Mayflower (38 page)

Connecticut officials made sure that all three factions of their friendly Indians shared in the execution. According to one account, “the Pequots shot him, the Mohegans cut off his head and quartered his body, and Ninigret’s [Niantics] made the fire and burned his quarters; and as a token of their love and fidelity to the English, presented his head to the council at Hartford.”

If the death of Canonchet did not end the war, it was, in Hubbard’s words, “a considerable step thereunto.” The Indians had lost a leader whose bravery and magnetism had briefly united several groups of Native peoples into a powerful and effective fighting force. In the days and weeks ahead, dissension began to threaten the Indians as the English belatedly came to realize that the Praying Indians were the best ones to drive home the wedge that might break apart the Nipmuck-Narragansett-Pokanoket alliance.

The wedge? A thirty-eight-year-old English captive named Mary Rowlandson.

By late March, a large number of Indians had gathered at Wachusett Mountain to the north of modern Worcester. The steep and rocky terrain provided them with protection from the English yet was far enough east that they could easily attack the towns between them and Boston. On April 5, the Praying Indian Tom Doublet arrived at Wachusett with a letter from colonial officials in Boston. In addition to the possibility of opening peace negotiations, the letter mentioned the release of English prisoners.

An early-twentieth-century view of Wachusett Mountain

On April 12, Doublet returned to Boston with the Indians’ response. They were in no mood, as of yet, to discuss peace: “you know and we know your heart great sorrowful with crying for you lost many many hundred men and all your houses and your land, and women, child and cattle… [you] on your backside stand.” They were willing, however, to discuss the possibility of ransoming hostages. As a minister’s wife, minis-ter Mary Rowlandson was the Indians’ most notable captive, and she inevitably became the focus of the negotiations.

In mid-April, Rowlandson, who was still in the vicinity of the Connecticut River with Weetamoo, learned that her presence was required at Wachusett, where Philip and her master, Quinnapin, were already meeting with the Nipmucks. Before receiving this news, she had reached a new nadir. Her son, she had learned, was racked by the flux and was infested with lice; she had heard nothing about her daughter. Without Quinnapin to intervene, Rowlandson’s relationship with Weetamoo—difficult from the start—had deteriorated to the point that the sachem had threatened to beat her with a log. “My heart was so heavy…that I could scarce speak or [walk along] the path,” she remembered. But when she learned that she might soon be ransomed to the English, she felt a sudden resurgence of energy. “My strength seemed to come again,” she wrote, “and recruit my feeble knees and aching heart.”

Rowlandson arrived at Wachusett Mountain in the midst of preparations to attack the town of Sudbury. With the death of Canonchet having already begun to erode Native confidence, the Indians urgently needed a major victory. They were winning the war, but they were without significant reserves of food. Even if they succeeded in growing a significant amount of corn, they couldn’t harvest the crop until late summer. In June, the groundnuts went to seed and became inedible. They must force the English to sue for peace before the beginning of summer. Otherwise, no matter how great their military victories, they would begin to starve to death.

On April 17, Rowlandson became one of the few Westerners to witness a Native war dance. In the center of a large ring of kneeling warriors, who rhythmically struck the ground with their palms and sang, were two men, one of whom held a musket, and a deerskin. As the man with the gun stepped outside the ring, the other made a speech, to which the warriors in the ring enthusiastically responded. Then the man at the center began to call for the one with the gun to return to the deerskin, but the outsider refused. As the warriors in the ring chanted and struck the ground, the armed man slowly began to yield and reentered the ring. Soon after, the drama was repeated, this time with the man holding two guns. Once the leader of the dance had made another speech, and the warriors had “all assented in a rejoicing manner,” it was time to leave for Sudbury.

It was a smashing Native victory. Two different companies of English militia fell victim to ambush. The Indians killed as many as seventy-four men and suffered minimal losses. And yet, the Sudbury Fight failed to be the total, overwhelming triumph the Indians had hoped for. “[T]hey came home,” Rowlandson remembered, “without that rejoicing and triumphing over their victory, which they were wont to show at other times, but rather like dogs (as they say) which have lost their ears.” Even though they had inflicted terrible damage, there were still plenty of English left to fight another day, and for the Indians the days were running out.

The negotiations with the English took on a new urgency. The sachems ordered Rowlandson to appear before them in what they described as their “General Court.” They wanted to know what she thought she was worth. It was an impossible question, of course, but Rowlandson named the figure of £20. In the letter accompanying their ransom request, the sachems, led by the Nipmuck known as Sagamore Sam, adopted a far less arrogant tone: “I am sorry that I have done much wrong to you,” the note read, “and yet I say the fate is lay upon you, for when we began quarrel at first with Plymouth men I did not think that you should have so much trouble as now is.”

In early May, the Praying Indians Tom Doublet and Peter Conway arrived with the Englishman John Hoar from Concord. In addition to the ransom money, Hoar had brought along some provisions to help facilitate the negotiations. It soon emerged that Philip was against the ransoming of English captives, while the Nipmucks were for it. However, since Rowlandson was owned by Quinnapin, it was ultimately up to him.

Traditionally, Native Americans relied on the ritual of the dance to help them arrive at important decisions. The dance that day was led by four sachems and their wives, including Quinnapin and Weetamoo. Even though both of them had been almost constantly on the run for the last few months, the couple still possessed the trappings of nobility. “He was dressed in his Holland shirt,” Rowlandson wrote, “with great laces sewed at the tail of it; he had his silver buttons; his white stockings, his garters were hung round with shillings, and he had girdles of wampum upon his head and shoulders. She had a kersey [a twilled woolen fabric] coat and covered with girdles of wampum from the loins upward: her arms from her elbows to her hands were covered with bracelets; there were handfuls of necklaces about her neck and several sorts of jewels in her ears. She had fine red stockings and white shoes, her hair powdered and face painted red that was always before black.”

That night, Quinnapin sent a message to John Hoar that he would release Rowlandson the next day if in addition to the ransom of £20, “he should let him have one pint of liquor.” Hearing of the Narragansett sachem’s offer, Philip ordered Rowlandson to come before him. “[He] asked me what I would give him to…speak a good word for me.” She asked what it was he wanted. Philip’s reply: two coats, twenty shillings, a half bushel of seed corn, and some tobacco. It was the same ploy he had used ten years before on Nantucket Island—an extortion attempt that once again made him appear bullying and opportunistic. As his earlier acts of kindness toward Rowlandson had indicated, Philip was better than this.

As the night wore on, Quinnapin became roaring drunk. “[He] came ranting into the wigwam,” Rowlandson remembered, “and called for Mr. Hoar, drinking to him and saying, ‘He was a goodman,’ and then again he would say, ‘Hang him, rogue.’” Quinnapin then ordered Rowlandson to come before him, and after drinking to her, but “showing no incivility,” he began to chase his young wife around the wigwam, the shillings attached to his pants “jingling at his knees.” His wife proved too fast for him and escaped to another wigwam. “But having an old squaw,” Rowlandson wrote, “he ran to her and so through the Lord’s mercy we were no more troubled that night.”

The next morning, the sachems held another meeting—a meeting that Philip, who apparently did not receive his coats and tobacco, refused to attend. To Rowlandson’s great joy, it was decided that she should be released. To this day, the place where she gained her freedom, marked by a huge, glacier-scored boulder, is known as Redemption Rock.

By sundown Rowlandson, Hoar, and the two Praying Indians had reached her former home of Lancaster, where they decided to spend the night. “[A]nd a solemn sight it was to me,” she wrote. “There had I lived many comfortable years amongst my relations and neighbors, and now not one Christian to be seen, nor one house left standing.”

They reached Concord the next day around noon, and by evening they were in Boston, “where I met,” Rowlandson recalled, “my dear husband, but the thoughts of our dear children, one being dead and the others we could not tell where, abated our comfort each to other.” Over the course of the next few months, both their children were released, and they spent the rest of the war living among friends in Boston.

But Rowlandson found it difficult to leave her captivity behind. “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together,” she wrote, “but now is other ways with me….[W]hen others are sleeping, mine eyes are weeping.”

It was a new era in the war. With the success of Tom Doublet and Peter Conway in negotiating the release of Mary Rowlandson and with increasing numbers of Massachusetts-Bay officers using Praying Indians as scouts (even Samuel Moseley came to see the light), New Englanders began to realize that it was both stupid and inhumane to keep hundreds of loyal Indians sequestered against their will. In the middle of May, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that the Praying Indians be removed from Deer Island. “This deliverance…,” Daniel Gookin wrote, “was a jubilee to those poor creatures.”

On May 18, Captain William Turner with 150 volunteers from Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton attacked a large Native fishing camp on the Connecticut River. Although Turner and his men were ambushed during their retreat and more than 40 Englishmen, including Turner, were killed, they had succeeded in killing hundreds of Indians. On June 9, the Nipmuck leader Sagamore Sam lost his wife in another English assault. The Nipmucks decided they must sue for peace.

Unwilling to become a Nipmuck bargaining chip, Philip, accompanied by Quinnapin and Weetamoo, left Wachusett Mountain and headed south into familiar territory. With his brother-in-law Tuspaquin, the Black Sachem of Nemasket, leading the charge, Philip’s people attacked towns throughout Plymouth and Rhode Island.

From his temporary home on Aquidneck Island, Benjamin Church could see the smoke rising from locations up and down Narragansett Bay. Communication was difficult in these dangerous times, and they were all anxious for any word about their loved ones and friends. On May 12, Alice gave birth to a son named Constant in honor of her father.

A few days later Church took up a knife and stick and began to whittle. He’d been out of the war now for more than three months, and he wasn’t sure what he should do now that his son had been born. Perhaps he should take up carpentry. But as he whittled the stick, his hand slipped, and he badly gashed two of his fingers. Church smiled. If he was going to injure himself, he might as well do it in battle.

It was time he returned to the war.

O
N
T
UESDAY,
J
UNE
6, Benjamin Church attended a meeting of the General Court in Plymouth. Travel in the colony was still dangerous, but Church had managed to hitch a ride on a sloop from Newport to Cape Cod. The Cape and islands had remained free of violence throughout the first year of the war. Instead of treating their large Praying Indian population with cruelty and distrust, the English inhabitants had relied on them for their protection. As a result, the Cape had become the colony’s one oasis of safety, and Church used it to good effect, securing a horse in modern Falmouth, then known as Saconessett, and riding north along the eastern shore of Buzzards Bay to Sandwich and then on to Plymouth.

More than three months had passed since the Council of War had refused his request to lead a large group of Native Americans against Philip. Over that brief span of time, English attitudes toward the Praying Indians had undergone a fundamental change just as the main theater of the war shifted back to Plymouth Colony. Church sensed that his time had finally arrived.

As it so happened, the Council of War had decided to do almost exactly as Church had proposed back in February. They planned to send out in a few weeks’ time a force of three hundred soldiers, a third of them Indians, under the command of Major Bradford. Connecticut and the Bay Colony had also promised to provide companies that included significant numbers of Native scouts.

This was all good news, of course, but Church had no intention of serving under Bradford. Bradford was a trustworthy and loyal officer, but Church had his own ideas about how to fight the war. He must find an army of his own.

Two days later, Church was in a canoe with two Cape Indians headed back to Aquidneck Island. They were approaching the rocky shore of Sakonnet at the southeastern corner of Narragansett Bay. This was the home of Awashonks, the female sachem whom Church had known before the war. He was certain that if given the opportunity, Awashonks would have aligned herself with the English. Instead, she’d taken her people across the bay to the then neutral Narragansetts. After the Great Swamp Fight, the Sakonnets had been forced north along with the Narragansetts and eventually made their way to Wachusett Mountain.

As Church and his two Indian guides approached the jagged rocks and pebble beach of Sakonnet, he saw some of the sachem’s Indians fishing in the surf. The Sakonnets, Church realized, had returned home. Perhaps he could convince them to abandon Philip and serve under him.

The Indians began to shout and make signs that Church should come ashore. But when the canoe approached, they retreated and hid amid the clefts of the rocks. Fearful that the Sakonnets might be luring him into a trap, Church ordered the Cape Indians to back away from shore. Over the next few minutes, as the canoe rose up and down with the rhythmic heave of the ocean swell, the Sakonnets and Cape Indians struck up a conversation in their Native language, but it was difficult for them to hear each other above the crashing surf. Church used hand signals to indicate that he was willing to meet with just two of them at the end of a nearby point of sand.

After pulling the canoe up on shore, Church realized that one of the Indians was an old friend named Honest George. George, who spoke English well, said that Church’s suspicions were correct; Awashonks “had left Philip and did not intend to return to him any more.” Church asked George to deliver a message to his sachem: in two days he would meet her and just two others at a well-known rock near the western shore of Sakonnet.

The next day, Church went to Newport to inform the authorities of his proposed meeting with Awashonks. Since the Sakonnets were regarded as the enemy, he needed official sanction. But the Rhode Island officials refused to grant him a permit, claiming Church “was mad” and would most certainly be killed if he dared meet with the Sakonnets. Church, however, resolved to go ahead with the meeting—with or without the authorities’ blessing.

Treaty Rock, circa 1900, where the Sakonnet sachem Awashonks agreed to join forces with Benjamin Church

He purchased a bottle of rum and a roll of tobacco to assist with the negotiations, and on the morning of the next day, he and the two Cape Indians prepared to paddle to Sakonnet. But Alice refused to let them go. The Rhode Islanders were right; it was too dangerous. Church did his best to convince “his tender and now brokenhearted wife” that he must go. He assured her that this was nothing compared to the dangers he had already survived; if God looked favorably on his meeting with Awashonks, it might be of “great service” to the colony. Finally, Alice relented. “[C]ommitting her, his babes and himself to heaven’s protection,” Church set out for Sakonnet.

It was just a three-mile paddle from the Almy house on the east shore of Aquidneck Island to the meeting place. As Church had hoped, he could see some Indians waiting on the bank. One of them was Honest George, who said that Awashonks was nearby and willing to meet with him. When Church asked if she had come with just two others, George did not have time to reply before Awashonks came down to the shore with her son Peter and her principal warrior, Nompash. The sachem shook Church’s hand and gestured for him to follow her inland to where a large rock stood at the edge of a meadow of waist-high grass.

Almost as soon as the four of them had assembled around the rock, “a great body” of Indians, all of them armed and with their faces covered in war paint, rose up out of the grass. After a brief pause, Church said that George had indicated Awashonks might be willing to consider peace. She agreed that such was indeed the case. “It is customary,” Church replied, “when people meet to treat of peace to lay aside their arms and not to appear in such hostile form as your people do.” Only after the warriors had gathered their muskets in a large pile did Church begin the negotiations.

But first they must share in a drink of rum. He had poured the liquor into a calabash made from a large gourd, and after drinking to the sachem’s health, he offered the rum to Awashonks. Church could tell by the way she had watched him drink the rum that she suspected the liquor had been poisoned. When the sachem declined to take the calabash, Church poured some rum into his palm, slurped it down, then, raising up the gourd, took yet another “good swig,” which he later remembered “was no more than he needed.” At last confident that the rum was safe to drink, Awashonks accepted the calabash, and after taking a drink, she and Church began to talk.

The first thing the sachem wanted to know was why he had not returned a year ago, as promised, with a message from the governor. Church explained that the sudden outbreak of the war had made that impossible, and, in fact, he had attempted to contact her when he and a small group of men had come to Sakonnet only to become embroiled in the Pease Field Fight. At the mention of this encounter, the warriors rose up from the grass in a great “hubbub,” with one of them shaking his wooden club at Church with an intention that was impossible to misinterpret.

Honest George explained that the warrior had lost his brother at the Pease Field Fight and “therefore he thirsts for your blood.” It was then that Nompash, Awashonks’s chief warrior, stood up and commanded his men to be silent and “talk no more about old things.” Church turned to Awashonks and said that he was confident the Plymouth authorities would spare their lives and allow them to remain at Sakonnet if they disavowed Philip. He cited the example of the Pequots, a tribe that had once warred against the English but was now a trusted ally. He concluded by saying that on a personal level he sincerely looked forward to reclaiming “the former friendship” they had once enjoyed.

This was enough for Nompash. The warrior once again stood, and after expressing the great respect he had for Church, bowed and proclaimed, “Sir, if you’ll please to accept of me and my men, and will head us, we’ll fight for you, and will help you to Philip’s head before Indian corn be ripe.” Church had found his warriors. But now he had to secure the permission of Plymouth Colony.

Once the Nipmucks decided they must sue for peace in June, Philip was forced to flee from Wachusett Mountain. Since the Mohawks were now his avowed enemy, he could not head to the west or the north, and the Mohegans were waiting for him in Connecticut to the south. He must return to Plymouth Colony, where there were still considerable supplies of corn hidden in underground storage pits.

Coming south with Philip were the sachems Quinnapin and Weetamoo, and by June, approximately a thousand Pokanokets, Narragansetts, and even some Indians from as far away as the Connecticut River valley had ventured into Plymouth Colony from the north. On June 16, they attacked Swansea and burned all but four garrisons to the ground. On June 26, the Indians returned to that settlement, this time turning their attention to Wannamoisett, the portion of Swansea first settled by the Brown and Willett families in the 1650s. By this time Alexander and Philip’s old friend Thomas Willett had been dead almost two years. Willett’s twenty-two-year-old son Hezekiah had recently married Anna Brown and was living in a house equipped with a watchtower. Confident that no hostile Indians were in the vicinity, Hezekiah ventured out with his black servant only to be caught in a vicious cross-fire and killed. The Indians cut off his head and, taking the servant captive, returned to their encampment in triumph.

Hezekiah had been killed by Indians who were unaware of the Willetts’ long-standing relationship with Philip and his brother. Before his death, Massasoit had instructed both his sons to be kind to John Brown and his family, and the sight of Hezekiah’s dissevered head appears to have had a profound and wrenching effect on Philip. The black servant later told how “the Mount Hope Indians that knew Mr. Willett were sorry for his death, mourned, combed his head and hung peag [wampum] in his hair.”

Philip had returned both to the land and to the people he had known all his life. Philip was at war with Plymouth, but a tortured ambivalence had characterized his relationship with the colony from the very beginning. In the weeks ahead, the war that ultimately bore his name acquired the fated quality of Greek tragedy as events drew him, with an eerie remorselessness, home.

Church was having difficulties of his own. Soon after his meeting with Awashonks, he wrote an account of the negotiations and gave it to the sachem’s son Peter, who left for Plymouth to speak with the authorities. But on June 27, when Bradford’s army arrived at Pocasset, just across the bay from Aquidneck Island, Church had not yet received any word from Peter. Church informed Bradford of the Sakonnets’ willingness to serve under him in the fight against Philip, but Bradford would have none of it. He needed to have the official sanction of Governor Winslow before he allowed Church to command a company of Sakonnets. Until he had that, Awashonks and her people must get themselves to Sandwich at the base of Cape Cod, where they would be beyond Philip’s influence and reach, and await the governor’s decision.

Even though he was not happy with the major’s orders, Church urged the Sakonnets to comply. He would go to Plymouth and find out what had happened to Peter. In a week, he promised, he would meet them in Sandwich with a commission from Governor Winslow. And so, with a Cape Indian provided by Bradford leading them with a white flag of truce, the Sakonnets set out for Sandwich.

But Church was fated to suffer a host of additional delays. Given the dangers of traveling overland, he could not simply ride to Plymouth, and he was forced to accompany Bradford’s army on an unsuccessful hunt for Philip on Mount Hope. Not until Friday, July 7—several days past the deadline he had promised the Sakonnets—did Church finally reach Plymouth.

To his immense relief, he learned that after a thorough interrogation of Awashonks’s son Peter, Governor Winslow had accepted the provisional agreement Church had reached with the Sakonnets. “His honor smilingly told him,” Church later remembered, “‘that he should not want commission if he would accept it, nor yet good Englishmen enough to make up a good army.’” It had taken a month to arrange, but it looked as if Church would at last have his own company of Indians.

He decided he needed only half a dozen or so Englishmen, and in just a few hours he had rounded up a group that included thirty-two-year-old Jabez Howland, son of
Mayflower
passenger John Howland, and Church’s brother-in-law twenty-eight-year-old Nathaniel South-worth. They mounted their horses and, after riding all that night, arrived in Sandwich just a few hours before daylight. The Sakonnets, they learned, had departed several days before for parts unknown. Church feared that Awashonks had taken offense at yet another broken English promise; adding to his worries was the presence of a considerable number of hostile Indians in the region under the leadership of Totoson, the destroyer of Dartmouth and Clark’s garrison in Plymouth. After a few hours’ sleep, Church and his men set out to catch up with Awashonks and her people.

He thought it likely that they had headed back for home and were following the western shore of Buzzards Bay toward Sakonnet. After riding more than twenty-six miles, Church and his men came upon a bluff with a panoramic view of a bay that is presently the outer portion of New Bedford Harbor. Ahead, they heard “a great noise” ; quickly dismounting from their horses, they began to creep through the underbrush until they had come to the bluff’s edge. Below them was modern Pope Beach and a sight that Church never forgot: “[They] saw a vast company of Indians, of all ages and sexes, some on horseback running races, some at football, some catching eels and flatfish in the water, some clamming, etc.” Church soon learned that these were indeed the Sakonnets and that Awashonks and her warriors were exceedingly pleased to see him once again.