David J. Silverman

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David J. Silverman | Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha's Vineyard | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha's Vineyard

Then I thought, if I prayed to God in our Language, whether could God understand my prayers in our Language; therefore I did ask Mr. Jackson, and Mr. Mahu, If God understood prayers in our Language? They answered me God doth understand all Languages in the World.

—Conversion narrative of Waban, a praying Indian of Natick, 1653

JOHN Cotton Jr.'s maiden voyage to Martha's Vineyard in 1665 must have been a time of soul-searching and low expectations. Two years earlier this Harvard-educated son of a Puritan divine was run out of the Wethersfield, Connecticut, pastorate for sexual indiscretion and a sharp tongue. To rehabilitate his name, Cotton had to perform good Christian service and behave himself, so when the opportunity arose to replace the recently deceased Thomas Mayhew Jr. as preacher to the colonists of Martha's Vineyard and missionary to the island's Wampanoags, he reluctantly accepted the position. One imagines Cotton sailing toward this destination, eyes fixed on the shrinking mainland shoreline, reflecting on his fall from an elite family, college, and ministry, to become a poorly compensated missionary on a remote island, responsible for filling the poor ignorant savages (as New England colonists commonly called Indians) with a greater sense of God.¹

Cotton spent the next year studying the notoriously complex Wampanoag tongue, but this work was hardly enough training, as he discovered when he finally met with a native audience at Chappaquiddick on the Vineyard's east side on March 6, 1666. He plodded through his inaugural Wampanoag language sermon, and then perhaps breathed a sigh of relief assuming the hard work was done, only to have the Indians shower him with questions sharpened by two decades of Christian education under Mayhew and his Wampanoag assistants: "How conscience came to be asleepe or silent in a man at any time?"; "Whether Judas was saved or damned?" And perhaps most surprisingly, "Whether John Baptist onely sprinkled christs face with water or plunged him under water?" The following week in Nunnepog (Edgartown), Indian schoolteacher John Tackanash shared his belief with Cotton that it was "Gods revealed will" to answer prayers only if he deemed them good, an idea which was contrary to the instruction of senior Vineyard missionary Thomas Mayhew Sr. Another Wampanoag added that Mayhew failed to cite scripture in his sermons. Twice over the next month, Sengekontacket's William Lay (or Panunnut), a rising star among the Indians on the east side of the island, advertised his independent access to the Bible by requesting exegesis of several passages from Revelation, a book missionaries preferred to avoid.² Cotton had gone head-to-head with New England's greatest minds during his college days, but handling sensitive challenges from lay congregants, never mind Indians, was startlingly unfamiliar. Fortunately, Cotton continued to record the Wampanoags' questions in his journal until he finally left the island in 1667. Historians tend to suspect the portrait of New England's Christian Indians presented in most cited primary sources because those accounts were written by missionary John Eliot and approved by Puritan leaders to raise donations for the evangelical effort. Cotton's journal, though, was private, and it furnishes compelling evidence that a broad cross section of Vineyard Wampanoags had become engaged, knowledgeable Christians.

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