Prepared to report favorably, the explorers returned to the ship, which by the end of the week was safely anchored in the chosen haven. The selection of a site and the preparation of materials, in uncertain weather, delayed till Monday, the 25th, the beginning of “the first house, for common use, to receive them and their goods.” Before the new year, house-lots were assigned to families, and by the middle of January most of the company had left the ship for a home on land. But the exposures incident to founding a colony in the dead of a New England winter (though later experience showed that this was a comparatively mild one) told severely on all; and before summer came one half of the number, most of them adult males, had fallen by the way.[484] Yet when the “Mayflower” sailed homewards in April, not one of the colonists went in her, so sweet was the taste of freedom, even under the shadow of death. An avowed motive of the emigration was the hope of converting the natives; but more than three months elapsed before any intercourse with the Indians began. Traces of their propinquity had been numerous, and at length, on March 16/26, a savage visited the settlement, announcing himself in broken English as Samoset, a native of “the eastern parts,” or the coast of Maine, where contact with English fishermen had led to some knowledge of their language. From Samoset the colonists learned that the Indian name of their settlement was Patuxet, and that about four years before a kind of plague had destroyed most of the inhabitants of that region, so that there were now none to hinder their taking possession or to assert a claim to the territory. They learned also that their nearest neighbors were the Wampanoags, the headquarters of whose chief sachem, Massasoit, were some thirty miles to the southwestward, near the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. The next week Samoset brought in Squanto, formerly of Patuxet, who had been taken to England in 1614 by Hunt, and who was now willing to act as interpreter in a visit from Massasoit; the latter followed an hour later and contracted unhesitatingly a treaty of peace and alliance, which was observed for fifty-four years. [Illustration: THE SWORDS. [This group is preserved in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and all but two of the swords are associated with Plymouth history. The middle sword is that of Governor Carver. On the left, descending, are those of General John Winslow, Captain Miles Standish, and Governor Brooks of Massachusetts. On the right are those, in a like descending order, of Sir William Pepperrell, Elder Brewster, and Colonel Benjamin Church, the Plymouth hero of Philip’s War. Another Standish sword is preserved in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, and is figured in the group of Pilgrim relics on another page, as well as in Bartlett’s _Pilgrim Fathers_, p. 177. Concerning those above represented, see _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, i. 88, 114.—ED.]]