How Porcupine Jack was Bought for a Fat Beaver Tail

Shawmut
1613-1617

No days of summer are more delightful than Feast of Green Corn, when the first kernels are offered to Cantantowwit, Great Spirit. Highlight of the celebration is a ball game played between rival bands, the goals set a mile apart on sands swept even as a board.

Witawamet and Wapikicho are champions of the Shawmut, a thrill to see them running and leaping at the water’s edge. The strongest challenge comes from the band of Nanepashemet, “New Moon,” a sachem from north of the Charles estuary. One player in Nanepashemet’s squad excites special interest among the onlookers, who’ve never seen anyone like Jacques le Havre sporting on the sands at Feast of Green Corn.

Jacques is one of five Frenchmen, who survived a shipwreck at Cape Cod. Captured by local Wampanoag, they were passed along to other tribes, bartered for as curiosities. Two died after brutal treatment by their captors. Twenty-seven-year-old Jacques, a ship’s gunner, found a kind master in Nanepashemet.

Chikawanka-Jack, “Porcupine Jack,” so named for the long bristles on his chin, helps his team battle to a draw. That night, he leaps to his feet for a mating dance with plump Pemoleni. Ever-Beloved’s father holds no enmity toward the stranger and has no objection to the lovebirds. To the castaway’s delight, his new “father-in-law” buys him from Nanepashemet for a fat beaver tail.

American Beaver -- Photo: Steve/Wikipedia

 

In September 1614, Tasawin and Wapikicho go to trade with the Narragansett, bartering for wampum. On the return journey, they halt at Patuxet, a Wampanoag village located at what is now Plymouth, arriving the day a feast is held for the crew of an English ship lying offshore.

Thomas Hunt sailed from England the previous April with Captain John Smith, who explored the coast from Penobscot to Cape Cod. Of all the places Smith visited in “New England,” as he called these lands, he found nowhere more favored than “the country of the Massachusett, which is the paradise of all these parts . . .The seacoast shows you all along large cornfields and great troops of well-proportioned people.”

Captain John Smith, Map of New England 1616

 

At Patuxet, Master Hunt is equally admiring of his well-proportioned hosts, so much so that he lures twenty-seven aboard his ship and sets sail for the slave pens of Malaga, Spain.

Tasawin and Wapikicho are kidnapped. Heart-broken by the destruction of her family, Chitanawoo is filled with hatred for every devil from the deep blue sea, her son-in-law included. There’s talk of slaying Jacques, but Pemoleni begs mercy for the Frenchman, father of their son, Jacques Petit. Chikawanka Jack is spared. Since Witawamet is too young for the burdens of sachemship, Chitanawoo becomes leader of the Shawmut clan.

 

Imagining Boston - 5