Mayflower

been superseded as one of the army’s more colorful and audacious figures, Moseley was destined to become both a rival and a nemesis.
    With the arrival of more than three hundred new soldiers, the Miles garrison quickly became charged with a crude and volatile energy. The assault was scheduled for the following day, but some of the new arrivals, led by Quartermasters John Gill and Andrew Belcher, requested liberty to go out immediately and “seek the enemy in their own quarters.” Some Indians on the opposite side of the river were taking great delight in firing on the garrison. It was time to put these heathens in their place.
    Permission was granted, and twelve troopers prepared to take it to the enemy. In addition to William Hammond of nearby Rehoboth, who was to act as their “pilot” or scout, the troopers requested the services of Benjamin Church. They quickly set out across the bridge, all of them knowing that an audience of several hundred English soldiers was watching their every move.
    Almost as soon as they crossed the bridge, about a dozen Indians concealed in some nearby bushes let loose a killing volley of shot. In an instant, Hammond, the scout, was, if not dead, nearly so; Belcher was hit in the knee and his horse was shot out from under him, while Gill was slammed in the gut. Fortunately, he’d worn a protective coat of quarter-inch-thick ox hide, known as a “buff coat,” which he had lined with several pieces of well-placed parchment, and had suffered only a severe bruise.
    The troopers were so terrified by the attack that they turned their horses around and galloped back for the garrison, leaving Hammond dazed and dying in the saddle and Belcher pinned beneath his horse. As the troopers clattered across the bridge, Church “stormed and stamped, and told them ’twas a shame to run and leave a wounded man there to become a prey to the barbarous enemy.” By this time, Hammond had fallen down dead off his horse, and with the assistance of Gill and only one other man, Church attempted to save Belcher’s life. Church jumped off his horse and loaded both Belcher and Hammond onto the horses of the other two. As they retreated to the garrison, Church went after Hammond’s horse, which was wandering off toward the Indians. All the while, he shouted out to those at the garrison “to come over and fight the enemy.” But no one appeared willing to join him.
    The Indians had had a chance to reload and were now blasting away at Church as he continued to bawl indignantly at the army on the other side of the river. Every one of the Indians’ bullets missed its mark, although one ball did strike the foot of a soldier watching from the safety of the garrison. Church decided he had better join his cowardly compatriots before the Indians had a chance to reload and fire once again. He started back across the bridge but not without proclaiming, “The Lord have mercy on us if such a handful of Indians shall thus dare such an army!”

    Massachusetts governor John Leverett wearing an ox-hide buff coat
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    It was a grim and awful night. The weather had deteriorated dramatically since they’d seen the lunar eclipse several nights before, and as a cold wind lashed the Miles garrison with rain and Moseley’s roughneck crew mocked the troopers with “many profane oaths,” a soldier from Watertown lost control of himself. Screaming “God is against the English!” he ran crazily around the garrison until he was finally subdued, “a lamentable spectacle.”
    The vast majority of the soldiers gathered that night had grown up on stories of the military might of the Puritans during the English civil war. One of the most efficient fighting forces of the age, Cromwell’s New Model Army had subdued England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The navy, under the command of Robert Blake, had won so many victories against Holland and Spain that the crews of British ships proudly lashed brooms to their mastheads in recognition of having swept the Channel clean of enemy vessels. Now that Charles II was back on the throne, it was left to them, the militiamen of Puritan New England, to maintain the twin traditions of spiritual purity and martial prowess in the face of an ungodly foe.
    There was yet another legacy for these soldiers to consider that night at the Miles garrison. Thirty-eight years before, many of their fathers had served in