English-Indian Contacts in New England

Abstract

In approaching the history of English-Indian contacts in New England, we are faced with the fact that contact commenced long before significant records were made. For the casual reader, the history of New England began in 1620 with the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, yet he is confronted with the anomaly of Samoset's greeting, 'Welcome, Englishmen. We may search hopefully in the relations of the voyage of 1602,1 but our quest for the pre-contact Indian is hardly satisfied by the Indians who met Captain Gosnold then at Cape Neddick, clad in European clothes and rowing ... in a Baskeshallop, or by the Cuttyhunk natives who tossed off in English such phrases as, How now are you so saucie with my Tabacco? During the century which preceeded Gosnold's voyage, an unknown number of vessels had coasted or touched upon the New England shore,z but they seem to have left us only two accounts of encounters between Europeans and Indians, the accounts of Giovanni de Verrazano and Andre Thevet.3 These accounts were not written with ethnographers in mind, moreover, and the tiny light they shed into a dark century is tantalizing. We sense in them a pattern of contact which became