Squanto’s remains may lie beneath Cape Cod golf course

Most Americans have heard the somewhat true story of Tisquantum, popularly known as Squanto, and how he helped the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony by teaching them how to plant and grow North American crops, thus saving them from starvation.

Some know he was motivated not so much by goodwill as desperation; his community had also just been devastated by mass death. Fewer have learned — and probably not in school — the truth of his lonely, tragic life or that only a year after the feast that would later be called the “First Thanksgiving,” he was dead, perhaps at the hands of other Native Americans. And almost no one knows that 399 years later, his remains may lie in a wealthy area of Cape Cod, underneath the green of one of the country’s most picturesque golf clubs.

The majority of Tisquantum’s life is a mystery. We know he was a member of the Patuxets, an Indigenous tribe that was part of the Wampanoag confederation.

In 1614, English explorer Thomas Hunt was captain of a ship sailing along the coast of what is now Maine and Massachusetts. He was only supposed to be gathering fish and furs to sell back in England, according to a later account by his boss, John Smith (of Pocahontas fame). Instead, Hunt tricked 20 Patuxet people onboard, Tisquantum among them, and sailed away. Hunt sailed to Spain and sold the captives who had survived into slavery. Tisquantum escaped and made it to London, where, according to future Plymouth Gov. William Bradford, he lived with a merchant in the Cornhill neighborhood.

In 1619, five years after he was taken, Squanto finally made it back home, aboard yet another English explorer’s ship. He disappears from records until March 22, 1621, when he walked into the Plymouth Colony the Puritans were building on the land where his people used to live. Incredibly, to the Puritans at least, he spoke articulate English.

The Puritans had arrived the previous fall, too late to plant food; half of them died that winter. Soon, Tisquantum brokered a peace treaty between the Puritans and Ousamequin, leader of the Wampanoag confederacy.

Tisquantum leveraged his English language and cultural knowledge with the Wampanoags, and his Wampanoag language and cultural knowledge with the English, to benefit himself. That included, according to historian Nathaniel Philbrick in Mayflower: A Story of

Courage, Community and War, telling some tribes the English stored disease in barrels and could release it at will if the tribes didn’t do what he wanted. By November 1622, when Tisquantum went with Bradford on a trading mission to a nearby Wampanoag village, both sides had begun to view him with suspicion. A few days into the trip, Tisquantum suddenly fell ill and began bleeding from his nose, a condition Bradford termed “Indian fever.” He died a few days later. Little can be known today, but Philbrick doesn’t think it was a disease at all, suggesting that Ousamequin may have had him poisoned.

The beach he was buried near, now called Pleasant Bay, is nestled in an idyllic corner of Chatham. At least one local historian, the late Warren Sears Nickerson, has suggested Squanto’s remains were buried northeast of the beach. In about 1770, Nickerson wrote, “an Indian skeleton was washed out of a hill between the Head of the Bay and Crow’s Pond.” The manner of burial resembled that of the Puritans, suggesting it may have been Squanto. The remains were reburied nearby, on land now occupied by the Eastward Ho golf club. The club, on its website, claims his body “almost certainly rests within the bounds of today’s country club.”