The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  The thought that the Indians were a merciful God’s way of restoring his chosen people to righteousness was – ironically – a comforting one. Issues to do with the treatment of the Indians were conveniently ignored. To more thoughtful settlers another truth was that the catastrophe was caused not by sinfulness but by neglect of the Indian point of view, by the loss of Indian lands, livelihoods and autonomy. But these were not thoughts Josiah entertained. All he would admit in the future was that when it came to Indians there had been a need to ‘improve that great blessing of peace better than we have done’.

  * * *

  By no means all the Indians in Plymouth joined Philip. They began to give themselves up in quite large numbers, particularly the squaws whose husbands had vanished to fight. Slavery without trial was Josiah’s preferred way of dealing with them. Around 200 Indians who surrendered were taken straight to Plymouth harbour, and sold in the West Indies.

  It was an uncontroversial fact of English seventeenth-century life that rebels could be treated harshly. In 1685, 800 soldiers from Monmouth’s rebellion in England were sentenced to be slaves in the West Indies. It was expensive to support captured Indians and dangerous to allow them to remain in New England, since men could not be taken away from the fighting to guard them. Nevertheless a good number of Plymouth colonists objected. Captain Eels of the Dartmouth garrison and Benjamin Church had got local Indians to surrender on friendly terms after the attack on Dartmouth. They pleaded for the Indians to be treated fairly. But the Indians were sold nonetheless. This was ‘an action so hateful to Mr Church, that he opposed it, to the loss of the good will and respects of some that before were his good friends’. To agree to peace terms and then ignore them was dishonest and treacherous and not gentlemanly.

  There was unease too about the slavery of innocent Indians without any attempt at a trial. The Old Testament might support slavery, but Reverend Thomas Walley complained about the ‘rash cruelty of our English towards Innocent Indians’. In Massachusetts John Eliot petitioned the government, to remind them that the proclaimed purpose of their charter was to convert the Indians to the Gospel, not to ‘extirpate them’. Not only would selling the Indians into slavery prolong the war, it also consigned their souls to eternal perdition. He begged for an orderly discussion to ‘weigh the reason and religion that laboureth in this great case of Conscience’. He told the government that the English were behaving like the Spanish, the greatest insult in an English colonist’s vocabulary. They were destroying men and depopulating the land. He reminded them the country was large enough for all to have land, Indians and English.

  Daniel Gookin was one of the officials in charge of administrating the Praying Towns. He believed the Praying Towns, which were spaced at intervals along the western frontier, could have been a ‘living wall’ to guard the greater part of Massachusetts. With their superior ranging skills the friendly Praying Indians could have roamed the woods and protected the English to whom they had benevolent feelings. Instead, wrote Gookin in his eight-volume history of the New England tribes, ‘those counsels were rejected, and on the contrary a spirit of enmity and hatred conceived by many against those poor Christian Indians’. And in return Praying Indians turned against their English friends and joined Philip.

  For their own safety it was decided that the inhabitants of the Praying Towns should be interned on Deer Island in the middle of Boston harbour. In the spring of 1676 some Bostonians bayed for the Praying Indians to be killed or enslaved and sent out of the country. But more moderate voices, as Gookin reported, reminded them ‘their ancestors had a covenant with the English about thirty years since, wherein mutual protection and subjection was agreed’. A search in the records ordered by the General Court produced the treaty. The furore temporarily died down as it was agreed – reluctantly by some – that Massachusetts was bound by its terms.

  In fact nature did their dirty work for them. By the end of the war only 167 Praying Indians were still alive. There was nowhere for them to hunt and they slowly faded away, dying from malnutrition and exposure, living on what they could scavenge off the shore.

  Benjamin Church believed that had the promises to the Indians been kept, and had they been treated fairly, it would have gone a good way to shortening the war. Most if not all the Indians in those parts would have surrendered.

  As the war continued, such was Walley’s concern he asked the prominent and influential Plymouth pastor John Cotton junior to have a word with Josiah. He too feared that the severity shown to numbers of ‘poor squaws’ sent to the West Indies was a massive provocation. ‘What the effect will be God only knows. I could wish our honoured Governor would send for them back and return them to their friends.’ There was ‘much discontent about it; some fear we have paid dear for former acts of severity and how dear we may yet pay God knows’. If Cotton could do anything to change Josiah’s mind he would be doing a good service: ‘it will not be thought unreasonable that they should be returned again’.

  But Josiah’s never very warm feelings had hardened. In Josiah’s extenuation, as governor from late June 1675 onwards he was not only having to direct a war, he was also having to deal with the effects of the Indian raids on the colony’s towns. As the Indians became bolder and burned more houses all over Plymouth Colony he had the perpetual administrative headache of helping homeless widows and their children who came stumbling into Plymouth town from their ruined farms. The injured had to be looked after at public expense. Josiah was arranging to put up and feed hundreds of tired, terrified inhabitants. When it was a matter of practical survival there was little time to think about ethics. Running the war was a hideous and depressing strain. The ghastly tales of what was going on may have warped his judgement. Indians practised fiendish tortures: they dismembered the bodies of the English once they had stripped them naked and often flayed the skin off them, as well as scalping them.

  The horrors of the war strengthened his view that there was no room for mercy to the Indians. They were the enemy, ‘known many of them’ to be of those that have burned this and that town, ‘and killed many of the inhabitants’. He needed God’s help ‘to distinguish aright between the innocent and the guilty, if they are distinguishable’. This was total war where nothing was sacred for either side. His reactions, though not admirable, were executive. Josiah’s swift actions and rapid orders saved lives, in the short term.

  But he was also not in good health. Perhaps he should not have continued as governor. Throughout that autumn and winter his friends and those he governed worried about his ‘frail body’ and refer to weakness, though it is not clear what this consisted of.

  Despite having smaller numbers than the English, the Indians had considerable advantages. Widely acknowledged to be more accurate shots than the English, they had good hearing and almost supernaturally good eyes due to their expertise at hunting. Indian forest craft was legendary. In a land where forest dominated the theatre of war the Indians knew the terrain better than any English. Increase Mather wrote: ‘They have advantages that we have not, knowing where to find us, but we know not where to find them … every Swamp is a Castle to them, and they can live comfortably on that which would starve Englishmen.’ As the English had learnt during the Pequot War, Indians were exponents of what was later called guerrilla warfare.

  Guerrilla warfare was developed in America by what are now called Rangers following Indian example. John Eliot called it ‘the skulking way of war’. It took some time for English settlers to abandon their prejudices against the despised – because uncivilised – Indian battle tactics, to realise that they had to adapt their manoeuvres to the forest warriors if they wanted to defeat them. King Philip’s War was not a European war of soldiers in uniform tramping in tight formation across plains. War games and stalking the enemy were part of the Indians’ culture and tradition. They were invisible, specialising in ambushes and deadly raids on towns by night. The Indians had largely discarded their bows and arrows in favour of flintlocks. T
hese portable guns were much better for quick reloading than the heavy old muskets and matchlocks the Pilgrims had brought with them to America. By 1675 the tomahawk was only used at close quarters. Contemporary accounts show the Indians believed that English soldiers were slow and unfit. Plymouth’s troops were farmers on horseback who knew how to shoot but had little interest in manoeuvres or supply chains. But the Indians had been thinking about tactics for centuries.

  Even the commander of the colony’s armed forces, James Cudworth, had little time for military action. In the past he had been unwilling to go on a mission against the Dutch because he was overwhelmed by domestic chores and his hay was still in the ground. His wife had always been unwell and was getting worse with age. He had very little help with his farm other than an Indian boy. He burst out to Josiah that he was as ready to serve his king and his country as any man ‘in what I am capable and fitted for’. But he did not see why a man had to serve his country if it resulted in ‘the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family’. In 1675 ruin and destruction of farms and family were threatening to happen anyway.

  * * *

  When Penelope fled Marshfield, Salem was far from the fighting. But a couple of weeks after the Nipmucks started burning towns in Massachusetts the country between her and Josiah was no longer safe. A group of experienced Massachusetts military men – including Captain Edward Hutchinson, the son of Anne Hutchinson, and Ephraim Curtis, who was well known for his friendships with the Indians – attempted to broker a peace deal. As they travelled towards Brookfield north-west of Boston they noticed that all the Nipmuck villages were deserted. That should have warned them. They were ambushed in a narrow ravine and had to retreat to one of the garrison houses at Brookfield, by this time crowded with much of the town’s population. Curtis and his friend Henry Young tried to escape to raise the alarm, but were forced back.

  Captain Hutchinson died a lingering death of his wounds. One unwary colonist who ventured out of the garrison had his head cut off and used as a football. Eventually under cover of night Curtis somehow got to Marlborough – thirty miles away – to raise the alarm. He returned with forces to lift the siege of Brookfield. The trembling people in the garrison house had fought off an Indian attack of flaming arrows and barrels set on fire pressed up against the walls. They had been saved by a providential rainstorm. But Brookfield had to be evacuated and abandoned. This was only August. There was much worse to come.

  On 1 September Deerfield in remote western Massachusetts was attacked unexpectedly. This was the furthest outpost of the English frontier. It was clear that the war could not be stopped, and the conflict spread north-east to Maine. The Abenakis, who had once been the trading partners of the Pilgrims, began to attack individual farms, perhaps in revenge for cruel behaviour by rough traders.

  Along the Kennebec, over fifty settlers were killed and their houses burnt. In north-east Maine colonists led isolated lives. In search of land and prosperity, newcomers had fanned out. Their farms, whose green acres were so vast and exciting, proved dangerously vulnerable to attack by marauding Indians who felt they had suffered too long at the hands of foreign usurpers. Roger Williams had told Canonchet dismissively that Indian warfare was just ‘commotion’, and that they had not won any battles or seized any forts. But that was an Anglocentric notion of warfare. The Indians had indeed won no battles but their tactics were working. Settlers were deserting their land in droves. The geographical distances were so vast it was hard to get troops to the attacks in time. Atrocity followed atrocity. The Indians attacked the carts of settlers, with women and children fleeing their homes. The bands of roaming Indians bent on destruction were often 500 strong. The average New England town was no match for such swift raids.

  Being a settler had always required courage in the great empty spaces. Now that courage was undermined. Men and women who had seen their friends scalped, and their brains spilling out, and no mercy shown even to babes in arms were terrified and lost their spirit. They began to fear they could never defeat the Indians and that the hand of God was truly against them.

  In late September the towns of the upper Connecticut Valley gave a deadline to the river Indians to hand in their arms. A week later, on 4 October, Springfield, once the valley’s most powerful and successful settlement, was wiped out. Springfield had been pioneered by the Pynchon family. They had built up a business empire which stretched to Antigua in the West Indies, where they had interests in sugar and rum. The Indians burnt their warehouses and 300 homes.

  * * *

  Since the summer the Narragansetts had been sheltering Philip’s chief ally Weetamoo in the middle of a secret and impassable swamp. Most colonists believed that the Narragansetts were helping Philip to his dramatic and alarming successes in western Massachusetts. Without them his army could not have had such huge numbers. Dying or wounded Narragansetts were found amongst Philip’s warriors.

  According to the traders living on the edge of Narragansett country, the Pocassets were treated like kin. In point of fact they were now kin. Shortly after her arrival, having put aside her pro-English husband Peter Nunuit, Weetamoo quickly married Quinnapin, one of the Narragansett princes. Because the tie of family was sacred amongst the Indians, the Pocassets could not be yielded up, even if the Narragansetts were bound to do so by treaty. The English did not know this. But they were deeply suspicious.

  Roger Williams retained his tight connection to the Indians. After suggesting in his usually eccentric way that an informal straw poll of all of New England was needed to see what God had in mind, he did good practical work with the Narragansetts. Using the moment when he was ferrying Canonchet in his large canoe, Williams delivered blunt advice to the new young chief. He told Canonchet that Philip was ‘Cawkakinnamuk’ – that is, his own looking glass: he was deaf to all advice. Moreover Philip was ‘Cooshkouwawi’ – that is, he caught ‘at every part of the country to save himself’ – but he was done for.

  Williams reported Canonchet ‘answered me in a consenting, considering way’. He warned the young chief that if the Narragansetts were false to their treaty, the English ‘would pursue them with a Winter’s War, when they should not as mosquitoes and rattle snakes in warm weather bite us’.

  But even Roger Williams was losing his influence. He did not know that Canonchet had secretly decided to join Philip.

  * * *

  By 9 December the largest army New England had ever seen, over 1,000 troops from all the New England colonies except Rhode Island, was preparing to attack the Narragansetts on their own territory. It was a bold move.

  The United Colonies leaders have been criticised by historians for attacking the neutral Narragansetts in a pre-emptive strike. But Narragansett neutrality was a ruse. They had failed to surrender Weetamoo and her warriors, and many of their young braves were helping Philip’s troops. The United Colonies commissioners meeting at Boston that November had come to the grim conclusion that they must destroy the Narragansetts before the Narragansetts rose up and destroyed them.

  Although it was a matter of some discussion who should take charge of the United Colonies forces, Josiah’s long-standing military expertise, and his conduct of the war in Plymouth, meant that for many he was the natural choice. The clergyman William Hubbard, who was present at many episodes in the war, thought Josiah ‘a pattern to the succeeding race, that may come after’, full of courage, resolution and prudence. Josiah could have commanded ‘a far greater army than ever is like to be gathered together in this part of the world’, a wonderful example, as the first governor of a New England colony to be born there.

  Even if there were reservations about Josiah’s harshness, most of his contemporaries thought no man fitter ‘for this great service’ of saving New England, to execute ‘the vengeance of the Lord upon the perfidious and bloody heathen’, as Increase Mather called it. But those who knew Josiah worried whether he was physically strong enough. On 18 November, Reverend Walley hoped God would set aside his weakne
sses and Plymouth’s need of him and ‘make him a saviour to this poor distressed land’. They must do what they could ‘to keep him alive and in health by our prayers’.

  On 10 December the army marched out of Boston in gusts of snow and ice. They were to rendezvous with the Connecticut men at Wickford on the edge of the Narragansetts’ territory. There was a stone garrison house there under the command of Jerry Bull. Because of Connecticut’s long history of good relations with Uncas, alongside the 300 Connecticut soldiers were fifty Mohegans and some Pequots. But after the army had crossed the Seekonk River on a pontoon raft made of canoes and treetrunks, they discovered the Wickford garrison had been massacred. The buildings where they would have had cover for the night had been burnt to the ground.

  Despite the heavy snow the army started marching thirty miles south-west, to the Chipuxet River. The Indians had gone into the swamps where no Englishman wanted to go without a guide. Fortunately the soldiers found stores of food buried in the ground, and saw an Indian named Peter watching them. Threatened with hanging if he did not take them to the Narragansetts’ hiding place, he led them to a swamp they did not even know existed. Because of the weather, the usually near-impassable swamp was frozen solid. Peter took them to a huge palisaded fort, concealed on an island where the Narragansetts and their allies the Wampanoags and Pocassets were hiding.

  Seeing a way in, the English forces charged at the fort and fought bravely with the Indians. Six captains were killed and William Bradford’s son got a bullet in him which was still there a year later. Hundreds of Indians escaped.