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Reflection for November 27 2005

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Squanto

On a late November day when I was in the second grade the Sister in charge of my parochial school class had us do a dramatization of the Pilgrims' 1620 arrival in New England and their first Thanksgiving celebration in 1621. I was assigned the role of Squanto, the Indian who came out of the forest to greet the Pilgrims and teach them how to plant corn and survive their first Massachusetts winter. It wasn't a long play and I didn't have many lines, but I felt quite special being assigned Squanto's role. I would have felt even more special had I the capacity at age seven to do some research on the fellow - and the whole Pilgrim story.

For instance, I later found out that there were only fifty-one Pilgrim survivors at the first Thanksgiving dinner. And also that they were inclined to give quaint names to their children like: Desire, Remember, Love, Wrestling, Humility, Resolved, Oceanus and Peregrine! But maybe that wasn't so peculiar back then for in my own family tree - back in the 1800's - I find two sisters named Fury and Patience.

As for Squanto, he surprised the Pilgrims by speaking a fairly fluent English! And therein lies the tale of his being kidnapped way back in 1605 by an English ship plying the coast of New England and transported to England where he lived under the supervision of a Sir Somebody who had an interest in colonizing the New World. 1605! I mean, that was when Shakespeare was in his prime, producing plays like Macbeth and King Lear. And since Squanto remained in England from 1605 to 1614, a total of nine years, could he have failed to visit London - which was no metropolis back then - and even visited the Globe Theatre?

And not to stretch the point, but could Shakespeare have been introduced to him (he certainly must have seen some captured Native Americans) and sympathized with him, so much so that he wrote him into his play The Tempest as Caliban? Caliban was the native whom Prospero held captive on his Atlantic island. And remember how Propsero abuses Caliban: Abhorred slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, / Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour / One thing or other. When thou didst not / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes / With words that made them known. To which Caliban replies: You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / for learning me your language.

Well, whatever happened to Squanto in England, he did learn the language. But that's not all. Having returned to his native coast in 1614, he was picked up again by an English ship and dropped off in Spain. Here some Franciscans rescued him from slavery and instructed him in the Catholic faith and helped him return to England (by way of Newfoundland!) whence at last he found his way back to the Cape Cod region to find his own village had perished from disease. So this is the fellow who in 1620 walked out of the forest to greet the Pilgrims in their own tongue and teach them survival skills that came quite naturally to him. He himself died of a fever only two years later.

His tale tells me that there's so much more behind the mere name of everyone we meet in this world and only God has the capacity to know it all and treasure it. We are indeed individuals regardless of the ways they want to tag us and sum us up. And may not the story of Squanto also be a prophecy of the day when the whole human race may emerge from its islands and forests to meet and exchange - even accidentally - its gifts, skills, cultures, and languages in so enriching a way that we may ultimately celebrate a Thanksgiving of global dimensions - a kind of Pentecost?

-- Geoff Wood