The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  On the night of June 26, a total eclipse of the moon was witnessed all across New England. several soldiers claimed they saw a black spot in the moon’s center resembling “the scalp of an Indian.” All agreed that an “eclipse falling out at that instant of time was ominous.”

  Finally on Monday, June 28, with the arrival of several Massachusetts companies from Boston, the number of soldiers had reached the point that Cudworth was willing to attack the Indians. In addition to a troop of horsemen under Captain Thomas Prentice and a company of foot soldiers under Captain Daniel Henchman, there was a rowdy bunch of volunteers under the command of Captain samuel Moseley.

  The English had not yet fought a single battle, but Moseley, a sea captain, was already something of a hero. In April, he had led a successful assault on some Dutch pirates off the coast of Maine. In June, several of the captured sailors were put on trial and condemned to death, but with the outbreak of war, they were let free as long as they were willing to fight the Indians under Moseley. In addition to this group of pirates, which included a huge Dutchman named Cornelius Anderson, Moseley had a wild gang of servants and apprentices from Boston.

  To a pious group of farm boys and merchants from Plymouth, Moseley’s men seemed as savage as the Indians themselves. To Benjamin Church, Moseley was destined to become a bitter rival.

  The attack on the Indians was scheduled for the following day, but some of the new arrivals, led by quartermasters John Gill and Andrew Belcher, asked to go out immediately and “seek the enemy in their own quarters.” some Indians on the opposite side of the river were taking great delight in shooting at the garrison. It was time to put these heathens in their place.

  Permission was granted, and twelve troopers prepared to take it to the enemy. In addition to William Hammond of nearby Rehoboth, who was to act as their scout, the troopers asked Benjamin Church to join them. They quickly set out across the bridge, all of them knowing that an audience of several hundred English soldiers was watching their every move.

  Almost as soon as they crossed the bridge, about a dozen Indians hidden in some nearby bushes started firing at them. In an instant, Hammond, the scout, was, if not dead, nearly so. Belcher was hit in the knee and his horse was shot out from under him, while Gill was slammed in the gut. Fortunately, he’d worn a protective coat of quarter-inch-thick ox hide, known as a buff coat, which he had lined with several pieces of well-placed parchment, and suffered only a severe bruise.

  • Massachusetts governor John Leverett wearing an ox-hide buff coat.

  The troopers were so terrified by the attack that they turned their horses around and galloped back for the garrison, leaving Hammond dazed and dying and Belcher trapped beneath his horse. As the troopers clattered across the bridge, Church “stormed and stamped, and told them’twas a shame to run and leave a wounded man there to become a prey to the barbarous enemy.”

  By this time, Hammond had fallen down dead off his horse, and with the assistance of Gill and only one other man, Church attempted to save Belcher’s life. Church jumped off his horse and loaded both Belcher and Hammond onto the horses of the other two. As they retreated to the garrison, Church went after Hammond’s horse, which was wandering off toward the Indians. All the while, he shouted out to those at the garrison “to come over and fight the enemy.” But no one appeared willing to join him.

  The Indians had had a chance to reload and were now blasting away at Church as he continued to yell at his army on the other side of the river. Every one of the Indians’ bullets missed, although one ball did strike the foot of a soldier watching from the safety of the garrison. Church decided he had better join his cowardly companions before the Indians had a chance to reload and fire once again. He started back across the bridge, but not without proclaiming, “The Lord have mercy on us if such a handful of Indians shall thus dare such an army!”

  ◆◆◆ It was an awful night. As a cold wind lashed the Miles garrison with rain and Moseley’s men mocked the troopers with “many profane oaths,” a soldier from Watertown lost control of himself. screaming “God is against the English!” he ran crazily around the garrison—“a lamentable spectacle”—until he was finally calmed down.

  The next morning, Moseley and his pirates led the way across the bridge. Having learned to fight on a ship’s deck, these sailors were, it turned out, much better adapted to fighting Indians than the militiamen, who were trained in old-fashioned warfare and still carried heavy, ineffective matchlocks instead of flintlocks. Ten of the enemy could be seen on the opposite side of the river, about a half mile away, shouting insults at the English. “[N]ot at all daunted by such kind of alarms,” Moseley and his men “ran violently down upon them over the bridge, pursuing them a mile and a quarter on the other side.”

  Moseley’s men chased the Indians until they had disappeared into a swamp, killing, it was later reported, about a half dozen of them. In the meantime Church was forced to participate in a more traditional military operation. Fanning out in two wings, the troopers created a long line meant to clear the area of Indians while protecting the foot soldiers in the middle. Unfortunately, the center of the line was, in Church’s judgment, “not well headed.” With the rain making it hard to see, some of the soldiers mistook their comrades for the enemy. One of the troopers, a twenty-year-old soldier named Perez savage, who “boldly held up his colors in the front of his company,” was shot not once but twice, one ball harmlessly piercing the brim of his hat and the other hitting him in the thigh. With the weather getting worse by the moment and no Indians in sight (although several officers insisted that savage had been hit by Native fire), it was decided to return to the garrison for the night.

  The next day, the English forces were in no hurry to march on Mount Hope, where as many as five hundred Native warriors were said to be waiting for them. Not until noon did the English head out once again across the bridge. The previous day they had ventured only a mile and a half into enemy territory; this time they continued on to the English settlement at Kickemuit. Tensions were already high among the militiamen. What they saw at Kickemuit made them only more nervous about what lay ahead.

  The abandoned houses had all been burned. But even more disturbing were the pieces of paper seen fluttering in the air, paper that soon proved to be the torn pages of a Bible. For this overwhelmingly Puritan force, it was shocking to know that the Indians had ripped apart this most sacred of books and scattered God’s words to the winds “in hatred of our religion.”

  Then, three miles later, they discovered the remains of eight Englishmen, killed five days earlier at the nearby settlement of Mattapoisett. The Indians had placed the men’s heads, scalps, and hands on poles and planted them beside the road in a “barbarous and inhuman manner bidding us defiance.” The body parts were quickly buried, and the soldiers continued on.

  Two miles later, they reached the Pokanokets’ village. One of the first to arrive was the giant Dutch pirate Cornelius Anderson. It was clear that the Indians had left in a hurry. Cooking utensils had been left scattered on the ground, and at Philip’s own wigwam the Dutchman found what several local residents recognized as the sachem’s hat—a hat that Anderson placed triumphantly on his own huge head. spreading out almost as far as the eye could see was an estimated thousand acres of Indian corn. soon the soldiers began uprooting every stalk. If they could not defeat the Indians in battle, they would do their best to starve them to death.

  Church knew immediately what had happened. Philip and his people had escaped by canoes across the sound to Pocasset—not an easy feat since the waters surrounding Mount Hope were supposedly being guarded by ships from Rhode Island. Once in Pocasset, Philip had met up with Weetamoo, who now had no choice but to join her brother-in-law.

  Church recognized it as a brilliant move. Not only did Philip now have “a more advantageous post,” he was stronger than he’d ever been. Church’s commanders, however, chose to see Philip’s escape from Mount Hope as “a mighty conquest.” They had
driven the Pokanokets from their homeland.

  Church urged his superiors to pursue Philip immediately. If the sachem escaped again from Pocasset, the whole region might soon be at war. But the Plymouth commander James Cudworth insisted that they must first search every inch of the Mount Hope Peninsula for Indians. Then it was decided that the army should build a fort on the site of Philip’s village to make sure the Pokanokets did not return to Mount Hope. From Church’s perspective, it was nothing but busywork to delay the time when the English must finally face the Indians in battle. “’Twas rather their fear than their courage,” Church wrote, “that obliged them to set up the marks of their conquest.”

  While the Plymouth forces built a useless fort, the Massachusetts Bay authorities committed an even larger mistake. Instead of sending Moseley and the others after Philip, they decided it was time to turn their attention to the Narragansetts. There were concerns that the tribe might be preparing to join Philip in the war. some of the Pokanokets’ women and children, it was rumored, had sought shelter with the Narragansetts.

  In truth, however, there was no clear evidence that the tribe might attack the English. The Narragansetts, like all the other tribes in New England, were watching Philip’s rebellion very closely. In the beginning, they assumed the conflict was just between Philip and Plymouth. With the arrival of soldiers from Massachusetts Bay, the Narragansetts began to realize that the English saw the rebellion differently. Even though Massachusetts Bay had no complaints against Philip, the Puritans had quickly come to their neighbors’ defense. Even Rhode Island, which both Plymouth and Massachusetts normally ignored, had offered to help. “[The Narragansetts] demanded why the Massachusetts and Rhode Island rose and joined with Plymouth against Philip,” Roger Williams wrote on June 25, “and left not Philip and Plymouth to fight it out. We answered that all the colonies were subject to one King Charles, and it was his pleasure and our duty and engagement for one Englishman to stand to the death by each other in all parts of the world.”

  For his part, Church had not given up on his original hope of winning both Weetamoo and Awashonks over to the English side. He was convinced that if he’d been able to speak to the sachems before the fighting began, they would not have joined Philip. But even if it was too late to keep the Pocassets and sakonnets out of the war, it was a waste of time to stay at Mount Hope.

  One other officer agreed with Church that it was time to move into Pocasset. Matthew Fuller was the army’s surgeon general. Although he was, in his own words, too “ancient and heavy” to be chasing Indians, he asked Church if he’d go with him to Pocasset. Church responded that “he had rather do anything in the world than stay there to build the fort.” so on the night of Thursday, July 8, after taking the ferry that ran from the southern tip of Mount Hope to Aquidneck Island, which was part of Rhode Island and remained free of violence throughout the war, Fuller, Church, and just thirty-six men were transported by boat to the shores of Pocasset.

  ◆◆◆ While Fuller went north with half the men, Church took the other half south toward his home in sakonnet. With any luck, he might make contact with Awashonks. several hours later, his men began to complain that they had not yet found any of the Indians he had promised them. As they made their way along the shore of the sakonnet River, Church assured them “that if it was their desire to see Indians, he believed he should now soon show them what they should say was enough.”

  On Punkatees Neck, between a hill of dense forest and the stony shore of the sakonnet River, they found a newly planted field of peas. They also saw two Indians walking through the field toward them. When the Indians turned and started to run, Church called out that he only wanted to talk and would not hurt them. But the Indians continued to run.

  There was a fence between the field and the woods, so Church and his men followed the Indians over the fence and into the woods. suddenly the darkness erupted with the roar of dozens of muskets firing simultaneously. Like many other English officers would do in the months ahead, Church had led his men into an ambush.

  Church glanced back, “expecting to have seen half of them dead.” But all his men were still standing and firing blindly ahead. Church ordered them to stop firing. If they shot all at once, the Indians might charge them with their hatchets while they reloaded. It was time to retreat to the field.

  As soon as they reached the fence, Church ordered those who had not yet fired their muskets to hide behind the fence while the others moved into the field and reloaded. If the Indians should chase them to the fence, there would be a trap waiting for them. Church was quickly learning how to use the Indians’ own tactics of hiding and surprise against them.

  But when Church looked back to the heavily wooded hill from which they’d just come, he immediately began to change his strategy. From where he stood, the wooded hill appeared to be moving. He soon realized that the rise of land was completely covered with Indians, “their bright guns glittering in the sun” as they poured out of the woods and onto the field. The field bordered the sakonnet River, and the Indians were attempting to surround the Englishmen before they reached the water’s edge.

  Near the water were the ruins of a stone wall. Church ordered his men to run across the field and to the wall before the Indians reached it. He also told them to strip down to their white shirts so that any boats across the river would know that they were Englishmen and rescue them. soon they were all dashing across the field, the Indians’ bullets cutting through the leaves of the pea plants as they threw themselves over an old hedge and tumbled down the bank to the wall beside the shore.

  Unfortunately, it was not much of a wall. As the Indians took up positions around them, using the ruins of an old stone house and any available stumps, rocks, trees, and fence posts for protection, Church and his men were left wide open to shots from the north and south. They grabbed whatever rocks they could find and began widening the wall.

  But their biggest problem was not a lack of protection—it was their lack of gunpowder. Church estimated that they were up against several hundred Indians, and there were only twenty of them. Once they ran out of powder, the Indians would fall on them in a moment, and they would all be massacred.

  Church marveled at how his men “bravely and wonderfully defended themselves” in the face of such a huge force. All afternoon, beneath a hot sun, Church and his men held their ground as the Indians whooped and shouted. With night approaching, one of Church’s soldiers said he could see a sloop sailing toward them from a tiny island several miles up the river. “succor is now coming!” Church shouted. He recognized the ship as belonging to Captain Roger Goulding, “a man,” he assured them, “for business.”

  The sloop glided with the breeze down to the English soldiers. Captain Goulding proved as trustworthy as Church had claimed. He anchored his vessel and floated his canoe out to Church and his men. The sails and hull of his sloop were soon riddled with bullet holes, but Goulding stayed put.

  The canoe was so tiny that only two men could fit in it at a time. It took ten slow trips back and forth, but at least there was a growing number of soldiers in the sloop to provide cover for those in the canoe. Finally, only Church was left ashore. As he prepared to climb into the canoe, he realized that he had left his hat and cutlass at a nearby well, where he had stopped to get a drink of water at the beginning of the siege. When he told his men that he was going back to get his things, they begged him to get into the canoe. But Church refused to listen to them; he must have his hat and sword.

  since he was the only Englishman left, all the Indians’ guns were aimed at him as he made his way to the well, which today bears his name. A stream of bullets flew through the air, but none hit Church. On returning to the canoe, with the hat on his head and the cutlass at his side, he fired his musket one last time. Just as he settled into the canoe, a bullet grazed his hair, but he reached the sloop unharmed.

  It had been a remarkable day. For six hours, twenty men had held off three hundred Indians (a number t
hat was later confirmed by the Indians themselves) without suffering a single death. Church looked to this event for the rest of his life as proof of “the glory of God and His protecting providence.” But he’d also learned something else during what came to be known as the Pease Field Fight: When it came to Awashonks and the sakonnets, the time for diplomacy was over.

  ◆◆◆ On Monday, July 19, 1675, a combined Plymouth-Massachusetts force crossed the bay for Pocasset. Running along the eastern shore of the bay was a seven-mile-long cedar swamp, beside which Philip had reportedly camped with Weetamoo. For the English it would be a day of confusion and fear as they chased the Pokanokets and Pocassets into the depths of what Major William Bradford described as a “hideous swamp.” samuel Moseley once again led the charge. Moseley and his pirates were assisted by a pack of dogs, but even they weren’t very helpful in the Pocasset swamp.

  Almost as soon as Moseley’s men entered the swamp, five of them were dead, the bullets flying, it seemed, from the trees themselves. The Indians quickly retreated deeper into the swamp, deserting close to a hundred wigwams made of bark so green that they were impossible to burn. The English came upon an old man who was unable to keep up with the others and who told them that Philip had just been there.

  For the next few hours, they wandered through the swamp but soon discovered, in Hubbard’s words, “how dangerous it is to fight in such dismal woods, when their eyes were muffled with the leaves, and their arms pinioned with the thick boughs of the trees, as their feet were continually shackled with the roots spreading every way in those boggy woods.” several soldiers accidentally shot at their own men, and as darkness came on, all of them gladly gave up and retreated to more solid ground.