Mayflower (35 page)

What made Tefft’s guilt a certainty, in many men’s minds, was his appearance. Without English clothes and with a weather-beaten face, he
looked
like an Indian to the English. Tefft was a troubling example of what happened to a man when the Puritan’s god and culture were stripped away and Native savagery was allowed to take over. Two days after his capture, Tefft was hanged and, as was befitting a traitor, drawn and quartered. Hubbard claimed there were few tears at his execution, “standers by being unwilling to lavish pity upon him that had divested himself of nature itself, as well as religion, in a time when so much pity was needed elsewhere.”

In the middle of January, the temperature began to rise. A thaw unlike anything seen in New England since the arrival of the Pilgrims melted the snow and ice. It was just what the Narragansetts had been waiting for. The English could no longer track them in the snow. To augment their scanty provisions, the Indians could now dig for groundnuts. The time had come for the Narragansetts to make a run for it and join Philip and the Nipmucks to the north.

On January 21, Winslow received word that the Indians were “in full flight.” Not until almost a week later, on January 27, did the army—swelled to 1,400 with the arrival of Major Treat’s Connecticut forces—begin its pursuit.

By this time, Benjamin Church had returned. He was not yet fully recovered, but he agreed to join in what was hoped to be the final knockout punch against the Indians. Reports claimed that there were 4,000 of them, including 1,800 warriors, marching north. If they should reach the wilderness of Nipmuck country, New England was in for a winter and spring of violence and suffering.

About ten miles north of Providence, Winslow’s soldiers came upon a pile of sixty horse heads. The Narragansetts were scouring the land for anything that was edible. Unfortunately, this left little for the English, who were almost as poorly provisioned as the Indians. On a few occasions, the soldiers leading the English army were able to catch a glimpse of the rear of the Narragansett exodus only to watch the Indians disappear into the forest as soon as they came under attack.

Without sufficient supplies of food and with no way to engage the enemy, the morale of the English soldiers deteriorated with each day, and desertions became endemic. The temperature started to plummet once again, and illness swept through the English ranks; even General Winslow was reported to be suffering from the flux. Several days into what became known as the Hungry March, they came upon some wigwams beside an icy swamp. After exchanging gunfire, the Indians fled, although a friendly Mohegan managed to capture a Narragansett warrior who had been wounded in the leg.

That night, the Indian captive was brought before General Winslow for interrogation. It appeared to Church that the Narragansett was surprisingly forthcoming, but some of Winslow’s advisers suggested that they torture him until he offered “a more ample confession.” Church, who doubted that the Indian had anything more to divulge, insisted that he be allowed to live. Once again, Church’s advice was ignored. It was pointed out that the captive was injured, and they were in the midst of a strenuous march. To prevent the Narragansett from slowing them down the next day, it was decided that he must be executed.

The Indian was taken over to a large bonfire, where the Mohegan who had captured him prepared to cut off his head. “[T]aking no delight in the sport,” Church limped over to where the army’s supply horses were standing in the cold, jets of steam flowing from their nostrils. Church was about fifty yards from the fire, when the Mohegan raised his hatchet. Just as the weapon was about to slice through his neck, the Narragansett jerked his head to the side and broke free of the Mohegan’s grasp. Despite his injury, he began to run—directly, it turned out, for Benjamin Church, who was concealed in the darkness beyond the glow of the fire.

Church was still so lame that he needed the help of at least two people to mount his horse. He had tents in his wounds—plugs of gauze used to promote the drainage of pus and blood. This did not prevent him from tackling the Narragansett, who was stark naked and slippery with bear grease. After rolling around together on the ground, the Indian broke free of Church’s grasp and was running once again, this time with Church in close pursuit.

Since they were both wounded, there were, in Church’s words, “no great odds in the race.” They were lumbering over a frozen swamp, and the ice crackled so loudly with each of their steps that Church hoped his English friends back at the fire would “follow the noise and come to his assistance” even though it was impossible to see much of anything in the starless night. The Indian might have escaped if he had not blundered into a tree and nearly knocked himself out.

Soon the two of them were once again rolling around on the ground. This time the Indian grabbed Church by the hair and was attempting to twist his head and break his neck. Church’s wounds had “somewhat weakened him,” but he did his best to fight back by applying several “notorious bunts in the [Indian’s] face with his head.” As they mauled each another, Church could hear the welcome sound of cracking ice approaching from the fire. It proved to be the Mohegan. Feeling for them in the dark, he determined who was the naked Indian and who was the clothed Englishman, and “with one blow settled his hatchet in between them, and ended the strife.” The Mohegan gave Church a thankful hug and then “cut off the head of his victim, and carried it to the camp.”

By February 5, the Hungry March had reached the town of Marlborough at the eastern fringes of Nipmuck country. Winslow decided that he had no choice but to disband his army. Church returned to his pregnant wife, Alice, and their son, Thomas, who had been staying with family and friends in Duxbury.

The march had been an unmitigated catastrophe. Back in December, colonial officials had hoped to wipe the Narragansetts off the face of the earth. Instead, they had flushed thousands of them into the arms of the enemy.

The Puritans had claimed it was common knowledge among the Indians that the Narragansetts were planning to join the war in the spring. However, no one seems to have informed the Nipmucks of this plan. When the first Narragansett warriors began to arrive in January, they were shot at. As far as the Nipmucks knew, they were still traitors to the cause and had, in all likelihood, joined the English. Only after the Narragansetts had presented them with English scalps as proof of their loyalty did the Nipmuck sachems begin to realize that they had a new and powerful ally. Thanks to the intervention of the English in Rhode Island, there was yet another tribe eager to take up the fight.

But where were Philip and the Pokanokets?

S
ICK DESPERATE,
and fast becoming irrelevant to the war he had started, Philip and his small band of warriors headed more than fifty miles west to the Hudson River valley. In late December they made camp at Schaghticoke on the Hoosic River, an eastern tributary of the Hudson. It was here in the colony of New York, where a remnant of the original Dutch settlers still actively traded with the Indians and where the Hudson River provided access to the French to the north, that Philip hoped to stage his triumphant return to the war.

That fall, Philip had met with a French official on his way back to Canada after a visit to Boston. The Frenchman had presented the sachem with an ornate brass gun and pledged his country’s support in his war against the English. Specifically, he had promised Philip three hundred Indian warriors from Canada and all the powder and shot he needed. He even claimed the French navy would set up a blockade along the coast of New England to stop the flow of English supplies from Europe. But the Frenchman also had some requests of Philip. He asked that he and his warriors not burn the meetinghouses, mills, and “best houses.” “[F]or we intend to be with you in the spring before planting season…,” he said, “and possess ourselves of [the] Connecticut River and other English plantations.”

Philip was, once again, following in his father’s footsteps. He, too, was attempting to strengthen his decimated tribe through an alliance with a European power. There was no guarantee that the French would be any more trustworthy than the English in the long run, but at least for now Philip would have the warriors and ammunition he desperately needed. So he and his men, led by his principal captain, Annawon, established winter quarters at Schaghticoke and waited for the French and their Native allies.

In early January, New York governor Edmund Andros worriedly wrote to officials in New England that Philip had been joined by “3 or 400 North Indians, fighting men” at Schaghticoke. By February, Philip’s forces had reportedly grown to 2,100 and included 600 “French Indians with straws in their noses.” Although this figure was undoubtedly exaggerated, Philip had succeeded beyond all expectations in assembling one of the largest forces of Indian warriors in the region.

But there was another Native group to consider. The Mohawks, a powerful subset of the Iroquois, lived in the vicinity of Albany and were the most feared warriors in the Northeast. In addition to being the traditional enemies of the Indians of southern New England, they had a special hatred of the French and their Indian allies to the north. Yet if Philip could somehow succeed in bringing the Mohawks into the war on his side, he would be in a position to bring the New England colonies to their knees.

But Philip was not the only one seeking an alliance with the Mohawks. Governor Andros also hoped to enlist their aid. Unlike the Puritan magistrates, who viewed all Indians as potential enemies, Andros saw the Mohawks and the rest of the Iroquois as powerful independent entities that must be dealt with diplomatically rather than through force and intimidation. Andros and the Iroquois were in the midst of creating what became known as the Covenant Chain, a mutually beneficial partnership between the colony and the Iroquois that would stand for generations. It became Andros’s mission to persuade the Mohawks that Philip and the tribes to the east were a threat to that alliance. But it may have been Philip, instead of Andros, who ultimately brought the Mohawks over to the English side.

According to the Puritan historian Increase Mather, the Pokanoket sachem decided he must resort to a deception if he was going to create an alliance with the Mohawks. So he and his warriors killed a “scattering” group of Mohawks and blamed the murders on the English. Unknown to Philip, one of the Mohawks had escaped and reported that the Pokanoket sachem was behind the attack. Whether or not Philip was, as Mather maintained, the cause of his own downfall, sometime in late February, the Mohawks attacked his forces in Schaghticoke. By all accounts, it was a rout. On March 4, Governor Andros witnessed the triumphant return of the Mohawks to Albany. In addition to plenty of prisoners, they proudly displayed the scalps of the many Indians they had killed.

Once again, Philip’s forces were on the run, this time headed east, back to the Connecticut River. Instead of leading an invincible Native army, Philip was back to being a mere sachem with a reputation for grandstanding and defeat. The future of the war was in others’ hands.

His name was Job Kattenanit. He was a Praying Indian being held on Deer Island. Before he had been transported to the island, his village had been attacked by the Nipmucks, who’d taken his three children captive. By December, Job, who was a widower, was desperate to find his children, and he and another Praying Indian named James volunteered to become spies for the English. They were to infiltrate the Nipmucks at Menameset, the village near Brookfield to which Philip had fled after escaping from Plymouth, and learn anything they could about the Indians’ plans for the winter. If Job was lucky, he might also make contact with his three children. It was dangerous duty to be sure, but James and Job could truthfully tell the Nipmucks that they had been so abused and reviled by the English that they had been given no choice but to leave them.

James was the first to return, on January 24. He reported that the Nipmucks had at first threatened to kill them, but a sachem who had fought with James against the Mohawks several years earlier spoke in his defense, and they had been allowed to live. Job had located his children, who were all still alive, and he had decided to remain with them at Menameset for as long as possible. James reported to Daniel Gookin that the Nipmucks had “rejoiced much” when they learned that the Narragansetts had been forced to join their struggle. Now that most of the English towns along the Massachusetts portion of the Connecticut River had been abandoned, the Indians planned to attack the settlements to the east, including Medfield, Marlborough, Sudbury, Groton, and Concord, but it would begin with Lancaster. James even knew the details of how the Nipmucks planned to do it. First they would destroy the bridge that provided the only access point to the settlement from the east. Knowing that there was no way for English reinforcements to reach it, the Indians could burn the town with impunity.

Much of what James said was corroborated by other reports. But the Massachusetts authorities chose to dismiss his warnings as the untrustworthy testimony of just another Indian. General Winslow and his army were then doing their best to eliminate the Nipmuck-Narragansett menace, and it was hoped the Indians would be unable to resume their attacks. But by early February, Winslow’s army had been disbanded, leaving the western portion of the colony more vulnerable than ever before. Then, at ten o’clock on the night of February 9, Daniel Gookin was awakened by an urgent pounding on the door of his home in Cambridge. It was Job.

Like James before him, he had traveled with “rackets on his feet” through the drifting snow of the western frontier. He was starving and exhausted; he was already fearful of what might happen to his children, whom he had been forced to leave with the Nipmucks; but he felt a responsibility to tell Gookin that everything James had reported was true. Four hundred Nipmucks and Narragansetts were about to descend on Lancaster, and there was very little time. The attack was scheduled to begin tomorrow, February 10, at daybreak.

Gookin leaped out of bed and sent a dispatch to Marlborough, where Captain Samuel Wadsworth and about forty troops were stationed. The messenger rode all that night, and by morning Wadsworth and his men were riding furiously for Lancaster, about ten miles away. As both James and Job had predicted, the bridge had been burned, but Wadsworth and his troops were able to get their horses across its still-smoldering timbers. Up ahead the English soldiers could see smoke rising into the sky and hear the shouts of the Indians and the firing of muskets. The attack had already begun.

Mary Rowlandson was thirty-eight years old, and the mother of three children—Joseph, eleven; Mary, ten; and Sarah, six. In a few years’ time she would be the author of
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God,
an account of her capture by the Indians that became one of America’s first bestsellers. But on February 10, 1676, she was simply the wife of Lancaster’s minister, John Rowlandson, who was away in Boston urging the authorities to provide his town with some protection.

As the wife of a minister, Mary was one of Lancaster’s foremost citizens. Instead of Goodwife Rowlandson, she was addressed as Mistress Rowlandson. Adding to her stature in the community was the fact that her father, John White, had been one of Lancaster’s earliest and wealthiest residents, and Mary had six brothers and sisters, many of whom still lived in town. Mary and John’s large home, built beside a hill and with a barn nearby, served as the town’s social center. Mary especially enjoyed the nights before and after the Sabbath, “when my family was about me, and relations and neighbors with us, we could pray and sing, and then refresh our bodies with [food from] the good creatures of God.”

On the morning of February 10, the residents of Lancaster had taken the precaution of gathering in five different garrisons, one of which included the Rowlandson home. When the Indians attacked at daybreak, there were between forty and fifty men, women, and children assembled in the Rowlandson garrison.

First they heard the musket fire in the distance. When they looked cautiously out the windows, they could see that several houses were already burning. They could hear shouts and screams as the Indians worked their way from house to house until suddenly they too were under attack.

Dozens of Indians took up positions on the barn roof and on the hill behind the house and began firing on the garrison “so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail.” In no time at all, three of the men stationed at the windows had been hit, one of them quite badly in the jaw. The Indians found large quantities of flax and hemp in the barn, and jamming the combustibles up against the sides of the house, they attempted to set the clapboards on fire. One of the men was able to douse the flames with a bucket of water, but the Indians “quickly fired it again,” Rowlandson wrote, “and that took.” Soon the roof of the house was a roaring maelstrom of flame. “Now is the dreadful hour come,” she remembered. “Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out.” Mothers and children were “crying out for themselves and one another, ‘Lord, what shall we do?’”

With six-year-old Sarah in her arms and her other two children and a niece clustered around her, she resolved “to go forth and leave the house.” But as they approached the doorway, the Indians unleashed a volley of “shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had taken a handful of stones and threw them.” Mary and the children paused, but with the flames roaring behind them, they had no choice but to push ahead, even though they could see the Indians waiting for them with their muskets, hatchets, and spears. Her brother-in-law John, already wounded, was the first to die. The Indians shouted and began to strip his body of clothes as they continued firing at anyone who dared leave the house. Rowlandson was hit in the side, the bullet passing through her and into the abdomen of the child she clutched protectively in her arms. Her nephew William’s leg was broken by a bullet, and he was soon killed with a hatchet. “Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen,” she wrote, “standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.” Rowlandson’s oldest sister, who had not yet left the house and had just seen her son and brother-in-law killed, cried out, “Lord let me die with them!” Almost immediately, she was struck by a bullet and fell down dead across the threshold of the house.

A 1771 woodcut depicting the attack on Mary Rowlandson’s house

An Indian grabbed Rowlandson and told her to come with him. Indians had also seized her children Joseph and Mary and were pulling them in the opposite direction. Unbeknownst to Rowlandson, Wadsworth and his troopers had just arrived, and the Indians had decided it was time to leave. She cried out for her children but was assured that if she went along quietly, they would not be harmed. Rowlandson had anticipated this moment and, like many New Englanders, had vowed that “if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than be taken alive.” But now, in the presence of the Natives’ “glittering weapons” and with Sarah in her arms, she thought differently. She and twenty-three others were taken that day and so began what she later described as “that grievous captivity.”

They spent the first night on a hill overlooking the smoldering wreck of Lancaster. A vacant house stood on the hill, and Rowlandson asked if she and her injured daughter might sleep inside. “What, will you love Englishmen still?” mocked the Indians, who exultantly feasted on roasted cattle while Rowlandson and the others were given nothing to eat. “Oh the roaring and singing and dancing and yelling of those black creatures in the night,” she remembered, “which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.”