The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World*

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  ◆ Nineteenth-century depiction of Mary Rowlandson being taken across the Connecticut River toward Philip’s forces.

  ◆◆◆ On February 29, Benjamin Church attended a meeting of the Council of War at Governor Winslow’s home in Marshfield. The raid on Medfield the week before had been followed by an attack on nearby Weymouth, and there were fears that the colony was about to be overrun with hostile Indians from the north. A member of the Council of War proposed that a militia company of sixty soldiers be sent to the farthest towns in the colony to defend against a possible Indian attack. The same official proposed that Church be the company’s commander. But Church had a proposal of his own.

  If the Indians returned to Plymouth, it was reasonable to assume that, in Church’s words, “they would come very numerous.” As Massachusetts had learned, it was a waste of time stationing militias in town garrisons. Although they helped to defend the settlement in the event of an attack, they did nothing to limit the Indians’ activities. The only way to conduct the war was to “lie in the woods as the enemy did.” And to do that, you not only needed a large force of several hundred men, you needed a large number of friendly Indians. “[I]f they intended to make an end of the war by subduing the enemy,” Church insisted, “they must make a business of the war as the enemy did.” He suggested that Plymouth officials should equip him with an army of three hundred men, a third of them Indians. Give him six weeks, he said, and he and his men would “do good service.”

  Because it included the use of a large number of Indians, Church’s proposal shocked the Council of War. At that time in Plymouth Colony, fear of all Indians—hostile and friendly alike—was so high that just a few days before, the Council had voted to banish some Praying Indians to Clark’s Island in Plymouth Harbor. Not surprisingly, the Council turned him down. But Church’s words were not totally ignored. The man who agreed to serve instead, Captain Michael Pierce of scituate, was given, in addition to sixty Englishmen, twenty “friend Indians” from Cape Cod.

  Church decided then his first priority must be to make sure his pregnant wife, Alice, and their son, Tom, were safe. If the Indians should come in the numbers he expected, he knew that Duxbury, where they were now located, was likely to be a prime target. Even though it meant leaving the colony, he decided to take Alice and Tom to Aquidneck Island.

  It was an unpopular decision with the authorities, from whom he needed a permit. Eventually, Church was able to convince Governor Winslow that he could be of some use to him “on that side of the colony,” and he was given permission to relocate to Rhode Island. On March 9, they set out for Taunton, then proceeded by boat down the Taunton River to Mount Hope Bay and Aquidneck Island, before arriving safely at Captain John Almy’s house in Portsmouth.

  ◆◆◆ For the English, March of 1676 was a terrible and terrifying month. Indians from across New England banded together for a devastating series of raids that reached from the Connecticut River valley to Maine and even into Connecticut itself, a colony that had, up until then, been spared from attack. But it was in Plymouth, on sunday, March 26, where the English suffered one of the worst defeats of the war.

  Captain Pierce and his force of sixty Englishmen and twenty Praying Indians were marching north along the east bank of the Blackstone River when they spotted some Indians. There were just a few of them, and when the Indians realized they were being followed, they turned to flee. Pierce’s men eagerly chased them, only to discover that they had walked into an ambush. A force of five hundred Indians, apparently led by Canonchet, emerged from the trees. Pierce and his soldiers ran across the rocks to the west bank of the Blackstone, where another four hundred Indians were waiting for them.

  Pierce ordered his company of eighty men to form a single ring, and standing back to back, they fought bravely against close to a thousand Indians, who according to one account “were as thick as they could stand, thirty deep.” By the end of the fighting two hours later, fifty-five English, including Pierce, were dead, along with ten of the Praying Indians. Nine English soldiers either temporarily escaped the fighting or were taken alive and marched several miles north, where they were tortured to death at a place still known today as Nine Men’s Misery.

  Given the impossible odds, the Praying Indians would not have been blamed for trying to escape at the first sign of trouble. But one Indian named Amos stood at Pierce’s side almost to the very end. Even after his commander had been shot in the thigh and lay dying at his feet, Amos continued to fire on the enemy. Finally, it became obvious that, in the words of William Hubbard, “there was no possibility for him to do any further good to Captain Pierce, nor yet to save himself if he stayed any longer.” The Narragansetts and Nipmucks had all blackened their faces for battle. so Amos smeared his face with gunpowder and stripped off his English clothes to impersonate the enemy. After pretending to search the bodies of the English for anything valuable, he disappeared into the woods.

  Amos was not the only Praying Indian to make a remarkable escape that day. As the fighting drew to a close, another Praying Indian turned to the English soldier beside him and told him to run. Taking up his tomahawk, the Indian pretended to be a Narragansett chasing his foe, and the two of them did not stop running until they had left the fighting far behind.

  When word of the heroism of Pierce’s Praying Indians began to spread, public opinion regarding the use of friendly Indians in combat started to shift. It still took some time, but New Englanders came to realize that instead of being untrustworthy and dangerous, Indians like Amos and the spies James and Job might in fact hold the secret to winning the war.

  ◆◆◆ Unlike Massachusetts and Plymouth, Connecticut had relied on friendly Indians from the start of the conflict. In addition to the Mohegans, there were the Pequots and the Niantics, a subset of the Narragansetts, who had remained loyal to the English. In early April, a Connecticut force under Captain George Denison was in the area of modern Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when they captured an Indian woman who told them that Canonchet was nearby. Over the course of the next few days, Denison’s eighty or so Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics competed with one another for the honor of capturing the great Narragansett sachem.

  In the last few months, Canonchet had earned the reputation for physical courage that had so far escaped the more famous Philip. Dressed in the silver-trimmed jacket the Puritans had given him during treaty negotiations in Boston, with a large wampum belt around his waist, the young sachem was known for his bravery in battle. Even the Puritans had to admit that Canonchet “was a very proper man, of goodly stature and great courage of mind, as well as strength of body.” At considerable risk, he and thirty warriors had succeeded in collecting the seed corn from storage pits just north of Mount Hope. The corn had already been delivered to the Connecticut River valley, where the women would begin planting in May. He was now leading the army of fifteen hundred Indians that had destroyed Captain Pierce’s company.

  • Canonchet Memorial in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Limestone statue sculpted in 1977.

  On April 9, Canonchet was resting at the foot of a hill near the Blackstone River with nine of his warriors, trading stories about the attack on Captain Pierce and his company, when he heard “the alarm of the English.” He ordered two of his men to go to the top of the hill and report back what they saw, but the men never returned. A third warrior was sent, and he, too, disappeared. Only after two more men went to the top of the hill did Canonchet learn that “the English army was upon him.”

  Taking up his musket and blanket, the Narragansett sachem began to run around the base of the hill, hoping to sneak through the enemy forces and escape behind them. However, one of Denison’s Niantic warriors saw the sachem moving swiftly through the woods, and the chase was on.

  Canonchet soon realized that Denison’s Indians were catching up to him. Hoping to slow them down, he stripped off his blanket, but the Indians refused to stop and pick up the valuable item. Canonchet then shook off his silver-trimmed coat, follow
ed by his belt of wampum. Now the Indians knew they had, in Hubbard’s words, “the right bird, which made them pursue as eagerly as the other fled.”

  Ahead was the Blackstone River, and Canonchet decided to try and cross it. But as he ran across the slick stones, his foot slipped, and he fell into the water and soaked his gun. Canonchet still had a considerable lead over his pursuers, but he now knew that flight was useless. According to Hubbard, “he confessed soon after that his heart and his bowels turned within him, so as he became like a rotten stick, void of strength.” A few seconds later, a Pequot Indian named Monopoide caught up to the sachem, who surrendered without a fight.

  The English offered to spare Canonchet’s life if he helped them convince Philip and the others to stop the fighting. But he refused, “saying he knew the Indians would not yield.” He was then taken to stonington, where officials blamed him for dragging the Narragansetts into war. He responded that “others were as forward for the war as himself and that he desired to hear no more thereof.” When told he’d been sentenced to die, he replied that “he liked it well, that he should die before his heart was soft or had spoken anything unworthy of himself.” Just before his execution in front of a Pequot firing squad, Canonchet declared that “killing him would not end the war.” He threw off his jacket and stretched out his arms just as the bullets pierced his chest.

  Connecticut officials made sure that all three tribes of their friendly Indians shared in the execution. According to one account, “the Pequots shot him, the Mohegans cut off his head and quartered his body, and Ninigret’s [Niantics] made the fire and burned his quarters; and as a token of their love and fidelity to the English, presented his head to the council at Hartford.”

  If the death of Canonchet did not end the war, it was, in Hubbard’s words, “a considerable step thereunto.” The Indians had lost a leader who had briefly united several groups of Native peoples into a powerful army. In the days and weeks ahead, dissension began to threaten the Indians as the English finally realized that using the Praying Indians was the best way to break apart the Nipmuck-Narragansett-Pokanoket alliance.

  ◆ Reputed to be Ninigret II, son of the Niantic sachem who sided with the English during King Philip’s War.

  ◆◆◆ By late March, a large number of Indians had gathered at Wachusett Mountain to the north of modern Worcester. The steep and rocky terrain protected them from the English yet was far enough east that they could easily attack the towns between them and Boston. On April 5, the Praying Indian Tom Doublet arrived at Wachusett with a letter from colonial officials in Boston. In addition to the possibility of starting peace negotiations, the letter mentioned the release of English prisoners.

  On April 12, Doublet returned to Boston with the Indians’ response. They were not ready yet to discuss peace: “you know and we know your heart great sorrowful with crying for you lost many many hundred men and all your houses and your land, and women, child and cattle ... ; [you] on your backside stand.” They were willing, however, to discuss the possibility of ransoming hostages. As a minister’s wife, Mary Rowlandson was the Indians’ most important captive, and she quickly became the focus of the negotiations.

  In mid-April, Rowlandson, who was near the Connecticut River with Weetamoo, learned that she was wanted at Wachusett, where Philip and her master, Quinnapin, were already meeting with the Nipmucks. Before receiving this news, she had reached a new low. Her son was deathly ill, and she had heard nothing about her daughter. Without Quinnapin to help her, Rowlandson’s relationship with Weetamoo—difficult from the start—had deteriorated to the point that the sachem had threatened to beat her with a log. “My heart was so heavy ... that I could scarce speak or [walk along] the path,” she remembered. But when she learned that she might soon be returned to the English, she felt a sudden burst of energy. “My strength seemed to come again,” she wrote, “and recruit my feeble knees and aching heart.”

  Rowlandson arrived at Wachusett Mountain in the midst of preparations to attack the town of sudbury. With the death of Canonchet, the Indians urgently needed a major victory. They were winning the war, but they were very low on food. Even if they succeeded in growing a significant amount of corn, they couldn’t harvest the crop until late summer. By June, the groundnuts would be gone. They needed to make peace with the English before the beginning of summer. Otherwise, no matter how great their military victories, they would begin to starve to death.

  On April 17, Rowlandson became one of the few Westerners to witness a Native war dance. In the center of a large ring of kneeling warriors, who struck the ground with their palms and sang, were two men, one of whom held a musket and a deerskin. As the man with the gun stepped outside the ring, the other made a speech, to which the warriors in the ring cheered. Then the man at the center began to call for the one with the gun to return to the deerskin, but the outsider refused. As the warriors in the ring chanted and struck the ground, the armed man slowly began to yield and reentered the ring. soon after, the drama was repeated, this time with the man holding two guns. Once the leader of the dance had made another speech and the warriors had “all assented in a rejoicing manner,” it was time to attack sudbury.

  ◆ An early-twentieth-century view of Wachusett Mountain.

  It was a great Native victory. Two different companies of English militia were successfully ambushed. The Indians killed as many as seventy-four men and suffered minimal losses. And yet, the sudbury Fight failed to be the complete triumph the Indians had hoped for. “[T]hey came home,” Rowlandson remembered, “without that rejoicing and triumphing over their victory, which they were wont to show at other times, but rather like dogs (as they say) which have lost their ears.” Even though they had caused terrible damage to the English, there were still plenty of soldiers left to fight another day, and for the Indians the days were running out.

  The negotiations with the English became more urgent. The sachems ordered Rowlandson to appear at their “General Court.” They wanted to know what she thought she was worth. It was an impossible question, of course, but Rowlandson named the figure of £20, about $4,000 today. In the letter accompanying their ransom request, the sachems, led by the Nipmuck chief known as sagamore sam, tried to make amends: “I am sorry that I have done much wrong to you,” the note read, “and yet I say the fate is lay upon you, for when we began quarrel at first with Plymouth men I did not think that you should have so much trouble as now is.”

  In early May, the Praying Indians Tom Doublet and Peter Conway arrived with the Englishman John Hoar from Concord. In addition to the ransom money, Hoar had brought along some provisions. It soon came out that Philip was against the ransoming of English captives, while the Nipmucks were for it. However, since Rowlandson was owned by Quinnapin, it was ultimately up to him.

  Traditionally, Native Americans relied on ritual dances to help them make important decisions. The dance that day was led by four sachems and their wives, including Quinnapin and Weetamoo. Even though both of them had been almost constantly on the run for the last few months, the couple still wore the clothes of nobility. “He was dressed in his Holland shirt,” Rowlandson wrote, “with great laces sewed at the tail of it; he had his silver buttons; his white stockings, his garters were hung round with shillings, and he had girdles of wampum upon his head and shoulders. she had a kersey [a twilled woolen fabric] coat and covered with girdles of wampum from the loins upward: her arms from her elbows to her hands were covered with bracelets; there were handfuls of necklaces about her neck and several sorts of jewels in her ears. she had fine red stockings and white shoes, her hair powdered and face painted red that was always before black.”

  The next morning, the sachems held another meeting. To Rowlandson’s great joy, it was decided that she should be released. To this day, the place where she gained her freedom, marked by a huge boulder, is known as Redemption Rock. By sundown, Rowlandson, Hoar, and the two Praying Indians had reached her former home of Lancaster, where they decided to spend th
e night. “[A]nd a solemn sight it was to me,” she wrote. “There had I lived many comfortable years amongst my relations and neighbors, and now not one Christian to be seen, nor one house left standing.”

  They reached Concord the next day around noon, and by evening they were in Boston, “where I met,” Rowlandson recalled, “my dear husband, but the thoughts of our dear children, one being dead and the others we could not tell where, abated our comfort each to other.” Over the course of the next few months, both their children were released, and they spent the rest of the war living among friends in Boston.

  But Rowlandson found it difficult to leave her captivity behind. “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together,” she wrote, “but now is other ways with me. ... [W]hen others are sleeping, mine eyes are weeping.”

  ◆◆◆ With the success of Tom Doublet and Peter Conway in negotiating the release of Mary Rowlandson, and with more Massachusetts Bay officers using Praying Indians as scouts (even samuel Moseley came to see the light), New Englanders began to realize that it was both stupid and inhumane to keep hundreds of loyal Indians as prisoners on Deer Island. In the middle of May, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that the Praying Indians be removed. “This deliverance ... ,” Daniel Gookin wrote, “was a jubilee to those poor creatures.”