West of the Pokanokets were the Narragansetts, a tribe of two thousand warriors, whose chief, Canonicus, sent to Plymouth in January, 1622, a bundle of arrows tied with a snake’s skin, signifying a challenge of war.  Bradford knew that it was fatal to hesitate or show fear, and he promptly stuffed the snake’s skin with bullets and returned it to the sender with some threatening words.  This answer alarmed Canonicus, who thought that the snake’s skin must be conjured, and he did not pursue the matter further.  But the colonists took warning, and the whole settlement was enclosed with a paling, and strict military watch was maintained.  Thus the winter passed and the spring came, but without the hoped-for assistance from the merchant partners in England.[4]

On the contrary, the arrival in May, 1622, “without a bite of bread,” of sixty-seven other persons, sent out on his own account under a grant from the Council for New England, by Thomas Weston, one of the partners, plunged them into dire distress, from which they were happily saved by a ship-captain, John Huddleston, from the colony on James River, who shared his supplies with them, and thus enabled them to “make shift till corn was ripe again.”  Weston’s emigrants were a loose set, and before they left in August they stole most of the green corn, and thus Plymouth was threatened with another famine.  Fortunately, about this time another ship from Virginia, bearing the secretary of state, John Pory, arrived, and sold the colonists a supply of truck for trading; by which they bought from the Indians not only corn, but beaver, which proved afterwards a source of much profit.

Weston’s people removed to Wessagusset (modern Weymouth), on Massachusetts Bay, where they conducted themselves in so reckless a manner that they ran the double risk of starvation and destruction from savages.  To save them, Bradford, in March, 1623, despatched a company under Captain Miles Standish, who brought them corn and killed several of the Indians.  Then Standish helped Weston’s “rude fellows” aboard ship and saw them safely off to sea.  Shortly after Weston came over to look after his emigrants, fell into the hands of the Indians, escaped to Plymouth, where the colonists helped him away, and returned in October, 1623, to create more disturbance.

Weston was not the only one of the partners that gave the colonists trouble.  John Pierce took advantage of the prominence given him by the patent issued in his name for the benefit of all, to get a new one which made him sole actual owner of the territory.  His partners resented this injustice, and the Council for New England, in March, 1623, was induced to revoke the grant to Pierce.[5]