In 1639 about half the English from Plymouth relocated to the Nauset area, settling the town that is now Eastham. Many of the Nauset Indians died and the population declined drastically. Unfortunately, along with the trade goods, European diseases for which the Indians had no immunity were spread by these contacts. After 1620, English colonists from the settlement at Plymouth visited Nauset many times to buy food and trade. When he returned the next year, Champlain recorded in his journal that about 150 people were living around Nauset Harbor and about 500-600 were living around Stage Harbor to the south in the area of present day Chatham. Unfortunately, the visit to Nauset ended after four days with a fight between the French and the Indians in which one Frenchman was killed. As the expedition cartographer, Champlain has left us an informative map of the Nauset Harbor area (Figure 1). ” He also described the round wigwams, covered by a thatch made of reeds, and the people’s clothing, woven from grasses, hemp, and animal skins. We saw Brazilian beans, many edible squashes…tobacco, and roots which they cultivate …. He went ashore with some of the crew: “before reaching wigwams, entered a field planted with Indian corn… was in flower, and some five and a half feet in height. The first written account of the area was by Samuel de Champlain, who sailed in on July 21, 1605, and saw a bay with wigwams bordering it all around. Radiocarbon dating and information indicating the season in which different species were collected or hunted, based on studies of the shellfish and other faunal remains from ancient shell middens, indicate that people lived here year-round. One of the means of fishing can be seen in the upper right corner of the map of Nauset by Champlain (Figure 1), which shows a conical weir constructed of saplings and grass rope, designed to capture fish swimming from the marsh into a pond. In fact, the early Pilgrim settlers purchased corn and other crop foods from the Nauset Indians during the early years of their settlement at Plymouth, just across Cape Cod Bay. French explorers and the early English settlers report crop surpluses. Farming was simple, using stone hoes and fire-hardened wood tools to work the soil, but rewarding. Indians at Nauset Harbor practiced farming and fishing. The Nauset Archaeological District, within the southern portion of Cape Cod National Seashore was one focus of substantial ancient settlement since at least 4,000 BC.
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