The exact pathogen responsible for the first major wave remains debated by historians and epidemiologists, but the scale of death is not.

The National Museum of the American Indian describes the epidemic as killing nearly three-quarters of the Wampanoag nation.

Communities that had been thriving when Tisquantum was kidnapped were transformed.

Some were severely reduced.

Patuxet was devastated.

When Tisquantum returned in 1619, he found deserted homes and overgrown cornfields.

His family and most of the Patuxet community had not survived.

That homecoming deserves to sit at the center of his story.

He had endured kidnapping and years of displacement with the possibility that Patuxet still existed at the end of the journey.

Then he reached it.