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The Sparrow Hawk: When Indians and Pilgrims Rescued America’s First Shipwreck Victims

In 1863, a storm uncovered the bones of a ship that might have been the Sparrow Hawk, sunk off Cape Cod in 1626. William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, had described it, making it the first recorded shipwreck in American history. And since both Nauset Indians and Pilgrims helped the survivors, it was also the first recorded mutual aid rescue.

Local people recovered the wreck and reassembled it on Boston Common. Then in 1889, 109 timbers of the Sparrow Hawk found their final home at the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Mass.

In April 2022, three scientists announced their finding that the wood discovered on Cape Cod had belonged to an early seventeenth-century English vessel. That made it extremely probable the wreck was, indeed, the Sparrow Hawk – the one described by Bradford.

For historians, the Sparrow Hawk was more than a shipwreck. The story of the victims’ rescue showed the Nauset and the Pilgrims had repaired their sometimes rocky relationship.

Wreck of the Sparrow-Hawk

The Pilgrims had antagonized the Nauset when they first landed. They did it by stealing a cache of their buried corn in Truro. Within the previous 20 years, European explorers had also not endeared themselves to the Cape Cod natives. Samuel de Champlain’s two visits had resulted in fights and deaths. Martin Pring and his men had to leave in a hurry after staying for two months. The worst, Thomas Hunt, had captured 27 natives from Cape Cod and Plymouth, taken them to Spain and sold them into slavery.

Then in 1621, a Plymouth teenager named John Billington got lost and ended up with the Nausets on Cape Cod. The colonists found out where he was. They were anxious about getting him back from the people they’d robbed, but their visit to the Cape ended well. They retrieved the boy, paid back the Nauset for the corn they’d stolen and made peace with Aspinet, the tribe’s sachem.

Following the Billington mission, several parties of Plymouth colonists travelled to the area to trade with the local Indians.

Then in December 1626, a ship from England bound for Jamestown, Va., ran aground during a storm in the waters off of Pleasant Bay, in what is now Orleans. William Bradford described the wreck in his history. The rescue began a heritage of shipwrecks and lifesaving that has endured for nearly four hundred years.

William Bradford

Mutual Aid

The first responders to this wreck were the local Indians, who approached the passengers and crew as they made their way to shore. The wariness of the survivors was no doubt ameliorated when the approaching Indians called out to them in English. Bradford describes the scene:

But shortly after they saw some Indians come to them in their canoes, which made them stand upon their guard; but when they heard some of the Indians speak English unto them, they were not a little relieved, especially when they heard demand if they were the Governor of Plimoth’s men or friends; and that they would bring them to the English houses or carry their letters.

The survivors sent two men and a letter with the Indians to Plymouth. Governor Bradford personally led the rescue mission. He assembled a crew, had a boat readied and traversed Cape Cod Bay to Namskaket Creek (now the border of Brewster and Orleans). He then crossed two miles over the future Orleans to the site of the wreck. They carried supplies and repair materials with the help of the Indians. After a failed attempt to repair the ship, they brought the survivors back to Plymouth.

The episode shows that relations between the colonists and Indians had improved significantly, and that the peace agreement reached in Nauset in 1621 was working.

Leander Cosby, of Orleans, Mass., standing with remains of the 1626 shipwreck Sparrow Hawk, on Boston Common. Cosby, an early visitor to the wreck site, helped excavate and preserve it. Photo courtesy Pilgrim Hall Museum.

Family Lore

The country was in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 when the remains of a ship surfaced in what was called “Old Ships Harbor” in the vicinity of the 1626 wreck. The shipwreck was recovered, and analysis at the time determined that the remains came from that first wreck described by Bradford.

A local resident named Sparrow reported that Indian legend, passed on to his family, indicated that the ship’s name was the Sparrow Hawk. Since the time the remains went to Boston, people have called it the Sparrow Hawk, though no record exists of the ship’s actual name.

Sparrow Hawk Identified

Three scientists have since tried to authenticate the 1863 findings. Their findings, published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, also included more information about the passengers on the Sparrow Hawk. The researchers are Calvin Mires, a maritime archeologist and researcher with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Aiofe Daly, an associate professor at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen; and Fred Hocker, research director at the Vasa Museum in Sweden.

They scientifically dated the wood using tree-ring analysis and a technique called wiggle-match dating, which put the ship’s construction between 1556 and 1646. They also concluded the ship’s timbers came from English wood, and that English shipbuilders had made the vessel. Those findings made it very, very probable that the ship was indeed the Sparrow Hawk.

“How many other early seventeenth-century English vessels are likely to have been lost in the same place?,” they wrote.

The Sparrow Hawk at Pilgrim Hall. Photo: Ron Peterson

More About the Sparrow Hawk

In their report, the scientists added more information about the passengers aboard the Sparrow-Hawk. Two of them, John Fells and John Sibsey, were English planters who hoped to build tobacco farms in Virginia. They had brought the rest, farmers and indentured Irish servants. During the six-week voyage, the captain had gotten scurvy and they ran out of water and beer.

The Pilgrims gave them some land to keep them busy and fed for nearly a year. Then they found passage on other boats to Virginia.

Today, the Sparrow Hawk’s timbers are on display at the Pilgrim Hall Museum.

End Notes

Images: Sparrow Hawk timbers PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21038030. Pinnace By Halfblue, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3697704. Pilgrim Hall Museum By Giorgio Galeotti – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50915900.

Ron Petersen co-authored this story. He is the chair of the Orleans Massachusetts Historical Commission. Ron 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.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Alice Bishop, Pilgrim Murderess, Kills her 4-Year-Old Daughter

The mystery of why Alice Bishop cut her four-year-old daughter’s throat in Plymouth Colony still lingers 370 years later.

Alice didn’t deny that she did it. In fact, she confessed right away when a neighbor saw the pool of blood on the floor of her home.

She had, apparently, been a good Pilgrim mother up until then. But she did it, and she hanged for it in the fall of 1648 at the Duxbury Fair.

A Fair Puritan, chromalithograph, by Pery Moran (detail)

Donna A. Watkins, a descendant of Alice Bishop, tells the story of her life in her book Diverse Gashes. Though Watkins doesn’t have a definitive answer, she does sort through the difficulties the Pilgrims’ endured just to survive. She especially focuses on the struggles faced by Pilgrim women to run the house and family while remaining subservient to men and achieving godly perfection—all under the prying eyes of the neighbors.

Alice Bishop

Alice first appears in the historical record as “Alice Martin” on the day she married George Clarke–Jan. 22, 1639 (N.S.).

Watkins believes Alice Bishop may have been related to William Bradford, who served as Plymouth’s governor on and off for 30 years and wrote Of Plimoth Plantation. How, or when, she arrived in Plymouth—or even whether she was born there—isn’t known. But her absence from the Pilgrims’ records suggests she didn’t cause trouble or engage in ‘unseemly behavior,’ Watkins argues.

Alice’s new husband George Clarke had bought a 10-acre plot of land with a small wooden house on it in a neighborhood called Playne Dealing, two miles north of Plymouth. George farmed, Alice tended the house. That meant getting up before dawn, building a fire, cooking over an open hearth, hauling water, spinning hemp or flax or grinding corn.

She gave birth to their first child, Abigail, in 1643. Her second, the ill-fated Martha, was born in 1644. George Clarke died, probably suddenly, around then.

A replica house in Plymouth Colony, similar to the one Alice Bishop lived in.

On Dec. 5, 1644, the widowed Alice Clarke married Richard Bishop, a hired man. It wasn’t unusual for widowed spouses to remarry quickly in colonial New England. The Bishops’ daughter Damaris was born in 1646. Richard and Alice seemed to get along, as no records exist of trouble between them.

Alice Bishop, Murderess

On Saturday, July 22, 1648, Alice Bishop would have been cooking meals for two days, since the Pilgrims forbade cooking on Sunday. Her husband was probably working in the fields. Abigail, then six, may have helped her mother with the chores.

Then a neighbor, 23-year-old Rachel Ramsden, stopped by the house to visit. Rachel noticed four-year-old Martha asleep on her bed. Alice gave her a kettle and asked her to borrow some buttermilk from Goodwife Winslow.

Alice had seemed normal, Rachel later testified. But when she returned, Alice seemed ‘sad and dumpish.’ Then Rachel noticed blood at the foot of the ladder leading to the attic. She asked about the blood. Alice pointed upstairs and told her to look.

Rachel, not seeing Martha in the bed, feared Alice had killed her, so she ran home to tell her parents. Her parents notified William Bradford, who quickly assembled three other men into a posse and went to the Bishop’s house.

The men later declared to the court what they saw: “…at the foot of a ladder which leads into an upper chamber, much blood; and going up, all of us, into the chamber, we found a woman child of about four years of age lying in her shift upon her left check with her throat cut with diverse gashes cross ways[.]”

The men then described the savagery of the attack: “…the wind pipe cut and stuck into the throat downward, and a bloody knife lying by the side of the child[.]”

They concluded that Alice Bishop had killed the child with the knife, and she confessed to them that she had.

But Why?

Donna Watkins notes that the court records tell us nothing about why Alice Bishop killed Martha Clarke. One possible explanation: Her older daughter did it, and Alice took the fall for it.

But Watkins delves further into another explanation. Perhaps Alice just suddenly lost control under the demands of constant physical labor, motherhood, marriage, a mixed family, snooping neighbors and the community’s expectations of perfect behavior. And to make it even harder to live in that overcontrolled Puritan environment, Alice Bishop as a woman only ranked as a second-class citizen.

The Pilgrims, Watkins noted, expected complete domestic harmony. Court records show plenty of actions against neighbors, but few against family or household members. “They controlled their emotions at home at the expense of their relationships with their neighbors,” wrote Watkins.

She speculated that Rachel Ramsden, the neighbor, could have said something critical of Alice Bishop. Perhaps Martha should have been up and awake by then. And perhaps four-year-old Martha misbehaved, which caused Alice Bishop to suddenly fly into an uncontrolled rage and take a knife to her daughter’s throat.

William Bradford

William Bradford, then governor, may have had Alice Bishop in mind when he wrote about the reasons for evil to appear in Plymouth Colony. “…[A]s it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.”

William Bradford

Bradford wrote those words between 1648 and 1650, around the time Alice Bishop went to the gallows for murdering her daughter. At that time, Bradford had sunk into sadness and despair. Many of the original Pilgrims had died, Plymouth had shrunk and settlers had scattered into new towns. It was then that he stopped writing Of Plimoth Plantation.

Watkins argues, plausibly, that the murder of Martha Clarke and the hanging of Alice Bishop, possibly his relatives, contributed to his depression.

Donna A. Watkins in her book Diverse Gashes: Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony, 1648, explores the reasons Alice Bishop may have slashed her four-year-old daughter’s throat.

Images: House and fence in Plimoth By Ben Franske – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4459090.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Barns

Thousands of New England’s historic barns have survived severe weather, westward migration, suburban sprawl and competition from corporate agribusiness.

Often connected to other farm buildings and the farmhouse, they usually had many uses. Historic barns sheltered dairy cows, teams of oxen, horses, hay and crops.

Some historic barns, on the other hand, were built specifically for one purpose, like Connecticut tobacco or Vermont dairy cows.

But typical New England farm families grew a variety of crops and livestock, making and selling anything to support the farm. A New England farmer might sell maple syrup, timber, clothing, hard cider and barrels. He might run a tavern, or rent out his rooms or his beehives.

Big House, Little House…

Northern New England’s historic barns often connect to the house and to other buildings, Thomas L. Hubka described such connected farm buildings as ‘Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn.’

Though you might assume New Englanders connected their houses to outbuildings because of the weather, you would be only partly right.

According to Hubka, the agricultural reform movement beginning in the early 19^th century inspired New England farmers to make their farms more efficient.

So they connected their houses with such outbuildings as barns, ells, chicken coops, sugar houses, woodsheds, workshops and carriage sheds.

Farming as a way of life has waned in New England, but the public appetite for locally grown, unadulterated food is sparking a revival on a smaller scale.

If you have any favorite historic barns in New England, please share them in the comments section.

Windsor Tobacco Barn

Two of Windsor’s historic barns that sheltered shade tobacco. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Tobacco loved the sandy soil of Windsor, Conn., and in 1640 farmers began planting tobacco seeds from Virginia. As cigar smoking grew popular in the early 19th century, Connecticut farmers began to specialize in cigar binders using Broadleaf and Havana Seed. Eventually, they grew a light, tasty tobacco under tents of hand-woven cloth (hence ‘shade tobacco’) to use as wrappers.

By the middle of the 19th century, Connecticut emerged as a leading producer of tobacco. The tobacco Valley ran from Springfield to Hartford.

Tobacco farmers relied on seasonal labor from college campuses in the South, including Morehead College, which sent a young Martin Luther King, Jr., to Simsbury. They also used local child labor. World War II and the passage of child labor laws forced farmers to rely on immigrant workers from Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

Health concerns and competition from mass-produced cigar wrappers caused Connecticut’s tobacco acreage to dwindle.

Windsor produced more shade tobacco than anywhere else in the state. So in 1988, the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society formed in Windsor to preserve artifacts from the era. The historical society’s Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum is located in Northwest Park in Windsor.

135 Lang Road, Windsor, Connecticut

Sabbathday Lake Barns

The Shakers built these classic examples of New England historic barns. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Ann Lee founded the Shaker sect, formally known as the The United Society of Believers, in Manchester, England, in 1847. Lee broke away from the Quakers, and her followers were known as the ‘Shaking Quakers’ because of their ecstatic dancing during Sunday meeting.

After Ann Lee – known as ‘Mother Ann’ – went to prison for her beliefs, she came to America with eight followers in 1774.

The Shakers expanded to 19 utopian communities throughout the Northeast and Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia and Florida. They preached a doctrine of celibacy, self-sufficiency, pacifism, communal living and equality between the sexes.

In 1794, the Shakers formed Sabbathday Lake near New Gloucester and Poland, Maine,

By the 1840s, the Sabbathday Lake Shakers had carved a large enterprise out of the Maine forests. They owned 1,900 acres and 26 large buildings, including barns, a meetinghouse, a blacksmith shop and a large dwelling house.

The Sabbathay Lake Shakers built their barns in the New England style, the most common found in the region. Larger than typical barns in other parts of the country, they have doors at the ends and basements. The Shakers built the Sabbathday Lake barns into the side of a hill, which allowed them to access the upper floor from the ground.

The Shakers peaked in the 1840s, with 6,000 members throughout the United States. Their belief in celibacy would doom them to slow, near extinction.

But for many years during the 19^th century, the simple, self-sufficient Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, sold their products to the luxury-loving guests and the owners of the Poland Spring Hotel.

707 Shaker Road, New Gloucester, Maine

Old Tavern Farm

Like many historic barns in New England, the Old Tavern barn connects to the other farm buildings.

Like many historic barns in Northern New England, the barn at the Old Tavern Farm in Greenfield, Mass., connects to buildings with other uses.

The Old Tavern Farm served many purposes over the centuries, reverting today to its original use as a bed and breakfast.

The farm’s early owners supplemented their farm income by running a tavern – or perhaps it was the other way around. They served neighbors and travelers along the Old Post Road

The tavern also served as a meeting place, a courtroom and a newsroom, noted the registration form for the National Register of Historic Places. The property doubled as a military training field, sports arena, stockyard and fairgrounds.

Samuel Hinsdale inherited the farm from his father, Mehuman Hinsdale, once taken captive by Indians in the 1704 raid on Deerfield. Hinsdale began building on the land in 1740, and by 1747 he operated a tavern.The main house was built around 1820, but the wing was built in 1794 on Hinsdale’s foundation.

Others ran the tavern from 1836 until 1860, when the temperance movement shut it down. The Smith family ran the 160-acre farm from the latter part of the 19th century until 1997.

817 Colrain Road, Greenfield, Massachusetts

Bennett Farm

That cupola on the Bennett Farm’s barn was once a steeple.

Ocean Born Mary’s son Thomas Wallace once owned the land in Henniker that became the Bennett Farm. The son of the legendary New Hampshire woman then sold it to Joseph Lewis in 1777. Its subsequent owners ran it as a tavern until 1848. From that point on, its owners ran it as a typical Northern New England farm.

The barn was built in 1834 as a religious meeting house. Around 1860, the Bennett Farm’s barn burned down, so the farm’s owner moved the meeting house to the farm and converted it to a barn. The top of the steeple blew off during the Hurricane of 1938, leaving a cupola. .

Mark Bennett bought the farm in 1902, and his son Stephen took over when his father died in 1925 and ran it into the 1960s. Stephen’s son now runs the farm.

“Bennett Farm as it survives today conveys the character and scale of a late 19th-early 20th century diversified family farm,” notes The National Register of Historic Places registration form.

11 Bennett Rd., Henniker, New Hampshire

Mount Hope Farm

See Mount Hope’s historic barn at the Saturday farmer’s market held at Mount Hope.

The Mount Hope Farm in Bristol, R.I., includes a mansion built in 1745 and expanded in 1840 and 1895, and two historic barns built in 1860. But it also owes its significance to its storied owners and connected events.

Once the traditional seat of the Wampanoag Indians, Benjamin Church killed King Philip nearby. The colonists then confiscated the land, and the wealthy merchant and slave owner Isaac Royall, Jr., built the farmhouse in 1745. But Royall’s Loyalist sympathies forced him to move to Halifax at the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The State of Rhode Island then confiscated the land again. Proceeds from the sale of Mount Hope went to pay Continental Army officers and soldiers.

William Bradford, great, great grandson of the Pilgrim governor, bought the house in 1783, and George Washington visited him for a week there. Bradford later won election to the U.S. Senate. The farm is also known as the Governor Bradford House, though he only served as deputy governor.

In the early 1950’s, the then-owner, Rudolf F. Haffenreffer, III, deeded Mount Hope and approximately 250 acres of the original farm to Brown University.

“Today, this handsome estate with its historic mansion and beautiful gardens, is an island of tranquility in an increasingly urban landscape,” noted the National Register of Historic Places registration form.

250 Metacom Ave., Bristol, Rhode Island

Shelburne Farms Horseshoe Barn

The Horseshoe Barn at Shelburne Museum.

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, created a classic Gilded Age gentleman farm in Shelburne, Vt.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course.

Among Shelburne Farms’ historic barns is the horseshoe barn, not one of the original buildings designed by architect Robert Henderson Robertson. It was built later as the next generation of Vanderbilts struggled to keep up the farm.

The Webbs’ daughter-in-law, Electra Havemeyer Webb, turned Shelburne Farms into a museum. She wanted a proper setting for the carriage collection, so she searched and found a rare horseshoe-shaped dairy born in Georgia, Vt.

Because the owner refused to sell it, Electra had her staff find, move and assemble hand-hewn beams from 12 historic barns and stone from two gristmills. They finished the 238-foot-long barn in 1949.

In 1957, the museum built the annex to house 150 more vehicles added to the collection.

In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows. It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Bennett Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19490337; Old Tavern Farm By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24500134.

Mount Hope Barn by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28160904.

This story about historic barns was updated in 2023.

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Seven Colonial New England Games

The Puritans were never known for their lighthearted play, and the Puritan leadership viewed colonial New England games with disgust.

In the early 1600s, games that developed skills, such as shooting competitions, were viewed more favorably than those that were merely diversions.

The worst of all colonial New England games, at least to the Puritan mind: those that involved luck.

Games and sports caused controversy back in England, where the first kings James and Charles encouraged their subjects to enjoy themselves on Sunday afternoon. Anyone who didn’t want to play games could leave the country, they said. So that’s exactly what many Puritans did.

Here is a sampler of seven games they played once they arrived in the colonies.

Colonial New England Games

Stoolball. Stool ball resembles cricket. A pitcher throws a ball at a target, usually a stool, though a tree or other object could be substituted. A second man tries to swat the ball away, either with his hand or a paddle, so that it doesn’t strike the stool. Points are scored for each ball successfully swatted away.

Stoolball, one of the more popular colonial New England games. Illustration from A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, John Newbery

The game eventually evolved to include fielding and running. To score runs, a batter who hit a ball would run between two stools while the fielders would recover the hit ball — very similar to cricket.

Gov. William Bradford of the Plymouth colony reported dismay to find men playing stool ball on Christmas Day in 1621. Some men did not want to work on Christmas, and Bradford relented. He hoped, however, that they would eventually learn that Christmas was not a day for celebration and join him in his labors. When he returned from his work he found the men playing stoolball. He stopped them by confiscating their gear.

Banned in Boston

Ninepins. Another sport that flourished in America was ninepins, a form of outdoor bowling. New England’s Puritan leaders frowned on ninepins, but it did exist as the government banned it. The participants used stones rolled across the ground to knock down pins.

While played on the sly in New England, New York created a public bowling green.

Pitching the Bar. Another of the games that shocked William Bradford in 1621: pitching the bar. It involved throwing a bar or log as far as possible. He put a stop to this, too.

Foot Races. Of course, Native Americans had pastimes of their own. Many of the games helped develop the skills needed for survival as adults. Throwing balls, a ring-toss game and foot races that could cover many miles were among the common pursuits.

Slide Groat. Slide groat was another of the colonial New England games that people had to play on the sly. This was a miniature shuffleboard type of game, also called shovelboard. Players used a board, often the top of a bar. They slid pennies along the length of the board, trying to get them to stop inside a defined target area to score points.

Illustration of Gov. William Bradford ruining Christmas by forbidding colonial New England games.

A Loathsome Game

Football. Football of the 1600s wasn’t like football of today. It more resembled soccer or European football mixed with rugby, with boys kicking the ball to each other in a form of keep-away that could turn quite violent.

The Puritans loathed football. Englishman Philippe Stubbs, something of a Puritan scold, pointed out the dangers of football in his pamphlet, The Anatomie of Abuses. In it, he attacked a wide range of games, pastimes and other supposed vices. He wrote:

Now who is so grosly blinde that seeth not that these aforesaid exercises not only withdraw us from godliness and virtue, but also haile and allure us to wickednesse and sin? For as concerning football playing I protest unto you that it may rather be called a friendlie kinde of fyghte than a play or recreation—a bloody and murthering practice than a felowly sport or pastime.

Nevertheless, football invaded the pious streets of New England towns. The Puritans recorded complaints about young men playing the game in the streets of Boston.

Hats, Too?

Coasting. Coasting was what we would call sledding today. Children fashioned sleds with two runners and hopped on them to slide down any hill with a slope great enough to provide adequate gravitational inducement.

Not surprisingly, the Massachusetts government did not like coasting and outlawed it. In New York state, the officials went so far as to punish anyone caught coasting by impounding not just their sled, but their hat as well.

Thanks to A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, John Newbery; Child Life in Colonial Days, Alice Morse Earle. This story about colonial New England games was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about the birth of modern football here.

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Exactly How New England’s Indian Population Was Decimated

Even before European colonists thinned the Indian population in New England, war and disease had already begun their dirty work.

A team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists studied the health of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere over 7,000 years. Native American health had declined even before Columbus came to the New World, they concluded in a book published in August 2017, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere.

The researchers found Indians’ health got worse because they came to depend on corn. They also began to live in denser communities, allowing infectious disease to spread quickly.

Still, the Indian population didn’t begin its demise until the Europeans arrived in the 16^th century.

Indians lament death by disease.

About 60,000 Indians lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut at the beginning of the 17^th century, according to Sherburne Cook. Maine had a robust population of Abenaki tribes. According to some estimates, Maine had more than 20,000 Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy Indians.

A century later, New England’s Indian population began to disappear. Some tribes were already extinct.

This is how the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population.

Indian Population Before the Pilgrims

The seeds of the Indians’ destruction were planted more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began even before English and French explorers showed up at the turn of the 16^th century. In 1504, a French vessel was documented fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Portuguese fishermen arrived two years later.

Early map of the Grand Banks.

By 1519, a hundred European ships made round trips to the Grand Banks. The first tourist cruise to North America sailed from London in 1536, but food ran short and many died.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans, were devastated by a typhus epidemic in 1586. Other diseases brought the Passamaquoddy population to 4,000 from 20,000.

The 1616 Plague

In 1616, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast, wreaking the most devastation north of Boston. It’s not clear what it was – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague.

Whatever it was, it was terrifying. So much of the Indian population died there weren’t enough left to bury the dead. English colonist Thomas Morton described the heaps of dead Indians ‘a new found Golgotha.’

As many as 90 percent of the 4,500 Indians of the Massachusetts tribe perished. The disease cleared the Boston Harbor islands of inhabitants.

John Smith

English explorer John Smith had visited New England before the plague in 1614. He returned eight years later, and what he saw shocked him.

“God had laid this country open for us,” he wrote. “Where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found.”

Disease persisted among the Massachusetts from 1620 to 1630. When smallpox struck in 1633, it left only about 750 and obliterated entire villages. The colonists herded the Massachusetts who survived into Christian villages of ‘praying Indians.’

Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote ‘about this time [1631] the Indians began to be quarrelsome touching the Bounds of the Land which they had sold to the English, but God ended the Controversy by sending the Smallpox amongst the Indians of Saugust, who were before that time exceeding numerous.’

Along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, Mohawk raids had already weakened the Pennacook Indians when the 1616 plague arrived. It killed three out of four Pennacooks.

That same plague almost completely obliterated two other Pennacook tribes in Massachusetts, the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem.

Wampanoags

The plague of 1616-1618 cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston, but was far less severe south of Plymouth.

King Philip

A year after the Pilgrims arrived, their Indian visitor Samoset told them, ‘about foure yeares agoe, all the Inhabitants dyed of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor childe remaining, as indeed we haue found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claime unto it.’

“Thousands of them died,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor. “They not being able to bury one another, their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground.”

Enough Wampanoag Indians survived to resist the colonists’ land grab during King Philip’s War in 1675.

But disease persisted among the tribe, weakening it further. By the war’s outbreak, the Wampanoag Indian population fell to 2,500 from as many as 5,500. Those who weren’t killed in the war were sold into slavery, moved to praying towns or migrated west. King Philip’s War virtually obliterated the Wampanoag.

Narragansett

Roger Williams with Narragansett Indians

The Narragansett were the biggest tribe in New England, with 7,800 members including 300 on Block Island. Protected by Narragansett Bay, they didn’t come into contact with the white invaders as early or as frequently as northern tribes. The great plague of 1616 didn’t affect them.

Because the Narragansetts were so much larger, Wampanoag leader Massasoit made peace with the Plymouth colonists to ally them against his Narragansett rivals.

The Narragansetts’ first epidemic was smallpox in 1633, which killed 700 of them. Chronic ailments further reduced their numbers to 5,000 by the outbreak of King Philip’s War. Wrote Roger Williams in 1643,

They commonly abound with children, and increase mightily; except the plague fall amongst them, or other lesser sicknesses, and then having no means of recovery, they perish wonderfully.

Infectious disease terrified the Narragansetts. “I have often seene a poore House left alone in the wild Woods, all being fled, the living not being able to bury the dead, so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but Houses and the whole Towne take flight,” wrote Williams.

The Narragansetts tried to stay out of King Philip’s War, but after English colonists massacred as many as 1,100 of them at the Great Swamp Fight in 1675, they had no choice but to fight. After King Philip’s War fewer than 500 Narragansetts remained. They were allowed to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown, R.I., where they frequently intermarried with African-Americans and Indians from other tribes.

The Nauset

The Nauset, a tribe of about 8,000 on Cape Cod and the islands, were also apparently unaffected by the plague of 1616. But other diseases gradually reduced their numbers. The 2,100 Nausets on Cape Cod were down to 1,250 by 1700, and all had been converted to Christianity. By 1660, they had been driven into the Mashpee Reservation; the population of 2,100 Nausets fell to 1,250 by 1700.

Disease had also reduced the Indian population of 6,000 on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket by more than half, to 2,330.

Connecticut’s Indian Population

Before the English arrived, an Algonkian tribe that became the Pequots moved into Connecticut from the Connecticut River to the Rhode Island border, displacing the people who lived there. There were about 3,000 of them, and the population remained stable with little European contact and in the absence of war and severe epidemic disease.

War devastated the Pequot Indian population.

Then English colonists and Mohegan warriors attacked them in the Pequot War of 1637. Hundreds were killed or captured and hundreds more fled to southwestern Connecticut and Long Island. Only 200 were left by war’s end, and they were absorbed into the Mohegan tribe.

Shortly after the Pequot War in 1643, there were about 2,200 Pequot-Mohegans. Smallpox, flu, diphtheria and measles reduced their numbers to 750 by 1705. By then, the colonists had already herded them into Connecticut reservations at Ledyard and Groton.

One Connecticut tribe tried to protect itself by building a fort. A thousand Mattabesic Indians sealed their fate when they enclosed themselves in a palisade fort in Hartford County. By 1634, smallpox and plague killed all but 50 of them with terrifying swiftness.

Of the 3,000 other Connecticut Indians in the vicinity – Podunk, Mattabesic, Hammonasset and Wongunk – most who survived sold their land and moved away.

Reservations

During the 17^th century, life was short for the English colonists as well as the Indian population. By 1700, life expectancy in New England rose to 45-50 years, 15 years higher than in old England.

The Europeans had large families, and the colonist population grew 3 percent a year, doubling every 23 years. The land-hungry colonists pushed the remaining Indian population into warfare, and then into reservations and to parts west.

Before the Europeans arrived, about 10,000 Penobscot Indians lived in what is now Maine. The population collapsed from infectious diseases and fighting between the Iroquois over the fur trade. The Penobscot sided with the French during four Anglo-French wars, which the French ultimately lost.

The Indian Population Makes a Comeback

Both the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy ceded their land to Massachusetts (which later became Maine). They had only a reservation on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. By 1800, the Penobscot Indian population fell to 500.

Many Indians converted to Christianity and moved to one of 14 praying towns. Indians moved to reservations in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and Fall River in Massachusetts.

During the 20^th century, New England’s Indian population made a comeback. But that is a story for another day.

With thanks to The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century by S.F. Cook and to The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose. This story about New England’s Indian population was updated in 2022.

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James DeWolf, the RI Senator Who Murdered a Slave and Got Away With It

James DeWolf died the second richest man in America after accumulating a fortune from buying, selling and – in one case – murdering slaves.

James DeWolf

He was born into two powerful slave-trading families in Rhode Island, the DeWolfs and the Potters. He leveraged the family business into great wealth and a seat in the U.S. Senate. His descendants became prominent writers, artists and ministers.

At least one of his progeny had the good grace to be ashamed of her slave-trading heritage. And at least James DeWolf was somewhat inconvenienced when he was found to have murdered a sick woman he enslaved.

James DeWolf

James DeWolf was born in Bristol, R.I., on March 18, 1764, the seventh son of Mark DeWolf, a slave trader, and Abigail Potter, who also came from a slave-trading family.

During the American Revolution, he sailed as a teenager on a private armed vessel.

After the war he became captain of a ship and began to trade slaves, often bringing enslaved farmworkers from Cuba to the American South to work on plantations.

Rhode Island banned slavery in 1787, but that didn’t stop James DeWolf and his family. They continued to finance and run slave trading voyages to Africa.

In 1790, DeWolf married into another powerful family that would protect him when he needed protection. His wife, Nancy Ann Bradford, was the great-great-great-granddaughter of William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, and the daughter of another William Bradford who would be elected to the U.S. Senate.

Arrested

Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade.

In 1791, a warrant was issued for the arrest of James DeWolf. He was captain of the Polly, a slave ship, sailing from Africa to Cuba with 142 slaves and 15 crew. When an enslaved African woman, middle-aged, came down with smallpox, James DeWolf ordered her quarantined. She was tied to a chair and brought abovedeck. When she got worse, DeWolf asked for a volunteer to throw the sick woman overboard. The crew refused.

James DeWolf decided to do it himself. He blindfolded and gagged her so the other slaves couldn’t hear her scream. Then he asked a sailor to help him with a grappling hook, which they attached to her chair. The two men lowered her into the ocean. She sank immediately, drowned and died.

According to a crewman’s testimony, James DeWolf said he regretted the loss of such a good chair.

What James DeWolf did wasn’t unusual. Sick slaves were often tossed overboard. But murder on the high seas was illegal under the Federal Crimes Act of 1790.

James DeWolf returned to Rhode Island on the Polly. He recorded that he sold 109 slaves at a profit, and he kept 10 for himself. In doing so he broke the Rhode Island Act of 1787, which decreed no slave should be brought to Rhode Island.

Flight

Someone, it isn’t clear who, found out about the murder aboard the Polly. A federal grand jury investigated and charged James DeWolf with murder. Attorney General John Jay requested a warrant for his arrest. But James DeWolf had disappeared.

James DeWolf absconded to the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, leaving his wife and children behind in Bristol. In St. Eustatius he continued his slave-trading business by corresponding with his brother.

Linden Place

He was eventually discovered in the West Indies and charged with murder. Two men who crewed on DeWolf’s ships testified that they had to throw the woman overboard to save the crew and ‘valuable cargo’ from catching smallpox. The prosecuting attorney filed a formal declaration that he didn’t want to prosecute the case.

DeWolf then moved to St. Thomas, where he was also charged with murder. No one testified against him, and the judge ruled in his favor.

Meanwhile, his well-connected family was working to drop the charges in Rhode Island. After four years, the federal marshal in Rhode Island dropped the arrest warrant against James DeWolf. He immediately returned to his home in Bristol, Linden Place.

11,000 Slaves

Upon his return to Rhode Island, James DeWolf amassed power and wealth. He served 17 years as a Rhode Island state senator, and in 1821 he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

All the while he continued his slave trading, usually with his family. His father had started importing slaves in 1769 and his nephew George continued the tradition until 1820. The DeWolf family is estimated to have brought 11,000 enslaved people to the United States.

James DeWolf also owned sugar and coffee plantations in Havana, a rum distillery and a mill. He and his family started the Bank of Bristol and a company to insure slave ships.

In 1809 he invested in the Arkwright Manufacturing Co. During the War of 1812 he fitted out privateers that captured 40 British ships worth more than $5 million. When he died in 1837 in New York City he was believed to be the second wealthiest man in the United States.

His daughter Abby married Charles Dana Gibson; they had a grandson, also named Charles Dana Gibson, the artist who created the Gibson Girl.

His descendant Katrina Browne directed a documentary about her family’s slave trading heritage, Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North. (See the trailer for the film here.)

Images: Linden Place By Kenenth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57710961. This story was updated in 2022.

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