It would be easy to quote from many serious productions, contemporaneous with the _New Canaan_ and a century after it, examples of the same method of daring historical hypothesis; a single instance will, however, suffice. In his history of Lynn, written in 1829, the Rev. Alonzo Lewis says (p. 21): “The Indians are supposed by some to be the remnants of the long lost ten tribes of Israel; and their existence in tribes, the similarity of some of their customs, and the likeness of many words in their language, seem to favor this opinion.”
More sensible than either Thomas Morton or Mr. Lewis, William Wood, in writing his _New England’s Prospect_, in 1633, remarks (p. 78), that “Some have thought they [the Indians] might be of the dispersed Jews, because some of their words be near unto the Hebrew; but by the same rule they may conclude them to be some of the gleanings of all nations, because they have words which sound after the Greek, Latin, French, and other tongues.”
There is in the _Magnalia_ (book III. part iii.) a lengthy but highly characteristic passage, in which Mather recounts the points of resemblance which the evangelist Eliot saw between the Indians and “the posterity of the dispersed and rejected Israelites.”
[230] Peddock’s, or Pettick’s, Island, still so called, is one of the largest islands in Boston Bay. It lies directly opposite to George’s Island and Hull, from which last it is separated by a narrow channel, and is between Weymouth and Quincy bays, on the east and west. See Shurtleff’s _Description of Boston_, p. 557.
[231] Leonard Peddock seems to have been in the employment of the Council for New England. In the records of the Council for the 8th of November, 1622, is the following entry: “Mr. Thomson is ordered to pay unto Leo: Peddock £10 towards his paynes for his last Imployments to New England.” Subsequently, on the 19th of the same month: “It is ordered that a Letter be written from the Counsell to Mr. Weston, to deliver to Leonard Peddock, a boy Native of New England called papa Whinett belonging to Abbadakest, Sachem of Massachusetts, which boy Mr Peddock is to carry over with him” (_Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society_, April, 1867, pp. 70, 74).