Squanto

Tisquantum, remembered as Squanto, grew up in Patuxet, a Wampanoag village on the coast of what is now Massachusetts. Around 1614 an English captain mapping the coastline for future colonization lured a group of Patuxet men aboard his ship, including Tisquantum, and sailed them to Europe to be sold as slaves. He ended up in Spain, where Catholic friars reportedly bought him out of slavery, and from there made his way to England, where he lived for several years and learned English while working for a merchant.

He finally secured passage back across the Atlantic in 1619, only to find Patuxet empty. An epidemic, likely brought by earlier European contact, had killed nearly everyone in his village during his years away. He was effectively the last of his people with nowhere left to return to.

The following year English colonists established Plymouth Colony on the site of his ruined village. Rather than treating them purely as trespassers, Tisquantum, who by then spoke fluent English, taught the starving settlers how to plant corn using fish for fertiliser, where to fish, and helped negotiate a treaty with the regional Wampanoag leader Massasoit. His motives were his own, shaped by loss and calculation as much as goodwill, and he died of a fever in 1622 while guiding an English trading expedition.