CHAPTER I.

THE PEQUOT WAR.

HOSTILITIES BEFORE THE WAR.-ENDICOTT'S EXPEDITION TO BLOCK ISLAND. - ITS SUCCESS. INDIANS OF THE MAIN LAND ATTACKED. - RETALIATION ON THE ENGLISH PLANTATIONS. A GENERAL WAR RESOLVED ON. MASON'S EXPEDITION. REDUCTION OF THE PEQUOT FORT. - RESULTS OF THE SUMMER'S WORK.-EXTINC TION OF THE PEQUOT TRIBE.-CHARACTER OF THE INDIANS. RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL QUALITIES. INFLUENCE OF THE PEQUOT WAR UPON THE GROWTH AND PROSPERITY OF THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES.

Origin of

quot War.

THE murder of Captain Oldham by the Indians of Block Island aroused the most serious alarm throughout the feeble colonies of New England. It seemed to be, in the light of other the Peacts of similar atrocity, the final and conclusive evidence of the impossibility of any peace with these savages. They meant, it seemed, utterly to destroy the English. There was in the minds of most of them hardly the glimmer of a reason for this deadly enmity against the white men; but instead of reason was the love of blood; the love of revenging some real or fancied wrong; the love of plunder; the love of the clash of war with the maddening music of the groans of tortured men, the shrieks of women, and the cries of children. The war-whoop, as it rang through the woods, found this quick responsive chord in every savage bosom. But the more thoughtful

among them believed their race stood in the presence of a terrible dilemma: either the intruders must be destroyed or driven to the ships that brought them, or they must themselves turn their backs upon the beloved land where the bones of their ancestors were buried, where to every hill and rock and river clung the most cherished memories, tender with romantic legend, reverent with superstition, or fierce with inherited hate. Their deepest religious sense was in the love of the land where from generation to generation the tribes had lived and died, where the children never forgot to add day by day a stone to the simple monuments that marked the graves or the deeds of the fathers. Who were these pale-faced strangers that they should give up their country to them? should look their last upon that glorious sea out of which the sun came to light up and warm their hunting-grounds? should hide themselves in the deep shadows of those western forests that had no end?

Colonial statesmen were compelled to meet face to face, with such wisdom and such strength as they could, this plain and well defined Indian question-not yet settled after the lapse of more than two centuries- could these people be subjugated, and the tribal distinctions, which made them distinct nationalities, be obliterated? Affairs wore too stern an aspect for that lamentation to be remembered which the good Robinson, twelve years before, had addressed to his Plymouth flock: "Oh! how happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you had killed any." The problem was simplified, for a time at least, to how these heathen could be most easily and most effectually killed.

But milder measures were first exhausted. The murderers of Stone and of Oldham were demanded of the Pequots with remuneration for property destroyed. The demands were met with evasions, or with promises made only to be broken. Savage cunning was more than a match for the diplomatic arts of the civilized and wiser white men. There was no solution left but force.

Endicott's expedition to Block Island.

In August, 1636, five small vessels, carrying about a hundred men, sailed from Boston to Block Island; for it was the Indians of that island who had murdered Oldham and taken his vessel. John Endicott of Salem was in command of the expedition, and his orders from the magistrates of Boston were that he should kill all the men, but should spare the women and children. The hundred men had four captains beside the commander-in-chief. "I would not," writes one of them-John Underhill, "have the world wonder at the great number of commanders to so few men, but know that the Indians' fight far differs from the Christian practice. And he explains that as the savages divided themselves into small.

1636.]

ENDICOTT'S EXPEDITION TO BLOCK ISLAND.

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bodies, so it was necessary to meet them with like detachments, the honor of command remaining the same whether given to captains of tens or captains of thousands. This Underhill, who showed himself at other times a braggart, a bigot, a libertine, little given to shame or scruple of any other sort, was sensitive on a point of rank and soldierly reputation.

The attack.

The wind blew hard, and the surf rolled in heavily on the rocky shores of Block Island as the expedition approached it. A landing was made in spite of a shower of arrows with which the Indians attempted to repel the invaders-a futile defence, for

only one Englishman was wounded. Another arrow recoiled harmless from the helmet of Underhill, and would, he writes, have slain him, "if God in his Providence had not moved the heart of my wife to persuade me to carry it along with me, which I was unwilling to do." Whereupon he improves the occasion, after the fashion of the time, by these pious and timely reflections: "First, when the hour of death is not yet come, you see God useth weak means to keep his purpose unviolated; secondly, let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife, though she be a woman." Not that there was anything remarkable in this evidence of how precious the life of John Underhill was in the sight of God, and how important to the success of the expedition; but it was marvellous that God should condescend to