Mayflower (37 page)

If the Indians returned to Plymouth, it was reasonable to assume that, in Church’s words, “they would come very numerous.” As Massachusetts had learned, it was a waste of time stationing militias in town garrisons. Although they helped to defend the settlement in the event of an attack, they did nothing to limit the Indians’ activities. The only way to conduct the war was to “lie in the woods as the enemy did.” And to do that, you not only needed a large force of several hundred men, you needed a large number of friendly Indians. “[I]f they intended to make an end of the war by subduing the enemy,” Church insisted, “they must make a business of the war as the enemy did.” Instead of worrying about how much money was being spent, Plymouth officials should equip him with an army of three hundred men, a third of them Indians. Give him six weeks, and he and his men would “do good service.”

The council turned him down. The colony, it explained, was already woefully in debt, and “as for sending out Indians, they thought it no ways advisable.” But Church’s words were not without some effect. The man who agreed to serve in his stead, Captain Michael Pierce of Scituate, was given, in addition to sixty Englishmen, twenty “friend Indians” from Cape Cod.

Church decided his first priority must be to ensure the safety of his pregnant wife, Alice, and their son, Tom. If the Indians should come in the numbers he expected, he knew that Duxbury, where they were now located, was likely to be a prime target. Even though it meant leaving the colony, he resolved to take Alice and Tom to Aquidneck Island. It was an unpopular decision both with the authorities, from whom he needed a permit, and with his wife’s relations. Eventually Church was able to convince Governor Winslow that he could be of some use to him “on that side of the colony,” and he was given permission to relocate to Rhode Island.

Prior to their departure, they stopped in Plymouth to say good-bye to Alice’s parents. The Southworths were adamant: their daughter should remain in Plymouth safely tucked away with their grandson in Clark’s garrison on the Eel River, just a few miles from the town center. At the very least, she should remain there until she’d delivered her baby in May. But Church was just as obstinate, and on March 9, they set out for Taunton, from which they would proceed by boat down the Taunton River to Mount Hope Bay and Aquidneck Island.

In Taunton the Churches encountered Captain Pierce and his company. Pierce must have known that Church had spurned the command that he had chosen to accept, but that did not prevent the captain from offering to provide Church and his family with an escort to Rhode Island. Church politely declined Pierce’s “respectful offer,” and the following day he and his family arrived safely at Captain John Almy’s house in Portsmouth.

A few days later, they heard the shocking news. Clark’s garrison in Plymouth had been attacked by Indians. Eleven people, most of them women and children, had been killed, and the garrison had been burned to the ground.

For the English, March of 1676 was a terrible and terrifying month. Indians from across New England banded together for a devastating series of raids that reached from the Connecticut River valley to Maine and even into Connecticut, a colony that had, up until now, been spared from attack. But it was in Plymouth, on Sunday, March 26, where the English suffered one of the most disheartening defeats of the war.

The previous day, Captain Pierce and his men had skirmished with some Indians fishing for salmon, shad, and alewives at the falls of the Blackstone River. After spending the night at Rehoboth, Pierce set out once again in search of Indians. He suspected that there were an unusually large number of them in the area, and he sent a messenger to Providence to request reinforcements. As it turned out, all of Providence’s residents were worshipping in the town’s meetinghouse that morning. Reluctant to interrupt, the messenger waited until the service had ended before delivering Pierce’s request. By then, it was too late.

Pierce and his force of sixty Englishmen and twenty Indians were marching north along the east bank of the Blackstone River when they spotted some Indians. There were just a few of them, and when the Indians realized they were being followed, they appeared to flee in panic. Pierce’s men eagerly pursued, only to discover that they had blundered into an ambush. A force of five hundred Indians, apparently led by Canonchet, emerged from the trees. Pierce and his soldiers ran across the rocks to the west bank of the Blackstone, where another four hundred Indians were waiting for them.

Pierce ordered his company of eighty men to form a single ring, and standing back to back, they fought bravely against close to a thousand Indians, who according to one account “were as thick as they could stand, thirty deep.” By the end of the fighting two hours later, fifty-five English, including Pierce, were dead, along with ten of the Praying Indians. Nine English soldiers either temporarily escaped the fighting or were taken alive and marched several miles north, where they were tortured to death at a place still known today as Nine Men’s Misery. As Church had warned, the enemy had come in overwhelming numbers, and as he might also have predicted, it was Pierce’s small band of friendly Indians who distinguished themselves during the battle.

Given the impossible odds, the Cape Indians would not have been faulted for attempting to escape at the first sign of trouble. But such was not the case. An Indian named Amos stood at Pierce’s side almost to the very last. Even after his commander had been shot in the thigh and lay dying at his feet, Amos held his ground and continued to fire on the enemy. Finally, however, it became obvious that, in the words of William Hubbard, “there was no possibility for him to do any further good to Captain Pierce, nor yet to save himself if he stayed any longer.” The Narragansetts and Nipmucks had all blackened their faces for battle. Smearing his face with gunpowder and stripping off his English clothes, Amos did his best to impersonate the enemy, and after pretending to search the bodies of the English for plunder, he disappeared into the woods.

There were other instances of remarkable ingenuity on the part of the Cape Indians that day. As the fighting drew to a desperate conclusion, a Praying Indian turned to the English soldier beside him and told him to start to run. Taking up his tomahawk, the Indian pretended to be a Narragansett pursuing his foe, and the two of them did not stop running until they had left the fighting far behind. When word of the heroism of Pierce’s Cape Indians began to spread, public opinion regarding the use of friendly Indians in combat started to shift. It still took some time, but New Englanders came to realize that instead of being untrustworthy and dangerous, Indians like Amos, James, and Job might in fact hold the secret to winning the war.

Two days after slaughtering Pierce and his company, Canonchet and as many as 1,500 Indians attacked Rehoboth. As the inhabitants watched from their garrisons, forty houses, thirty barns, and two mills went up in flames. Only one person was killed—a man who believed that as long as he continued to read the Bible, no harm would come to him. Refusing to abandon his home, he was found shot to death in his chair—the Bible still in his hands.

The next day, March 29, the Indians fell on Providence. Most of the town’s five hundred inhabitants had left for the safety of Aquidneck Island, but there remained in Providence a hardy contingent of thirty men, including seventy-seven-year-old Roger Williams. All that day the Indians wandered up and down the streets of the town, firing the houses. Providence was situated on a steep hill overlooking a large salt cove, and when a group of Indians appeared on the opposite shore, Williams, a long staff in his hand, strode out to the end of a point to speak with them. For the next hour, with only a narrow sliver of water between him and the enemy and with Providence burning behind him, Williams conversed with this group of Nipmucks, Pokanokets, Pocassets, Narragansetts, and Connecticut River valley Indians.

“I asked them,” he wrote in a letter to his brother in Newport, “why they assaulted us with burning and killing who ever were [kind] neighbors to them, (and looking back) said I, ‘This house of mine now burning before mine eyes hath lodged kindly some thousands of you these ten years.’” The Indians replied that even though Rhode Island had remained neutral, it had provided assistance to the other colonies during their assault on the Narragansetts that winter. But Williams would have none of it. “I told them they…had forgot they were mankind and ran about the country like wolves tearing and devouring the innocent and peaceable…. They confessed they were in a strange way.”

Williams warned them that planting time was approaching. A valley sachem said that “they cared not for planting these ten years. They would live upon us, and dear. He said God was with them…for [the English] had killed no fighting men but…they had killed of us scores.” He then invited Williams to go to the site of the Pierce battle and “look upon three score and five now unburied.” These words provoked Williams into angrily challenging the Indians to fight the English in the open field instead of “by ambushes and swamps.” In the end, however, he offered his services as a peacemaker. The Indians said that after another month spent burning Plymouth Colony, they might speak to him again. “We parted,” Williams wrote, “and they were so civil that they called after me and bid me not go near the burned houses for there might be Indians [who] might mischief me, but go by the water side.” Williams closed his letter with a word of warning to his brother: “prepare forts for women and children at Newport and on the island or it will be shortly worse with you than us.”

By the beginning of April, it looked as if the Indians might do as they had once threatened and drive the English to the very edge of the sea. Adding to the Puritans’ troubles was the outbreak of disease. That spring, a lethal influenza claimed the lives of inhabitants in just about every New England town, including several military officers and the governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop Jr. Then, on April 9, an event occurred that changed the course of the war.

Unlike Massachusetts and Plymouth, Connecticut had relied on friendly Indians from the very start of the conflict. In addition to the Mohegans, there were two factions of Pequots, as well as the Niantic Indians, a subset of the Narragansetts, who had remained loyal to the English. In early April a Connecticut force under Captain George Denison was in the vicinity of modern Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when they captured an Indian woman who revealed that Canonchet was nearby. Over the course of the next few days, Denison’s eighty or so Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics competed with one another for the honor of capturing the great Narragansett sachem.

In the last few months, Canonchet had earned the reputation for charismatic leadership that had so far eluded the more famous Philip. Dressed in the silver-trimmed jacket the Puritans had given him during treaty negotiations in Boston, with a large wampum belt around his waist, the young sachem was passionate and decisive and known for his bravery in battle. Even the Puritans, who blamed him for the defection of the Narragansetts, had to admit that Canonchet “was a very proper man, of goodly stature and great courage of mind, as well as strength of body.” At considerable risk, he and thirty warriors had succeeded in collecting the seed corn from storage pits just north of Mount Hope. The corn had already been delivered to the Connecticut River valley, where the women would begin planting in May. He was now leading the army of 1,500 Indians that had annihilated Captain Pierce’s company and had laid waste to Providence and Rehoboth.

On April 9, Canonchet was resting at the foot of a hill near the Blackstone River with nine of his warriors, trading stories about the attack on Captain Pierce and his company, when he heard “the alarm of the English.” He ordered two of his men to go to the top of the hill and report back what they saw, but the men never returned. A third warrior was sent, and he too disappeared. Only after two more men ventured to the top of the hill did Canonchet learn that “the English army was upon him.” Taking up his musket and blanket, the Narragansett sachem began to run around the base of the hill, hoping to sneak through the enemy forces and escape behind them. However, one of Denison’s Niantic warriors saw the sachem moving swiftly through the woods, and the chase was on.

Canonchet soon realized that Denison’s Indians were beginning to catch up to him. Hoping to slow them down, he stripped off his blanket, but the Indians refused to stop for the plunder. Canonchet then shook off his silver-trimmed red coat, followed by his belt of wampum. Now the Indians knew they had, in Hubbard’s words, “the right bird, which made them pursue as eagerly as the other fled.”

Ahead was the Blackstone River, and Canonchet decided he must attempt to cross it. But as he ran across the slick stones, his foot slipped, and he fell into the water and submerged his gun. Canonchet still had a considerable lead over his pursuers, but he now knew that flight was useless. According to Hubbard, “he confessed soon after that his heart and his bowels turned within him, so as he became like a rotten stick, void of strength.” Soon after crossing the river, a Pequot Indian named Monopoide caught up to the sachem, who surrendered without a fight.

The first Englishman on the scene was twenty-two-year-old Robert Stanton. When Stanton started questioning Canonchet, the proud sachem replied, “You much child, no understand matters of war. Let your brother or your chief come, him I will answer.”

The English offered Canonchet his life if he helped them convince Philip and the others to stop the fighting. But he refused, “saying he knew the Indians would not yield.” He was then transported to Stonington, where officials blamed him for dragging the Narragansetts into war. He responded that “others were as forward for the war as himself and that he desired to hear no more thereof.” When told he’d been sentenced to die, he replied that “he liked it well, that he should die before his heart was soft or had spoken anything unworthy of himself.” Just prior to his execution in front of a Pequot firing squad, Canonchet declared that “killing him would not end the war.” When Uncas’s son responded that he was “a rogue,” Canonchet defiantly threw off his jacket and stretched out his arms just as the bullets pierced his chest.