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Desperate Shores - The Mayflower · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season one of American Political History Desperate Shores The Mayflower September sixth, sixteen twenty.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Mayflower leaves Plymouth, England, one hundred and two passengers, a crossing that was supposed to begin in August, and would have, if their companionship, the Speedwell, hadn't leaked twice and forced them back to port both times.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: The delay cost them six weeks of sailing weather.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: They were now heading into the North Atlantic in autumn.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: The Speedwell's leaking was suspicious enough that some of the crew believed it was deliberate.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sailors who had signed on for a colonial settlement that they didn't fully understand, and who had found repeated mechanical failure a more comfortable exit than refusal.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Several passengers took the speedwell's failure as their cue to turn back.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: The hundred and two who remained were the ones who didn't.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Among the one hundred and two, thirty seven separatists, the people we call today pilgrims, who had spent eleven years in exile in Leiden, Holland, watching their children become Dutch and deciding they could not let that stand.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And sixty five strangers, the name the pilgrims gave to the secular passengers, hired workers, indentured servants, and trademark recruited by the merchant company funding the voyage, who had no particular religious mission, and no particular reason to trust the people they were sailing with.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Two groups, one ship, no shared purpose except survival.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: The separatists had a specific grievance and a specific dream.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The grievance was that the Church of England, which they did not believe was a true reformation of Catholicism, but simply a Catholic Church with a Protestant king at its head.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: King Henry VIII had not created it out of theological conviction, but out of a desire for a divorce and the need for money.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: In the pilgrims' view, the Church of England had stolen the monasteries, installed the king where the Pope had been, and called it all reform.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: They had wanted to separate entirely, to build the church governed by its congregation, not its monarch, to read the Bible as they understood it, without a king appointed clergy telling them what it meant.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: In England, their stance was sedition.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the earliest pilgrim leaders had published pamphlets calling the church into question, illegally on secret printing presses, and found themselves chased by authorities.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen oh seven, when a group of them tried to flee to Holland, their ship's captain spotted militia coming down the docks and immediately set sail, leaving more than half of them on the shore.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: The wives left behind were arrested, then released.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: The law held that a wife was bound to obey her husband in almost all things, and could not be held responsible for his crimes.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: It took time, but eventually they made it to Leiden, and for eleven years they built a life there.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Leiden was a tolerant city, a university town, one of the few places in Europe where you could practice your religion privately without fear of arrest.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: The textile industry gave them work, they had a congregation, their worship, and their community.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was not an easy life.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: The cloth trade was hard physical labor, long hours at looms and presses.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Their leader, William Brewster, ran a printing press on the side, smuggling pamphlets critical of the Church of England back across the channel, until the English ambassador pressured the Dutch authorities to shut them down.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: That pressure from London, the crown's long arm reaching even into tolerant Leiden, was part of what finally pushed them towards the New World.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: You could not be far enough from England inside of Europe.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: You had to cross an ocean.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: The other issue was that their children were becoming Dutch, speaking Dutch, playing with Dutch children, absorbed into Dutch culture.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the pilgrims understood with clarity that comes from watching their children become strangers, that if they stayed in Leiden, their dream of a pure godly community built on biblical simplicity would dissolve in a generation.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that was no small choice.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Getting on a ship in 1620 and sailing to the coast of New England, across the Atlantic was the closest thing in their century to a one way trip to another planet.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: You would sell everything you owned, you would say goodbye to the people who you were leaving behind, knowing you would almost certainly never see them again.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: No stable mail service to connect the old to the new world.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sisters, parents, friends, gone.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not just far away.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: The pilgrims made this choice in full knowledge of the costs.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: They also made it having just discovered that the deal had changed.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: The company of Merchant Adventures of London had offered them passage and land grants in exchange for part-time labor, two days a week producing trade goods for the company.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: By the time the pilgrims were aboard the ship with their possessions sold behind them, the terms had quietly become four days a week, and the company had added strangers to the passenger list without asking.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sixty five people with no stake in their religious mission, none of the shared purpose, and no reason to defer to pilgrim leadership once they were ashore.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The pilgrims could have backed out, but they had already sold everything.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: They had no better offer waiting.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: They swallowed the change and sailed.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: The crossing was brutal.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: The North Atlantic in autumn is not a place to be in a wooden ship with one hundred passengers sharing a space roughly the length of a tennis court.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: The storm pushed the Mayflower off course, off schedule, off plan.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Midway across, a fierce storm cracked one of the main structural beams of the ship.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: William Bradford recorded the moment.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: One of the main beams in the midship was bowed and cracked, which put them in some fear that the ship could not be able to perform the voyage.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: There was a great iron screw the passengers brought out of Holland, which they would raise into place into the beam, so they continued themselves to the will of God and resolved to proceed.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: They spotted land on november ninth, sixteen twenty, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, more than two hundred miles northeast of where they were supposed to be.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: The patent charter authorized them to settle near the mouth of the Hudson River, what is today New York City.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: They tried to sail south.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: The shoals on the south side of Cape Cod are some of the most treacherous waters in the North Atlantic coast.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Mayflower nearly ran aground.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: The captain turned back, with winter closing in, supplies low, and the ship's captain, who had no intention of being stranded in the New World, the choice was to settle where they were or die trying to get where they were supposed to be.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: They settled where they were.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But before anyone went ashore, something happened in the hold of that ship that would echo through the next four centuries of American history.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: They had a legal problem.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: The company charter authorized a settlement in a specific location, and they weren't in it.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the strangers were making noise about going on their own way once they landed, arguing that without a valid patent they owed no particular loyalty to anyone on the ship.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: The pilgrims understood exactly what that meant.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: In a wilderness, with a hundred people and one shot at survival, a colony divided against itself would die.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: One man in the hold had been in exactly this situation before twice.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Stephen Hopkins was a stranger, no religious mission, no stake in the pilgrim dream.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: But he had been a clerk at Jamestown from 1610 to 1614, arriving during the starving time.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: He had watched a colony tear itself apart through factional dysfunction and the collapse of shared authority.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: He had seen what happened when desperate people in a hostile environment stopped trusting their leadership.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: He had also, a decade earlier, made the mutineers argument himself.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Wrecked in Bermuda on the way to Jamestown aboard the sea venture, Hopkins had argued to the survivors that without a valid patent, the only law was the consent of those present.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was convicted of mutiny, sentenced to death, and pardoned.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, ten years later he was in the hold of another ship off course from another charter.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the strangers were making the same argument he had once made himself.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever he said in the hold, we cannot know, but he was the only man in the room who had lived the consequences of not having a compact.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Mayflower Compact was not born from political philosophy, it was born from desperation, the practical need to bind two groups of people with nothing in common except a ship and a shoreline into something that could function as a community.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: They wrote it themselves.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the name of God, amen.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign, Lord King James, having undertaken for the glory of God the advancement of Christian faith and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combined ourselves together into a civil body politic for a better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinance, acts, constitutions, and officers from time to time as shall be thought most meet and convenient for our general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: one hundred and eighty nine words.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are here, we are together, we need laws, and those laws will be made from the general good of the colony, and we will all obey them.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Forty one men signed it, free men of every rank, from the pilgrim leadership to the stranger tradesmen, and on a ship anchored in a harbor they hadn't planned to be in, in November, with winter bearing down.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen twenty, in the middle of an era of absolute divine monarchy, when European kings ruled by the word of God and challengers went to the dungeon, this was not a small thing.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: They chose Plymouth.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: The site was already cleared.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Fields that had been planted and harvested for generations.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: What they didn't know was that the Wampanoag nations around them understood immediately, was that they had settled on a graveyard.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: The Patuxet had lived there, a disease scholars have debated the exact cause with recent research pointing toward leptosporosis, which had spread through the coastal nations and New England and destroyed the Patuxet entirely.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Their village, their cleared fields, their planted grounds, all of it sapped empty, waiting.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Wampanoeg saw the settlers as putting stakes down in a place of death and misfortune.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: The first winter would kill half the pilgrims.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Of the one hundred and two who arrived, roughly fifty survived to see spring.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: They died of pneumonia, of scurvy, of the cold, of starvation.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: They died at a rate of two or three a night.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: The survivors, too sick and too few to dig proper graves, left their dead in the woods.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: James Chilton died that winter.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: His wife died a few days later.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Dagory Priest, Solomon Prower, Richard Bitteridge, Rose Standish, Mary Allerton, Elizabeth Winslow, names from the ships manifest, gone within weeks of arrival.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: They did not light fires during the day.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't want anyone watching from the tree lines to know how few of them were left.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Fifty people, sick, starving, trying to hide how close they were to extinction.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Among them William Bradford.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: He kept a record of almost everything, who arrived, who died, what was decided.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: He recorded the deaths of his neighbors with meticulous grief of a man trying to hold the community's memory together.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: He recorded the death of Dorothy Bradford, his wife in December of sixteen twenty.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: While the Mayflower still sat at anchor in the harbor, she fell overboard and drowned.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And they were not paranoid to be watching the tree line.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were being watched.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit, Saint of the Wampanoag, knew exactly what was happening at Plymouth.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He had heard of the reports of the English who had come into contact with natives around Jamestown.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: He had seen what English diseases did to coastal nations.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: His first instinct was to eliminate the settlement before it could become a threat.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: But he paused.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because Plymouth was different from the rumors.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was more than half women and children.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was not a military base like Jamestown.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: This was a settlement, families trying to build something, and they were dying.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: A settlement that could barely keep itself alive in the first few months was not the same strategic problem as Jamestown.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit also had a more pressing problem.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Wampanoag Nation had been devastated by the same coastal epidemic that destroyed the Patuxet, weakened enough that some accounts describe them as being forced to send payments to the Massachusetts nation.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that arrangement was formal tribute or something closer to extortion by raiding, the effect was the same.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Every year of it bled the Wampanoag's resources and prestige and made them weaker relative to their neighboring nations.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: The Wampanoag needed allies.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit needed something to change the balance of power.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: English weapons on his side of the equation could change everything.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: He watched the pilgrims die through the winter, calculating.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: A weakened, grateful English settlement, one that needed him to survive, could be exactly the counterweight he required.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: The question was how to approach them without triggering a violent misunderstanding from either side.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: The answer to that question walked into Plymouth.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Samoset was a Segamore, a leader of a smaller nation, from what is now Maine, who had spent years trading with English fishing boats along the coast and had picked up enough of the language to be useful.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was visiting Massasoit when the situation at Plymouth became an opportunity.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: In March of sixteen twenty one, Samoset walked into Plymouth.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: He carried two arrows, one with an arrowhead, one without peace or war.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: The choice of which to present would depend entirely on what he found.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: He asked in English, where are your beers?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: The pilgrims, who had been watching the tree line all winter in terror, were astonished.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Samiset was not in a hurry.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: He had some knowledge of English customs, enough to know that a guest who stayed late enough would eventually be offered a bed for the night.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: So he talked and he waited, and it got dark, and then later, and Plymouth had a problem.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Their guest was not leaving, and sending him away could be read as an insult that they couldn't afford to give.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Samoset was invited to stay the night in Stephen Hopkins' house, a one room shelter shared by his entire family.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, Samoset left Plymouth, returning to Massasoit with word that he had been treated as an honored guest.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit considered this, and a few days later he arrived himself, with ninety warriors.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Edward Winslow recorded what he saw.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit was in his thirties, though his appearance was of an elder, an able body, grave counts, and spare of speech.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: His face was painted a deep red.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Around his neck hung a great chain of white bone beads, from it a small bag of tobacco.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: His followers were painted too, some black, some red, some yellow, some white, some with crosses and other designs.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: One of them had a great long knife hanging from his bosom.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Governor John Carver came out to meet him with a drum, a trumpet, and a small honor guard of musketeers.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: They brought Massasoit to a house under construction, a green rug on the floor and cushions.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Carver kissed Massasoit's hand, Massasoit kissed him back.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: They sat down together.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Carver called for liquor.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit drank deeply.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Carver called for fresh meat, Massasoit ate and shared it with his men.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: The trumpet sounded and Massasoit marveled at it.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: He asked one for his men to try.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Two peoples, separated by ten thousand years and every possible category of difference, language, culture, religion, history, sitting on a cushion in an unfinished house in March, eating meat and sounding a trumpet, trying to find the shape of a peace.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they found it in those conversations.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: The treaty they agreed to that day was mutual.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Both peoples would keep the peace, come to each other's aid if attacked by a third party, and maintain open trade and friendly relations.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Massasoit brought with him a man who would make all of this workable.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Tisquantum, and his story begins before the pilgrims had ever thought of leaving England.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Tisquantum was a Patuxet, a member of the very nation whose village Plymouth now occupied.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen fourteen, an English captain named Thomas Hunt invited a group of Patuxet men aboard his ship under the pretense of trade.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Once they were on board, he sailed for Spain and sold them as slaves.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Tisquantum was among that group.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was sold to Spanish merchants, purchased by a group of monks who educated him and eventually brought him to England.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Tisquantum eventually lived in London for several years, navigating a world entirely unlike anything he had known, learning a language and customs of a new people with extraordinary speed.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: He eventually convinced English merchants that he could guide them to great riches in New England, securing passage back across the Atlantic.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: When the ship reached the New England coast, he went over the side and swam ashore.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: He had been gone for years, he had been enslaved.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: He crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: He came home to find his people extinct.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Patuxet had been wiped out by disease when he was in Europe.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Every person he had known since childhood, every family, every face, every name gone.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was the last of his nation standing on the shore of an empty coast, returned to the village of the dead.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever he had imagined in all those years away, whatever version of home had kept him going, no longer existed.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: He eventually found his way into the orbit of Massasoit, who recognized immediately what Tusquantum was, a man who spoke English fluently, who understood English culture from the inside, who could interpret not just words but intentions.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit kept him close.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: The pilgrims would come to know him as Squanto, a diminutive name, a marker of his low station as he was the last surviving member of a destroyed nation.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Tisquantum is the name of who he was.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Squanto is the name that was given to him because of his position.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever his station in Massasoit's eyes, he was irreplaceable.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Standing on the beach at Plymouth in March 1621, interpreting between the Satchem of the Wampanoag and fifty freezing, starving English settlers, Tusquantum was arguably the most important person on the North Atlantic coast.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Tusquantum stayed the summer in Plymouth, teaching them what they needed to know to survive.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: What they needed to know was almost everything.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: The seeds the pilgrims had brought from England failed entirely.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: They had packed Mediterranean crops and assumed that since New England shared latitude with Spain, it must share climate.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: It does not.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Tusquantum taught them how to plant maize in the native ways, using fish bodies as fertilizer, placing seeds in the proper rhythm with the soil.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: He taught them to build and use native fishing nets.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: He showed them where to fish and when.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: The founders of Plymouth Colony wrote plainly that Tusquantum saved them, not as a figure of speech, but as a literal statement of fact.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Without his knowledge, Plymouth would have become another failed English colony, another set of names and a ship's manifest that no one would remember.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: In October of 1621, Plymouth had its first successful harvest.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: The pilgrims held a feast and invited Massasoit.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Word spread and hundreds of Wampanoag warriors showed up alongside to celebrate with the fifty surviving pilgrims.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Three days of eating, games, and the particular relief of a people who had been very close to dying, who found themselves improbably still alive.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is the story of what we celebrate on Thanksgiving.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was born out of a feast of friendship between the Wampanoag and the pilgrims.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: But a peace needs managing.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And one problem had emerged quickly.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Wampanoag warriors discovered that Plymouth would feed any visitor who came to the settlement, not wanting to risk offense to Massasoit.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Word traveled.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Warriors began showing up regularly, two or three at a time, and sitting down for a hot meal.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Plymouth could not turn them away, but Plymouth also could not afford to feed the Wampanoag nation on an ongoing basis.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they sent the deputy governor to talk to Massasoit about it.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit found this amusing.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: He acknowledged that things had gotten a little out of hand, and he agreed to a particular solution.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Plymouth was only obligated to feed his official representatives, and he would be obligated to feed theirs.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: To identify his official representatives, the pilgrims gave him a bronze chain necklace, and said that anyone bearing the necklace was speaking for Massasoit and would be treated accordingly.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone else showing up hungry for a free meal would be politely declined.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is a small detail, but it shows something important.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: These two people were not just coexisting on paper.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: They were actively working out practical terms of a shared life, week by week, problem by problem.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: The peace was not a declaration, it was a practice.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Tisquantum was not a simple man.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: His story does not have a simple moral.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: As his position as Plymouth's translator and guide made him indispensable, he began to use the position for his own purposes.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: He told various native nations around Plymouth that the English had barrels of plague buried under a fort, and that he alone could control where it was released, demanding tribute from smaller nations who believed him.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: He played both sides of the Anglo Wampanoag relationship for personal advantage, maneuvering between the English and Massasoit with the skill of a man who understood that his value to both parties was his only protection.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit eventually demanded that Plymouth hand over to Squantum for his punishment.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: This was not a simple request.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was a test of whether Plymouth's commitment to the alliance meant subordinating their own interests to the Wampanoag's authority.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Plymouth refused.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were too dependent on him.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: They felt too great a debt.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: From Massasoit's perspective, this refusal revealed something.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: The alliance was mutual only up until a point, and that point was wherever Plymouth's survival interests drew that line.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: The conflict was never cleanly resolved, because Tusquantum died of fever in 1622 while guiding a trading expedition for Plymouth, which ended the immediate crisis while leaving the underlying questions unanswered.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the spring of 1623, word reached Plymouth that Massasoit was gravely ill, dying, in fact.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Some said he was already dead.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Edward Winslow decided to go to him, not because there was a strategic calculation to make, but because Massasoit was Plymouth's friend, and a friend does not ignore a friend's dying.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: He set out on foot forty miles through late winter mud and cold.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Partway there a group of Wampanoag warriors told him to turn back.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit had already passed.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: There was no point in him continuing.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: What Winslow did not know, and what would only become clear later, was that these warriors belonged to a faction within the Wampanoag who wanted Massasoit's policy of friendship with Plymouth ended.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: They were trying to prevent an English physician from reaching their chief, and if Massasoit died with no Englishman present to pay respects, Plymouth's absence would look like contempt from a colony that claimed friendship.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Edward Winslow kept walking.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: He arrived to find Massasoit alive, barely.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: He could not see, he could not eat, he had not slept in days.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Winslow cleared the infection from his mouth and throat, he fed him broth and stayed through the night.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Massasoit collapsed into sleep.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: He woke the next day.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: The peace and friendship would hold for another generation.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share this show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.