The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In putting together a pan-Indian force to fight the English, Philip was attempting to accomplish what not even the great Narragansett sachem Miantonomi had been able to pull off in the 1640s. Miantonomi had been known for his bravery in battle, while Philip appears to have had a different sort of charisma. His growing desperation and anger over how he’d been treated by Plymouth Colony made him extremely attractive to many Indians across the region, all of whom had experienced some version of the Pokanokets’ problems with the English. If they did not band together now, the opportunity might never come again.

  For their part, the English remained confident that Philip had committed himself to peace. Instead of being concerned by the Pokanokets’ growing desire for guns and ammunition, they saw it as a financial opportunity. Incredibly, in the fall of 1674, Plymouth magistrates voted to repeal a law prohibiting the sale of gunpowder and ammunition to the Indians.

  Then, in January of 1675, John sassamon, the Harvard-educated Indian who had once served as Philip’s interpreter, paid a visit to Josiah Winslow.

  ◆◆◆ Although Philip considered him dishonest, sassamon was nonetheless the son-in-law of Philip’s sister Amie. In fact, he lived on land given to him by Amie’s husband, Tuspaquin, known as the Black sachem of Nemasket. Despite his connection to Native royalty, sassamon was working once again for the missionary John Eliot and was minister to a group of Praying Indians in Nemasket.

  In January, sassamon informed Josiah Winslow that Philip was on the verge of war. This was not what the governor of Plymouth wanted to hear. Even when sassamon warned that his life would be in danger if anyone learned that he had spoken with the governor, Winslow’s reaction was to dismiss the claim as yet another Indian rumor.

  At forty-three, Winslow was no longer the bold young man who had shoved a pistol in Alexander’s chest. His health had become a concern (he may have had tuberculosis), and the prospect of a major Indian war was simply not part of the future he saw for Plymouth.

  Not long after his meeting with the governor, sassamon’s dead body was discovered beneath the ice of Assawompsett Pond in modern Lakeville, Massachusetts. Left lying on the ice were his hat, his musket, and several ducks he had shot. It certainly appeared as if sassamon had accidentally fallen through the ice and drowned. But when the Indian who found the body pulled it from the pond, no water poured from his mouth—an indication that sassamon had been dead before he went through the ice. The body was also bruised and swollen around the neck and head.

  When word of sassamon’s death reached Winslow, the governor of Plymouth finally began to believe that the Pokanokets might be up to something. An investigation was launched, and in March Philip voluntarily appeared in court to answer any questions the officials might have. strenuously denying his involvement in sassamon’s death, the sachem insisted that this was an Indian matter and not the concern of the Plymouth government. The court, however, continued its investigation and soon found an Indian who claimed to have witnessed the murder. Conveniently hidden on a hill overlooking the pond, he had seen three Indians—Tobias, one of Philip’s senior counselors; Tobias’s son; and one other—seize sassamon and violently twist his neck before shoving his lifeless body beneath the ice. On the strength of this testimony, a trial date was set for June 1.

  As the date of the trial approached, Philip’s brother-in-law Tuspaquin bailed out Tobias. This enabled Tobias to speak with Philip, who was concerned that he would be the next one on trial. To no one’s surprise, Philip chose not to attend the hearing. Instead, he remained at Mount Hope, where he surrounded himself with warriors and marched to within sight of the border of swansea, a town founded just eight years before that abutted the Pokanokets’ lands at Mount Hope. Reports began to filter in to Plymouth that large numbers of “strange Indians” were making their way to the Pokanoket homeland.

  The last thing Philip wanted was to go to war before all was ready. They did not have enough muskets, bullets, and especially gunpowder. But events were quickly spinning beyond any single person’s control. If the English insisted on putting Tobias and the others on trial, he might have no choice.

  A panel of eight judges, headed by Winslow, ran the trial. There were twelve English jurors assisted by six Praying Indians. Winslow later claimed they were the “most indifferentest, gravest, and sage Indians,” but this did little to alter Philip’s belief that the verdict had already been decided.

  According to English law in the seventeenth century, two witnesses were required to convict someone of murder. But the English had only a single witness, and as it came out in the trial, before supposedly witnessing the murder, he had been forced to give up his coat to Tobias to pay off a gambling debt. Even so, all eighteen members of the jury found Tobias and the others guilty. It was a shocking miscarriage of justice.

  The executions were scheduled for June 8. As the condemned were brought to the gallows, all three Indians continued to maintain their innocence. Tobias was hanged first, followed by his friend. But when it came time to execute Tobias’s son, the rope broke. Whether this was by accident or was planned, it had the desired effect. As the young Indian struggled to his feet, with the still-twitching bodies of his father and family friend suspended in the air above him, he was given the chance to save his life. so he changed his story, claiming that the other two had indeed killed sassamon while he looked on helplessly. With the boy’s confession, the authorities now had the number of witnesses the law required, even if it was after the fact.

  Traditionally, a condemned man had his life spared after a failed execution. But a month later, with war raging across the colony, Tobias’s son was taken from his cell and shot to death with a musket.

  ◆◆◆ The trial had been a travesty of justice—and an insulting challenge to the authority of the Pokanoket leader. Now, it seemed, was the time for Philip to take the opportunity given him by the English and lead his people triumphantly into battle.

  ◆ The site of King Philip’s village on the eastern shore of the Mount Hope Peninsula in the early 1900s.

  His warriors were surely ready for it. Young, with little to lose and everything to gain, the fighting men of the Pokanokets now had the chance to win back their people’s land. It was a year ahead of Philip’s original schedule, but the season was right. The trees and underbrush were thick with new leaves, providing the cover the warriors needed when attacking the English. The swamps, which the Indians traditionally used as sanctuaries in times of war, were still mucky with spring rain, and the English soldiers could never enter them. If they waited until midsummer, it would be too late. They did not have the stores of gunpowder they had hoped to have in a year’s time, nor the firm commitments they had planned to get from the other tribes, but there was nothing they could do about that now. They needed to strike soon and furiously.

  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Governor Winslow remained hopeful that the present troubles would blow over. But except for writing a single letter to Philip in the weeks after the trial for sassamon’s murder, he failed to take an active role in stopping a possible outbreak of violence. Puritan historians later insisted that Philip pushed his people into the conflict. The English residents of swansea told a different story. According to an account recorded in the early part of the following century, Philip and his counselors “were utterly averse to the war” in June 1675. swansea resident Hugh Cole later told how Philip sent him word that “he could not control his young warriors” and that Cole should abandon his home and seek shelter on Aquidneck Island. Another tradition claimed that when Philip first heard that one of his warriors had killed an Englishman, he “wept at the news.”

  He had reason to weep. Even with recent recruits from neighboring tribes, his fighting force amounted to no more than a few hundred poorly equipped warriors. Even worse, they were situated on a peninsula. If they were unable to fight their way north into the heart of Plymouth Colony, their only means of escape from Mount Hope was by water.

  But the E
nglish had weaknesses of their own. Unlike the Indians, who traveled across the countryside as the seasons changed, the English lived in houses that were fixed permanently to the ground. As a consequence, all their possessions—including clothing, furniture, food, and livestock—were there for the taking. As they were about to discover, an Indian war was the worst fate imaginable for the English of Plymouth Colony.

  PART III

  WAR

  THIRTEEN

  Kindling the Flame

  BY THE MIDDLE of June 1675, the Pokanokets’ war dance had entered its third week. The warriors had their faces painted, their hair “trimmed up in comb fashion,” according to a witness, “with their powder horns and shot bags at their backs” and with muskets in their hands. They danced to the beat of drums, the sweat pouring from their already greased bodies. With each day, the call for action grew fiercer. Philip knew he could not hold them back much longer.

  The powwows had predicted that if the Indians were to be successful in a war, the English must draw the first blood. Philip promised his warriors that on sunday, June 20, when the English would all be away from their homes at church meetings, they could begin pillaging houses and killing livestock, thus beginning a game of cat and mouse that would gradually lead the English into war.

  On Mount Hope Neck, just a few miles north of Philip’s village, was a cluster of eighteen English houses at a place known as Kickemuit. As June 20 approached and the hostility of the nearby Indian warriors increased, several residents decided it was time to abandon their homes and seek shelter elsewhere. To the north, on the other side of a bridge across the Palmer River, was the home of the minister John Miles. The residents began to flock to this large house, which after being reinforced against possible Indian attack became known as the Miles garrison, a place of safety in war. A few miles to the east in Mattapoisett, there was also the Bourne garrison, a large stone structure that soon contained sixteen men and fifty-four women and children.

  On the morning of sunday, June 20, seven or eight Indians approached a man from Kickemuit who had not yet abandoned his home. The Indians asked if they could use his grinding stone to sharpen one of their hatchets. The man told them that since it was the sabbath, “his God would be very angry if he should let them do it.” soon after, the Indians came across an Englishman walking up the road. They stopped him and said “he should not work on his God’s Day, and that he should tell no lies.” Intimidated by the Indians, the last residents of Kickemuit left for the shelter of the garrisons. By day’s end, two houses had been burned to the ground.

  Governor Winslow heard the news that night, and by the morning of Monday, June 21, he had ordered towns across the colony to assemble their militia at Taunton, from where they would be sent to swansea. He also sent a message to officials in Boston, asking for help, but there was no reason to assume that Massachusetts Bay would rush to Plymouth’s defense. There were many in that colony who were critical of Plymouth’s treatment of the Pokanokets. And for those with long memories, Plymouth had been so slow to come to the Bay Colony’s aid during the Pequot War that the Plymouth militia had missed the fighting.

  ◆◆◆ In only a few days’ time, companies of militiamen had begun to arrive at Taunton. The elderly James Cudworth was named the army’s commander, with Major William Bradford, the fifty-five-year-old son of the former governor, as his second-in-command.

  since they’d just arrived on the scene, Cudworth and Bradford were as ignorant as everyone else as to the movements of the Pokanokets. There was one man, however, who had firsthand knowledge of the territory to the south and the Indians surrounding Mount Hope Bay. Just the year before, Benjamin Church, a thirty-three-year-old carpenter, had become the first Englishman to settle in the southeastern tip of Narragansett Bay at a place called sakonnet, home to the female sachem Awashonks and several hundred of her people.

  ◆ An engraving of Benjamin Church that appeared in a nineteenth-century edition of his narrative.

  Instead of being intimidated by the fact that he was the only Englishman in sakonnet, Church enjoyed the chance to start from scratch. “My head and hands were full about settling a new plantation,” he later remembered.

  From the beginning, Church had known that his future at sakonnet depended on a strong relationship with sachem Awashonks, and over the course of the last year, the two had become good friends. In early June, she sent him an urgent message. Philip was about to go to war, and he demanded that the sakonnets join him. Before she made her decision, Awashonks wanted to speak with Church.

  Church quickly discovered that six of Philip’s warriors had come to sakonnet. Awashonks explained that they had threatened to make the Plymouth authorities turn against her by attacking the English houses and livestock on her side of the river. she would then have no alternative but to join Philip. Church recommended instead that Awashonks ask Plymouth for protection from the Pokanokets. He promised to leave immediately for Plymouth and return as soon as possible with instructions from the governor.

  Just to the north of the sakonnets in modern Tiverton, Rhode Island, were the Pocassets, led by another female sachem, Weetamoo. Even though she was Philip’s former sister-in-law, the relationship did not necessarily mean she had to join him. Church decided to stop at Pocasset on his way to Winslow’s home in Duxbury.

  He found her, alone and very upset, on a hill overlooking Mount Hope Bay. she had just returned by canoe from Philip’s village. War, Weetamoo feared, was inevitable. Her own warriors “were all gone, against her will, to the dances” at Mount Hope. Church advised her to go immediately to Aquidneck Island, just a short canoe ride away, for her safety. As he had told Awashonks, he promised to return in just a few days with word from Governor Winslow.

  But Church never got the chance to make good on his promise. Before he could return to Weetamoo and Awashonks, the fighting had begun.

  ◆◆◆ Church had been in Plymouth speaking with Governor Winslow when the call for the militia had gone out, and he had immediately reported to Taunton. As the army prepared to march to swansea, Major Bradford asked Church to lead the way with a small group of soldiers. Church and his company, which included several “friend Indians,” moved so quickly over the path to swansea that they were able to kill, roast, and eat a deer before the main body of troops caught up with them. Church was already discovering that he enjoyed the life of a soldier. As he later wrote in a book about his experiences during the war, “I was spirited for that work.”

  But Church still had much to learn about military tactics. His mission had been to provide protection to the soldiers behind him. By sprinting to swansea, he had left the army open to an Indian ambush. While Church bragged about the speed of his march south, his commanding officers may have begun to realize that this was a soldier who might be too reckless to be trusted.

  Over the next few days, more and more soldiers arrived at swansea. In addition to strengthening the Miles garrison, a temporary barricade was built to provide the growing number of soldiers with protection from possible attack. But no direct action was taken against the Indians. since hundreds of Native warriors were said to be with Philip, Cudworth felt that his own force had to match the Indians’ numbers before they could march on Mount Hope.

  With each passing day, the Indians’ taunting of the English increased. Church and his company could hear their whoops and the crackle of gunfire as the Native warriors slaughtered cattle and robbed houses. But so far, no English men or women had been injured. By the morning of Wednesday, June 23, some residents had grown bold enough to return to their houses to retrieve goods and food.

  ◆ The Miles garrison in the early twentieth century.

  That day, a father and son left the garrison and came upon a group of Indians ransacking several houses. The boy had a musket, and his father urged him to fire on the Indians. One of the Indians fell, then picked himself up and ran away. Later in the day, some Indians approached the garrison and asked why the boy had shot at one of th
eir men. The English responded by asking whether the Indian was dead. When the Indians said yes, the boy snidely replied, “It was no matter.” The soldiers tried to calm the now enraged Indians by saying it was “but an idle lad’s word.” But the truth of the matter was that the boy had given the warriors exactly what they wanted: the go-ahead to kill.

  Thursday, June 24, proved momentous in the history of Plymouth. Reports differ, but all agree that it was a day of horror and death in swansea. At least ten people, including the boy and his father, were killed by the Indians. some were ambushed on their way back from prayers at the meetinghouse. One couple and their twenty-year-old son stopped at their home to get some provisions. The father told his wife and son to return to the garrison while he finished collecting corn. But as the father left the house, he was attacked by Indians and killed. Hearing gunshots, the son and his mother returned to the house. Both were attacked and in what became a common fate in the months ahead, they were scalped.

  For the next few days, Church and the other soldiers remained cooped up at the garrison as their commanders waited for reinforcements to arrive from Massachusetts Bay. In a clear attempt to mock the soldiers, the Indians had the nerve to approach the garrison itself. Two soldiers sent to draw a bucket of water from a nearby well were shot and carried away. They were later discovered with “their fingers and feet cut off, and the skin of their heads flayed off.” Even worse, the Indians succeeded in killing two of the garrison’s sentries “under the very noses of most of our forces.”