Year: Day to Day Men; March 16
The Darkness of the Night
The sixteenth of March in 1621 marks the day Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore, made contact with the Pilgrims of the recently established Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English colony in New England.
Samoset was a sagamore, or subordinate chief, of an Eastern Abenaki tribe that resided in Maine. The Abenaki, ‘People of the Dawn Land’, are indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States. The are an Algonquian-speaking people and part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of the five principal Eastern Algonquian Nations.
Samoset had learned some English from visiting an earlier settled fishing camp in the Gulf of Maine; English fishermen would fish cod off the coast of Mohegan Island. In March of 1621, Samoset was visiting Massasoit, the sachem or leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy. Massasoit’s people had been seriously weakened by a series of epidemics and were vulnerable to attacks by the Narragansetts, the most powerful tribe in the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620. Massasoit Sachem sought an alliance with the Plymouth colonists as a way to protect his people.
On Friday, the sixteenth of March in 1621, Samoset entered the settlement at Plymouth alone and greeted the colonists in English. He was the first indigenous person with whom the colonists could converse. Samoset told the colonists about the land, the sagamores, and his people’s strength and numbers. He was also acquainted with many of the captains and fishermen who visited the colony. Samoset and the colonists communicated and, in the evening, lodged at colonist Stephen Hopkin’s house.
The next morning, the Plymouth colonists gave Samoset a knife, bracelet and a ring before he left with a promise to return. On the twenty-second of March, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, the last known member of the Wampanoag Patuxet tribe. Squanto, who spoke a greater degree of English, arranged a meeting between the leaders of the colonists and Massasoit.
Massasoit forged critical personal and political ties with colonial leaders William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins, Edward Winslow, John Carver and Myles Standish, which grew from the peace treaty negotiated on the twenty-second of March in 1621. The alliance assured the neutrality of the Wampanoag Confederacy during the 1636 Pequot War.
Notes: In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge. Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them.
English Sea Captain Christopher Levett entertained Samoset and other tribal leaders in 1624 onboard his ship at harbor in Portland, Maine. Samoset is believed to have died circa 1653 in Pemaquid, Maine.