Mayflower

shore of the bay was a seven-mile-long cedar swamp, beside which Weetamoo and Philip had reportedly camped. For the English it would be a day of disorientation and fear as they pursued the Pokanokets and Pocassets into the depths of what Major William Bradford described as a “hideous swamp.” In his memoir of the war, Church says almost nothing about this particular battle, most probably because he was required to fight with the Plymouth companies, which were, according to William Hubbard, the last to enter and the first to retreat.
    Instead of Church, it was Samuel Moseley who once again led the charge. Moseley and his privateers were assisted by a pack of dogs, but even they proved of limited effectiveness in the Pocasset Swamp. As far as the English were concerned, the Indians, who camouflaged themselves with tree branches and ferns, were virtually invisible in this dark, wet, and densely overgrown environment. While the leather shoes of the English succumbed to the sucking mud, the Indians danced weightlessly across the mire, their flintlocks cradled in their arms. Needless to say, the English matchlocks and pikes proved ineffective in these conditions, so ineffective, in fact, that it would soon become illegal for a militiaman to equip himself with anything but a flintlock and a sword.
    Almost as soon as Moseley’s men entered the swamp, five of them were dead, the bullets flying, it seemed, from the vegetation itself. The Indians quickly retreated deeper into the gloom, deserting close to a hundred wigwams made of bark so green that they proved impossible to burn. The English came upon an old man, who was unable to keep up with the others, and who told them that Philip had just been there.
    For the next few hours, they ranged about the swamp, but soon discovered, in Hubbard’s words, “how dangerous it is to fight in such dismal woods, when their eyes were muffled with the leaves, and their arms pinioned with the thick boughs of the trees, as their feet were continually shackled with the roots spreading every way in those boggy woods.” Several soldiers found themselves firing on their own men, and as darkness came on, all of them gladly gave up the chase and retreated to more solid ground.
    That night, Major Cudworth, the leader of the Plymouth forces, decided that he had had his fill of swamps. They would do as they had done on Mount Hope: instead of pursuing the enemy, they’d build a fort. Cudworth and his fellow officers preferred to think that they now had Philip and Weetamoo trapped. If they carefully guarded the swamp and prevented the Indians from escaping, they hoped to starve them out. In addition to the soldiers stationed at forts on Mount Hope and in Pocasset, Cudworth proposed that there be a small “flying army,” whose purpose was to prevent the Indians from “destroying cattle and fetching in supply of food, which being attended, will bring them to great straits.” If this strategy worked—and he had every reason to believe it would—the war was effectively over. Since there was now no need for a large army, most of the companies from Massachusetts-Bay, including Moseley’s, were sent back to Boston.
    There was unsettling evidence, however, that Philip was not the only Indian sachem at war. A week earlier, on July 14, what appeared to have been Nipmucks from the interior of Massachusetts had fallen on the town of Mendon, twenty miles to the west of Boston, and killed six people. Closer to home, Philip’s brother-in-law Tuspaquin, the Black Sachem, had laid waste to Middleborough, while Totoson from the Buzzards Bay region, just to the west of Cape Cod, had attacked the town of Dartmouth, burning houses and killing several inhabitants. While yet another “losing fort” was being constructed at Pocasset, Church accompanied the 112 Plymouth soldiers sent to aid Dartmouth.
    Unlike the towns to the east on Cape Cod and the islands, where many of the local Indians were Christian and remained faithful to the English throughout the war, Dartmouth was surrounded by hostile Natives. Every English house, except for three garrisons, had been destroyed, and the decision was quickly made to evacuate all the town’s inhabitants to Plymouth.
    What seems never to have occurred to Major Cudworth, who led the expedition to Dartmouth, and to Captain Henchman, who was left to build the Pocasset fort, was that Totoson’s attack might have