by Jill Lepore
Naked English bodies had been stripped of the clothes of civility, stripped, sometimes, of their English skin, just as the land had been stripped of its “improvements.” The affinity between English land and English bodies was long-standing. When William Wood surveyed New England in 1634 he claimed that “that part of the country wherein most of the English have their habitations … is for certain the best ground and sweetest climate …, agreeing well with the temper of our English bodies.”42 The colonists’ sense of the predestination of their settling in New England, their natural affinity with the land, and their cultural proclivity to conflate property with identity, all combined to produce this oneness of bodies and land. And this, in turn, became a vehicle that allowed them to express their concerns with both cultural and territorial boundaries between English and Indians. In the context of King Philip’s War, concerns about the boundaries of the body became overlaid onto concerns not only about the boundaries of English property but also about the cultural boundaries separating English from Indian. Bodies were defined in relationship to houses, but houses, too, were metaphorical bodies. The physical integrity of houses could be compromised just as the physical integrity of bodies could. In English anatomical thought, skin, “an unseamed Garment covering the whole Body,” was likened not only to clothing but also to buildings: “The Skin it self is the Wall of the Castle.”43 Open doors, then, could be like wounds on the body, the people spilling out like blood.
“These are perillous times which we now live in,” Increase Mather preached during the war, “when men … can scarce look out of doors, but they are in danger of being seized upon by ravening Wolves, who lye in wait to shed blood, when men go not forth into the field, not walk by the way side, but the Sword of the Enemy, and fear is on every side.”44 The war, it seemed, redefined the physical landscape. No longer did fences mark the boundaries of safety, no longer town limits, but the walls of houses and the skin of bodies. Doors, then, became especially dangerous, deeply symbolic places separating safety from peril, life from death, order from chaos. Employing a common metaphor, the Connecticut Council warned, “an high handed enemie is at our doore.” Or, as those in Massachusetts maintained, God had been provoked “to stir up many adversaries against us, not only abroad, but also at our own doors (causing the heathen in this Wilderness to be as thorns in our sides, who have formerly been, & might still be a wall unto us therein).” Even Benjamin Tompson made use of the evocative power of doorways, pitying the “Poor people spying an unwonted light,” who “Leap to the door to fly, but all in vain, / They are surrounded with a pagan train.”45
To emphasize the symbolic significance of doors and walls in the writing about the war is not to dismiss the very real protection that houses, especially those that were garrisoned, afforded during Indian attacks. When Brookfield was besieged and some eighty townspeople fortified themselves in a single garrison house, only those who “occasionally stept out” lost their lives. Thomas Wilson was shot when he went to get water, and Sargent Prichards’ son had his head chopped off while running to fetch goods from his father’s house. Henry Young never actually left the garrison but merely took a peek “out at a garret window”; for his curiosity, he was shot and mortally wounded. And when Providence was attacked, “all that were in Forts, Men, Women and Children, were Saved,” but two colonists died that day nonetheless: Elizabeth Sucklin, who “was preparing to goe from Her own Hous to A Fort, but delaying they Killed Her,” and Goodman Wright, who “could not be perswaded to come into any garrison” but remained in his own, unfortified home. (As Roger Williams remarked, “H. Wright would trust God in his own Hous. There they Killed Him with his own hammer.”)46 Indeed, it was because of these very real hazards that leaving the protection of a house or a garrison, walking out the door, or even sticking a head out a window took on new meaning during the war—it was the most dangerous thing a body could do.47Thomas Wakely’s attachment to his property was, in fact, not unusual, and meeting death on the doorstep, as he did, was not an uncommon fate.
If building a house on a piece of land makes that land your own, and if the land you own defines who you are, then losing that house becomes a very troubling prospect indeed. With this in mind, Thomas Wakely’s willingness to die with his house becomes easier to understand. Separated from his property, Thomas Wakely would no longer be Thomas Wakely, farmer, no longer Thomas Wakely, Englishman.48 “Many people in these partes are like soules distracted, running hither and thither for shelter,” Samuel Gorton observed with dismay, “whole families together not leaving there houses only, but goods and livelyhood also.” By becoming as nomadic as Indians, they had lost not only their property but their identity as well, “blown / From place to place without an home to own.”49
III
WHEN JOHN FOSTER engraved a map of New England to accompany William Hubbard’s Narrative, he marked English territory with tiny houses and church steeples, and Indian territory with trees.50 And when Benjamin Tompson recruited the assistance of a painter to help him portray New England’s devastation, he instructed him to paint the Indians green:
If painter overtrack my pen let him
An olive color mix, these elves to trim;
Of such an hue let many thousand thieves
Be drawn like scarecrows clad with oaken leaves,
Exhausted of their verdant life and blown
From place to place without an home to own.
John Foster’s map of New England, 1677. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society
When Tompson turned his attention to the backdrop of his portrait of New England’s Indians, he instructed the painter:
Let round be gloomy forests with cragged rocks Where like to castles they may hide their flocks …
Far, far away from the homes and barns and fences and churches of colonial towns, Tompson’s Indians are both naked and homeless. They are clad only “with oaken leaves,” a symbol of their organic connection to the woods in which they live. In part, Tompson was speaking literally; Algonquians commonly camouflaged themselves with ferns, leaves, and branches.51 (Mary Pray feared that summer, “when the leaves are green,” was the Indians’ best time for fighting.52) But Tompson was also speaking metaphorically when he, like many colonists, portrayed the Indians as if they had no clothes and no homes and suggested, even, that the Indians had no bodies—they blended so well with the woods as to be almost invisible there, indistinguishable from the wilderness around them, more like plants than people or, if animate, more like animals.53 In the first decades of settlement, the Indians’ supposed oneness with the woods (and their corresponding lack of ownership of the land) had served the colonists well in claiming New England as a vacuum domicilum—during King Philip’s War it made those same Indians frightful enemies. “Clad with oaken leaves,” Indians could easily ambush English settlers or hide from English soldiers. As Tompson versified it, “The trees stood sentinels and bullets flew / From every bush (a shelter for their crew).” Or, again, “every stump shot like a musketeer, / And bows with arrows every tree did bear.”54
Swamps made the best cover of all. To the colonists’ eyes, Indians were entirely invisible in swamps, disembodied, indistinguishable from the vegetation around them. Swamps were “so full of Bushes and Trees, that a Parcel of Indians may be within the Length of a Pike of a Man, and he cannot discover them.”55 “How many Indians we killed we cannot tell,” wrote one Englishman, “for so thick were the bushes, that hardly one was to be seen.”56 In the chaos of swamps, the English might even mistakenly shoot one another: “Our Men when in that hideous place if they did but see a Bush stir would fire presantly, whereby ’tis verily feared they did sometimes unhappily shoot English Men instead of Indians.”57 As a result, English soldiers were quite appropriately terrified of swamps. Daniel Henchman and his forces
were not willing to run into the Mire and Dirt after them in a dark Swamp, being taught by late Experience how dangerous it is to fight in such dismal Woods, when their Eye
s were muffled with the Leaves, and their Arms pinioned with the thick Boughs of the Trees, as their Feet were continually shackled with the Roots spreading every Way in those boggy Woods. It is ill fighting with a wild Beast in his own Den.58
To the colonists, swamps were hideous and dangerous places, the most foreign and un-English land in all the New World. The word itself, “swamp,” only entered the English language with the first reports from North America in 1624.59 And each time the colonists wrote about swamps they saw the need to offer a definition. “A Swamp” Nathaniel Saltonstall informed his English readers, “signifies a Moorish Place, overgrown with Woods and bushes, but soft like a Quagmire or Irish Bogg, over which Horse cannot at all, nor English Foot (without great Difficulty) passe.” Or, as William Harris put it, a swamp is “a sorte of watery ground by brookes: or rivers: or pond sydes: very wooddy, & not pasable for horses, & very troublesome for men to pas.” Usually swamps were defined as watery or waterlogged (as we think of them today), but the colonists occasionally used the term to describe simply a “thick wood” or a “Grove of trees and underwoods.”60 (So often did Indians hide themselves in swamps that the English came to use the word as a verb, as in the description they “in swamped them selves in a great Spruse swamp,” or in the order “Apprehend them before they swamp themselves.”61)
Just as the fate of English bodies and English houses was inextricably linked, so Indians were fated to live or die in swamps. And if houses explain scenes of English devastation, swamps explain Indian scenes. The English called swamps the dens of wild beasts, “habitations of cruelty,” and “habitations of darkness,” but they were also, clearly—and especially in wartime—habitations of Indians.62 Algonquians had long used swamps as “Refuges for Women and children in Warre” and as warehouses for corn and other foods to be consumed during winter months; and, from the earliest months of King Philip’s War, they also used swamps as hideouts, since the English were particularly inept at navigating through them.63 As Increase Mather declared, “every Swamp is a Castle to them.”64
Much as men like John Josselyn had insisted, “Towns they have none,” Algonquians were not nomads. They lived for most of the year in regular, settled communities, one in summer, one in winter. In summer, families gathered to live in villages near fertile agricultural lands; in winter, they moved closer to hunting grounds, returning to the same place for as many years as the lands could sustain them. Algonquian settlements were generally small, and consisted of a group of wigwams, sturdy buildings constructed of woven mats that could be easily disassembled and transported (and quite similar to the “English wigwams” the colonists had lived in when they first arrived). By the middle of the seventeenth century some wigwam construction included English hardware for doorframes and windows. In general, Algonquian wigwams were much more sparsely furnished than English houses, though many did contain items of English furniture: a chair, bed, table, or chest. What goods Indians owned, European or otherwise, needed to be portable, while the English cherished permanent property most of all. Colonists and Indians alike viewed this, and the temporary nature of wigwam construction, as a fundamental cultural difference. (Moreover, most Algonquians proved unwilling to adopt English ways. In Natick, John Eliot had made it a priority that Christian Indians cease to “live shifting up and downe to other Wigwams,” but even when he provided supplies and house lots, Natick Indians rarely built English-style houses for themselves, preferring to live in more traditional homes.)65
During a bad year, native communities might move more often, and during war, they might move a good deal. Refuges in swamps lessened the strains of war, allowing women, children, and old men to stay put in safe havens. Yet, whatever their similarities to or differences from English homes, colonists refused to consider Indian settlements in swamps real “towns,” or their wigwams true “houses.”66 Entering Pocasset Swamp, James Cudworth wrote, “the place we found was a hideous dismal swamp; the house or shelter they had to lodge in, contained, in space, the quantity of four acres of ground, standing thick together,” but his labeling of a wigwam a “house” was extremely unusual.67More typical was Benjamin Tompson’s scorn:
Their myrmidons enclosed with clefts of trees
Are busy like the ants or nimble bees:
And first they limber poles fix in the ground,
In figure of the heavens convex: all round
They draw their arras-mats and skins of beasts
And under these the elves to make their nests.
Rome took more time to grow than twice six hours,
But half that time will serve for Indian bowers.68
Here, Indian homes are animal “nests” or, at best, temporary “bowers.” Mary Rowlandson came perhaps closer than any other chronicler of the war to considering Indian settlements in swamps analogous to English towns, but she, too, resisted the idea:
When I came to the brow of the hill, that looked towards the swamp, I thought we had come to a great Indian town (though there were none but our own company). The Indians were as thick as the trees: it seemed as if there had been a thousand hatchets going at once: if one looked before one, there was nothing but Indians, and behind one, nothing but Indians, and so on either hand.69
Rowlandson at first thought she had come to a “great Indian town” but quickly corrected herself—this scene, too, was one of wild disorder, with Indians not living in settled communities but lurking “as thick as the trees.”
Swamps, where “the Indians were as thick as the trees,” were also the places where the English inflicted the most damage and practiced the greatest cruelties. Yet, in refusing to consider Algonquian settlements in swamps homes, the colonists absolved themselves of any possible violation of the laws of war in destroying them. English notions of just conduct dictated that soldiers were not to “plunder and burne houses, drive away the inhabitants, breake open the doores, and commit such like outrages,” and it was just these violations that most alarmed colonists whose towns were thus destroyed.70 But in swamps, English soldiers again and again mimicked Indian “outrages.”71When the English managed to find a hidden, “enswamped” Algonquian camp, they usually burned the Indians’ wigwams, just as the Indians burned English houses. Samuel Moseley reported in August 1675, “we did find A parsell of wigwoms beond the Swaimp about 20 which we burnt &c.”72 Often enough, the chief difference between English and Indian “cruelties” was simply the words they used to describe them: since Indian homes were “wigwams,” not “houses,” their settlements “camps,” not “towns,” fights in swamps were “courageous battles,” not “massacres.”
This particular manifestation of the moral vocabulary of warfare is best seen in the English attack on the Narragansetts’ Great Swamp on December 19, 1675. On that day, a coalition of English soldiers from each of the United Colonies, aided by an Indian guide, entered the Great Swamp (near present-day South Kingstown, Rhode Island), where they found a palisaded fort sheltering hundreds of wigwams and, by some estimates, as many as three thousand or four thousand Narragansetts. Most were women and children hidden in the swamp for protection during the war, along with storehouses of winter supplies. English soldiers first set fire to the wigwams and then waited as the Narragansetts began fleeing over the palisade and through its doors and windows. Then the soldiers “ran on the very musles of thyr guns, up to the Indeans port holes: & fyred in at them, & leped over thyr brest workes, & run into theyr forte, & beat them out: & slew many of them.” The fury of the English was so great that, rather than preserve the wigwams for their own shelter, or save the food, they burned everything and were forced to march back out of the swamp all through the night and the next several days, in driving snow, during which many English soldiers froze to death.73
The English attack on the Great Swamp has all the elements of an Indian assault on an English town, or upon a house like Thomas Wakely’s: setting fire to buildings to drive the people out; then, as they fled the smoke and flames, killing them on their doorste
ps, or “port holes”; and finally, destroying all who had remained inside. Surely this fight violated several English codes of just conduct during warfare, not least among them the rule that “To cut off a few nocent, wee are not to cut off multitudes of Innocents, such as are Weomen and Children (as in sieges, and other depopulations) of whom the one is to be spared for sex, the other for want of age.”74 Still, no English account of the “Great Swamp Fight” noted this inconsistency. Instead, most English accounts emphasized the justness of the attack and celebrated it as one of the few “fair” contests of the war: “The English Souldiers played the men wonderfully; the Indians also fought stoutly, but were at last beaten out of their Fort.” Upon entering the fort, “It did greatly rejoice our Men to see their Enemies, who had formerly sculked behind Shrubs and Trees, now to be engaged in a Fair Field.” Joseph Dudley noted the “great courage” of the English soldiers who “valiantly scaled the fort.” And Benjamin Tompson wrote: