Passaconaway was a 17th century sachem and later bashaba (chief of chiefs) of the Pennacook people in what is now southern New Hampshire in the United States, who was famous for his dealings with the Plimouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies. Name 17th century records spell his name in a variety of ways, including Papisseconewa, Papisseconeway, Passeconneway, Papisseconneway, Passeconewa, Passaconaway, and Peasconaway. In New English Canaan (1637) Thomas Morton wrote the name as "Papasiquineo". At some point in the late 1830s American author Samuel G. Drake either theorized, or encountered someone else's theory, that these names are all derived from words for "child" and "bear" - he make the claim for the first time in the 1841 8th edition of his Indian Biographies. Chandler Potter's 1856 History of Manchester derived the name from papoeis "a child" and kunnaway "a bear", but does not provide citations for this (the two terms he uses most likely came from Roger Williams' A Key Into the Language of America, which includes papoòs "infant" and paukunnawaw "bear" and "Ursa major"). The alleged "child of the bear" translation has become a staple in subsequent accounts about Passaconaway, but is linguistically problematic, despite looking plausible. Modern speculative reconstructions based on 17th century orthography point to the name most likely having been something (in modern orthography) like Papisseconneway. There are no extant contemporaneous accounts of the name's literal meaning, nor about whether it was related to his lineage, his status as a powow, or other social significance, whether it was an autonym or heteronym, or even from which of the various Algonquian dialects it came (the English colonists were much better acquainted with Wampanoag, Massachusett and Narragansett communities than with the Pennacook, and Williams' glossary is of Narragansett words). In 19th century and subsequent publications he has sometimes been equated with the Catholic sachem called St. Aspenquid, but this is erroneous. Life Passaconaway was widely respected by contemporaneous Native Americans in the New England region, by English colonists (even those who said that his supernatural abilities were satanic in origin), and was taken seriously as a political leader by colonial English settlers. One of the key native figures in the colonial history of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, he is believed to have been born between 1550 and 1570, and had died by 1669 (his birth and death dates are imprecise, and reckoning is skewed by the report of