ABSTRACT
The latter end of this yeare [1647] Mr. [John] Wilson [minister in Boston], Mr. [John] Eliot [minister to the English in Roxbury, Mass. and missionary to Indians], and my selfe [Shepard was minister in Cambridge, Mass.] were sent by those [colonists] in Yarmouth [a town on Cape Cod] to meet with some other Elders of Plimouth pattent, to heare and heale (if it were the will of Christ) the difference and sad breaches which have been too long a time among them . . . Mr. Eliot as hee takes all other advantages of time, so hee tooke this, of speaking with, and preaching to the poore Indians in these remote places about Cape Cod: in which journey I shall acquaint you with what all of us observed . . . . wee observed much opposition against him, and hearing of him at the day appointed, especially by one of the chiefest Sachims [sachems, or chiefs] in those parts . . . [but] notwithstanding this opposition wee found another Sachim then present willing to learne, and divers of his men attentive and knowing what was said: and in the time which is usually set apart for propounding questions, an aged Indian told us openly, “That these very things which Mr. Eliot had taught them as the Commandments of God, and concerning God, and the making of the world by one God, that they had heard some old men who were there now dead, to say the same things, since whose death there hath been no remembrance or knowledge of them among the Indians untill now they heare of them againe” . . . I hear by a godly and able Christian who hath much converse with them; that many of them have this apprehension stirring among them, viz. “That their forefathers did know God, but that after this, they fell into a great sleep, and when they did awaken they quite forgot him” (for under such metaphorical language they usually expresse what eminent things they meane:) . . . . A fourth and last observation wee took, was the story of an Indian in those parts, telling us of his dreame many yeers [sic.] since, which he told us of openly before many witnesses when we sate at meate: the dreame is this, hee said, “That about two yeers before the English came over into those parts there was a great mortality among the Indians [a reference to the plague of 1616-1619, which wiped out the majority of Indians between Saco River on the north and east and Narragansett Bay on the south and west], and one night he could not sleep above half the night, after which hee fell into a dream, in which he did think he saw a great many men come to those parts in cloths,
just as the English mans book; this black man he said stood upon a higher place than all the rest, and on the one side of him were the English, on the other a great number of Indians: this man told all the Indians that God was moosquantum or angry with them, and that he would kill them for their sinnes, whereupon he said himself stood up, and desired to know of the black man what God would do with him and his Squaw and Papooses, but the black man would not answer him a first time, nor yet a second time, untill he desired the third time, and then he smil’d upon him, and told him that he and his Papooses should be safe, and that God would give unto them Mitcheu, (i.e) victualls and other good things, and so hee awakened.”
