Overnight the Indian war had vanished. Overnight the coast from Saco Bay in Maine to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island lay wide open to European settlements. The cleared fields along the rivers and salt marshes grew up to weeds, ready for the spade of the English planter. For twenty miles inland the land was cleared of the Indian menace in precisely the area where they had been most agricultural, in what John Smith had called the “Paradise of all those parts.” The choicest sites for plantations, at the river mouths and along the tidal reaches of Boston Bay, Salem, Gloucester, and Plymouth, were stripped of opposition. Beaver, deer, and codfish multiplied unhindered. Smith’s description of Plymouth, “good harbor, good land and no want of anything but industrious people,” was now doubly true of the whole mainland shore of Massachusetts Bay. These conditions were confirmed by Captain Thomas Dermer in 1619. Dermer had been associated with John Smith and Ferdinando Gorges in an attempted New England voyage in 1615, and was probably familiar with the coast. He was in Newfoundland in 1618 and there became acquainted with Squanto, who had been living in the household of John Slany in England. Squanto’s European stay was now completed, and someone had brought him out to Newfoundland. Dermer appreciated how valuable he might prove to be in a trading voyage to Massachusetts, and secured permission from Governor John Mason of Newfoundland, and also from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to use him as a pilot for a Massachusetts voyage. Arrived in Massachusetts Bay, Dermer wrote: “I passed alongst the coast where I found some ancient Plantations, not long since populous now utterly void, in other places a remnant remaines but not free of sickenesse. Their disease the Plague for wee might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who describe the spots of such as usually die.” Reaching Plymouth, which, we remember, was Squanto’s home, he goes on: “When I arrived at my Savages native Country (finding all dead) I travelled alongst a daies journey Westward, to a place called Nummastaquyt [Nemasket or Middleboro], where finding Inhabitants I dispatched a messenger a dayes journey further west to Poconokit, which bordereth on the sea; whence came to see me two Kings; attended with a guard of fiftie armed men, who being well satisfied with that my Savage and I discoursed unto them--gave me content in whatsoever I demanded.” At Poconokit he “redeemed a Frenchman, and afterwards another at Mastachusit,” victims of shipwreck three years before. What a chronicle these two castaways might have added to Massachusetts history had their memoirs been preserved!