Note 234 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

Pratt’s account of this survivor among the French crew is to be found in IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iv. pp. 479, 489. He says that “one of them was wont to read much in a book (some say it was the New Testament), and that the Indians enquiring of him what his book said, he told them it did intimate that there was a people like French men that would come into the country and drive out the Indians.” The account given by Mather (Magnalia, B. I. ch. ii. § 6) is curiously like that in the text. After quoting the substance of Pratt’s statement he adds: “These infidels then blasphemously replied, ‘God could not kill them;’ which blasphemous mistake was confuted by a horrible and unusual plague, whereby they were consumed in such vast multitudes that our first planters found the land almost covered with their unburied carcases; and they that were left alive were smitten into awful and humble regards of the English by the terrors which the remembrance of the Frenchman’s prophecy had imprinted on them.”

Pratt, whom Mather followed, claims to have derived his knowledge of these events during the winter of 1622-3 directly from savages concerned in them. The probability is that the tradition of the French captive, and his book and prophecy, was a common one among the settlers both at Plymouth and about Boston Bay. Pratt apparently had a habit, as he grew old, of appropriating to his own account many of the earlier and more striking incidents of colonial history. (Mather’s Early New England, p. 17.)