Squanto, along with other Indians, is captured by sea captain Thomas Hunt. Hunt transports them to Spain where he begins selling his captives into slavery.
Squanto, whose correct Indian name was Tisquantum, was born around the year 1590, in the Wampanoag community of Patuxet. This was a village of some two thousand people, located on the present-day Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts. Patuxet was linked by kinship and political alliance to other Wampanoag communities that lay between the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay and the end of Cape Cod as well as the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
When Squanto was a young man European explorers began to visit Patuxet, searching for opportunities to trade. These whites also were interested in a location for settlement and, like others before and after them, hoped to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific.
Squanto was about sixteen years old when, in 1605 and 1606, one particular Frenchman came exploring, Samuel de Champlain. To accommodate Champlain and other friendly Europeans the Patuxets began growing surplus corn, or maize, and collecting furs to exchange with these men who had come to their shore from very far away across a wide ocean.
It is uncertain exactly what Squanto's standing among his own people was at this time. It seems that he may have possessed some elevation of position such as a sachem or one who was studying to become a sachem at a later date.
In 1614, Captain John Smith , late of Jamestown, Virginia, set in motion events that would direct the path Squanto's life would take from then on. At first Smith warred against Squanto's people, then made peace with them before he returned to England.
In Smith's absence he left a second ship in the vicinity, under the command of Thomas Hunt. The ship's mission was to fish for cod that abound in those waters. Hunt may have snared plenty of cod but when he left the area to return to Europe he also had in his possession another prize.
Hunt had lured Squanto and some twenty other Wampanoags on board his ship then sailed away. In Malaga, Spain , Hunt began selling his captives as slaves.
Recommended Reading:
Sources:
Athearn, Robert G. The New World: American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States, Volume 1. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1963.
Hoxie, Frederick E., Editor. Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1996.
