Anyone who has attended elementary school in the United States has heard of Squanto, the Indian who helped the Pilgrims celebrate their first Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth. Many have even portrayed him as part of an annual Thanksgiving play. Yet that is not the Squanto one finds in the spare, fragmented historical record, which for four centuries has been as easily manipulated as a kaleidoscope. Andrew Lipman’s Squanto: A Native Odyssey offers a powerful corrective to the received understanding of the initial encounters between Native Americans and Europeans. Squanto, who also went by his adopted name, Tisquantum (Lipman uses both names almost interchangeably), was far from the only, or even the first, Native American to treat with Europeans, even in the discrete history of the Pilgrims.
Squanto was born probably around 1590 and grew up in the Wampanoag settlement of Patuxet, with a childhood and adolescence that Lipman weaves together from a variety of ethnographic and historical sources. In 1614, Thomas Hunt, John Smith’s second in command, seized Squanto and two dozen other Wampanoags whom he hoped to sell into the Mediterranean slave trade. Spanish law forbade the enslavement of Native Americans (though not Africans), and when he landed at Málaga, Hunt claimed he had captured them when they attacked his ship off Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and sold them to a local priest who planned to “distribute” them to people who would employ them as servants and teach them the rudiments of Christianity before they gained their freedom.
A couple of years on, Englishmen associated with the Newfoundland Company brought Squanto to England, probably in the belief that he was from Cape Breton and thus familiar with Newfoundland. Squanto lived with John Slany, a company officer, in what is now the City of London, at the same time as Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe) lived in the same neighborhood. Whether they met is likely but unknown; if they did, their common language would have been English. He fared better than the younger Pocahontas, who died in March 1617. That same month (or possibly a year later), Squanto was in Newfoundland, ostensibly to serve as a go-between with the elusive Beothuks.