Mayflower (28 page)

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of June 1675, the Pokanokets’ war dance had entered its third week. There were hundreds of warriors, their faces painted, their hair “trimmed up in comb fashion,” according to a witness, “with their powder horns and shot bags at their backs,” and with muskets in their hands. They danced to the beat of drums, the sweat pouring from their already greased bodies, and with each day, the call for action grew fiercer. Philip knew he could not hold them back much longer.

The powwows had predicted that if the Indians were to be successful in a war, the English must draw the first blood. Philip promised his warriors that come Sunday, June 20, when the English would all be away from their homes at meeting, they could begin pillaging houses and killing livestock, thus beginning a ritualistic game of cat and mouse that would gradually goad the English into war.

On Mount Hope Neck, just a few miles north of Philip’s village, was a cluster of eighteen English houses at a place known as Kickemuit. As June 20 approached and the belligerence of the nearby Indian warriors increased, several residents of this most remote portion of Swansea decided it was time to abandon their homes and seek shelter elsewhere. To the north, on the other side of a bridge across the Palmer River, was the home of the minister John Miles. Dispossessed residents began to flock to this large structure, which after being reinforced against possible Indian attack became known as the Miles garrison. A few miles to the east in Mattapoisett, there was also the Bourne garrison, a large stone structure that soon contained sixteen men and fifty-four women and children.

The Miles garrison in the early twentieth century

On the morning of Sunday, June 20, seven or eight Indians approached an inhabitant of Kickemuit who had not yet abandoned his home. The Indians asked if they could use his grinding stone to sharpen one of their hatchets. The man told them that since it was the Sabbath, “his God would be very angry if he should let them do it.” Soon after, the Indians came across an Englishman walking up the road. They stopped him and said “he should not work on his God’s Day, and that he should tell no lies.” Unnerved and intimidated, the last residents of Kickemuit left for the shelter of the garrisons. By day’s end, two houses had been burned to the ground.

Governor Winslow received word of the vandalism that night, and by the morning of Monday, June 21, he had ordered towns across the colony to muster their militia for a rendezvous at Taunton, where they would be dispatched to Swansea. He also sent a message to officials in Boston, requesting their colony’s assistance. There was no reason to assume that Massachusetts-Bay would rush to Plymouth’s defense. As the flare-up with Philip in 1671 had shown, there were many in that colony who were critical of Plymouth’s treatment of the Pokanokets. And for those with long memories, Plymouth had been so slow to come to the Bay Colony’s aid during the Pequot War that the Plymouth militia had missed the fighting. In the end, however, Massachusetts-Bay decided that it was in its own best interests to support Plymouth. Not only was the uprising a possible threat to its inhabitants, but the conflict might make available large portions of choice Indian land.

In the middle of all this, Governor Winslow decided he needed to put his colony’s religious house in order. The latest troubles with the Indians were a sign that God was unhappy with Plymouth. It was time, therefore, that “we humble ourselves before the Lord for all those sins whereby we have provoked our good God sadly to interrupt our peace and comfort.” Winslow proclaimed that Thursday, June 24, be designated a day of fasting and humiliation.

Plymouth Colony was rife with sin, but apparently none of those sins involved the treatment of the Indians. Winslow later insisted that “we stand as innocent as it is possible for any person or people towards their neighbor.” Even the trial for Sassamon’s murder was, in Winslow’s view, an exampleof English justice and magnanimity. In a letter to the governor of Connecticut, he claimed that Tobias and the other condemned men had “give[n] us thanks for our fair trial of them.”

The result of this stubborn insistence on rectitude was to dehumanize the Indians so that they seemed the wanton and senseless instruments of God’s will. This meant that there was nothing to be achieved through diplomacy; if the English were to make any progress in their difficulties with the Indians, they must do it through prayer and the sword.

Solid maple war club, inlaid with white and purple wampum, reputed to have been King Philip’s

By Monday night, companies of militiamen had begun to arrive at Taunton. The elderly James Cudworth of Scituate was designated the army’s commander with Major William Bradford, the fifty-five-yearold son of the former governor, as his immediate subordinate.

Since they’d just arrived on the scene, Cudworth and Bradford were as ignorant as everyone else as to the movements of the Pokanokets. There was one man, however, who had firsthand knowledge of the territory to the south and the Indians surrounding Mount Hope Bay. Just the year before, Benjamin Church, a thirty-three-year-old carpenter, had become the first Englishman to settle in the southeastern tip of Narragansett Bay at a place called Sakonnet, home to the female sachem Awashonks and several hundred of her people.

Instead of being intimidated by the fact that he was the only Englishman in Sakonnet (known today as Little Compton, Rhode Island), Church relished the chance to start from scratch. “My head and hands were full about settling a new plantation,” he later remembered, “where nothing was brought to: no preparation of dwelling house, or outhousing or fencing made. Horses and cattle were to be provided, ground to be cleared and broken up; and the uttermost caution to be used, to keep myself free from offending my Indian neighbors all round me.” Church was a throwback to his maternal grandfather,
Mayflower
passenger Richard Warren. By moving to Sakonnet, he was leaving his past behind and beginning anew in Indian country.

But as became increasingly clear in the traumatic months ahead, Church had moved well beyond his Pilgrim forebears. The early days of Plymouth Colony had been devoted to establishing a community of fellow worshippers. Within the shelter of their wooden wall, the Pilgrims had done their best to separate themselves from both the wilderness and the ungodly. Church, on the other hand, was quite content to be living among the heathen—both red and white. In addition to Awashonks and the Sakonnets, with whom he developed “a good acquaintance…and was in a little time in great esteem among them,” there were the residents of Aquidneck Island, just across the Sakonnet River to the west. Mostly Baptists and Quakers, these were not the sorts with whom a proper Puritan socialized. Church, on the other hand, “found the gentlemen of the island very civil and obliging.” While his wife, Alice, and their two-year-old son, Thomas, stayed with relatives in Duxbury, he labored to prepare a new home for them.

An engraving of Benjamin Church that appeared in a nineteenth-century edition of his narrative

Church had taken up where the former “Lord of Misrule,” Thomas Morton of Merrymount, had left off fifty years before. But where Morton had been an outsider from the start, Church was as closely connected by blood and by marriage (his wife was the daughter of Constant Southworth, William Bradford’s stepson) to the aristocracy of Plymouth Colony as it was possible to be.

He was also ambitious. Possessed “of uncommon activity and industry,” he had already constructed two buildings by the spring of 1675 when he heard a disturbing rumor. Philip, sachem of Mount Hope—just five miles to the north—was “plotting a bloody design.”

From the start, Church had known that his future at Sakonnet depended on a strong relationship with sachem Awashonks, and over the course of the last year the two had become good friends. In early June, she sent him an urgent message. Philip was about to go to war, and he demanded that the Sakonnets join him. Before she made her decision, Awashonks wanted to speak with Church.

Church quickly discovered that six of Philip’s warriors had come to Sakonnet. Awashonks explained that they had threatened to incite the wrath of the Plymouth authorities against her by attacking the English houses and livestock on her side of the river. She would then have no alternative but to join Philip. Church turned to the Pokanokets and accused them of being “bloody wretches [who] thirsted after the blood of their English neighbors, who had never injured them.” For his part, he hoped for peace, but if war should erupt, he vowed to be “a sharp thorn in their sides.” He recommended that Awashonks look to the colony for protection from the Pokanokets. He promised to leave immediately for Plymouth and return as soon as possible with instructions from the governor.

Just to the north of the Sakonnets in modern Tiverton, Rhode Island, were the Pocassets, led by another female sachem, Weetamoo. Even though she was Philip’s sister-in-law, the relationship did not necessarily guarantee that she was inclined to join forces with him. Church decided to stop at Pocasset on his way to Winslow’s home in Duxbury.

He found her, alone and despondent, on a hill overlooking Mount Hope Bay. She had just returned by canoe from Philip’s village. War, Weetamoo feared, was inevitable. Her own warriors “were all gone, against her will, to the dances” at Mount Hope. Church advised her to go immediately to Aquidneck Island, just a short canoe ride away, for her safety. As he had told Awashonks, he promised to return in just a few days with word from Governor Winslow.