Tisquantum Quotes

This was his homeland. Odd how even a place as familiar to him as his own skin could appear so unknown and unknowable, hostile and dangerous. And somehow, even as his shadow proclaimed him taller than the trees, Tisquantum felt in his heart that he had never felt smaller.

Thus, by degrees, we began to discover Tisquantum; whose ends were only to make himself great in the eyes of his countrymen, by means of his nearness and favour with us: not caring who fell, so he stood.

At our return from Nauset we found it true that Massasoyt was put from his country by the Narrohiggansets. Word also was brought unto us that Coubatant, a petty sachim or governor under Massasoyt, whom they ever feared to be too conversant with the Narrohiggansets, was at Namaschet; who sought to draw the hearts of Massasoyt’s subjects from him; speaking also disdainfully of us, storming at the peace between Nauset, Cummaquid and us, and at Tisquantum, the worker of it; also at Tokamahamon and one Hobbamock, two Indians, our allies, one of which he would treacherously have murdered a little before, being a special and trusty man of Massasoyt’s.

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 she had three sons, who, when Master Hunt was in these parts, went aboard his ship to trade with him, and he carried them captives into Spain, (for Tisquantum at that time was carried away also,) 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 offence, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that 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.

Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.

My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting technique—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing a bountiful harvest. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students took notes.

Tisquantum was seized on his journey home, perhaps because of his association with the hated English, and sent to Massasoit as a captive.

Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed that “Indians themselves indeed are true men” and should not be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our service like brute animals.”) The priests intended to save both Tisquantum’s body, by preventing his enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to Christianity.

Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social world had vanished.