12/28/2022 0 Comments The pilgrims![]() The Pilgrims arrived here in a hard dark winter. If you arrive on a July day, as I did recently, you’ll need to autocorrect for the bright blue summer sky, the calm, flat sea receding so far into the distance at low tide that it shimmers like a heat mirage. Heading north on Highway 6 through Cape Cod, you take a left in the town of Eastham onto Samoset Road and drive past retail businesses and marshes and salt ponds toward a parking lot carved into the dunes along the bay side of the Cape. The place is still called First Encounter Beach. But the First Encounter on Cape Cod, Mass., and the events leading up to it provide a historical snapshot of arresting clarity, in which English outcasts searching for a home and an indigenous population struggling to hold on to one found themselves in conflict before a single word could be exchanged. The resonant story of the Pilgrims-shocking hardship, flinty endurance, alliances and wars and accommodations with native tribes-has always centered around the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth and the first Thanksgiving. ![]() The relieved Pilgrims christened the spot where the skirmish took place “The First Encounter.” In the end, no one was hurt, though one of the assailants gave an “extraordinary cry” after a musket was discharged in his direction and before he disappeared with the rest of the natives into the brambly forest that covered the dunes. “Their note was after this manner,” the account informs us: ‘Woath! Woath! Ha! Ha! Hach! Woach!’” As they fought, the Indians let out a spine-chilling war cry. By then, three other men in the barricade had their matchlocks ready to fire.Īccording to a narrative known as Mourt’s Relation that was probably written by William Bradford and Edward Winslow, two of the participants in the fight, the Englishmen were alert and dexterous enough to duck the arrows that came flying out of the trees. As the men ran down to the shallop to retrieve their muskets and armor, Standish-who carried a more efficient flintlock firearm- got off several shots. The rest had set theirs near an open boat, a shallop, that was tied up on the beach. Only four members of the shore party had their arms ready. Most of the men carried matchlock muskets, which were slow to load and prime and were fired by a burning match cord held in a clamp that ignited powder in a flash pan. Together, the saints and strangers would come to be known as Pilgrims. Among these was Miles Standish, hired by the separatists to serve as military adviser in the colony they hoped to establish far from the repressive reach of King James and his corrupted Church of England. The others were sailors and pilots from the ship’s crew, along with a few “strangers,” the servants, hired men and families who were unaffiliated with the congregation and for reasons of their own had joined the Atlantic crossing. There were 16 men in camp, half of whom were “saints,” members of the religious separatist group that formed the nucleus of the Mayflower enterprise. His warning arrived only moments before a flurry of arrows flew through the barricaded Mayflower’s shore party screamed as one of the members camp the explorers had built, though none found its target. “Indians! Indians!” of the he came running in from the woods toward a tidal beach on the lee side of Cape Cod. Miles Standish led a small group of explorers on desperate scouting missions that predate the landing at Plymouth Rock. 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. ![]() ![]() The Pilgrims' First Encounter With Indians | HistoryNet Close ![]()
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