“Take the story of Squanto, the famed Indian guide and translator for the even more famous Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, those intrepid voyagers on the Mayflower…How, might we ask, had this deus ex machina learned English well enough to approach the pilgrims in 1621? The answer is grim; Squanto had been kidnapped in 1614 by Thomas Hunt.
Already, then, before the Pilgrims had endured their first winter, the interlocked gears of colonization and enslavement had forced a Patuxet Indian man across the Atlantic and back, into chattel slavery and out.
William Bradford, governor of Plymouth, late describe with delight that "Squanto continued with them and was a special instrument of God for their good beyond their expectation. The Christian God, Squanto might have thought, worked in mysterious ways.