Mayflower

departure, “fired thicker and faster than ever.”
    Some of Church’s men began to talk about making a run for it. Church insisted that their best chance at survival was to stay together. It was already a miracle that they were still alive. God, in his “wonderful providence,” had chosen to preserve them. Church was confident that no matter how bad it looked now, “not a hair of their head[s] should fall to the ground” if they continued to be “patient, courageous, and prudently sparing of their ammunition.” It was a soldier’s version of predestination: God was in control, and he was on their side.
    One of the men had become so frightened that he was unable to fire his musket. Church ordered him to devote his energies to reinforcing the wall. As Church delivered his speech, the soldier was in the midst of laying a flat rock down in front of him when a bullet ricocheted off the stone’s face. It was exactly the example Church needed. “Observe,” he cried out to his men, “how God directed the bullets [to]…hit the stone” and not the man. Whether through Providence or not, from that moment forward, everyone “in his little army, again resolved one and all to stay with and stick by him.”
    All afternoon, beneath a hot sun, Church and his men held their ground as the Indians made the surrounding woods echo with their whoops and shouts. With night approaching, one of Church’s soldiers said he could see a sloop sailing toward them from a tiny island several miles up the river. “Succor is now coming!” Church shouted. He recognized the vessel as belonging to Captain Roger Goulding, “a man,” he assured them, “for business.”
    The sloop glided with the diminishing northwesterly breeze down to the besieged soldiers. Captain Goulding proved as trustworthy as Church had claimed. He anchored his vessel to windward of them and floated a buoy with his canoe tied to it to Church and his men. The sails and hull of his sloop were soon riddled with bullet holes, but Goulding stayed put.
    The canoe was so tiny that only two men could fit in it at a time. It took ten agonizingly slow trips back and forth, but at least there was a growing number of soldiers in the sloop to provide cover for those in the canoe. Finally, only Church was left ashore. As he prepared to climb into the canoe, he realized that he had left his hat and cutlass at a nearby well, where he had stopped to get a drink of water at the beginning of the siege. When he informed his men that he was going back to collect his possessions, they pleaded with him to get into the canoe. But Church was adamant; he was not about to leave without his hat and sword. He loaded all the gunpowder he had left in his musket and started for the well.
    Since he was the only remaining Englishman, all the Indians’ guns were trained on him as he made his way to the stone-encircled spring that today bears his name. A ceaseless stream of bullets flew through the air and drove into the ground at his feet, but none hit Church. On returning to the canoe, with the hat on his head and the cutlass at his side, he fired his musket one last time, but there was barely enough of a charge to push the bullet out of the barrel. Just as he settled into the canoe, a bullet grazed his hair while another splintered the wooden brace against which he’d nestled his chest, but he reached the sloop unscathed.
    It had been a remarkable day. For six hours, twenty men had held off three hundred Indians (a number that was later confirmed by the Indians themselves) without suffering a single casualty. It was a deliverance that Church looked to for the rest of his life as indisputable proof of “the glory of God and His protecting providence.” William Bradford had learned of it in a dream, but for Benjamin Church it had been revealed in battle: he was one of the elect.
    He’d also learned something else during what came to be known as the Pease Field Fight. When it came to Awashonks and the Sakonnets, the time for diplomacy had passed.
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    Even if the Sakonnets had joined Philip, Church still held out hope that many other Indians in the region might be convinced to stay out of the conflict. As the Puritan historian William Hubbard observed, most Indians in southern New England were unsure of what to do next. It was in the colony’s best interests, Church maintained, to welcome all