How Did The Mayflower Revolt

I EXPLORATIONS

The Pilgrims were hungry and weak from scurvy after two months at sea by the time the Mayflower anchored in the icy waters on the bay side of
Cape Cod in the winter of
1620. Miles Standish led a small group of explorers on desperate scouting missions that predate the landing at Plymouth Rock

First
Encounter
By Stephen Harrigan

‘I

I
NDIANS! INDIANS!” one of the members of the Mayflower’s shore party screamed as

he came running in from the woods toward a

tidal beach on the lee side of Cape Cod. His warning arrived only moments before a flur-

ry of arrows flew through the barricaded

camp the explorers had built, though none found its target. It was dawn of December 8, 1620. There were
16 men
But this is not the only monument. Nearby is another bronze plaque, set down onto the beach in 2001, telling the story through a 21st-century lens. “Near this site,” the plaque reads, “the Nauset tribe of the Wampanoag Nation, seeking to protect themselves and their culture, had their first encounter…”
By the time the Pilgrims got to Cape Cod, the Nausets, along with the rest of the original residents of this part of
New England, had plenty of reason to fear European explorers and cod fishermen. There had been contact and trading for almost a century, and in the decades leading up to the arrival of the Mayflower, relations between visitors and inhabitants had grown increasingly tense.
Sometimes the discord flared into violence, and several times English seafarers kidnapped Indians to sell into slavery or to exhibit to the curious back home.
It was the Nausets’ Pokanoket cousins on the mainland who suffered the most. An epidemic of European origin had, in only three years, almost destroyed a thriving native nation. The disease also destabilized the balance of power in the region, stirring up intertribal wars in
In the end they decided there had to be a more secure place for them than this windblown cape, and so after another week they set out in the shallop again for their third reconnaissance, sailing south. On the shore of
Wellfleet Bay, they encountered a dozen natives “busy about a black thing.” As soon as they saw the boat, the
Indians fled. The black thing was probably a beached pilot whale. When the Pilgrims pulled into shore and started exploring the next day, they found three more, in addition to the one the Indians had been butchering.
They liked what they saw around Wellfleet: a decent harbor, streams of fresh water, a shoreline whose tidal dynamics suggested that it might regularly deliver up dying whales to be used for meat and oil.
No doubt the Nausets were watching the Pilgrims as they once again walked uninvited through their villages and their graveyards. After weeks of avoiding these

64 AMERICAN HISTORY

intruders, of witnessing the defilement and theft of their property, they had seen enough. In the darkness of the next morning they attacked.
“It pleased God to vanquish our enemies and give