William and Benedict Arnold: Rhode Island’s Borgias?

The Borgias

The House of Borgia rose to political and ecclesiastical prominence during the Italian Renaissance. Though the Borgias were accused of murder, bribery, and simony, and the powerful Medici family were their enemies, the Borgias produced two popes, and their support of the arts helped spur the Renaissance.

17^th century Rhode Island had a pair of leaders who could well be described as Borgia-esque. William Arnold was baptized on 6/24/1587 in Ilchester, County Somerset. His eldest son, Benedict, was baptized on December 21, 1615, also in Ilchester, and died June 19, 1678 in Newport, Rhode Island. No, he wasn’t THAT Benedict Arnold, but he was the Revolutionary War traitor’s great-grandsire.

Arnold coat of arms

William Arnold brought his family from Somerset to Hingham, Massachusetts in 1635. A year later the Arnolds followed Roger Williams (who was banished for radical notions, such as freedom of religion) to Providence, Rhode Island. In 1638 William and his sons moved a few miles south of Providence, and named their self-governed settlement Pawtuxet, after the nearby river.

Rhode Island 1660

The Arnolds got along well with Roger Williams, but the same could not be said of Samuel Gorton. On January 12, 1642-3, Gorton, who Roger Williams described as bewitching and bemadding poor Providence, purchased a large tract of land adjoining Pawtuxet from the Narragansetts, and named it Shawomet. 

Samuel Gorton on trial

Samuel Gorton had been turned out of nearly every place he settled in New England. He came to Boston in 1636, but before long he fled Massachusetts’ Puritans for Plymouth. The Pilgrims quickly ousted him. Gorton tried Portsmouth, then Newport, and then Providence, Rhode Island, but didn’t stay long in any of those towns. William Coddington, Rhode Island’s chief Justice, had him whipped for insolence after Gorton referred to him as a “Just-Ass.”

Benedict and William Arnold loathed their new neighbor, knew that the Puritans in Massachusetts felt likewise, and also knew that Massachusetts eagerly sought to claim the entire western side of Narragansett Bay. Benedict  had learned to speak the Narragansett language, and used his knowledge to undermine Rhode Island in general, and Samuel Gorton in particular. Two minor Narragansett sachems had partial control of both Pawtuxet and Shawomet. Benedict Arnold took these chieftains to Boston and persuaded them to submit themselves and their lands to Massachusetts. On September 8, 1642, Benedict and William Arnold formally turned the English settlement at Pawtuxet over to Massachusetts’ rule and protection.

With the Arnolds’ cooperation in hand, Massachusetts ordered Gorton to come to Boston’s court to answer charges of duress and theft made by the Narragansett chieftans. Gorton refused, and Massachusetts sent an army to arrest him, again with the Arnolds’ blessing. 

Remember the Borgias’ reputation for assassination and murder? Benedict and William Arnold knew well that the Puritans considered Samuel Gorton to be a heretic, and that delivering him into Puritan hands placed Gorton in grave danger. Maybe they weren’t seeking Gorton’s life, but he was tried, not for harassing the Indians, but for heresy. He barely escaped execution when a single vote saved Samuel Gorton’s life.

Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick

The Arnolds likely wanted to see Gorton removed so they could occupy the Gortonists’ improved lands, but that plot failed as well. Samuel Gorton sought help from his powerful patron, the Earl of Warwick. The overt harassment of Samuel Gorton by his neighbors stopped, and Gorton named his settlement Warwick in gratitude.

William and Benedict Arnold also engaged in other shady practices. On October 27 1643, Massachusetts ordered that the Narragansett chieftans be lent fowling guns, and gave Benedict Arnold permission to supply them with powder and shot, though giving Indians arms and ammunition was directly counter to Rhode Island’s law. Samuel Gorton also complained that the Arnolds gave liquor to the Indians – also illegal – and traded on the Sabbath Day.

The Arnolds and their Pawtuxet residents remained under Massachusetts’ jurisdiction, despite a charter issued by Parliament in 1644 which included Pawtuxet as part of Rhode Island. On May 22, 1649, Rhode Island’s court sent letters to Pawtuxet, ordering them subject themselves to Rhode Island governance, but the Arnolds ignored it.

The Arnolds actively undermined Rhode Island’s affairs by providing information to the Puritans for sixteen years, and were repaid with food and protection. William wrote regarding Rhode Island’s effort to get a charter from Parliament: From Pawtuxet, this 1^st day of the 7^th month, 1651, Much Honored, I thought it my duty to give intelligence unto the much honored Court [of Massachusetts] of that which is now working here in these parts; so that if it be the will of God, an evil may be prevented … under the pretence of liberty of conscience about these parts, there comes to live all the scum, the runaways of the country, which, in time, for want of better order, may bring a heavy burthen upon the land … I humbly desire my name may be concealed, lest they, hearing of what I have herein written, they will be enraged against me, and so will revenge themselves upon me.

William Arnold maintained his opposition to Rhode Island, and Samuel Gorton went back to London in disgust. He returned in 1658 with a strong letter of protest from the Earl of Warwick, who was both an ardent Puritan and a sponsor of Providence settlement. Massachusetts was finally forced to withdraw, Pawtuxet submitted to Rhode Island, and on 5/31/1666 William Arnold swore allegiance to King Charles II. William Arnold remained in Pawtuxet for the rest of his life, reconciling with his neighbors as they mellowed with age.

Benedict Arnold grave marker

William's son, on the other hand, had already grasped a new opportunity. In 1653, at the age of 38, Benedict took his family to Rhode Island’s principal city, Newport. He became a freeman that year and represented Newport in Rhode Island’s government, and in 1657 he succeeded Roger Williams as President of the colony. He served as president, then as governor almost continuously from then until his death in 1678.

Now, Benedict Arnold had to fight off Massachusetts, his former protector. He complained to Parliament, and then to King Charles II about “sundry obstructions” and claims made by Massachusetts and Connecticut to the Narragansett Indians’ lands. He vigorously pursued a new royal charter for Rhode Island, and obtained that vital document in 1663, granting the colony self-rule and liberty of conscience in “a Republic of Liberty under Law, in which every man is king and no man subject.”

Though the Puritan colonies complained, and despite the “bad effects of their doctrines and endeavors,” President Arnold allowed the highly controversial Quakers to shelter in Rhode Island. He advised the Puritan colonies to let them speak their minds in peace, and in 1658 coolly noted that where Quakers were punished harshly, they unceasingly returned and gained adherents through their patient sufferings. However, Rhode Island’s government allowed Quakers to declare themselves freely, and in consequence, “they least of all desire to come [among us].”

Benedict truly turned over a new leaf, pursuing the union of Pawtuxet and Warwick with Rhode Island’s other towns. He became a warrior for civil and religious liberty, and the historian Samuel G. Arnold wrote of his famed ancestor that “he recognized the distinction between persecution and opposition, between legal force and moral suasion as applied to matters of opinion … throughout his long and useful life he displayed talents of a brilliant order which were ever employed for the welfare of his fellow men.”

If Benedict Arnold’s actions benefitted himself along with his fellow Rhode Islanders, that was all to the better. At Governor Arnold’s death, his will dispersed several thousand acres of land, cash, and livestock among his wife and children. If wealth was any indication, God had clearly poured out his favor on Benedict Arnold, and so did Rhode Island, even though Benedict had once been a force of opposition. 

Jo Ann Butler is proud to be a 13^th generation descendant from Benedict Arnold. She is currently writing about the Arnolds in the final volume of her A Scandalous Life series about Herodias (Long) Hicks Gardner Porter and Rhode Island’s earliest years.

Sources:

“Benedict Arnold, First Governor of Rhode Island” - Hamilton B. Tompkins - Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society - 1919

The Great Migration - Robert Anderson, George Sanborn, Melinde Sanborn - 1999

The Arnold Memorial - Elisha S. Arnold - 1935

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Arnold_%28settler%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Harris_%28settler%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Arnold_%28governor%29

http://benedictarnoldscandal.weebly.com/background.html

http://store.sho.com/dvds-and-books/index.php?v=showtime_shows_the-borgias_book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gorton

1650: The FIRST attorney general in America -- a firebrand

Engaged for the people, by, or in the peoples' name

William Dyer, the son of a yeoman farmer from a village near Boston, Lincolnshire, was apprenticed as a haberdasher in London, where his guild brothers often became mayors, councilmen, or government officers. After his emigration to New England in 1635, he held a succession of appointments as surveyor, clerk, Secretary of State, and General Recorder, and was appointed the first Attorney General of Rhode Island in 1650. But as I discovered, Dyer was also the first Attorney General of any colony in North America! And wait until you read his commission. It’s brilliant. It will make you long for a return to that ideal of government today!

In 1628, the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony followed the lead of the Plymouth Colony, and obtained a royal charter to form a community that was self-governed but answerable to the King, Parliament, and laws of England. The Massachusetts Bay Company purchased a huge tract of wilderness that was later subdivided to become part of New Hampshire and Connecticut.

In late 1637, a large group of religious dissidents in the Boston area, including Anne and William Hutchinson, and William and Mary Dyer, were given the choice of submitting to the Massachusetts Bay theocracy, or being banished. They may have been planning to leave anyway, but the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson for heresy certainly hurried their departure. While she was under house arrest in the winter of 1637-38, the men were searching for and purchasing land from the Narragansett Indians, for what would become the Colony of Providence Plantations and Rhode Island.

The group may have sent their belongings by ship around Cape Cod, but some of them walked out of Boston and through the Indian trails of the forest in hip-deep snow, near the time of Passover and Easter. They walked 44 miles in what must have been an impressive Exodus from Egypt.

Upon their arrival, they immediately began building a town at the top of Rhode Island, later called Portsmouth. And a year later, a group of them moved to build a town and harbor called Newport. William and Mary Dyer were co-founders.

They formed the first democracy in America—and a secular one at that— (Massachusetts governors John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley were disdainful of democracy), and obtained their own charter from the English government in 1643, after Massachusetts Bay’s Gov. Winthrop implied that Rhode Island would be annexed to Massachusetts, thus bringing the heretics back under his control.

In May 1650, the General Assembly, meeting in Newport, created the offices of Attorney General and Solicitor General. William Dyer and Hugh Bewitt/Buit, respectively, were immediately engaged.

Notice the wording in the order and commission for Attorney General below, that he was “Engaged for the people, by, or in the peoples name…”  Does that sound familiar, like, say, the Gettysburg Address by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, when he said that “Government by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?  

Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address

You won't see many “one people” or “We the People” empowering statements until 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, or 1787, when the United States Constitution was written. But Rhode Island was there in 1650, advocating for us—the People.

How wise and creative and brilliant were those Rhode Island founders?! Huzzah! This office of Attorney General was not created for the use of oligarchs, or “the cutthroat of prosperitie” and commerce, or for preferment of the representatives and executive officers (feel free to contrast with modern government). It was for the interests of the people—of any background or social structure or financial status.  

The. Free. People. 

The job description promised protection from criminals, and from officers of the state. These assemblymen were not creating laws to cover their behinds, they were creating laws for transparency and accountability. It’s mind-boggling, contrasting what the United States (and its allies) have come to over the last few decades.

Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, p. 220 and 225:

Acts and Orders made at the Generall Courte of Election held at Newport, May the 23d, (1650), for the Colonie of Providence Plantations.

It is ordered by this Courte, to apoynt an Atturney Generall for the Colonie, as also a Solicitor. That the Atturney Generall shall have full power to impleade any transgression of the lawe of this State in any Courte of this State; but especially to bringe all such matters of penal lawes to tryall of the Generall Courte of Tryalls, as also for the tryall of the officers in the State at the Generall Assemblies, and to impleade in the full power and authoritie of the free people of this State, their prerogatives and liberties; and because envy, the cut throat of all prosperitie will not faile to gallop with its full careere, let the sayed Atturney be faithfully ingaged and authorized and encouraged. Engaged for the people, by, or in the peoples name, and with their full authoritie assisted; authorized, that upon information of transgressions or transgressors of the lawes, prerogatives and liberties of the people, and their penal lawes, he shall under hand and seale take forth summons from the President or Generall Assistants, to command any delinquent, or vehemently suspected of delinquencie in what kind soever accordinge to the premises, to appeare at the Generall Courte, if it be thereto belonginge, or to the Generall Assemblie in those matters proper thereunto; and if any refuse to apeare at that mandamus in the State of England’s name and the free people of this State, he shall be judged guiltie; and so proceeded with according to fine or penaltie.

Mr. William Dyre is deputed Generall Atturney for the Colonie, and ingaged.

I created the table by searching for the first attorney general of every English colony or early state of America. William Dyer is, indeed, the very first appointment, by 27 years!

First Attorneys-General of colonial/east-coast America

Year instituted	Colony/east coast of America	First attorney general
1650	Rhode Island	William Dyer
1677	North Carolina	George Durant
1684	New York	crown appointee
1686	Pennsylvania	David Lloyd
1686	Massachusetts	Benjamin Bullivant
1686	western New Jersey	??
1688	Maryland	Charles Carroll
1698	South Carolina	Nicholas Trott
1704	Vermont	Alexander Griffith
1712	Virginia	Sir John Randolph (deputy AG)
1754	Georgia	William Clifton
1778	Delaware	Gunning Bedford, Jr.
1785	New Hampshire	Samuel Livermore
1820	Maine	Erastus Foote
1897	Connecticut	Charles Phelps

The most famous segment of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address is:  “…that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Note the similarity to the 1650 commission to the office of Rhode Island attorney general: “engaged for the people, by, or in the peoples' name.”

Well done, Rhode Island, and well done, William Dyer.  

The Dyers trilogy, by Christy K Robinson

Christy K Robinson has written a trilogy (two historical novels based in fact, and a nonfiction book) on Mary and William Dyer. Traditionally, Mary Dyer, who is known for giving her life in the cause of religious liberty, gets all the attention because Quaker historians used her story for political and evangelization purposes. Because he never became a Quaker, William Dyer’s history has been much more difficult to tease out of archives and records in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and the British Library. But this English farmer's son was a foundation stone of American democracy. One might call him a Firebrand.

First Contact: When Wampanoags Met Europeans

Pilgrims and Wampanoags at Thanksgiving

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, they were worried about how they would get along with New England’s ‘wild men.’ However, the Pilgrims found Cape Cod and Plymouth eerily quiet, and Native American villages had been emptied of occupants by a smallpox-like plague. The Pilgrims praised God for his foresight in clearing their new home of rivals, and survived their first New England winter by raiding the Indians’ cemeteries and storehouses for corn.

Massasoit

The Massachusetts tribe may have been nearly extinct, but it wasn’t long before the Plymouth settlers met other Indian neighbors. The Wampanoags, led by Massasoit, quickly allied themselves with the Englishmen. Other tribes proved less friendly. The Narragansetts sent a challenge to the English in the form of arrows tied with a snakeskin. The Pilgrim leaders filled the snakeskin with lead shot and returned it as a signal that they, too, were prepared for war.

Ships from England arrived steadily, and new settlements sprang up in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Near New London, the Pequot tribe pushed back against encroaching settlers, and the first war between English settlers and Native Americans took place in 1637. Due to the English army’s overwhelming arms advantage – muskets and steel armor vs. bows and arrows – it ended quickly. Pequots who managed to escape death joined other tribes, and captives were sold into slavery. New England’s tribes remembered that harsh lesson, and it took nearly forty years for the next war to erupt.

However, by 1675 New England’s tribes were chafing under English rule. Game was disappearing, English cattle raided their crops, the fur-bearing animals they once traded to the Englishmen were trapped out, and the English settlers no longer wanted wampum manufactured by New England’s tribes. Worst of all, English settlers encroached deep into Indian land on all fronts. Wampanoag raids began in the summer of 1675, and quickly broke into open warfare.  They were led by Massasoit’s grandson, Metacomet, known as King Philip by his English neighbors. Though the Wampanoags were joined by Narragansetts, Nipmucks, Sakonnets, and Pocassets, the Indians’ defeat was inevitable.

I am now at work on the manuscript which will complete my trilogy about Herodias Long of Rhode Island, and King Philip’s War looms large on my horizon. The Pilgrims and Puritans left many descriptions of New England’s Indians, but I wondered if the Native American culture was altered by the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620. After all, by the time the Pilgrims arrived, Europeans had been coming to America for many years for fish, furs, and timber. The Pilgrims found an iron kettle in a cache of corn, and the Indians possessed other English goods, so, how else had they changed? For comparison, I sought out the first contact between Europeans and New England’s Indians.

Giovanni da Verrazano

In January 1524, Captain Giovanni da Verrazano captained a single ship, manned by only fifty men. He hoped to find new lands for France (the sponsor of his journey) and a short cut to China. That hope was dashed, but Verrazano was the first European since the Vikings to explore the American coast.

Verrazano’s ship, La Dauphine, departed the Canary Islands on January 17, 1524. They reached Cape Fear, North Carolina about March 1, and Pamlico Sound soon afterward. In the Cape Fear area, Verrazano wrote, We had seen many people who came to the shore of the sea and seeing us approach fled, sometimes halting, turning back, looking with great admiration. Reassuring them by various signs, some of them approached, showing great delight at seeing us, marveling at our clothes, figures and whiteness, making to us various signs where we could land more conveniently with the small boat, offering to us of their foods.

Verrazano and his men made contact with the tidewater Indians, though not without trepidation. One young sailor swam near to shore with to toss bells and mirrors to the Indians, but was then overwhelmed by the waves. The Indians ran to carry him ashore, and the alarmed lad uttered very loud cries. The Indians replied in kind, hoping to show him that he should not fear. Then they laid him on the ground, stripped off his wet shirt and hose, and built a large fire nearby. Verrazano, watching from shipboard, was not the only one who thought the sailor was about to be roasted for food. However, the lad revived, and when he was ready to go back to the ship’s boat, the Indians, holding him always close with various embraces, accompanied him as far as the sea.

In the vicinity of Delaware, Verrazano found the inhabitants more fearful. He and his men met two women with a half-dozen children, but the rest of the villagers had fled. They gave the women food, which the old woman ate with gusto, but a younger one threw to the ground. Verrazano took a young boy to carry to France, and tried to take the young woman as well, who was of much beauty and of tall stature. She cried out so that the sailors released her, but kept the boy.

That unfortunate Indian lad was one of many who were kidnapped over the centuries, including Tisquantum/Squanto, who learned English from his captors before returning to New England in 1617. He proved to be a godsend to the Pilgrims in 1621, introducing them to Massasoit and other tribal leaders, and teaching the Pilgrims how to grow crops in weather harsher than they had known in England. However, the kidnapping of Squanto and other New England Indians no doubt added to the fear displayed by the Indians whom the Pilgrims encountered. 

1556 map of New York and Newport harbors

At the Hudson River Verrazano saw many inhabitants, clothed with the feathers of birds of various colors, [who] came toward us joyfully, uttering very great exclamations of admiration. Verrazano’s ship sailed along Long Island and passed Block Island, which Verrazano described like the island of Rhodes, full of hills, covered with trees. 

Then the ship entered Narragansett Bay. Verrazano found a beautiful port which he named Refugio – we know it as Newport. When La Dauphine entered the port, Verrazano said about twenty barges full of people approached the ship. They stopped about fifty paces away, then altogether uttered a loud shout, signifying that they were glad. Having them somewhat, imitating their gestures, they came so near that we threw them some little bells and mirrors and many trinkets, having taken which, regarding them with laughter, they entered the ship confidently.

Ninigret of the Niantics

This was the first meeting between Europeans and the Wampanoags, the tribe which would save the Pilgrims’ lives a century later. Verrazano’s account of the Wampanoags in their pre-contact state is worth relating here at length (slightly abridged): There were among them two Kings, of as good stature and form as it would be possible to tell; the first of about XXXX years, the other a young man of XXIIII years, the clothing of whom was thus: the older had on his nude body a skin of a stag, artificially adorned like a damask with various embroideries; the head bare, the hair turned back with various bands, at the neck a broad chain ornamented with many stones of diverse colors. The young man was almost in the same style.

This is the most beautiful people and the most civilized in customs that we have found in this navigation. They excel us in size; they are of bronze color, some inclining more to whiteness, others to tawny color; the face sharply cut, the hair long and black, upon which they bestow the greatest study in adorning; the eyes black and alert, the bearing kind and gentle, imitating much the ancient [manner]. Of other parts of the body I will not speak to your Majesty, having all the proportions which belong to every well built man. Their women are of the same beauty and charm; very graceful; of comely mien and agreeable aspect; of habits and behavior as much according to womanly custom as pertains to human nature; they go nude with only one skin of the stag embroidered like the men, and some wear on the arms very rich skins of the lynx; the head bare, with various arrangements of braids, composed of their own hair, which hang on one side and the other of the breast. Some use other hair-arrangements like the women of Egypt and of Syria use, and these are they who are advanced in age and are joined in wedlock.

They have in the ears various pendent trinkets as the orientals are accustomed to have, the men like the women, among which we saw many plates wrought from copper, by whom it is prized more than gold; which, on account of its color, they do not esteem; on the other hand rating blue and red above any other. That which they were given by us which they most valued were little bells, blue crystals and other trinkets to place in the ears and on the neck. They did not prize cloth of silk and of gold nor even of other kind, nor did they care to have them; likewise with metals like steel and iron, for many times showing them our arms they did not conceive admiration for them nor ask for them, only examining the workmanship. They did the same with the mirrors; suddenly looking at them, they refused them laughing.

Physical descriptions of Wampanoags and Narragansetts by 17^th century settlers vary little from Verrazano’s writings. However, the Indians quickly came to prize English clothing, replaced dyed porcupine quills and wampum beads made from clam shells with glass beads, and used buttons, bells, coins, and other English trinkets as ornaments. Mary Rowlandson was captured by the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War, and described her captors at a dance: He was dressed in his Holland shirt with great laces sewed at the tail of it; he had his silver buttons, his white stockings, his garters were hung round with shillings, and he had girdles of wampum upon his head and shoulders. She had a kersey coat and [was] covered with girdles of wampum from her loins upward; her arms from her elbows to her hands were covered with bracelets; there were handfuls of necklaces about her neck and several sorts of jewels in her ears. She had fine red stockings and white shoes, her hair was powdered and face painted red.

Back to Verrazano: They [the Wampanoags] are very liberal, so much so that all which they have they give away. We formed a great friendship with them, and one day, before we had entered with the ship in the port, remaining on account of the unfavorable weather conditions anchored a league at sea, they came in great numbers in their little barges to the ship, having painted and decked the face with various colors, showing to us it was evidence of good feeling, bringing to us of their food, signaling to us where for the safety of the ship we ought anchor in the port, continually accompanying us until we cast anchor there.

Verrazano may have admired the hospitality, beauty, and civility of the Wampanoags, but New England’s settlers during the 17^th century were less kind. They barred Indians from living among them, and even Roger Williams, who lived with the Narragansetts, described one of their chiefs as a ‘wise and peaceful prince,’ and wrote a dictionary of their language, described Indians as ‘barbarous scum and the offscourings of mankind.’ And though the Englishmen accused the Indians of theft, the Pilgrims raided Indian villages and cemeteries for artifacts which took their fancy, and stole their seed corn.

We remained XV days, supplying ourselves with many necessities; where every day the people came to see us at the ship, bringing their women, of whom they are very careful: because entering the ship themselves, remaining a long time, they made their women stay in the barges, and however many entreaties we made them, offering to give them various things, it was not possible that they would allow them to enter the ship. And one of the two Kings coming many times with the Queen and many attendants through their desire to see us, at first always stopped on a land distant from us two hundred paces, sending a boat to inform us of their coming, saying they wished to come to see the ship; doing this for a kind of safety. And when they had the response from us, they came quickly, and having stood awhile to look, hearing the noisy clamor of the sailor crowd, sent the Queen with her damsels in a very light barge to stay on a little island distant from us a quarter of a league ... And one time, our people remaining two or three days on a little island near the ship for various necessities as is the custom of sailors, [the king] came with seven or eight of his attendants, watching our operations, asking many times if we wished to remain there for a long time, offering us his every help. Then, shooting with the bow, running, he performed with his attendants various games to give us pleasure. This description of archery and games is very similar to the Thanksgiving the Pilgrims shared with their Indian neighbors.

My conclusion is that the Wampanoag and Narragansett cultures were not much altered between the arrivals of Verrazano in 1524 and of the Pilgrims in 1620. However, the Indians were quick to adapt, eagerly seeking English clothes and ornaments. They were equally avid to possess guns, but the English settlers tried to keep their armaments to themselves. As King Philip’s War demonstrated, those efforts were unsuccessful.

Verrazano's 1524 exploration

As for Captain da Verrazano, after his time with the Wampanoags, Verrazano and his crew passed along lower Cape Cod, then set off across the sea to France. In 1527 Verrazano returned to the New World, this time to Brazil, and returned to Europe with a cargo of brazil wood. A year later, Verrazano explored Florida, the Bahamas, and the Lesser Antilles. When he rowed ashore, probably on Guadeloupe, he was killed and cannibalized by the island’s Carib inhabitants.

Sources:

Verrazano’s voyage along the Atlantic coast of North America, 1524  Giovanni da Verrazano

Of Plymouth Plantation  William Bradford

Flintlock and Tomahawk, 1958  Douglas Leach

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 1682   Mary Rowlandson

wikimedia.com

wikipedia.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_da_Verrazzano

http://seattletimes.com/ABPub/2008/09/24/2008199921.jpg