Mayflower (33 page)

As his decision to settle in the wilderness of Sakonnet might indicate, Church preferred to do things his own way. And as the Pease Field Fight had shown, he enjoyed being in charge. Being part of a vast English army was not something that appealed to him. But when General Winslow proposed that he serve as his aide, Church was unable to resist the opportunity to advise the most powerful person in Plymouth Colony.

Church and Winslow rode together to Boston. After meeting with Massachusetts officials, they headed to Dedham Plain, where more than 450 soldiers and troopers were assembling as similar groups gathered in Taunton, Plymouth, and New London. Quotas had been assigned to each colony, with 527 soldiers coming from Massachusetts, 158 from Plymouth, and 325 from Connecticut.

The Massachusetts forces were under the command of Major Appleton, a veteran of the war in the western frontier, with the companies under his command headed by Captains Moseley, Issac Johnson, Joseph Gardner, Nathaniel Davenport, and James Oliver, and a troop of horse under Captain Prentice. The Connecticut forces were under Major Treat, another veteran commander, with Captains Nathaniel Seeley, John Gallop, John Mason, and Thomas Watts heading up the companies. Plymouth’s two companies were under Captains William Bradford and John Gorham.

December 2 was declared a day of prayer throughout New England. According to Increase Mather, “the churches were all upon their knees before the Lord, the God of Armies, entreating his favor and gracious success in the undertaking.” On December 8, Winslow and his soldiers departed from Dedham. After a night at Woodcock’s garrison in modern North Attleboro, the army arrived at Seekonk along the Seekonk River. Winslow ordered Church to sail directly for their next destination, Smith’s garrison in Wickford, Rhode Island, while he led the troops on the land route through Providence. That way Church could prepare for his arrival; it also provided Church with the opportunity to share a boat ride with the redoubtable Samuel Moseley.

By this time in the war, Moseley was almost as mythic a figure as Philip himself, while Church, with the exception of the Pease Field Fight, had accomplished almost nothing. If word of Church’s righteous indignation over the enslavement of the Indians at Dartmouth and Plymouth had reached Moseley, the former privateer would undoubtedly have viewed the Plymouth carpenter as misguided and weak. It could only be hoped that General Winslow would not rely too heavily on the advice of his softhearted aide.

For his part, Church resolved to prove that he was as skilled at capturing Indians as anyone in New England. Church had been ordered to prepare for Winslow’s arrival. But instead of remaining at Smith’s garrison in Wickford, Church teamed up with some “brisk blades” from Rhode Island and set out that night in search of Indians. It was a cold December night, but they had the benefit of a nearly full moon. By sunrise the next day, Church and his men had returned to the garrison with eighteen captive Indians. As it turned out, Moseley had also been out that night, and he, too, had captured eighteen Indians.

Winslow and his army had already arrived by the time Church and Moseley returned to Wickford. “The general, pleased with the exploit,” Church wrote, “gave them thanks, particularly Mr. Church, the mover and chief actor of the business.” There were two Indian children in Church’s group, and Winslow decided to make a present of these “likely boys” and send them to friends in Boston. The general grinned at Church and said that “his faculty would supply them with Indians boys enough before the war was ended.” As Winslow had made clear last August, slaves were one of the spoils of war.

Moseley had captured an Indian named Peter, who because of a falling-out with one of the Narragansett sachems was willing to talk. Peter claimed the tribe possessed a total of three thousand “fighting men,” most of them gathered together with their women and children in the depths of a giant swamp to the southwest. As the English had learned in pursuing Philip, under normal conditions it was almost impossible to fight the Indians in a swamp. But these were not normal conditions. It had been a bitterly cold December, so cold that the wet-lands had frozen solid. As a consequence, Winslow could now take his army just about anywhere. The real problem was how to find the Narragansetts. It was true that there were no leaves on the trees, but the swamplands around modern Kingston, Rhode Island, were still so dense with undergrowth that even the most experienced guide would have difficulty navigating them to the Indians’ lair. Peter, however, claimed he could find it.

For them to move on the Narragansetts, Winslow had to march his army south to Jireh Bull’s garrison in modern Narragansett, Rhode Island. From there it should be a six-to seven-mile march to the swamp. But on December 15, Winslow received disturbing news. The Indians had attacked the garrison, killing fifteen people and burning it to the ground, effectively robbing him of a location from which to launch the attack. Even more troubling was that the Connecticut soldiers under the command of Major Treat had not yet arrived. Two days later, Winslow learned that Treat and 300 English and 150 friendly Mohegan and Pequot Indians had arrived at the burned-out shell of Bull’s garrison. The next day, Winslow’s force set out to the south, arriving at the garrison around five in the evening.

The next day was a Sunday, but Winslow decided he had no choice but to attack. Otherwise his entire army might freeze and starve to death. The frigid temperatures had frozen in the supply ships that were to provide his soldiers with food. Most of his men had only enough provisions to last them a single day. With the garrison in ruins, his army had no shelter during one of the coldest nights in New England’s history. The temperature was not only bitterly cold, it had begun to snow. “That night was very snowy,” Captain Oliver wrote. “We lay a thousand in the open field that long night.” By morning, the snow was two to three feet deep. Even before the men headed out at 5
A.M.
, the hands of many were so frostbitten that they were unable to work their muskets.

For eight hours they marched without stop through the drifting snow, with Moseley’s company in the lead and with the soldiers from Connecticut taking up the rear. What was to have been just a seven-mile trek proved more than double that as the army was forced to follow a circuitous route along the high ground to the north. Finally, around 1 p.m., they came to the edge of a dense swamp. Indians began to fire from the trees and bushes, and Peter announced that they had arrived at their destination. Winslow appears to have had no particular plan of what to do next. Two Massachusetts companies, led by Captains Johnson and Davenport, pursued the Indians into the swamp “without,” Hubbard wrote, “staying for word of command, as if everyone were ambitious who should go first.”

They had not gone far when they were presented with a truly aweinspiring sight. Ahead of them, looming above the frozen, snow-covered swamp, was a huge wooden fort. No one had ever seen anything quite like it. Set on a five-acre island and containing approximately five hundred wigwams and thousands of Indians, the fort combined elements of Native and European design. In addition to a palisade wall of vertically planted tree trunks, the fort was surrounded by a sixteen-foot-thick “hedge” of clay and brushwork. At the fort’s corners and exposed points were flankers and what the English described as blockhouses—structures made of tree branches from which the Indians could fire at anyone attempting to scale the wall. The fort had a single point of entry, where a massive tree trunk spanned a moatlike sheet of frozen water. Any Englishman who attempted to cross the tree trunk would be picked off by the Indians long before he made it into the fort. If they had any hope of breaching the wall, they must find another way in.

Peter, their Indian guide, was not sure whether there was, in fact, an alternative entrance. Hubbard later insisted that it was God who led the English to the one place where there was a possibility of piercing the Indians’ defenses. In a remote corner of the fort there was a section that appeared to be unfinished. Instead of vertical logs and a thick clay barrier, there was a section of horizontally laid tree trunks that was just four feet high and wide enough for several men to scramble into the fort at a time. But what soon became known as the “trees of death” was probably not, as the English assumed, an unfinished portion of the fort. Rather than an Achilles’ heel, it may have been an intentional feature designed to direct the English to a single, defensible point. On either side of the gap were flankers, where Indians equipped with muskets could rake any soldiers who dared to storm the opening; there was also a blockhouse directly across from the opening to dispose of anyone who managed to enter the fort. If the Narragansetts’ supplies of gunpowder had held out throughout that long afternoon, the English would have come to realize just how ingenious the design of this fort really was.

In the end, the fort provided eloquent proof of who were the true aggressors in this conflict. Instead of joining the Pokanokets and Nipmucks, the Narragansetts had spent the fall and winter doing everything in their power to defend themselves against an unprovoked Puritan attack. If ever there was a defensive structure, it was this fort, and now a thousand English soldiers were about to do their best to annihilate a community of more than three thousand Indian men, women, and children, who asked only to be left alone.

As soldiers spread themselves along the perimeter and poured shot at the fort, the companies led by Captains Johnson and Davenport prepared to go in. With the officers leading the way, they charged the four-foot-high section of the fort. As soon as Johnson reached the logs, he was shot dead. Captain Davenport was wearing “a very good buff suit,” and it was believed the Indians mistook him for General Winslow himself. He was hit three times, and after handing his musket to his lieutenant, died of his wounds. The fire from the flankers and blockhouse was so fierce that those soldiers who were not already dead fell on their faces and waited for reinforcements.

It was now time for Captains Moseley and Gardner to give it a try. Moseley later bragged that once inside the fort he saw the muskets of fifty different Indians all trained on him. Moseley survived the onslaught, but his men were unable to make any significant progress into the fort.

Next came Major Appleton and Captain Oliver. Instead of a helterskelter rush, they organized their men into “a storming column.” Crying out, “[T]he Indians are running!” Appleton’s and Oliver’s men were able to push past their comrades from Massachusetts-Bay and take the flanker on the left side of the entrance. In addition to reducing the deadliness of the Indians’ fire by approximately a third, the capture of the flanker provided the soldiers with some much-needed protection.

Holding his own Plymouth companies in reserve, Winslow sent in the soldiers from Connecticut. Although one of the flankers had been taken, no one had informed the Connecticut officers of the danger posed by the blockhouse directly opposite the entrance. Major Treat and his men ran headlong into fire so deadly that four of five Connecticut captains were killed. The soldiers were, in Hubbard’s words, “enraged rather than discouraged by the loss of their commanders,” and pushed on into the fort.

As the fighting raged on, Benjamin Church began to regret his decision not to lead a company of his own. “[I]mpatient of being out of the heat of the action, he importunately begged leave of the general that he might run down to the assistance of his friends.” Winslow reluctantly yielded to his request, provided that Church take some soldiers with him. Thirty Plymouth men instantly volunteered, and Church and his makeshift company were on their way into battle.

Church had no sooner entered the fort than he saw “many men and several valiant captains lie slain.” There were also many Indian bodies, with more than fifty corpses piled high in a corner of the fort. To his left, fighting amid the wigwams, was a friend of Church’s, Captain Gardner of Salem. Church called out to Gardner, and the two men exchanged glances when the captain suddenly slumped to the ground. Church ran up to him and, seeing blood trickle down Gardner’s cheek, lifted up his cap. Gardner looked up at Church but “spoke not a word.” A bullet had passed through his skull, and before Church could say anything, Gardner was dead.