From Samoset they learned three very important facts. The first was that the Indians, all along the coast, were greatly and justly exasperated against the white men, by the treachery of one Captain Hunt. This infamous man, while trading with the Indians, had inveigled twenty-seven men on board his ship, and then, closing the hatches upon them, had carried them off where most of them had never been heard of more. The wretch took these poor kidnapped Indians to Spain, and sold them as slaves, for one hundred dollars each. The untutored savages who, before this, were friendly, being thus robbed of their kindred, knew no better than to wreak their vengeance upon any white man whom they might encounter. Not long after this a French ship was wrecked on Cape Cod. The savages, burning with a desire for vengeance, massacred all but three or four of the crew, whom they reserved as prisoners. Everything that had been saved from the wreck they divided among themselves. Hence, perhaps, the iron kettle which the Pilgrims had found in one of their exploring tours. The captives were sent from one tribe to another, into the interior, that there might be no possibility of a rescue. One of these captives, probably a thoughtful, perhaps a religious man, learned their language, and told them that “God was angry with them, and in punishment would destroy them and give their country to another people.” They replied that “they were so numerous that God would not be able to destroy them.” But it so happened that ere long a terrible plague, resembling the yellow fever, broke out among the Indians, sweeping them off by thousands. The whole country became nearly depopulated. In these disastrous days the Indians remembered the words of the Frenchman, and began to fear that the white man’s God was really taking vengeance upon them. When the Mayflower arrived they feared that another people had come to take possession of their lands. Hence the hostile attitude which had been assumed, and the attack at the First Encounter. Samoset seemed to know all about this attack, and said that it was made by a tribe on the Cape called Nausites. It appears that the plague, above referred to, swept the whole seaboard, from the mouth of the Penobscot River to Narraganset Bay. Some tribes became nearly extinct. The Massachusetts tribe was reduced, it is said, from thirty thousand to three hundred fighting men. Captain Dermer, who visited the coast a year before the landing of the Pilgrims, writes: “I passed along the coast where I found some ancient plantations, not long since populous, now utterly void. In other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness. Their disease was the plague, for we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die.”