Note [556 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
[556]
Shakespeare’s jeering remark in “The Tempest,” Act II, Scene II, regarding those who refuse to help a lame beggar, but who will pay their money to see a dead Indian, may apply to one of these captives. Out of the common interest in savages the poet doubtless constructed the monster, Caliban.
When the Plymouth colony was founded, two of these captives were placed on board a vessel bound from Bristol to the coast of Maine. A Spanish fleet captured the ship, and the Indians were carried to Spain. Gorges afterward recovered one of these two, who, with at least two others of the original five, was afterward sent to America. Gorges, A Briefe Narration of the Originall Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations into the parts of America, etc., in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, series 3, vi, p. 54; Drake, op. cit., edition of 1867, p. 13.