Document T5.

The Colonisation of North America.

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)

After the Englishmen landed at Plymouth in 1620, most of them probably would have starved to death but for aid received from friendly natives of the New World. Indians regarded the Plymouth colonists as helpless children: they shared corn with them from the tribal stores, showed them where and how to catch fish and got them though the first winter. When spring came they gave the white men some seed corn and showed them how to plant and cultivate it. For several years these Englishmen and their Indian neighbors lived in peace, but many more shiploads of white people continued coming ashore. The ring of axes and the crash of falling trees echoed up and down the coasts of the land which the white man now called New England. Settlements began crowding in upon each other. In 1625 some of the colonists asked Samoset to give them 12.000 additional acres of Pemaquid land. Samoset knew that land came from the Great Spirit, was as endless as the sky, and belonged to no man. To humor these strangers in their strangers ways, however, he went through a ceremony of transferring the land and made his mark on a paper for them. It was the first deed of Indian land of English colonists. Most of the other settlers, coming in by thousands now, did not bother to go through such a ceremony. By the time Massasoit, great chief of the Wampanoags died in 1662 his people were being pushed back pushed back into the wilderness