The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (37 page)

Connecticut officials made sure that all three tribes 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 who had briefly united several groups of Native peoples into a powerful army. In the days and weeks ahead, dissension began to threaten the Indians as the English finally realized that using the Praying Indians was the best way to break apart the Nipmuck-Narragansett-Pokanoket alliance.

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Reputed to be Ninigret II, son of the Niantic sachem who sided with the English during King Philip's War.

◆◆◆ By late March, a large number of Indians had gathered at Wachusett Mountain to the north of modern Worcester. The steep and rocky terrain protected them 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 starting peace negotiations, the letter mentioned the release of English prisoners.

On April 12, Doublet returned to Boston with the Indians' response. They were not ready 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, Mary Rowlandson was the Indians' most important captive, and she quickly became the focus of the negotiations.

In mid-April, Rowlandson, who was near the Connecticut River with Weetamoo, learned that she was wanted at Wachusett, where Philip and her master, Quinnapin, were already meeting with the Nipmucks. Before receiving this news, she had reached a new low. Her son was deathly ill, and she had heard nothing about her daughter. Without Quinnapin to help her, 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 returned to the English, she felt a sudden burst 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, the Indians urgently needed a major victory. They were winning the war, but they were very low on food. Even if they succeeded in growing a significant amount of corn, they couldn't harvest the crop until late summer. By June, the groundnuts would be gone. They needed to make peace with the English 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 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 cheered. 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 attack sudbury.

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An early-twentieth-century view of Wachusett Mountain.

It was a great Native victory. Two different companies of English militia were successfully ambushed. The Indians killed as many as seventy-four men and suffered minimal losses. And yet, the sudbury Fight failed to be the complete 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 caused terrible damage to the English, there were still plenty of soldiers left to fight another day, and for the Indians the days were running out.

The negotiations with the English became more urgent. The sachems ordered Rowlandson to appear at 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, about $4,000 today. In the letter accompanying their ransom request, the sachems, led by the Nipmuck chief known as sagamore sam, tried to make amends: “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. It soon came out 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 ritual dances to help them make 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 wore the clothes 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.”

The next morning, the sachems held another meeting. 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 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.”

 

◆◆◆ With the success of Tom Doublet and Peter Conway in negotiating the release of Mary Rowlandson, and with more 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 as prisoners on Deer Island. In the middle of May, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that the Praying Indians be removed. “This deliverance ... ,” Daniel Gookin wrote, “was a jubilee to those poor creatures.”

On May 18, Captain William Turner with 150 soldiers 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 forty 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 had to make peace with the English.

Meanwhile, 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 way, 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 Church's family were all anxious for any word about their loved ones and friends. On May 12, his wife, 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 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 again. But as he whittled the stick, his hand slipped, and he badly cut 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.

SIXTEEN

ON TUESDAY, JUNE 6, Benjamin Church attended a meeting of the General Court in 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 period of time, English attitudes toward the Praying Indians had changed just as the main fighting had shifted back to Plymouth Colony. Church sensed that his timing was just right.

As it so happened, the Council of War had decided to do almost exactly what Church suggested 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 wanted to find an army of his own.