The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  According to some accounts Uncas did briefly pause and think about it before he pressed on to Hartford cunningly to ask the magistrates’ advice as to what should happen to his captive. Miantonomo was interested in religious questions. In conversation with his braves on the issue of where heaven was, he had said that it was not clear – was it to the south-west? Now he might find out for himself.

  * * *

  A hundred miles away at Boston, the commissioners of the United Colonies met to decide what should be done. They included Edward, who had ridden over from Marshfield. They were all of the same opinion as John Winthrop, who frankly admitted to his diary regarding Miantonomo ‘that it would not be safe to set him at liberty, neither had we sufficient ground to put him to death’. They decided to take advantage of the General Assembly of Elders to ask what they should do. Without any qualms the clergymen ordered death.

  This conference met in the utmost secrecy because they worried that if word got out to the Narragansetts, they might kidnap some of the commissioners on their way home and use them as hostages to bargain for Miantonomo’s life. The Mohawks were reported to be within a day’s journey of Hartford waiting for Miantonomo’s signal. It never came.

  The commissioners asked Uncas and his men to take Miantonomo away from Hartford jail, where its governor, John Haynes, was holding him, and execute him themselves. They phrased it thus: ‘These things being duly weighed’ they believed that Uncas ‘cannot be safe while Miantonomo lives’ and that by secret treachery or open force his life would still be in danger. Uncas could ‘justly put such a false bloodthirsty enemy to death, but in his own jurisdiction, not in the English plantations’. Because Uncas had shown himself a ‘friend to the English, and in this craving their advice, if the Narragansett Indians or others shall unjustly assault Uncas for this execution, upon notice and request the English promise to assist and protect him, as far as they may against such violence’.

  There were many stories about how Miantonomo met his end. One had Uncas’s brother step up behind him unexpectedly on his march to Uncas’s territory and bury a tomahawk in his head. Edward insisted Miantonomo had been put to death in a formal fashion in a house. The death was ‘one blow with an hatchet on the side of the head as he walked easily in the room (expecting no less) which fully dispatched him at once’. There were two Englishmen there to ensure there was no torture, as was the Indians’ usual custom. They were required by the commissioners ‘to give him honourable burial, which they did and had thanks returned by the Narragansetts for those particulars’. How very far Edward had come in twenty-three years to describe the end of the pride of the Narragansetts. Samuel Gorton would muse how peculiar it was that Christian clergymen found it so easy to give the death penalty to an Indian. He wrote sarcastically that Uncas ‘murdered him in cold blood, according to the direction of his Christian advisers’. Most historians nowadays see Miantonomo’s death as judicial murder. The United Colonies got Uncas to do their dirty work and he was more than happy to comply.

  * * *

  The English had not felt safe while Miantonomo was alive, yet they were no more secure after his death. Miantonomo’s pan-Indian uprising had been thwarted, but the Narragansetts were doubly determined to destroy Uncas. Wild with the desire to avenge their executed leader, they brought New England to the brink of war periodically for many years thereafter. Their heartbreak created a burning hostility to the English that lasted for decades.

  A month after Miantonomo’s death scouts and trappers in the woods told the petrified towns they needed to be on permanent professional Indian watch. They braced themselves for bloodthirsty attacks. In Marshfield at a town meeting run by Edward the townsfolk were told to sleep in their clothes with arms ready by their beds on account of ‘imminent danger near to the whole body of the English in this land’. There was to be a watch against the Indians in four parts of the town. The Winslows’ home had a permanent sentry on duty to raise the alarm: one shot meant a neighbouring township had been attacked; two, that the Indians were attacking Marshfield. On the Sabbath all those able to bear arms had to bring them to the meeting house. They begged the colony government for a new barrel of gunpowder.

  To Romantic nineteenth-century writers searching for heroes after the American Revolutionary Wars, Miantonomo was a sympathetic figure. His fate reminded the historian Samuel Drake of Napoleon: ‘We do not say that the English of New England dreaded the power of Miantonomo as much as those of Old England did that of Napoleon afterwards; but that both were sacrificed in consequence of the fears of those into whose power the fortune of wars cast them, will not, we presume, be denied.’

  Today a cairn of stones marks the spot where Miantonomo died. One of the most important authorities on the period, Neal Salisbury, believes that Miantonomo’s peaceful prior record and his friendship with Roger Williams indicate that if Uncas had agreed to a pan-Indian front, as Miantonomo had requested on his last journey, there could have been an effective institutional counterweight to expansion by Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. It would have stabilised ‘Indian–European relations in and around what was soon to become Rhode Island’. Handled more thoughtfully after the Pequot War, Miantonomo might have behaved differently.

  Roger Williams at the time believed that there were ‘some sparks of true friendship’ there. Miantonomo had just needed to be convinced that ‘the English never intended to despoil him of the country’.

  Gorton seems to have been genuinely sad. He reported that the Narragansetts mourned for a year and a half because of the enormity of the crime of executing a great prince. Although Edward disputed this because it reflected so badly on Massachusetts, there was no question that the Narragansetts were devastated. As Edward himself had reported many years previously, mourning was a huge part of Indian culture – it was so heartfelt it drew tears even from the English.

  After a while the Narragansett women removed the black from their faces, and came off their knees. They had been wailing night and day. In the royal temple the Narragansett priests spoke continually of their loss.

  Narragansetts remained dedicated to avenging his murder. If they did not do so, it would so ‘lie upon their own heads, as to bring more miseries and evils upon them’. It was religiously ordained that they avenge their prince.

  In the autumn Miantonomo’s brother Pessicus sent huge amounts of wampum to John Winthrop as a gift, intended to allow them to attack Uncas. Winthrop kept the wampum, but sent back a message that the Bay and all the United Colonies were Uncas’s friend, and vowed to protect him.

  In the spring of 1644 Boston demanded the presence of Canonicus, Miantonomo’s uncle, to make it clear that the Bay would take severe measures if the Narragansetts attacked the Mohegans and did not stop sending wampum to the Mohawks. But old Canonicus refused to come to a meeting. Uncharacteristically – for he had always been a man of courtesy – he kept the Massachusetts messengers waiting outside the wigwam in the rain. He did not care if they were insulted. He wanted them to know how grief-stricken the tribe was at Miantonomo’s death. Canonicus was a man of intense emotions. When his own son had died he is said to have burned down his palace. After his nephew’s death he could not bear to meet with the English. It was clear to him that Miantonomo had been right. The English were determined to wipe them out. But the Narragansetts had a wily friend in Gorton.

  In the winter of 1643–4, shortly after Miantonomo’s death, Gorton and his associates had been evicted from their homes at Shawomet by the Bay government. They were convicted of sedition and blasphemy – in a court that had no jurisdiction over them, in their view – and sentenced to hard labour in towns nearby. Fears that their anarchic ways might be contagious – as well as many colonists’ considerable disapproval of their persecution – got them released. But worried that their title was still in doubt, Gorton escaped to England. Furious at the way he had been treated, he approached the English Committee for Foreign Plantations to ask that he and his fellow planters be reinsta
ted at Shawomet. Lord Warwick was the friend and sponsor of Puritan colonies, but he also believed in freedom of religion. He told Massachusetts that they must leave Gorton’s settlement alone. As a gesture of gratitude, the Gortonogs – as the Indians called them – renamed it Warwick.

  Gorton saw parallels between the oppression of the Narragansetts and his own. He told the Narragansetts they too should put themselves under the protection of the English government. The Puritans were in bad odour back home. He reported, Edward wrote, ‘us to be base and low, out of favour with the king and state’. Gorton played on the fact that any court cases in New England had a higher legislature in the shape of Charles I, a notion that was to become an important part of Indian political thinking. He and his friends drew up a document on 19 April 1644 for the Narragansetts: ‘The Act and Deed of the voluntary submission of the Chief Sachem and the rest of the princes, with the whole people of the Narragansetts, to the government and protection of that honourable state of Old England.’ In theory that meant other colonies must leave them alone. Roger Williams also successfully appealed to Warwick on behalf of all the plantations on and round Rhode Island for a special patent to protect them against Massachusetts.

  When the Bay ordered the Narragansetts to court once more to lecture them about attacking Uncas, the tribe responded in writing that they still intended to wage war against Uncas to avenge the death of Miantonomo and others of their people whom he had slain. If they had problems with this, the matter should be referred to Charles I. The letter was signed not with signatures but with symbols: Canonicus’s was a hammer, described as ‘The mark of that ancient Canonicus protector of that late deceased Miantonomo during the time of his nonage [minority or youth]’.

  The Narragansetts could not know that Charles I was about to be defeated and would be in no position to defend them. They remained recalcitrant and defiant. Around the same time the Powhatans in Virginia launched a final attempt to drive the English out of their lands. It seemed as if all the English colonies were at risk of perishing.

  * * *

  Anne Hutchinson’s husband had died in 1642. Worried about her own position vis-à-vis an expansionist Massachusetts, she decided to move from Rhode Island to New York state, into remote territory disputed between the Dutch and Indians. But there she and all but one of her children were surrounded by Indians and scalped.

  This was interpreted as God’s judgement on her. Thomas Weld, the revered minister at Roxbury, wrote he had never heard of the Indians in those parts attacking like that, ‘therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman, to make her and those belonging to her an unheard of heavy example’.

  * * *

  After a year of skirmishing and raids, the Narragansetts surrounded Uncas in his fort at Shantok, intending to starve him out. A messenger was sent to Pessicus, Miantonomo’s successor, to tell him to move away. Loath as they were to go to war again, the United Colonies felt duty-bound to defend what Edward described as ‘Uncas our confederate’. The Narragansetts received the messengers from the commissioners with contempt. They said there would be no peace without Uncas’s head. The English should not try and assist Uncas or they would ‘procure the Mohawks against them’. They threatened that ‘they would lay the English cattle on heaps as high as their houses, and that no Englishman should stir out of his door to piss, but he should be killed’. Canonicus remarked fatalistically that ‘the young Sachems, being but boys, will need war, and so set all the country in Combustion’.

  An army of 300 men assembled at Boston. It was the last military outing for peppery Myles Standish. Amongst the fray were Massasoit and his men. It was a fearsome-looking troop commanded by Edward Gibbons which made its way west to meet the men of Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven.

  Just before the Massachusetts troops arrived Myles Standish saw the Rhode Islanders take the Indians into their houses even though they were armed. He sent Roger Williams a furious message which ‘required them to lay aside their neutrality, and either declare themselves on the one side or other’. But the Narragansetts lost their nerve at the thought of such a great army coming against them. They sued for peace.

  * * *

  At Providence, however, the tender friendship between Roger Williams and Canonicus continued. Williams was particularly distraught about the treatment of the Narragansetts. He continued to see them as peaceful people, as he would report in a book written for the English market. A Key into the Language of America was a study mainly of the Narragansett tribe and the Algonquian language intended to show the humanity of the Indians. Written on board ship on his way to England to get his charter, and published in 1644, the book became a bestseller in the England of the Civil War. The reason he could be so empathetic with the Indians was that they were descended from Adam. For him, it was ‘admirable to see, what paths their naked, hardened feet have worn through the wilderness, even in the most stony places’. He could not help contrasting the Indians’ kindly treatment of him with the colonists’: when ‘the hearts of my countrymen and friends and brethren failed me’ God stirred up ‘the barbarous heart of Canonicus to love me as his son to his last gasp’. As far as he was concerned, ‘Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies etc.’ But that was increasingly not the position of the English.

  The fact that the Indians were barbarians did not matter – Roger Williams had concluded, after much soul-searching, that the true uncorrupt church had vanished with the Apostles. In his 1645 tract Christenings Make Not Christians, he wrote how his friendship with the Indians meant he could have converted the whole country. But to convert them ‘from one false worship to another, and the profanation of the holy name of God’, was pointless. In his view man had to wait for the next Revelation, whenever that would come.

  In A Key, trying to demonstrate the Indian word wunnaumwayean, meaning ‘if he say true’, Williams wrote:

  ‘Canonicus … once in a solemn oration to myself in a solemn assembly, using this word, said, “I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English since they landed; nor never will”. He often repeated this word “wunnaumwayean”: “If the Englishman speaks true, if he means truly, then shall I go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posterity shall live in love and peace together”. I replied, that he had no cause (as I hoped) to question Englishman’s, “wunnaumwauonck”, that is faithfulness, he having had long experience of their friendliness and trustiness. He took a stick and broke it into ten pieces, and related ten instances (laying down a stick to every instance) which gave him cause thus to fear … I satisfied him on some presently, and presented the rest to the governors of the English, who I hope will be far from giving just cause to have Barbarians question their “wunnaumauonck”.’

  In 1647 when Canonicus was dying – perhaps of a broken heart – he sent for Williams ‘and desired to be buried in my cloth, of free gift’, and so he was. Williams saw Canonicus as a great man. On 5 October 1654, when once again Massachusetts was threatening war against the Narragansetts, he reminded them of the persistent loyalty of the statesman who ensured his people had never shed English blood. To him the Narragansetts’ ‘late, famous long-lived Canonicus’, ‘their prudent and peacable prince’, had qualities comparable to Boston’s ‘prudent peace-maker, Mr Winthrop’. Canonicus’s funeral was celebrated with the same ‘most honourable manner and solemnity, (in their way)’, as the English laid Winthrop to sleep.

  * * *

  The days of trustful intimacy had passed. The rising power amongst the Narragansetts was Ninigret, the chief of a smaller tribe closely linked to the Narragansetts, the eastern Niantics.

  The only existing painting of Ninigret shows a childlike figure in a headband and a pair of red shorts. But nothing about Ninigret was childlike. He was cunning personified. Recognising the inferior size of his tribe, his attitude was to play for time. While appearing to agree pleasantly with all points of treaties at the mom
ent of making them, in practice he completely ignored them. Hostages were sent who were not royal children; the wampum was never delivered. Ninigret was not in the same heroic mould as Miantonomo. As a result he was a good deal more successful.

  In behaviour recognisable 300 years later to leaders such as Gandhi who had no political power but the support of their people, the Narragansetts embarked on what has been described as passive resistance. A pattern developed: troops were sent and at the last moment the Narragansetts appeared to capitulate. A cold war developed and continued for over two decades with the English threatening war, but never having to wage it.

  New men such as Humphrey Atherton, whose name was to become notorious for illegally taking Indian land, treated the Narragansett leaders discourteously. On one occasion Atherton stormed into Pessicus’s wigwam, held him by the hair and demanded wampum holding while a pistol to him. It was a different era.

  Passaconaway, sachem of the Pennacook people by the Merrimack River, made a point of paying tribute and submitting to the Bay. In 1660 he gave an apocalyptic warning to keep the peace with the English. ‘Hearken to the words of your father,’ he said.

  ‘I am an old oak that has withstood the storms of more than a hundred winters … I who have had communion with the Great Spirit dreaming and awake – I am powerless before the Pale Faces … I commune with the Great Spirit. He whispers me now – “Tell your people, Peace, Peace, is the only hope of your race. I have given fire and thunder to the pale faces for weapons. I have made them plentier than the leaves of the forest, and still shall they increase! These meadows they shall turn with the plow – these forests shall fall by the axe – the pale faces shall live upon your hunting grounds, and make their villages upon your fishing places!” The Great Spirit says this, and it must be so! We are few and powerless before them! We must bend before the storm! The wind blows hard! The old oak trembles! Its branches are gone! Its sap is frozen! It bends! It falls! Peace, Peace, with the white men – is the command of the Great Spirit – and the wish – the last wish – of Passaconaway.’