Mayflower (25 page)

On the eastern shore of Mount Hope is the huge outcropping of rock from which the peninsula gets its name. More than three hundred feet high, Mount Hope provides panoramic views of Narragansett and Mount Hope bays. It is a towering, majestic chunk of gneiss and quartz that puts the relatively minuscule Plymouth Rock to shame.

Approaching Mount Hope from the south

There is a legend that Philip once stood upon the summit of Mount Hope and, turning west, hurled a stone all the way across the peninsula to Poppasquash Neck more than two miles away. It is a tradition that reflects the sense of power and strength that many Pokanokets may have projected upon their new leader, who was just twenty-four years old in August 1662. That summer, the “flocking multitudes” at Mount Hope became so uproarious that the Plymouth magistrates feared Philip had convened a council of war. Only a few weeks after hauling his brother into court, Governor Prence made the same demand of Philip.

The young sachem who appeared at Plymouth on August 6, 1662, was not about to cower before the English. As Philip made clear in the years ahead, he considered himself on equal terms with none other than Charles II. All others—including Governor Prence and the deceitful Major Josiah Winslow—were “but subjects” of the king of England and unfit to tell a fellow monarch what to do. Philip’s “ambitious and haughty” demeanor at the Plymouth court that day moved one observer to refer to him mockingly as “King Philip”—a nickname he never claimed for himself but that followed the sachem into history.

No matter how self-possessed Philip appeared that day in court, he knew that now was not the time to accuse the English of murdering his brother. Alexander’s death had thrust him into a difficult and completely unexpected situation. If Philip truly suspected that his brother had been assassinated, he must have believed that Alexander’s boldness had gotten him killed. Philip was young enough to be his late brother’s son. He had no choice but to be very careful, particularly in the early days of his sachemship.

Instead of indignantly accusing Winslow of murdering his brother—something he did not say openly to an Englishman until near the outbreak of hostilities thirteen years later—Philip told the members of the court exactly what they wanted to hear. He promised that the “ancient covenant” that had existed between his father and Plymouth remained inviolate. He even offered his younger brother as a hostage if it might ease the magistrates’ concerns, but it was decided that this was not necessary. As far as Governor Prence was concerned, relations with the Indians were once again back to normal.

Over the next few years, as Philip settled into his new role as leader of the Pokanokets, New England grew more and more crowded. Both the English and the Indians depended on agriculture, and only about 20 percent of the land was suitable for farming. Adding to the pressure for land was the rapid rise of the English population. The first generation of settlers had averaged an astonishing seven to eight children per family, and by the 1660s those children wanted farms of their own.

The English were not the only ones whose world was changing. The Indians of Philip’s generation had grown up amid the boom times of the fur trade and had come to regard expensive Western goods as an essential part of their lives. But now, with the virtual extinction of the beaver, the devaluation of wampum, and the loss of so much land, this new generation of Native Americans was beginning to confront a future of radically diminished opportunities.

The pressure was particularly intense in Plymouth. Unlike Massachusetts-Bay and Connecticut, which had large hinterlands, the Indians and English in Plymouth had almost nowhere left to go. Pushed south to the neck of Mount Hope, Philip and his people were hemmed in from almost every side. Looking out from the summit of Mount Hope, Philip could see chimney smoke from the houses of the English to the north in Wannamoisett; to the south, just a half mile from the tip of Mount Hope was Rhode Island (known today as Aquidneck Island), home to the thriving English settlements of Portsmouth and Newport. Off in the distance to the west were the Narragansetts; closer to home was Hog Island, which, thanks to his brother Alexander, had become a part of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, back in 1654. Philip’s only relief came when he looked east across Mount Hope Bay to Pocasset in modern Tiverton, Rhode Island, the homeland of Weetamoo, Alexander’s widow and the “Squaw Sachem” of Pocasset.

Adding to the Pokanokets’ growing sense of claustrophobia were the Englishmen’s livestock. Domesticated creatures such as cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs were constantly straying off English farms and feasting on the Indians’ corn. Despite attempts to address the Indians’ complaints (a fence was built across the northern edge of Mount Hope), livestock remained a major irritant in English-Native relations.

But if Philip had inherited a diminished and pressure-filled world, he proved remarkably resourceful in making the most of what was available to him. Yes, the Englishmen’s livestock were a nuisance. Well, then Philip would get cattle of his own. In 1665 he acquired a horse; in 1669, his large herd of hogs got him in trouble with the proprietors of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Philip had the audacity to ferry his pigs out to Hog Island. His brother had sold the island fifteen years ago, but to Philip’s mind it was just the place for his swine to forage.

As Philip knew, losing land had the most direct impact on the well-being of his people. If the Pokanokets were to survive as an independent entity, they must hold on to what land his father and brother had not yet sold. Soon after becoming sachem, he and Governor Prence agreed to a seven-year embargo on the sale of Indian land. It was an extraordinary agreement that marked a bold and high-minded departure from the practices of the past, and Philip instructed John Sassamon to write the governor a letter. “Last summer [Philip] made that promise with you,” Sassamon wrote, “that he would not sell no land in seven years time…. [H]e would have no English trouble him before that time.”

But Philip’s idealistic resolve soon wavered. The following year, in April 1664, Philip agreed to sell a piece of land bordering the towns of Bridgewater, Taunton, and Rehoboth for a record £66 (roughly $12,000 today)—almost twice the amount his father had received for the Pokanoket homeland of Sowams. If the embargo had proven fleeting, Philip had at least succeeded in getting the English to pay a decent price for his land. Philip was doing just what his father had done forty years before—adapting to the inevitable forces of change.

Paul Revere’s engraving of King Philip

Because Philip was the supreme sachem of the Pokanokets, his power over his people was, according to Roger Williams, that of “an absolute monarchy.” In reality, however, there were practical limits to his authority. If he should do something to lose the trust and respect of his people, the sachem might find himself without anyone to lead. “[V]ery frequently their men will leave them upon distaste or harsh dealing,” wrote Daniel Gookin, Massachusetts-Bay’s superintendent of the Praying Indians, “and go and live under other sachems that can protect them; so that their princes endeavor to carry it obligingly and lovingly unto their people, lest they should desert them, and thereby their strength, power, and tribute would be diminished.”

Philip was also expected to conduct himself with the dignity befitting a supreme sachem. In addition to dressing more elaborately than the common people, he possessed a larger wigwam than most and traveled with an entourage of warriors and wives. When a person of lesser status greeted him, that person must say, “Cowaúnckamish,” meaning, “My service to you,” as he stroked both of the sachem’s shoulders.

An elm bowl attributed to King Philip

By all accounts, Philip
looked
the part. One admiring Englishman who saw the sachem on the streets of Boston estimated his clothing and large belts of wampum to be worth at least £20, approximately $4,000 today. But if Philip was to maintain himself as sachem of the Pokanoket without continuing to rely on the sale of Indian land, he needed to find an alternative to the fur trade that had once supported his father.

Ever since the Pilgrims had watched the gambols of whales around the anchored
Mayflower,
the English had sought to exploit these large sea mammals as a source of oil and baleen. Nowhere were there more whales than in the waters surrounding Nantucket Island—a fifty-square-mile sandbank twenty-four miles off the south shore of Cape Cod. Massasoit had long since determined the rules by which the Nantucket Indians divided up the whales that washed up on the island’s shore. As whale oil became an increasingly sought-after commodity in New England, it was crucial that Philip reassert his father’s claims over the Indian whalers of Nantucket.

In 1665, Philip received word that a Nantucket Indian named John Gibbs had broken a Native taboo: he had spoken the name of Philip’s dead father. Philip decided he must personally oversee Gibbs’s punishment, and he set out on an expedition that might also help to strengthen his influence on the island.

In 1665, the Indian population on Nantucket was huge—somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 at a time when the total number of Pokanokets and their allies, including those on Nantucket, is estimated to have been about 5,000. The island’s English population, on the other hand, barely reached one hundred. On Nantucket, Philip would experience what it had been like in 1621 when the Indians had still been the overwhelmingly dominant force in New England.

By canoe, it was about sixty-five miles from Mount Hope to Nantucket. Philip landed on the west end of the island and then used the sand cliffs along the south shore to conceal his progress east to Gibbs’s home near a pond that still bears his name. Soon the Indian was in Philip’s custody. But as the sachem prepared to execute the transgressor, some members of the English community offered to pay for his release. Gibbs was a special favorite of the island’s interpreter, Peter Folger, and would soon become a minister to Nantucket’s Christian Indians. Philip named a price, but the English were unable to meet it. A standoff ensued as Philip refused to lessen his offer, using “threatening language,” the island historian Obed Macy later reported, “pronounced with an emphasis which foreboded no good.”

Philip appeared to be in control of the situation, especially given that the English were outnumbered by more than ten to one. But as may have become increasingly clear to Peter Folger (whose daughter Abiah would have a son named Benjamin Franklin), Philip did not have the support of the local Indians in this matter. The English “concluded,” Macy wrote, “to put all to risk. [T]hey told [Philip], that, if he did not immediately leave the island, they would rally the inhabitants, and fall upon him and cut him off to a man.”

Both sides knew it was an empty threat, but it was Philip who backed down. With £11 in hand, he “happily took the alarm, and left the island as soon as possible.”

Instead of Philip, it had been the English who had proved their loyalty to the local Indians, and in the years ahead more and more of those Indians would turn to Christianity. With the outbreak of war a decade later, the Indians of Nantucket became one of the first Native groups in New England to “disown” Philip. For a young sachem seeking to assert his authority over one of the most populous and potentially lucrative portions of his territory, the voyage to Nantucket had been a disaster.