The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  ◆ Pocasset Swamp as it appeared in the early twentieth century.

  That night, Major Cudworth, the leader of the Plymouth forces, decided that he had had enough of swamps. They would do as they had done on Mount Hope: Instead of pursuing the enemy, they’d build a fort. Cudworth and his fellow officers thought that they now had Philip and Weetamoo trapped. If they carefully guarded the swamp and prevented the Indians from escaping, they could starve them out.

  In addition to the soldiers stationed at forts on Mount Hope and in Pocasset, Cudworth suggested that there be a small “flying army,” whose purpose was to prevent the Indians from “destroying cattle and fetching in [a] supply of food, which being attended, will bring them to great straits.” If this strategy worked, the war would effectively be over. since there was now no need for a large army, most of the companies from Massachusetts Bay, including Moseley’s, were sent back to Boston.

  There was evidence, however, that Philip was not the only Indian sachem at war. A week earlier, on July 14, what appeared to have been Nipmucks from Massachusetts had attacked the town of Mendon, twenty miles to the west of Boston, and killed six people. Closer to home, Philip’s brother-in-law Tuspaquin, the Black sachem, had burned down Middleborough, while the sachem Totoson from the Buzzards Bay region just to the west of Cape Cod had attacked the town of Dartmouth, burning houses and killing several people. While yet another “losing fort” was being built at Pocasset, Church accompanied the 112 Plymouth soldiers sent to aid Dartmouth.

  What seems never to have occurred to Major Cudworth, who led the expedition to Dartmouth himself, and to Captain Henchman, who was left to build the Pocasset fort, was that Totoson’s attack might have been a diversion. On July 30, word reached Henchman that the Indians he was supposedly guarding in the Pocasset swamp were no longer there. Philip and several hundred Pokanokets and Pocassets had managed to escape to the north and make their way across a shallow part of the Taunton River. They were now hurrying west and to the north toward Nipmuck country.

  A messenger was sent to Rehoboth, where the minister, Noah Newman, began to organize a party of volunteers to pursue Philip. Also in Rehoboth was a group of approximately fifty newly arrived Mohegan Indians under the command of Uncas’s son Oneco. The Mohegans’ decision to remain loyal to the English was one of the few pieces of good news the colonies received in the summer of 1675, and Uncas’s son eagerly joined the chase.

  By sunset of July 31, the English and Mohegans had pursued Philip across the seekonk River into the vicinity of modern North Providence. The trail headed northwest for another ten or so miles, and with it now almost totally dark, several Mohegan scouts were sent up ahead. They reported hearing the sounds of wood being chopped as Philip’s men made camp. Leaving their horses behind, the English and Mohegans continued on foot another three miles until they reached a region known as Nipsachuck.

  It had been hoped that Captain Henchman and his men, who had sailed from Pocasset to Providence, would have joined them by now. But even without reinforcements, they decided it was time to fight the enemy. As they prepared to attack just before dawn, five Pocassets from Weetamoo’s camp, apparently out looking for food, stumbled upon them. shots were fired, and the battle began.

  The fighting lasted until nine in the morning, when Philip’s and Weetamoo’s men were forced to retreat into a nearby swamp. They had suffered a major loss—twenty-three men including Nimrod, one of Philip’s bravest warriors, were dead—while the English had lost only two men.

  Philip had lost even more men to desertion, and he and his sixty or so remaining warriors were almost ready to surrender as they huddled at the edge of the Nipsachuck swamp. They were starving, exhausted, and almost out of gunpowder, with several hundred women and children depending on them for protection. But instead of pursuing the enemy, Captain Henchman, who had not arrived from Providence until after the fighting was over, decided to wait until the Mohegans had finished taking plunder from the bodies of the dead. Not until the next morning did he order his men to break camp and pursue Philip.

  By then it was too late. Both Weetamoo and Philip had managed to escape. They hadn’t gone far when Weetamoo, who had been a reluctant ally of Philip’s since the very beginning of the war, decided to leave her brother-in-law. Many of the women and children were unable to go much farther. Even if it might mean capture, the Pocasset sachem decided that she and two hundred women and children, along with a handful of their husbands and fathers, would look for safety among the nearby Narragansetts to the south. Philip’s forces, now down to just forty warriors and a hundred or so women and children, continued north until they were met by several Nipmuck warriors, who led them to a remote, well-guarded village at Menameset.

  ◆◆◆ Three times Philip had avoided what seemed like certain capture, but he had been driven from his homeland. His original fighting force of approximately 250 warriors was down to 40, only 30 of whom had guns. The Pokanokets were, for all practical purposes, defeated. Yet by fighting his way out of Plymouth Colony, Philip had a chance to transform a local fight into a regionwide war.

  The Pokanokets were in bad shape, but the Nipmucks were ready to take up the fight. Just a few days before, they had destroyed the frontier town of Brookfield, Massachusetts. On Friday, August 6, Philip was greeted by three of the Nipmucks’ most powerful sachems. Philip still possessed a coat made of wampum, and he used it to good effect. Unstringing the valuable white and purple shell beads, he gave a large amount of wampum to each of the sachems.

  In the months ahead, Philip continued to cut “his coat to pieces” as he secured the cooperation of sachems from Connecticut to modern Maine. “[B]y this means,” William Hubbard wrote, “Philip ... kindl[ed] the flame of war ... wherever he [went].”

  FOURTEEN

  Fuel to the Enemy

  THE WAR THAT had begun in New England’s oldest colony spread with terrifying speed to the newest and most distant settlements in the region. The frontier of Massachusetts, which included the Connecticut River valley and modern New Hampshire and Maine, soon erupted into violence.

  The war in Massachusetts had truly begun on August 2 with the Nipmucks’ attack on the town of Brookfield, one of the most isolated settlements in the colony. Brookfield had just twenty houses and was a day’s journey from its nearest neighbor, springfield. As happened often in the months ahead, the fighting began with an ambush. Diplomats from Boston, hoping to establish peace with the Nipmucks, were suddenly attacked from a hillside overlooking the forest path. Eight English, including three residents of Brookfield, were killed, with just a handful of survivors managing to ride back to town. soon after their arrival, several hundred Nipmucks descended on Brookfield, and one of the most legendary sieges in the history of New England was under way.

  For two days, eighty people, most of them women and children, gathered in the home of sergeant John Ayres, one of those killed in the ambush. When the Indians were not burning the rest of the town to the ground, they were firing on the house with guns and flaming arrows, forcing the English to chop holes through the roof and walls so that they could put out the fires. At one point, the Nipmucks loaded a cart full of flaming rags and pushed it up against the side of the house. If not for a sudden shower of rain, the house would surely have caught fire. Finally, on the night of August 3, fifty troopers under the command of Major simon Willard came to the rescue, and the Nipmucks dispersed.

  ◆ Nineteenth-century engraving of the English coming to the rescue at the end of the Indian assault on Brookfield.

  With the attack on Brookfield, people throughout the western portion of the colony began to fear that they would be next, especially when the Nipmucks moved on Lancaster on August 22 and killed eight English. On August 24, a council of war was held at the town of Hatfield on the Connecticut River, where concerns were raised about the loyalty of the neighboring Indians. A force of one hundred English was sent out, and the Indians, many of whom did not want to go to war, had no choice but t
o join the fight against them. What became known as the battle of south Deerfield resulted in the deaths of nine English and twenty-six Indians as the war quickly spread up and down the river valley.

  On september 3, Richard Beers was sent with thirty-six men to evacuate the town of Northfield. Unaware of the Indians’ use of hiding as a tactical weapon, Beers led his men into an ambush and twenty-one were killed. On september 17, a day of public humiliation and prayer was declared in Boston. Colonists were told to refrain from “intolerable pride in clothes and hair [and] the toleration of so many taverns.” But the Lord remained unmoved.

  The following day proved to be, according to Hubbard, “that most fatal day, the saddest that ever befell New England.” Captain Thomas Lathrop was leading seventy-nine people away from the town of Deerfield. They were about to cross a small stream when several of the soldiers put down their guns to gather some ripe autumn grapes. At that moment, hundreds of Indians burst out of the forest. Fifty-seven English were killed, turning the brown waters of what was known as Muddy Brook bright red with blood. From then on, the stream was called Bloody Brook.

  ◆ Nineteenth-century engraving of the Native American attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts.

  For the Indians, it was an astonishingly easy triumph. “[T]he heathen were wonderfully animated,” the historian Increase Mather wrote, “some of them triumphing and saying, that so great a slaughter was never known, and indeed in their wars one with another, the like hath rarely been heard of.” But the fighting was not over yet.

  Captain samuel Moseley and his men happened to be nearby, and they heard gunshots. By this time, Moseley was widely known as Massachusetts Bay’s most ferocious Indian fighter. Moseley believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, so he refused to trust Native scouts and had nothing but contempt for the colony’s Praying Indians. In August, he disregarded orders and burned the wigwams of the friendly Penacooks in New Hampshire; soon after, he seized a group of Praying Indians on false charges, strung them together by the neck, and marched them into Boston for punishment. since Moseley was related to the governor and was now a popular hero, he felt free to do anything he wanted. He also enjoyed shocking the authorities back in Boston. That fall, he happily wrote that he had ordered a captive Indian woman “be torn in pieces by dogs.”

  There was no Englishman the Indians hated more, and when Moseley took the field at Bloody Brook, the Nipmuck warriors shouted, “Come on, Moseley, come on. You want Indians. Here are enough Indians for you.”

  For the next six hours, Moseley and his men put up a tremendous fight. Moseley ordered his vastly outnumbered men to remain together as a unit as they marched back and forth through the Natives, firing their muskets relentlessly. After hours of fighting, Moseley was forced to ask his two lieutenants to take the lead while he, according to Hubbard, “took a little breath, who was almost melted with laboring, commanding, and leading his men through the midst of the enemy.” If not for the arrival of Major Robert Treat and some friendly Mohegans at dusk, Moseley and his men might have all been killed. The next day, sixty-four Englishmen were buried in a single mass grave.

  ◆ Nineteenth-century engraving of the ambush at Bloody Brook.

  Less than a month later, on October 5, the Indians fell on springfield. By day’s end, thirty-two houses and twenty-five barns had been burned; several mills had been destroyed and tons of provisions. In all of springfield, only thirteen out of seventy-five houses and barns were left standing.

  In this climate of growing fear, the presence of the Praying Indians’ self-contained villages within a thirty-mile radius of Boston became unacceptable to most New Englanders. When the minister John Eliot and Captain Daniel Gookin, superintendent to the Praying Indians, dared to defend the Indians against charges of disloyalty, they received death threats. Finally, Massachusetts authorities decided to relocate the Praying Indians to a camp on Deer Island in Boston Harbor.

  On the night of October 30, hundreds of Praying Indians gathered at a dock on the Charles River. The ships left at midnight, and in the months ahead, many of these Indians died of starvation and exposure on the bleak shores of Deer Island.

  That fall, Boston was overrun with English refugees from towns along the Connecticut River. With food running low, Major samuel Appleton was told to stop any more people from leaving their settlements without official permission.

  Adding to the fears and frustrations of the English was the elusiveness of the man who had started the conflict. By November, Philip had become an almost mythic figure to the Puritans, who imagined he was responsible for every burning house and lifeless English body. In the years to come, stories sprang up in the river valley of how Philip moved from cave to cave and mountaintop to mountaintop, watching with satisfaction as fire and smoke arose from the towns along the Connecticut River.

  The truth, however, was less romantic. Instead of being everywhere, Philip spent much of the summer and fall near the modern Massachusetts-Vermont state border. While he and his handful of poorly armed warriors may have participated in some of the victories that season, Philip was not the mastermind behind any plan of Native attack. Indeed, there is no proof of his presence at a single battle in the fall of 1675. Rather than looking to the Pokanoket sachem for direction, the Nipmucks and the river valley Indians, as well as the Abenakis in New Hampshire and Maine, were fighting this war on their own.

  With Philip having vanished like smoke into the western wilderness, and with unrest and fear growing by the day among the English, colonial authorities needed a foe they could see and fight. To the south was the largest tribe in the region: the Narragansetts. To date, their sachems had signed two different treaties swearing their loyalty to the English. However, many New Englanders believed that the Narragansetts were simply waiting. Come spring, when the leaves had returned to the trees, they would surely attack. “[T]his false peace hath undone this country,” wrote one Providence resident on October 20.

  The colonial forces demanded that the Narragansetts turn over the Pokanokets and Pocassets who were in their midst—especially the female sachem Weetamoo. When an October 28 deadline came and went and no Indians had been surrendered, the decision was made. “The sword having marched eastward and westward and northward,” Increase Mather wrote, “now beginneth to face toward the south.”

  The United Colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth decided to raise the largest army New England had ever seen. In December, one thousand soldiers, representing close to 5 percent of the region’s male English population, would invade the colony of Rhode Island, which refused to participate in the attack. The leader of this huge force was to be Plymouth’s own Josiah Winslow. serving as General Winslow’s trusted aide was none other than Benjamin Church.

  ◆◆◆ In early December, Church and Winslow rode together to Boston. After meeting with Massachusetts officials, they headed to Dedham Plain, where more than 450 soldiers and horse troopers were assembling as similar groups gathered in Taunton, Plymouth, and New London. In all, 527 soldiers came from Massachusetts, 158 from Plymouth, and 325 from Connecticut. The Massachusetts forces were under the command of Major Appleton, a veteran of the war in the western frontier. The Connecticut forces were under Major Treat, another veteran commander, and Plymouth’s two companies were under captains William Bradford and John Gorham.

  December 2 was declared a day of prayer throughout New England. According to Increase Mather, “the churches were all upon their knees before the Lord, the God of Armies, entreating his favor and gracious success in the undertaking.” On December 8, Winslow and his soldiers departed from Dedham. The next day, the army arrived at seekonk along the seekonk River. Winslow ordered Church to sail directly for their next destination, smith’s garrison in Wickford, Rhode Island, while he led the troops on the land route through Providence. That way Church could prepare for his arrival; it also gave Church the chance to share a boat ride with samuel Moseley.

  By this time in the war, Moseley wa
s almost as mythic a figure as Philip himself, while Church, with the exception of the Pease Field Fight, had accomplished almost nothing. For his part, Church wanted to prove that he was as skilled at capturing Indians as anyone in New England. so instead of remaining at smith’s garrison in Wickford to await Winslow, Church teamed up with some “brisk blades” from Rhode Island and set out that night in search of Indians. It was a cold December night, but they had the benefit of a nearly full moon. By sunrise the next day, Church and his men had returned to the garrison with eighteen captive Indians. As it turned out, Moseley had also been out that night, and he, too, had captured eighteen Indians.

  Winslow and his army had already arrived by the time Church and Moseley returned to Wickford. “The general, pleased with the exploit,” Church wrote, “gave them thanks.” There were two Indian children in Church’s group, and Winslow decided to make a present of these “likely boys” and send them to friends in Boston. The general grinned at Church and said that “his faculty would supply them with Indians boys enough before the war was ended.” As Winslow made clear, slaves were to be one of the prizes of war.

  Moseley had captured an Indian named Peter, who because of an argument with one of the Narragansett sachems was willing to talk. Peter claimed the tribe possessed a total of three thousand “fighting men,” most of them gathered together with their women and children in the depths of a giant swamp to the southwest. As the English had learned in pursuing Philip, under normal conditions it was almost impossible to fight the Indians in a swamp. But these were not normal conditions. It had been a bitterly cold December, so cold that the swamps had frozen solid. As a consequence, Winslow could now take his army just about anywhere. The real problem was how to find the Narragansetts. It was true that there were no leaves on the trees, but the swamplands around modern Kingston, Rhode Island, were still so dense with bushes that even the most experienced guide would have difficulty leading them to the Indians’ base. Peter, however, claimed he could find it.