Undefended homes around Lancaster quickly went up in flames, but the garrison houses withstood the first assaults. Forty-two people had jammed inside the blockhouse of the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, where they held off a sharp attack for more than two hours. (Rowlandson himself was in Boston, trying to enlist more soldiers for protection.) They might have held out until relief arrived, as did the other garrisons in the area, but only one of the two roof flankers was finished, and the rear of the house had been stacked high with firewood, further blocking defensive gunfire from inside. Using combustible flax and hemp they found in the barn, the Indians were eventually able to slip up and set fire to the building.
“Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in blood, the House on fire over our heads, and the bloody Heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred out,” Rowlandson’s thirty-eight-year-old wife, Mary, later recounted. “As soon as we came to the door and appeared, the Indians shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the House, as if one had taken a handfull of stones and threw them.” But with the flames roaring and many of the defenders already dead, they had no choice but to stagger out. Mary Rowlandson was struck in the side by a bullet, which also hit her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, whom she was holding. Her nephew William was killed, and his mother, despairing, said, “Lord, let me dy with them,” moments before she fell down dead from a musket ball.
As the fight sputtered to an end, Rowlandson and the others “[stood] amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.” One victim, tomahawked in the head and stripped naked, was still trying to crawl away. Others lay dead of spear or gunshot wounds. Rowlandson had often said that she would rather die than be taken alive by Indians, “but when it came to the tryal my mind changed.”
Of those inside, only one escaped. Twenty—among them Mary and her three children, including the badly injured Sarah—were taken captive; the rest died in the attack or its immediate aftermath.
For more than three days, the war party moved across the snowy landscape. Most of the English captives would have been bound with long “prisoner ropes,” woven of tough dogbane fibers, their ends ornately decorated with tin bangles or dyed quillwork, or led by similar halters designed to be tied around a captive’s neck, like a leash. Rowlandson and her wounded daughter, however, often rode bareback on a horse, with young Sarah crying out, “I shall dy, I shall dy,” in fever and pain. They settled with the Nipmucs at Menameset, the village where Quanapohit and Kattananit had been spying. Six days later, Sarah died. Rowlandson, her own wound poulticed with dried oak leaves, survived.
King Philip’s War marked several firsts in frontier history, among them the first widespread uprising of many Indian groups against a common enemy and the first time large numbers of English captives were taken by raiding parties. Captivity, slavery, and adoption of captives were, of course, traditional among the Algonquians, but this time Philip and his allies held white captives for ransom, a technique that would become common in the century to come.
Capture of Mary Rowlandson
This woodcut frontispiece from the 1770 edition of Mary Rowlandson’s book, The soveraignty & goodness of God, is one of several that appeared in eighteenth-century editions showing her armed or bravely fighting off the attackers—something she never claimed to have done. (© American Antiquarian Society)
Having been sold by the man who captured her, Mary Rowlandson was held for the next three months by a Narragansett sachem named Quinnapin and his wife, Wetamo (or Weetamoo). Wetamo was the widow of Philip’s older brother, Wamsutta; the sister of Philip’s wife; and a Pocasset sachem in her own right—a sauncksquûaog, or “squaw sachem,” one of the hereditary female leaders among the Algonquians,11 such as those who had led Wampanoag communities on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
Pursued by the English, the Indians moved constantly, once burning their wigwams behind them when the army was breathing down their necks, carrying their sick and elderly on their backs through the forest. They gleaned stray grains of corn and wheat from abandoned fields and scavenged old bones “full of wormes and magots . . . scald[ing] them over the fire to make the vermine come out.” In her later account, Rowlandson speaks often of her own hunger and privation, but it’s clear that no one was eating well. Eventually, they joined Philip’s larger forces—“I could not but be amazed at the numerous crew of Pagans”—and Philip himself asked her to sit and smoke a pipe. She primly refused, having quit tobacco in her captivity, seeing now that it was “a bait, the devil lays to make men loose their precious time.”
Compared with some captives, Rowlandson had a fairly easy time of it. She specifically noted that none of the men made any attempt to assault her, and she even set herself up in a minor business, parlaying her skills as a seamstress into food and the odd coin. She knitted stockings and sewed garments and caps, including a shirt for Philip’s little boy. She lobbied to be taken by horse to Albany and traded for gunpowder, but she had no thoughts of trying to escape overland, later explaining, “I was utterly hopeless of getting home on foot . . . I could hardly bear to think of the many weary steps I had taken to come to this place.” It was just as well, because when Quinnapin and Wetamo gave her permission to visit her son in a village just a mile away, she became so lost that she had to return to her village, find Quinnapin, and have him show her the path.
While Rowlandson was trying to convince Quinnapin and Wetamo to ransom her, the council in Boston was working toward the same goal for all the English hostages—if they could find someone to carry the offer to Philip’s forces. They solicited messengers from the Praying Indians on Deer Island, who—no real surprise—showed little enthusiasm for helping the people who had incarcerated them. Eventually, however, one of the Deer Island captives, a man known as Tom Dublett or Tom Nepanet, agreed to make the trip, carrying a letter from Massachusetts governor John Leverett addressed, “For the Indian Sagamores & people that are in warre against us.” Leverett asked for a written response, “if you have any among you that can write.”
They had at least two—Peter Jethro and James Printer, the two Christian Nipmucs who had been among the Praying Indians captured by Philip’s forces the previous autumn. First Jethro and then Printer served as scribes for the sachems, as Dublett and a second Christian Indian, known as Tatatiquinea or Peter Conway, shuttled back and forth between Boston and Philip’s camp at Wachusett Mountain. After several weeks of negotiations, they settled on the rather princely sum of twenty pounds for Rowlandson. The other captives, not ranking as high socially as a minister’s wife, would be ransomed later. “Though they were Indians, I gat them by the hand,” she said of Dublett and Conway, “and burst out into tears; my heart was so full that I could not speak to them.”
Mary Rowlandson was freed—“redeemed” was the usual term—in early May, just as the trees were leafing out, although none of the other captives, including her surviving children, accompanied her. Philip’s luck, by contrast, was running out, as was that of his allies. The Narragansett sachem Canonchet, trying to steal corn for the spring planting, had been captured a month earlier by a group of English volunteers, Narragansetts, Pequots, and Mohegans. Like his father, Miantonomi, Canonchet was executed by his enemy sachems. Holding wide his silver-trimmed coat in defiance, he was gunned down by Uncas’s son Owaneco and the Pequot leader Robin Cassacinamon, who then carried his head to Hartford.
Stonewall John, who had built Queen’s Fort and perhaps the Great Swamp fort as well, was captured by the Mohegan and tortured to death in July, his fingers and toes cut off as he stoically bore the pain, his legs broken, and his skull split. Rowlandson’s former master, Quinnapin, was captured and tried by a court-martial in Newport “for these sundry crimes following, namely: for being disoyall to his said Majesty [in] sundry Ways . . . through thy wicked bloody Minde and trayterous, rebellious, roietous and routous Acts.” With other “rebellious” Indians, he was executed by firing squad in August. Meanwhile, Wetamo and a small p
arty with her were ambushed, and the sauncksquûaog drowned while trying to escape across a river. She, too, was decapitated, her head impaled on a pike in the town of Taunton.
A week later, Philip’s wife, Wootenekanuske, and nine-year-old son were captured, and ten days after that, a Christian Pocasset named John Alderman, who had deserted Wetamo’s band early in the war and was soldiering for the English, shot Philip himself. The sachem’s body was quartered, and Alderman was given the head and one of Philip’s hands, which bore distinctive scars. Alderman turned in the head for the standard bounty of thirty shillings, and Philip’s bleached skull was displayed on a pole in Plymouth for decades thereafter. Alderman retained Philip’s hand, which he kept in a bucket of rum “to show such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities on him; and accordingly he got many a penny by it.”
In the wake of the war, the Algonquians of southern New England scattered like leaves. Many, like those among whom Rowlandson was held, were captured and shipped off to the Antilles as slaves, and the lands of the Nipmuc, Narragansett, and Wampanoag were seized by the English. Philip’s son, and perhaps also the sachem’s wife, were sold into West Indian slavery after Puritan leaders such as Increase Mather couldn’t quite bring themselves to hang the boy for his father’s sins—though they considered it, long and hard, while the lad languished in prison for months.
Rowlandson, by contrast, was soon reunited with her surviving children, Joseph and Mary. She was widowed and remarried just a few years after her release. Her story, “made Publick at the earnest Desire of some Friends,” was published in 1682 under the title The soveraignty & goodness of God, together, with the faithfulness of his promises displayed; being a narrative of the captivity and restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.
Rowlandson’s book was a landmark in several respects. It became the first American bestseller, and Rowlandson became the first American woman author published in North America within her lifetime. It was also the first of many captivity narratives, a literary form that would endure for the next two and a half centuries.
Above all else, The soveraignty & goodness of God was a religious testament, and in many ways the Puritan ideal. Virtually everything that befell Rowlandson during her captivity, good or ill, large or small, from her daughter’s horrific death to losing two cobs of corn, is held up as a divine lesson and vital cog in God’s plan. At times in the book, it seems that King Philip’s War itself was staged primarily for the spiritual edification of Mary Rowlandson. When the Indians narrowly escaped the pursuing English army across a frigid river, “we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance; if we had been, God would have found a way for the English to have passed this river.” And when her feet remained dry when she stepped onto the raft that carried her across that river, it could not “but be acknowledged as a favour of God to my weakened body.”
It is typical of the paradoxes of the First Frontier that Rowlandson was rescued from Indian captivity through the services of two Indian negotiators, with two others acting as scribes. Tom Dublett was still dunning the Massachusetts council eight years later for compensation for undertaking “that Hazardous service” on the council’s behalf. He asked for twenty or thirty shillings; instead, he was finally given two coats “in sattisfaction for his paynes & travile.” Peter Jethro was accepted back by the English, having first turned in his father, the sachem Tantamous, who on September 26, 1676, was marched through the streets of Boston with several other Indian leaders and hanged. Even Increase Mather had a hard time swallowing that example of familial treachery, referring to the son as “that abominable Indian.”
But it is James Printer who remains the most inscrutable enigma here. When the Praying town of Hassanemesit was overrun by Philip’s warriors and Printer went with the attackers, he could have been either an unwilling captive making the best of a horrible situation or a willing convert to the cause; no one knows which. Historians have viewed his role in the Rowlandson negotiations as both enlightened self-interest and selfless service. For her part, Mary Rowlandson had no use for Christian Indians, including “James the printer,” considering them to be savage turncoats, despite the fact that four of them were instrumental in her release.
Two months after helping to secure Rowlandson’s redemption, Printer was given a safe-conduct to return to Boston—if he was willing to make a public display of his loyalty. In most cases, this meant fighting alongside the English against Philip’s diminished uprising. Instead, Printer was given specific instructions, relayed from the council by Daniel Gookin, superintendent for the Praying Indians. Printer complied, arriving in Boston with the required “two heads,” which usually meant scalps, as surety of his allegiance. Whose they were and how he took them, no one knows. Still, many in Massachusetts found his professions of loyalty hollow, however many scalps he produced. “A Revolter he was,” one Boston letter writer sniffed, “and a fellow that had done much mischief.”
Printer would never be free of the taint of suspicion from either side. After the war, he took up preaching at Hassanemesit and resumed his work typesetting books in Cambridge. One was an Algonquian translation of the Bible. Another, in a surpassing irony, was The soveraignty & goodness of God, by Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.
In southern New England, Philip’s death and the collapse of the Wampanoag resistance effectively marked the end of the war and of Algonquian political and military muscle there. The situation was much different in northern New England. Because King Philip’s War was not a coordinated, centrally commanded offensive, other tribes continued their own feuds with the English without interruption.
Along the coast of Maine, where colonial settlements were thinly spread along rivers and bays, the English were especially vulnerable to attack. Initially, the Penobscot sachem Madockawando managed to keep most of his people out of the war, ignoring highhanded English demands that the Abenaki and other Natives unilaterally disarm and even deciding to overlook English slavers—supposedly hunting for renegades in league with Philip—who took the far easier route of simply kidnapping peaceful Wapánahkis from Machias Island.
When war did finally erupt along the Maine coast, English fears about vulnerability were realized. Scattered and far from protection, settlements were razed one after another. “Honoured Mother,” wrote Thaddeus Clark of Casco Bay in June 1676, bearing tragic news:
On Friday last in the morning your own Son with your two Sons in Law Anthony & Thomas Bracket & their whole families were killed & taken by the Indians, we know not how, ’tis certainly known by us that Thomas is slain & his wife & children carried away captive, and of Anthony & his familie we have no tidings & and therefore think they may be captivated . . . There are of men slain, 11, of women & children 23 killed & taken, and we that are alive are forced upon McAndrew’s his Island to secure our own . . . We are so few in number that we are not able to bury the dead, till more strength come to us.
It was against this backdrop that Mugg Heigon’s plan for an Abenaki naval sweep of the outer islands, followed by an assault on Boston, was taking shape. Whether such a strategy would have succeeded had Mugg himself not been killed in battle, we are left to guess, but after the initial successes in snatching up fishing boats—thirteen, including the William and Sarah, from Salem and Marblehead alone—the scheme went sour. Some of the sailors and ships managed to slip free on their own, and influential Salem merchants pressured the Massachusetts council to send north an armed ketch with forty men onboard, which succeeded in retaking the remaining vessels.
Boston was safe from seaborne attack, but by the time hostilities petered out in 1677, the “Eastern Indians” had, unlike their southern cousins, won a significant victory, all but clearing Europeans from the coast of Maine. Instead of solidifying these gains, however, the eastern Abenaki sachems (many of whom had not been active participants in the war) looked at their own decimated numbers, and at the ever-present Iroquois threat to the west, and decided they could use the newly chastened English as a bulwa
rk against the Mohawk. They invited the colonists to return—setting by treaty what they considered inviolable conditions, including the recognition of Indian authority (with annual tribute payments of corn) and promises to remain in the lower, tidal zones of the major rivers, leaving the vast inland areas to the Natives.
How seriously the English took these promises is debatable. Within a short while, Indians were again protesting intrusions, land thefts, and expanding white settlements. War would come again soon—but this time, the reason would not be merely the sad old cycle of escalating offenses and grievances.
King Philip’s War was a regional conflict fought for local reasons, as had been most of the previous wars on the First Frontier. But as the seventeenth century drew to an end, the underlying rationale for war on the eastern frontier shifted. All the earlier triggers of strife remained—indeed, in many cases grew more pronounced—but increasingly, the fundamental forces driving each side to war were global as well as regional. Monarchs and empires in Europe—forging and breaking alliances, jockeying for wealth, sending forth armies—would for the next seventy-five years ignite war after war thousands of miles away on the American frontier.
But for now, there seemed to be a chance for peace. Wanalancet, the sachem of the Pennacook in New Hampshire, had managed to steer his people clear of the worst of King Philip’s War, following the course of neutrality his late father, Passaconaway, had followed for forty years. It wasn’t easy. Nearly sixty, Wanalancet (who had reluctantly agreed to be baptized a few years earlier) showed Job-like patience in the face of English arrogance and double-dealing.
In the fall of 1675, for instance, he got word from his scouts that an English force led by the notorious Indian hater and privateer Captain Samuel Moseley, one of those who had slaughtered the Narragansetts in the Great Swamp Fight, was approaching. Finding the Pennacook camp along the upper Merrimack deserted, Moseley ignored his orders and burned the village, including its crucial winter supply of dried fish, before heading back to Massachusetts—never realizing his men were constantly shadowed by Pennacook warriors, who could easily have ambushed them. Instead, Wanalancet, who had moved his people out of harm’s way before the English arrived, held his men in grim check, then retreated with his band still farther back into the mountains, where they scraped by on scarce game until regional hostilities simmered down in the summer of 1676.
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