and no small admiration of ours; of which many desired to learne
more than we had the meanes for want of utterance in their language
to expresse." So Heriot could not be subtle in the native tongue.
Heriot did what he could to convert them: "I did my best to make
His immortall glory knowne". His efforts were chiefly successful
by virtue of the savage admiration of our guns, mathematical
instruments, and so forth. These sources of an awakened interest
in Christianity would vanish with the total destruction and
discomfiture of the colony, unless a few captives, later massacred,
taught our religion to the natives.[2]


[1] According to Strachey, Heriot could speak the native language.

[2] Heriot's Narrative, pp. 37-39. Quaritch, London, 1893.


I shall cite another early example of a New England deity akin to
Ahone, with a deputy, a friend of sorcerers, like Okee. This
account is in Smith's General History of New England, 1606-1624.
We sent out a colony in 1607; "they all returned in the yeere
1608," esteeming the country "a cold, barren, mountainous rocky
desart". I am apt to believe that they did not plant the
fructifying seeds of grace among the natives in 1607-1608. But the
missionary efforts of French traders may, of course, have been
blessed; nor can I deny that a yellow-haired man, whose corpse was
found in 1620 with some objects of iron, may have converted the
natives to such beliefs as they possessed. We are told, however,
that these tenets were of ancestral antiquity. I cite E. Winslow,
as edited by Smith (1623-24):--