“The shoutOf battle, the barbarian yell, the brayOf dissonant instruments, the clang of arms,The shriek of agony, the groan of death,In one wild uproar and continued din,Shake the still air.”Southey’sMadoc.
“The shoutOf battle, the barbarian yell, the brayOf dissonant instruments, the clang of arms,The shriek of agony, the groan of death,In one wild uproar and continued din,Shake the still air.”Southey’sMadoc.
“The shout
Of battle, the barbarian yell, the bray
Of dissonant instruments, the clang of arms,
The shriek of agony, the groan of death,
In one wild uproar and continued din,
Shake the still air.”
Southey’sMadoc.
’Tis related of a certain keeper of wild beasts at Florence, that, after he had entertained the spectators in the amphitheatre with their encounters on the stage, he had a strange device for forcing them back into their dens. A wooden machine, painted in the image of a great green dragon, with two lighted torches protruding from its sockets as eyes, and vomiting sulphurous flame, was wheeled into the midst of the herd, and before this onset the fiercest animal crawled howling to his cell.
’Tis an emblem of despotism; it is government coercing men by fraud and fear, by appeals to the ignorant and brutish instincts. The Pilgrim Fathers took a long stride away from that ugly ideal. They developed a nobler type of civil polity; and in nothing was their temper and Christianity more firmly shown than in their treatment of the Indians, whom they regarded as the orphaned wards of civilization. They were uniformly gentle and obligingto the savage tribes, and they were invariably and inflexibly just in treatment and in requisition. Take this for an illustration: In 1636, an Indian who had been on a trading tour to the pale-face settlements, seated himself towards evening on the day of his return in the woods on the edge of a swamp. He had with him a parcel of coats, and five pieces of wampum, the peaceful trophies of his barter. Soon he was accosted by four white men who happened to pass. A friendly chat ensued; the pipe of peace was passed; when suddenly the whites saw the coats and the wampum. At once that meanest, most unscrupulous imp in Satan’s brood, the devil of avarice, entered their hearts—avarice, of which Decker has said,
“When all our sins are old in us,And go upon crutches, covetousnessDoes but then lie in her cradle.”
“When all our sins are old in us,And go upon crutches, covetousnessDoes but then lie in her cradle.”
“When all our sins are old in us,
And go upon crutches, covetousness
Does but then lie in her cradle.”
They determined to assassinate the dusky trader and filch his goods. Under pretence of shaking hands with him, one of the ruffians stabbed him in the thigh; this blow was followed by another, and yet another; whereupon the death-smitten savage fled. The murderers also departed; and when they were gone the Indian crawled back from his forest hiding-place and stretched himself across the trail, that he might be discovered and receive help.
This scene was enacted at Pawtucket, near Providence, but then within the precincts of Plymouth colony. Some hours after the affray, Roger Williams learned from an Indian runner that somepale faces were at Pawtucket almost starved. He at once sent the sufferers food and spirits, and a cordial invitation to visit his cabin. After some delay they came, enlisting the sympathy of their kind host by a pitiful tale of loss of way and hunger in the forest. Towards ten o’clock all retired. At midnight a loud cry was heard. The Indians clamored at the door for admittance, and to Roger Williams’ queries they replied by informing him that one of their brothers lay almost dead in the woods from wounds inflicted by a party of pale-faces. “Have you seen them?” they shouted.
Meantime, the murderers, awakened by the cries, had fled. They were pursued, and three of the four were captured, and arraigned for trial at Plymouth. A jury was empannelled, and among the twelve “good men and true” were Bradford, and Standish, and Prince, and Winslow.[924]No delay was suffered, but the trial was fair and open. The guilt of the assassins was clearly proved, and they were sentenced to be hung.[925]Three limp forms suspended from the gallows-tree a little later, gave most palpable evidence that justice covered even the tangled wilderness morasses with its ægis. It was as certain death to kill an Indian in the forests of America, as to slay a noble in the crowded streets of London.
The effect of this execution was salutary. Its strict impartiality pleased the shrewd red men. Itconvinced them of the certainty of the colonial protection. And kindred acts before had won them to surrender that most prominent trait in their habits,the avenging oftheir personal wrongs; they adjourned their injuries to the justice of the Pilgrim courts and invoked the statute, sure that
“The good need fear no law;It is his safety, and the bad man’s awe.”
“The good need fear no law;It is his safety, and the bad man’s awe.”
“The good need fear no law;
It is his safety, and the bad man’s awe.”
But now this old epoch was buried: a new one dawned. The Indian surveyed the incoming pale-face tide which seemed always to flow and never to ebb. The hunting-grounds of his people began to disappear. His own domain was restricted—there was no longer free range. A farm was here; a clearing was there; yonder stood a settler’s cabin. The “medicines” of the red men grew alarmed. They asked each other: “Where will this end?” To be sure, the settlers held their estates by purchase; but the Indians did not always understand the value of a bargain from which they reaped no benefit; nor did they at all times recognize the validity of contracts made by their sachems, perhaps without the knowledge of the tribe, and which alienated the forest acres of their immemorial inheritance.
Heated by memory and by fear, and kindled by some occasionally unfriendly acts of the colonists—for in so large a population it was impossible that all should be just and honest—many of the New England tribes grew restless and peevish. A human powder magazine yawned beneath the feet of thePilgrims; it needed but some bold hand to drop the spark to cause an explosion which might unhinge a continent.
This the Pequods essayed to do. They had long been fretful. The Connecticut colonists had befriended a rival and hated tribe, the Mohegans.[926]Sassacus, the sachem of the Pequods, and Uncas, the Mohegan sagamore, were at deadly enmity.[927]Yet Uncas was the frequent and welcome occupant of pale-face cabins from Providence in the east to the farthest onion rows which troubled the Dutchmen in the west. The Pequods panted for revenge. They began to intrigue for a war of extermination. Embassies were despatched to inveigle neighboring tribes into an alliance against the ever-encroaching pale-faces. At the camp-fires of the Wampanoags, and in the wigwams of the Narragansetts, the Pequod orators pleaded their wrongs, sneered at the whites, and depicted the ferocious pleasures of the war-path to many a credulous and eager listener.
The forests became pregnant with insurrection, and at last a faint whisper of the impending peril reached the settlements. White Massachusetts shivered. Sir Harry Vane, knowing the influence of Roger Williams with the Indians, wrote him urgently to balk the Pequod embassadors among the Narragansetts.[928]At once the founder of Rhode Island set out; alone in his canoe, through a cutting, stormywind, he pulled across the bay to the forest haunt of Canonicus and Miantonomoh.[929]
“The Pequod diplomats were already at work, urging the dark dangers which hung over their united tribes, reiterating the tale of the encroachments of the whites, the chicanery, the insolence, the cruelty, which some had practised, and appealing to the Indian pride of possession and of race. For three days and nights Roger Williams, in the sachem’s lodge, mixed with the bloody-minded Pequod embassadors, and pushed his dangerous opposition to the war; and at last his old friendship and superior diplomacy prevailed. Canonicus and Miantonomoh repudiated the Pequod league and refused to dig up the tomahawk.”[930]
The Pequods, no whit disheartened by this balk, determined to fight unassisted, thinking, perhaps, that the precipitation of hostilities would fire the Indian heart.
Sassacus, followed by seven hundred[931]painted and yelling warriors, plunged into the woods and opened the war-path. Winding out of their beautiful nest in southeastern Connecticut, between the rivers Pawcatuck and Thames,[932]they spread consternation and the most ghastly form of death north, east, south, west.
According to their habit, the Indians were cautiousat the outset. Isolated instances announced their hostility. In 1634, Captains Stone and Norton sailed up the Connecticut in a coasting smack, manned by a crew of eight men. They were steering for a Dutch trading station on the river side, when their vessel was becalmed. In a flash a fleet of canoes were launched from either bank of the river, and a swarm of savages surrounded the smack. Suspecting no danger, twelve of them were permitted to board, and Stone engaged two of these to pilot a boat higher up the stream. The guides at night murdered the two sailors in charge of this shallop, and at the same hour their companions on the vessel assailed the sleeping crew. Stone was killed secretly in his cabin, and, to conceal the body, a light covering was thrown over it. Then the massacre extended to the deck and forecastle. Soon all were dead save Norton. “He had taken to the cook-room on the first alarm, and here he made a long and resolute defence. That he might load and fire with the greatest expedition, he placed powder in an open bowl, just at hand, which, in the hurry of action, taking fire, so burned and blinded him that he could fight no longer; whereupon he too was tomahawked.”[933]Then the smack was pillaged and sunk.[934]
Two years later, John Oldham,[935]while trading fairly on the Connecticut, was suddenly set uponand brained. His companions, two Narragansett Indians and a couple of boys, were kidnapped.[936]
A few days after this sad catastrophe, an old English sailor, John Gallup, floating on the tranquil bosom of the treacherous river in his little shallop of twenty tons, manned only by himself, his two sons, and one old salt, espied Oldham’s pinnace off Block Island. He tacked for it and hailed. No answer; a closer survey showed him a deck crowded with Indians. Gallup’s suspicion was aroused, and when the clumsy savages attempted to make sail and get away, he regarded the movement as a cover to foul play.
Then one of the most remarkable instances of gallantry recorded in the annals of border warfare occurred. Gallup, with his single sailor and his two little boys, armed only with a couple of rusty muskets, two pistols, and some buck-shot, prepared for action, and this though fourteen savages, heated by carnage and drunk with blood, stood ready with guns, and pikes, and swords, to repel his assault. The wind was fresh, and the audacious captain steered directly for the pinnace, and striking it stem foremost, nearly upset it; which so frightened the Indians that six of them jumped overboard and were drowned. Repeating this manœuvre—in unconscious imitation of the Athenian naval tactics—he came stem on again; for there were still too many Indians for him to venture to carry the pinnace by boarding. After this thump, Gallup hadthe satisfaction of seeing, as he cleared his vessel and stood off once more, four more savages leap into a watery grave—for they all sank. Then he steered for the battered craft for the third time; whereupon the remaining Indians sought refuge in the hold beneath the hatches. Gallup sprang on the deck of poor Oldham’s vessel, and there, stretched out before his eyes, was the late owner himself, still warm, but with cloven skull and amputated hands and feet.[937]
The savages in the hold were now anxious to surrender. Two of them at Gallup’s bidding came up and were bound; and then, maddened by the sight of Oldham’s disfigured corpse, the sailor plunged the victims into the river. The two remaining savages would not give up their arms or come up from under the hatches. Gallup could not dig them out; so he secured the cargo, buried Oldham, and then tying the pinnace to the stern of his own victorious shallop, he set sail to tow her to the settlements. But in the night it blew hard; his capture was detached, and, drifting to the Narragansett shore, the secreted warriors escaped—two only out of fourteen[938]—a swift and sweeping retribution.
The knowledge of these dismal tragedies crept slowly into the colonies. News was carried only by some coastwise vessel, whose progress, crab-like, was backwards; by some Indian runner often interested in being sluggish; or by some pale sufferer who, traversingforest, morass, and mountain, was frequently his own messenger of woe; for the Pilgrims had no stage-coaches like their immediate descendants; no good roads, like the men of ’76; no railway and no steamboat, like ourselves; and above all, no telegraph, annihilating space, to
“Speed the swift intercourse from soul to soul,Or waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.”
“Speed the swift intercourse from soul to soul,Or waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.”
“Speed the swift intercourse from soul to soul,
Or waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.”
But eventually the colonists learned of these spasmodic outrages; and all promptly decided that justice and the common weal alike dictated punishment. “After consultation with ‘the magistrates and ministers,’ Sir Harry Vane despatched ninety men down Long Island sound, in three small vessels, to the seat of war—Block island. The expedition was under the chief command of John Endicott, who was assisted by four subordinate officers, one of whom, Captain John Underhill, wrote an account of the foray and of the succeeding and more effective one. A sort of Friar Tuck—devotee, bravo, libertine, and buffoon—Underhill takes a memorable place among the eccentric characters who from time to time broke what has been altogether too easily assumed to have been the dead level of New England gravity in those days. He had been a soldier in Ireland, in Spain, and more recently in the Netherlands, where he ‘had spoken freely with Count Nassau.’ He came over with Winthrop, who employed him to train the Pilgrims in military tactics.”[939]
The expedition, spite of Endicott’s skill and Underhill’s bravery and the number of men engaged in it, was an essential failure. A few savages were shot; some lodges were burned; several canoes were staved; and a number of acres of corn were despoiled. Indeed, just enough was done to madden the savages, but not enough to intimidate them.[940]
In the summer of 1636, Endicott sailed into Boston harbor in bloodless triumph. Meantime, his irritating raid was revenged by a wide-spread assault upon the isolated Connecticut colonists.[941]Every tree became a covert. In the long grass, in the morasses, in the out-buildings of the settlers, lurked the envenomed savages. To step outside those block citadels to which all flocked for safety, was certain death. Men were kidnapped and roasted alive.[942]Traders were waylaid on the rivers and tortured to death; and two victims especially were cut into two parts lengthwise, each half being hung up on a tree by the bank of the Connecticut.[943]Women and children were captured and reserved for a fate worse than death. In the winter of 1637, thirty of the two hundred settlers who had colonized Connecticut, fell beneath the hatchets of the Pequods.[944]Everywhere the whites were worsted; even at Saybrook, their chief fort, the garrison was heldin duress by a besieging band of demoniacal red men.[945]
New England was trembling on the verge of death. For the distressed and harassed Pilgrims there seemed no alternative but speedy extermination, or such an exercise of courage and skill as should effectually overawe the Indians in the full flush of their success. Measures were at once matured. Massachusetts Bay acted with her accustomed vigor. It was declared that “the war, since it was waged on just grounds and for self-preservation, ought to be vigorously prosecuted.”[946]Six hundred pounds were levied; one hundred and sixty men were recruited.[947]
At Plymouth similar activity was displayed; and a levy of forty men was made.[948]But it was in Connecticut, the menaced spot, that the most herculean exertions were put forth. Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, placed ninety men in the field, under the command of stout John Mason—a sometime soldier in the Low Countries under Sir Thomas Fairfax, who held him in such esteem that in after-years, when at the head of the parliamentary muster, he wrote his truantprotégéurging his return to England, that he might lend his skilful sword to the patriot cause.[949]
Mason, with Hooker’s benediction, immediatelyopened a vigorous campaign. Saybrook was reinforced.[950]A subsidiary detachment of Mohegans, under Uncas, was recruited.[951]The mouth of the Connecticut was made the base of operations, and thither the united levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, were transported. Here a council of war was held. After Stone, the chaplain, had sought the divine direction in prayer, it was decided to march directly upon the Pequod village off Point Judith.[952]All embarked; the objective point was safely reached. Then a storm intervened; it was impossible to land. The next day was Sunday; it was spent devoutly on shipboard; nor was it until Tuesday evening, the third day after they had dropped anchor, that the eager Pilgrims touched land.[953]
Mason bivouacked on the sea-shore, and in the gray of the next morning commenced the memorable march. “Seventy-seven brave Englishmen—the rest were left in charge of the vessels—sixty frightened Mohegans, and four hundred more terrified Narragansetts, entered the war-trail, and went twenty miles westward towards the Pequod country, to a fort occupied by some suspected neutrals. There a pause for the night was made, and, lest any Indian should give the doomed Pequods the alarm, the citadel was girt by the sentries of the shrewd English captain.”[954]
Before noon, on the following morning, they broke camp, and marched fifteen miles farther inland, pausing at nightfall under a hill “which, according to information received from their dusky allies—who had now all fallen in the rear, ‘being possessed with great fear’—stood the chief stronghold of the Pequods.”[955]
Mason could hear the savage revelry of the ill-fated and unsuspecting Indians very distinctly, as the wind wafted the laughter, the yells, the vaunts, from the village over the little hill. The din sank and fell till midnight. All were enjoying a general guffaw over the English, whose ships they had seen sail eastward on the sound, bearing, as they imagined, the pale-face warriors to tell their squaws of their discomfiture.[956]
The Pequod fort was a citadel of straw. It “was merely a circular acre or two enclosed by trunks of trees some twelve feet high, set firmly in the ground, and so closely ranged as to exclude entrance, while the interstices served as port-holes for marksmen. Within, ranged along two parallel lanes, were upwards of seventy wigwams, covered with matting and thatch. At the two points for entrance or egress, spaces were left between the timbers, the intervals being protected only by a slighter structure, or by loose branches.”[957]
Something of all this the curious eyes of the Pilgrims took in as they patiently waited for themidnight order to advance. At length it came; the camp was broken; prayers were offered; the Indian allies fell back to a still safer distance. The drowsy Pequod stronghold was surrounded; Mason was on one side, Underhill was on the other. Cautiously the girdling band crept on, on, on, towards the sally-ports, looking like sheeted phantoms in the ghastly moonlight. Their hands were on the gates, when a dog barked. The Indians were aroused. “Owanux! Owanux!” “The Englishmen are here!” came in a hoarse shout from within. Then, with a wild “Huzza!” the Pilgrims plunged themselves like an avalanche upon the frail and creaking fortress, firing the straw in fifty different directions. The rest was death; for it was not a battle—it was a massacre. Shouting the watchwords of the Israelites in Canaan, the Pilgrims smote the Pequods hip and thigh, for they knew that safety and peace dwelt in every blow—that severity was mercy.
Soon the explosion of a powder-train made the village kick the heavens. Then the flames began to wink, and at last to go out. Darkness followed—a darkness made more frightful by the moans of the wounded, the fierce panting of those wretches who still struggled against fate, and the vindictive yell of the Mohegan and Narragansett warriors, now in full cry after the dazed and despairing fugitives.[958]
At last the sad morning dawned. The dead bodies of seven hundred[959]Pequods were counted amidthedébrisof the carnage. There lay the whole nation,
“In one red burial blent.”
“In one red burial blent.”
“In one red burial blent.”
But let us turn from the sickening scene. “Never was a war so just or so necessary,” remarks Palfrey, “that he who should truly exhibit the details of its prosecution would not find the sympathy of gentle hearts deserting him as he proceeded. Between right policy and the suffering which sometimes it brings upon individuals, there is a wide chasm, to be bridged over by an argument with which the heart does not naturally go. When, for urgent reasons of public safety, it has been determined to take the desperate risk of sending the whole available force of a community into the field to encounter desperate odds, and certain to be set on, if worsted, by neutral thousands, the awful conditions of the venture forbid daintiness in the means of achieving the victory, or about using it in such a manner as to veto the chance of incurring the same peril again. At all events, from the hour of that fatal carnage Connecticut was secure. There could now be unguarded sleep in the long-harassed cabins of the settlers. It might be hoped that civilization was assured of a permanent abode in New England.”[960]
Mason followed up his victory, like an able soldier as he was. After the fatal night attack, Sassacusand the remnant of his undone tribe fled westward.[961]They were overtaken, and forced to fight in a swamp and in a panic. Then there was another massacre; and two hundred prisoners were captured, besides a booty of trays, kettles, and wampum.[962]The Pequod chieftain once more baffled fate, and with a body of twenty warriors sought an asylum among the Mohawks, on the banks of the Hudson, where the unhappy sagamore, bereaved of people and of country, was himself treacherously slain, his scalp-lock being sent as a trophy to the pale-face conquerors.[963]
At the same time two other chiefs were hunted down at a point east of New Haven. Here they were beheaded; and the spot—now a famous summer resort—has been called since that day “Sachem’s Head.”[964]
It is sad to relate that this awful slaughter was crowned by the enslavement of the wretched survivors of the fight. When Mason returned to Hartford, bringing the retinue of his command with him, Massachusetts and Connecticut, needing laborers, and blind to the injustice, divided the human booty; and with Rhode Island, which purchased some of the victims, they must share the guilt.[965]But in this the Pilgrims did not sin against the spirit of their age. It was not an insurrection against the conscienceof that epoch, for the flagitious practice was universal. Human slavery had not yet been branded as infamous amid the scornful execrations of mankind.
Thus in death and captivity closed the career of a gallant tribe. They threw themselves before the chariot-wheels of progress, and were crushed; they essayed to check God, and were overthrown. Like ancient Agag, they were hewn in pieces. In its first warlike bout with barbarism, civilization was the victor, and went crowned with bays.