The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  On sunday, July 30, Church took a brief break from the war to pray at the meetinghouse in Plymouth. But before the end of the service, the Reverend John Cotton was interrupted by a messenger from Josiah Winslow, who had just ridden in from Marshfield. The governor needed to speak with Captain Church immediately.

  A “great army of Indians” had been seen gathering on the eastern shore of the Taunton River. If they succeeded in crossing the river, the towns of Taunton and Bridgewater would be in danger. Winslow requested that Church “immediately ... rally what of his company he could.”

  Church gathered his company of eighteen Englishmen and twenty-two Indians and set out for Bridgewater. Meanwhile, a handful of the town’s militia were already out on a mission of their own. They were approaching the Taunton River when they heard some suspicious noises. They soon discovered that the Indians had laid a huge tree across the river and were at that very moment beginning to cross over toward Bridgewater.

  There were two Indians on the tree, an old man with the traditional long hair of a Native American and a younger man with his hair cut short in the style of a Praying Indian. One of the militiamen shot and killed the older Indian, and the younger one, who was lugging a container of gunpowder, tossed the powder into the bushes and escaped back into the forest on the eastern shore of the river.

  The dead Indian turned out to be Akkompoin, Philip’s uncle and one of the sachem’s most trusted advisers. They later learned that the other Indian had been Philip himself. In an effort to disguise himself, he had cut off his hair, and for the moment at least, the change in hairstyle had saved his life.

  Many of Philip’s subjects were not so lucky that day. After more than a year of extreme hardship, they were exhausted, starving, and unhappy. Conditions had become particularly difficult in the last month. With the appearance of Church’s company in early July, the swamps were no longer safe. With no way to protect their children, the Indians had been reduced to the most terrible measures a people can ever know. William Hubbard reported that “it is certainly affirmed that several of their young children were killed by themselves, that they might not be betrayed by their crying or be hindered with them in their flight.”

  The Bridgewater militiamen reported that the Indians they met on Monday, July 31, were so discouraged that many of them were helpless to defend themselves. According to one account, “some of the Indians acknowledged that their arms shook and trembled so that they could not so readily discharge their guns as they would have done.” Ten Indians were shot dead with loaded muskets in their hands, while fifteen others “threw down their guns and submitted themselves to the English.” For many of the Indians, there was no reason left to fight.

  ◆◆◆ Early the next morning, Church and his company set out from Bridgewater. They had recruited several men from the local militia, and one of these “brisk lads” guided them to where the Indians had laid the tree over the river. Looking across, they saw an Indian sitting on the tree’s stump—an unusual thing for a hostile Indian to be doing the morning after a confrontation with the Bridgewater militia. Church took aim, but his Native companion told him to hold his fire; he believed it might be a friendly Indian. Then the Indian, apparently hearing them, glanced in their direction, and the sakonnet immediately realized it was Philip himself. He fired his musket, but it was too late. The sachem had rolled off the stump and escaped into the woods.

  Church and his men ran across the tree and soon came upon a group of women and children that included Philip’s wife and nine-year-old son. There was a fresh trail south, and the prisoners informed him that it had been left by sachem Quinnapin and his people, who had decided to return home to the western shore of Narragansett Bay. But where was Philip? The prisoners claimed that they did not know, “for he fled in a great fright when the first English gun was fired, and they had none of them seen or heard anything of him since.”

  Leaving some of his men with the prisoners, Church and the rest of the company headed down the trail, hopeful that they might overtake the enemy. But after several miles, Church realized that, given the importance of the prisoners he now had, he should get them back to Bridgewater before dark. His sakonnets, however, were reluctant to give up the chase. They explained that Awashonks’s brother had been killed by the Narragansetts, and they wanted revenge. Church named a sakonnet called Lightfoot as their captain and “bid them go and quit themselves like men. ... [A]way they scampered,” Church wrote, “like so many horses.”

  The next morning, Lightfoot and his men returned with thirteen prisoners. They had caught up to the Narrangansetts and killed several of them and “rejoiced much at the opportunity of avenging themselves.” Church sent the prisoners on to Bridgewater and, with the sakonnets leading the way, resumed the search for Philip.

  They came upon an abandoned camp that convinced them the Pokanokets were close at hand. Moving quickly through the woods, they discovered a large number of women and children who were too tired to keep up with the main body of Indians up ahead. The prisoners reported that “Philip with a great number of the enemy were a little before.” It was getting late in the day, but Church didn’t want to stop. He told the sakonnets to inform their prisoners that “if they would submit to order and be still, no one should hurt them.”

  As night fell, they could hear the sounds of Philip’s men chopping wood and setting up camp. Church told his men and prisoners that they were going to spend the night sitting quietly in the swamp. If any prisoner attempted to escape, Church would “immediately kill them all.”

  Just before daybreak, Church explained to the prisoners that he and his men were about to attack Philip. He had no one he could spare to guard them, but he told them that it was in their best interests not to escape. Once the fighting was over, they were to follow their trail and once again surrender themselves. Otherwise, they would all die.

  He sent out two sakonnet scouts. At the same time, it turned out, Philip sent two scouts of his own. Philip’s men spotted the sakonnets and were soon running back to camp, making “the most hideous noise they could invent.” By the time Church and his men arrived, the Pokanokets had fled into a nearby swamp, leaving their kettles boiling and meat roasting on the fire.

  Church left some of his men at the place where the Indians had entered the swamp, then led a group of soldiers around one side while Isaac Howland took another group around the other side. Once they had positioned men around the entire edge of the swamp, Church and Howland met at the farthest point just as a large number of the enemy emerged from inside the swamp.

  Hopelessly outnumbered, Church and his handful of soldiers could easily have been massacred by the Pokanokets. suddenly, a sakonnet named Mathias shouted out in the Indians’ own language, “If you fire one shot, you are all dead men!” Mathias went on to claim that they had a large force and had the swamp completely surrounded.

  Many of the Pokanokets did as the other Indians had done just a day before: Astonished, they stood motionless as Church’s men took the loaded muskets from their hands. Not far from the swamp was a dip in the land that Church compared to a “punchbowl.” He directed the prisoners to jump down into the hollow, and with only a few men standing guard—all of them triple-armed with guns taken from the Indians—he ran back into the swamp to find Philip.

  Almost immediately, Church found himself virtually face-to-face with the Pokanoket leader and several of his warriors. By this point, the sachem’s behavior was entirely predictable. When cornered or confronted, Philip always ran. As Church and two sakonnets fought the Pokanoket warriors, Philip turned and fled back to the entrance of the swamp.

  This might have been the end of the sachem. But one of the men Church had left waiting in ambush outside the swamp was a notorious drunkard named Thomas Lucas. Whether or not he had just had a drink, Lucas was, in Church’s words, not “as careful as he might have been about his stand.” Instead of killing the enemy, Lucas was shot by the Pokanokets, and Philip escaped.

  �
� Benjamin Church’s sword.

  In the meantime, Church had his hands full in the swamp. Two enemy warriors surrendered, but the third, whom Church described as “a great stout surly fellow with his two locks tied up with red [cloth] and a great rattlesnake skin hanging to the back part of his head,” refused to give up. This, it turned out, was the sachem Totoson.

  While the sakonnets guarded the others, Church chased Totoson. They were running through some dense bushes when the Indian tripped on a grapevine and fell flat on his face. Before he could get back up, Church raised the barrel of his musket and killed him with a single blow to the head. But as Church soon discovered, this was not Totoson. The sachem had somehow evaded him for the moment, and now, filled with rage, Totoson was coming up from behind, “flying at him like a dragon.” Just in the nick of time, the sakonnets opened fire. The bullets came close to killing Church, who claimed “he felt the wind of them,” but they had succeeded in scaring off Totoson, who escaped into the swamp.

  They had not captured Philip or, for that matter, Totoson, but Church’s band of eighteen English soldiers and twenty-two sakonnets had nonetheless managed one of the more spectacular feats of the war. Once the fighting had ended and they had rounded up all their prisoners, they discovered that they had taken a grand total of 173 Indians.

  Church asked some of them if they could tell him anything about their sachem. “sir,” one of them replied, “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.”

  When they reached Bridgewater that night, the only place that could handle all the prisoners was the pound, a fenced-in area used to collect the town’s herds of sheep and cattle. The sakonnets were assigned guard duty, and Church made sure to provide both the guards and their prisoners with food and drink. “[T]hey had a merry night,” Church remembered, “and the prisoners laughed as loud as the soldiers, not [having been] so [well] treated [in] a long time.”

  ◆◆◆ By early August, most of the Indian leaders had been captured or killed, or had turned themselves in. On sunday, August 6, two days after Church delivered his prisoners to Plymouth, Weetamoo and what remained of her Pocasset followers were near Taunton when a group of local militiamen attacked. The English took twenty-six prisoners, but Weetamoo escaped. soon after, she tried to cross the Taunton River, but before she reached Pocasset on the eastern shore, her raft broke apart and she drowned.

  Her naked body was discovered on the shore of Gardner’s Neck, once the village site of her father, Corbitant. Not knowing who it was, an Englishman cut off the woman’s head and sent it on to Taunton. Upon its arrival, the nameless head was placed upon a pole within sight of the Indians taken prisoner just a few days before. soon enough, the residents of Taunton knew whose head it was. According to Increase Mather, the Pocassets “made a most horrid and diabolical lamentation, crying out that it was their Queen’s head.”

  A few days later, Weetamoo’s husband, Quinnapin, was taken captive, and on August 25, he was executed in Newport. A month later, sagamore sam and several other Nipmuck sachems who had been tricked into surrendering were also executed on the Common.

  By that time, Totoson was dead. An old Indian woman later reported that after the sachem’s eight-year-old son died from disease, Totoson’s “heart became as a stone within him, and he died.” The woman threw some brush and leaves over Totoson’s body and surrendered herself to the authorities in sandwich, where she, too, became ill and followed her sachem to the grave.

  ◆◆◆ In terms of the percentage of population killed, the English had suffered losses that are difficult for us to imagine today. During the forty-five months of World War II, the United states lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population; during the Civil War, the death rate was somewhere between 4 and 5 percent; during the fourteen months of King Philip’s War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8 percent of its men.

  But the English losses appear almost tiny when compared to those of the Indians. Of a total Native population of approximately twenty thousand, at least two thousand had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; three thousand had died of sickness and starvation; a thousand had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated two thousand eventually fled to join either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England lost somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of its people. Philip’s local fight with Plymouth Colony had grown into a regionwide war that had done nearly as much as the plagues of 1616-19 to diminish New England’s Native population.

  ◆ John Foster’s 1677 map of New England.

  In the end, the winner of the war was the side who was able to outlast the other. The colonies had suffered a series of terrible defeats, but they had England to provide them with food, muskets, and ammunition. The Indians had only themselves, and by summer they were without the food and gunpowder necessary to fight a war. By August, it had become obvious that the fighting was coming to a close. But as everyone knew, the war would not be over until Philip of Mount Hope had been taken.

  ◆◆◆ By Friday, August 11, most of the English forces from Plymouth Colony had been disbanded. Only Benjamin Church and his loyal sakonnets were still out on patrol. They had just spent the day in Pocasset but had come up with nothing. Church decided he was going to visit his wife, Alice.

  Church and his men took the ferry to Aquidneck Island. Alice and the boys were now staying at the home of the merchant Peleg sanford in Newport, and Church and half a dozen of his company rode their horses the eight miles to sanford’s house. When she first glimpsed her husband, Alice was so overcome with surprise that she fainted. By the time she had begun to revive, Church noticed that two horsemen were approaching at great speed.

  They proved to be sanford and Church’s old friend Captain Roger Goulding, the sailor who had saved him more than a year ago during the Pease Field Fight. They had news: An Indian had appeared earlier that day at the southern tip of the Mount Hope Peninsula. He reported that he had just fled from Philip, who had killed the Indian’s brother for proposing that they surrender. The Indian was now on Aquidneck Island and willing to lead Church to Philip’s camp.

  Church turned to Alice and smiled apologetically. He and his men had not yet had the chance to unsaddle their horses. “[H]is wife,” he later wrote, “must content herself with a short visit, when such game was ahead.” Church asked sanford and Goulding whether they wanted to come along. They quickly agreed, and soon the men were back on their horses and riding north toward Mount Hope.

  ◆◆◆ The Indian was waiting for them at the ferry. He was, according to Church, “a fellow of good sense, and told his story handsomely.” Philip, the Indian reported, was on a little area of high ground surrounded by a swamp at the base of the rocky heights of Mount Hope. The sachem had returned to the center of his territory, and the Indian offered to lead Church to him “and to help kill him, that he might revenge his brother’s death.”

  It was after midnight by the time they approached Philip’s camp. In addition to sanford and Goulding, Church had a few of his Plymouth regulars, including Caleb Cook, grandson of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cook, to fill out his veteran band of sakonnets. There was also a Pocasset Indian named Alderman.

  Church assigned Goulding to lead the group that would attack Philip’s headquarters. With the Pokanoket to guide them, Goulding and his men would creep on their stomachs until they came within sight of the enemy. By that time, Church would have stationed the rest of his men around the edge of the swamp.

  Experience had taught them that the Indians always built their shelters so that they were open to the swamp. They also knew that it was, in Church’s words, “Philip’s custom to be foremost in the flight.” When Goulding and his men attacked, the sachem would immediately flee into the swamp, and Church and his men would be waiting for him.

  It was always dif
ficult to tell friend from foe in the early-morning darkness of a swamp, so Church told Goulding and his men to shout at the top of their lungs once the fighting began. The rest of them would fire on only those “that should come silently through the swamp.”

  ◆◆◆ It had come down to just a handful of Philip’s toughest and most loyal men. There was the young warrior who supposedly fired the first shot back in June of 1675. He would be one of the first to die that morning. There was also the great survivor: Annawon.

  The old warrior had fought alongside Philip’s father, Massasoit, decades before. It is likely that he had been one of the warriors to carry the dying Alexander on his shoulders back to Mount Hope. For more than a year now, he had been with Philip every step of the way. In just the last month alone, they had covered hundreds of miles as they crisscrossed their homeland, always on the run.

  When the Indians had fallen asleep that night, their exhaustion had been mixed with more than the usual fear. After the brother of the executed warrior left, they all knew the English would be coming soon. As day approached, Philip awoke from a dream. They must leave immediately, he told Annawon and the others. In his dream, he had been captured by the English. They had been betrayed.

  One of the warriors stood up. A musket fired, and the yelling began. Philip leaped to his feet, threw his powder horn and petunk (a pouch containing bullets) over his shoulder, and, with his musket in hand, started to run. It would be left to Annawon and the others to gather their belongings and hold the English off for as long as possible.