Guests could stroll among the fashionable elite along the boardwalk. A full orchestra entertained dinner guests.

Then in 1905, Baker added a funny little shed with a pitched roof to the side of the Chequasset Inn. He let a Dr. David Belding conduct his shellfish research from what was actually the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries Shellfish Laboratory and Quahog Hatchery.

David Belding

Belding, a brilliant shellfish biologist and a medical doctor, laid the foundation for modern aquaculture in that shed. He wrote groundbreaking reports on bay scallops, quahogs, oysters and soft-shell clams that have yet to be surpassed. Belding also served in the Army Medical Corps in World War I, wrote books and worked as Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology at (appropriately) the Boston University School of Medicine

It would be a long time before Belding’s research bore fruit. The Wellfleet oyster continued its slide.

Things got worse. A typhoid epidemic in 1924 was blamed on oysters, while Prohibition closed the oyster cellars and taverns where they were so gleefully consumed. In 1936, David Atwood closed Wellfleet’s last oyster company. The town turned to tourism, improving the roads, creating a dump, bringing in electricity.

The Return of Dr. Belding

Scallops and quahogs overtook oysters as Wellfleet’s main crop during the Depression. Then during World War II, the Army set up a training camp for amphibious landing craft at Wellfleet. The vessels churned up so much silt they smothered the oyster beds.

By 1956, Wellfleet oysters were only planted by individuals doing it as a side hustle on small private beds. The good news was that people started following Dr. Belding’s advice, and it seemed to work. The town bought seed from the state and encouraged fishermen to bring in their shells to one section of the flats so they could collect oyster seed.

In 1966, Dr. Belding, then in his 80s, returned to Wellfleet to join the newly created Shellfish Advisory Board. Wellfleet worked with other Cape towns and the state to revive the Wellfleet oyster. They started a cultching program, planting bushels of scallop shells to catch oyster seed.

Wellfleet Harbor today

Miracle on Ice

In 1980, an artist, entrepreneur and fisherman named Paul Suggs formed the Mud Hake Oyster Company. It signaled a new era and new energy in the Wellfleet oyster industry. Suggs got a grant, and he got good at shucking. Two days a week he’d take his oysters on the road to sell them.

Suggs then decided to sell Wellfleet oysters at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He bought up the local product in the weeks beforehand – 80 bushels of oysters, 25 bushels of mussels and 40 bushels of clams.

In a rented U-Haul, he led friends, wives and children to Lake Placid. They set up a raw bar at the Ancient Mariner Hotel and started selling shellfish as fast as they could shuck them. One day Suggs was walking through the Ancient Mariner restaurant wearing a Wellfleet oyster T-shirt. Someone yelled, “Hey Wellfleet, hey Wellfleet!” The voice belonged to a member of the U.S. hockey team.

Suggs got to talking with the hockey players, who told him how much they wanted to win their game against the Soviet team the next day. The Soviets had dominated Olympic hockey through the 1970s, and their army had just invaded Afghanistan.

Suggs said he held the key to victory. He would give them all the Wellfleet oysters and clams they could eat for free, if they promised not to have sex that night and dissipate all that energy. He guaranteed they’d win if they kept their promise.

Both sides kept their end of the deal, and the next day the U.S. hockey team won in the last 10 seconds of the game – the Miracle on Ice.

End Notes

With thanks to The Famous Beds of Wellfleet, A Shellfishing History, by D.B. Wright. according to History of Barnstable County, Mass., 1620-1637-1686-1890 by

Images: Wellfleet oysters by Paula O via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Map of Wellfleet, Boston Public Library via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Miracle on Ice magazine cover By Copyright by Sports Illustrated/Photographed by Heinz Kluetmeier, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25356046. Union Oyster House by By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434529. Wellfleet’s First Congregational Church By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093285. Oyster spat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35474428. First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. This story updated in 2022.

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Native-American Slavery in New England

Native-American slavery began almost as soon as English colonists arrived in Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. The earliest records date to 1636. By the end of the 17th century, the colonists enslaved over 1,200 Native Americans or sold them as slaves to other colonies.

Prior to 1700, colonists enslaved most of the Native men, women and children after capturing them in war. The Pequot War from 1636-38 provided New England leaders the chance to increase trade in Native-American slaves. A powerful trading nation, the Pequot dominated southern New England in the decades before the English arrived. Though they did not expand beyond southeastern Connecticut, the other Native Nations felt the Pequot’s trading power. The arrival of the English made a volatile situation worse. Aligning themselves with the Narragansett, Niantics and Mohegans, colonists used the murder of two English traders as an excuse to ignite the conflict.

The Pequot War

According to historian Alfred A. Cave, “Puritan chroniclers freely admitted that their military offensive against the Pequot Indians was highly punitive, deliberately intended to inflict the maximum number of casualties.” During the yearlong conflict, the English killed over 700 of the approximately 4,000 Pequot and enslaved many more. The colonists and their allies killed many of the male captives. The women and children who could not escape were to “be disposed aboute in the townes” of New England, or sold into slavery in colonies as far away as the Caribbean and Nicaragua.

Trespassing

After the English destroyed the Pequot nation, their hegemony slowly grew in the area. Warfare and disease left Native-American villages throughout New England vacant. As the number of English colonists grew, they began moving into these ghost towns. That decreased the distances between English settlements and Native American villages. But as the English moved farther and farther inland, they brought their livestock with them.

English farmers routinely let their livestock roam free in the forests surrounding their burgeoning settlements. Often the animals found their way into the fields of Native American farmers and ate their crops. The Native Nations of New England complained to the colonial government, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. Fed up, many began killing any English livestock that wandered into their fields. Tensions rose and led to an inevitable war. Metacomet, known by the English as King Philip, leader of the Wampanoag, reportedly said that “for forty Yeares Time, Reports and jealosys of War had bin very frequent, that we did not thinking that now a War was breaking forth.” However, he wrote, “about a Week before it did, we had Cause to think it would.”

Metacomet, known as King Philip

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War lasted three years. Metacomet rallied a large Native-American alliance, consisting of several Native Nations of New England to fight. Ultimately, the English prevailed, further cementing their hegemony in the region. Recounting the war in 1685, a colonist by the name of Edward Randolph noted that “upward of 3000 Indian men women and children destroyed, who if well managed would have been very serviceable to the English, which makes all manner of labour dear.” During King Philip’s War, the English enslaved huge numbers of Native American captives, claiming it as their right in a “just war.” They often sold hundreds of Native American captives at large scale auctions. Others got assignments “to individuals as rewards for wartime service, and as a form of monetary restitution to war-battered English towns.”

A scene from King Phillip’s War, illustration from Indians of North America by George M. Bodge

King Philip’s War was a turning point in the history of New England. The colonists captured and killed almost 50 percent of the Native American populations. They lost 5 ,000 of 11,000 Indigenous souls in southern New England. The war also drastically changed the way Native American slavery operated.

Native-American Slavery Begins to Change

Prior to the 18th century, most Native-American slaves were war captives or refugees. The English called it something different; they “sold and devoted unto servitude “By the second half of the 17th century, Native-American slavery began to look much different.

The English felt confident in their dominance of the region and tried to assert sovereignty over all the Native Nations. They felt it right to consider the Native Americans of New England subject to English colonial law. Native Americans did not agree. Nevertheless, the colonists consistently set out to punish Native Americans who broke English law. These offenses ranged from “killing Cattle and Shepe,” stealing a handkerchief and “Eatting of mottin that was stolen.” When English judges found Native Americans guilty of breaking English law, they sentenced them to indentured servitude. Once indentured, they could be bought and sold throughout New England and beyond. And, if they tried to escape and failed, colonial officials would tack years onto their sentences. That effectively tied them to lifelong slavery. Thus, the colonists found ways to keep Native-American slavery alive even when the numbers of POWs declined.

Going to Court

Native Americans did not take this lying down. Since before King Philip’s War, Native Americans tried to use the English court system to retain sovereignty and resist English incursion. In 1700, leaders of the Mashpee petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to free several Mashpee thrown into debtors’ prison.

In the petition, Simon Popmoney, George Wapock and the other leaders claimed the English frequently made them and their children servants for too long. They pleaded “Ignorance of the Law, weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration.”

“[S]ome of us that are Elder, & severall of our Children have run in to the English mens Debts, and not being able, nor perhaps careful to pay att the time appointed; our Self & our poor Children, are frequently made Servants for an unreasonable time.”

In this letter we see a rather brilliant strategy unfolding. By using such subordinate language, the Mashpee leaders attempted to use the English colonists’ own notions of superiority against them. By claiming fault through “Ignorance…weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration” they told the English what they wanted to hear. Nevertheless, they defended their sovereignty by asserting the unfairness of long stretches of servitude. Unfortunately, the results of such cases depended upon the presiding judge, who often had Native American slaves himself.

The Long Life of Native-American Slavery

Perhaps as a response to the widespread abuse of indentured servitude after King Philip’s War, colonies created laws governing the status of Native Americans. In the early 18th century, Massachusetts passed a law rating Native American, as well as African, slaves with “horses and Hogs.” While in the past, the English bought and sold Native American slaves while they had term left on their indenture, but they still viewed them as people — unequal to Europeans, but people nonetheless. Now, English eyes viewed Native Americans as property.

Rhode Island attempted to ban the practice. But, in the end, the ban had little to no effect. It allowed indentures of children for up to 30 years. In colonial New England, that amounted to a life sentence.

Ultimately, the practice of Native-American slavery persisted up to the Revolution, if not beyond. In 1744, a physician from Annapolis visited a southern Connecticut town with an African slave. [T]he children were frightened att my negroe, for here negroe slaves are not so much in use,” he wrote. “Their servants being chiefly bound or indentured Indians.”

Thirty years later, the Rhode Island census of 1774 showed over 35 percent of Native Americans in the colony lived with white families.

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.. This story was updated in 2022.

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Nine Men’s Misery: ‘Oldest Veterans Memorial’ Honors Tortured Plymouth Colonists

On the wooded grounds of an old monastery in Cumberland, R.I., a pile of stones stands next to a cement pillar with a plaque on it. Called Nine Men’s Misery, people describe it as the oldest veteran’s memorial in the United States. It commemorates the death of nine men killed by Narragansett Indians during King Philip’s War.

Forty miles to the south lies another monument in another woods. A granite obelisk off a hiking trail marks the massacre of an estimated 700 Narragansett men, women and children by colonial militia. Known as the Great Swamp Fight, it led directly to the death of the nine men in Cumberland.

Together, the old stone markers tell at least part of the story of the Narragansett involvement in King Philip’s War. And over the years, the message of one of those monuments changed.

The message of the other has stayed pretty much the same. And it remains a monument to a myth.

From Nine Men’s Misery to the Great Swamp Fight. Map courtesy Google maps.

King Philip’s War

For many years King Philip, also known as Metacomet, had followed in the footsteps of his father, Massasoit. He maintained peace between his tribe, the Wampanoag, and the colonists, as his father had with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony.

But over the next decades the English encroached on far too much of the Wampanoag’s land. They forced the Indians to agree to a humiliating treaty and then unfairly condemned three Wampanoag to death.

To prepare for war, King Philip, assembled an alliance of native tribes to fight the English colonists.

King Philip’s War started in June 1675 without the Narragansetts. They had signed a treaty of neutrality with Massachusetts Bay Colony. And Rhode Island, led by an aging Roger Williams, tried to stay out of the war as well.

It wasn’t to be.

King Philip

The war that followed devastated both sides. It destroyed about a third of New England’s towns and cost Plymouth Colony eight percent of its adult male population. As many as a thousand Indians were sold into slavery, and 5,000 died in battle, of sickness or starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north.

The Great Swamp Fight

King Phillip decided to take advantage of the Narragansett pledge of neutrality. He sent noncombatants — women, children, the old and the infirm — to safety in the Narragansett winter settlement in the Great Swamp. But on Dec. 19, 1675, Benjamin Church led a 1,000-man militia from Plymouth, Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies into Rhode Island. They marched to the Great Swamp, now in South Kingstown, and they massacred an estimated 700 Indian men, women and children.

In 1906, descendants of the colonists and members of the Narragansett tribe dedicated a 20-foot-high granite obelisk to commemorate the battle.

Three Narragansett women stood in the rain and unveiled a marker that read,

Attacked within their fort upon this island, the Narragansett Indians made their last stand in King Philip’s War and were crushed by the united forces of the Massachusetts Connecticut and Plymouth Colonies in the “Great Swamp Fight,” Sunday, 19 December, 1675.

This record was placed by the Rhode Island Society of Colonial Wars, 1906.

In the 1930s, an Indian historian named Princess Red Wing held a much different kind of ceremony at the Great Swamp. She helped redefine the meaning of the battle site – as a tragic massacre rather than a glorious battle victory.

Native Americans have held the Great Swamp Massacre Ceremony annually since then. They light fires, call the roll of fallen soldiers, sing, dance and give speeches. And by doing so, they make it clear that neither the Great Swamp Fight nor King Philip’s War extinguished the Narragansett people.

By Astoddard73 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51159108

The Great Swamp Fight memorial

Pierce’s Fight

The Great Swamp Fight drew both Rhode Island and the Narragansetts into King Philip’s War.

In retaliation for the massacre, the Narragansett leader Conanchet organized several tribes into two armies. One army in Massachusetts attacked and destroyed most of the settlements in central Massachusetts. The southern army burned towns in Rhode Island along Narragansett Bay.

On March 26, 1676, the Narragansetts baited a trap for a Plymouth Colony militia led by Capt. Michael Pierce. Pierce marched his men to what is now Cumberland, where they spied several Indians who appeared wounded. Pierce’s militia chased the Indians to a bend in the Blackstone River. There, Pierce realized the Indians had lured him into an ambush.

The Narragansetts overpowered the colonial militia after a battle known as Pierce’s Fight. Exactly how many Indians took part in the fight will probably never be known, but scholars claim 1,000 is a reasonable estimate. The militia, including friendly Indians, numbered about 65.

Nine Men’s Misery

The legend of Nine Men’s Misery begins sometime after Pierce’s fight ended. A rescue party supposedly came across nine scalped dead men and buried their bodies. They then stacked a pile of rocks as a memorial to the slain soldiers.

Nine Men’s Misery marker, placed in 1928

According to the myth, the Indians captured nine men who were part of Pierce’s militia and tortured them to death. Or the Indians seated the prisoners on a rock and did a war dance while they decided what to do with them. Because the Indians couldn’t agree on a form of torture, they simply tomahawked and then scalped the prisoners. One account even had the Indians carving smiles onto their faces to mock the promises broken by the colonists.

The Narragansetts went on to burn Providence and other towns, but the colonists soon captured and killed Canonchet. The war pretty much ended on Aug. 12, 1676 with the shooting death and dismemberment of King Philip, though skirmishes continued for more than a year.

A Tangled Tale

In 1790, some medical students started to dig up the bodies to study their anatomy, but outraged locals stopped them. The bodies were then reburied, the rocks reassembled and the myth of Nine Men’s Misery continued.

A century later, an order of Trappist monks bought the property and built a monastery on it. In 1928, they cemented a pile of rocks together on the alleged site of Nine Men’s Misery, and the Rhode Island Historical Society placed a marker next to it. The marker reads:

Nine Men’s Misery

On This Spot

Where They Were Slain By

The Indians

Were Buried the Nine Soldiers

Captured in Pierce’s Fight

March 26, 1676

A Myth May Have Some Truth

In 2011, a graduate student named Lawrence K. LaCroix investigated the facts surrounding Pierce’s Fight. He found no evidence, written or archaeological, “to support an association with Captain Pierce, the King Philip’s War, or even the 17th century.”

LaCroix concluded Nine Men’s Misery was mostly legend, but it had some semblance of truth.

He found that someone unearthed skeletal remains somewhere in Cumberland, probably a mile south of Nine Men’s Misery. Then around 1790, after the medical students went grave digging, someone reburied the bodies at or near Nine Men’s Misery.

Soon after the monks bought the property in 1900, the bodies were once again disinterred. The Rhode Island Historical Society accepted them and kept them in the basement of the John Brown House, which it owns.

Then in 1976, the remains of the nine bodies were ceremonially reburied elsewhere.

The monastery burned down in 1950, and the monks sold the property to the town. But the legend of Nine Men’s Misery continues, for example, in promotional materials for Blackstone Valley tourism.

Perpetuating that myth, concluded LaCroix,

reinforces nineteenth century public attitudes toward patriotic inspiration, obstructs the construction of a more factual battle account and unfairly biases readers’ perceptions of Native Americans.

With thanks to Lawrence K. LaCroix, Captain Pierce ‘s Fight: An Investigation Into a King Philip’s War Battle and its Remembrance and Memorialization.

The Great Swamp Fight Memorial , 41 Great Swamp Monument Rd., West Kingston, R.I. Image by By Astoddard73 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51159108.

Nine Men’s Misery is at Diamond Hill Rd., Cumberland, R.I. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Puritans Blame Provoking Evils for King Philip’s War

Increase Mather could see King Philip’s War coming from his pulpit. All around him he saw sinful activity: periwigs, high prices, tippling in the ordinary, even people leaving the Sunday meeting before it ended. And so when the Native Americans rose up and began to destroy entire villages, Mather pressed the Massachusetts General Court to legislate morality. The lawmakers then passed the 1675 Provoking Evils legislation, New England’s most notorious blue laws.

Increase Mather

Increase Mather, an ambitious 36-year-old minister, had a fanatical desire to reform Puritan society. He believed the Puritans had strayed from the founding generation’s moral purpose. He was literally a product of those founders: His father, the influential Rev. Richard Mather, had come to Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Puritan Migration.

“Mather seems to have been on the side of the declining old-style,” wrote historian Anne Kusener Nelsen. “All that was new in any way — the merest toleration, luxurious apparel, or the changing character of the churches — presented a threat to Mather’s ideal of the Puritan state.”

Increase Mather

Mather thought the Puritans had gone horribly soft even before the Nipmucks, Wampanoags and Narragansetts began attacking New England’s frontier. Parents weren’t bringing up children properly within the church. Fashions had gotten out of hand, with men wearing long hair and women wearing bangs and topless dresses.

And that wasn’t all. The lower orders of society showed contempt for authority and people didn’t behave in church. Merchants and laborers charged exorbitant prices. Some people even rode to other towns on the pretext of going to lecture but really frequented taverns.

Clearly, the Puritans were going to hell in a handbasket.

King Philip, or Metacomet

And so when King Philip unleashed his fury on the New England colonists, Mather was quite certain the Lord had sent them as his agents to purify his people.

The way to win the war, Mather believed, was to eliminate the provoking evils.

“Let them no more say, God must do all, we can do nothing, and so encourage themselves to live in a careless neglect of God, and of their own souls, and salvation,” he wrote in his history of the conflict.

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War began on June 20, 1675 when a war party of Pokanokets struck the tiny Plymouth Colony settlement of Swansea. Thereafter, Indian allies shocked and terrified New England. Hundreds of warriors would strike swiftly and suddenly, burning villages, taking captives and slaughtering families.

During the 14 months of fighting, Plymouth Colony lost 8 percent of its adult male population. In the end, 35 towns were burned or abandoned, leaving only 65 in New England.

The war also disrupted the homogenous, self-governing Puritan communities. Military commissioners had authority over the Puritan ministers. Large numbers of armed soldiers, usually strangers, moved into small, close-knit towns.

The Indians suffered even more as a result of the war. The colonists sold as many as a thousand into slavery, and 5,000 died in battle, of sickness or of starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north. At the outset of the war, Indians comprised 30 percent of New England’s population; by the end, they dwindled to 15 percent.

King Philip’s War

Provoking Evils

In October 1675, four months into the war, Increase Mather took his turn delivering a lecture before the General Court.

He told them only one thing could turn God from his displeasure and spare Massachusetts from the heathen: a thorough reformation of provoking evils.

The lower house, the democratic deputies (now known as the House of Representatives) quickly passed the laws banning provoking evils. The aristocratic magistrates in the upper house (now the Senate) didn’t go along with them. One week later, an Indian war party attacked a town. The magistrates quickly passed the Provoking Evils law.

On the day the magistrates acted, the Puritans scored a victory against the Indians. Mather, of course, interpreted that to mean God approved of the Provoking Evils law.

The horror! Slashed sleeves.

The General Court passed a strict dress code prohibiting such fashion excesses as slashed sleeves, periwigs and bared bosoms. The law authorized local officials to prosecute men for wearing long hair and women for wearing bangs or curling their hair.

Town officers had to close the meeting house doors so no one could leave before service ended. If children didn’t come to Sabbath service, town officials would fine their parents or whip the children.

Massachusetts already had laws on the books against swearing, but lawmakers strengthened them by ordering punishment to anyone who overheard a swear word and didn’t report it.

The General Court ordered every person found at a Quakers meeting to be apprehended, jailed for three days or fined five pounds. If the constable didn’t enforce the law, he would pay a four pound fine.

No longer could townspeople drink in taverns (known as ordinaries), which existed only for travelers.

Finally, they fixed wages and prices.

Backlash

Enforcing the Provoking Evils law would surely end the war, wouldn’t it?

Not everyone thought so.

Gov. John Leverett

Gov. John Leverett told Mather over dinner he’d gone too far when he complained about rampant drunkenness in the colony.

Three months after the Provoking Evils law passed, Increase Mather gave another sermon about excess in apparel and the frequenting of taverns. After meeting, two wealthy parishioners, Capt. Thomas Lake and John Richards, stayed behind. They told him he might have persuaded the ignorant, but no rational man would buy his argument. .

And Mather’s rival, the less-fanatical Rev. William Hubbard, believed the Puritans’ land grabbing caused King Philip’s War. Hubbard also thought military ineptitude and overconfidence prolonged the bloodshed.

Land

Eventually, of course, the Puritans won the war and the provoking evils laws were repealed. And in the end, Mather came around to Hubbard’s view that land hunger caused the conflict.

Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England: whereas the first Planters here that they might keep themselves together were satisfied with one Acre for each person, as his propriety, an after that with twenty Acres for a Family, how have men since coveted after the earth, that many hundreds, nay thousands of Acres, have been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians, have forsaken Churches, and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow-room enough in the world.

Thanks to King Philip’s War and the Hubbard-Mather Rivalry by Anne Kusener Nelsen, published in the William and Mary Quarterly, and The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723 by Michael G. Hall. This story was updated in 2022.

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