Mayflower

than match the Indians’ before they marched on Mount Hope.
    With each passing day, the outrages committed by the Indians increased. Church and his compatriots could hear their whoops and the crackle of gunfire as the Native warriors slaughtered cattle and pilfered houses. But so far, no English men or women had been injured. By the morning of Wednesday, June 23, some residents had grown bold enough to return to their houses to retrieve goods and provisions.
    That morning, a father and son ventured from the garrison and came upon a group of Indians ransacking several houses. The boy had a musket, and his father urged him to fire on the looters. One of the Indians fell, then picked himself up and ran away. Later in the day, some Indians approached the garrison and asked why the boy had shot at one of their men. The English responded by asking whether the Indian was dead. When the Indians replied in the affirmative, the boy snidely said “it was no matter.” The soldiers tried to calm the now infuriated Indians by saying it was “but an idle lad’s word.” But the truth of the matter was that the boy had given the warriors exactly what they wanted: the go-ahead to kill.
    Thursday, June 24, the day of fasting and humiliation throughout the colony, proved momentous in the history of Plymouth, but not in the way the governor had intended. Reports differ, but all agree that it was a day of horror and death in Swansea. At least ten people, including the boy and his father, were killed by the Indians. Some were killed on their way back from prayers at the meetinghouse. One couple and their twenty-year-old son stopped at their home to secure some provisions. The father told his wife and son to return to the garrison while he finished collecting corn. But as the father left the house, he was beset by Indians and killed. Hearing gunshots, the son and his mother returned to the house. Both were attacked and in what became a common fate in the months ahead, scalped; and as also happened with terrifying frequency, both survived their scalpings only to die from loss of blood.
    For Church and the other soldiers cooped up at the garrison, the days ahead proved an exasperating and humiliating ordeal as they were forced to wait for the reinforcements from Massachusetts-Bay to arrive. In a clear attempt to mock the soldiers’ impotence, the Indians had the audacity to approach the garrison itself. Two soldiers sent to draw a bucket of water from a nearby well were shot and carried away. They were later discovered with “their fingers and feet cut off, and the skin of their heads flayed off.” Even worse, the Indians succeeded in killing two of the garrison’s own sentries “under the very noses of most of our forces.” On the night of June 26, a total eclipse of the moon was witnessed all across New England. Several soldiers claimed they saw a black spot in the moon’s center resembling “the scalp of an Indian.” All agreed that an “eclipse falling out at that instant of time was ominous.”
    Finally on Monday, June 28, with the arrival of several Massachusetts companies from Boston, the number of soldiers had reached the point that Cudworth was willing to venture from the garrison. In addition to a troop of horse under Captain Thomas Prentice and a company of foot soldiers under Captain Daniel Henchman, there was a rowdy bunch of volunteers under the command of Captain Samuel Moseley. The English had not yet fought a single battle, but Moseley, a sea captain, was already something of a hero. In April, Moseley had led a successful assault on some Dutch privateers off the coast of Maine. In June, several of the captured sailors were put on trial and condemned to death, but with the outbreak of war, they were granted a reprieve as long as they were willing to fight the Indians under Moseley. In addition to this multinational group of pirates, which included a huge Dutchman named Cornelius Anderson, Moseley secured the services of a wild gang of servants and apprentices from Boston. Decidedly lacking in Puritan restraint and with a seaman’s love of profanity, Moseley’s company proved adept at transferring their talent for murder and mayhem from the wilderness of the high seas to the swamps and forests of New England.
    To a pious group of farm boys and merchants, Moseley’s men seemed as savage as the Indians themselves. To Benjamin Church, who had suddenly