At the mouth of the river, they met a late-arriving company of Massachusetts soldiers under Captain Daniel Patrick, who was primed for an assault on Weinshauks. Mason overruled him. Underhill loaded the wounded onto the boats bound for Saybrook, while Mason and Patrick, guided by the Mohegans, took their combined forces another twenty miles west across Pequot and western Niantic land, burning what they could between the Thames and Connecticut rivers.
Mason, in his account of the fight, put the death toll at between six hundred and seven hundred people and said that only fourteen were captured or escaped. It was, by any measure, a slaughter to eclipse anything previously seen in New England, and the news shocked and sickened more than just “young soldiers” exposed to the butchery. The Mohegan and Narragansett warriors “cried Mach it, Mach it,” Underhill recalled, “that is, It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.”
The Puritans hardly thought so. Mason was promoted to major, and the small army’s actions were heralded in Plymouth and the Bay Colony. “It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in the fyre . . . and horrible was the stinck and sente ther of,” wrote William Bradford, “but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God, who wrought so wonderfully for them.” Even Lion Gardener, who considered the war a mistake from the beginning, called the massacre at Mystic a “victory to the glory of God, and honour of our nation.”
To Underhill, the logic was simple. “It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious? (as some have said),” he wrote. “Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”
The Pequot tried to regroup, but suddenly every hand was against them. Former tributaries such as the Mohegan, River Indians, and Montauk joined the hunt, sending scalps and heads back to the colonies. Some escaped to the tangled thickets of ohomowauke, the owl’s nest swamp, where the rhododendrons were in bloom. Most were killed or taken, and the unusual, blood-red hearts of the rhododendron blossoms in ohomowauke were, for generations to come among the Pequot, a reminder of their ancestors’ deaths.
Harried by pursuing Mohegans and Englishmen, Sassacus and the surviving sachems moved the Pequot west along the coast toward Quinnipiac. A month and a half after the attack on Mystic, however, eighty men and two hundred women and children were cornered by a combined force of English soldiers and Mohegan, Narragansett, and Long Island Indians in another swamp, called munnacommock, near present-day Fairfield, Connecticut.
As dusk fell on July 13, Thomas Stanton, a colonist who spoke some Pequot, negotiated the surrender of the Pequot women and children and the local Indians with whom they had been sheltering. There was no quarter offered for the Pequot men, who remained pinned down through the night. At daybreak, they made a desperate counterattack, creating a diversion by which many escaped. Unable to flee, the wounded were summarily executed by the English.
Sassacus and about twenty bodyguards sought refuge far to the west, but the Mohawk, to curry favor with the English, made them a gift of the sachem’s head and hands. About three hundred Pequots, almost all of them women and children, were reduced to slavery. Seventeen, mostly boys, were shipped to Bermuda but wound up instead on Providence Island, a short-lived Puritan colony off the coast of Nicaragua.
The rest, whom John Winthrop indicated were “women and maid children,” apparently remained in New England, parceled out among the colonists. The Reverend Hugh Peter, a preacher at Salem, wrote to Winthrop asking for his share. “Wee have heard of a dividence of women and children in the bay and would bee glad of a share viz: a young woman or girle and a boy if you thinke good.” Winthrop was happy to oblige.
A few Pequots managed to come through this ordeal and regain their freedom, including the wife of the sachem Mononotto, of whom Winthrop said he took particular care because she’d shielded the two teenage girls kidnapped from Wethersfield. But few others enjoyed such protection. One Pequot woman, for example, was branded in “punishment” for having been raped. Branding, usually on the shoulder, was also a common sanction for runaways who were recaptured.
Roger Williams, who alone among the colonial leaders had taken the time to learn Algonquian ways, was deeply troubled by the treatment of the captives. “Since the Most High delights in mercy, & great revenge hath bene allready taken,” he urged leniency for the Pequot, suggesting that they be kept subject to English oversight but “which they will more easily doe in case they may be sufferd to incorporate with the natives in either places.” To make them useful, he recommended that the Pequot be charged an annual tribute in wolf scalps, “an incomparable way to save much cattell alive in the land.”
Facing annihilation, the sachems leading the roughly two thousand Pequot survivors had little choice but to accede to a September 1638 treaty at Hartford between the English and their Indian allies. On the face of it, the treaty wiped away the Pequot as a nation. They “shall no more be called Peaquots but Narragansetts and Mohegans,” their people parceled out between those two tribes. Nor would the victors “suffer them to live in the country that was formerly theirs but is now the Englishes by conquest.” As for the Mohegan and Narragansett, who were already clashing along their expanded borders, they “shall not presently Revenge it But they are to appeal to the English . . . to decide the same.”
In the short term, at least, both the English and the Indian victors made important gains in the aftermath of the war. Although Massachusetts and Connecticut bickered between themselves for years over control of the old Pequot land, the Pequot defeat had lessened the immediate danger to settlers along the Connecticut River. The Bay Colony had also established itself as a prime shaper of policy well beyond its immediate borders, and the war had brutally reinforced English influence as a whole in the region. If the English could crush the Pequot, many sachems doubtless decided, they could presumably crush any Indian nation that stood against them.
The Narragansett and Mohegan leaders, anxious to avoid a similar fate while vying for control of the wampum trade, prime hunting grounds, and tributaries, worked to cement the friendship of their nearest colonial neighbors—Uncas with the river colonies in Connecticut, and Miantonomi (with Roger Williams acting as a critical liaison) with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Mason and Uncas formed a particularly close partnership, which was often at odds with Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr., who never fully trusted the Mohegan leader. In fact, treading the line between the Mohegan and Narragansett became harder and harder for the English as the two Indian groups came into increasingly direct and violent conflict—and as the English realized that the sachems were pursuing their own agendas, which did not always mesh with colonial desires.
His four-year contract at an end, Lion Gardener left Connecticut in 1639. He moved his family to manchonake, a three-thousand-acre island between the gaping jaws of eastern Long Island—“an Island of mine owne,” as he described it. Careful of both English law and Native convention, Gardener secured a royal patent for it and also paid the Montauk sachem a black dog, rum, trading cloth, a gun, and powder. The name manchonake, or “island where many died,” was an echo of a long-ago Pequot attack, and Gardener renamed his new home Isle of Wight. When his daughter Elizabeth was born there in 1641, she became the first English child born in New Netherland. Remarkably, his descendants still retain what is now known as Gardiners Island more than a dozen generations—and some messy legal battles—later.
The influx of defeated Pequots, meanwhile, greatly bolstered the communities into which they merged. This was especially true of the Mohegan. At the height of Pequot power, Uncas had barely a few dozen followers. Now he ruled 2,500 people—although like all seventeenth-century Native communities in southern new England, his was a “tribe” born as much of amalgamation and happenstance, and bound by adoption and marriage, as of any notion of traditional collective identit
y.
Already married to the daughter of the murdered sachem Tatobem, Uncas married one of the dead man's widows in 1638—one of several wives he would choose from among high-caste Pequot refugees. In 1638, speaking to the Puritan elders in Boston, Uncas was questioned about the presence of Pequots in his villages. There were none, he said, only Mohegans—even though at least one of the warriors standing with him had led Pequot attacks on Fort Saybrook. From Uncas’s Algonquian perspective, both facts were true and not mutually exclusive.
Along with the conquered survivors allotted by treaty to the Mohegan and Narragansett, there came others who arrived in the Indian villages far more surreptitiously. With time, it seems, almost all the Pequots enslaved after the war and not shipped abroad escaped their English masters and melted away into the diaspora. By 1644, their experiment with Indian servants a failure, the Puritans began turning to African slaves instead.
Yet as complete as the Pequot defeat appeared in 1638, when even their name was illegal, they quickly reemerged as a distinct people. Not all of the Pequots were subsumed into the Mohegan and Narragansett. Some were settled at nameag, “the fishing place,” on the western shore of the Connecticut River, which formed the border between the Mohegan and the old Pequot homeland. Although they were tributaries to Uncas, they exercised a degree of autonomy few other Pequots enjoyed, and with time the community grew—as did their sway with the Connecticut colonists.
The Nameag leader, Robin Cassacinamon, had been a servant in the Winthrop home years before—whether voluntarily or otherwise is unknown—but because of the family ties, Governor John Winthrop Jr. trusted him enough to place an English settlement, Pequot Plantation (later New London), near Nameag in 1646. Winthrop saw Cassacinamon as a foil to Uncas’s growing power, and the Pequot in turn deftly used the English against his Mohegan overlord.
With time, Cassacinamon was able to pry his people free of Uncas entirely. In 1650, Winthrop granted them a small holding on the coast at Noank, in the old Pequot homeland, where they were directly beholden to the colonial government. Eight years later, when Noank proved too cramped for the growing community—and just two decades after the edict that they “shall no more be called Peaquots”—Cassacinamon and his people were given a two-thousand-acre tract at Mashantucket.
Ironically, this renaissance of a former English enemy occurred even as an English ally, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi, found himself dangerously boxed in. At war with the Mohegan, he had to fend off allegations, fostered by Uncas, that he and his people were negotiating with surrounding tribes for a mass uprising against the English. This time, the Bay-men were the brake, reining in Connecticut’s fire-breathing plan to march against the Narragansett. But when Miantonomi, leading an army of a thousand men against Uncas, was captured by his old rival in 1643 and delivered to the English, the colonists saw a way to rid themselves of a potential danger. Miantonomi was handed back to Uncas, who tomahawked the sachem to death before English witnesses.
The dread among English colonists of a coordinated Indian rebellion, planted by Opechancanough in Jamestown and fanned again before the Pequot War, never faded. No one knows if Miantonomi was really trying to raise a pan-Indian army, but in less than a generation, the threat would come true, sparking the single bloodiest war ever fought on what would become American soil, as a leader would emerge to unite the tribes in a way no sachem had ever done. His name was Metacom, better known as King Philip.
Chapter 5
Between Two Fires
Daybreak, July 7, 1677. The fishing ketch William and Sarah out of Marblehead, Massachusetts, rode gently at anchor off Port La Tour at Cape Sable, on Nova Scotia’s southern tip. Its crew of half a dozen was still asleep, enjoying a brief respite from several weeks of hard fishing in the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine; the ship’s hold was half full of cod, some of the fish longer than a man’s leg. The ship’s master, Joseph Bovey, planned to spend two days at La Tour, taking on water and firewood before heading back to sea.
One of the fishermen, a Marbleheader named Robert Roules, “aged thirty years or thereabouts,” heard something and, in the growing light of dawn, peered over the side of the two-masted vessel. A canoe with nine or ten Indians had drawn alongside, their muskets primed and cocked. They saw him and shouldered their weapons. Roules instinctively dropped flat onto the deck as a ragged fusillade of gunfire ripped through the early-morning air, the lead balls slamming harmlessly into the ship’s windlass.
“What for you kill Englishmen?” Roules shouted in the pidgin English of the frontier, as the Indians scrambled aboard.
“If Englishmen shoot we kill—if not shoot, we no kill,” one of the warriors yelled back, as Bovey and the three other half-dressed fishermen staggered awake. Some of the Indians’ muskets were still loaded, and the ship’s guns were too far away. The crew, having no choice, surrendered.
As the tense drama aboard the William and Sarah played out, the frontier from the Chesapeake to Maine had already endured two years of war, after long-simmering tensions finally erupted in wide-scale violence. It was bad enough in Virginia, where tit-for-tat killings between a plantation owner and local Doeg Indians quickly escalated into a major regional confrontation with the neighboring Susquehannock, who were attacked even though they had nothing to do with the original fight.
But worse by far was the regional maelstrom that engulfed New England. The United Colonies of England (Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut, which had confederated in 1643) faced their greatest fear—a mass uprising of tribes throughout southern New England. King Philip’s War, named for the Wampanoag sachem who led it—Metacom, son of the early Pilgrim ally Massasoit and known to the colonists as Philip—was arguably the most murderous conflict ever waged on American soil, and one that saw both Europeans and Natives adopting the techniques of the other, forging the violent framework of frontier war that would endure for generations.
King Philip’s War was a civil war, although no one quite agreed on what kind of civil war. To the English, it was a treasonous uprising by royal subjects, whose leaders had signed treaties swearing their allegiance to the Crown. In Puritan eyes, the fact that some Praying Indians—Christian converts—joined the fray added another level of perfidy.
To Philip and his followers, the fight was a just insurrection, years in coming, against outside invaders. But for many Algonquians, it was even more vividly a civil war in the purest, brother-against-brother sense, one that pitted members of the same village or the same family against one another. Loyalty to either side was sometimes bought with the head of one’s own kin.
The revolt against the English started among the Wampanoag in 1675, but it quickly spread, first to other Algonquian tribes in southern New England, such as the Nipmuc, then north to many of the Abenaki, such as the Sokokis and Cowasuck. Gone was the traditional restraint of Algonquian warfare—the limited casualties, the focus on captives for adoption or torture, the sparing of women and children. The Pequot War and the massacre at Mystic Fort had rewritten the rules on both sides.
Most of the Indian attacks on frontier homes and settlements were meant to drive home a simple, terrifying message: leave the land or lose everything. This was proving especially effective in Maine (then part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony), where the widely scattered farms and villages had been all but obliterated and most of the remaining colonists forced onto outer islands, where the sea provided at least a little protection from the war canoes.
Although Roules and the others did not yet know it, the seizure of the William and Sarah was something altogether different—the first step in a bold Indian plan to carry the fight against the interlopers into colonial England’s very heart, using the Europeans’ own naval technology against them. The brainchild of a Sokokis war leader named Mugg (or Mogg) Heigon, the concept was simple but audacious. First, the Abenaki would capture dozens of the English fishing and trading vessels that still plied the waters of northern New England with impunity
. With the ships, the Indians would be able to reach “all the fishing ilandes and so to drive all the contre befor them,” as one English captive named Francis Card overheard Mugg say. After all, the “Eastern Indians,” as the Europeans called the coastal Wapánahki, had been sailing European shallops for at least a century.
But that was only the beginning. “[H]e doth make his brag and laf at the english,” Card reported, “and saith that he hath found a way to burn boston.” In his fleet of captured ships, packed tight with fighting men, Mugg and the Abenaki would sail into an unsuspecting Boston Harbor without raising suspicions, then torch the city.
Before waging a ferociously effective war against the English, Mugg and another Sokokis sachem, Squando, were advocates for peace with the colonists, but their patience had been worn down by years of abuses and provocations. For Squando, who had been converted to Christianity by the Puritan missionary John Eliot, the final straw was intensely personal. Two Englishmen, rowing a boat near his riverside village, encountered Squando’s wife and young son in a bark canoe. To test the widespread belief that Indian infants could, like animals, swim instinctively, they tipped the canoe into the cold water. Squando’s wife managed to rescue the child and claw her way back to safety, but the boy died the following day. Squando had had enough of the English.
Although Mugg was killed before his plan for a naval assault was put into action, the Indians moved ahead with it. As the capture of the William and Sarah showed, the fishing boats—which, like that ketch, sailed mostly from Marblehead—were fairly easy prey, especially when the crew landed, as they had to do, to cure their catch. While their fellow Bay-men were outraged at the losses, they laid some of the responsibility on the Marbleheaders themselves—“a dull and heavy-moulded sort of People,” without “either Skill or Courage to kill any thing but Fish.”
The First Frontier Page 18
