On 12 August 1676 as dawn revealed the dark pine trees and low shores of Rhode Island, the rising sun also lit up the dome-shaped rock called Mount Hope. From the ledge where his men had pitched camp for the night, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, whom the English called King Philip, looked down and prepared to flee. He and his braves were completely surrounded by English soldiers.
Sixty years earlier, before the coming of the Mayflower, Philip’s father’s land stretched to Cape Cod. But by 1676 Mount Hope was his son’s last remaining stronghold.
The Indians had been so successful at evading the English that Philip was convinced they were secure in this most secret home territory. He had not bargained for the tracking skills of Colonel Benjamin Church, the commander of the English, who was using Indian scouts to supplement the colonists’ woodcraft. Philip had escaped too often, and Church was determined to trap him. In the duel of wits that had been going on for the past month, Church made careful mental notes of Philip’s way of operating. One of Philip’s men going out to relieve himself in the early morning had been shot at. Now gunfire was ricocheting wildly up the rock.
As the Indians returned fire, Philip threw off his meal satchel, cloak, jewellery and powder horn, which would weigh him down. Gun in hand, he started to leap through the wood into the swamp. The English were wary of swamps because they were so difficult to navigate. Philip had a good chance of escaping through its dark recesses as he had in the past.
Perhaps, though, he no longer cared very much what became of him. The fight had gone out of him after the English had caught his wife and treasured nine-year-old son. Clergymen in Boston were now debating bringing biblical precedent to bear on whether it was right to hang this boy – the child of a rebel – or sell him into slavery.