The revolt of the Indians was so dramatic that they drove the English towards the sea. Over half of the ninety New England towns were attacked. Seventeen were razed to the ground, their fine frame buildings, barns and fences reduced to heaps of ashes. Another twenty-five towns were badly wrecked.
By April 1676, ten months after the war began, it was not safe for the English to live beyond a certain point in the American wilderness. A third of all frontier towns in Massachusetts were abandoned. The colony begun by the Mayflower settlers was in danger of vanishing, as if the previous fifty years had never been.
When the Indian attacks had begun in late June 1675, no one could have predicted they would develop into what one historian has called ‘the bloodiest war in American history in terms of its proportionate effect on a region’. It was assumed that the fighting would soon be over, and limited to Plymouth Colony, never that it could lead to the tribes of southern New England rising together against the English, the stuff of colonists’ nightmares. The New England clergyman Increase Mather has left us a contemporary account of the war. He described how ‘this fire which in June was but a little spark, in three months time is become a great flame, that from East to West the whole Country is involved in great trouble’.
* * *
On 22 June 1675, hoping to keep the mass of Indians away from the lure of Philip’s warlike preparations, the governments of Rhode Island and Massachusetts went into action. But when the three captains entrusted with negotiating with Philip found mutilated English corpses on the way to Swansea, the peace mission was aborted. On 26 June Massachusetts soldiers were sent to Mount Hope.
The expedition started inauspiciously with an eclipse of the moon. The troops halted in total darkness, until the moon began to shine again and lit up the trail. To some, a black spot in the middle of the moon resembled an Indian scalp. To others, it looked like an Indian bow drawn against the English.
After a brisk rendezvous with the Plymouth troops at the minister’s house at Swansea, which was within a quarter of a mile of Mount Hope, some Massachusetts troopers were so keen to get to the Indians that they impetuously ran over the bridge. It was a foolish action. Indians lurking in undergrowth attacked and Philip and his men seized the opportunity, leapt into canoes and escaped from Mount Hope across Narragansett Bay to the country of the Pocassets.
Once the massed ranks of English soldiers were ready to march across the Mount Hope bridge in formation, they found no Indians left. There was just a torn-up Bible, a very frequent occurrence in the war showing how much the Indians hated this symbol of English power.
A couple of miles on they came upon the hideous sight of heads, scalps and hands cut off the corpses of English people. These body parts had been stuck on poles. The commander insisted on cutting them down.*
Eventually the search was called off. The peninsula was empty. The soldiers came upon Philip’s large wigwam which was deserted. Retreating back over the bridge to Swansea they were encircled by thirty or forty Indian dogs. So swift had Philip’s flight been, the dogs had lost their masters.
Philip’s dramatic escape had been masterminded by Weetamoo, who had finally shown her hand. Abandoning all pretence of supporting the English, she now threw her weight behind Philip. It was she who sent the canoes in which Philip fled, and it was she who enabled him to go to ground in her territories opposite Mount Hope. She sheltered him for a month. A crucial number of the warriors defending Philip in his hideaway turned out to be from Weetamoo’s own tribe, the Pocassets. At last, Weetamoo was taking revenge against the settlers for what she regarded as the murder of her husband.
The colonists were hampered by lack of ammunition and food. They knew that Philip was holed up in the Pocasset Swamp on Weetamoo’s land and they tried to make a firm treaty with the Narragansetts, to prevent him escaping to Narragansett territories nearby. Soldiers who were all novices in war imagined that the unknown woods were full of hundreds of Indian warriors.
If failing to contain Philip on Mount Hope had been a great mistake, the Plymouth troops’ inability to capture him in the Pocasset Swamp was catastrophic. The colonists should have had men at the swamp’s northern end to catch him as he came out. But the Plymouth men were not professional soldiers. Ever since the New England Confederation was formed in the 1640s, militias had become more systematised, and each town had a trained band with two or three officers who drilled them in the use of weapons, but this took place just four or five times a year. Most of these officers did not have a grasp of military strategy.
Philip’s warriors made deliberate diversionary attacks on the towns of Middleborough and Dartmouth, and on the night of 29 July, a hundred English troops were forced to go to the assistance of Dartmouth. Only twenty-five men were left guarding the swamp. Philip seized the opportunity to escape. He and his braves made their way north-west over the Taunton River on rafts and were now free in the Nipmuck country. The Nipmucks had given assurances of neutrality, but the promises were meaningless. They joined Philip, launching small-scale but alarming attacks on the Massachusetts towns of Mendon, Brookfield and Lancaster. And from then on the war spread across the whole of New England. Philip’s breakout from the swamp was the beginning of a tremendous journey through New England rallying the tribes, largely on foot or by canoe. Philip was not to be seen in his home territories again for another year.
In the past the pragmatic Canonicus and Passaconaway had urged peace and accommodation; they recognised that in the long term the Indians could not defeat the English. But Miantonomo had warned it must be war if the Indians wanted to preserve their autonomous civilisation. The charismatic Philip had been preparing the ground with the war dances and conferences he had at Mount Hope over the past few years. Now his message of insurrection was out in the open. It spread amongst mutinous tribes like a hissing charge of dynamite. The nightmare had come to pass. Philip had united the tribes against the English.
* * *
Two weeks after the war began Josiah made his will. He had serious fears Careswell would be Philip’s next port of call. He wrote to Governor Leverett at the end of July that he had heard ‘my person … has been much threatened’. The Winslows had to decide what to do with Penelope and their two children. Elizabeth was eleven but Isaac was only four. The murder of Rachel Mann, ‘a serious, modest, well-disposed woman’, and the baby she was breastfeeding when Rehoboth was attacked was particularly horrifying. It seemed sensible to send the whole household north to Salem, outside the war zone, to the Curwens, who could look after them in their large house. Nowhere in Plymouth Colony felt safe.
At least Josiah did not have to worry about his mother. At some point before that summer, Susanna had died. In the autumn of 1673 her old friend Mistress Elizabeth Warren also passed away. They had known each other since Leiden, over half a century before. The Plymouth Colony records relate that Mistress Warren was ‘honourably buried’. Having lived a godly life, she ‘came to her grave as a shock of corn fully ripe’.
Meanwhile Susanna’s grandchildren and daughter-in-law were clambering into canoes to go across the Marshfield creek to reach the sea. From the coast they could get a ketch to the safety of Boston. The household included a young female cousin, Elizabeth Gray. The Winslows seem to have brought her up perhaps as a companion for their daughter. Josiah’s nephew William White was also living at Careswell to get an agricultural education, as was the custom, helping Josiah farm his considerable acreage. He was probably asked to protect the family on their journey north; he could return later to fight.
It was a frantic departure, but their journey was relatively well managed in comparison to the chaos as the war continued, when carts of desperate people evacuated burning towns all over New England. The practical Penelope managed to hand over a copy of Josiah’s will to her brother-in-law.
Josiah would now be ‘less encumbered’. He had twenty men with him at Careswell. He had resolved to stand and fight for as long as he could – ‘as long as a man will stand by me’, in a garrison where all were taking watches night and day. Josiah had built protective extensions onto the house. At an angle to the fence round the property there was a well and beyond it a pond and a cedar tree. Legend has it that from a window of the house one of the garrison spotted an Indian sniper hiding in the tree and shot him. The pond became known as Long Tom Pond. Some say there was a tunnel from the house which came up outside the stockade onto the marsh.
The countryside was so dangerous that Josiah could not return to Plymouth town. As governor he had to conduct the war temporarily from Careswell. Fortunately he had been Plymouth’s military leader for almost twenty years. He was increasingly gloomy. It had become clear that the war was going to need to be a joint enterprise involving the United Colonies. Josiah asked that Boston organise support for a defensive war, because it was not safe to send a messenger cross-country to Connecticut. He told Captain Cudworth, commander of Plymouth Colony’s small army, that the ablest men, with the Massachusetts soldiers ‘and our Indian allies’, should be made into ‘as many small parties as you shall judge convenient and so to range down this way or where your best intelligence may guide you to speak with the enemy’. The rest should go home to protect their towns and families.
Though Josiah spoke of ‘Indian allies’, he believed most of the Indians in the Plymouth Colony would eventually join Philip. Even Indians who were their friends would be too frightened of Philip to oppose him. The arrival of an Indian named Vickus and his son and a party of men offering to help put him into a dilemma: ‘I am not well assured of their fidelity, yet in as much as they are come down to tender their service, we are not willing to put such a discouragement upon them to refuse them least it should cause them to take part with the Enemy.’
The Narragansetts swore they would not join Philip. Yet while Philip was still on Mount Hope locals had seen their canoes passing across Narragansett Bay with emissaries to Philip. A hundred Narragansett warriors had marched to Warwick, but they retreated. As usual Uncas stirred the pot in Boston: he lost no opportunity to tell the government that the Narragansetts were treacherous. But in this case he had some reason. After Philip escaped from the Pocasset Swamp, English colonists saw Weetamoo and her Pocassets heading down to the Narragansett main camp thirty miles to the south-west.
By August the impenetrable Narragansett country was hiding Weetamoo and several hundred Pocasset warriors. As always in such moments of crisis Massachusetts called in Roger Williams as interpreter and ambassador. But his influence was no longer what it had been. Miantonomo’s son Canonchet had grown up in the shadow of his father’s death. Canonchet was as stoical and fierce as Philip. The history of being menaced by the English meant he had abjured the desire for peace the Narragansetts had once been known for.
Ninigret held himself aloof. He had intimidated the English colonies for twenty years with his war threats. But his actions at this time reveal that he had been a clever diplomat, exploiting whatever powers he could against the English to attempt to keep hold of Narragansett territory. Ninigret had no intention of going to war. He began to distance himself from the Narragansett leadership, and offered to broker a peace, suggesting he went with an English envoy to the Mohawks to stop them joining in on Philip’s side. When this offer was not taken up, Ninigret removed his people from their home territories. For the rest of the war they largely secluded themselves in unknown country. The Pennacook tribe similarly believed that no good could come from joining either side. They too vanished.
* * *
The war coincided with a widespread belief that God was not pleased with New Englanders, who would have to pay for deserting their promises by becoming so worldly. For some time there had been great anxiety amongst New England clergy about their covenant with God. Increase Mather’s sermon of February 1674 had warned ‘The Day of Trouble is near’ when a sinning people would be punished. He had not known when. It was clearly now. The warnings about what would happen to a backsliding people were about to be verified. In his account of the war he observed that ‘great and public Calamities seldom come upon any place without Prodigious Warnings to forerun and signify what is to be expected’. There had been various portents: the noise of a ‘great piece of Ordnance’ at Hadley and other towns; in Malden people talked of the sound of drums passing.
From August 1675 onwards, when it became clear how many Indians were responding to Philip’s call, the mood of the English colonists became more desperate. God’s will was urgently sought. What did it mean? Reverend Thomas Walley on Cape Cod struggled to interpret the divine significance of the war. A Quaker had told him it was punishment for persecuting them. But some thought it was because the colony allowed them ‘public exercise of their false worship’. Like so many, Josiah interpreted it as God using the Indians to punish the colonists, to ‘scourge and chasten us’, as he told John Winthrop junior soon after the war began. The terrible destruction was for the population’s own good. Throughout New England the churches advised people to beg God for forgiveness, through days of humiliation and fasting.
The thought that the Indians were a merciful God’s way of restoring his chosen people to righteousness was – ironically – a comforting one. Issues to do with the treatment of the Indians were conveniently ignored. To more thoughtful settlers another truth was that the catastrophe was caused not by sinfulness but by neglect of the Indian point of view, by the loss of Indian lands, livelihoods and autonomy. But these were not thoughts Josiah entertained. All he would admit in the future was that when it came to Indians there had been a need to ‘improve that great blessing of peace better than we have done’.
* * *
By no means all the Indians in Plymouth joined Philip. They began to give themselves up in quite large numbers, particularly the squaws whose husbands had vanished to fight. Slavery without trial was Josiah’s preferred way of dealing with them. Around 200 Indians who surrendered were taken straight to Plymouth harbour, and sold in the West Indies.
It was an uncontroversial fact of English seventeenth-century life that rebels could be treated harshly. In 1685, 800 soldiers from Monmouth’s rebellion in England were sentenced to be slaves in the West Indies. It was expensive to support captured Indians and dangerous to allow them to remain in New England, since men could not be taken away from the fighting to guard them. Nevertheless a good number of Plymouth colonists objected. Captain Eels of the Dartmouth garrison and Benjamin Church had got local Indians to surrender on friendly terms after the attack on Dartmouth. They pleaded for the Indians to be treated fairly. But the Indians were sold nonetheless. This was ‘an action so hateful to Mr Church, that he opposed it, to the loss of the good will and respects of some that before were his good friends’. To agree to peace terms and then ignore them was dishonest and treacherous and not gentlemanly.
There was unease too about the slavery of innocent Indians without any attempt at a trial. The Old Testament might support slavery, but Reverend Thomas Walley complained about the ‘rash cruelty of our English towards Innocent Indians’. In Massachusetts John Eliot petitioned the government, to remind them that the proclaimed purpose of their charter was to convert the Indians to the Gospel, not to ‘extirpate them’. Not only would selling the Indians into slavery prolong the war, it also consigned their souls to eternal perdition. He begged for an orderly discussion to ‘weigh the reason and religion that laboureth in this great case of Conscience’. He told the government that the English were behaving like the Spanish, the greatest insult in an English colonist’s vocabulary. They were destroying men and depopulating the land. He reminded them the country was large enough for all to have land, Indians and English.
Daniel Gookin was one of the officials in charge of administrating the Praying Towns. He believed the Praying Towns, which were spaced at intervals along the western frontier, could have been a ‘living wall’ to guard the greater part of Massachusetts. With their superior ranging skills the friendly Praying Indians could have roamed the woods and protected the English to whom they had benevolent feelings. Instead, wrote Gookin in his eight-volume history of the New England tribes, ‘those counsels were rejected, and on the contrary a spirit of enmity and hatred conceived by many against those poor Christian Indians’. And in return Praying Indians turned against their English friends and joined Philip.
For their own safety it was decided that the inhabitants of the Praying Towns should be interned on Deer Island in the middle of Boston harbour. In the spring of 1676 some Bostonians bayed for the Praying Indians to be killed or enslaved and sent out of the country. But more moderate voices, as Gookin reported, reminded them ‘their ancestors had a covenant with the English about thirty years since, wherein mutual protection and subjection was agreed’. A search in the records ordered by the General Court produced the treaty. The furore temporarily died down as it was agreed – reluctantly by some – that Massachusetts was bound by its terms.
In fact nature did their dirty work for them. By the end of the war only 167 Praying Indians were still alive. There was nowhere for them to hunt and they slowly faded away, dying from malnutrition and exposure, living on what they could scavenge off the shore.
Benjamin Church believed that had the promises to the Indians been kept, and had they been treated fairly, it would have gone a good way to shortening the war. Most if not all the Indians in those parts would have surrendered.
As the war continued, such was Walley’s concern he asked the prominent and influential Plymouth pastor John Cotton junior to have a word with Josiah. He too feared that the severity shown to numbers of ‘poor squaws’ sent to the West Indies was a massive provocation. ‘What the effect will be God only knows. I could wish our honoured Governor would send for them back and return them to their friends.’ There was ‘much discontent about it; some fear we have paid dear for former acts of severity and how dear we may yet pay God knows’. If Cotton could do anything to change Josiah’s mind he would be doing a good service: ‘it will not be thought unreasonable that they should be returned again’.
But Josiah’s never very warm feelings had hardened. In Josiah’s extenuation, as governor from late June 1675 onwards he was not only having to direct a war, he was also having to deal with the effects of the Indian raids on the colony’s towns. As the Indians became bolder and burned more houses all over Plymouth Colony he had the perpetual administrative headache of helping homeless widows and their children who came stumbling into Plymouth town from their ruined farms. The injured had to be looked after at public expense. Josiah was arranging to put up and feed hundreds of tired, terrified inhabitants. When it was a matter of practical survival there was little time to think about ethics. Running the war was a hideous and depressing strain. The ghastly tales of what was going on may have warped his judgement. Indians practised fiendish tortures: they dismembered the bodies of the English once they had stripped them naked and often flayed the skin off them, as well as scalping them.
The horrors of the war strengthened his view that there was no room for mercy to the Indians. They were the enemy, ‘known many of them’ to be of those that have burned this and that town, ‘and killed many of the inhabitants’. He needed God’s help ‘to distinguish aright between the innocent and the guilty, if they are distinguishable’. This was total war where nothing was sacred for either side. His reactions, though not admirable, were executive. Josiah’s swift actions and rapid orders saved lives, in the short term.
But he was also not in good health. Perhaps he should not have continued as governor. Throughout that autumn and winter his friends and those he governed worried about his ‘frail body’ and refer to weakness, though it is not clear what this consisted of.
Despite having smaller numbers than the English, the Indians had considerable advantages. Widely acknowledged to be more accurate shots than the English, they had good hearing and almost supernaturally good eyes due to their expertise at hunting. Indian forest craft was legendary. In a land where forest dominated the theatre of war the Indians knew the terrain better than any English. Increase Mather wrote: ‘They have advantages that we have not, knowing where to find us, but we know not where to find them … every Swamp is a Castle to them, and they can live comfortably on that which would starve Englishmen.’ As the English had learnt during the Pequot War, Indians were exponents of what was later called guerrilla warfare.
Guerrilla warfare was developed in America by what are now called Rangers following Indian example. John Eliot called it ‘the skulking way of war’. It took some time for English settlers to abandon their prejudices against the despised – because uncivilised – Indian battle tactics, to realise that they had to adapt their manoeuvres to the forest warriors if they wanted to defeat them. King Philip’s War was not a European war of soldiers in uniform tramping in tight formation across plains. War games and stalking the enemy were part of the Indians’ culture and tradition. They were invisible, specialising in ambushes and deadly raids on towns by night. The Indians had largely discarded their bows and arrows in favour of flintlocks. These portable guns were much better for quick reloading than the heavy old muskets and matchlocks the Pilgrims had brought with them to America. By 1675 the tomahawk was only used at close quarters. Contemporary accounts show the Indians believed that English soldiers were slow and unfit. Plymouth’s troops were farmers on horseback who knew how to shoot but had little interest in manoeuvres or supply chains. But the Indians had been thinking about tactics for centuries.
Even the commander of the colony’s armed forces, James Cudworth, had little time for military action. In the past he had been unwilling to go on a mission against the Dutch because he was overwhelmed by domestic chores and his hay was still in the ground. His wife had always been unwell and was getting worse with age. He had very little help with his farm other than an Indian boy. He burst out to Josiah that he was as ready to serve his king and his country as any man ‘in what I am capable and fitted for’. But he did not see why a man had to serve his country if it resulted in ‘the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family’. In 1675 ruin and destruction of farms and family were threatening to happen anyway.
* * *
When Penelope fled Marshfield, Salem was far from the fighting. But a couple of weeks after the Nipmucks started burning towns in Massachusetts the country between her and Josiah was no longer safe. A group of experienced Massachusetts military men – including Captain Edward Hutchinson, the son of Anne Hutchinson, and Ephraim Curtis, who was well known for his friendships with the Indians – attempted to broker a peace deal. As they travelled towards Brookfield north-west of Boston they noticed that all the Nipmuck villages were deserted. That should have warned them. They were ambushed in a narrow ravine and had to retreat to one of the garrison houses at Brookfield, by this time crowded with much of the town’s population. Curtis and his friend Henry Young tried to escape to raise the alarm, but were forced back.
Captain Hutchinson died a lingering death of his wounds. One unwary colonist who ventured out of the garrison had his head cut off and used as a football. Eventually under cover of night Curtis somehow got to Marlborough – thirty miles away – to raise the alarm. He returned with forces to lift the siege of Brookfield. The trembling people in the garrison house had fought off an Indian attack of flaming arrows and barrels set on fire pressed up against the walls. They had been saved by a providential rainstorm. But Brookfield had to be evacuated and abandoned. This was only August. There was much worse to come.
On 1 September Deerfield in remote western Massachusetts was attacked unexpectedly. This was the furthest outpost of the English frontier. It was clear that the war could not be stopped, and the conflict spread north-east to Maine. The Abenakis, who had once been the trading partners of the Pilgrims, began to attack individual farms, perhaps in revenge for cruel behaviour by rough traders.
Along the Kennebec, over fifty settlers were killed and their houses burnt. In north-east Maine colonists led isolated lives. In search of land and prosperity, newcomers had fanned out. Their farms, whose green acres were so vast and exciting, proved dangerously vulnerable to attack by marauding Indians who felt they had suffered too long at the hands of foreign usurpers. Roger Williams had told Canonchet dismissively that Indian warfare was just ‘commotion’, and that they had not won any battles or seized any forts. But that was an Anglocentric notion of warfare. The Indians had indeed won no battles but their tactics were working. Settlers were deserting their land in droves. The geographical distances were so vast it was hard to get troops to the attacks in time. Atrocity followed atrocity. The Indians attacked the carts of settlers, with women and children fleeing their homes. The bands of roaming Indians bent on destruction were often 500 strong. The average New England town was no match for such swift raids.
Being a settler had always required courage in the great empty spaces. Now that courage was undermined. Men and women who had seen their friends scalped, and their brains spilling out, and no mercy shown even to babes in arms were terrified and lost their spirit. They began to fear they could never defeat the Indians and that the hand of God was truly against them.
In late September the towns of the upper Connecticut Valley gave a deadline to the river Indians to hand in their arms. A week later, on 4 October, Springfield, once the valley’s most powerful and successful settlement, was wiped out. Springfield had been pioneered by the Pynchon family. They had built up a business empire which stretched to Antigua in the West Indies, where they had interests in sugar and rum. The Indians burnt their warehouses and 300 homes.
* * *
Since the summer the Narragansetts had been sheltering Philip’s chief ally Weetamoo in the middle of a secret and impassable swamp. Most colonists believed that the Narragansetts were helping Philip to his dramatic and alarming successes in western Massachusetts. Without them his army could not have had such huge numbers. Dying or wounded Narragansetts were found amongst Philip’s warriors.
According to the traders living on the edge of Narragansett country, the Pocassets were treated like kin. In point of fact they were now kin. Shortly after her arrival, having put aside her pro-English husband Peter Nunuit, Weetamoo quickly married Quinnapin, one of the Narragansett princes. Because the tie of family was sacred amongst the Indians, the Pocassets could not be yielded up, even if the Narragansetts were bound to do so by treaty. The English did not know this. But they were deeply suspicious.
Roger Williams retained his tight connection to the Indians. After suggesting in his usually eccentric way that an informal straw poll of all of New England was needed to see what God had in mind, he did good practical work with the Narragansetts. Using the moment when he was ferrying Canonchet in his large canoe, Williams delivered blunt advice to the new young chief. He told Canonchet that Philip was ‘Cawkakinnamuk’ – that is, his own looking glass: he was deaf to all advice. Moreover Philip was ‘Cooshkouwawi’ – that is, he caught ‘at every part of the country to save himself’ – but he was done for.
Williams reported Canonchet ‘answered me in a consenting, considering way’. He warned the young chief that if the Narragansetts were false to their treaty, the English ‘would pursue them with a Winter’s War, when they should not as mosquitoes and rattle snakes in warm weather bite us’.
But even Roger Williams was losing his influence. He did not know that Canonchet had secretly decided to join Philip.
* * *
By 9 December the largest army New England had ever seen, over 1,000 troops from all the New England colonies except Rhode Island, was preparing to attack the Narragansetts on their own territory. It was a bold move.
The United Colonies leaders have been criticised by historians for attacking the neutral Narragansetts in a pre-emptive strike. But Narragansett neutrality was a ruse. They had failed to surrender Weetamoo and her warriors, and many of their young braves were helping Philip’s troops. The United Colonies commissioners meeting at Boston that November had come to the grim conclusion that they must destroy the Narragansetts before the Narragansetts rose up and destroyed them.
Although it was a matter of some discussion who should take charge of the United Colonies forces, Josiah’s long-standing military expertise, and his conduct of the war in Plymouth, meant that for many he was the natural choice. The clergyman William Hubbard, who was present at many episodes in the war, thought Josiah ‘a pattern to the succeeding race, that may come after’, full of courage, resolution and prudence. Josiah could have commanded ‘a far greater army than ever is like to be gathered together in this part of the world’, a wonderful example, as the first governor of a New England colony to be born there.
Even if there were reservations about Josiah’s harshness, most of his contemporaries thought no man fitter ‘for this great service’ of saving New England, to execute ‘the vengeance of the Lord upon the perfidious and bloody heathen’, as Increase Mather called it. But those who knew Josiah worried whether he was physically strong enough. On 18 November, Reverend Walley hoped God would set aside his weaknesses and Plymouth’s need of him and ‘make him a saviour to this poor distressed land’. They must do what they could ‘to keep him alive and in health by our prayers’.
On 10 December the army marched out of Boston in gusts of snow and ice. They were to rendezvous with the Connecticut men at Wickford on the edge of the Narragansetts’ territory. There was a stone garrison house there under the command of Jerry Bull. Because of Connecticut’s long history of good relations with Uncas, alongside the 300 Connecticut soldiers were fifty Mohegans and some Pequots. But after the army had crossed the Seekonk River on a pontoon raft made of canoes and treetrunks, they discovered the Wickford garrison had been massacred. The buildings where they would have had cover for the night had been burnt to the ground.
Despite the heavy snow the army started marching thirty miles south-west, to the Chipuxet River. The Indians had gone into the swamps where no Englishman wanted to go without a guide. Fortunately the soldiers found stores of food buried in the ground, and saw an Indian named Peter watching them. Threatened with hanging if he did not take them to the Narragansetts’ hiding place, he led them to a swamp they did not even know existed. Because of the weather, the usually near-impassable swamp was frozen solid. Peter took them to a huge palisaded fort, concealed on an island where the Narragansetts and their allies the Wampanoags and Pocassets were hiding.
Seeing a way in, the English forces charged at the fort and fought bravely with the Indians. Six captains were killed and William Bradford’s son got a bullet in him which was still there a year later. Hundreds of Indians escaped.
In an echo of the Mystic massacre in the Pequot War, the English set fire to wigwams with old women and children in them. According to Connecticut historian Benjamin Trumbull, a number of the English soldiers were unhappy at this unchristian behaviour. Drawing on accounts in contemporary manuscripts, Trumbull wrote that ‘The burning of the wigwams, the shrieks and cries of the women and children, and the yelling of the warriors exhibited a most horrible and affecting scene, so that it greatly moved some of the soldiers. They were much in doubt then, and afterwards, often seriously inquired whether burning their enemies alive could be consistent with humanity and the benevolent principles of the Gospel.’ But there were not enough of such dissenters to call a halt.
It was thought best to evacuate the swamp, in case the Indians were hidden in the trees and launched a second attack. Although some thought the wounded would be better off in sheltered surroundings, Josiah decided it was safer to march back through the deep snow to Wickford. But it was a ghastly journey. They lost their way and had to walk all night in the biting wind. Provisions arrived by boat from Boston for the weary troops but there were not enough. Josiah gave orders to local farmers to slaughter sheep.
* * *
Although the swamps were famously difficult to attack, under Josiah the English troops had managed to destroy the Narragansetts’ lair. At last the Indians had been defeated in straightforward battle. To the victors it seemed an extraordinary and emblematic victory over an apparently unbeatable foe, a triumph for the English way of life. The engagement was ever after called the Great Swamp Fight. (John Winthrop’s son Wait Still Winthrop’s poem ‘Some Meditations’, written ten days after the battle, pronounced Indians ‘a swarm of flies’. This line has been seen as the beginning of a dehumanisation of the Indians.)
The Great Swamp Fight became a touchstone of New Englanders’ valour. It reversed the psychological trauma of the chosen people not having God on their side. It appeared that – after all – He was. But the Narragansetts were no longer neutral, or semi-neutral. Having now officially joined Philip they began to rain down terror on the rest of New England.
After the Great Swamp Fight the Narragansett leader Canonchet had asked for a truce, which Josiah impatiently refused. Had the truce been given and peace terms made, New England could have been spared the warfare that now ensued. Josiah’s iron will at the beginning of the Indian insurrection had been viewed as a strength. Now flexibility was called for. Perhaps Josiah was no longer so in command of himself as he had been. His friend the secretary and historian of Plymouth Colony, Nathaniel Morton, thought he probably ruined his own health from exposure. The beginning of what appears to have been a clotting or thrombotic problem may have manifested itself and made him blinkered and short-tempered. Nevertheless he had the reputation of a ‘stout commander’.
Since Josiah would not allow a peace parley, in the view of some critics he should have pursued the Narragansetts immediately, for Canonchet began a series of terrifying raids seizing cattle and horses. But it took two long weeks for fresh troops to come from Connecticut. Like so many farmer soldiers called up, colonists were unwilling to campaign for long periods of time. They wanted to be at home guarding their families, and sowing their crops to make sure they had a harvest and didn’t starve the next winter.
At the end of January the army set off after Canonchet, always hoping for another pitched battle, but they never caught up with the main party of the fleet-footed Narragansetts. The English travelled north for seventy miles, always seeing the fires of the Indians in the distance. The skeletons of the animals the Narragansetts butchered lay all around, but for the colonists it was known as the Hungry March. Boats with food could not get to them because of the frozen water. The soldiers had to eat their own horses in the snow.
Josiah finally stopped at Marlborough because he was in Nipmuck country. Despite mutterings then and after, that in one more day they would have cornered the Narragansetts, Josiah opined it was not so. He made tracks for Boston, where the army was disbanded.
The official position was that New England still had not done enough to please the Lord. He had ‘deferred our Salvation’, wrote Increase Mather. Josiah was furious with Rhode Island, which had not allowed the army to be sheltered in their houses during the Narragansett campaign. That had added to the exhaustion and poor health of his soldiers.
On 8 February Josiah had to stop serving through ill health. He was paid £32 for service in war. He may have gone to Salem to be nursed briefly by Penelope. But he was still governor of Plymouth so he had to return there. John Cotton junior’s wife Joanna was well known for her medical skills and may have been called on to help Josiah recover.
Meanwhile in January the governor of the recently acquired colony of New York, Edmund Andros, had finally given the United Colonies news of Philip. The Indian king was sick but had 400–500 men within fifty miles of Albany.
Governor Andros had only arrived in North America the year before, but he had already done a deal with the Mohawks. When the English had seized New Netherland in 1664 this had had a knock-on effect on the local system of Indian alliances and the Mohawks became allies of the English at New York. In response to Andros, they now unleashed themselves against Philip in his winter hideout, driving him away from the Hudson River.
The English colonists continued desperately warding off the Narragansetts who were still attacking their settlements. All New England towns now enhanced their fortifications. Extra garrison houses were built with loopholes for guns to poke out of the backs of chimneys. Salem threw up a wall across the neck of the peninsula on which the town was built, an order signed by George Curwen. Refugees from Maine were driven west to Salem because it was the nearest safe town. Did Penelope learn to use a gun?
In February 1,000 screaming Indians attacked Medfield. A helpful Indian spy who had watched the town burn came through the night on snowshoes to tell Daniel Gookin that Lancaster would be next. From then on settlers became more receptive to using friendly Indians to scout; they could slip in and out of camps; they overheard plans and secrets. As they had always been, they were priceless guides through the wilderness.
As English soldiers began struggling to get through from Boston, several hundred Indians surrounded Lancaster. They used the town’s winter log pile to burn the garrison house. Around two dozen people were taken prisoner, including Mrs Mary Rowlandson, the wife of Reverend Joseph Rowlandson.
She wrote a celebrated history of her captivity, which begins: ‘On the tenth of February 1676, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: their first coming was about sunrising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven.’ The Rowlandsons’ own house was set on fire. As Mary opened the door to leave with her children,
the Indians shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house, as if one had taken an handful of stones and threw them, so that we were fain to go back. We had six stout dogs belonging to our garrison, but none of them would stir, though another time, if any Indian had come to the door, they were ready to fly upon him and tear him down … But out we must go, the fire increasing, and coming along behind us, roaring, and the Indians gaping before us with their guns, spears, and hatchets to devour us. No sooner were we out of the house, but my brother-in-law (being before wounded, in defending the house, in or near the throat) fell down dead, whereat the Indians scornfully shouted, and hallooed, and were presently upon him, stripping off his clothes.
Mrs Rowlandson was dragged away, having been wounded by a bullet. In her arms she was clutching her six-year-old daughter Sarah, who was bleeding from the bowel and the hand. Mrs Rowlandson’s mind was full of dreadful sights, her friends and relations ‘bleeding out their heart-blood upon the ground. There was one who was chopped into the head with a hatchet, and stripped naked, and yet was crawling up and down.’
The Indians put Sarah on a horse because she was plainly dying, and after six days of travelling in the woods of northern Massachusetts they buried the little girl. Mrs Rowlandson was both grieving and ill herself. Every night she heard of new Indian triumphs and fresh assaults on New England towns: ‘They began their din about a mile before they came to us. By their noise and whooping they signified how many they had destroyed.’ And though God upheld her through her ordeal she felt she was being punished for being lazy about her observance of the Sabbath. She worried about the effect on her other daughter of living with the Indians. But as she would relate, the Indians were not unkind either to her or her children.
Mrs Rowlandson was sold to Weetamoo and her new husband the Narragansett chief Quinnapin. Mary did not like the arrogant Weetamoo, whose personal maid she became: ‘a severe and proud Dame … bestowing every day in dressing herself neat as such time as any Gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with Necklaces, with Jewels in her ears, and Bracelets upon her hands’. Weetamoo was spiteful to her and slapped her face. She was a fearsome warrior queen who fought with her men.
King Philip appeared, to coordinate campaign plans with Weetamoo. Mrs Rowlandson found herself sewing a shirt for Philip’s son. Despite the war, English clothing remained prestigious amongst the Indian community. In return Philip gave her a small cake of corn and a pancake fried with bear grease. He treated her with gentleness, offering to smoke tobacco with her, and reassured her that her ordeal would soon be over. ‘Philip came up and took my hand, and said, two weeks more and you shall be mistress again.’ Her book is full of information about the Indians: Weetamoo made ‘girdles of wampum and beads’, and her braves left women alone and neither tortured nor raped them.
Mrs Rowlandson endured three months of captivity. A meeting was called to decide how much she could be ransomed for. Rather pathetically the Indians told her they were the ‘General Court’ and she was to stand up and say how much she was worth. Worried by the destruction of her home and all her family’s possessions when Lancaster was stormed, she said £20. That was what she was ransomed for on 3 May.
* * *
At the end of March, in a terrible blow for Roger Williams, his own plantation, Providence, was burned by 1,500 Narragansett warriors. He had cultivated the tribe’s friendship for over forty years.
In an extraordinary rendezvous with the warriors – a meeting which the town and his sons begged him not to undertake – Williams confronted them. Even as he did so, his own house was torched. Pointing at it, Williams said ‘this house now burning before mine eyes hath lodged kindly some thousands of you these ten years’. Williams asked why they attacked a neighbour who had always been good to them. The Narragansetts responded that the people of Providence had helped their enemies in Plymouth and Massachusetts. They also told Williams the English God had deserted them. Williams replied that on the contrary, ‘God had prospered us’. It was an exchange that left Williams shaking. The world he had built, the friendships he had cherished, were literally going up in flames in front of his eyes.
In the end he was numbered on the side of his own kind. But, as many of his statements show, he believed that the English greed for land bore a heavy responsibility. An articulate Indian named John Wallmaker (or Stonewall John) said, ‘You have driven us out of our own country and then pursued us to our great misery, and your own, and we are forced to live upon you.’ That was an accurate if unwelcome summing-up.
* * *
At the end of March from Plymouth Josiah wrote to Boston begging to be sent troops. As governor he was in a mood of utter despair. He put it baldly: ‘we are very weak and unable to defend ourselves’.
The Indian army had returned to Plymouth Colony with force. They massacred the Eel River garrison three miles from Plymouth town. The warriors knew most people would be at the meeting house on the Sabbath. This garrison was believed to be one of the safest places in the colony. Benjamin Church had been advised to send his heavily pregnant wife there; fortunately she preferred Rhode Island. Mrs Clark, the wife of the commander of the garrison, was killed along with eleven others.
This was followed by the grisly death of Captain Pierce of Scituate and eighty men, sixty English and twenty Wampanoag Christian Indians, who were lured into a trap on 26 March at Pawtucket Falls on Rhode Island. Surrounded by Canonchet and 500 screaming Narragansetts, they died valiantly in a circle defending one another. That same day the minister of Marlborough left church because he had a toothache. As he opened the door he saw the town was completely surrounded by Indians, who had approached silently. Marlborough was destroyed.
In Salem Penelope had no idea whether Josiah was dead or alive. For all she knew, Careswell might have been destroyed along with the rest of Marshfield. In fact Marshfield itself was never attacked, but a number of houses were burned in an attack on Scituate just nine miles away. The minister of Bridgewater wrote: ‘We are in expectation every day of an assault here. The Lord prepare us for our trial.’ By late April the protective circle of the outlying Massachusetts towns of Lancaster, Groton, Marlborough and Medfield was no more. All their inhabitants had fled. Farmhouses were burning in an arc across New England from eastern Maine to Connecticut. Hostile Indian forces were in striking distance of New England’s main port. All the northern settlements on the Connecticut River, from Northfield to Deerfield, were ghost towns.
New England’s international trade had come to a halt. With the whole country in a state of siege there were no men on the wharves to land goods, no merchants to commission ships, no farmers to cut down trees and make lathes to send abroad. As communications were reduced the English were largely reliant on friendly Indians for news of what was happening. And there was a constant anxiety about whether those Indians would stay friendly.
The very bitter feeling against the English was expressed not just by murderous attacks. The Indians struggled to deliver an explicit message that they felt oppressed by English culture. Mrs Rowlandson had noticed the hatred of the Bible – Weetamoo snatched Mary’s copy out of her hand ‘and threw it out of doors’. After Medfield was burned in February 1676 a Nipmuck pinned a tragic letter to a cart which said: ‘We will fight you twenty years if you will. There are many Indians yet. You must consider the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.’ Written by a literate Indian who probably once lived in a Praying Town, it was the end of a dream.
All over New England, in the isolated English outposts which had been havens of neat fields, the golden corn rotted. There was no one to gather in the harvest. Those who survived were too frightened to go into the fields because their Indian enemies could be waiting for them. Every tap on the window, every rustle in the bushes, could be the beginning of a shocking domestic massacre.
On 21 April 1676 Captain Wadsworth and his men were massacred trying to relieve the burning settlement of Sudbury. Indian braves had suddenly risen up from the long grass. It was Sudbury which at last convinced the Massachusetts Council that Indians must be used as scouts. This decision made an incalculable difference. Indian scouts were sent ahead ‘to give speedy notice of the Indians’ movements and disappoint their mischievous designs’.
The tide began to turn when Canonchet of the Narragansetts was captured. Like the citizen soldiers, the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags longed to return home. They were beginning to starve because they could not get at their food stores buried in the earth. ‘General Hunger’ was a potent weapon against them.
Canonchet had gone to Mount Hope to find seed corn when a hunting party of English soldiers came upon him. They did not realise it was him until, as he was running, in order to go as fast as possible he started throwing off his clothes, including the silver-laced coat the English had given him. In his haste his foot slipped on a stone crossing the Pawtucket River, he fell and was caught. When he was asked to reveal Philip’s whereabouts and submit to the English, this proud son of the tragic Miantonomo said he would fight it out to the last man. Just before he was executed he said, ‘I like it well. I shall die before my heart is soft, and before I have spoken a word unworthy of myself.’
Canonchet told the English that killing him would not end the war because all the Indians wanted to destroy them. In fact, however, most Indians had had enough of being fugitives. Philip’s allies were exhausted and feared that the Mohawks would come for them. They were living on groundnuts and English cattle that they stole in the night. Once the planting season passed without them having put seed in the ground, they would starve. They could no longer peacefully smoke their fish on frames by rivers in preparation for the winter. They started to surrender in large numbers. An Indian known as James Printer, John Eliot’s typesetter assistant, reappeared. He threw himself on the authorities’ mercy, reporting that many Indians were dying of disease.
An atmosphere of acute anxiety and sadness prevailed also amongst the English. Weakened by the war, they fell prey to a flu epidemic. John Winthrop junior died, aged seventy. So many perished in Boston that the funeral processions bumped into one another.
* * *
Philip was being forced slowly back to his old territories. It was rumoured that he was calling Indians to him for a last stand at Mount Hope. He might regroup and then fall on Plymouth Colony again.
In spite of all that had happened Philip retained affection for those English who were his friends. In a tragic episode Hezekiah Willett, the son of Philip’s former trading partner Thomas Willett, stepped out of his door in Swansea, when Narragansetts leapt up and beheaded him. His body was stripped and his black servant Jethro was carried off. Jethro later reported poignantly that ‘the Mount Hope Indians that knew Mr Willett, were sorry for his death, mourned, combed his head, and hung peag in his hair’.
Benjamin Church, meanwhile, was coaxing Philip’s neighbours, the Sakonnet Indians under their Squaw Sachem Awashonks, into coming over to the English side. Awashonks said she would abandon Philip on condition all her tribe’s lives were spared. Church gave his word, and said how pleased he was at the thought of the return of their former friendship. Awashonks responded forthrightly they would get Philip’s head before the Indian corn was ripe.
When he picked up his new brigade, Church was treated to an extraordinary sight. At sundown the Sakonnet Indians came running from all directions, carrying the tops of dry pine trees to build a huge fire. The tribe surrounded it in three rings: Awashonks and the oldest of her people, ‘men and women mixed’, kneeling down formed the first ring next to the fire; all the ‘lusty stout men’ standing up formed the next; and then ‘all the rabble in a confused crew surrounded on the outside’. The chief captain danced between the rings and the fire with a spear in one hand and a hatchet in another, listing all the nations of Indians who were enemies to the English and mock-fighting firebrands in the fire. He was followed by another and another with increasing fury. Awashonks explained they were all now engaged to fight for Church. He might call upon them at any time and any place. She presented Church with what he called ‘a very fine firelock’.
Church had been told a great Indian secret: that they always travelled ‘thin and scattered’ for safety. The English ‘always kept in a heap together’ so that it was as easy to hit them as a house. The English never scattered and the Indians always did.
* * *
As the summer sun blazed down on the bracken, the forces of colonists and Church’s Indians scoured the thick woods. Four times they narrowly missed capturing Philip. The Indian king had cut his hair to disguise his appearance. Church was so near that his men found Philip’s camp kettles still boiling over a fire, though the Indians were nowhere to be seen. Church’s men frequently found flattened grass, showing they were being watched.
On 30 July Philip attempted to cross the Taunton River to attack Bridgewater again. His braves had pulled down a large pine tree and placed it across the river in preparation. Church and his men approached very early in the morning. On the stump of a tree an Indian warrior was sitting by himself. Church was about to fire when one of the Indians shouted he was friendly. As he was looking down the barrel Church realised he had had Philip himself in his sights. But Philip leapt down a bank on the side of the river and escaped.
That day not only did Church capture 133 Indians but he also retrieved Philip’s wife Wootonekanuska, and their nine-year-old son. One of his prisoners told him, ‘Sir, you have now made Philip ready to die, for you have made him as poor and miserable as he used to make the English; for you have now killed or taken all his relations.’
All English writers noted the warmth of the affection the Indians had for their children. And, as clan leader of the Wampanoag peoples, Philip had plenty of reason for heartbreak now that the Sakonnet braves of his close cousin Awashonks were helping his enemies.
On 6 August a treacherous Indian offered to reveal the hiding place of the Squaw Sachem Weetamoo, Philip’s one remaining ally. Her men were captured but Weetamoo herself managed to flee. She tried to get over the river on a makeshift raft, but it fell apart and she drowned. Perhaps she was too broken, cold and miserable to struggle. Her naked corpse was found not far from the waterside where she had helped Philip make his escape the year before. The soldiers who came across her body sliced off her head and put it on a pole in Taunton. Some Indians in the prison there recognised her. They started to howl with anguish, crying out that ‘it was their queen’s head’.
Six days later Philip himself and his closest comrades were cornered in his old home. Perhaps Philip had given up all hope. He no longer had much reason to live. In a state of extreme exhaustion, he had killed one of his followers who disagreed with his future plans. This man’s brother had found his way to Benjamin Church. When Church learnt Philip was just across the water, he crossed onto the peninsula. Philip was on a little spot of upland on Mount Hope, below which was a swamp. Church knew it well. Telling his men to be silent and crawl on their bellies, under the cover of darkness he positioned them throughout the trees. As the sun rose they were to make a noise, in effect beat Philip out and then ambush him. They now knew Philip’s techniques for escape. He was always first out of a trap so they were well prepared to fire at anyone who came silently out of the swamp.
The story goes that Philip woke to find the swamp surrounded. At an opening to the swamp, where he was sure Philip would exit, Church had positioned two men – an Englishman and a Sakonnet Indian named Alderman. Sure enough Philip’s lithe figure raced out. They both took aim. The Englishman’s gun did not fire because it was damp. But Alderman had an old musket, a more reliable weapon, and an extraordinary eye. Philip fell stone dead on his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him.
As they saw him fall, his men escaped. They did not see their leader dragged out of the mud by his stockings and breeches, or his head cut off and his body quartered by their Sakonnet cousins.
No one at that time would have found this very shocking, but the Wampanoag braves would have resented the impertinence of the unimportant Sakonnet chosen to dismember their leader. As he stood with his hatchet he made a disrespectful speech over their chief’s body: Philip had been ‘a very great man, and had made many a man afraid of him’ but, however important he had been, the Sakonnet was now going to ‘chop his arse for him’.
* * *
In the centre of another swamp in woods above Rehoboth, Church had another coup. He tracked down Annawon, one of Philip’s most important commanders – ‘a very subtle man of great resolution’. He had also been a valiant captain under Massasoit. An old squaw was making supper in the camp. Under the noise of her pounding corn, Church and his men lowered themselves down the cliff and seized Annawon. Church told Annawon’s Indians he could guarantee their lives would be spared, and that although he would plead for Annawon’s, he could not guarantee it. There followed an extraordinary scene.
All except Church and Annawon went to rest. For an hour in the bright moonlight the two stared at one another. Church could not speak Algonquian, and he thought Annawon could not speak English. Annawon suddenly produced a package. It was Philip’s ceremonial dress, and included what Church called Philip’s belt, a sort of stole that reached the ankles, ‘curiously wrought with black and white wampum, in various figures and flowers, and pictures of many birds and beasts’, as well as a headband with two flags at the back. Falling on his knees Annawon said in plain English, ‘Great Captain, you have killed Philip and conquered his country, therefore these things belong to you.’ Annawon told Church all the objects were Philip’s ‘royalties which he was wont to adorn himself with when he sat in state’. They were edged round with red hair which Annawon said was got from the Mohawk country. Annawon had saved them after Philip’s desperate flight. The night passed in good conversation as Annawon related his war deeds and life with Massasoit.
As soon as it was light they marched out of the swamp. Annawon and his Indians were taken to Plymouth while Church had business in Boston. He was sure his men would soon capture the last of Philip’s captains, his brother-in-law Tispaquin, another superb soldier. Church had given his word that if Tispaquin surrendered he would not be executed. He thought it was much more sensible to incorporate the captured chiefs along with other good fighters into the colonists’ army against the Maine Indians.
But though Church had given his word to Tispaquin and intended to plead for Annawon, it was to no avail. When he returned to Plymouth their heads were stuck on poles there, along with Philip’s.
Despite the amnesty, all male Indians over the age of fourteen who surrendered were sold into slavery in the West Indies. At least 1,000 were sent to work on the sugar plantations. It was their punishment as rebels, as one of Josiah’s surviving certificates declared.
Most people felt harshly towards the Indians. They paid to see an exhibition of Philip’s hands and the powder scar where he had burned himself, which were displayed in Boston and other towns. But finer feelings were not altogether dead. In his memoirs Benjamin Church wrote how in a cleaning-up operation in 1677 to make sure the woods were safe, he met an old Indian whose name was ‘Conscience’. ‘Then the war is over’, said Church, ‘for that was what they were searching for, it being much wanted.’
But it was to the slave markets of the Caribbean that Philip’s young son was probably sent. The Elders of Plymouth and Boston made use of the Old Testament to debate what to do about what they described as ‘a child of death’. This was the boy, whose name is not known, for whom Philip had asked Mrs Rowlandson to sew a shirt. Deuteronomy said a child should not be put to death for his father’s sins, but there were precedents when children of notorious rebels and traitors who had been ‘the principal leaders’ against a whole country could be executed, even if they themselves were not culpable. But the kind-hearted Reverend James Keith of Bridgewater, who, tradition relates, hid Philip’s wife Wootonekanuska and their son before they were captured, urged mercy. He wrote to John Cotton junior on 30 October 1676, ‘I long to hear what becomes of Philip’s wife and his son.’ The last mention of him is in a letter John Cotton junior wrote from Plymouth to Increase Mather on 20 March 1677: ‘Philip’s boy goes now to be sold.’ What became of Philip’s wife and son is not known. There are many legends that his descendants – and thus of course the descendants of the great Massasoit – can be found in Bermuda or the West Indies.
* * *
Philip’s death was a sign of God’s blessing, that New England’s providential destiny was still on course. Nevertheless colonists remained crushed by what seemed to many to be God’s judgement that they were a sinful people who had lost sight of their covenant. Penelope herself had some kind of nervous crisis that was so severe she had to be counselled by Elders at Plymouth and Marshfield.
At the end of the war a fire broke out in Boston, which burnt forty-six houses before it was brought under control. It was another sign of God’s power. He could turn their dwellings to ashes without the help of either foreign or domestic enemies.
Though Josiah was regarded as a hero in Plymouth, some contemporaries in Rhode Island and Massachusetts were angry about what many saw as an unnecessary war. Josiah himself was too well connected and well liked to come in for much personal recorded criticism. The war had killed perhaps ten per cent of the population of New England as a whole, with half the population of Indian tribes being wiped out. Those Indians who managed to escape the wrath of the Puritan colonies either hastened west to New York or north-east to Maine where the fighting was continuing. Governor Andros welcomed the pathetic refugees fleeing their homeland. Good relations with the Mohawks and their Iroquois relations were a keystone of his administration. Whether they wanted to be or not, numerous Indian refugees were adopted members of the Mohawk tribe.
The fourteen Praying Towns were reduced to four. The relationship between the Indians and English had been irremediably altered. It was not until the nineteenth century, when the new American Republic was in search of a national myth, and the Indians were no longer dangerous, that they were once again upheld as noble savages.
Such was the feeling in 1676 against Daniel Gookin, the superintendent of the Indians, he was not re-elected to the Massachusetts Court of Assistants. Gookin’s account of what he called The Sufferings of the Indians was not published in America in his lifetime.
In 1690 John Eliot died. His Latin School at Roxbury continues to this day. Eliot’s Algonquian Bible went out of print. After the war Harvard University’s Indian College saw no more Indian students. The building fell into ruins by the end of the century. Despite the best intentions, its most successful students – John Sassamon and James Printer – had not done well straddling the English and Indian peoples.
With the death of Roger Williams in 1683 another great champion of the Indians passed away. He had denounced Philip as an ‘ungrateful monster’, but to his dying day Williams defended the point of view of the Narragansetts, nostalgically recalling the great friendship they had shown him for forty years. He did not abandon his controversial championing of their customs. English settlers’ cheating over land grants ‘stunk in their pagan nostrils’ and was one of the reasons for ‘their late great burning and slaughtering of us’. As was often the case with early settlers, Williams decided to be buried in his own garden. When an enthusiast tried to find the grave in the nineteenth century, all that he could retrieve was an apple-tree root. It was as if New England’s vegetation had taken over his body just as the native inhabitants had taken over his heart.