The country was sparsely settled by natives: for some four years earlier an “unwanted plague,” an act of God the pious might have been excused for judging it to sweep the country bare for the uses of white immigrants, had all but depopulated the coast from the Penobscot to Narragansett. The vicinity of Plymouth, in particular, had been affected, and when Squanto was returned there by Dermer, he found all his kinsmen dead. It is said that a short time before the calamity, the Nausets, making reprisals on a shipwrecked French crew for the kidnapping activities of the whites, had been promised by one of their victims the vengeance of the white man’s God who would surely destroy them and give over their country to his people. “We are too many for him to destroy,” boasted the Indians. But when the plague wasted them, and the arrival of the Mayflower might be held as confirmation of the prophecy, their assurance may have weakened. It seemed that the white man’s God might have more power than they supposed; and perhaps that futile flight of arrows at the First Encounter was no more than a half-hearted protest at the decree of fate. The natives had some pretty superstitions of their own—as to the discovery of Nantucket, for instance, which, they told the Englishmen, had been quite unknown until many moons earlier when a great bird had borne off in his talons so many children from the south shore that a giant, one Maushope, moved with pity, had waded out into the sea and followed the bird to the island where he found the bones of the ravished children under a tree. Whereupon, recognizing the futility of regret, he sat him down to smoke, and the smoke was borne back across the waters he had traversed—the true origin of fog in the Sound. And Indians, as it drove in from sea, would say: “There comes old Maushope’s smoke.” Another story has it that Nantucket was formed of the ashes from Maushope’s pipe; but that the island was discovered by the parents of a papoose that was borne off by an eagle. They followed fast in their canoe, but not fast enough, for they were only in time to find the bones of their child heaped under a tree in the hitherto unknown land of Nantucket.