by Sarah Vowell
They found Oldham’s body under an old fishing net, “stark naked, his head cleft to the brains, and his hand and legs cut as if [the Indians] had been cutting them off, and yet warm.”
The Bay Colony had slowly worked themselves up into a rage for retribution over the murder of Captain Stone, a drunken adulterer they themselves would have killed if he was ever daft enough to return to Massachusetts. Oldham, on the other hand, was one of them, a church member, a member of the same body. That Indians had bashed in his brains and attempted to dismember him was in and of itself reason enough to mow down his murderers. That the killing happened after two years of Massachusetts’s jitters about Indian behavior south of its border meant war.
Two natives who understood the colonists’ state of mind, and wisely tripped all over themselves to remain on the Bay Colony’s good side, were Canonicus and Miantonomi, the Narragansett sachems. The following week, Canonicus sent three messengers, two of whom were eyewitnesses to Oldham’s murder, to Boston. They brought a letter from Roger Williams and news that Miantonomi was already “gone with seventeen canoes and two hundred men to take revenge.”
Winthrop says Massachusetts authorities interrogated one of the three Narragansett messengers. He divulged that Oldham’s murderers were Niantic allies of the Narragansett who, unbeknownst to Canonicus and Miantonomi, killed Oldham because he traded with the Pequot.
Winthrop records that Governor Vane wrote to Roger Williams to watch his back “if we should have occasion to make war upon the Narragansett, for Block Island was under them.”
In other words, at this point, war with the Pequot is still not a foregone conclusion. But the Pequot’s chief rivals, the Narragansett, with help from Roger Williams, have acted quickly and shrewdly to win over the Bay Colony to their side.
Boston soon receives word from Miantonomi, that he is on the Niantic case and that he has a hundred fathom of Oldham’s wampum to send to Boston. (By contrast, Boston is still waiting to receive the reparation wampum they had demanded from the Pequot more than a year earlier.) The following week, Boston sends representatives to Miantonomi’s co-sachem, Canonicus, to shore up its alliance with the Narragansett. Winthrop writes with relief that the sachem has “great command over his men, and marvelous wisdom in his answers and the carriage of the whole treaty, clearing himself and his neighbors of the murder, and offering assistance for revenge of it.”
On August 25, 1636, Winthrop records in his journal that Governor Vane, along with the magistrates and ministers meet “about doing justice upon the Indians for the death of Mr. Oldham” and agree to deputize a posse posthaste. They dispatch ninety men divided amongst four captains, including John Underhill, under the general command of Salem’s John Endecott.
Boston is cleaning house. The expedition’s mission is twofold. Winthrop writes, “They had commission to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children . . . and from thence go to the Pequot to demand the murderers of Captain Stone,” along with one thousand fathom of wampum. If they are refused the perpetrators and the booty, the men are to kidnap Pequot children as ransom. Snatching kids away from their mothers as a military plan would be horrifying except for the fact that—spoiler alert—what the English end up doing to the Pequot youngsters is way, way worse than kidnapping.
As if there isn’t enough to worry about, the devil’s sorcerers are plotting against them. Roger Williams sends a disquieting letter, informing Boston that “The Pequots hear of your preparations . . . and comfort themselves in this that a witch amongst them will sink” the English boats “by diving under water and making holes.” Williams adds, “I hope their dreams through the mercy of the Lord shall vanish, and the devil and his lying sorcerers shall be confounded.”
Do keep in mind Williams’s warning of underwater witches as we witness the ugliness ahead. To modern readers, the Pequot War is an unpleasant turf war in which the English battle a specific New England tribe. To the English, they are fighting the devil himself and his earthly representatives.
John Endecott, John Underhill, and their men sail to Block Island. Underhill would go on to write a gripping memoir of the Pequot War, titled News from America. In it, he says that when they pull up along the island’s shore, around fifty natives are lying in wait. They let loose their arrows, Underhill writes, “as though they had meant to have made an end of us all in a moment.” One Englishman is hit in the neck, but because he is wearing a collar so stiff “as if it had been an oaken board,” his life is spared. Similarly, Underhill relates that had his wife not nagged him into wearing his helmet, he would have been “slain” by an arrow through the forehead. “The arrows flying thick about us, we made haste to the shore,” he writes. Luckily, he points out, “Our bullets out-reach their arrows.”
They make camp. The next day, they set off to kill the islanders, but the islanders have hidden in the swamps. Since the English can’t find anyone to shoot at, they spend the day “burning and spoiling the land.” The following day, more of same. The English “burnt their houses” and “cut down their corn.” Still, no Indians to be found. So Underhill admits the following distasteful fact: the English, denied the human targets they came for, “destroyed some of their dogs instead of men.”
The Block Islanders never come out. So the demoralized English slink off toward Connecticut to confront the Pequot. Once they get there, Underhill writes, some Pequot on shore spot their boats and call out, “What cheer, Englishmen? What do you come for?” The English do not answer them. The Indians nevertheless follow them. Underhill says the Pequot run along the bank of the Pequot River (now the Thames), asking, “Are you hoggery? Will you cram us? That is, are you angry, will you kill us, do you come to fight?”
That evening, Underhill says, the English remain on the river, in their boats. The Niantic and Pequot build fires on either riverbank so the English won’t “land in the night.” Underhill complains that, “they made the most doleful and woeful cries all the night (so that we could scarce rest).”
The next day, according to Underhill the English are approached by a Pequot, “a grave senior, a man of good understanding, portly, carriage grave, and majestical in his expressions. He demanded of us what the end of our coming was.”
They answer that the government of the Bay has sent them to bring back the heads of the men who murdered Captain Stone. “It was not the custom of the English to suffer murderers to live,” they explain. “Therefore, if the Pequot desired their own peace and welfare, they will peaceably answer our expectation and give us the heads of the murderers.”
“They being a witty and ingenious nation,” Underhill remarks, the old man insisted they knew “not that any of ours have slain any English.” Then he told them about a trading boat that came up their river and how the men on it lured their sachem on board and then informed the tribe that if they wanted him back to give them a bushel of wampum. “This peal did ring terribly in our ears,” the old man explained. So, he said, the Pequot gave the kidnappers what they asked and the kidnappers returned the sachem to shore, “but first slew him.” Seeing the corpse of their leader, he said, “made us vow a revenge.”
The elder ambassador continues. When another white man’s boat showed up, that being Captain Stone’s, the dead sachem’s son went aboard. “Stone, having drunk more than did him good, fell backwards on the bed asleep.” So the sachem’s son took out his hatchet and “therewith knocked him in the head.” The old man asks, “Could ye blame us for revenging so cruel a murder? For we distinguish not between the Dutch and the English, but took them to be one nation. And therefore, we do not conceive that we wronged you.”
The English aren’t buying it. They tell the ambassador that his people have had more than enough contact with the English and the Dutch to tell the two apart. “Seeing you have slain the king of England’s subjects, we came to demand an account of their blood.”
The old man then counters, essentially, No, really, we can’t tell you people ap
art. Then the English tell him that can’t be true. “We must have the heads of those persons that have slain ours or we will fight you.”
The old man asks them to wait in their boat and he will go to his people and bring back an answer. When the soldiers follow him ashore, he insists the Englishmen wait in a spot they quickly determine is the most vulnerable position around. “ They carried themselves very subtly,” Underhill remarks of the old man’s smarts. He comes back and says the sachem has gone to Long Island.
The English tell him they don’t believe this and if the Pequot don’t produce the sachem forthwith, the soldiers will “beat up the drum and march through the country and spoil your corn.”
So the old man tells the English to wait. So they do. Then they wait some more. Then they notice, while they’re waiting, that the Pequot are leading away their women and children and burying things of value. In other words, preparing either for battle or escape. When a messenger tells the English the sachem will see them if they will lay down their arms, the English say no and the Pequot laugh at them for waiting so long, so the English start shooting willy-nilly and the Pequot run off and the English dig up the Pequot’s stuff and take it, says Underhill, as booty. Then, just as they had done on Block Island, Underhill writes, “We spent the day burning and spoiling the country.” And, “having burnt and spoiled what we could light on, we embarked our men and set sail for the Bay.”
Winthrop’s journal records with delight that the men “came all safe to Boston, which was a marvelous providence of God, that not a hair fell from the head of any of them.” Not only that, but on their way home, they were accompanied by a Narragansett interpreter who killed a Pequot in a swamp along the way and “flayed off the skin of his head,” i.e., scalped him. So: bonus.
The jubilation, however, is short-lived when Winthrop hears from Williams that the Pequot are attempting not only to make peace with the Narragansett but “had labored to persuade them that the English were minded to destroy all Indians.” Boston is alarmed enough by the possibility of a Pequot-Narragansett alliance, according to Winthrop, that they send for Miantonomi right away.
By the time Miantonomi arrives in Boston, there have been more skirmishes between the Pequot and the settlers in Saybrook.
According to Winthrop’s journal entry for October 21, 1636, Miantonomi addresses an assembly of Boston’s magistrates and ministers. He reassures them “ That [the Narragansett] had always loved the English, and desired firm peace with us” and “that they would continue in war with the Pequot and their confederates.”
Boston draws up a formal agreement with Miantonomi, but since he doesn’t entirely understand the articles of the treaty, Winthrop says, “We agreed to send a copy of them to Mr. Williams who could best interpret them to them.” The treaty calls for “neither party to make peace with the Pequot without the other’s consent”; “not to harbor the Pequots”; “to put to death or deliver over murderers”; and “free trade between us.”
If only every English ally were as cordial as Miantonomi. In the same entry, Winthrop reports receiving a snippy letter from Governor Bradford in Plymouth complaining that Boston had “occasioned a war by provoking the Pequot,” thus placing Plymouth in harm’s way. Winthrop admits the letter irks him. “ The deputy took it ill” is how he puts it. He writes back to Bradford, “We went not to make war upon them, but to do justice.”
In this same action-packed journal entry about the treaty with the Narragansett and the displeasure of Plymouth, Winthrop brings up “one Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston” and her “dangerous errors.” This is the first time Winthrop mentions Anne Hutchinson. The years 1636-37 are busy and difficult: Boston banishes Roger Williams, prepares to go to war against the king of England, does go to war with the Pequot, watches Connecticut draw away some of its best citizens, and deals with Anne Hutchinson, a female blabbermouth who is so difficult and so defiant that the General Court will long for the good old days of bickering with the comparatively easygoing Williams.
By January of 1637, Winthrop’s journal notes that “a general fast was kept in all the churches.” The Massachusetts Bay colonists diet en masse to appease God for an accumulation of sins and worries—everything from the “bishops making havoc” back home with their “popish ceremonies and doctrines” to “the dangers of those at Connecticut, and of ourselves also, by the Indians,” as well as “the dissensions in our churches,” by which he means the recent Hutchinson hubbub.
By March, good old Miantonomi sends Boston a tribute of “forty fathom of wampum and a Pequot’s hand,” severed body parts being the seventeenth-century equivalent of a gift basket of mini-muffins. Also, the Connecticut settlers send word that they are, per Winthrop’s journal, “unsatisfied with our former expedition of the Pequot, and their expectations of a further prosecution of the war.” To that end, Boston dispatches Captain John Underhill to Saybrook.
May of 1637 is the most eventful month in an eventful year. Partly as a result of his firm hand (which is to say hypercritical severity—a Puritan selling point) throughout the Anne Hutchinson crisis, Winthrop is reelected governor for the first time in three years. There’s news from Connecticut that the Pequot killed nine English settlers and kidnapped two English girls. And Roger Williams, acting as the Bay Colony’s go-between with the Narragansett, sends a letter to Boston reporting that “our neighbor princes,” i.e., Canonicus and Miantonomi, have been made aware of “your intentions and preparations against the common enemy, the Pequot.”
“Miantonomi kept his barbarous court lately at my house,” Williams continues. Then he boasts, “He takes some pleasure to visit me.” The Narragansett send along a list of suggestions and requests for joining the English in combat, including advising the English to attack the Pequot at night “when they are commonly more secure at home, by which advantage [they] may enter the houses and do what execution they please.”
For their trouble, Williams writes that Canonicus would “gladly accept a box of eight or ten pounds of sugar.” He also notes “that it would be pleasing to all natives, that women and children be spared.” At the end of Williams’s letter is a helpful map of the Connecticut River area, including where the Pequot forts are, including the location of the principal sachem, Sassacus.
Captain John Mason, a former Bostonian who had settled in Connecticut, leads a force of colonists and Mohegan allies under the command of Uncas to Fort Saybrook, where they will meet up with the Boston soldiers under the command of John Underhill and the Narragansett. Mason and Uncas split up, with Mason’s forces going by boat and Uncas’s men going on foot. Mason was dubious at best whether he could count on Uncas. He would soon find out that the English could always count on Uncas.
Not only did Uncas show up at the fort, as promised, he and his men got into a scrape with some Pequot on the way there and brought back five severed Pequot heads to prove it. Mason, who, like Underhill, wrote a memoir of the conflict—A Brief History of the Pequot War—enthuses that the English saw the decapitations as “a special providence; for before we were somewhat doubtful of [Uncas’s] fidelity.” Underhill uses the same word to describe the Mohegan commitment in News from America: “ This mightily encouraged the hearts of all, and we took this as a pledge of their further fidelity.”
More good news. Oh, but what could be better news than a bouquet of enemy heads rolling around the fort’s floor? Live English girls. Underhill relates that brave Dutch traders dispatched by the governor of New Netherland rescued the two Connecticut maids who had been kidnapped by the Pequot and return them to the fort. The eldest girl, who is sixteen, especially impresses the men. Underhill writes, “She told us [the Pequot] did solicit her to uncleanness, but her heart being much broken,” she asked them, “How shall I commit this great evil and sin against my God?” Fearing “God’s displeasure with them,” the Pequot didn’t touch either girl. Still, Underhill recounts, “hope was their chiefest food and tears their constant drink.” The girl rec
alls that she lost hope and worried her captors would kill her, especially if the war came.
Then she had a most Calvinist epiphany. She asked herself, “Why should I distrust God? Do I not daily see the love of God to my poor, distressed soul? And he hath said that he will never leave me, nor forsake me.” Realizing this, she resolved, “I will not fear what man can do unto me, knowing God to be above man, and man can do nothing without God’s permission.”
Underhill is clearly awed by the girl’s pious pluck. She inspires him to think of celebrated would-be martyrs of the Old Testament, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, like Daniel in the lion’s den: “Better in a fiery furnace with the presence of Christ, than in a kingly palace without him. Better in the lion’s den, in the midst of all the roaring lions with Christ, than in a down bed with wife and children without Christ.”
Thus are the English troops spiritually nurtured by the released Calvinist captive, and in good spirits due to Uncas’s so very thoughtful decapitation offering, when Miantonomi and his army arrive to help out. Mason recalls that the Narragansett gathered themselves “into a ring, one by one, making solemn protestations how gallantly they would [carry] themselves and how many men they would kill.”
Mason reports that on May 25, “about eight of the clock in the morning, we marched thence toward the Pequot, with about five hundred Indians.” Their original aim was to attack the headquarters of Sassacus, the Pequot sachem. After all, it was Sassacus who had murdered Captain Stone to avenge his father’s death. But at some point, they decide to attack the Pequot fort at Mystic instead. It’s closer.
As the day wears on, they get hotter and hungrier, and Mason says that “some of our men fainted.”
