Mayflower

command of Major Thomas Savage, reached the southern bank of the river. But instead of pursuing the Indians, Savage elected to do as so many Puritan commanders had done before him. Even though he had the Indians almost in his grasp, he decided to quit the chase. Over the last few days, hundreds of the old and infirm had somehow managed to ford the river, but Savage claimed it was not safe for his men to attempt a crossing. For Rowlandson, it was a devastating turn of events, but the Lord must have had his reasons. “God did not give them courage or activity to go after us,” she wrote; “we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance.”
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    The Indians continued north for several days until they reached the Connecticut River near the town of Northfield. Philip, Rowlandson was told, was waiting for them on the opposite bank. “When I was in the canoe,” she recalled, “I could not but be amazed at the numerous crew of pagans that were on the…other side. When I came ashore, they gathered all about me…[and] asked one another questions and laughed and rejoiced over their gains and victories.” For the first time of her captivity, Rowlandson started to cry. “Although I had met with so much affliction,” she wrote, “and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight, but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished. But now I may say as Psalm 137, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon…[I] wept.’” One of the Indians asked why she was crying. Not knowing what to say, she blurted out that they would kill her. “‘No,’ said he, ‘none will hurt you.’” Soon after, she was given two spoonfuls of cornmeal and told that Philip wanted to speak with her.
    It was one of several conversations she would have with the Pokanoket sachem. Despite everything she had heard of Philip’s malevolence, Rowlandson was treated with kindness and respect by the Native leader. When she entered his wigwam, Philip asked if she would “smoke it.” She would gladly have taken up a pipe before her captivity, but by now she had weaned herself from tobacco and had vowed never to smoke again. In the weeks ahead, she would knit a shirt and cap for Philip’s son and even be invited to dine with the sachem. “I went,” she remembered, “and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten and fried in bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.”
    Later, while in the midst of yet another extended journey, Rowlandson feared she lacked the strength to continue. As she slogged through the knee-deep mud of a swamp, Philip unexpectedly appeared at her side and offered his hand and some words of encouragement. In her narrative of her captivity, Rowlandson faithfully records these acts of kindness on Philip’s part. But nowhere does she suggest that the sachem was unfairly portrayed by her fellow Puritans. Rowlandson had lost her daughter and several other loved ones in the war Philip had started, and nothing—not a pancake or a hand offered in friendship—could ever bring them back.
    On March 9, Philip met for the first time with Canonchet, the young leader of the Narragansetts. As they all recognized, the victories they had so far won at Lancaster and Medfield were meaningless if they did not find a way to feed their people. They needed seed corn to plant crops in the spring. Hidden underground in Swansea was a large cache of seed. Canonchet volunteered to lead a group of warriors and women back into the very heart of Plymouth Colony to retrieve the corn. As the women returned with the seed to the Connecticut River valley, Canonchet would remain in Plymouth and bring the war back to where it had begun.
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    Despite the espionage work of Job and James, distrust of the Praying Indians was at its height. The note left at Medfield by James the Printer was looked at by many as proof that the missionary efforts of John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had only added to the threat posed by the Indians. On February 28, Richard Scott of Boston got very drunk and in the presence of three witnesses began to rail against Gookin, “calling him an Irish dog that was never faithful to his country, the son of a whore, a bitch, a rogue, God confound him and God rot his soul.” Scott, a veteran of