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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the notorious figure of John Wompas, also known as John White. Upsetting expectations is emblematic of Wompas's entire life. He was a Harvard-educated scholar who became a sailor; he called the Nipmuc village of Hassanamesit his home but spent his adult life dwelling among the English of Roxbury, Boston, and London; he claimed the right, by inheritance, to lead the Nipmucs, but elders of his tribe insisted he was “no sachem”; and he cheated his kin of their lands by selling thousands of acres of Nipmuc Country to the English, then bequeathed all of Hassanamesit to his Nipmuc kin in his will. These contradictions reflect a gap between expectations and reality. This book thus offers the opportunity to examine that gap and, in the process, revise people's understanding of Native New England and the emerging English empire that engulfed it.

This chapter discusses John Wompas's “desire to be at sea.” Wompas spent his life straddling two worlds, so there is harmony in the fact that he sought the companionship of a group of men who spent half of their lives at sea and half ashore. From 1668 until his death, the maritime community—on sea and land—was where John seemed most at ease. Perhaps his desire to be at sea is not surprising; water was central to both his Indian and English worlds. The Nipmucs were the “freshwater people” because their lives and livelihood centered on the large lakes that dotted their homeland. Meanwhile, Wompas's years in the English world also showed him the centrality of seafaring to the English.

This chapter recounts the period when John Wompas left Massachusetts at a time of personal trouble as well as a time of trouble for the colony. Massachusetts had been under a cloud of royal disapproval, since the king sent royal commissioners to investigate the colony's loyalty and adherence to English law in 1664. Within a year of John's departure from Massachusetts, a more immediate crisis struck the region: a devastating war broke out between the English colonists and their Indian neighbors, the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, as well as many of Wompas's Nipmuc kin. By the time he returned to Massachusetts in 1677, he would find a way to use both the war and the colony's political disgrace to his own advantage.

This chapter looks at the war between the colonists and many of the surrounding Native peoples in New England, which began in late June 1675. Initially, it involved only the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags under their sachem Philip Metacom—also known as King Philip—but the conflict quickly spread to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and northern New England, drawing in English and Indian combatants from all of those locales, including the Nipmucs of the central Massachusetts highlands. Few groups suffered more during King Philip's War than the Christian Indians, caught as they were between the distrust of their Indian kin and the English to whom they had pledged their loyalty. Their treatment by the English during and after King Philip's War fueled John Wompas's growing anger against the Massachusetts government, which would explode on his return to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677.

This chapter focuses on John Wompas's residence in London, which allowed him to make new friends and acquaintances. As he had done before, he drew on them for financial and emotional support and rewarded them with deeds to Native land. Wompas again found a welcome reception at the court of Charles II, including expressions of support for the rights of the Crown's Native subjects. However, the king's supportive words would not translate into deeds, an outcome that reveals much about the English empire's shallow commitment to Native peoples. Resourceful as ever, Wompas managed through his own actions to secure assistance for himself and protection for the lands of his Nipmuc kin.

This concluding chapter studies the Hassanamisco Reservation. Edward Pratt, the executor of John Wompas's will, wasted no time attempting to cash in on his acquaintance with the land-rich Indian sailor. On November 3, 1679, safely landed in New England, Pratt registered his deed for eight miles square of Nipmuc land with the Middlesex County clerk. However, Pratt and the other Englishmen who held deeds to Wompas's land and benefited from his will battled with colony authorities and Wompas's Nipmuc kin for nearly a quarter of a century, interrupted by wars and several changes of government. Despite the self-serving efforts of Pratt and his associates, Hassanamesit remained in Indian possession well into the eighteenth century. A few acres of Hassanamesit—the Hassanamisco Reservation—are still held by Nipmucs in the twenty-first century, and the legal documentation of that possession leads directly back to the will of John Wompas.