Guide Note

Tisquantum, a Patuxet man popularly known as Squanto, assisted the Pilgrims following their first winter in the New World, in 1620, in which roughly half the settlers died of disease and malnutrition.

Fast Facts

1. Born circa 1585
2. Captured by Englishman Thomas Hunt to be sold as a slave
3. Returned to homeland on a ship with Thomas Dermer
4. Spoke English
5. Assisted the Pilgrims
6. Died in 1622

Tisquantum was brought to England as a slave in roughly 1605, and entered into a peculiar series of liberations and recaptures, and of journeys back and forth to North America, before returning to his village in 1619 and finding that it had been wiped out by the historic smallpox pandemic that killed roughly 90% of the region's Native Americans. He joined a Wampanoag settlement, and was called upon to help deal with the newly-arrived Pilgrims by Samoset, an Abenaki visiting from what is now Maine, and who himself spoke some English; and by Massasoit, the local Wampanoag leader. Tisquantum would stay with the Pilgrims for over a year, teaching them about local resources. The net effect to himself was that the Pilgrims distrusted him as an agent of the Wampanoags, while the Wampanoags distrusted him in the other direction. After his death from a fever, in 1622, he found a place in history more settled than the place he occupied in life.