Mayflower (31 page)

All afternoon, beneath a hot sun, Church and his men held their ground as the Indians made the surrounding woods echo with their whoops and shouts. With night approaching, one of Church’s soldiers said he could see a sloop sailing toward them from a tiny island several miles up the river. “Succor is now coming!” Church shouted. He recognized the vessel as belonging to Captain Roger Goulding, “a man,” he assured them, “for business.”

The sloop glided with the diminishing northwesterly breeze down to the besieged soldiers. Captain Goulding proved as trustworthy as Church had claimed. He anchored his vessel to windward of them and floated a buoy with his canoe tied to it to Church and his men. The sails and hull of his sloop were soon riddled with bullet holes, but Goulding stayed put.

The canoe was so tiny that only two men could fit in it at a time. It took ten agonizingly slow trips back and forth, but at least there was a growing number of soldiers in the sloop to provide cover for those in the canoe. Finally, only Church was left ashore. As he prepared to climb into the canoe, he realized that he had left his hat and cutlass at a nearby well, where he had stopped to get a drink of water at the beginning of the siege. When he informed his men that he was going back to collect his possessions, they pleaded with him to get into the canoe. But Church was adamant; he was not about to leave without his hat and sword. He loaded all the gunpowder he had left in his musket and started for the well.

Since he was the only remaining Englishman, all the Indians’ guns were trained on him as he made his way to the stone-encircled spring that today bears his name. A ceaseless stream of bullets flew through the air and drove into the ground at his feet, but none hit Church. On returning to the canoe, with the hat on his head and the cutlass at his side, he fired his musket one last time, but there was barely enough of a charge to push the bullet out of the barrel. Just as he settled into the canoe, a bullet grazed his hair while another splintered the wooden brace against which he’d nestled his chest, but he reached the sloop unscathed.

It had been a remarkable day. For six hours, twenty men had held off three hundred Indians (a number that was later confirmed by the Indians themselves) without suffering a single casualty. It was a deliverance that Church looked to for the rest of his life as indisputable proof of “the glory of God and His protecting providence.” William Bradford had learned of it in a dream, but for Benjamin Church it had been revealed in battle: he was one of the elect.

He’d also learned something else during what came to be known as the Pease Field Fight. When it came to Awashonks and the Sakonnets, the time for diplomacy had passed.

Even if the Sakonnets had joined Philip, Church still held out hope that many other Indians in the region might be convinced to stay out of the conflict. As the Puritan historian William Hubbard observed, most Indians in southern New England were unsure of what to do next. It was in the colony’s best interests, Church maintained, to welcome all potentially neutral Indians with open and beneficent arms.

But by July 1675, the hysteria of war had taken hold of New England. Shocked by the atrocities at Swansea, most English inhabitants had begun to view all Indians with racist contempt and fear. As a result, many Indians who would gladly have remained at peace were given no choice but to go to war.

Weetamoo was Philip’s sister-in-law, but she did everything she could to avoid the conflict. Church had advised her to seek refuge on Aquidneck Island, and that was exactly what she had done. But when she fled to Aquidneck by canoe with six of her men, some of the English inhabitants, who were “in fury against all Indians,” insisted that she leave the island. When Philip and his warriors stormed into Pocasset, Weetamoo was left with no option but to join him.

Other Indians attempting to remain neutral were told to flock to the shoreline of their territory, where, if they “did not meddle” with the English in any way, they would be safe. Unfortunately, soldiers such as Anderson the Dutchman made no effort to distinguish between friendly and hostile Natives. At one point during his depredations on Mount Hope, Anderson and twelve men came upon sixty Indians who were hauling their canoes ashore. Anderson and his privateers immediately killed thirteen of them, took eight alive, and once the rest had fled into the swamps, proceeded to burn all forty canoes.

Pocasset Swamp as it appeared in the early twentieth century

Just prior to the outbreak of violence, some Quakers from Aquidneck Island had taken the ferry to Mount Hope and attempted to convince Philip and his advisers that they should submit to some form of arbitration rather than go to war. For a sachem supposedly bent on violence, he had proven surprisingly open to the Quakers’ suggestion and admitted that “fighting was the worst way.” The Quakers, however, were in no position to speak for Plymouth Colony, and nothing ever came of the overture.

Now, while fighting was still very much a local affair, was the time for Governor Winslow to attempt a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. At the very least, some coordinated effort could have been made to assure nonhostile Indians that they were safe from attack. But none of these measures were taken. In fact, when several hundred Indians surrendered to authorities in Plymouth and Dartmouth after being assured that they’d be granted amnesty, Winslow and his cronies on the Council of War refused to honor the promise. On August 4, the council determined that since some of the Indians had participated in the attacks,
all
of them were guilty. That fall they were shipped as slaves to the Spanish port of Cádiz.

From the perspective of the Plymouth magistrates, there was nothing unusual about enslaving a rebellious Native population. The English had been doing this in Ireland for decades; most recently Cromwell had sent large numbers of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish slaves to the West Indies. After the conclusion of the Pequot War in 1637, Massachusetts-Bay officials had sent a shipload of Indian slaves, including fifteen boys and two women, to the Puritan settlement on Providence Island off the east coast of Central America. Selling Indian captives served two functions: it provided income to help pay for the war, and it removed a dangerous and disruptive people from the colony—not to mention the fact that it made the rebels’ lands available for later settlement by the English.

But if the policy made perfect sense to Winslow and the Council of War at Plymouth, Benjamin Church regarded it as a shocking abomination of justice that would only prolong the war. Church was no paragon of vitue. In the years ahead he, like many Englishmen in the Narragansett Bay region, would own African slaves. But he would also work diligently to ensure that the Indians he’d come to know in Sakonnet continued to live freely and peacefully in the region. To Church’s mind, the enslavement of the Indians from Plymouth and Dartmouth in the summer of 1675 was “an action so hateful…that [I] opposed it to the loss of the good will and respect of some that before were [my] good friends.”

By Monday, July 19, most of the Massachusetts companies that had been diverted to Narragansett country had returned to Mount Hope, and a combined Plymouth-Massachusetts force crossed the bay for Pocasset. Running along the eastern shore of the bay was a seven-mile-long cedar swamp, beside which Weetamoo and Philip had reportedly camped. For the English it would be a day of disorientation and fear as they pursued the Pokanokets and Pocassets into the depths of what Major William Bradford described as a “hideous swamp.” In his memoir of the war, Church says almost nothing about this particular battle, most probably because he was required to fight with the Plymouth companies, which were, according to William Hubbard, the last to enter and the first to retreat.

Instead of Church, it was Samuel Moseley who once again led the charge. Moseley and his privateers were assisted by a pack of dogs, but even they proved of limited effectiveness in the Pocasset Swamp. As far as the English were concerned, the Indians, who camouflaged themselves with tree branches and ferns, were virtually invisible in this dark, wet, and densely overgrown environment. While the leather shoes of the English succumbed to the sucking mud, the Indians danced weightlessly across the mire, their flintlocks cradled in their arms. Needless to say, the English matchlocks and pikes proved ineffective in these conditions, so ineffective, in fact, that it would soon become illegal for a militiaman to equip himself with anything but a flintlock and a sword.

Almost as soon as Moseley’s men entered the swamp, five of them were dead, the bullets flying, it seemed, from the vegetation itself. The Indians quickly retreated deeper into the gloom, deserting close to a hundred wigwams made of bark so green that they proved impossible to burn. The English came upon an old man, who was unable to keep up with the others, and who told them that Philip had just been there.

For the next few hours, they ranged about the swamp, but soon discovered, in Hubbard’s words, “how dangerous it is to fight in such dismal woods, when their eyes were muffled with the leaves, and their arms pinioned with the thick boughs of the trees, as their feet were continually shackled with the roots spreading every way in those boggy woods.” Several soldiers found themselves firing on their own men, and as darkness came on, all of them gladly gave up the chase and retreated to more solid ground.

That night, Major Cudworth, the leader of the Plymouth forces, decided that he had had his fill of swamps. They would do as they had done on Mount Hope: instead of pursuing the enemy, they’d build a fort. Cudworth and his fellow officers preferred to think that they now had Philip and Weetamoo trapped. If they carefully guarded the swamp and prevented the Indians from escaping, they hoped to starve them out. In addition to the soldiers stationed at forts on Mount Hope and in Pocasset, Cudworth proposed that there be a small “flying army,” whose purpose was to prevent the Indians from “destroying cattle and fetching in supply of food, which being attended, will bring them to great straits.” If this strategy worked—and he had every reason to believe it would—the war was effectively over. Since there was now no need for a large army, most of the companies from Massachusetts-Bay, including Moseley’s, were sent back to Boston.

There was unsettling evidence, however, that Philip was not the only Indian sachem at war. A week earlier, on July 14, what appeared to have been Nipmucks from the interior of Massachusetts had fallen on the town of Mendon, twenty miles to the west of Boston, and killed six people. Closer to home, Philip’s brother-in-law Tuspaquin, the Black Sachem, had laid waste to Middleborough, while Totoson from the Buzzards Bay region, just to the west of Cape Cod, had attacked the town of Dartmouth, burning houses and killing several inhabitants. While yet another “losing fort” was being constructed at Pocasset, Church accompanied the 112 Plymouth soldiers sent to aid Dartmouth.

Unlike the towns to the east on Cape Cod and the islands, where many of the local Indians were Christian and remained faithful to the English throughout the war, Dartmouth was surrounded by hostile Natives. Every English house, except for three garrisons, had been destroyed, and the decision was quickly made to evacuate all the town’s inhabitants to Plymouth.

What seems never to have occurred to Major Cudworth, who led the expedition to Dartmouth, and to Captain Henchman, who was left to build the Pocasset fort, was that Totoson’s attack might have been a diversion. On July 30, word reached Henchman that the Indians he was supposedly guarding in the Pocasset Swamp were no longer there. Several hundred Pokanokets and Pocassets had been sighted almost twenty miles to the west of the Taunton River, and they were headed north toward Nipmuck country.

After fleeing across Mount Hope Bay to the Pocasset Swamp, Philip realized that he must escape from Plymouth Colony. Otherwise the Pokanokets would, as Cudworth had predicted, begin to starve to death. He must find a way to reach his father’s old haunts among the Nipmucks, approximately sixty miles to the northwest.

They must somehow cross the Taunton River just above Mount Hope Bay and move with lightning speed past the settlements of Taunton and Rehoboth before crossing a stretch of flat, open country known as the Seekonk Plain to the Seekonk River. Once they’d forded the river, they would head north to the Nipmucks. About a hundred women, children, and elderly were judged to be too weak to complete the journey, and as the night of the escape approached, there were undoubtedly many tearful good-byes.

The English had built their fort at the southern end of the Pocasset Swamp, near where the Taunton River flows into Mount Hope Bay. Philip and Weetamoo headed north, working their way up the full seven-mile length of the swamp over ground the English considered impassable. Since the Taunton River was between them and potential freedom to the west, and they no longer had any canoes, this strategy had the benefit of taking them to where the river was fordable. On a night at the end of July, at dead low tide, probably in the vicinity of modern Dighton, where the river is less than an eighth of a mile wide, 250 of Philip’s and Weetamoo’s warriors, accompanied by a large number of women and children (including Philip’s wife and their eight-year-old son), prepared to cross the Taunton River. They constructed crude rafts of driftwood, and after wading out to the center of the stream, they swam and floated their way to the western bank. As dawn approached, they clambered onto shore and disappeared into the woods.