Passaconaway, "the child of the bear," a man of considerable ability, was the earliest Indian chief whose subjects dwelt upon the banks of the Merrimack, and whom history has made known to us. He was regarded as a magician for whom the trees would dance and the rocks move, who in the summer turned water into ice, and in winter made it burst into flame. He could bring dead serpents to life, and make himself a burning fire, Major Gookin says he saw him alive about 1663, at Pawtucket, when he was about one hundred and twenty years old. He flourished at the time of the first permanent English settlements in Massachusetts, and showed himself the friend of the white man. In 1644 he, with'others, made a treaty with and submitted themselves to the English. In 1660 he resigned the sachemship to his son, Wannalancet, and at a great banquet, according to the early chronicles, made the following oration:

"Hearken to the words of your father! I am an old oak that has withstood the storms of more than a hundred winters. Leaves and branches have been stripped from me by the winds and frosts. My eyes are dim; my limbs totter; I must soon fall. When young no one could bury the hatchet in a sapling before me. My arrows could pierce the deer at a hundred rods. No wigwam had so many furs, no pole had so many scalp-locks as Passaconaway's. Then I delighted in war. The whoop of the Penacooks was heard on the Mohawk and no voice so loud as Passaconaway's. The scalps upon the pole in my wigwam told the story of Mohawk suffering.

"The English came; they seized the lands; they followed upon my footpath; I made war on them, but they fought with fire and thunder. My young men were swept down before me when no one was near them. I tried sorcery against them but they still increased, and prevailed over me and mine. I gave place to them, and retired to my beautiful Island, Naticook. I, that can take a rattlesnake in my palm as I would a worm without harm, -I, that have had communication with the Great Spirit, dreaming, and awake, -I am powerless before the pale-faces. These meadows they shall turn with the plow; these forests shall fall by the axe. The palefaces shall live upon your hunting grounds, and make their villages upon your fishing places. The Great Spirit says this, and it must be so. We are few and powerless before them. We must bend before the storm; peace with the white man is the command of the Great Spirit, and the wish - the last wish - of Passaconaway." [Indian Wars of N. E., Caverly.]

Source: History of Chelmsford Massachusetts, by the Rev. Wilson Waters, Lowell MA 1917

I believe that Thomas Morton was referring to Passaconaway when he spoke of the magic of Papasiquineo, in his Description of the Indians in New England (1637):
 

Of Their Petty Conjuring Tricks

If we doe not judge amiss of these Salvages in accounting them witches, yet out of all question we may be bold to conclude them to be but weake witches, such of them as we call by the names of Powahs: some correspondency they have with the Devil out of all doubt, as by some of their actions, in which they glory, is manifested. Papasiquineo, that Sachem or Sagamore, is a Powah of greate estimation amongst all kinde of Salvages there: he is at their Revels (which is the time when a great company of Salvages meete from severall parts of the Country, in amity with their neighbours) hath advanced his honor in his feats or juggling tricks (as I may right term them) to the admiration of the spectators, whom he endevoured to persuade that he would goe under water to the further side of a river, too broad for any man to undertake with a breath, which thing he performed by swimming over, and deluding the company with casting a mist before their eyes that see him enter in and come out, but no part of the way he has been seen: likewise by our English, in the heat of all summer to make Ice appear in a bowl of faire water; first, having the water set before him, he hath begun his incantation according to their usuall custom, and before the same has been ended a thick Cloud has darkened the aire and, on a sudden, a thunder clap hath been heard that has amazed the natives; in an instant he hath showed a firm piece of Ice to float in the midst of the bowl in the presence of the vulgar people, which doubtless was done by the agility of Satan, his consort.

And by meanes of these sleights, and such like trivial things as these, they gaine such estimation amongst the rest of the Salvages that it is thought a very impious matter for any man to derogate from the words of these Powahs. In so much as he that should slight them, is thought to commit a crime no less heinous amongst them as sacrilege is with us, . . .

Source: Thomas Morton, New English Canaan . . . (1637), reprinted in Old South Leaflets (Boston, 1883), vol. 4. [Thomas Morton was one of the founders of the settlement at Mount Wollaston (present day Quincy, MA, south of Boston), a renegade group of colonists who got into lots of hot water with the governments of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies.]

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