The Pequots had found many excuses as to why they had not handed over Stone’s murderers to Massachusetts, one of them being that the killers had recently died of smallpox. It was the perfidious Uncas who assured the Bay that the murderers were alive and the Massachusetts leaders became increasingly nervous about the Pequot obduracy. They now regarded their insubordination as dangerous, rather than merely a disagreement.
Uncas’s machinations were brilliantly successful. In June 1636 he told Jonathan Brewster that the Pequots were sure the English all along the river were going to attack them. Therefore the Pequots were going to attack first. This devastating news terrified the vulnerable new English communities in Connecticut. Intensely alarmed, Massachusetts summoned the Pequots to Boston. If Stone’s killers were not delivered, along with the wampum tribute, the colony would no longer be at peace with them. They would ‘revenge the blood of our countrymen as occasion shall serve’.
As bad luck had it, a few weeks later, there was another death and it was of grave moment to Jonathan Brewster: on 20 July Indians killed his wife Lucretia’s brother, John Oldham. Oldham had become wealthy and respectable. Settling at Watertown, he had been a representative to the General Court at Boston. He was on a trading voyage when Indians boarded his ship. They had cut off his head and were sawing at his hands and feet when an English scout discovered them. The deck of the ship was glistening with Oldham’s blood. It gave Uncas another perfect opportunity to raise the ante with his outraged friend Brewster. Oldham’s murder was a game changer as far as the Bay government was concerned, that they should be on their guard against the Indians.
In fact this murder had absolutely nothing to do with the Pequots. It was the work of the Block Island Indians, allies of the Narragansetts (and at their chiefs’ direction). The Narragansetts believed that Oldham was on a voyage to trade with the Pequots. The murder was not intended to bring on a war with the English. The Narragansett chief Canonicus and his stern, proud nephew Miantonomo wished for their friendship. A quick killing was to make it clear that they did not wish English traders to work with the Pequots, though they denied it to the Bay’s messengers – and were believed. The messengers observed in Canonicus – ‘the conqueror of all these parts’ – ‘much state, great command over his men: and marvellous wisdom in his answers’. Nevertheless the Boston leaders were becoming very jumpy about dealing with the Indians.
To Plymouth’s alarm the Massachusetts government decided their best hope of safety lay in pre-emptive action. In August, amidst an atmosphere of undisguised anxiety, an expedition under John Endecott, who had been so rough with Thomas Morton, set off to Block Island in Narragansett Bay. They were to retrieve Stone’s killers and put all the braves to death, sparing the women and children but burning their homes and fields. Then they were to go west along the coast to an important Pequot village near the Saybrook colony fort and demand tribute.
Unfortunately Endecott’s adventure had the worst outcome, without achieving very much. It put the Pequots into a fury as they were not guilty of Oldham’s murder. Their demand for a parley was rejected. The commander of Saybrook, Lion Gardiner, accurately forecast that the Pequots would now be buzzing like angry wasps round him in his exposed situation while Endecott retreated to the safety of Boston, a hundred miles away. For the whole of the next winter and early spring the Pequots not only imprisoned Gardiner and his fellow colonists in their fort but roamed up and down the Connecticut River attacking the new English towns, killing over thirty people.
The raids on remote settlements alarmed not only Lion Gardiner but other colonists now beginning to spread into outlying towns. The whole of New England felt in danger. The risks especially annoyed Plymouth – Edward wrote that the war ‘did not concern them, seeing the Pequots had not killed any of theirs’.
The Winslows were peculiarly vulnerable, exposed in the newly built town of Marshfield above Duxbury Bay. They had taken the decision to move permanently out of Plymouth that very year. Edward was entirely reliant on his good relations with Massasoit’s Wampanoags. To get to Plymouth and its protective fort, Edward and his family would have to go across the marshes or via Brant Rock out to sea. The Winslows’ new home was built on a peninsula at the edge of a salt meadow backing onto the northern part of Plymouth Bay. Although today the land is flat, then it was more of a bluff. Like those of other early settlers, the house was probably positioned for defensive purposes, especially in light of the rising tensions in New England. The creek which lay at the end of the garden was a navigable waterway, providing a sure escape for Edward, Susanna and their children: Edward’s two stepsons Resolved and Peregrine, and his three children, who included the eight-year-old Josiah and his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth.
There was a distinct possibility the besieged Saybrook garrison could starve to death. Those manning the fort built to house the flower of the exiled Puritan nobility watched as the bloated bodies of their fellow English floated by. Master John Tilly, the operator of a small sailing vessel, was murdered in a particularly grisly fashion. On his way back to Boston from Connecticut he made the mistake of stopping to spend a pleasant afternoon ‘afowling’ near Saybrook. As he ambled about with his piece resting on his shoulders, the Indians rose up from the long grass. He did not stand a chance. He uttered not a word as he was tied to a stake and flayed to death, having first had his fingers and toes cut off in front of Saybrook fort. The Indians admired his courage and shouted that he was a stout fellow.
* * *
In the late summer came news that the unthinkable had happened: the Pequots’ bitterest enemies, the Narragansetts, were thinking of joining their side. Roger Williams had been on Narragansett land at Providence for less than a year but he had become very close to their leadership. The magnificent Miantonomo frequently dropped in without warning, accompanied by his warriors, and spent the night. Such was Roger Williams’ popularity that chief Canonicus himself had measured out the width and depth of his trading house. In old age Williams remembered how ‘I never denied him [Canonicus] or Miantonomo whatever they desired of me as to goods or gifts or use of my boats or pinnace, and the travels of my own person, day and night’. He was often seen transporting fifty Narragansett warriors in his large canoe.
Williams was trusted to be the Narragansetts’ ‘councillor and secretary in all their wars’. Nothing could have been more crucial. When the English corn was ready for harvesting the Narragansetts told him ‘The Pequots and Narragansetts were at truce’. Miantonomo revealed that the Pequots ‘had laboured to persuade them that the English were minded to destroy all Indians’. If the Narragansetts did not join and fight with the Pequots, they would be attacked next.
Determined to stop this alliance, hardly telling his wife what he intended, Williams jumped into his canoe ‘to cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of life, to the sachem’s house’. He stayed three days and nights with Miantonomo, side by side with ambassadors from the Pequots whose hands and arms he thought ‘reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on the Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also’.
Williams’ invaluable diplomacy that long autumn and winter meant the Narragansetts were persuaded to remain neutral – though it was touch and go.
With the careless self-confidence of those who for centuries had been born to rule, the Narragansett leaders dismissed the Pequots’ warning. At this point the Narragansetts saw the English as people they could do business with, and assumed they would be able to carry on their usual way of life. It did not mean that they would not enforce their own punishments on English people not abiding by their laws – the Narragansetts were used to having their own way in their dominions.
Miantonomo was summoned to Boston, where, as he had done before, he made a speech protesting his love for the English and pledged loyalty to the Bay. As proof, he offered firstly a great deal of wampum, and secondly – th
e unambiguous sign of loyalty as far as the Narragansetts were concerned – a severed Pequot hand.
Had the Pequots and Narragansetts combined at that date, it certainly could have meant the end of the English colonies. The Pequots could raise around 4,000 warriors. The Narragansett numbers were declining because of the smallpox, but in 1636 they were still a tribe numbering nearly 30,000. At least a quarter were braves who could have fought. The combined English colonies’ official fighting force was under 200 soldiers. Even with Roger Williams’ urgent representations, the New England colonies stood in great danger in the winter and spring of 1637. Pequot ambassadors continued secretly to visit the Narragansetts to urge them to come over to their side, repeating their warnings: if they did not rise against the English now, they would be rooted out of their own land.
New England’s majestic rocky terrain could always assume a stern and threatening aspect. That spring it seemed additionally unsettling. Its high cliffs were the vantage points of hostile Indians. The settlers laboured under an oppressive mood. There was bitter friction between the supporters and enemies of Anne Hutchinson. Many began to question what had seemed the certainty of their mission. The continuous attacks from the Indians meant the settlements were on constant alert. It was no longer clear which Indians could really be trusted, other than Massasoit and Uncas.
* * *
When the siege of Saybrook was finally lifted after some difficulty in March 1637, the Pequots simply went upriver. To the colonists’ horror, on 23 April the riverside settlement of Wethersfield was attacked. Founded only three years before, it was at a fragile stage of development. A local tribe had been angered by Wethersfield occupying land they viewed as theirs. Wethersfield’s citizens had not realised the depths of their resentment and trusted them. Nor did they recognise that their Indian neighbours were affiliated to the Pequots. The settlers had gone out to their fields to work in their usual way. Indians rose up from the shadows, their tomahawks poised to scalp. They killed three women and six men and carried off two young girls. Escaping by water, their canoes with a hundred warriors and the captive girls passed Saybrook fort. The Indians shouted and jeered at the English; imitating the English Puritan custom they used the word ‘brother’ sarcastically.
Plymouth reluctantly came round to Winthrop’s warnings that the whole English presence in New England could be wiped out. The colonies were now in agreement that an ‘offensive and defensive’ war had to be made against the Pequots. By this stage, Massachusetts was not in a state to be very considered in its responses to the Indians. It now appeared to many colonists that Satan was operating against them, both inside the colony and in the wilderness surrounding them. The Anne Hutchinson affair had been the first sign. The presence of many soldiers who had been involved in the religious battles of the Thirty Years War in Europe exacerbated the colonists’ tendencies to encase the conflict with the Indians in eschatological terms, and allow it more menace than it deserved. The learned clergy searched Holy Writ for guidance. In sermons the Indians were portrayed as instruments of Satan and the difficulties the colonies were facing in terms of a struggle between God and Satan. The struggle against the Pequots became a holy war. The New England colonies officially declared war against them on 1 May.
On 10 May John Mason left Hartford, Connecticut at the head of the militia with sixty Mohegans from Uncas to rendezvous with John Underhill, coming from Boston. They were to meet in Pequot country. The path to the Pequot fort lay through Narragansett territory. It was a thorny wild landscape, covered with scrub and undergrowth and completely unknown to them. Mason was courteous and formal, apologising for coming armed onto Narragansett territory. But the Indians were angered, especially since English troops surrounded the Narragansetts’ fort for the night and said anyone passing in or out would be killed. The English were worried the Narragansetts might leak their plans to the Pequots.
The Narragansett leadership viewed an English army on their territory with dismay. Many years later Roger Williams would recall how ‘that old Prince Canonicus who was most shy of all English to his last breath’ had been wary about allowing any English to settle on his land. Williams was only welcomed by Canonicus because he was a friend and because he spared no cost in plying the Indians with gifts. Williams related how Canonicus was not only shy but canny: he was not to be stirred with money to sell his land to let in foreigners. It was true that he ‘received presents and gratuities many of me’ but it was not thousands of pounds or even tens of thousands that ‘could have bought of him an English entrance into this bay’.
Thanks to Williams, Miantonomo gave them crucial information. The key to success was to attack at night. It would take too long to reach the Pequots’ main fort, Weinshauks. They should head for the Indian fort at the mouth of the Mystic River, a rocky eminence dashed by the roaring surf about twenty miles from Saybrook. Miantonomo insisted the Pequot ‘women and children be spared’. There were rumoured to be about 700 Pequots in the fort. Miantonomo said rather slightingly he thought the English numbers ‘too weak to deal with the enemy, who were (he said) very great captains and men skilful in war’.
Sparing the women and children was the last thing on the colonists’ minds. After the attack on Wethersfield none of the English felt very merciful. Moreoever it was unclear how reliable the Narragansetts were – or indeed the Mohegans. Both tribes were rumoured to have Pequots in their ranks. The unaccustomed heat made several English soldiers faint. Although some of Miantonomo’s men accompanied the English towards the Pequot at Fort Mystic, the body of the Indian troops were the Mohegans.
The assault was an almost total success, from the Puritan point of view. A dog barked as they approached. The Indians woke up and shouted ‘Owanux! Owanux!’, meaning Englishmen. But it was too late. Creeping up to the top of the hill, the colonists rushed in and set fire to seventy wigwams. The whole fort started to blaze, in the process killing between 400 and 700 people. John Underhill reported ‘many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troops to the Indians, twenty, and thirty at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword’.
Mason and Underhill had worried unnecessarily about the untried nature of the militias. Their novice soldiers had been guided by God Himself. The Mohegans provided cover for the English to run back to their boats at Pequot harbour. Meanwhile the Narragansetts hung back and did not really fight – which made the English very suspicious.
In fact the Narragansetts were horrified by what they saw, and expressed the deepest disapproval of the mass murder of civilians. Underhill reported with some amazement how upset the Narragansetts were watching the Mystic Fort burn with the Pequots inside. They shouted, ‘It is naught, it is naught,’ meaning it is wicked or evil. Miantonomo told Underhill that he disapproved of ‘the manner of the Englishmen’s fight’ because it ‘slays too many men’. Despite their fondness for torture, low population levels meant the Indians did not go in for pitched battles. Mason described how Indian war confrontations were for display: ‘they might fight seven years and not kill seven men’ because they did not come near one another. They shot randomly with their arrows. ‘Then they gaze up in the sky to see where the Arrow falls, and not until it is fallen do they shoot again, this fight is more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.’ Indian tactics were far closer to guerrilla warfare. Miantonomo might have suggested that they crept up on the Pequots, but he had not anticipated the wholesale slaughter and was amazed that they were not negotiated with, as was customary. All of this was outside the Narragansett rules of engagement.
In the Thirty Years War, it had been usual to burn fields and towns, and kill women and children. Now the slaughter of the Pequots had more than a whiff of genocide, even though the English had felt it was a question of ‘us’ or ‘them’. Captain Underhill was asked ‘why should you be so furious’ and ‘should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?’ Unsurprisingly his response
was to seek biblical example: ‘sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents; sometimes the case alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings…’
Via Roger Williams the Narragansetts sent messages urging clemency, but the remaining warriors of the vanquished Pequots were killed. A final group was rounded up in a swamp near the Quinnipiac River where the men made a last stand and the women and children surrendered. The leader of the Pequots had fled desperately to the Mohawks, but they killed him and sent his scalp to Connecticut to show their friendship was not with the defeated Pequots. Miantonomo expressly asked that the Pequots who surrendered should not be enslaved. But this was not to be: the women and children were rounded up and sold into slavery in the West Indies or became servants to the English. The name of the Pequots was officially extinguished.
Many historians have seen this as an alarming portent of a future where African Americans were enslaved for two hundred years. Although amongst the Indians slavery of defeated tribes was a consequence of battle – the victors enslaved the defeated – it had a pernicious effect between Indians and English. The Pequots were a different race and different civilisation from the English. Enslaving them entrenched differences between the two peoples, enhancing a superiority complex amongst the English. Indian leaders who were not Pequots took away the lesson that, deep down, the English were not their friends.
* * *
Miantonomo was immensely offended by the aftermath of the war. He had expected far greater rewards. The Narragansetts assumed they would take over much of the territory of the Pequots, and become the dominant tribe of the area. Thanks to Uncas this did not happen.
Uncas’s close relationship with John Mason lasted for the rest of their lives. The portly captain had warmed to him for fighting so bravely during the expedition. In return, Mason was rewarded by much Mohegan land in what had been Pequot territory. Though Mason’s troops became notorious for brutality to the Pequots his ties to the Mohegans were different. By 1671 he had tied up 20,000 acres for the Mohegans in such a way that he believed it could never be touched by other land-hungry English settlers.
The Mayflower Page 19
