Note 255 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

This Sachem, “the most noted powow and sorcerer of all the country,” is better known by the name of Passaconaway. There is quite an account of him in Drake’s Book of the Indians (B. III. ch. vii). He is the Pissacannawa mentioned by Wood in his Prospect (p. 70), of whom the savages reported that he could “make the water burn, the rocks move, the trees dance, metamorphize himself into a flaming man.” Morton says of the Indian conjurers, “some correspondency they have with the Devil out of all doubt;” Wood, to the same effect, remarks that “by God’s permission, through the Devil’s helpe, their charmes are of force to produce effects of wonderment;” Smith declares of the Indians, “their chiefe God they worship is the Devil” (True Travels, vol. i. p. 138); Mather intimates that it was the devil who seduced the first inhabitants of America into it (Magnalia, B. I. ch. i. § 3), and Winthrop, describing the great freshet of 1638, records that the Indians “being pawawing in this tempest, the Devil came and fetched away five of them” (vol. i. p. *293).

See also Gookin’s Indians, I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 154; Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 356; and Champlain’s Voyages, vol. iii. p. 171. Champlain says the Indians do not worship any God; “they have, however, some respect for the devil.”