Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/83

Rh few of the leaders among the Massachusetts and the dispersion of the rest into unhealthy swamps where disease and death made conquest of many of them. When the pious Robinson heard of these deeds, he was much grieved and said, "Oh that you had converted some, before you had killed any." Thus the humane acts of Winslow and Hampden, in saving, by providential aid, the life of Massassoit, were repaid by friendly counsels, which preserved the infant colony from complete extermination. While an Indian's revenge is proverbial, his gratitude should also be kindly remembered, and the dwellers in Plymouth and Bristol counties ought ever to cherish in grateful memories the name of Massassoit of Sowams, who saved their ancestors and their colony from a premature and inevitable destruction.

The path broken and trodden between Sowams and Plymouth by the pioneers, Winslow, Hopkins, and Hampden, became in process of time a well-beaten highway for the interchange of the products of the chase for the implements of civilization used in husbandry and hunting. Although as the elder Cushman justly said, "the first care of the Plymouth adventurers was to settle religion before either profit or advantage," yet the circumstances of their colonization demanded the utmost use of every opportunity offered to secure money, to repay their outfit and the traders who had aided their establishment in the new world. They were not greedy of amassing money or lands for their own sake, so much as to meet the large demands made upon them in the first years of their settlement by the London and Plymouth merchants. From England they received cloth, coats, hatchets, hoes, knives, kettles, plates, shoes, powder, shot, and guns. These they exchanged with the Indians for the furs of beaver, mink, and otter, and the skins of deer and foxes, which they shipped to England; and their tours of inspection among the Massachusetts, the Kennebecks, the Wampanoags, and the Manhattoes, were mainly to secure friendly commercial relations.