The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  When he picked up his new brigade, Church was treated to an extraordinary sight. At sundown the Sakonnet Indians came running from all directions, carrying the tops of dry pine trees to build a huge fire. The tribe surrounded it in three rings: Awashonks and the oldest of her people, ‘men and women mixed’, kneeling down formed the first ring next to the fire; all the ‘lusty stout men’ standing up formed the next; and then ‘all the rabble in a confused crew surrounded on the outside’. The chief captain danced between the rings and the fire with a spear in one hand and a hatchet in another, listing all the nations of Indians who were enemies to the English and mock-fighting firebrands in the fire. He was followed by another and another with increasing fury. Awashonks explained they were all now engaged to fight for Church. He might call upon them at any time and any place. She presented Church with what he called ‘a very fine firelock’.

  Church had been told a great Indian secret: that they always travelled ‘thin and scattered’ for safety. The English ‘always kept in a heap together’ so that it was as easy to hit them as a house. The English never scattered and the Indians always did.

  * * *

  As the summer sun blazed down on the bracken, the forces of colonists and Church’s Indians scoured the thick woods. Four times they narrowly missed capturing Philip. The Indian king had cut his hair to disguise his appearance. Church was so near that his men found Philip’s camp kettles still boiling over a fire, though the Indians were nowhere to be seen. Church’s men frequently found flattened grass, showing they were being watched.

  On 30 July Philip attempted to cross the Taunton River to attack Bridgewater again. His braves had pulled down a large pine tree and placed it across the river in preparation. Church and his men approached very early in the morning. On the stump of a tree an Indian warrior was sitting by himself. Church was about to fire when one of the Indians shouted he was friendly. As he was looking down the barrel Church realised he had had Philip himself in his sights. But Philip leapt down a bank on the side of the river and escaped.

  That day not only did Church capture 133 Indians but he also retrieved Philip’s wife Wootonekanuska, and their nine-year-old son. One of his prisoners told him, ‘Sir, you have now made Philip ready to die, for you have made him as poor and miserable as he used to make the English; for you have now killed or taken all his relations.’

  All English writers noted the warmth of the affection the Indians had for their children. And, as clan leader of the Wampanoag peoples, Philip had plenty of reason for heartbreak now that the Sakonnet braves of his close cousin Awashonks were helping his enemies.

  On 6 August a treacherous Indian offered to reveal the hiding place of the Squaw Sachem Weetamoo, Philip’s one remaining ally. Her men were captured but Weetamoo herself managed to flee. She tried to get over the river on a makeshift raft, but it fell apart and she drowned. Perhaps she was too broken, cold and miserable to struggle. Her naked corpse was found not far from the waterside where she had helped Philip make his escape the year before. The soldiers who came across her body sliced off her head and put it on a pole in Taunton. Some Indians in the prison there recognised her. They started to howl with anguish, crying out that ‘it was their queen’s head’.

  Six days later Philip himself and his closest comrades were cornered in his old home. Perhaps Philip had given up all hope. He no longer had much reason to live. In a state of extreme exhaustion, he had killed one of his followers who disagreed with his future plans. This man’s brother had found his way to Benjamin Church. When Church learnt Philip was just across the water, he crossed onto the peninsula. Philip was on a little spot of upland on Mount Hope, below which was a swamp. Church knew it well. Telling his men to be silent and crawl on their bellies, under the cover of darkness he positioned them throughout the trees. As the sun rose they were to make a noise, in effect beat Philip out and then ambush him. They now knew Philip’s techniques for escape. He was always first out of a trap so they were well prepared to fire at anyone who came silently out of the swamp.

  The story goes that Philip woke to find the swamp surrounded. At an opening to the swamp, where he was sure Philip would exit, Church had positioned two men – an Englishman and a Sakonnet Indian named Alderman. Sure enough Philip’s lithe figure raced out. They both took aim. The Englishman’s gun did not fire because it was damp. But Alderman had an old musket, a more reliable weapon, and an extraordinary eye. Philip fell stone dead on his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him.

  As they saw him fall, his men escaped. They did not see their leader dragged out of the mud by his stockings and breeches, or his head cut off and his body quartered by their Sakonnet cousins.

  No one at that time would have found this very shocking, but the Wampanoag braves would have resented the impertinence of the unimportant Sakonnet chosen to dismember their leader. As he stood with his hatchet he made a disrespectful speech over their chief’s body: Philip had been ‘a very great man, and had made many a man afraid of him’ but, however important he had been, the Sakonnet was now going to ‘chop his arse for him’.

  * * *

  In the centre of another swamp in woods above Rehoboth, Church had another coup. He tracked down Annawon, one of Philip’s most important commanders – ‘a very subtle man of great resolution’. He had also been a valiant captain under Massasoit. An old squaw was making supper in the camp. Under the noise of her pounding corn, Church and his men lowered themselves down the cliff and seized Annawon. Church told Annawon’s Indians he could guarantee their lives would be spared, and that although he would plead for Annawon’s, he could not guarantee it. There followed an extraordinary scene.

  All except Church and Annawon went to rest. For an hour in the bright moonlight the two stared at one another. Church could not speak Algonquian, and he thought Annawon could not speak English. Annawon suddenly produced a package. It was Philip’s ceremonial dress, and included what Church called Philip’s belt, a sort of stole that reached the ankles, ‘curiously wrought with black and white wampum, in various figures and flowers, and pictures of many birds and beasts’, as well as a headband with two flags at the back. Falling on his knees Annawon said in plain English, ‘Great Captain, you have killed Philip and conquered his country, therefore these things belong to you.’ Annawon told Church all the objects were Philip’s ‘royalties which he was wont to adorn himself with when he sat in state’. They were edged round with red hair which Annawon said was got from the Mohawk country. Annawon had saved them after Philip’s desperate flight. The night passed in good conversation as Annawon related his war deeds and life with Massasoit.

  As soon as it was light they marched out of the swamp. Annawon and his Indians were taken to Plymouth while Church had business in Boston. He was sure his men would soon capture the last of Philip’s captains, his brother-in-law Tispaquin, another superb soldier. Church had given his word that if Tispaquin surrendered he would not be executed. He thought it was much more sensible to incorporate the captured chiefs along with other good fighters into the colonists’ army against the Maine Indians.

  But though Church had given his word to Tispaquin and intended to plead for Annawon, it was to no avail. When he returned to Plymouth their heads were stuck on poles there, along with Philip’s.

  Despite the amnesty, all male Indians over the age of fourteen who surrendered were sold into slavery in the West Indies. At least 1,000 were sent to work on the sugar plantations. It was their punishment as rebels, as one of Josiah’s surviving certificates declared.

  Most people felt harshly towards the Indians. They paid to see an exhibition of Philip’s hands and the powder scar where he had burned himself, which were displayed in Boston and other towns. But finer feelings were not altogether dead. In his memoirs Benjamin Church wrote how in a cleaning-up operation in 1677 to make sure the woods were safe, he met an old Indian whose name was ‘Conscience’. ‘Then the war is over’, said Church, ‘for that was what they were searching
for, it being much wanted.’

  But it was to the slave markets of the Caribbean that Philip’s young son was probably sent. The Elders of Plymouth and Boston made use of the Old Testament to debate what to do about what they described as ‘a child of death’. This was the boy, whose name is not known, for whom Philip had asked Mrs Rowlandson to sew a shirt. Deuteronomy said a child should not be put to death for his father’s sins, but there were precedents when children of notorious rebels and traitors who had been ‘the principal leaders’ against a whole country could be executed, even if they themselves were not culpable. But the kind-hearted Reverend James Keith of Bridgewater, who, tradition relates, hid Philip’s wife Wootonekanuska and their son before they were captured, urged mercy. He wrote to John Cotton junior on 30 October 1676, ‘I long to hear what becomes of Philip’s wife and his son.’ The last mention of him is in a letter John Cotton junior wrote from Plymouth to Increase Mather on 20 March 1677: ‘Philip’s boy goes now to be sold.’ What became of Philip’s wife and son is not known. There are many legends that his descendants – and thus of course the descendants of the great Massasoit – can be found in Bermuda or the West Indies.

  * * *

  Philip’s death was a sign of God’s blessing, that New England’s providential destiny was still on course. Nevertheless colonists remained crushed by what seemed to many to be God’s judgement that they were a sinful people who had lost sight of their covenant. Penelope herself had some kind of nervous crisis that was so severe she had to be counselled by Elders at Plymouth and Marshfield.

  At the end of the war a fire broke out in Boston, which burnt forty-six houses before it was brought under control. It was another sign of God’s power. He could turn their dwellings to ashes without the help of either foreign or domestic enemies.

  Though Josiah was regarded as a hero in Plymouth, some contemporaries in Rhode Island and Massachusetts were angry about what many saw as an unnecessary war. Josiah himself was too well connected and well liked to come in for much personal recorded criticism. The war had killed perhaps ten per cent of the population of New England as a whole, with half the population of Indian tribes being wiped out. Those Indians who managed to escape the wrath of the Puritan colonies either hastened west to New York or north-east to Maine where the fighting was continuing. Governor Andros welcomed the pathetic refugees fleeing their homeland. Good relations with the Mohawks and their Iroquois relations were a keystone of his administration. Whether they wanted to be or not, numerous Indian refugees were adopted members of the Mohawk tribe.

  The fourteen Praying Towns were reduced to four. The relationship between the Indians and English had been irremediably altered. It was not until the nineteenth century, when the new American Republic was in search of a national myth, and the Indians were no longer dangerous, that they were once again upheld as noble savages.

  Such was the feeling in 1676 against Daniel Gookin, the superintendent of the Indians, he was not re-elected to the Massachusetts Court of Assistants. Gookin’s account of what he called The Sufferings of the Indians was not published in America in his lifetime.

  In 1690 John Eliot died. His Latin School at Roxbury continues to this day. Eliot’s Algonquian Bible went out of print. After the war Harvard University’s Indian College saw no more Indian students. The building fell into ruins by the end of the century. Despite the best intentions, its most successful students – John Sassamon and James Printer – had not done well straddling the English and Indian peoples.

  With the death of Roger Williams in 1683 another great champion of the Indians passed away. He had denounced Philip as an ‘ungrateful monster’, but to his dying day Williams defended the point of view of the Narragansetts, nostalgically recalling the great friendship they had shown him for forty years. He did not abandon his controversial championing of their customs. English settlers’ cheating over land grants ‘stunk in their pagan nostrils’ and was one of the reasons for ‘their late great burning and slaughtering of us’. As was often the case with early settlers, Williams decided to be buried in his own garden. When an enthusiast tried to find the grave in the nineteenth century, all that he could retrieve was an apple-tree root. It was as if New England’s vegetation had taken over his body just as the native inhabitants had taken over his heart.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Penelope Alone: the widow’s bed ‘not priced’

  The war had been ruinously expensive, and especially terrible for Plymouth. A contemporary report to the English government said 1,200 houses in New England had been burnt, 8,000 cattle had died and huge quantities of food had been destroyed. In August 1676, thanks to an initiative by Increase Mather’s brother, a minister in Dublin, Irish Protestants sent a ship called the Katharine with cargo to be sold for the poor people of New England. Everywhere Josiah looked there was misery. Plymouth could not even pay its creditors. During the Narragansett campaign Josiah had persuaded the local grandee Peleg Sanford to advance money for bandages for his men after the Great Swamp Fight, but Sanford was still dunning for his money six years later.

  Plymouth was particularly devastated because so much of the war took place on its land. In addition to blackened fields there was a shortage of labour because so many men were dead. The English had not gone in for scalping or skinning their enemies as the Indians did on a regular basis. (One Englishman had his stomach cut open and a Bible stuffed into it.) But the English had burned Indian villages. And there were other atrocities – particularly at the hands of the privateer turned Massachusetts soldier Samuel Moseley and his band of thugs. On 16 October 1675 Moseley ordered a captured Indian woman resisting questioning ‘to be torn in pieces by dogs’. On two occasions he shot prisoners in his care. The rest were sold into slavery. His position as a relation of Governor Leverett seems to have protected him from criminal proceedings.

  Unlike the Indians, most of the colonists eventually returned to their own homes, but getting back to normal was hampered by mental anguish as well as lack of manpower. Amidst the wreckage of clothing and linen were the broken remains of chairs and tables carved so painstakingly in happier times. Precious sentimental objects, often the last relics of ancestors and deceased relations, were blown away by the wind, and lost forever. The wilderness, which had been beaten back, returned.

  Careswell was battered by its spell as a garrison house where twenty men had lived. Penelope had to face the fact that, like Careswell, her husband would never be the same again. Josiah was no longer the athletic young man of his portrait. Wearied by leadership, by dealing with the injured, maimed and homeless, his aims were now a return to order and restoring the public finances.

  The tax rate for Plymouth needed to be set at ten times what it had been before the calamitous war, but people were nervous about returning to their homes to start the vast task of rebuilding on their own. Sporadic attacks were feared. The mood throughout New England was sombre. Men were dying of their wounds and disease. As Mary Rowlandson would recall: ‘I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me.’

  The solution preached by Elders in meeting houses all over New England was greater orthodoxy, greater repentance and a harsher attitude to heterodoxy. The war had happened because the colonists had retreated from the values which had brought them to America. Eastern Maine was still uninhabitable because of the continuing war with the Abenaki. The drying up of trade and the despair was inevitably seen as a sign of sinfulness exemplified for some by the Half-Way Covenant. The Old Testament showed how God had punished His people in the past if they had not pleased Him. Now He was doing it again.

  In his poem ‘New England’s Crisis’ the schoolmaster poet Benjamin Tompson pointed out that if New England had remained true to the simplicity of its early days – when settlers were happy to eat off wooden trays with clam shells – all might have been well. Tompson sighed for the Eden of their ‘wiser fathers’, when manners were plai
n, clothes not European but ‘puritanick capes’, and when graces were so long the food got cold. They had been ‘golden times (too fortunate to hold)’ sinned away ‘for love of gold’.

  The colonial administrator Edward Randolph was asked by the government in London to report on New England in the aftermath of the war. He related in amazement ‘the government of the Massachusetts (to give it in their own words) do declare these are the great evils for which God hath given the heathen commission to rise against them’, one of which was ‘following strange fashions in their apparel’.

  But the sin of pride was all part of the same problem, the new profaneness which made God angry. Now Plymouth Colony’s inhabitants were graver, less accommodating and less open-minded than before. There was a new brutality, as if they wanted to prove themselves by their harshness and intolerance. Plymouth had been much the most charitable to the Quakers of the New England colonies. There were several communities of them, especially on Cape Cod, but now feeling had grown that their strange religion bore a heavy responsibility for ‘these dreadful frowns of providence’. The Quakers had earned additional obloquy because of their association with Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders had tried to claim some of Philip’s empty land and had taken in many of the defeated Indians, although they felt that they had suffered badly from a war that was not of their making.

  * * *

  There was only one way of paying for the costs of the war: gain control of the rich agricultural Wampanoag lands at Mount Hope. It was Josiah’s hope that these Indian territories be granted to Plymouth as opposed to their rivals, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To this end, and to secure a proper charter, Josiah heavily cultivated the English government official Edward Randolph. Randolph was a frequent guest at Careswell. Josiah was becoming increasingly lame but Randolph was taken to shoot game in an elegant fashion. Over a glass of wine imported before the war, Randolph convivially discussed how to advantage Plymouth.