“To Bee Trained Up Among the English”

This chapter details John Wompas's youth in the town of Roxbury. Although Roxbury was an English town, it had a decidedly Indian side. Because Roxbury was the home of John Eliot, the “apostle to the Indians,” the town was a destination as well as a way station. It stood at the heart of the English effort to bring “civility” and Christianity to the Indians, a project that would frame much of John Wompas's life. John Eliot, Daniel Gookin, and colleagues from surrounding towns used several different approaches to converting and “civilizing” the Indians. These approaches include establishing Christian Indian towns, preparing Indians to form their own Puritan congregations, recruiting Indian children to live and work within English families, and shepherding a small number of Indian children through English grammar school to enroll at Harvard College.

“The English Did Wrong Them About Their Lands”

This chapter details John Wompas's experience of returning home and finding an English family occupying his house, which was emblematic of the situation facing New England Indians in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a situation dramatically accelerated by the recent war. Everywhere, the English had taken possession of Indian property, shutting Indians out with their fences, their livestock, and their laws. Not just barriers and deeds, but also colony-wide restrictions on Indian activity made what once had been Indian land off limits. This seems to have triggered a radical change in Wompas, turning him from a man who moved fluidly between Indian and English worlds in pursuit of his own interests to one who consistently represented himself as an Indian, championed Indian interests, and aspired to Indian leadership.

“Prask That Was Wife to John Wompas”

This chapter focuses on John Wompas's wife, Ann Prask. Like Wompas, Prask came from a Native community and was raised in an English one, and like him she lost her mother and father at an early age. The first loss came through her mother's premature death. The second came through her violent separation from her father as a captive in the Pequot War, the first major Indian–English clash following colonization of the land of the Ninnimissinuok. In contrast to Wompas's privileged position as an Indian scholar, Prask entered English society as a common slave. Nevertheless, the enslaved girl would marry the Native scholar, bringing him an endowment of land and her experience of war and Indian slavery. Although the impact of these experiences is more difficult to trace, it must have informed Wompas's attitude toward the English, particularly after both scourges resurfaced during King Philip's War of 1675–1678.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the notorious figure of John Wompas, also known as John White. Upsetting expectations is emblematic of Wompas's entire life. He was a Harvard-educated scholar who became a sailor; he called the Nipmuc village of Hassanamesit his home but spent his adult life dwelling among the English of Roxbury, Boston, and London; he claimed the right, by inheritance, to lead the Nipmucs, but elders of his tribe insisted he was “no sachem”; and he cheated his kin of their lands by selling thousands of acres of Nipmuc Country to the English, then bequeathed all of Hassanamesit to his Nipmuc kin in his will. These contradictions reflect a gap between expectations and reality. This book thus offers the opportunity to examine that gap and, in the process, revise people's understanding of Native New England and the emerging English empire that engulfed it.

“Hee Had Lost a Great Many Men in the Warr”

This chapter looks at the war between the colonists and many of the surrounding Native peoples in New England, which began in late June 1675. Initially, it involved only the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags under their sachem Philip Metacom—also known as King Philip—but the conflict quickly spread to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and northern New England, drawing in English and Indian combatants from all of those locales, including the Nipmucs of the central Massachusetts highlands. Few groups suffered more during King Philip's War than the Christian Indians, caught as they were between the distrust of their Indian kin and the English to whom they had pledged their loyalty. Their treatment by the English during and after King Philip's War fueled John Wompas's growing anger against the Massachusetts government, which would explode on his return to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677.

“One Piece of Land to Cling on To”

This concluding chapter studies the Hassanamisco Reservation. Edward Pratt, the executor of John Wompas's will, wasted no time attempting to cash in on his acquaintance with the land-rich Indian sailor. On November 3, 1679, safely landed in New England, Pratt registered his deed for eight miles square of Nipmuc land with the Middlesex County clerk. However, Pratt and the other Englishmen who held deeds to Wompas's land and benefited from his will battled with colony authorities and Wompas's Nipmuc kin for nearly a quarter of a century, interrupted by wars and several changes of government. Despite the self-serving efforts of Pratt and his associates, Hassanamesit remained in Indian possession well into the eighteenth century. A few acres of Hassanamesit—the Hassanamisco Reservation—are still held by Nipmucs in the twenty-first century, and the legal documentation of that possession leads directly back to the will of John Wompas.

“Royall Protection”

This chapter focuses on John Wompas's residence in London, which allowed him to make new friends and acquaintances. As he had done before, he drew on them for financial and emotional support and rewarded them with deeds to Native land. Wompas again found a welcome reception at the court of Charles II, including expressions of support for the rights of the Crown's Native subjects. However, the king's supportive words would not translate into deeds, an outcome that reveals much about the English empire's shallow commitment to Native peoples. Resourceful as ever, Wompas managed through his own actions to secure assistance for himself and protection for the lands of his Nipmuc kin.

“The Place of Their Desires”

This chapter looks at Hassanamesit, a Nipmuc Indian town nestled in the wooded hills forty miles inland from the coastal lands of the Massachusett Indians where John Wompas's ancestors came from. Although Wompas spent little of his own life there, he claimed it as his own. However, Hassanamesit was a place others desired as well; their conflicting wishes for its lakes and streams and thousands of acres of trees and meadows would powerfully shape Wompas's life and reputation and divide him from his closest kin. Hassanamesit was also the seat of the “royal line” of Nipmuc rulers. While individual communities of Nipmucs had their own rulers, or sachems, they also recognized a chief or paramount sachem, whose seat was at Hassanamesit.

“New England Hath Lost the Day”

This chapter recounts the period when John Wompas left Massachusetts at a time of personal trouble as well as a time of trouble for the colony. Massachusetts had been under a cloud of royal disapproval, since the king sent royal commissioners to investigate the colony's loyalty and adherence to English law in 1664. Within a year of John's departure from Massachusetts, a more immediate crisis struck the region: a devastating war broke out between the English colonists and their Indian neighbors, the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, as well as many of Wompas's Nipmuc kin. By the time he returned to Massachusetts in 1677, he would find a way to use both the war and the colony's political disgrace to his own advantage.

“I Cherish a Desire to Be at Sea”

This chapter discusses John Wompas's “desire to be at sea.” Wompas spent his life straddling two worlds, so there is harmony in the fact that he sought the companionship of a group of men who spent half of their lives at sea and half ashore. From 1668 until his death, the maritime community—on sea and land—was where John seemed most at ease. Perhaps his desire to be at sea is not surprising; water was central to both his Indian and English worlds. The Nipmucs were the “freshwater people” because their lives and livelihood centered on the large lakes that dotted their homeland. Meanwhile, Wompas's years in the English world also showed him the centrality of seafaring to the English.