Connecticut’s colonies were vulnerable and isolated. The planters constantly sensed Indians 200 feet above the valley floor watching them from clefts in the traprock. When a new warning appeared of Miantonomo’s plans to attack Connecticut after the harvest, their magistrates demanded a war. The Indians intended to go in small groups ‘to the chief men’s houses by way of trading, etc and should kill them in the houses and seize their weapons’. But Winthrop and his fellow Bay magistrates were loath to go to war again: ‘Although the thing seemed very probable, yet we thought it not sufficient ground for us to begin a war.’
They would have to stand continuously on their guard. Unable to venture out beyond their palisades they would be prevented from attending to their farms or continuing to trade with the Indians. The Bay disarmed important chiefs: Cutshamekin at Braintree and the celebratedly long-lived Passaconaway, chief of the Pennacooks, who lived by the Merrimack River. Once again Miantonomo was hauled in to be questioned. At his examination at Boston he insisted on having several councillors with him, for as Winthrop noted, Miantonomo was ‘a very subtle man’. He wanted witnesses to confirm what he had said. He denied all manner of conspiracy and asked for those accusing him to be present and do so to his face. He said the accusations were mere rumours set about by Uncas – whom he said was treacherous to the English. Miantonomo was fed up of having to keep his men at home and not allow them to go out hunting.
By the end of October the Indians’ guns were handed back, though most of New England’s small settlements remained tense and on edge. The winter of 1642–3 saw extraordinary snowfall, reducing communication between settlements to the advantage of the Indians. It was decided that every town must be furnished with powder out of the common store. Guns must be provided, as well as military watches and alarms.
The citizens found it hard to contain their anxieties. The town records show their fears about Miantonomo were so great that colonists travelled in convoys. The Indians’ mastery of woodcraft and ability to move silently through the forests in their moccasins meant the colonists were constantly on edge.
The farmers were sitting ducks. Some said that Pequots were now part of Miantonomo’s force prepared to burn homesteads and scalp the inhabitants. Edward was one of the chief architects of a plan to join the separate plantations into an overarching organisation for their protection, so the colonies could coordinate troops and act at short notice. The English government could not help because their soldiers were occupied on English Civil War battlefields, and in any event they were too far away. Putting aside their differences and jealousies over land patents, an inter-colonial organisation called the New England Confederation was established. The more far-sighted, including Edward, believed it was all too possible for the Dutch and French to be drawn in on the Indian side, not to speak of the Mohawks. The United Colonies created on 19 May 1643 were a ‘perpetual league of friendship for offence and defence’. Each colony sent two commissioners and no colony was to declare war without consulting the others.
Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven* were thus drawn together. Rhode Island, however, was regarded as being full of dangerous heretics – like Roger Williams, plus Anne Hutchinson and her supporters – and was not allowed to join. Nor were its idiosyncratic settlers interested in doing so. Anne Hutchinson and her husband and followers were in exile at Aquidneck, Rhode Island, on land sold to them by the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags. The Narragansetts’ decision to sell land to the Bay’s enemies of course did not improve their standing in Boston. In addition it had become clear that the land round Narragansett Bay was some of the most fertile in New England with potential for a superb harbour.
Most Plymouth colonists fatalistically buried themselves in the hard work involved in just getting by, raising enough pigs for the winter, chopping enough trees for the stove. They did not want to think about war. Edward, one of the two commissioners representing Plymouth in the confederation, spent far more time in Boston. His fierce devotion to John Winthrop continued. He hero-worshipped Winthrop as he had once hero-worshipped William Brewster and John Robinson. It had altered him, making him more zealous and less open-minded. Moving in the company of Bostonians gave him more of a sense of a New England that was not just a loose collection of small settlements, but a place growing up into a godly nation.
* * *
Immigrants fleeing Charles I’s reforms continued to arrive. Perhaps they had no idea of quite how disturbed the situation was. They were just anxious to get out of England. In the August of 1638 twenty ships and at least 3,000 persons ‘of good quality and estate’ came through the port of Boston. Many were enterprising and zealous Puritan gentry who had no faith in the king’s promises. Amongst them was a small party of East Anglians, connections of the Winthrops headed by Herbert Pelham. His wife Jemima (née Waldegrave) had died on the voyage, but Herbert sailed on. The Pelham family would play a big part in the Winslows’ lives. Amongst the arrivals, no doubt bewildered by their mother’s sudden death, were Herbert’s four young children, including the five-year-old Penelope, Edward’s future daughter-in-law. Their maternal grandfather, Thomas Waldegrave, had pooled resources with Herbert Pelham, investing early in the Massachusetts Bay Company, so they were entitled to at least 800 acres once they got to America.
Like many of the gentry passengers who came off the boats in their heavily embroidered and expensive fabrics denoting their status at home, the Pelhams were damp and anxious. Accompanied by their beautiful and elaborate household objects they lumbered down the rough gangplanks onto the mud of the Boston wharves in their dainty shoes, clutching their cloaks tighter against the sharp air. What had started out as an exhilarating adventure in a large family party had gone tragically wrong already. They were perhaps a little fearful, but the Pelhams had powerful connections in colonising circles, as well as family in Boston. Herbert’s brother William and sister Penelope were there and could look after Herbert and his motherless children. William Pelham was one of the first planters at Sudbury – he had secured land there for Herbert and the Waldegraves.
Despite the storm of the Anne Hutchinson affair, the settlers at Boston had not lost all their human qualities, including the governor, Richard Bellingham. He had been not only the recorder of Boston, Lincolnshire, but also its MP before emigrating in 1634. Herbert’s sister Penelope caught his eye. She was already promised to a young man lodging in the governor’s house, but the forceful Bellingham, who was one of the most powerful politicians of the day, soon got her to prefer himself, and they married in 1641. In Boston in New England Bellingham had a large country house on the marshes at what is now called Chelsea, where he hunted. He owned the ferry between Boston and Chelsea, across the Mystic River.
Fortunately for Herbert and his motherless brood an intimacy sprang up between himself and Elizabeth Harlakenden, the young widow of an admired and very orthodox Boston magistrate. She may have felt sorry for a man struggling with small children, as she was in a similar position herself, and they probably had friends in common. Herbert and his former wife Jemima had been close neighbours of the family of Elizabeth’s husband Roger, living a couple of miles away from their manor house at Earls Colne in Essex. By 1638 Roger had died of smallpox. But he left a wealthy widow and by 1639 Herbert had married her, adding a New World fortune to his already sizeable portfolio (he owned at least 800 acres of Lincolnshire and had great expectations of his father-in-law Thomas Waldegrave’s estates in Suffolk).
But many immigrants were not in his fortunate position and had to travel to found new towns. Freshly arrived from England, the less well-to-do inhabitants of Massachusetts had little idea how to survive in the wilderness, let alone how to combat their Indian neighbours. There were few horses and they were no good in forests. To get to the new towns they had to travel through watery swamps with all their luggage, walking on tree trunks in thickets which sometimes gave way to ‘an uncertain bottom in water’. Once they emerged from the forest they met ‘a sco
rching plain’. Sometimes the sun was so strong and the fern undergrowth smelt so overwhelming that folk whose stockings were already cut to pieces fainted, yet on they went, carried by their pastors and their faith.
Once they found a place to plant their church, near water, it was thin times bartering with the Indians for flesh, including an animal none of them had seen or eaten before, a ‘rockoon’ or raccoon. And ‘instead of apples and pears, they had pompkins and squashes of divers kinds’.
It was hard to get a herd established; often after one or two years the cattle died, wolves still took the pigs, and the sheep did not thrive unless they were farmed with cattle. Horses also did not do well, ‘which made many an honest gentleman travel a foot for a long time, and some have even perished with extreme heat in their travels’. The lack of English grain – wheat, barley and rye – ‘proved a sore affliction to some stomachs’. Those who survived best were the ones who could live ‘upon Indian bread and water’.
Emigration ceased abruptly when the English Civil War began, and with it the specie that came with immigrants. Prices plummeted: cows and corn lost three-quarters of their value. The New Englanders could not pay their debts in England for commodities they had already imported. There were gigantic economic problems as well as the fear of the Indians.
* * *
A weary Edward was permanently in the saddle on the trail through briars and undergrowth that lay between Marshfield and Boston. Nowhere was safe. Even the most trusted Indian guide might turn out to have Pequot sympathies or have a relative who was a Pequot or a Narragansett. Now that the colonists had essentially become an occupying force, it was hard to make a distinction between friendly pro-English Indians and those full of hatred for these newcomers. The wrong guess could mean death. Edward was no longer their champion and perhaps no longer even really their friend. His admiration for the exotic ways of the Indians had been replaced by fear.
He now believed there was a ‘deep conspiracy against all English in the land’, a conspiracy his knowledge of the Indians convinced him the Indians could win. Pamphlets written by Edward in the 1640s show his belief in the necessity of patrolling all Indian alliances, particularly anything to do with Miantonomo and the Narragansetts. Writing for an English audience to defend the way of life in New England and convince the English government not to interfere in it, Edward was mindful of London friends who asked why the colonists kept needlessly engaging ‘in the troubles between the Indians’. Attempting to convey the intricacies of life surrounded by the tribes, Edward told them that in New England it was fantastically important (even if unimaginable to an English person) to know what was going on amongst the Indians. He wrote: ‘if we should not here and there keep correspondence with some of them, they would soon join all together against us’. A couple of marriages could link dynasties and armies in the twinkling of an eye.
At the height of the threat of war, a mystical free spirit called Samuel Gorton – a man regarded as a heretic by most of the New England leadership, including the ‘heretical’ Rhode Islanders – chose to befriend Miantonomo. Gorton and his family refused to obey the laws of Plymouth, and moved from settlement to settlement managing to offend everyone with whom they came into contact. Gorton challenged William Coddington for the leadership of Newport. The Rhode Island settlements found him insolent and intolerable. Roger Williams thought he truly deserved the name of ‘familist’ and refused to have him causing trouble in Providence. Taking pride in not being book learned and saying the first thing that came into his head, Gorton had a genius for putting people’s backs up. (In fact he shared many of the traits of Puritan settlers – self-belief and a conviction that he knew best about God.)
In the winter of 1642 Miantonomo sold Gorton land at Shawomet, now Warwick, Rhode Island (no colonist would sell him land). Miantonomo’s right to do so was forcefully challenged by the English, and he was yet again summoned to court in Boston. Not only was the Narragansetts’ freedom of movement curtailed, Miantonomo’s right to deal with his family’s land how he pleased was now denied.
Samuel Gorton had considerable sympathy with the Narragansett royal family, who were astonished not to be treated as if they were the Bay’s equals. To the colonists’ intense annoyance, Gorton started to tell Miantonomo that the Indian’s peer was Charles I. Lion Gardiner heard from his sachem friends that Miantonomo told his chiefs not to give any more wampum tribute to the English, ‘for they are no Sachems, nor none of their children shall be in their place if they die; and they have no tribute given them; there is but one king in England, who is over them all’. Gorton’s friendship with Miantonomo made him a traitor when the New England colonies were in a state of siege.
Gorton was encouraging Miantonomo to resist the main power in the land. In Edward’s view Gorton and his friends had acted as the Narragansetts’ ‘tutors, secretaries and prompters to suggest their greatness and our weakness to them’.
Feeling so outnumbered in the huge foreign land, and under pressure to save their lives that winter, the New England colonies resembled military garrisons. Loyalty was everything. Fiercely independent views had taken the Puritans to America, but now they were living in a state of siege there was no room for quirky individual thought. At a time of hysteria exacerbated by the Indian threat, and when the success of New England was believed so much to depend on fulfilling the terms of its godly covenant, Gorton could not be viewed rationally. He was perceived as posing a huge danger to the New England mission, though in fact his way of treating Miantonomo as an equal and great chief might indeed have been a better way forward.
For his part Miantonomo was assaulted by angry feelings of grievance. Around thirty years old and at the peak of his powers, in every way he was hemmed in. He kept the peace, although he was said to have hired an assassin to kill Uncas. In fact, had Miantonomo’s life been less circumscribed, his all-consuming antagonism might have come to an end. It is not clear that he still planned to enact a conspiracy against the English – his real focus was on Uncas, whom he was determined to murder – but most colonists believed Miantonomo was continuing to send secret signals to allied Indian tribes that they should be prepared to rise, and that payments to the Mohawks had not ceased.
Edward and the leaders at Boston and Plymouth felt as frustrated as Miantonomo. The New England magistrates wondered who would rid them of this troublesome sachem. The answer was not long in coming.
As Uncas schemed how to accrue more territory and power via the English, fate rolled the dice in his favour. A sachem of Connecticut and a cousin of Miantonomo, Sequasson, was involved in a skirmish with Uncas and the Mohegans. At a time of maximum tension, what was just one of the many little border fights which were part of the Indian pattern of life made the Connecticut settlers fear for their lives and their cattle. Sequasson asked Miantonomo for help. Maddened by not being able to hunt or even move in the country of his ancestors, Miantonomo leapt at the chance to attack his hated rival.
As much as he disliked rules, Miantonomo was nevertheless careful to appear to abide by them. He asked for Boston’s permission – as he had been constrained to by their treaty – to go to war against Uncas. Boston did not veto it. The answer came: it was up to him. Miantonomo did not approach Connecticut. He may have felt such anger at the Treaty of Hartford, which had removed the Pequot country from him at a stroke, that he elected to ignore it. Perhaps tired by treaties which he could not read, he thought one English group’s permission was enough.
In the summer of 1643, with 1,000 men he went after Uncas, who he knew had only 400 or so warriors, pursuing him to the edge of his fort at Shantok, situated between two rivers. The rival chiefs met on the plains below the fort by the Thames River. Throughout the hot August night Uncas’s scouts watched the palisaded fort. The moonlit plain seemed empty, but Miantonomo’s men were hidden in trees and rocks, their faces painted black.
When Uncas saw that he was heavily outnumbered, he asked for a parley. It took place before both armie
s, which were drawn up facing each other. Uncas asked for single combat. When, as Uncas had predicted, Miantonomo rejected this, Uncas dropped to the ground as if he had been attacked. It was a secret signal. The Mohegans let fly with their arrows, and the unprepared Narragansetts fled. Many of them did not know there was a bend in the river close by. The path unexpectedly came out onto cliffs and a gorge through which ran swirling rapids. It is said hundreds of Narragansetts perished when they fell to their deaths in the foaming Yantic Falls.
While the Narragansett braves were in their usual leather breeches, Miantonomo himself was weighed down by the suit of English armour lent to him by Gortonists who naturally had taken the Narragansetts’ side. He was unaccustomed to wearing heavy armour, which prevented him from escaping quickly. According to John Winthrop, two of his captains saw he was struggling. Hoping to save their own lives, the traitors dragged their leader to Uncas. The ruthless Uncas rewarded them by dashing out their brains.
Witnesses said Miantonomo stood mute and Uncas jeered at him: ‘If you had taken me … I would have besought you for my life.’
Unable to resist causing mischief and genuinely sorry for Miantonomo, Samuel Gorton added his usual inflammatory ha’p’orth to the stew. He sent a message to Uncas as if from the Boston government, saying Miantonomo must be released. He had considerable sympathy for the magnificent chief who had been personally generous to him. Instead, Miantonomo was borne in triumph to Connecticut by Uncas. On the march to Hartford an exhausted Miantonomo made one final attempt at a pan-Indian rising. He offered a blood alliance to Uncas, the tie which was valued above all others by the Indians. He would marry Uncas’s daughter, and proposed his brother Pessicus should marry one of Massasoit’s daughters to unite all the Indians against the English invaders.
The Mayflower Page 21