The Dutch in Connecticut, meanwhile, have been trading with the Pequot, but with other Indians, too. How do the Pequot feel about this? They murder a handful of Indians, probably Narragansett, on their way home from trading with the Dutch.
To show the Pequot who’s boss, the Dutch kidnap Tatobem, the principal sachem of the Pequot, and demand a ransom of wampum for his return. After receiving the wampum, the Dutch do send Tatobem back to the Pequot—his dead body.
Start keeping score.
Surprise, surprise, the Pequot retaliate. Which makes a certain amount of eye-for-an-eye sense. Except that in the dumbest of all possible moves, the Pequot take revenge on the Dutch by killing a white boat captain on the Connecticut River who turns out to be an Englishman. They all look alike, right?
On the bright side, the Pequot have murdered Captain John Stone, a pirate of such loose morals he has been banished from Massachusetts Bay. And not for high-minded, theological differences of opinion, either. According to Winthrop’s journal, Stone got the boot in 1633 because he was found “in the drink” and in bed “with one Bancroft’s wife.” Stone was tried before the court and fined one hundred pounds—quite a sum in seventeenth-century Boston—and “ordered upon pain of death to come here no more.”
If a Pequot were going to murder a colonist from Massachusetts, picking one who faced the death sentence if he ever set foot in Massachusetts again would be a lucky one to kill. And at first, that’s true. When he hears about Stone’s death, Winthrop says in his journal that he plans to write the governor of Virginia about a reprisal since “Stone was of that colony.” Stone was no longer “of” Massachusetts, so he’s someone else’s problem. That’s in January of 1634. By November, however, the English demand that the Pequot turn over Stone’s murderers. Winthrop doesn’t explain the gradual change of heart but my guess is that a turf war over Connecticut becomes increasingly inevitable and the English are ready to pick a fight.
The buildup to the Pequot War reminds me of what skateboarders call the frustration that makes them occasionally break their own skateboards in half—“focusing your board.” The Pequot War is just that—a destructive tantrum brought on by an accumulation of aggravation.
In September 1634, the esteemed minister of the church at New Town, Thomas Hooker (the Puritan dissident who sailed on the same boat as John Cotton), petitions the General Court on behalf of his congregation. Hooker informs the court that they want to leave the Boston area and settle in Connecticut. One of their reasons for going, according to Winthrop’s journal, is “the fruitfulness and commodious-ness of Connecticut, and the danger of having it possessed by others, Dutch or English.” (And by English they mean the Plymouth folk.) Of course, Winthrop, who really does believe the things he said in “Christian Charity” about how the colonists should be knit together as members of the same body, is loathe to lose any of the godly. He is especially despondent about Hooker’s possible defection, writing that the minister’s exit would be a great loss as “the removing of a candlestick is a great judgment, which is to be avoided.” The candlestick, in Puritan lingo, is one of Christ’s lights, an important, beloved object of admiration that draws in other worshippers as moths to flame. Winthrop fails to notice that Hooker is in the same position Winthrop himself was in leaving England—being accused of abandoning his countrymen in their time of need. Remember, Winthrop had helped write that pro-emigration tract back in England that claimed “The departing of good people from a country does not cause a judgment, but warns of it.”
The murder of Stone in Connecticut and the threat of losing Hooker’s congregation to Connecticut is happening right around the time that Salem cuts the king’s cross out of the flag, Roger Williams is still in his prebanishment, mouthing-off period, and Bishop Laud demands the Charter be sent back to England. Winthrop is hardly paranoid to worry that the colony is on the verge of falling apart.
The magistrates temporarily talk Hooker and his flock into tabling their move, especially since it “would expose them to evident peril, both from the Dutch . . . and from the Indians.” But within two years, Hooker would lead his people to Connecticut to found Hartford, just in time for the full-blown Pequot War.
In November 1634, the Pequot send two ambassadors to Boston to meet with Winthrop and the other assistants, who tell the pair that Boston’s friendship is conditional upon the Pequot turning over the murderers of Captain Stone. They reply that all but two of the perpetrators have since died of smallpox. (A devastating epidemic has recently wreaked havoc amongst the Pequot, Mohegan, and Narragansett.) Winthrop notes of the Pequot testimony, “This was related with such confidence and gravity, as, having no means to contradict it, we inclined to believe it.”
So far so good. Winthrop also notes that the Pequot were desperate for allies: “ The reason why they desired so much our friendship was because they were now in war with the Narragansett.” As a result, “they could not trade safely anywhere.”
The Pequot representatives agree to a treaty. Per Winthrop, they are to “deliver us the two men who were guilty of Capt. Stone’s death,” as well as “give us four hundred fathom of wampum, and forty beaver, and thirty otter skins.” Oh, and also: “to yield up Connecticut.” If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. But Winthrop says the Pequot request that the English “settle a plantation there.” They want the English there to trade with them, and for protection.
The next morning, Winthrop says, some Narragansett are rumored to be lurking nearby in order to ambush the Pequot ambassadors. The English talk the Narragansett into leaving, promising them that if they make peace with the Pequot, the English will give them a portion of the tribute wampum.
The following year, that being 1635, Winthrop reports that on the same ship Henry Vane sailed in on, his son, John Winthrop, Jr., returns from a trip abroad with a commission in hand from a group of English nobles to “begin a plantation at Connecticut and be governor there.” The settlement and its strategically important fort, where the Connecticut River meets Long Island Sound, will be named Saybrook, in honor of two of the nobles: Viscount Say and Sele, and Lord Brook.
Then, in May of 1636, Winthrop writes that the twenty-four-year-old Henry Vane is elected to be governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and “Mr. Hooker . . . and most of his congregation went to Connecticut.” Though his journal is of course mum, Winthrop must be worried about the state of things—a youngster is running the colony, there’s this Connecticut brain drain to worry about, and he’s still reeling from Roger Williams’s banishment in January.
But it turns out that banishing Roger Williams was the smartest thing the Massachusetts Bay Colony ever did, in terms of cinching its status as
the
New England superpower. And not just because his rebellious opinions were undermining the Bay’s monolithic conformity. As Williams would so bluntly describe his own history with New England Indians, “God was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes (even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem) to gain their tongue.” So he was already proficient in the Algonquian language and well known as a friend to natives by the time the Narragansett took him in. Within a year of Massachusetts kicking him out, Massachusetts was using Williams as its Indian ambassador, negotiator, and spy.
Oddly enough, he was happy to help. “I am not yet turned Indian,” Williams writes Winthrop. But he had turned Indian enough to meddle on Boston’s behalf.
In a letter Williams wrote later (1670), he recalled, “When the next year after my banishment, the Lord drew the bow of the Pequot War against the [English] . . . I had my share of service to the whole land in that Pequot business, inferior to very few that acted.”
Williams goes on to say that after receiving letters from the Boston government requesting that he “use my utmost and speediest endeavors to break and hinder the league labored for by the Pequots against . . . the English,” he set off toward Pequot headquarters in his canoe in a storm. Once he got there, he for several days was forced “to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequot ambassadors, whose hands and arms (me thought) wreaked with the blood of my countrymen murdered and massacred by them on the Connecticut River.” He was so scared of them, “I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also.”
Williams’s geographical location in Providence situated him much closer to the Connecticut River Valley than faraway Boston. That, coupled with his language skills and Indian alliances, made him a crucial participant. In that same 1670 letter, he claims he was so helpful that John Winthrop lobbied to have his banishment rescinded. Williams writes that Winthrop “and some of other council motioned, and it was debated, whether or no I had merited not only to be recalled from banishment, but also to be honored with some remark of favor.” Of course the banishment remained in place. Williams writes cryptically that he was thwarted by one “who never favored the liberty of other men’s consciences.” In other words, he blames John Cotton.
Winthrop’s journal entry for July 20, 1636, remarks that a trader named John Gallop who was on his way to Long Island was forced by a windstorm to put in at Block Island (currently part of the state of Rhode Island). Gallop spotted a boat he recognized as belonging to his fellow Bay Colony resident John Oldham, “a member of the Watertown congregation.” Gallop shouted hello to Oldham “but had no answer.” Plus, the deck of Oldham’s boat was “full of Indians (fourteen in all).” Gallop suspected foul play, as the Indians were “armed with guns, pikes, and swords.” Gallop steered his boat to bash into Oldham’s and scared the Indians. Ten of them jumped into the water and drowned. Gallop and the two boys who were with him came aboard Oldham’s boat, tied up two Indians on deck, but, “being well acquainted with their skill to untie themselves . . . he threw them bound into the sea.”
They found Oldham’s body under an old fishing net, “stark naked, his head cleft to the brains, and his hand and legs cut as if [the Indians] had been cutting them off, and yet warm.”
The Bay Colony had slowly worked themselves up into a rage for retribution over the murder of Captain Stone, a drunken adulterer they themselves would have killed if he was ever daft enough to return to Massachusetts. Oldham, on the other hand, was one of them, a church member, a member of the same body. That Indians had bashed in his brains and attempted to dismember him was in and of itself reason enough to mow down his murderers. That the killing happened after two years of Massachusetts’s jitters about Indian behavior south of its border meant war.
Two natives who understood the colonists’ state of mind, and wisely tripped all over themselves to remain on the Bay Colony’s good side, were Canonicus and Miantonomi, the Narragansett sachems. The following week, Canonicus sent three messengers, two of whom were eyewitnesses to Oldham’s murder, to Boston. They brought a letter from Roger Williams and news that Miantonomi was already “gone with seventeen canoes and two hundred men to take revenge.”
Winthrop says Massachusetts authorities interrogated one of the three Narragansett messengers. He divulged that Oldham’s murderers were Niantic allies of the Narragansett who, unbeknownst to Canonicus and Miantonomi, killed Oldham because he traded with the Pequot.
Winthrop records that Governor Vane wrote to Roger Williams to watch his back “if we should have occasion to make war upon the Narragansett, for Block Island was under them.”
In other words, at this point, war with the Pequot is still not a foregone conclusion. But the Pequot’s chief rivals, the Narragansett, with help from Roger Williams, have acted quickly and shrewdly to win over the Bay Colony to their side.
Boston soon receives word from Miantonomi, that he is on the Niantic case and that he has a hundred fathom of Oldham’s wampum to send to Boston. (By contrast, Boston is still waiting to receive the reparation wampum they had demanded from the Pequot more than a year earlier.) The following week, Boston sends representatives to Miantonomi’s co-sachem, Canonicus, to shore up its alliance with the Narragansett. Winthrop writes with relief that the sachem has “great command over his men, and marvelous wisdom in his answers and the carriage of the whole treaty, clearing himself and his neighbors of the murder, and offering assistance for revenge of it.”
On August 25, 1636, Winthrop records in his journal that Governor Vane, along with the magistrates and ministers meet “about doing justice upon the Indians for the death of Mr. Oldham” and agree to deputize a posse posthaste. They dispatch ninety men divided amongst four captains, including John Underhill, under the general command of Salem’s John Endecott.
Boston is cleaning house. The expedition’s mission is twofold. Winthrop writes, “They had commission to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children . . . and from thence go to the Pequot to demand the murderers of Captain Stone,” along with one thousand fathom of wampum. If they are refused the perpetrators and the booty, the men are to kidnap Pequot children as ransom. Snatching kids away from their mothers as a military plan would be horrifying except for the fact that—spoiler alert—what the English end up doing to the Pequot youngsters is way, way worse than kidnapping.
As if there isn’t enough to worry about, the devil’s sorcerers are plotting against them. Roger Williams sends a disquieting letter, informing Boston that “The Pequots hear of your preparations . . . and comfort themselves in this that a witch amongst them will sink” the English boats “by diving under water and making holes.” Williams adds, “I hope their dreams through the mercy of the Lord shall vanish, and the devil and his lying sorcerers shall be confounded.”
Do keep in mind Williams’s warning of underwater witches as we witness the ugliness ahead. To modern readers, the Pequot War is an unpleasant turf war in which the English battle a specific New England tribe. To the English, they are fighting the devil himself and his earthly representatives.