The man who saved America

He was only trying to be nice. He wanted to use his language skills. And if he didn't help them, they would surely die.

He was a Native American named Squanto. "They" were the Pilgrims, who'd arrived in Massachusetts in November 1620. Both are examples of the unlikely nature of the American story.

The Pilgrims (known in England as the Pilgrim Fathers) were a group of Protestant families from the East Midlands who had their differences with the Church of England. Some of them had tried living in Holland, where they'd enjoyed religious tolerance, but hadn't adapted to the Dutch culture. So they decided to form their own community in the new Virginia colony.

Now, if you're going to do something like this, you need an early start. The trip across the Atlantic took two months in those days. Even going was a fool's errand. It had taken 19 attempts in Virginia to produce one permanent colony — Jamestown — and the Pilgrims were starting from scratch.

By the time everyone was ready to go, it was already July. After a stop in England, they got under way in early August. At sea, their ship developed a leak, so they turned back for repairs. The second time out, the same thing happened. The hired crew, not wanting to make the journey, had sabotaged the ship.

With a different ship — the Mayflower — they set out again in September, making landfall in November. A storm had carried them much further north than they'd planned. Even so, one could normally expect to trade with the native people for something to eat. This time, however, no one was around. The Pilgrims found native houses and burial mounds with baskets of corn, acorns and beans inside.

Even with this luck, 49 of the 102 colonists died that winter of disease and malnutrition. They might not have survived the following winter either, had they not met Squanto. He simply walked into their campsite one day in March and introduced himself.

Squanto showed the settlers where they could catch fish and eel, and taught them to use these as fertilizer. He also mediated between the settlers and the nearby Wampanoag people. It helped a great deal that Squanto could already speak English.

History books like to emphasize the pioneering nature of the Pilgrims' progress, but in fact, Europeans had been exploring the coast for a hundred years. In 1605, Squanto and a few of his contemporaries were helping some Englishmen load goods onto their ship when the Englishmen trapped them on board and took them back to the mother country to show people.

In 1612, Squanto returned to North America with John Smith of the Jamestown colony. On the way back to New England, however, he was kidnapped again: an Englishman took him to Spain and tried to sell him into slavery. Local monks intervened, and Squanto was able to escape to London. There he worked with a shipbuilder, who took him to Newfoundland.

In 1619, Squanto finally got back to his village, only to find that European diseases had wiped out his people. So he assisted the new people who had arrived — particularly in their diplomatic missions to native tribes — and helped to organize the first Thanksgiving. Neither side trusted him completely, though, and some believe that the Wampanoag poisoned Squanto in 1622 to stop his collaboration with the white man.

They might have seen what was coming. Without Squanto, the remaining Pilgrims might have died. New England, as a colony, might have been abandoned. The city of Boston, a few miles from Squanto's village, might never have been built — and the revolution that started there, and that inspired democracy around the world, might never have happened.