Mayflower (40 page)

In many ways, he was his father’s son. In the 1620s, Governor Bradford had objected to Thomas Morton’s gambols with the Indians around the maypole at Merrymount. A half century later, Major Bradford had little patience for Church’s unorthodox and reckless method of fighting both with and against the Indians. But Bradford was too forthright and humble not to give the man he called “cousin” his due. Church might be prideful and more than a little cavalier with the lives of his men, but he was winning the war. On July 24, Bradford replied to a letter he’d just received from the Reverend John Cotton, who had apparently praised Church’s most recent triumphs.

As it turned out, Bradford did not succeed in taking the Pokanoket sachem on July 25. As the major had surely come to suspect, God had, in his infinite and unfathomable wisdom, reserved that honor for Benjamin Church.

On Sunday, July 30, Church took a brief respite from the war to worship at the meetinghouse in Plymouth. But before the conclusion of the service, the Reverend John Cotton was interrupted by a messenger from Josiah Winslow, who had just ridden in from Marshfield. The governor needed to speak with Captain Church.

A “great army of Indians” had been seen massing on the eastern shore of the Taunton River. If they succeeded in crossing the river, the towns of Taunton and Bridgewater would be in danger. Winslow requested that Church “immediately…rally what of his company he could.” Church leaped into action but, finding no provisions in the town’s storehouse, was forced to jog from house to house collecting what bread the goodwives of Plymouth were willing to donate to the cause.

As Church and his company of eighteen Englishmen and twenty-two Indians made their way toward Bridgewater, a handful of the town’s militia were already out on a reconnaissance mission of their own. They were approaching the Taunton River when they heard some suspicious noises. They soon discovered that the Indians had felled a huge tree across the river and were at that very moment beginning to cross over toward Bridgewater. There were two Indians on the tree, an old man with the traditional long hair of a Native American and a younger man with his hair cut short in the style of a Praying Indian. One of the militiamen shot and killed the older Indian, and the younger one, who was lugging a container of gunpowder, tossed the powder into the bushes and escaped back into the forest on the eastern shore of the river. The dead Indian turned out to be Akkompoin, Philip’s uncle and one of the sachem’s most trusted counsellors. They later learned that the other Indian had been Philip himself. In an effort to disguise himself, he had cut off his hair, and for the moment at least, the change in hairstyle had saved his life.

Many of his subjects were not so lucky that day. After more than a year of unrelenting hardship, Philip’s people were exhausted, starving, and dispirited. Conditions had become particularly difficult in the last month. With the appearance of Church’s company in early July, the swamps that had once provided them with a place of refuge were no longer safe. With no way to protect their children, the Indians had been reduced to the most terrible and desperate extreme a people can ever know. William Hubbard reported that “it is certainly affirmed that several of their young children were killed by themselves, that they might not be betrayed by their crying or be hindered with them in their flight.” Another source claimed that the children’s parents had resorted to hiring “a cruel woman among them to kill their children; she killed a hundred in one day.”

The Bridgewater militiamen reported that the Indians they met on Monday, July 31, were so stunned and terror-struck that many of them were helpless to defend themselves. According to one account, “Some of the Indians acknowledged that their arms shook and trembled so that they could not so readily discharge their guns as they would have done.” Ten Indians were shot dead with loaded muskets in their hands, while fifteen others “threw down their guns and submitted themselves to the English.” For many of the Indians, there was no reason left to continue.

Early the next morning, Church and his company set out from Bridgewater. They had recruited several men from the local militia, and one of these “brisk lads” guided them to where the Indians had laid the tree across the river. Church and one of his men crept in among the leafy branches of the fallen tree. Looking across the river, they saw an Indian sitting on the tree’s stump—an unusual thing for a hostile Indian to be doing the morning after the encounter with the Bridgewater militia. Church took aim, but his Native companion told him to hold his fire; he believed it might be a friendly Indian. But when the Indian, apparently hearing them, glanced in their direction, the Sakonnet immediately realized it was Philip. He fired his musket, but it was too late. The sachem had rolled off the stump and escaped into the woods.

Church and his men ran across the tree and soon came upon a group of women and children that included Philip’s wife and nine-year-old son. There was a fresh trail south, and the prisoners informed him that it had been left by sachem Quinnapin and his people, who had resolved to return home to the western shore of Narragansett Bay. But where was Philip? The prisoners claimed that they did not know, “for he fled in a great fright when the first English gun was fired, and they had none of them seen or heard anything of him since.”

Leaving some of his men with the prisoners, Church and the rest of the company headed down the trail, hopeful that they might overtake the enemy. It was a muggy summer day, and after several miles of running along the eastern bank of the river, their clothes were drenched in sweat. They came to a shallow portion of the river, where they could tell the Narragansetts had crossed to the other side. The water reached up to their armpits, but they quickly forded the river and continued the pursuit.

But after another mile, Church realized that given the importance of the prisoners he now had in his possession, he must return to the downed tree and get them back to Bridgewater before dark. His Sakonnets, however, were reluctant to give up the chase. They explained that Awashonks’s brother had been killed by the Narragansetts, and they wanted revenge. Church designated a Sakonnet named Lightfoot as their captain and “bid them go and quit themselves like men.” “[A]way they scampered,” Church wrote, “like so many horses.”

The next morning Lightfoot and his men returned with thirteen prisoners. They had caught up to the Narrangansetts and killed several of them and “rejoiced much at the opportunity of avenging themselves.” Church sent the prisoners on to Bridgewater and, with the Sakonnets leading the way, resumed the search for Philip.

They came upon an abandoned encampment that convinced them the Pokanokets were close at hand. Moving quickly through the woods, they discovered a large number of women and children who were too tired to keep up with the main body of Indians up ahead. The prisoners reported that “Philip with a great number of the enemy were a little before.” It was getting late in the day, but Church was loath to give up the chase. He told the Sakonnets to inform their prisoners that “if they would submit to order and be still, no one should hurt them.”

As night descended, they could hear the sounds of Philip’s men chopping wood and setting up camp. Drawing his men and prisoners in a ring, Church informed them that they were going to spend the night sitting quietly in the swamp. If any prisoner attempted to escape, Church would “immediately kill them all.”

Just before daybreak, Church explained to the prisoners that he and his men were about to attack Philip. He had no one he could spare to guard them, but he assured them that it was in their best interests not to escape. Once the fighting was over, they were to follow their trail and once again surrender themselves. Otherwise, he would hunt them down and kill them all.

He sent out two Sakonnet scouts just as, it turned out, Philip sent two scouts of his own. Philip’s men spotted the Sakonnets and were soon running back to camp, making “the most hideous noise they could invent.” By the time Church and his men arrived, the Pokanokets had fled into a nearby swamp, leaving their kettles boiling and meat roasting on the fire.

Church left some of his men at the place where the Indians had entered the swamp, then led a group of soldiers around one side of the morass while Isaac Howland took another group around the other side. Once they had positioned men at regular intervals around the entire perimeter of the swamp, Church and Howland rendezvoused at the farthest point just as a large number of the enemy emerged from the swamp’s interior.

Hopelessly outnumbered, Church and his handful of soldiers could easily have been overrun and massacred by the Pokanokets. Suddenly, a Sakonnet named Matthias shouted out in the Indians’ own language, “If you fire one shot, you are all dead men!” Mathias went on to claim that they had a large force and had the swamp completely surrounded.

Many of the Pokanokets did as their brethren had done just a day before: astonished, they stood motionless as Church’s men took the loaded muskets from their hands. Not far from the swamp was a depression of land that Church compared to a “punchbowl.” He directed the prisoners to jump down into the hollow, and with only a few men standing guard—all of them triple-armed with guns taken from the Indians—he plunged back into the swamp to find Philip.

Almost immediately, Church found himself virtually face-to-face with the Pokanoket leader and several of his warriors. By this point, the sachem’s behavior was entirely predictable. When cornered or confronted, Philip invariably ran. As Church and two Sakonnets engaged the Pokanoket warriors, Philip turned and fled back to the entrance of the swamp. This might have been the end of the sachem. But one of the men Church had left waiting in ambush outside the swamp was a notorious drunkard named Thomas Lucas. Whether or not he had just taken a nip, Lucas was, in Church’s words, not “as careful as he might have been about his stand.” Instead of killing the enemy, Lucas was gunned down by the Pokanokets, and Philip escaped.

In the meantime, Church had his hands full in the swamp. Two enemy warriors surrendered, but the third, whom Church described as “a great stout surly fellow with his two locks tied up with red [cloth] and a great rattlesnake skin hanging to the back part of his head,” refused to give up. This, it turned out, was Totoson, the sachem who had attacked Dartmouth and the Clark garrison. While the Sakonnets guarded the others, Church chased Totoson. It looked as if the sachem might escape, so Church stopped to fire his musket. Unfortunately it was a damp morning, and Church’s musket refused to go off. Seeing his opportunity, Totoson spun around and aimed
his
musket, but it, too, failed to fire. Once again, the chase was on.

Church momentarily lost him in the undergrowth but was soon back on the trail. They were running through some particularly dense bushes when the Indian tripped on a grapevine and fell flat on his face. Before he could get back up, Church raised the barrel of his musket and killed him with a single blow to the head. But as Church soon discovered, this was not Totoson. The sachem had somehow eluded Church, and filled with rage, Totoson was now coming up from behind and “flying at him like a dragon.” Just in the nick of time, the Sakonnets opened fire. The bullets came very close to killing the person they were intended to save (Church claimed “he felt the wind of them” ), but they had the desired effect. Totoson abandoned his attempt to kill the English captain and escaped into the swamp.

They had not succeeded in capturing Philip or, for that matter, Totoson, but Church’s band of eighteen English soldiers and twenty-two Sakonnets had nonetheless managed one of the more spectacular feats of the war. Once the fighting had ended, and they had rounded up all their prisoners, they discovered that they had taken a grand total of 173 Indians.

Church asked some of them if they could tell him anything about their sachem. “Sir,” one of them replied, “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.”

When they reached Bridgewater that night, the only place that could accommodate all the prisoners was the pound, a fenced-in area used to collect the town’s herds of sheep and cattle. The Sakonnets were assigned guard duty, and Church made sure to provide both the guards and their prisoners with food and drink. “[T]hey had a merry night,” Church remembered, “and the prisoners laughed as loud as the soldiers, not [having been] so [well] treated [in] a long time.”

On Sunday, August 6, two days after Church delivered his prisoners to Plymouth, Weetamoo and what remained of her Pocasset followers were in the vicinity of Taunton when a group of local militiamen attacked. The English took twenty-six prisoners, but Weetamoo escaped.

Soon after, she attempted to cross the Taunton River, but before she reached Pocasset on the eastern shore, her rickety raft broke apart, and she drowned. A day or two later her naked body was discovered on the shore of Gardner’s Neck, once the village site of her father, Corbitant. Not knowing who it was, an Englishman cut off the woman’s head and sent it on to Taunton. Upon its arrival, the nameless head was placed upon a pole within sight of the Indians taken prisoner just a few days before. Soon enough, the residents of Taunton knew whose head it was. According to Increase Mather, the Pocassets “made a most horrid and diabolical lamentation, crying out that it was their Queen’s head.”