Squanto: A Native Odyssey

By Andrew Lipman

Yale University Press 2024

An unalloyed pleasure of reading new biographies lies in stumbling on that rare book promising to reassemble the jigsaw puzzle of history and dust the cobwebs off a personage languishing under a pile of stale assumptions. For individuals plagued by a spotty historical record, such an attempt is always a high wire act where the historian is obliged to balance well-informed conjecturing against the urge to overreach, and the results can either enlighten or devolve into inane gossip. “There are good reasons no one has written a stand-alone study of him before”, writes Andrew Lipman (associate professor of history at Columbia University) in Squanto: A Native Odyssey, frankly admitting the challenges in the path of any biographer of Tisquantum, the man more commonly known as Squanto.

Best remembered for being an early liaison between the Native American population in Southern New England and the Mayflower Pilgrims, he was a member of the Patuxet tribe of Wampanoags, leading an eventful life the complexities of which have largely been lost. Squanto first appears on the historical stage in 1614, as a captive of English adventurers, destined to a future of slavery that took him from his native Patuxet (in and around modern day Plymouth, Massachusetts) to far flung places like Spain, London, and Newfoundland. Trapped on this five year long trip of barbarity, Squanto faced immense cultural shocks and challenges with an admirable knack for adaptation, not least of which entailed learning his captors’ tongue and playing an active role in persuading the English of his value as a guide in the land of his birth, a double edged bid to return home. After his return to a world devastated by sudden epidemics, Squanto vanished from the historical record again before resurfacing in 1620 as a peace broker between the local Pokanokets and the beleaguered settlers recently arrived on their doorstep aboard the Mayflower, betraying dimensions in his personality operating above any crude thirst for revenge on the English, with the ancillary effect of securing a kind of kitschy posterity.

Two documents recently discovered in provincial Spain helps to flesh out and rethink the narrative around Squanto’s stint as a slave, and on the face of it, these appear to be the only new archival discoveries informing the narrative being created in this book. Necessity breeds it’s own brilliance however, and Lipman produces a trenchant synthesis out of the patchwork quilt of primary documents we have on Squanto, complicating everything he touches, and upending the easy generalizations this figure has attracted through the centuries. The lack of sources invites a broader study of Squanto’s world, a penetration into the lives of both his own people and the alien cultures he attempted to build a bridge towards, and the book soars towards this goal on the back of intelligent thinking and an impressive array of interdisciplinary research.

A limpid examination of the interplay between the indigenous tribes on the Eastern seaboard of America and the European sailors repeatedly triggering contact with them, is the other book hidden inside this biography of Squanto; a necessary approach to make any kind of conjectures about his early life and probable psychology, and yet, becoming a beguiling panoply of reflections on that world on it’s own. From explorations into the nature of Wampanoag language and religion, to features of geography and kinship that Squanto would have developed his interiority under; from a study into European contact with tribes neighbouring Squanto’s own, forming a clearer picture of the kinds of pressures to avoid or engage with the aliens pressuring his people, to a description of traditional Patuxet hazing and coming of age ceremonies informing the probable nature Squanto brought to bear profitably on his captors, the book freely dispenses with such nuggets of insight, sometimes reaching rhetorical apotheosis in a passage like:

Tisquantum, that teller of tales, avoided the false certainty of a marker like Plymouth Rock. He preferred a verbally preserved poetic nothingness over a heavy-handed granite somethingness. He knew that in time a forgotten hole [a traditional Wampanoag signifier for any memorable event] would fill on it’s own, so the absence of dirt represented the presence of historians [Wampanoags kept such holes clear of dirt, in memory of the signified event]. It was reminiscent of the absentative suffix in his language, that grammatical convention that let speakers recall a lost person without speaking their name. The missing name in a Wampanoag sentence, like a missing piece of earth alongside a Wampanoag path, demonstrated reverence for those who came before. The search for Squanto’s legacy will always end up at that particular place where his body cannot be found but his memory lives on.

If “[as Squanto knew himself] … an interpreter’s work is never done”, this is a fine rendering of a world often lost in interpretation.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi