Mayflower (36 page)

They left early the next morning. Rowlandson’s wounds had begun to fester, making it impossible for her to carry her daughter. One of the Indians had a horse, and he offered to hold Sarah, who whimpered, “I shall die, I shall die” as Rowlandson staggered behind “with [a] sorrow that cannot be expressed.” That night she sat in the snow with her fever-racked daughter in her lap. “[T]he Lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful spirit,” she remembered, “and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning.”

That afternoon they arrived at the great Nipmuck gathering spot of Menameset. There Rowlandson met Robert Pepper, a captive now for more than five months. Pepper told her to lay oak leaves on her wound, a Native remedy that had helped his injured leg and would also cure Rowlandson. But there was nothing to be done for little Sarah. “I sat much alone with a poor wounded child in my lap,” she wrote, “which moaned night and day, having nothing to revive the body or cheer the spirits.” Finally on February 18, nine days after being shot, Sarah died.

Before this, Rowlandson had been horrified even to be in the same room with a corpse. Now her daughter’s dead body was the only source of comfort she possessed, and that night she slept in the snow with Sarah cradled to her breast. The next morning, the Indians buried her child on the top of a nearby hill. “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me,” Rowlandson wrote, “in preserving me in the use of my reason and sense, in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life.” Instead, she went in search of her other two children.

There were more than two thousand Indians gathered at Menameset. Rowlandson had learned that her ten-year-old daughter Mary was living somewhere nearby. That day as she wandered from wigwam to wigwam, she found her. But when her daughter began to sob uncontrollably, the girl’s master told Rowlandson that she must leave—“a heart-cutting word to me.” “I could not sit still in this condition,” she remembered, “but kept walking from one place to another.” She prayed to the Lord that he would show her “some sign, and hope of some relief.” Soon after, she heard her son’s voice.

Joseph had been taken to a village about six miles away. His master’s wife had agreed to bring him to his mother, and “with tears in his eyes, he asked me whether his sister Sarah was dead…and prayed…that I would not be troubled in reference to himself.” It was too brief a visit, but Rowlandson could not help but interpret her son’s appearance as God’s “gracious answer to my earnest and unfeigned desire.”

The next day, February 22, several hundred warriors returned from a raid on the town of Medfield, twenty miles southwest of Boston. There had been about two hundred soldiers quartered in the town, but even this sizable force was not enough to prevent the Indians from burning close to fifty houses and killing more than a dozen inhabitants. Even worse, the Indians had the audacity to leave a note. One of the Indians had been formerly employed as a typesetter in Cambridge. Known as James the Printer, he undoubtedly penned the letter that was found stuffed into a gap in a nearby bridge: “Know by this paper, that the Indians that thou hast provoked to wrath and anger, will war this twenty-one years if you will; there are many Indians yet, we come three hundred at this time. You must consider the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.”

When the war party returned to Menameset, the warriors shouted a total of twenty-three times to indicate how many English had been killed. “Oh! The outrageous roaring and hooping that there was…,” Rowlandson wrote. “Oh, the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was over some Englishmen’s scalps that they had taken.” One of the Indians had brought back a Bible from the raid, and he offered it to Rowlandson. She immediately turned to chapter 30 of Deuteronomy and read, “though we were scattered from one end of the earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curses upon our enemies.” It was a wonderful balm for the grieving and godly Englishwoman. “I do not desire to live to forget this Scripture,” she remembered, “and what comfort it was to me.”

Rowlandson’s master was the Narragansett sachem Quinnapin. Her mistress was Quinnapin’s new wife, Weetamoo, the sachem from Pocasset. Much had transpired since Weetamoo had spoken with Benjamin Church about her unwillingness to go to war. After being forced to join her brother-in-law Philip, she had fled to the then neutral Narragansetts. There is evidence that she once again attempted to surrender to colonial authorities, but as had happened before at Aquidneck Island she was once again rebuffed. By marrying Quinnapin, who already had two wives but none as noteworthy as the Pocasset sachem, Weetamoo formally aligned herself with the Pocassets’ ancestral foe. After the Great Swamp Fight, all of them were in this together.

By the middle of February word had reached Menameset of the Mohawk attack on Philip. The Pokanoket sachem and what was left of his forces were bound for a village site well to the north on the Connecticut River. It was time for the Nipmucks and Narragansetts to meet with Philip and plan for the spring offensive. When their scouts informed them that a large Puritan army, including six hundred cavalry, was headed for Menameset, the Nipmucks and Narragansetts immediately broke camp and headed north.

So far, Rowlandson had been in close contact with several English captives, including a former neighbor and half a dozen children. But after the departure from Menameset, she saw almost nothing of her fellow captives.

Keeping two thousand Native men, women, and children ahead of a mounted English army might seem out of the question. But as Mary Rowlandson witnessed firsthand, the Indians’ knowledge of the land and their talent for working cooperatively under extraordinary duress made them more than a match for the fleetest of English forces.

As a small group of warriors headed south “to hold the English army in play,” hundreds upon hundreds of Indians picked up their possessions and began to flee. “I thought to count the number of them,” Rowlandson wrote, “but they were so many and being somewhat in motion, it was beyond my skill.” It was a scene worthy of Exodus. “[T]hey marched on furiously, with their old and with their young. Some carried their old decrepit mothers, some carried one and some another. Four of them carried a great Indian upon a bier, but going through a thick wood with him, they were hindered and could make no haste; whereupon they took him upon their backs and carried him, one at a time, till they came to Bacquag River.”

Known today as Miller’s River, the waterway is an eastern tributary of the Connecticut. Swollen with snowmelt, the river was too deep and the current too swift to be forded without some kind of assistance. “They quickly fell to cutting dry trees,” Rowlandson wrote, “to make rafts to carry them over the river.” Rowlandson and her master and mistress were one of the first ones across the river. The Indians had heaped brush onto the log rafts to protect them from the frigid water, and Rowlandson was thankful that she made it across the river without wetting her feet, “it being a very cold time.”

For two days, while the warriors did their best to delay the English, the rafts went back and forth across the river. A temporary city of wigwams sprang up along the northern bank of the Bacquag as the Indians waited for everyone to complete the crossing.

It was the third week of her captivity, and Rowlandson’s hunger was such that she greedily ate what she had earlier regarded as “filthy trash,” from groundnuts and corn husks to the rancid offal of a long-dead horse. Rowlandson was often on the edge of starvation, but so were her captors, whose ability to extract sustenance from the seemingly barren winter landscape seemed nothing less than a God-ordained miracle. “[S]trangely did the Lord provide for them,” she wrote, “that I did not see (all the time that I was among them) one man, woman, or child die with hunger.”

Now that she no longer had her daughter to care for, Rowlandson was expected to work. In a finely sewn pouch known as a pocket, she kept her knitting, and she was soon at work on a pair of white cotton stockings for her mistress, Weetamoo. As a sachem, Weetamoo wore both English and Native finery. She also conducted herself with a dignity that Rowlandson, who had formerly been the one to whom deference had been paid, could not help but find offensive: “A severe and proud dame she was, bestowing…as much time as any of the gentry of the land [in dressing herself neat]: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands.” In the weeks ahead, as the pressures mounted on both the Indians and their captives, Weetamoo treated Rowlandson with increasing harshness.

By Monday, March 6, everyone had made it across the river. That day they set fire to their wigwams and continued north just as the English army, under the command of Major Thomas Savage, reached the southern bank of the river. But instead of pursuing the Indians, Savage elected to do as so many Puritan commanders had done before him. Even though he had the Indians almost in his grasp, he decided to quit the chase. Over the last few days, hundreds of the old and infirm had somehow managed to ford the river, but Savage claimed it was not safe for his men to attempt a crossing. For Rowlandson, it was a devastating turn of events, but the Lord must have had his reasons. “God did not give them courage or activity to go after us,” she wrote; “we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance.”

The Indians continued north for several days until they reached the Connecticut River near the town of Northfield. Philip, Rowlandson was told, was waiting for them on the opposite bank. “When I was in the canoe,” she recalled, “I could not but be amazed at the numerous crew of pagans that were on the…other side. When I came ashore, they gathered all about me…[and] asked one another questions and laughed and rejoiced over their gains and victories.” For the first time of her captivity, Rowlandson started to cry. “Although I had met with so much affliction,” she wrote, “and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight, but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished. But now I may say as Psalm 137, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon…[I] wept.’” One of the Indians asked why she was crying. Not knowing what to say, she blurted out that they would kill her. “‘No,’ said he, ‘none will hurt you.’” Soon after, she was given two spoonfuls of cornmeal and told that Philip wanted to speak with her.

It was one of several conversations she would have with the Pokanoket sachem. Despite everything she had heard of Philip’s malevolence, Rowlandson was treated with kindness and respect by the Native leader. When she entered his wigwam, Philip asked if she would “smoke it.” She would gladly have taken up a pipe before her captivity, but by now she had weaned herself from tobacco and had vowed never to smoke again. In the weeks ahead, she would knit a shirt and cap for Philip’s son and even be invited to dine with the sachem. “I went,” she remembered, “and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten and fried in bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.”

Later, while in the midst of yet another extended journey, Rowlandson feared she lacked the strength to continue. As she slogged through the knee-deep mud of a swamp, Philip unexpectedly appeared at her side and offered his hand and some words of encouragement. In her narrative of her captivity, Rowlandson faithfully records these acts of kindness on Philip’s part. But nowhere does she suggest that the sachem was unfairly portrayed by her fellow Puritans. Rowlandson had lost her daughter and several other loved ones in the war Philip had started, and nothing—not a pancake or a hand offered in friendship—could ever bring them back.

On March 9, Philip met for the first time with Canonchet, the young leader of the Narragansetts. As they all recognized, the victories they had so far won at Lancaster and Medfield were meaningless if they did not find a way to feed their people. They needed seed corn to plant crops in the spring. Hidden underground in Swansea was a large cache of seed. Canonchet volunteered to lead a group of warriors and women back into the very heart of Plymouth Colony to retrieve the corn. As the women returned with the seed to the Connecticut River valley, Canonchet would remain in Plymouth and bring the war back to where it had begun.

Despite the espionage work of Job and James, distrust of the Praying Indians was at its height. The note left at Medfield by James the Printer was looked at by many as proof that the missionary efforts of John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had only added to the threat posed by the Indians. On February 28, Richard Scott of Boston got very drunk and in the presence of three witnesses began to rail against Gookin, “calling him an Irish dog that was never faithful to his country, the son of a whore, a bitch, a rogue, God confound him and God rot his soul.” Scott, a veteran of Moseley’s company, claimed that if he should be lucky enough to encounter Gookin on a Boston street at night, “I would pistol him. I wish my knife and scissors were in his heart.” There was even talk of leading an assault on the Praying Indians at Deer Island. As Gookin realized, Scott and those like him were merely bullies who, frustrated by the army’s lack of success, “would have wreaked their rage upon the poor unarmed Indians our friends.”

Plymouth was not immune to such sentiment. In February, the Council of War, headed by Governor Winslow, voted to send the Praying Indians of Nemasket to Clark’s Island in Plymouth Harbor and “there to remain and not to depart from there…upon pain of death.” But even as officials acted to curb the freedoms of the colony’s friendly Indians, they were, as Benjamin Church soon found out, reluctant to pay for putting an end to the war.

On February 29, Church attended a meeting of the council at Winslow’s home in Marshfield. The raid on Medfield the week before had been followed by an attack on nearby Weymouth, and there were fears that the colony was about to be overrun with hostile Indians from the north. A member of the Council of War proposed that a militia company of sixty be sent to the outlying towns in the colony to defend against a possible Indian attack. The same official proposed that Church be the company’s commander. But just as he had done prior to the Great Swamp Fight, Church refused the offer of command. Instead, he had a proposal of his own.