The advent of these colonists was a great blessing to the Indians. The men of Plymouth and of Massachusetts, alike recognizing that universal brotherhood which Christianity so prominently enforces, were disposed to treat the Indians with the utmost kindness, and to do everything in their power to elevate and bless them. They purchased their lands, their corn and their furs, and paid fair prices for them, thus introducing into their wigwams comforts of which they previously had no conception. The Indians were thus stimulated to industry, and these friendly relations would have continued, to the inestimable benefit of both parties, but for the outrages inflicted upon the savages by such godless wretches as the infamous Captain Hunt, the low and thieving gang of Weymouth adventurers, and drunken sailors and reckless vagabonds, who, fleeing from crimes in their own country, gave loose to unrestrained passions in this New World. The Pilgrims had no power to prevent these atrocities. The poor savages, ignorant and degraded, knew not how to discriminate. If drunken white men, vagabond sailors from some English vessel, pilfered their wigwams, insulting their wives and daughters, there was no law to which they could appeal, and, in their benighted state, the only redress before them was to violate, with still more terrible atrocities, with torture and flame and blood, the inmates of some white man’s log house, the home, perhaps, of piety and prayer, where the Indian, if hungry, would be fed, if sick, would be nursed with true brotherly and sisterly tenderness. Thus, in God’s mysterious government of this world, the consequences of the crimes of the vilest men fell with awful desolation upon the heads of the best of men. The Indians had no circulating medium. Indeed they had no trade among themselves. In illustration of the benefits which the coming of the Pilgrim Fathers conferred upon them, let us again refer to the trading-post established, about twenty miles south from Plymouth, at Manomet, now Sandwich. Here, upon a small but navigable stream, a dwelling and storehouses were erected, where canoes and coasting vessels from all along the shore, as far as New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson, could meet in the exchange of their articles of value. A land carriage of but about six miles, over the neck of the Cape, the Suez of America, as it was then called, brought them to the waters of Massachusetts Bay, and to intercourse with all the settlements and Indian villages scattered along its shores. Indian runners could easily transport the light articles of traffic, and thus the dangerous passage around the vast peninsula of Cape Cod was avoided. Some circulating medium seemed essential in the trade thus commenced and rapidly extending.