Massasoit
Massasoit (mas-uh-SOYT) was a prominent leader of the Wampanoag people during the early 17th century, best known for his alliance with the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts. His leadership emerged in a period of significant upheaval for his tribe, exacerbated by an epidemic that had decimated many of his people. Seeking to strengthen his position against rival tribes, particularly the Narragansetts, Massasoit formed a crucial alliance with the English settlers, fostering a relationship characterized by both cooperation and cultural exchange.
Massasoit communicated with the Pilgrims through English-speaking Native Americans, Samoset and Squanto, who played instrumental roles in establishing the initial rapport between the two groups. He is noted for his philosophical stance on land ownership, challenging European notions of property and emphasizing a collective relationship with the earth. Over time, however, Massasoit grew disillusioned as increasing colonial encroachment threatened his people's lands and way of life. His legacy is complex, viewed variously as a visionary leader who aided the survival of the Pilgrims or as a figure whose decisions inadvertently facilitated the colonial expansion that led to Native American displacement. As such, Massasoit remains a significant yet controversial figure in the narrative of early American history.
Massasoit
Chief
- Born: c. 1580
- Birthplace: Near present-day Bristol, Rhode Island
- Died: 1661
- Place of death: Near present-day Bristol, Rhode Island
Wampanoag grand sachem (r. before 1620-1661)
Wampanoag leader Massasoit arranged the first Native American meetings with the Pilgrims. His people assisted the Pilgrims during their first hard winters in the New World, taking part in the first Thanksgiving with them. Massasoit counseled peace, but his son Metacom went to war in the mid-1670’s, after his people’s land base had been severely depleted.
Areas of achievement: Government and politics, diplomacy
Early Life
Because the English encountered Massasoit (mas-uh-SOYT) at middle age, very little reliable published information exists on his early life. Massasoit allied with the Pilgrims out of practical necessity, because many of his people had died in an epidemic shortly before the whites arrived, and he sought to forge an alliance with them against the more numerous Narragansetts. Massasoit, father of Metacom, favored friendly relations with the English colonists when he became the Wampanoags’ most influential leader. Massasoit also became a close friend of the dissident Puritan Roger Williams, providing Williams with life-sustaining lodging during a blizzard that accompanied his flight from Boston to found the new colony of Providence Plantations, now Rhode Island.
Massasoit called on two English-speaking Native Americans, Samoset and Squanto, to communicate with the English immigrants. Samoset (c. 1590-c. 1653), an Abenaki whose name means “he who walks overmuch,” made contact with English fishermen near the home of his band, the Pemaquid Abenakis, on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. Samoset had had enough contact that, by the time the Pilgrims reached the area in 1620, he was able to greet them in English. On March 21, 1621, Samoset surprised the English immigrants by walking into Plymouth Plantation and announcing a welcome in their language.
Samoset returned to the settlement March 22 in the company of Squanto, who also had learned English. Squanto (also called Tisquantum), had probably been kidnapped from his native land in 1614 by English explorers. They sold him and twenty Pawtuxet companions on the slave market at Malaga, Spain. A Christian friar smuggled Squanto to England, where he worked for a rich merchant as he learned the English language. Squanto obtained passage back to America on a trading ship, before the arrival of the Pilgrims, who came ashore in 1620. Like Samoset, Squanto surprised the Pilgrims by greeting them in English. He showed the immigrants how to plant corn in hillocks, using dead herring as fertilizer (the seeds of English wheat, barley, and peas did not grow). Squanto also taught the Pilgrims how to design traps to catch fish, and he acted as a guide and interpreter.
Samoset and Squanto arranged a meeting between the colonists and Massasoit. This meeting was the beginning of Massasoit’s long-term friendship with the New England settlers. During the first years of settlement, Samoset “sold” large tracts of land at the Pilgrims’ behest. He acknowledged the first such deed in 1625 for twelve thousand acres of Pemaquid territory.
Massasoit was described by William Bradford in 1621 as “lustie… in his best years, an able body grave of countenance, spare of speech, strong [and] tall.” Williams met Massasoit when the latter was about thirty years of age and, in Williams’s words, became “great friends” with the sachem. Williams also became close to Canonicus, elderly leader of the Narragansetts. With both, Williams traveled in the forest for days at a time.
Life’s Work
By January, 1635, the Puritans’ more orthodox magistrates had decided that Roger Williams must be exiled to England, jailed if possible, and silenced. They opposed exiling Williams in the wilderness, fearing that he would begin his own settlement, from which his “infections” would leak back into Puritania. About January 15, 1636, Captain John Underhill was dispatched from Boston to arrest Williams and place him on board ship for England. Arriving at Williams’s home, Underhill and his deputies found that he had escaped. No one in the neighborhood would admit to having seen him leave.
Aware of his impending arrest, Williams had set out three days earlier during a blinding blizzard, walking south by west to the lodge of Massasoit, at Mount Hope. Walking eighty to ninety miles during the worst of a New England winter, Williams suffered immensely, and he most likely would have died without Indian aid. Nearly half a century later, nearing death, Williams wrote: “I bear to this day in my body the effects of that winter’s exposure.” Near the end of his trek, Williams lodged with Canonicus and his family. He then scouted the land that had been set aside for the new colony.
A statement by Massasoit has served for more than three centuries to illustrate the differences in conception of the earth and property ownership between many Native American and European-derived cultures. In Brave Are My People (1993), Frank Waters describes a “purchase” by Miles Standish and two companions of a tract of land fourteen miles square near Bridgewater, for seven coats, eight hoes, nine hatchets, ten yards of cotton cloth, twenty knives, and four moose skins. When native people continued to hunt on the land after it was “purchased” and were arrested by the Pilgrims, Massasoit protested:
What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth. For the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, bears, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs to him only?
While Standish and his companions thought they had carried away an English-style deed, Massasoit argued that their goods had paid only for use of the land in common with everyone.
As he aged, Massasoit became disillusioned with the colonists, as increasing numbers of them pressed his people from their lands. He had fathered three boys and two girls. The two younger men, who would become chiefs of the Wampanoags after Massasoit’s death, were named Wamsutta and Metacom by their father, and Alexander and Philip by the English. Alexander succeeded Massasoit as principal chief of the Wampanoags after his father’s death, and Philip, later called King Philip by the English and the progenitor of King Philip’s War or Metacom’s War, assumed the office among a people increasingly angry over English treatment after Alexander’s death in 1662.
Significance
Massasoit is potentially among the most controversial of figures in American history, since the significance of his relationship to the Pilgrims is open to diametrically opposed interpretations. He may be seen as the enlightened soul who made the decision not to allow the first European immigrants to his land to starve to death and who made possible the foundation of the most famous and culturally significant English settlement in the New World. That is, he may be seen as a hero of the story of the prehistory of the United States of America. Alternatively, he may be seen as the naive or myopic leader who allowed the colonial powers of Europe to gain a foothold in New England and to begin the slow but inevitable process of dominating, displacing, and ultimately killing the Native American population—as an inadvertent traitor to his own people.
Bibliography
Covey, Cyclone. The Gentle Radical: A Biography of Roger Williams. New York: Macmillan, 1966. This biogrpahy of Roger Williams contains information about Williams’s associations with Massasoit.
Drake, James David. King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Unlike many authors, who maintain King Philip’s War was a battle between two different cultures — one Native American and the other British — Drake argues the conflict was a civil war within a more cohesive New England culture.
Schultz, Eric B., and Michael J. Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict. Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 1999. An in-depth history of the war as well as a guide to the sites of the raids, ambushes, and battles.
Waters, Frank. Brave Are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light, 1993. One chapter of this book contains biographical material on Massasoit.
Weeks, Alvin G. Massasoit of the Wampanoags. Fall River, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1919. Reprint. Scituate, Mass.: Digital Scanning, 2001. Digital Scanning, Inc. has digitized Weeks’s book and made it available in a PDF format that can be downloaded from the company’s web site, http://www .pdflibrary.com.
Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Seventeenth Century
December 26, 1620: Pilgrims Arrive in North America; March 22, 1622-October, 1646: Powhatan Wars; June 20, 1675: Metacom’s War Begins.