Iyannough, the Sachem Who Named Hyannis

The name Hyannis is Wampanoag, and it belongs to a real man. He was Iyannough, sometimes written Iyanough or Hyanno, a young sachem, or leader, of a Wampanoag band that lived around Cummaquid, in what is now Barnstable. The Wampanoag are the People of the First Light, and they had lived along these shores for more than twelve thousand years before any European ship appeared.

Iyannough enters the written record for an act of kindness. In the summer of sixteen twenty-one, a boy from the new Plymouth colony, one of the Billington children, wandered off and got lost in the woods. A party from Plymouth came searching, and it was Iyannough and his people who helped find the child and return him safely.

The settlers described the young sachem as gentle, courteous, and generous, unusual praise in their accounts. His life was short. He died in sixteen twenty-three, still a young man in his late twenties, during a period when disease and mistrust were pulling the two peoples apart.

Today the largest village on Cape Cod carries his name, though it has been reshaped in English spelling into Hyannis. The fast ferry that runs from the harbor to Nantucket is even called the Iyanough. It is worth remembering, as you drive these streets, that the name over every shop and street sign honors a Wampanoag leader who once helped strangers find a lost child.