Illustration by Caverly, Robert Boodey Wikimedia commons

Andrew Lipman—

This book is not a traditional biography. It’s a study of a person and his world—a portrait set in a larger land- and seascape. The opening chapters that explore his cultural upbringing before he appeared in the historic record are critical to interpreting his better-documented actions later in life. The interludes on pivotal side actors and far-flung locations help explain why he was taken and how he found his way home. Filling in the backdrop of his times allows us to perceive Squanto in silhouette, but these sections are intended to be more than just scenery. The places he saw and the things he learned would inform his decisions before and after he returned to Patuxet.

A wider frame also helps us see what is—and what is not—exceptional about his story. Contrary to the Mayflower legend, the New England settlements were not born from a single ship. The English families that came to squat in Patuxet were never a stand-alone band of dissidents that stood apart from their mother country. Their colony is best understood as one node among many in an emerging network of English plantations, fishing stations, and trading ventures. This budding empire connected Mediterranean ports, Atlantic islands, and Indigenous harbors on North American and Caribbean shores. Squanto and the Pilgrims are indeed important in both Native and colonial history writ large, but their encounter is best viewed on an appropriate scale: as one episode among many early Indigenous encounters with Europeans.1

Tracking Tisquantum and others like him as they pinballed around the Atlantic basin reveals the many transatlantic conflicts and ambitions that created the colonial societies of North America. Exploring the politics of the Wampanoags and their neighbors introduces us to a complicated Indigenous world that was changing for decades before the settlers arrived. The resulting narrative provides a more global saga than older, narrower accounts that followed the English families on their voyage west.

This narrative of Squanto’s life and times is divided into three parts. The first, “Home,” illuminates the most obscure part of Tisquantum’s story: his childhood and young adult years. This part of the book is more ethnographic than biographic, as it is grounded in what we know about the daily life, material culture, language, religion, social structure, and government of the Wampanoag society that raised him. The result is a composite picture of a typical boy growing up in Patuxet, not quite a depiction of the real young man. This section also introduces the dynamic and sometimes dangerous Indigenous political world that Squanto navigated, both as the colonists’ translator and as a politician in his own right.

“Away,” the second part, looks at his captivity from several angles. It begins with the related stories of other Native men taken before him. Not only did their experiences foreshadow his ordeals, but their respective kidnappings are best seen as a single connected process. The man from Patuxet remains an opaque figure in his time overseas, but we can still explore the diverse places he encountered, while seeking to understand the means and motives of the imperialists who were trying—and often failing— to colonize North American shores.

The third section, “Home Again,” narrates his homecoming, from his return in the late summer of 1619 to the day in November 1622 when he died. In a close rereading of the colonists’ accounts, Tisquantum emerges as a distinctive, if still elusive, character. It was in this momentous period when his personal challenges and contradictions became most clear. Only at the close of this section, when we take stock of everything we can know about him from cradleboard to grave, can we arrive at provisional answers to the questions that loom over his final days.

The final chapter on the Patuxet man’s “afterlives” traces his shifting place in American memory and popular culture. In the four hundred years since his death, Squanto has been reimagined by generations of storytellers, museum interpreters, writers, preachers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and actors—Native and non-Native alike. In both life and death, he was many things to many people. Much like his real-world counterpart, the fictionalized Squanto was put to work, cast as helper, hero, villain, or victim in narratives of national origins.

In this book I aim to do justice to the real person, but myth busting itself isn’t the main point; there are better reasons to learn about this past than seeking a cheap feeling of superiority over your grade school teachers. Debunking the narrative that he was a happily welcoming indigene is about as easy as tipping over a cardboard cutout. It takes a little more work to explore his culture, to retrace his travels, and then use this information to reconsider a misunderstood man.2 To follow his journeys across the Atlantic and home again, first we have to rewind to roughly thirty years before that fever took him, to a time before any European had set foot in Patuxet, when Tisquantum was still in his mother’s womb.

1. Winslow, Good News, 61, 66 (gunpowder); Bradford, OPP, 135–36. ↩︎
2. Winslow, Good News, 64 (“ends were only”); Bradford, OPP, 137 (“plaid his own game”). ↩︎

From Squanto: A Native Odyssey by Andrew Lipman. Published by Yale University Press in 2024. Reproduced with permission.

Andrew Lipman is professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier, won the Bancroft Prize in American History. He lives in New York City.