Mayflower (39 page)

They found the Sakonnet sachem at an open-sided shelter facing the bay. As Church and his men watched the red sun sink over the hills upon which the city of New Bedford would one day be built, the Sakonnets served them a supper that included “a curious young bass in one dish, eels and flatfish in a second, and shellfish in a third.” By the time they’d finished eating, a large pile of firewood had been assembled in front of Awashonks’s lean-to, and soon the bonfire was lit, “all the Indians, great and small, gather[ing] in a ring round it.”

Many of the Sakonnets had participated in the war dance witnessed by Mary Rowlandson prior to the Sudbury Fight. That night they performed a similar ritual. But instead of preparing to fight
against
the English, they were now preparing to fight
for
the people they had once considered their enemies. After each warrior had danced around the fire with a spear in one hand and a wooden club in the other and vowed to fight against the enemies of the English, Nompash stepped forward and announced to Church that “they were making soldiers for him.”

In the weeks ahead, Church’s Sakonnet warriors would take him to places that no Englishmen—except perhaps for Joshua Tefft, the renegade from Rhode Island—had been before. With the Sakonnets’ help, Church’s company would penetrate the hitherto impenetrable swamps of the New England wilderness—the same kind of physical and spiritual landscape in which, fifty-five years before, Massasoit had gathered his people after the arrival of the
Mayflower.

We will never know what Massasoit’s powwows had told him about the future, but we do know that his son Philip took encouragement from his own powwows’ insistence that he would never die at the hands of an Englishman. With the Sakonnets’ entry into the war on the side of the colony, that prophecy gave the Pokanoket sachem little consolation. Learning of the defection of the Sakonnets was said, according to William Hubbard, to have “broke[n] Philip’s heart.” From that day forward, he was fighting not just the English; he was fighting his own people.

Church and his new Sakonnet recruits reached Plymouth the next day. Having already acquired a reputation for daring and unconventionality, Church attracted several new English volunteers, including Jabez Howland’s brother Isaac, Caleb Cook, Jonathan Delano, and Jonathan Barnes. In their late twenties and early thirties, many of these men were, like Church, either the sons or grandsons of the original Pilgrims. With the help of the Sakonnets, this hardy group of
Mayflower
descendants was about to develop a new way to fight a war.

Church was by no means the first to utilize friendly Indians against the enemy. The Connecticut forces had relied on the Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics since the beginning of the conflict. Under the leadership of Major John Talcott, Connecticut forces had become known for their relentless pursuit of the enemy—and for massacring almost all those they encountered. In many ways, Talcott had become another Samuel Moseley, but unlike Moseley and his roughneck band of privateers, who enthusiastically butchered Native men, women, and children, Talcott preferred to let his Indians do much of the dirty work. He claimed to be appalled by the brutality of his Mohegan and Pequot scouts, but that did not prevent him from giving them free rein when it came to killing and torturing the Narragansetts.

In early July, Talcott’s company surprised several groups of Narragansetts, and in the course of a few days killed more than two hundred of them, including the female sachem known as Queen, whom Talcott described as “that old piece of venom.” Talcott decided to keep one of the Narragansetts alive so that his own Native warriors could torture him to death while providing “an ocular demonstration of the savage, barbarous cruelty of these heathen.” Ritual torture was a long-standing part of Indian warfare, and Talcott later provided the Puritan historian William Hubbard with a detailed account of how the Mohegans cut the young warrior apart, finger by finger and toe by toe, “the blood sometimes spurting out in streams a yard from his hand,” before clubbing him to death.

No matter how shocking such incidents might have seemed in English eyes, they obfuscated an essential truth about King Philip’s War. Atrocities were expected in both European and Native conflicts. And yet, the English had to admit that compared to what was typical of European wars, the Indians had conducted themselves with surprising restraint. As Mary Rowlandson could attest, the Native warriors never raped their female captives—a common occurrence in the wars of seventeenth-century Europe.

But that did not prevent the level of violence in King Philip’s War from escalating during the summer of 1676. As in the final stages of the English civil war, what has been described as “a kind of victor’s justice” began to assert itself. Confident that the Indians were about to go down in defeat, increasing numbers of English commanders followed Talcott’s example and refused to grant the enemy any quarter. Since the Indians were in rebellion against the colonial governments to which they had once promised their loyalty, they were, in the English view, guilty of treason and therefore deserving of death. There was another alternative, however, that had the benefit of providing a way to begin paying for the war: slavery.

Some Englishmen preferred to view this as a more humane alternative. But sending large numbers of Native men, women, and children to almost certain death on a Caribbean sugar plantation was hardly an act of mercy. One of the few to object to the policy of enslaving Indians was the missionary John Eliot. “To sell souls for money seems a dangerous merchandise,” Eliot wrote. “To sell [the Indians] away from all means of grace…is the way for us to be active in destroying…their souls.” Most New Englanders, however, were so terrified by the prospect of living with the enemy in their midst that they gladly endorsed the policy of shipping Indian captives to the Caribbean and beyond. Onto this dodgy moral ground entered Benjamin Church.

More than anything else, Church wanted the conflict to end. This did not mean that he felt the war was unjustified. From his perspective, Philip and his warriors, some of whom had threatened him personally prior to the war, richly deserved to die, for they had dragged the region into an unnecessary conflict that had resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent English and Native people. This did not apply, however, to many, if not most, of the other Indians in New England, who had been pushed to become Philip’s allies through the ignorance, arrogance, and misplaced zeal of the English. In Church’s view, Indians like the Sakonnets, Pocassets, Narragansetts, and many Pokanokets should be given the benefit of the doubt and treated with compassion.

Back in August of the previous year, Church had objected vehemently to Winslow’s decision to enslave the Indians taken at Dartmouth. But now, with war raging once again throughout the colony, he had no choice but to adapt to the skewed ethics of a society that still feared it was on the verge of annihilation. The highest priority was to end the fighting, and Church now believed that with the Sakonnets on his side, he could accomplish exactly that.

Unlike the conscripted soldiers under the command of Major Bradford, whose salaries were being paid by the colony, Church’s volunteers must, in effect, pay for themselves. Church’s agreement with the Plymouth authorities was this: he and his English soldiers received half the money derived from the sale of Indian prisoners and their arms, while the Sakonnets received what Church described as “loose plunder.” The arrangement was, in Church’s words, “poor encouragement” at best, but it was the only way the government was going to allow him to fight the war on his own terms.

On the evening of July 11, Church’s company of approximately two dozen men, more than half of them Indians, left Plymouth for Middle-borough, where a mixed group of Pokanokets and Narragansetts had recently been sighted. Church realized he still had much to learn when it came to the subtleties of Indian warfare. As they made their way along the path to Middleborough, he asked the Sakonnets “[h]ow they got such advantage of the English in their marches through the woods.” They replied that it was essential to keep the men widely separated or, as Church described, “thin and scattered.” According to the Sakonnets, the English “always kept in a heap together” ; as a result, it was as “easy to hit [a company of English soldiers] as to hit a house.” Church soon discovered that spreading out his men had the added benefit of making his tiny army seem much larger than it actually was.

The Sakonnets also insisted that silence was essential when pursuing the enemy. The English addiction to talking to one another alerted the Indians to their presence. Creaking leather shoes were not to be tolerated; even the swishing sound made by a pair of thick pants could be detected by the Indians. If some form of communication was required, they should use an ever-changing vocabulary of wildlife sounds, from birdcalls to the howling of a wolf. They must also learn how to track the enemy. The morning was the best time, since it was possible to trace a man’s steps in the dew. But perhaps the most important lesson Church learned from the Sakonnets was never to leave a swamp the same way he had entered it. To do otherwise was to walk into an ambush.

Benjamin Church’s sword

To this markedly Native form of fighting, Church brought influences of his own, many of them derived from living among the mariners of Aquidneck Island. The sword he carried at his side was crudely fashioned compared to the elegant German rapier worn several decades earlier by Miles Standish. Church’s sword had a simple maple handle and a broad, upturned blade typical of the weapons used by Caribbean buccaneers, making it ideally suited to hand-to-hand combat. Church also spoke like a sailor. A Native scout was a “pilot.” When someone suddenly veered off in another direction, he “tacked about.” And as he soon discovered, exploring the smothering green of a New England swamp in summer had much in common with navigating a treacherous, fogbound coast.

After a few hours’ sleep in Middleborough, Church and his men set out after the enemy. Soon one of his Indian scouts reported having found an encampment. Based on the Sakonnets’ description of, in Church’s words, “their fires and postures,” he directed his men to surround the camp, and on his cue, they rushed at the enemy, “surprising them from every side so unexpectedly that they were all taken, not so much as one escaped.” Church took an immediate liking to one of the captured Indians, named Jeffrey, who freely told him of the whereabouts of a large number of Indians near Monponsett Pond, where Philip’s brother Alexander had been seized back in 1662. Church decided to make Jeffrey a part of their company, promising “that if he continued to be faithful to him, he should not be sold out of the country but should become his waiting man.” As it turned out, Jeffrey remained a part of the Church household for the rest of the Indian’s life.

After delivering his prisoners to Plymouth, Church and his men were on their way to Monponsett, where they captured several dozen additional Indians. Over the course of the next few weeks, Church’s string of successes continued unabated, and he soon became the talk of the colony. On July 24, Winslow broadened Church’s powers to allow him to do as he had done with Jeffrey: grant mercy to those Indians who agreed to help him find more of the enemy. Church’s recruits were soon convincing other newly captured Indians to do as they had done and come over to what he described as “the better side of the hedge.”

It was a deal that was difficult to refuse, but much of its appeal depended on the charisma, daring, and likability of the company’s captain. Church prided himself on his ability to bring even the most “treacherous dog” around to his way of thinking. “Come, come,” he would say, “you look wild and surly and mutter, but that signifies nothing. These my best soldiers were a little while ago as wild and surly as you are now. By the time you have been but one day…with me, you’ll love me too.” By the end of July, Church’s little band of volunteers was routinely bringing in more Indians than all of Plymouth’s and Massachusett Bay’s companies combined. In his history of the war, Cotton Mather wrote, “[S]ome of [Church’s] achievements were truly so magnanimous and extraordinary that my reader will suspect me to be transcribing the silly old romances, where the knights do conquer so many giants.”

Church undoubtedly enjoyed the praise, and in his own account of the war he does his best to portray himself as a swashbuckling knight errant of the woods, but as even he admitted, his successes would not have been possible without the presence of Bradford’s more traditional army. Based in Taunton, Bradford’s men chased Philip throughout the swamps and woods, and in several instances came within minutes of taking the Pokanoket sachem. But, unlike Church’s company, morale was a problem among Bradford’s conscripted soldiers, and by the end of July many of them had either deserted or found sufficient excuses to return home.

Bradford had been there from the beginning. Back in 1662, he had been present when the young Josiah Winslow took Philip’s brother Alexander. Bradford had been injured at the Great Swamp Fight, and when the temperamental Church had gone off in a huff to Aquidneck Island and Captain Pierce and his men had been wiped out in March, he had assumed command of the army no one else wanted to lead. Solid, dutiful, and pious, the fifty-two-year-old major did not share Church’s talent for improvisation and risk. Nor did he care to.