Mayflower (42 page)

Church was expected to hunt down and kill these two notorious warriors, but he had other ideas. He had recently been contacted by Massachusetts-Bay about assisting the colony against the Abenakis in Maine, where fighting still raged. With Tuspaquin and Annawon at his side, Church believed, he might be able to subdue the hitherto unconquerable Abenakis.

On August 29, he learned that the Black Sachem was in the region known as Lakenham, about six miles west of Plymouth. But after two days of searching, he’d only managed to take Tuspaquin’s wife and children. He left a message for the sachem with two old Nemasket women that Tuspaquin “should be his captain over his Indians if he [proved to be] so stout a man as they reported him to be.” With luck, Tuspaquin would turn himself in at Plymouth, and Church would have a new Native officer.

About a week later, word came from Taunton that Annawon and his men had been seen at Mount Hope. On Thursday, September 7, Church and just five Englishmen, including his trusted lieutenant Jabez Howland, and twenty Indians left Plymouth in search of Annawon.

They ranged about Mount Hope for several days and took a large number of Indians near the abandoned English fort. When Lightfoot came up with the idea of using the fort as a temporary prison, Church took some consolation in the fact that this misbegotten structure had finally been put to good use.

One of the captive Indians reported that his father and a girl had just come from Annawon’s headquarters. The old man and the girl were hidden in a nearby swamp, and the captive offered to take Church to them. Leaving Howland and most of the company with the prisoners, Church and a handful of men went in search of the prisoner’s father.

That afternoon they found the old man and the girl, each of whom was carrying a basket of provisions. They reported that Annawon and about fifty to sixty men were lodged in Squannakonk Swamp several miles to the north between Taunton and Rehoboth. If they left immediately, they could be there by sundown.

Church was in a quandary as to what to do next. He had only half a dozen men with him. Annawon had a reputation as one of Philip’s fiercest warriors, and the Indians said that he had let it be known “that he would never be taken alive.” What’s more, his men were “resolute fellows [and] some of Philip’s chief soldiers.” To take them on with just six men was madness.

But Church might never have this good a chance again. As he knew from experience, Annawon was exceedingly difficult to track down. He changed his camp every night and was, in Church’s words, “a very subtle man.” If they left immediately, the old man and the girl could take them directly to the warrior. If they waited until tomorrow, he would be gone.

Church asked his men if they were willing to “give Annawon a visit.” Most of them assented, but one of the Sakonnets pointed out “that it would be a pity that after all the great things [Church] had done, he should throw away his life at last.” In the end, however, Church believed the Lord was on his side. He had “no doubt,” he told his men, “that if they would cheerfully go with him the same almighty providence that had hitherto protected and befriended them would do so still.” In one voice, the Sakonnets said, “We will go.” Church then turned to the only Englishman in the company, Caleb Cook, and asked what he thought. “Sir,” Cook replied, “I am never afraid of going anywhere when you are with me.” And so, with the elderly Indian captive and the girl leading the way, they left for Annawon’s encampment.

The two guides walked so briskly over the swampy ground that Church and the rest of the company had difficulty keeping up. The old man insisted that since Church had given him his life, he had no choice but to serve him, and if Church’s plan was to work, they needed to get there as swiftly as possible.

They had been traveling for several hours when their guides suddenly stopped and sat down. The old man explained that Annawon always sent out scouts at sunset “to see if the coast were clear.” Only after it was completely dark could they resume their journey. As they waited for night, Church asked the old man if he would take a gun and fight for him. The Indian bowed low and said he was willing to lead Church to Annawon, but he would not take up arms against his “old friend.” Church agreed to respect his wishes, and they continued on through the dark.

They had not gone far when they heard a rhythmic beating noise. The Sakonnets instantly recognized it as the pounding of a mortar. Annawon’s women were grinding corn in preparation for supper.

The old man explained that Annawon had set up camp at the base of a steep rock. A surrounding swamp prevented access from any other point. Church and the old man crept up to the edge of the rock. They could see the flickering fires of Annawon’s people. There were three different groups, with “the great Annawon” and his son and several others lodged nearest the rock. Their food was cooking on the fires, and Church noticed that their guns were leaning together against a horizontal branch and that a mat had been placed over the weapons to protect them from the dew. He also noticed that Annawon’s feet and his son’s head were almost touching the muskets.

A nineteenth-century engraving depicting Church’s capture of Annawon

Church had become a master at using audacity as a tactical weapon. No one in his right mind would dare enter Annawon’s camp down the face of this rock. But if he could hide himself behind his two Indian guides, who were known to Annawon and his warriors, he might be able to secure the Indians’ guns before they realized who he was.

With the two guides leading the way, Church and his men climbed down the rock face, sometimes clutching at the bushes to keep from falling down the steep descent and using the beat of the mortar to conceal the sounds of their approach. As soon as he reached the ground, Church strode over to the gun rack with his hatchet in his hand. Seeing who it was, Annawon’s son pulled his blanket over his head and “shrunk up in a heap.” Annawon leaped to his feet and cried out “Howoh” or “Who?” Seeing that the Englishman could easily bludgeon his son, Annawon fell back in despair as Church secured the muskets. Now that he had captured Annawon, Church sent the Sakonnets to the other campsites to inform the Indians that their leader had been taken and that Church and “his great army” would grant them good quarter if they gave up quietly. As it turned out, many of the enemy were related to the Sakonnets and were more than willing to take them at their word, and Church and his company of half a dozen men had soon secured a complete and bloodless surrender.

Church then turned to Annawon and through an interpreter asked what he had to eat—“for,” he said, “I am come to sup with you.” In a booming voice, Annawon replied, “Taubut,” or “It is good.”

Sprinkling some of the salt that he carried with him in his pocket on the meat, Church enjoyed some roasted beef and ground green corn. Once the meal had been completed, he told Annawon that as long as his people cooperated they would all be allowed to live, with the possible exception of Annawon, whose fate must be decided by the Plymouth courts.

As the excitement wore away, Church realized he desperately needed sleep. He’d been awake now for two days straight. He told his men that if they let him sleep for two hours, he would keep watch for the rest of the night. But as soon as he lay down for a nap, he discovered that he was once again wide awake. After an hour or so, he looked up and saw that not only his own men but all of the Indians were fast asleep, with one exception: Annawon.

For another hour, they lay on opposite sides of the fire “looking one upon the other.” Since Church did not know the Indians’ language, and, he assumed, Annawon did not know English, neither one of them had anything to say. Suddenly the old warrior threw off his blanket and walked off into the darkness. Church assumed he had left to relieve himself, but when he did not return for several minutes, he feared he might be up to no good. Church sidled over to Annawon’s son. If his father should attempt to attack him, he would use the young man as a hostage.

A full moon had risen, and in the ghostly silver light he saw Annawon approaching with something in his hands. The Indian came up to Church and dropped to his knees, and holding up a woven basket, he said in perfect English, “Great Captain, you have killed Philip and conquered his country, for I believe that I and my company are the last that war against the English, so [I] suppose the war is ended by your means and therefore these things belong unto you.”

Inside the basket were several belts of wampum. One was nine inches wide and depicted flowers, birds, and animals. Church was now standing, and when Annawon draped the belt over his shoulders, it reached down to his ankles. The next belt was one that Philip had commonly wrapped around his head and possessed flags that had hung at his back; the third had been intended for his chest and contained a star at either end. All of the belts had been edged with red, possibly human hair that Annawon said had been secured in Mohawk country. There were also two glazed powder horns and a rich red blanket. These, Annawon explained, were what Philip “was wont to adorn himself with when he sat in state.”

The two warriors talked late into the night. Annawon spoke with particular fondness of his service under Philip’s father, Massasoit, and “what mighty success he had formerly in wars against many nations of Indians.” They also spoke of Philip. Annawon blamed the outbreak of hostilities on two factors: the duplicity of the Praying Indians, i.e., John Sassamon, and the impetuosity of the young warriors. He compared them to “sticks laid on a heap, till by the multitude of them a great fire came to be kindled.” He also spoke of spiritual matters. Annawon said that the course of the war had convinced him that “there was a great god that overruled all; and that he had found that whatever he had done to any of those, whether Indians or English, the same was brought upon himself in after-time.”

At daybreak, Church marched his prisoners to Taunton, where he met up with Lieutenant Howland, “who expressed a great deal of joy to see him again and said ’twas more than ever he expected.” The next day, Church sent Howland with the majority of the prisoners to Plymouth. In the meantime, he wanted Annawon to meet his friends in Rhode Island. They remained in Newport for several days and then finally left for Plymouth.

In just two months’ time, Church had brought in a total of seven hundred Indians. He hoped that the debt the colony owed him might make Governor Winslow listen to his pleas that Annawon and, if he should turn himself in, Tuspaquin be granted clemency. He could use them Down East.

Massachusetts governor John Leverett had requested to meet with him to discuss the possibility of his leading a company in Maine, and Church quickly left for Boston. But when he returned to Plymouth a few days later, he discovered “to his grief” that the heads of both Annawon and Tuspaquin had joined Philip’s on the palisades of Fort Hill.

A
S EARLY AS
the fall of 1675, they had begun to sail from the coast of New England: the slave ships. It began in September when a Captain Sprague departed from Plymouth with 178 Indians. By July of 1676, Plymouth had formalized the process of removing potentially dangerous Native men and boys by determining that “no male captive above the age of fourteen years should reside in the colony.” That fall, the English were not sure what to do with Philip’s nine-yearold son. Some ministers argued that the Bible granted the magistrates the power to execute the boy; others insisted on a more moderate course. In the end, Philip’s son, like his mother before him, was shipped off as a slave.

It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip’s War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope, once the crowded Native heart of the colony, was virtually empty of inhabitants. Fifty-six years after the sailing of the
Mayflower,
the Pilgrims’ children had not only defeated the Pokanokets in a devastating war, they had taken conscious, methodical measures to purge the land of its people.

In the years before the war, Native Americans had constituted almost 30 percent of the population of New England. By 1680, they made up less than 15 percent. But if the English had succeeded in asserting their demographic dominance, the war was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory for the colonists. The crushing tax burden required to pay for the conflict stifled the region’s economy. When the Mount Hope Peninsula went up for sale in 1680, there were no Plymouth residents with the resources to purchase it, and the land went to a group of investors from Boston. Not for another hundred years would the average per-capita income in New England return to what it had been before King Philip’s War.

John Foster’s 1677 map of New England

The war that was to have removed forever the threat of Indian attack had achieved exactly the opposite of its original intention. By cutting such a wide and blood-soaked swath between themselves and the Indians, New Englanders had thrown the region out of balance. Without “friend Indians” to buffer them from their enemies, those living in the frontier were left open to attack. Over the course of the following century, New England was ravaged by a series of Indian wars. Unable to defend themselves, the colonies that had once operated as an autonomous enclave of Puritanism were forced to look to the British Crown for assistance. Within a decade of King Philip’s War, James II had appointed a royal governor to rule over New England, and in 1692 Plymouth became a part of Massachusetts. By doing their best to destroy the Native people who had welcomed and sustained their forefathers, New Englanders had destroyed their forefathers’ way of life.

The Pilgrims had come to America not to conquer a continent but to re-create their modest communities in Scrooby and in Leiden. When they arrived at Plymouth in December 1620 and found it emptied of people, it seemed as if God had given them exactly what they were looking for. But as they quickly discovered during that first terrifying fall and winter, New England was far from uninhabited. There were still plenty of Native people, and to ignore or anger them was to risk annihilation. The Pilgrims’ religious beliefs played a dominant role in the decades ahead, but it was their deepening relationship with the Indians that turned them into Americans.

By forcing the English to improvise, the Indians prevented Plymouth Colony from ossifying into a monolithic cult of religious extremism. For their part, the Indians were profoundly influenced by the English and quickly created a new and dynamic culture full of Native and Western influences. For a nation that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century, however, the attitudes of many of the Indians and English had begun to change. With only a fraction of their original homeland remaining, more and more young Pokanokets claimed it was time to rid themselves of the English. The Pilgrims’ children, on the other hand, coveted what territory the Pokanokets still possessed and were already anticipating the day when the Indians had, through the continued effects of disease and poverty, ceased to exist. Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

For years Philip had used the promise of war as a way to appease his increasingly indignant warriors. Whenever pushed to an actual confrontation, however, he had always backed down, and it appears that as late as June 23, 1675, he held out hope that war might once again be averted. But instead of providing Philip with the support he so desperately needed to control his warriors, Governor Winslow only made matters worse. Indeed, it was his callous prosecution of Tobias and the others, for Sassamon’s murder, that triggered the outbreak of violence. By refusing to acknowledge that Philip’s troubles were also
his
troubles, Winslow was as responsible as anyone for King Philip’s War.

In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others. But from the moment Massasoit decided to become the Pilgrims’ ally, New England belonged to no single group. For peace and for survival, others must be accommodated. The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors—and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed—they risked losing everything. It was a lesson that Bradford and Massasoit had learned over the course of more than three long decades. That it could be so quickly forgotten by their children remains a lesson for us today.

King Philip’s War officially ended with the sachem’s death in 1676, but for Benjamin Church the fighting had just begun. Between 1689 and 1704, Church led five different “eastern expeditions” against the French and Indians in Maine. Joining him on these forays into the wilderness were many of the Sakonnets who had fought at his side against Philip, as well as Church’s literal child of war, Constant, who served as one of his captains. By the outbreak of Queen Anne’s War in 1702, Church had grown so fat that he required the help of two assistants as he waddled over the forest trails he had once bounded across as a young man.

In 1716, with the help of his son Thomas, he published
Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War.
By that time Mary Rowlandson’s book about her Indian captivity had gone through multiple editions. But another book, William Bradford’s
Of Plymouth Plantation,
still remained in manuscript. After being consulted by a variety of historians working on books about New England, including King Philip’s War chroniclers Increase Mather and William Hubbard, the calfskin-bound manuscript was lent by Bradford’s grandson Samuel to the Reverend Thomas Prince, who in 1728 placed it in his library in the steeple of the Old South Church in Boston. There it was to remain for the next four decades.

The Native peoples of southern New England left no known contemporary narrative of what happened to them after the arrival of the
Mayflower.
But that does not mean that no Indian accounts exist. Instead of the written word, the Native Americans relied on oral traditions, and almost as soon as the English came to America they began recording the Indians’ stories and legends.

The Indians on Cape Cod and the islands, who came to be known as the Wampanoags, told the legend of Maushop, a mythical giant who had many of the characteristics of a Native leader. In the beginning Maushop was a generous friend to his people, but as the years passed, he underwent a troubling change. He began to extort unreasonable amounts of tribute and created discord where he had once helped make peace. He also began to quarrel with his own family. “He would beat his old woman for nothing,” one version of the legend claimed, “and his children for a great deal less.”

One day, while his five children were playing on the beach near their home on Aquinnah, on the west end of Martha’s Vineyard, Maushop drew his huge toe across the sand. Seawater rushed toward his four sons and one daughter, and as the ocean rose around them, the boys lifted up their sister in a desperate attempt to save her. Just as they were about to drown, Maushop turned them into killer whales and commanded his sons to look after their sister.

Maushop’s wife was disconsolate, and her incessant weeping so angered the giant that he picked her up and threw her all the way to the rocky shore of Sakonnet, where she lived out the rest of her life begging for help from those who passed by in their canoes. Eventually she changed into a stone, and when the English arrived, they broke off her head and arms. By that time, Maushop had disappeared, “nobody knew whither.” His wife, on the other hand, remains in Sakonnet to this day—a disfigured rock at the edge of the sea.

By the time this legend was first recorded in the eighteenth century, the Indians of Cape Cod and the islands had been reduced to several hundred people, most of them living on reservations in the towns of Mashpee on the Cape and in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard. Despite Benjamin Church’s efforts to provide for them, the Sakonnets had dwindled from an estimated four hundred in 1700 to just six men and nineteen women by 1774.

In the years ahead, the legend of Maushop, like the legend of the Pilgrim Fathers, would soften into a benign and upbeat version of what had originally been a far more disturbing story. The early versions of the legend, recorded between 1792 and 1829, reflect the anger, fear, dislocation, and loss the Indians of the region felt in the wake of a war that had forced them to fight against their own people.

In the nineteenth century, the Indians of southern New England preferred to remember King Philip’s War as a strictly Indian-versus-English conflict. But for those who actually experienced the war or knew those who had, it was not a question of us against them; it was more like being part of a family that had been destroyed by the frightening, inexplicable actions of a once trusted and beloved father.

In 1741, the ninety-five-year-old Thomas Faunce asked to be carried in a litter to the Plymouth waterfront. Faunce had heard that a pier was about to be built over an undistinguished rock at the tide line near Town Brook. With tears in his eyes, Faunce proclaimed that he had been told by his father, who had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, that the boulder was where the Pilgrims had first landed. Thus was born the legend of Plymouth Rock.

In 1769, a group of Plymouth residents formed the Old Colony Club and designated December 22 as Forefathers’ Day in celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims on the Rock. Their first meeting was held at Thomas Southworth Howland’s tavern on Cole’s Hill, but as political differences came to the fore in the years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, the club’s membership, most of whom were Loyalists, decided to disband. It was left to the opposing faction, the Sons of Liberty, to seize upon, literally it turned out, Plymouth Rock.

Despite Faunce’s tearful testimony, a solid-fill pier had been built over the Rock. A small portion of the boulder, however, still poked above the sandy surface of the wharf, and on Forefathers’ Day in 1774 Colonel Theophilus Cotton arrived with the manpower and equipment required to extract the Rock, like a bad tooth, from the pier. But as Cotton and the Sons of Liberty attempted to load the Rock onto an awaiting wagon, disaster struck. The Rock broke in half—a metaphor, some sages insisted, for the looming split between the American colonies and Britain. Cotton and his men left the bottom, and presumably Loyalist, half of the Rock in the ground, and lugged the other piece to the town square, where they deposited it beside a newly raised liberty pole.

An 1853 daguerreotype of Hedge’s Wharf in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a group of citizens stand behind the exposed portion of Plymouth Rock

The Pilgrims were once again relevant, but so were Benjamin Church and Mary Rowlandson. Updated editions of their books appeared as their struggle against the Indians came to represent the colonists’ fight for independence. As it turned out, Church’s grandson, also named Benjamin Church, was found guilty of secretly abetting the British during the siege of Boston. The region’s Native Americans, on the other hand, proved more loyal to the cause of American liberty and freedom. An Indian from Rhode Island named Simeon Simon, who was reported to be a direct descendant of Massasoit, fought beside George Washington for all eight years of the Revolution.