by Jill Lepore
In the Active world of an unimaginable war, “eye or ear Witnesses” assumed new importance.72 As Benjamin Tompson wrote, “the natives’ treachery felt too fierce / For any but eyewitness to rehearse.” And when James Oliver described an attack on an Indian settlement (in which he participated), he said his letter was “as nearly as I can a true relation” but felt compelled to add that he had “read the narrative to my officers in my tent, who all assent to the truth of it.”73 Words alone, whether written or spoken, could no longer qualify as evidence—only the physical damage itself, the burned houses, the maimed bodies, the brittle pools of blood, could be believed. In a physical reality of such traumatic intensity, in a world where wounds, fire, and famine spread as fast as lies, rumors, and fictions, language itself had become inadequate.
For John Kingsley it was paper that seemed inadequate; what his heart held, sheets would not contain. In Kingsley’s and others’ writings, such “volume” and “blood, ink, and tears” metaphors suggest that pain endured and pain inflicted could only barely be contained by language, if at all. Certainly these pains could not be adequately expressed in a single letter or piece of poetry; ink, paper, and even books were all inadequate containers. Some of this imagery is no doubt formulaic, especially when used in verse, as in Benjamin Tompson’s couplet, “all the cruelties the foes devise / Might fill a volume,” or in Wait Still Winthrop’s stanza: “And now my frind, here I will End, no more here shall I write, Or lest I shall some Tears let fall, and spoil my Writing quite.”74 Yet when employed by writers like Kingsley and Pray, blood and ink metaphors take on a genuineness that suggests that even when these metaphors were used formulaically they expressed a widely and deeply felt sentiment about the inadequacy of language.
Other writers employed different strategies for “containing” the war’s pain in prose. Some simply put a premature end to their descriptions lest the letters they were writing burst from the pressure of the pain they contained. Saltonstall, for instance, abruptly ended one of his missives by concluding that “to reckon up all their Cruelties, would be no lesse burthensome to compassionate Christians Ears, than too tedious for a Letter, which is already swelled too big.” Still others wrote as a release, so their own selves would not burst from pains pressure. “I canot forbear to writ I am so fill of grife for our frinds and conterymen,” was the apology with which Mary Pray began a letter to a friend in Boston. William Leete, too, complained that he had “enough of other reall & sad storyes to exercise our thoughts & hearts.”75
Some writers sought to contain the suffering of the war by organizing it. “Their outrages are so many and different,” wrote the author of News from New-England, that “they will not be brought into a fluent Narration.” Nonetheless, he urged the reader “to accept them plainly and dyurnuily according to the time, place, and manner as they were committed, which is the only way to avoid omissions, and consequently to Satisfie the inquisitive, who I suppose would willingly hear of all the extremities have happened to the suffering Christians in this New England War.” In a like vein, Saltonstall recalled that when he first wrote about the war he was almost incapacitated by the pain of describing it: “My Hand Trembled, and my Heart almost fainted, when my Mind reflected on our present Miseries, and revolved for the Future what might be the Issue of that Deluge of Calamity which threatened us.” The next time, however, he approached the endeavor more rationally, relying on the comforting structure of chronology to calm him: “But that I may set down Things in some Method, I shall reassume the Narritive of our Troubles, where I left off in my last Letter, and relate the most considerable Actions from that Time, in the same Order as they happened.”76
Each of these three strategies—containing, censuring, and organizing the stories of the war—is consistent with Scarry’s theory about what pain does to language. “One of two things is true of pain,” according to Scarry. “Either it remains inarticulate or else the moment it first becomes articulate it silences all else.”77 A colonist faced with the trauma and suffering of King Philip’s War could remain silent, like Simon Bradstreet, or could articulate his pain, like John Kingsley, and risk becoming overwhelmed by it. This all-or-none theory of pain’s relationship to language helps explain the incongruency between how much some colonists wrote about King Philip’s War and how little others wrote.
Colonists who kept quiet about King Philip’s War had good reasons. Many were illiterate, or at least not quite literate enough to narrate their own experiences. Most deferred to the official record. And some were silenced by their own suffering. In a sense, these three different reasons are unified and embodied in the metaphors employed by Kingsley and Pray. Their metaphors—of paper, books, ink, volumes—testify not only to a relationship to pain and its uncontainability but also to a relationship to the authority of the written and especially the printed word in colonial New England.
IV
AT THE END of his almanac for 1676, Boston printer John Foster included several events of the war in his “Chronology of some memorable Occurrences hapning in New-England,” but added that
To particularize the memorable Transactions of this year would be sufficient to fill a Volume: It would therefore be in vain to … enumerate the horrid Massacres, Murthers, Savage Crueltyes, cowardize, ungrateful and perfidious dealings of Bloud-thirsty Barbarians.78
Here, Foster’s use of a volume metaphor to describe the war’s cruelties and explain his failure to write a more complete account of the war takes on a different cast than it had for John Kingsley. Kingsley was overwhelmed by the suffering he had endured and terrified at the idea of putting it into writing, but John Foster censored himself because he had other books in his shop to sell, among them Benjamin Tompsons New England’s Crisis and Increase Mather’s Brief History (and soon he would be peddling Hubbard’s Narrative, too). As a printer, John Foster knew what it meant to “fill a Volume,” and he knew to leave it to someone else, just as Simon Bradstreet knew well that a record of the war would be “publickly taken & the story of it Printed.”
Blood as ink. Volumes of villainy. Pain that sheets cannot contain. The cruelty of King Philip’s War invited these metaphors, this language of suffering and of the authority of the written, and especially the printed, word. By making the world unreal, a place where rumors abound and “mesengers like Jobes came soone one after another: [telling] of burneing houses, takeing cat-tell, killing men & women & Children: & carrying others captive,” the war created a world full of distortions, fictions, and confusion.79 For the colonists, that confusion created a war of words. But, whether illiterate or literate, New England’s Indians had little chance to win this kind of war, or even to wage it, since literacy itself, and the cultural compromises it entailed, was potentially dangerous. Seventeenth-century New England was a world in which books were scarce, but the ability and the authority to write them were even harder to acquire. And harder still, of course, for those whose first language was not English, and for those, like John Sassamon, to whom literacy might prove fatal. In the end, of course, the crucial rivalry was not between the competing interpretations of Massachusetts ministers such as Hubbard and Mather, or between accounts printed in London or Cambridge or Boston, but between the differing views of the war held by English colonists and Indians. The real silence was not that of “Harvardine quills” but of Algonquian pens. And, in that regard, the writing about the war was as critical as the waging of it. In place of native accounts of the war, some English colonists offered their versions of what the Indians might have had to say (a technique John Eliot had employed when he wrote “Philip’s” conversion narrative in the Indian Dialogues). Participating in a tradition that would last well into the nineteenth century, Benjamin Tompson imagined the speech Philip might have delivered to his warriors on the eve of the war:
My friends, our fathers were not half so wise
As we ourselves who see with younger eyes.
They sell our land to Englishmen who teach
O
ur nation all so fast to pray and preach:
Of all our country they enjoy the best,
And quickly they intend to have the rest.80
Whether these words in any way represent Algonquian motives in the war, they were, to the colonists, ultimately meaningless. As the colonists saw it, violence itself was the Indians’ only vocabulary. When English soldiers fired on Indians and Indians fired back, the colonists said they were “answering our Men in the same Language.”81 And even while the English lamented their helplessness against Indian attacks, they took comfort in the knowledge that they controlled the pens and printing presses. When William Hubbard briefly digressed from the war’s action in his Narrative, he quickly returned to the subject to “pursue the Rebellious Indians, and keep Pace with them in our History, though our Forces as yet could never overtake them in the Woods.”82If war is a contest of both injuries and interpretation, the English made sure that they won the latter, even when the former was not yet assured.
Chapter 3
HABITATIONS OF CRUELTY
A True but Brief Account of our Losses sustained since this Cruel and Mischievous War began, take as follows:
In Narraganset not one House left standing.
At Warwick, but one.
At Providence, not above three.
At Potuxit, none left Very few at Seaconicke.
At Swansey, two, at most.
Marlborough, wholy laid in Ashes, except two or three Houses.
Grantham and Nashaway, all ruined but one House or two.
Many Houses burnt at Springfield, Scituate, Lancaster, Brookefield and Northampton.
The greatest Part of Rehoboth and Taunton destroyed.
Great Spoil made at Hadley, Hatfield, and Chelmsford.
Deerfield wholly, and Westfield much ruined.
At Sudbury, many Houses burnt, and some at Hingham, Weymouth, and Braintree.
Besides particular Farms and Plantations, a great Number not to be reckoned up, wholly laid waste, or much damnified.
And, as to Persons, it is generally thought, that of the English there hath been lost, in all, Men Women and Children, above Eight Hundred, since the War began: Of whom many have been destroyed with exquisite Torments, and most inhumane Barbarities; the Heathen rarely giving Quarter to those that they take, but if they were Women, they first forced them to satisfie their filthy Lusts and then murdered them; either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as Trophies; wearing Mens Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dresse for Belts…. Nor have our Cattle escaped the Cruelty of these worse than Brute and Savage Beasts: For what Cattle they took they seldom killed outright: or if they did, would eat but little of the Flesh, but rather cut their Bellies, and letting them go several Days, trailing their Guts after them, putting out their Eyes, or cutting off one Leg, etc.
—NATHANIEL SALTONSTALL,
July 22, 1676
Nathaniel Saltonstall’s “True but Brief Account of our Losses” is a standard portrait of New England during King Philip’s War, a landscape of ashes, of farms laid waste, of corpses without heads.1 A place where three-legged cattle wander aimlessly, dragging their guts after them, and Indians strut through the woods wearing belts of human skin and necklaces of rotting fingers. It is difficult to imagine a scene that could do more to assault English notions of order.2 Towns have been razed and blood spills everywhere. Nearly all that was English has been destroyed—English houses, English farms, English crops, English livestock, English bodies. The tamed wilderness has become wild once again. English husbandry and agriculture have been ruined, leaving only scars on a landscape they once marked with fences and barns and fields of hay. Thousands of colonists have suffered; hundreds have died. As one frantic colonist reported, “Many of our miserable inhabitants lye naked, wallowing in their blood, and crying, and whilst the Barbarous enraged Natives, from one part of the Country, to another are on Fire, flaming forth their fury, Spoiling Cattle and Corn and burning Houses, and torturing Men, Women, and Children; and burning them alive.” “I am greatly afflicted,” Thomas Whalley lamented, “to see the danger we are in and the Confusion and sad disorder that we are fallen in.” And, as Saltonstall wrote, “Nothing could be expected but an utter Desolation.”3
Many colonists, sheltering themselves in garrisoned houses, could do little but watch as their towns were destroyed. While the people of Rehoboth looked on in horror, the Indians “fell presently to fyring of empty houses & burnt about 35 houses that had familyes belonging to them besides four other vacant houses that had no inhabitants & Barnes.” “Thay burnt our milles, brake the stones, ye, our grinding stones,” John Kingsley reported, “& what was hid in the erth they found, corne & fowles, kild catel & tooke the hind quarters & left the rest, yea, all that day … they burnt cartes wheeles, drive away our catel, shipe, horses.” “In a word,” Kingsley summarized, “had not the Lord restrayned [them] thay had not left won to have tould of our woful day.” Having pitched camp at the edge of town, the Indians “rose up at day light the next morning,” walked over to Providence, “& theire did likewise.” “The buryall of the slaine,” the town minister wrote, “tooke us 3 days.”4
Such terrifying ravages strained even the most eloquent colonists’ powers of description. Philip Walker called the war a “dredffull bludy shouer,” and Edward Wharton said the Indians had made of the English settlements “a burdensome and menstruous cloth” that, having fouled, they might now cast out of the land.5 Benjamin Tompson believed depicting this cruelest of wars required more than bloody metaphors, more, even, than the formidable skills of a poet. Since words alone could not suffice, Tompson wished a painter might “overtrack” his “pen.” Of the Indians, Tompson urged, “Limn them besmeared with Christian blood & oiled / With fat out of white human bodies boiled. / Draw them with clubs like mauls & full of stains, / Like Vulcans anvilling New England’s brains.” Of the damage, “Paint here the house & there the barn on fire, / With holocausts ascending in a spire.” Of loss, “Draw there the pastor for his bible crying, / The soldier for his sword, the glutton frying.” And of torment, “Let here the mother seem a statue turned / At the sad object of her bowels burned.”6 Tompson, with the help of his “painter,” presented a strikingly gruesome panorama, but Mary Rowlandson, unaided, provided perhaps the most arresting image of all. “Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.”7
Not only the colonists but their land, too, was bleeding, as Edward Wharton put it, like “a burdensome and menstruous cloth.” What happened to English people, in the colonists’ eyes, happened equally to English property, and the separation of the one from the other was counted among the greatest devastations of the war. Draw confusion everywhere, Benjamin Tompson instructed his artist, and paint the goddess of disorder ruling over all New England.
Let Ataxy be mounted on a throne
Imposing her commands on everyone …
One she bids flee, another stay, a third
She bids betake him to his rusty sword,
This to his treasure, th’other to his knees,
Some counsels she to fry and some to freeze,
These to the garrison, those to the road,
Some to run empty, some to take their load:
Thus while confusion most men’s hearts divide
Fire doth their small exchequer soon decide.8
If, as Elaine Scarry has argued, there are three arenas of damage in war—bodies, possessions, and political identities—then New England’s colonists conflated the three time and again.9 Colonial writers understood the destruction of houses as a blow not only to their property but also to the very Englishness of the landscape. Meanwhile, nearly any attack could be understood metaphorically as an assault on the human body. “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system,” the anthropologist Mary Douglas has written. “Its boundaries ca
n represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.”10 And the cultural proclivity to exploit the body as a symbolic system reaches its fullest expression during times of war when, by definition, boundaries are being breached. In the seventeenth-century world, war itself was even understood, by some, as “chirgury” undertaken on the body politic to heal a “wound,” or breach of the body’s boundary of skin. But surgery, like war, was itself invasive. “Warre is alwayes a Physick too strong,” Anthony Ashcam wrote in 1648, “which entring the body with a force greater then the infirmity, must needs increase the distemper, and like thunder purging the bad qualities, corrupt the good.”11
Nearly all of the damage to the English during King Philip’s War—the burning of houses, the spilling of blood, the English becoming Indianized—was understood as attacks on bounded systems. While disorder threatened to rule New England, military strategists sought means to draw a line to keep Indians—and chaos—out. In Massachusetts, alarmed colonists even debated building an eight-foot-high wall of stone or wood all the way from the Charles River to the bay, “by which meanes that whole tract will [be] environed, for the security & safty (under God) of the people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage & fury of the enimy.”12 But the concern with barriers was not limited to physical, geographical boundaries. It extended also to violations of English bodies, and, perhaps most terrifyingly of all, to Algonquian encroachments on English culture. Everywhere, there were barbarians at the gate.
I
ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1675, George Ingersol heard three guns go off in the distance, and noticed “great smoke up in the River above Mr. Mack-worth’s.” He sounded an alarm but could not assemble enough men to investigate safely. The next day, with reinforcements, Ingersol followed the smoke to what had been Thomas Wakely’s home. “When I came to the place, i found an house burnt downe, and six persons killed, and three of the same family could not be found. An old Man and Woman were halfe in, and halfe out of the house neer halfe burnt. Their owne Son was shot through the body, and also his head dashed in pieces. This young mans Wife was dead, her head skined.” The young woman, Ingersol reported, “was bigg with Child,” and two of her children, “haveing their heads dashed in pieces,” were found “laid by one another with their bellys to the ground, and an Oake planke laid upon their backs.” The three missing family members, Ingersol later discovered, had been taken captive.13