The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (34 page)

The next afternoon, thirty-four English corpses were buried in a mass grave; six more died over the next two days. Those wounded who survived the march, including Church and Captain William Bradford (who had been injured in the eye), were shipped to Newport on Aquidneck Island for medical treatment.

The battle became known as the Great swamp Fight, and more than 20 percent of the English soldiers had been either killed or wounded—double the casualty rate of the American forces at D-day in World War II. Of all the colonies, Connecticut had suffered the most. Major Treat (who was the last man to leave the fort) reported that four of his five captains had been killed and that eighty of his three hundred soldiers were either dead or wounded. This makes for a casualty rate of almost 30 percent—roughly equivalent to the Confederate losses at Antietam on the bloodiest day of the Civil War. Major Treat insisted that his men return to Connecticut, and despite the outraged objections of Winslow and his staff, who were already debating another strike against the Narragansetts, the Connecticut forces marched for stonington on December 28.

But as Winslow knew all too well, his army was not about to go anywhere. One supply ship had managed to make it to Wickford, but the rest of the vessels were trapped in the ice of Boston Harbor. The awful weather meant that it took five days before Bostonians heard the news of the army's hard-fought victory.

It cannot be denied that the assault was a major defeat for the Narragansetts. somewhere between 350 and 600 Native men, women, and children were either shot or burned to death that day. And yet there were still thousands of Narragansetts left alive. If they could make their way north to Nipmuck country, the number of enemy Indian warriors would be more than doubled. Instead of saving New England, Winslow's army had only increased the danger.

Two young sachems were left to lead what remained of the tribe: Canonchet, who had traveled to Boston that fall to negotiate with Puritan officials, and Quinnapin, who had married the Pocasset sachem Weetamoo. Before he had abandoned the fort, Canonchet had been careful to leave a message for the English. In the final minutes of the battle, as the soldiers moved from wigwam to wigwam with torches in their hands, one of them found the treaty Canonchet had signed in Boston. The Puritans took this as proof that the Narragansetts were fully aware that they broke their treaty with the English, but as Canonchet now knew for sure, it was a piece of parchment that had been worthless from the start.

 

◆◆◆ In the weeks ahead, Church lay in a bed in Newport, sick with fever, as his body fought off the infections from his wounds. The weather outside remained brutally cold—so cold that eleven of the replacement soldiers sent from Boston during the first week of January died of exposure before they reached Winslow's army at Wickford.

However, in the middle of January, the temperature began to rise. A thaw unlike anything seen in New England since the arrival of the Pilgrims melted the snow and ice. It was just what the Narragansetts had been waiting for. The English could no longer track them in the snow and the Indians could now dig for groundnuts. The time had come for the Narragansetts to make a run for it and join Philip and the Nipmucks to the north.

On January 21, Winslow received word that the Indians were “in full flight.” Not until almost a week later, on January 27, did the army—which had grown to fourteen hundred with the return of Major Treat's Connecticut forces—begin its pursuit.

By this time, Benjamin Church had also returned. He was not yet fully recovered, but he agreed to join in what was hoped to be the knockout punch against the Indians. Reports claimed that there were four thousand of them, including eighteen hundred warriors, marching north. If they should reach the wilderness of Nipmuck country, New England was in for a winter and spring of violence and suffering.

About ten miles north of Providence, Winslow's soldiers came upon a pile of sixty horse heads. The Narragansetts were killing and eating anything they could get their hands on. Unfortunately, this left little food for the English, who were almost as poorly provisioned as the Indians. On a few occasions, the soldiers leading the English army were able to catch a glimpse of the rear of the Narragansetts only to watch the Indians disappear into the forest as soon as they came under attack.

Without enough food and with no way to engage the enemy, the morale of the English soldiers got worse with each day, and desertions became widespread. The temperature started to fall once again, and illness swept through the English ranks.

By February 5, what has become known as the Hungry March had reached the town of Marlborough at the eastern fringes of Nipmuck country. Without enough food, Winslow decided that he had no choice but to disband his army. Church returned to his pregnant wife, Alice, and their son, Thomas, who had been staying with family and friends in Duxbury.

The march had been a complete disaster. Back in December, colonial officials had hoped to wipe the Narragansetts off the face of the earth. Instead, they had sent thousands of them running into the arms of the enemy.

FIFTEEN

Keeping the Faith

SICK, DESPERATE, AND
quickly becoming irrelevant to the war he had started, Philip and his small band of warriors headed more than fifty miles west to the Hudson River valley. In late December, they made camp at schaghticoke on the Hoosic River, an eastern branch of the Hudson. It was here in the colony of New York, where some of the original Dutch settlers still actively traded with the Indians and where the Hudson River provided access to the French to the north, that Philip hoped to stage his triumphant return to the war.

That fall, Philip had met with a French official on his way back to Canada after a visit to Boston. The Frenchman had presented the sachem with an ornate brass gun and pledged his country's support in the war against the English. specifically, he had promised Philip three hundred Indian warriors from Canada and all the ammunition he needed.

Philip was, once again, following in his father's footsteps. He, too, was attempting to strengthen his tribe through an alliance with a European power. There was no guarantee that the French would be any more trustworthy than the English in the long run, but at least for now Philip would have the warriors and ammunition he desperately needed. so he and his men, led by his main captain, Annawon, set up winter headquarters at schaghticoke and waited for the French and their Native allies.

By February, Philip's forces had reportedly grown to twenty-one hundred, which included six hundred “French Indians with straws in their noses.” Although this figure was undoubtedly exaggerated, Philip had succeeded in gathering one of the largest forces of Indian warriors in the region.

But there was another Native group to consider. The Mohawks, a powerful subset of the Iroquois, lived near Albany and were the most feared warriors in the Northeast. In addition to being the traditional enemies of the Indians of southern New England, like the Pokanokets and Nipmucks, they had a special hatred of the French and their Indian allies to the north. Yet if Philip could somehow make the Mohawks his allies, he would be in a position to bring the New England colonies to their knees.

Philip was not the only one seeking an alliance with the Mohawks. The governor of New York, Edmund Andros, also hoped to get them on his side. Unlike the Puritan magistrates, who viewed all Indians as potential enemies, Andros saw the Mohawks and the rest of the Iroquois as a powerful independent group that must be dealt with diplomatically rather than through force. Andros and the Iroquois were in the midst of creating what became known as the Covenant Chain, a partnership between the colony and the Iroquois that would stand for generations. It became Andros's mission to persuade the Mohawks that Philip and the tribes to the east were a threat to that alliance. sometime in late February, the Mohawks attacked Philip's forces in schaghticoke. By all accounts, it was a rout. On March 4, Governor Andros witnessed the triumphant return of the Mohawks to Albany. In addition to plenty of prisoners, they proudly showed all the scalps of the Indians they had killed.

Once again, Philip's forces had been decimated and were on the run. This time they headed east, back to the Connecticut River. The future of the war was in others' hands.

◆
The title page and first page of Genesis from John Eliot's Bible, translated into the Wampanoag language for the Praying Indians.

◆◆◆ His name was Job Kattenanit. He was a Praying Indian who had been sent to Deer Island. Before he had been transported to the island, his village had been attacked by the Nipmucks, who'd taken his three children captive. By December, Job, who was a widower, was desperate to find his children, so he and another Praying Indian named James volunteered to become spies for the English. Their mission was to join the Nipmucks at Menameset, the village near Brookfield to which Philip had fled after escaping from Plymouth, and learn anything they could about the Indians' plans for the winter. If Job was lucky, he might also make contact with his three children. It was a dangerous task to be sure, but James and Job could truthfully tell the Nipmucks that they had been so abused by the English that they had no choice but to leave Deer Island.

James was the first to report back to the English on January 24. He said that the Nipmucks had at first threatened to kill him and Job, but a sachem who had fought with James against the Mohawks several years earlier spoke in his defense, and they had been allowed to live. Job had found his children, who were all still alive, and he had decided to remain with them at Menameset for as long as possible. James reported to Daniel Gookin, the superintendent of the Praying Indians, that the Nipmucks had “rejoiced much” when they learned that the Narragansetts had been forced to join their struggle. Now that most of the English towns along the Massachusetts portion of the Connecticut River had been abandoned, the Indians planned to attack the settlements to the east, beginning with Lancaster. James even knew the details of how the Nipmucks planned to do it. First they would destroy the bridge that was the only entrance to the town. Knowing that there was no way for English reinforcements to reach it, the Indians could easily burn the settlement.

Much of what James said was confirmed by other reports, but the Massachusetts authorities chose to ignore his warnings as the untrustworthy testimony of just another Indian. Then, at ten o'clock on the night of February 9, Daniel Gookin was awakened by an urgent pounding on the door of his home in Cambridge.

It was Job. Like James before him, he had traveled with “rackets on his feet” through the snow of the western frontier. He was starving, exhausted, and fearful of what might happen to his children, whom he had been forced to leave with the Nipmucks, but he felt a responsibility to tell Gookin that everything James had reported was true. Four hundred Nipmucks and Narragansetts were about to descend on Lancaster, and there was very little time. The attack was scheduled to begin the next day, February 10, at daybreak.

Gookin leaped out of bed and sent a messenger to Marlborough, where Captain samuel Wadsworth and about forty troops were stationed. The messenger rode all that night, and by morning Wadsworth and his men were riding furiously for Lancaster, about ten miles away. As both James and Job had predicted, the bridge had been set on fire, but Wadsworth and his troops were able to get their horses across it. Up ahead the English soldiers could see smoke rising into the sky and hear the shouts of the Indians and the firing of muskets. The attack had already begun.

 

◆◆◆ Mary Rowlandson was thirty-eight years old and the mother of three children—Joseph, eleven; Mary, ten; and sarah, six. In a few years' time she would be the author of
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God,
an account of her capture by the Indians that became one of America's first bestsellers. But on February 10, 1676, she was simply the wife of Lancaster's minister, John Rowlandson, who was away in Boston begging the Puritan authorities to provide his town with some protection.