In the Devil's Snare (13 page)

And there was much to confront, especially after the June 27 assault on Cocheco and the killing of Richard Waldron. The councilors’ first instinct was to leave New Hampshire residents to their own devices. Responding to desperate pleas for help from the Portsmouth magistrates in the wake of the Cocheco raid, Bradstreet advised them to “put yourselves into such a way . . . as may accommodate the present emergency in the best manner you may,” explaining that Massachusetts could not at that time “impress men, or levy money” to assist them. But then the Wabanakis in quick succession attacked Black Point, Sagadahoc, Saco, and Oyster River. In early August, the Indians turned their attention to the stronghold at Pemaquid. On August 3, after a two-day battle, the town and fort surrendered to a combined force of three or four hundred Penobscots and Frenchmen. There the sachems Madockawando and Moxis asserted confidently to the fort’s commander that “Sir Edmund Andros was a great rogue and had almost starved them all last winter, but now he be a prisoner, and they no care for the New England people[.] They [will] have all their own Countrey by and by.”
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The threat to their valuable province of Maine led the self-proclaimed rulers of Massachusetts to respond to the looming disaster by dispatching a flurry of orders raising troops, placing a bounty of £8 on every scalp of a “ffighting man,” and promising militiamen any plunder they might acquire in the course of their service. Yet few men volunteered, and those pressed into the forces seemed inadequate to the task in both quantity and quality.
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From the Maine frontier came nothing but discouraging news: of settlers leaving by the score, “soe that wee Grow weaker & weker every day”; of village after village “in a miserable shattered Condition”; of people “brought so Exceeding Low that they are Just Redy to desert.” Indeed, after a second attack on their settlement, the residents of North Yarmouth and the soldiers garrisoned there decided to abandon the town. Such desperate circumstances led the pious magistrate and militia leader Robert Pike, of Salisbury, one of the northernmost towns of Massachusetts proper, to wonder aloud whether “we may be a peopl saved of the Lord tho a peopl that distroy our selvs.”
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In mid-September, the beleaguered frontier residents finally got a break when a Dutch ship sailed into Casco Bay from Pemaquid with a timely warning to Sylvanus Davis, now in command of Fort Loyal, built in 1680 to protect Falmouth. The Wabanakis were massing to the north, “Resolved to use theire uttermost Indevor to Destroy Casco: perteculerly & all the Engles In Jenerall.” Davis immediately wrote to Boston for help, and over the next few days he and others peppered the Massachusetts Council with more detailed information. Some of the most authoritative came from Richard Waldron’s adult daughter, acquired in a prisoner exchange on September 17: the Indians tell the woman that . . . they resolve forth with to Set upon this towne, which they reckon as their owne alreadie & then to their design in taking and ruining the whole province, they deride and scoff at us after a strange manner, they say they are much encouraged by some Gentlemen in Boston for the mannaging the warr against us which makes them go on with undaunted courage.

For once, the governor and council reacted effectively. After persuading Benjamin Church, an experienced Indian fighter from King Philip’s War, to take command of troops raised in Plymouth and Boston, they quickly dispatched both men and provisions to Falmouth on board several vessels, including the colony’s sloop Mary, captained by John Alden.
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The ships and troops arrived on Friday afternoon, September 20, just in time to save the town. Church realized that an attack was imminent, so he landed his men after nightfall, having previously kept them concealed below decks. Thus, when the Wabanakis assaulted Falmouth the next morning by crossing Anthony Brackett’s farm in order to reach the peninsula on which the town center was located, they encountered unexpected resistance from the Massachusetts soldiers as well as from local militiamen. Sylvanus Davis reported “a fierce fight” lasting about six hours, in which the New Englanders “forced them to Retreate & Judge many of them to bee slaine . . . there was Grate firings on Both sides.” The English lost eleven soldiers killed and ten wounded, some of whom died later. How many townspeople were among the casualties is uncertain. But the Reverend George Burroughs again survived an attack on Falmouth; on September 22 Church declared himself “well Satisfied with” Burroughs, who had been “present with us yesterday in the fight.”
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For Burroughs and others like him who had also lived in Falmouth thirteen years earlier, the assault must have stimulated bitter memories, for during the First Indian War, too, the Wabanakis had attacked the town by first raiding the farm of Anthony Brackett. Yet in the aftermath of the victory of September 21, 1689, the dangers must have seemed happily in the past. In his memoirs, Church recalled that “the poor inhabitants wonderfully rejoiced that the Almighty had favoured them so much.” The Falmouth residents jubilantly observed to Church that “it was the first time that ever the eastward Indians had been put to flight.”
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And “fly” the Wabanakis did. The Reverend Cotton Mather commented in his history of the war that they “Retired into the howling Desarts”—which he also termed “their inaccessible Swamps”—“where there was no Coming at them.” Church and the militia commanders attached to his command (Major Jeremiah Swayne, Captain William Bassett, Captain Simon Willard, and others) repeatedly sent out scouting parties, but except for one brief encounter a few days after the Falmouth attack, Church reported, they could not “make Discovery of Any Boddy of the enemy only soom few sculkin Roges.” Eventually, the Massachusetts government ordered most of the army disbanded, leaving only a limited number of soldiers stationed in Maine and New Hampshire over the winter.
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The Bay Colony proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for December 19, 1689. “The God of Heaven,” it announced, did “mitigate His many Frowns upon us in the Summer past, with a mixture of some very signal Favours.” Consequently, “our Indian Enemies have had a Check put upon their Designs of Blood and Spoil,” and “we have such hopes of our God’s adding yet more perfection to our Deliverances.” As Massachusetts officials had done in the past and as they would do in the future, they thus attributed both their defeats and their victories to God’s will. As his chosen people, they could do no else.
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One sour note remained. After all, the Indians who held Waldron’s daughter had told her that “they are much encouraged by some Gentlemen in Boston for the mannaging the warr.” To whom did they refer? If regarded as credible, the remark could be taken in two quite distinct ways. For the leaders of the Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts, it surely meant Andros and his aides, still held under guard in Boston but nevertheless able to communicate easily and openly with the outside world. To partisans of the former governor, however, it meant the greedy Boston merchants and their political allies. In the defense of his conduct submitted to authorities in London after his return, Sir Edmund Andros charged that soon after he was overthrown the Wabanakis were “supplyed with Amunicon and Provision out of a Vessell sent from Boston by some of the Cheife Conspirators before the Insurrection to Trade with them,” which “Encouraged and Enabled [them] to renew and pursue the Warr.”
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To residents of the frontier, of course, what mattered was not
who
was trading arms and ammunition to the French and the Indians, but simply the allegations that such trade was commonplace. For the people of Maine and New Hampshire, mercantile profits or possible diplomatic advantages paled in comparison to the threat to their families and communities posed by armed Wabanakis. No wonder, then, that the swirling rumors charging that
someone
was engaging in commerce with the enemy always found ready listeners on the northeastern frontier.
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THE DISASTERS OF 1690

Monday, February 24, 1689/90; Boston. Samuel Sewall and his wife hosted a dinner party for twenty, including Governor Simon Bradstreet and his wife, William Stoughton, Cotton Mather of the Second (North) Church, the merchant Thomas Brattle, and the two pastors of Sewall’s Third (South) Church, Samuel Willard and Joshua Moodey. What should have been a pleasant and festive occasion, though, turned to “bitterness,” Sewall noted in his diary, when the post arrived from Albany with the “amazing news” of “the Massacre at Schenectady by the French.” He filled in the details at the actual date of the event, February 8–9: “Schenectady, a village 20 miles above Albany, destroy’d by the French. 60 Men, Women and Children murder’d. Women with Child rip’d up, Children had their Brains dash’d out. Were surprise’d about 11 or 12 aclock Satterday night, being divided, and secure.” Governor Bradstreet, reading the dispatches at Sewall’s before and after dinner, must have been struck by the irony of a phrase he had drafted just eleven days before the attack: “This Winter season forbids the stirring of our Indian enemies,” he had confidently informed the ministry in London.
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Sewall’s brief diary entry encapsulated most of the key points about the raid: the French and Indians had attacked about midnight, in the middle of winter when such an onslaught was least expected; the village had been unguarded, in part because of internal dissension; and the raiders had shown little mercy to their victims, regardless of age or sex. By early March, one new and terrifying piece of information emerged from the maelstrom of reports. French and Indian prisoners captured and interrogated by those who chased the raiders revealed that their party had not been alone in undertaking a wilderness march in winter. They had departed from Montreal, but believed that another large group had left Quebec, headed for New England.
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Tuesday, March 18, 1689/90; Salmon Falls. The Schenectady prisoners’ information proved to be horrifyingly accurate. Early on March 18, “between break of the day & sunrise—when most were a bed & no watch kept neither in fort nor house,” a force of about sixty “Half Indianized French, and Half Frenchified Indians,” led by a French officer and Hope Hood of the Androscoggins, attacked the village of Salmon Falls. The next day, two Portsmouth magistrates described “the dreadfull destruction” to the council. The fort and more than twenty houses had been burned, many cattle killed, and eighty to a hundred people killed or captured, of whom “between twenty & Thirty [were] able men.” Pursuing militia from Portsmouth, York, and Cocheco had eventually caught up with and skirmished with the raiders, but did not know what casualties they had inflicted.
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Again a captive taken after the battle provided important information. The French soldier indicated that they had intended to strike a “more easterly” site, before being dissuaded by Hope Hood, whom they had encountered in the woods and who had “pilotted [them] to fall upon Salmon falls.” When asked their original destination, he replied that they “came forth . . . principly against Monsuir Tyng & the place where he lived.” Denied a victory at Falmouth the preceding September by Benjamin Church’s timely arrival, the force of French and Indians had once more targeted Fort Loyal.
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Before news of the Salmon Falls raid arrived in Boston, Bay Colony leaders had already decided to take the initiative in the war for the first time. Acting on a proposal submitted in January by a group of merchants including Bartholomew Gedney and Captain John Alden, they committed themselves in mid-March to launching an expedition against the French at Port Royal, Acadia. The plan involved joint public-private financing, with merchant subscribers and volunteer soldiers alike profiting from shares of any resulting plunder. On March 20, Governor Bradstreet explained to the ministry in London that in “the general opinion of the whole Countrey” the Indian war could not be ended, “nor will their Majesties subjects here ever live in Peace; but by the dislodging and removal of those ill neighbours the ffrench.” Success in this endeavor, he predicted, could spur New England to attack Canada itself. To general acclaim, the council chose the Maine-born baronet Sir William Phips as commander in chief. At the same time the Port Royal expedition was being planned, councilors also reacted positively to requests from Albany for assistance in attacking Quebec or Montreal. In late March Bradstreet proposed an intercolonial meeting to discuss such a scheme.
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The immediate difficulties faced by the northeastern settlements came a distant second to grandiose strategies, for the Bay Colony’s leaders quickly concluded that the settlers’ “own carelessness and want of vigilance” had caused both the Schenectady and Salmon Falls tragedies. “We find that hardly any Garrison has been taken except by Surprize,” observed Samuel Sewall, writing for the council. Such reasoning clearly implied that the victims of the raids bore primary responsibility for their own terrible fates, and therefore that Massachusetts could not be blamed for any losses. If frontier residents would merely stay on their guard, they could defend themselves easily enough. Fitz-John Winthrop of Connecticut (brother of Wait Winthrop, the Massachusetts councilor) fully concurred with that conclusion. When settlers displayed “unpardonable negligence” and failed to take appropriate steps to preserve their own safety, “such a people are miserable and canot be saved,” he observed in response to reports of the assault on Schenectady.
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So, after ordering 120 additional men from the Essex County militia sent northeastward, the council devoted its main energies to completing the arrangements for Phips’s Port Royal expedition, which sailed from Boston on April 20. The next day, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton set off for Manhattan, where on May 1 they promised that Massachusetts would contribute men and matériel to a combined colonial attack on Montreal. And on April 24, the council dispatched John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin to Maine and New Hampshire to investigate “the State and Condition of the Inhabitants there.” It directed them to ascertain how many soldiers were stationed at the various outposts, to advise the residents on how best to defend themselves, and to recommend the return to Massachusetts of any provincial soldiers “uncapeable of Service or of more than absolute necessity to be continued.”
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Hathorne and Corwin acted quickly. Just six days later, they wrote from York to summarize their findings. Many garrisons had no soldiers at all; others, Black Point and Saco among them, had six or fewer. Most of the troops were stationed at York, Wells, and Kittery (a total of about a hundred under two different commanders) or Falmouth, which housed sixty men under Captain Simon Willard. Then they issued recommendations to the leaders of the beleaguered province. Echoing parts of their instructions word for word, they advised constant scouting, attacks on Wabanaki fishing places, and withdrawal into a few garrisons that could be easily defended. They also exhorted the frontiersmen to take “due Care” that “you may not be supprized by the enemy and Sudenly destroyed as other places have benn.”
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When the Essex magistrates returned to the Bay Colony, they must likewise have presented proposals to the governor and council for the future disposition of the troops then stationed on the frontier. No extant record reveals what advice they offered their superiors, nor is there a surviving account of the council’s deliberations. But the councilors concluded that Willard’s men were no longer needed in Falmouth. If Hathorne and Corwin had strongly advocated maintaining a garrison there, it is hard to imagine the council having made that decision. On Thursday, May 15, responding to orders from Boston, Captain Willard marched his sixty soldiers out of Fort Loyal.
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About daybreak on Friday, May 16, a combined force of four or five hundred Wabanakis and French soldiers fell on Falmouth. This time, no Benjamin Church sailed into the harbor to save the town.

Tuesday, May 20, 1690; Falmouth,
as described by Captain Sylvanus Davis:

about 3 Clok after noone wee ware taken. They fought us 5 days & 4 nights in which time thay kild & woonded the Greatest parte of our men Burned all the howses & att last wee ware forst to have a perly with: them in order for a surender . . . wee Demand if thare was any french amongst them & if thay wold Give us quarter thay Answred thay ware french men & that thay woold Give us Good quarter . . . & that wee shoold have liberty to march to the next English towne. . . . but as soone as thay had us in theire Coustady thay Broke theire Articcuels sufred our wiming & Children & our men to bee mad Captiffs in the Hands of the Heathen to bee Cruelley murdred & Destroyed many of them & espetishal our wonded men, only the french kept my self & 3 or 4 more & Carried us over Land for Canada.

The attackers, Davis said, were led by Madockawando and “thoes Indians that wee had in hould that Sir Androus ordred to bee clered,” accompanied by Castine himself.
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The loss of Falmouth and about two hundred people stunned New Englanders, leading to the immediate abandonment of the small settlements southwest of Casco Bay. “Nothing now remaines Eastward of Welles,” reported Major Charles Frost and others from Portsmouth on May 22, noting that two ships sent to Casco to investigate had observed burning buildings everywhere along the coast. Three or four hundred refugees, “most women & Children,” had arrived in Portsmouth that week; “Wells will desert if not forthwith reinforced.” That threat elicited a council order to send 120 more militiamen to Wells and York, but the outlook appeared gloomy. One discouraged New Englander wrote, “We are precipitated into such distress & danger, as we have never seen before. . . . God is now come forth against us with an ax, a French ax, accompanied with Indian Hatchetts, & our very roote is like to receive the Stroake thereof.” Multiplying their woes, Thomas Danforth, president of the province, reportedly told Maine residents in response to their “earnest addresses [to Boston] . . . for Succour” that “the Lord Jesus Christ was King of the Earth as well as the heavens, and if he [Jesus] did not help them he [Danforth] could not.”
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Yet other news, as Samuel Sewall commented in his diary, partly “abates our sorrow for the loss of Casco”: on May 22 word arrived from Sir William Phips that his attack on Port Royal had been successful. A great deal of plunder had been taken, and those who invested in the enterprise, including Sewall himself, seemed likely to profit handsomely. Heartened by the victory, the council proceeded with its larger plan of launching a naval expedition against Quebec, also to be led by Phips, in coordination with the overland assault on Montreal. The major burden of the Montreal campaign was to be borne by New York and Connecticut. Although Massachusetts contributed some money, the colony reneged on its initial commitment of troops because of its need for men elsewhere.
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As men and supplies were being gathered in Boston and Albany for the projected attacks on the French strongholds on the St. Lawrence River, the war in the northeast continued. Even more than before, reports reaching Boston and London revealed that northern New England’s resources were being stretched to the breaking point. For example, on July 4 a militia troop led by Captain John Floyd set out from Exeter to destroy some Pennacook cornfields near the Piscataqua River. “Perceiving their Motion,” the Wabanakis attacked Exeter in the men’s absence, taking a garrison and scattering its defenders. On July 6 Floyd’s men and the same group of Wabanakis engaged in a “Bloody Action,” from which Floyd eventually had to retreat to Portsmouth after taking heavy casualties. The Indians, as they had at Falmouth, seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of where colonial troops were or, more precisely, where they were not.
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Although one writer described Essex County as “moste of itt in Armes goeing to releive those parts,” the more common response from those called up was reluctance and complaint. As demands for men mounted, local leaders balked. So many were being pressed into provincial service, contended Nathaniel Saltonstall of Haverhill and others, that their own towns were being left undefended.
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That less than one quarter of the 3,000 men needed for the Quebec expedition volunteered—despite the promise of plunder— added to the difficulty. Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary in late July that two militia majors had told the council “that if so many be press’d for Canada as the Order mentions, the fronteers will draw in.” And the problem extended beyond manpower: when Captain John Alden, acting on the council’s orders, went to Marblehead to confiscate the town’s cannon for the campaign against Quebec, he was opposed “in a tumultuous and riotous manner” by men who claimed that “it was unreasonable, that the Gunes should be tacken away from the Towne since they laye open to their Enemie.”
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On August 9, 1690, the Phips fleet finally sailed for Quebec, where it failed miserably in October. Contrary winds, smallpox raging through the ranks, and poor tactical decisions together crippled the effort; all that Phips accomplished was to ransom some prisoners, including Sylvanus Davis. The remaining ships began to limp back into Boston in mid-November. Long before that, the Albany expedition, commanded by Fitz-John Winthrop, had also collapsed. An anticipated large contingent of Iroquois warriors never materialized; there were insufficient numbers of canoes to transport the men up Lake Champlain; and smallpox and mysterious fevers decimated the troops. Winthrop abandoned the march in mid-August, when his men had gone just 100 miles beyond Albany. Like other New Englanders, Winthrop attributed his failure to “Providence,” whereas Governor Jacob Leisler of New York blamed the commander himself. He ordered Winthrop’s arrest but freed him after Connecticut protested vigorously.
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In contrast to the disappointing news from Canada, that from the northeastern frontier finally improved in the fall of 1690. Hope Hood, one of the Anglo-Americans’ bitterest enemies, was accidentally killed by some of his own allies. Further, an expedition led by Benjamin Church against the Wabanakis’ headquarters captured the wives and families of Kankamagus and the Androscoggin sachem Worombe, in addition to destroying the Indians’ winter food stores.
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In November a returned captive reported that the Wabanakis were “very poor and low,” because they had suffered “considerable” losses, including Hope Hood and other men “of principal Note.” They were, he revealed, “weary of the Warr, and have this several months been meditating how to mediate, and bring about a peace with the English.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, several sachems, including the men whose families had been captured, came to Wells seeking a truce. Since the colonists too were encountering great difficulty sustaining the war effort after their Canadian disasters, they welcomed the opportunity to negotiate. On November 29 Captain John Alden arranged a cease fire (until May 1) and an exchange of captives with Worombe, Kankamagus, Edgeremet, and three other sachems. That the two sides distrusted each other intensely became obvious in a notation on the document: “Signed & sealed Interchangeabley upon the Water in Canoes at Sackatehock when the wind blew hard.”
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