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The Man Who Talked With the Indians
| Article
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13608 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
6,454 Words |
| Author
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Pedro Beade
Pedro Beade is assistant professor of English and humanities
at Bryant College in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and a staff
member of the Rhode Island Historical Society. He has
published in linguistics, literature, and history, and is
currently at work on a biography of Roger Williams. |
Running into a Wampanoag camp in the middle of the wilderness should have worried an Englishman traveling in the dark winter woods of southeastern New England in 1636. In Boston, there had been rumors of Indian wars, while a few miles away the Pequots would soon go on the warpath and decimate Connecticut. But to Roger Williams, fleeing his Puritan brethren of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the smoky wigwams in the snowy wilderness were a welcome sight.
The round, skin-covered shelters were the homes of friends whose customs he respected, whose language he had begun to learn beside their campfires, and who knew him as a man of peace. The hospitality that the Wampanoags offered that exhausted foreigner may have saved his life. It certainly ensured the success of his mission, which was to reach the Indians who lived farther west on the far side of the large, blue bay that still bears their name. Leaving Plymouth Colony behind, he paddled a canoe across the mouth of a wide river; the Narragansett who greeted him on the rocky shore of what was to be Rhode Island called him neetop, "my friend."
Roger Williams and his reputation were very well known in his lifetime to many Indian nations throughout the Northeast. But to us in the twentieth century, he remains "one of the most complex men in early New England history" and "one of the most controversial figures of American historiography," as Alden T. Vaughan has described him in his masterful (and also controversial) book New England Frontier.
No contemporary portraits of Williams have survived, so we have no idea what he looked like, and even the date of his birth is uncertain. Williams himself was not too sure of his age. He made several conflicting estimates during his lifetime that lead historians to place his birth between 1600 and 1606, with the most probable date being 1603 or 1604, based on several statements made early in his life. In a letter of 1632, for example, he declared--as usual, in the form of an estimate--that he was closer to thirty than to twenty-five. And late in life, in 1678, he guessed that his age was "about seventie five years."
The record of Williams' birth must have been kept in St. Sepulcher, his London parish church. But that ancient structure was gutted by the great fire of 1666 and all its records were lost. Fire again destroyed any evidence that Williams may have kept later in Providence: During King Philip's War, in 1676, most of the city burned, and with it Williams' house and all his books and
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