Treacherous Waters: Tisquantum, the Red Atlantic, and the Beginnings of Plymouth Colony

Smith College Abstract: This article challenges recent scholarship which claims that Tisquantum, like other Native Americans who traveled the early modern Atlantic, was thereby positioned to lead his people in resisting or otherwise engaging with Europeans. The English kidnapping of Tisquantum and twenty-six other Wampanoags in 1614 sparked the onset of full-scale Wampanoag resistance to English colonization, and inspired competing English and Wampanoag narratives about Tisquantum and his legacy. The article follows Tisquantum's movements through highly racialized, imperial spaces in Málaga, London, and Newfoundland as he observed the workings of empires and their overseas ambitions. His return home with Englishmen led him to be distrusted and seized by fellow Wampanoags. After Plymouth colony was established, Wampanoags allowed Tisquantum to translate and help broker an alliance with the newcomers, but soon regretted that decision as Tisquantum sought to build his own power base. Wampanoags and Plymouth made peace only after Tisquantum died in 1622.