The first knowledge we have of the Wampanoags, and of the individuals who ruled over them and the other Pokanokets, is furnished in the collections of Purchas, on the authority of a Captain Dermer, the Master Thomas Dirmire spoken of by John Smith in his _New England Trialls,_ as "an vnderstanding and industrious gentleman, who was also with _him_ amongst the Frenchmen." Dermer was sent out from England in 1619, by Sir F. Gorges, on account of the President and Council of New England, in a ship of two hundred tons. He had a Pokanoket Indian with him, named Squanto, one of about twenty who had been kidnapped on the coast by Captain Hunt, in 1614, and sold as slaves at Malaga for twenty pounds a man. [FN] Squanto and a few others of the captives were either rescued or redeemed, by the benevolent interposition of some of the monks upon that island. "When I arrived," says Dermer in his letter to Purchas, "at my savage's native country, finding all dead, I traveled along a day's journey to a place called Nummastaquyt, where, finding inhabitants, I despatched a messenger a day's journey further west, to Pacanokit, which bordereth on the sea; whence came to see me two kings, attended with a guard of fifty armed men, who being well satisfied with that my savage and I discoursed unto them, (being desirous of novelty) gave me content in whatsoever I demanded. Here I redeemed a Frenchman, and afterwards another at Masstachusitt, who three years since escaped shipwreck at the northeast of Cape Cod." One of these two kings--as the sachems were frequently entitled by the early writers,--must have been Massasoit, so well known afterwards to the Plymouth settlers; and probably the second was his brother Quadepinah. The "native country" of Squanto was the vicinity of Plymouth, where the Indians are understood to have been kidnapped. Thousands of them, there, as well as elsewhere along the whole coast of New England, had been swept off by a terrible pestilence. * * * * * [FN] It is gratifying to learn from Smith that Hunt was punished, though not according to the baseness of his infamous crime. "He betraied foure and twentie of these poore Saluages aboord his ship, and most dishonestly and inhumanely for their kinde usage of me and all our men, carried them with him to Maligo, and there for a little priuate gaine sold those silly Saluages for Rials of eight; _but this vilde act kept him ever after from any more imploiement to these parts."_--Generale Historie of New England, published in 1632.