Canonicus

Chief

  • Born: c. 1565
  • Birthplace: Place unknown
  • Died: June 4, 1647
  • Place of death: Place unknown

Grand sachem of the Narragansett tribe (r. before 1600-1647)

Leader of the Narragansetts when the first English colonists arrived at Plymouth in 1620, Canonicus was one of the most influential political figures during New England’s formative years. Despite English provocations, he refused to join the Pequots in their war against the colonists, and he provided aid to the Rhode Island exile Roger Williams.

Areas of achievement: Government and politics, diplomacy, warfare and conquest

Early Life

Canonicus (kuh-NAHN-ih-kuhs) is believed to have been born sometime around 1565, and his first known dwelling place was on the western shore of Narragansett Bay, in what is now Rhode Island. Narragansett Bay is thus the most likely location of his birth, but no reliable evidence as to his actual birthplace exists. He was born to wealth and status: His grandfather Tashtassuck, the earliest recorded Narragansett sachem (the political, military, and spiritual leader of the tribe), was still legendary for his wisdom and courage when Canonicus was an old man. The status of the other tribes of the region—the Pequots to the west and the Wampanoags across the bay to the east—among the Narragansetts is indicated by the tradition that when the time came for Tashtassuck to marry his son and daughter, he could find no suitable matches among the neighboring tribes. Consequently, he was said to have married the siblings to each other.

Canonicus, the eldest of four sons of this match, probably ruled jointly with his father or grandfather as soon as he came of age, a Narragansett practice that ensured dynastic continuation while providing youth and strength in tribal leadership. The Narragansett nation had a hierarchical system of sub-sachems, each ruling at the pleasure of the great sachem. By 1600, Canonicus held this position, ruling a nation of some thirty thousand. Later in his reign, Canonicus continued the practice of joint rule with a younger kinsman, but, although Canonicus had a son named Mriksah or Meika, it was his nephew Miantonomo, son of his younger brother Mascus, whom Canonicus made his heir apparent and junior sachem.

Life’s Work

Canonicus appears in the records of the Plymouth Colony from its inception, though the colony’s relations with Massasoit (also known as Ousamequin) of the Wampanoags are better known. In 1621, Canonicus sought a treaty with the struggling colony, which instead signed a “covenant” with the Wampanoags that included a mutual defense pact. Since the Wampanoags had formerly held allegiance to Canonicus, this was a potentially belligerant act.

The affront may have resulted in a war threat from Canonicus in 1622, though the previously accepted facts of the case have now been called into question by historians. William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation (wr. 1630-1650, pb. 1856) asserts that the Narragansetts sent a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snake skin to Plymouth as a threat of war and that the governor (then Bradford himself) returned the same skin filled with powder and shot. It is unlikely that such a response would have deterred Canonicus had he really sought war; Plymouth gunpowder notwithstanding, the hundred or so colonists could not have prevailed against a nation of thirty thousand.

When the more organized and much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630, Canonicus sought a covenant with them as well. His name first appears in the colony’s records in 1633, when a Boston inquest found him and his nephew Miantonomo innocent of the murder of Captain John Oldham at the hands of the Pequots, though a few Narragansetts were implicated in the death. Oldham had taken an exploration party deep into Pequot territory on the upper Connecticut River, apparently carrying the smallpox virus, to which Native Americans were more susceptible than the Europeans who had generations of exposure to it. Canonicus lost more than seven hundred of his subjects to the disease that winter.

The following year, the Pequots, increasingly displaced by the new colonists, encroached on Narragansett hunting grounds, and Canonicus declared war with them. Massachusetts brokered a peace between the tribes, but by 1635, the Wampanoags threatened the Narragansett from the other side, and Canonicus went to war again. The following year, dissenters against the Massachusetts Bay orthodoxy, Roger Williams foremost among them, looked to Canonicus to provide them living space denied them by the Puritan authorities. These founders of what would become Rhode Island started a new precedent by paying for the lands they were granted. On March 24, 1637, William Coddington bought Aquidneck Island for 40 fathoms of white wampum; the deed names Canonicus and Miantonomo. That summer, English troops marched into the Mystic River Valley, where the Pequots held a fortified settlement. Canonicus sent one hundred warriors with the English, since he was still at war with the Pequots, but they were sickened by the massacre of their starving and diseased former enemies.

In 1642, a son of Canonicus, perhaps the Mriksah mentioned in early chronicles, died. While he had passed over his son to name his nephew junior sachem of their people, Canonicus clearly loved his son. Indeed, the elder Sachem’s love for his son was great enough for the incident to be recorded in Narragansett oral tradition. After burying his son, Canonicus registered his grief by burning his lodge, along with all of the son’s belongings. His grief increased in 1643, when the Mohegans, the larger nation of whom the Pequots were a sept, moved into Pequot territory and harried the Narragansett, and the Mohegan sachem Uncas killed Miantonomo. Knowing that the Boston authorities were complicit in the younger sachem’s death (they had promised Miantonomo protection then turned him over to Uncas), Canonicus responded in a bold move that demonstrated the depth of his comprehension of the colonial political situation. He renounced all ties with Boston and declared the Narragansetts to be under the direct protection of the king of England.

Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing that King Charles I had problems of his own with Puritans in England, who had seized control of Parliament and kept him under house arrest. Nevertheless, Canonicus had had enough of Boston’s claims of authority in the region. When the governor called him to Boston in the spring of 1644, he refused to go. When Boston magistrates came to his village to investigate, Canonicus kept them waiting for two hours in the rain before letting them into his lodge. On April 19, 1644, he signed a treaty acknowledging Great Britain as the only sovereign authority in the colonies.

The last years of Canonicus’s life saw a waning of Narragansett authority. Canonicus mostly deferred to the new junior sachem, Miantonomo’s brother Pessecus, who ruled solely upon the death of Canonicus on June 4, 1647.

Significance

Despite the preferential treatment the New England colonies gave to the enemies of Canonicus, colonial writers paint a surprisingly flattering portrait of the great sachem’s pacifism, his honesty, and his generosity. Roger Williams credited Canonicus with saving his life with his hospitality in Rhode Island, and more than fifty years before Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), John Lathrop, Jr., made the sachem the hero of an epic poem, The Speech of Caunonicus: Or, An Indian Tradition (1802). Thus, more than 150 years after the death of Canonicus, a minor Boston poet remembered him as the sachem who had met the first colonists. Lathrop likened Canonicus to Moses, leading his people through the oppression of a more powerful and alien king.

Two hundred years after the passing of Canonicus, Henry David Thoreau recalled New England traditions of the great sachem serving boiled chestnuts at council feasts. A modern historian of Rhode Island, Sydney V. James, has attributed the form of the Rhode Island colony largely to the policies of Canonicus. Canonicus showed himself an able military leader against the Wampanoags and Pequots, but equally skilled in peacemaking, even in the face of Puritan belligerence.

Bibliography

Doherty, Craig A. The Narragansett. Vero Beach, Fla.: Rourke, 1994. This very brief (31 pp.) pamphlet provides an overview of the tribe led by Canonicus; includes maps and period illustrations.

James, Sydney V. Colonial Rhode Island: A History. New York: Scribner, 1975. A thorough treatment of the early history of Narragansett Bay, with a relatively sympathetic account of Canonicus’s role in the English settlement of the area.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Three Visitors to Early Plymouth: Letters About the Pilgrim Settlement in New England During Its First Seven Years. Plymouth, Mass.: Plimoth Plantation, 1963. Primary documents from the time of the first English contacts with Canonicus.

Lathrop, John, Jr. The Speech of Caunonicus. Calcutta, India: Hircirrah Press, 1802. This brief epic, though a fictionalized account of the sachem’s first encounter with Europeans, shows how his memory was preserved in early republican New England.

Rubertone, Patricia E. Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001. While this is a work of archaeology rather than history, it provides useful sociological background to the Narragansetts of the time of Canonicus.

1617-c. 1700: Smallpox Epidemics Kill Native Americans; December 26, 1620: Pilgrims Arrive in North America; June, 1636: Rhode Island Is Founded; July 20, 1636-July 28, 1637: Pequot War; 1642-1651: English Civil Wars.