Mayflower

following day he and his family arrived safely at Captain John Almy’s house in Portsmouth.
    A few days later, they heard the shocking news. Clark’s garrison in Plymouth had been attacked by Indians. Eleven people, most of them women and children, had been killed, and the garrison had been burned to the ground.
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    For the English, March of 1676 was a terrible and terrifying month. Indians from across New England banded together for a devastating series of raids that reached from the Connecticut River valley to Maine and even into Connecticut, a colony that had, up until now, been spared from attack. But it was in Plymouth, on Sunday, March 26, where the English suffered one of the most disheartening defeats of the war.
    The previous day, Captain Pierce and his men had skirmished with some Indians fishing for salmon, shad, and alewives at the falls of the Blackstone River. After spending the night at Rehoboth, Pierce set out once again in search of Indians. He suspected that there were an unusually large number of them in the area, and he sent a messenger to Providence to request reinforcements. As it turned out, all of Providence’s residents were worshipping in the town’s meetinghouse that morning. Reluctant to interrupt, the messenger waited until the service had ended before delivering Pierce’s request. By then, it was too late.
    Pierce and his force of sixty Englishmen and twenty Indians were marching north along the east bank of the Blackstone River when they spotted some Indians. There were just a few of them, and when the Indians realized they were being followed, they appeared to flee in panic. Pierce’s men eagerly pursued, only to discover that they had blundered into an ambush. A force of five hundred Indians, apparently led by Canonchet, emerged from the trees. Pierce and his soldiers ran across the rocks to the west bank of the Blackstone, where another four hundred Indians were waiting for them.
    Pierce ordered his company of eighty men to form a single ring, and standing back to back, they fought bravely against close to a thousand Indians, who according to one account “were as thick as they could stand, thirty deep.” By the end of the fighting two hours later, fifty-five English, including Pierce, were dead, along with ten of the Praying Indians. Nine English soldiers either temporarily escaped the fighting or were taken alive and marched several miles north, where they were tortured to death at a place still known today as Nine Men’s Misery. As Church had warned, the enemy had come in overwhelming numbers, and as he might also have predicted, it was Pierce’s small band of friendly Indians who distinguished themselves during the battle.
    Given the impossible odds, the Cape Indians would not have been faulted for attempting to escape at the first sign of trouble. But such was not the case. An Indian named Amos stood at Pierce’s side almost to the very last. Even after his commander had been shot in the thigh and lay dying at his feet, Amos held his ground and continued to fire on the enemy. Finally, however, it became obvious that, in the words of William Hubbard, “there was no possibility for him to do any further good to Captain Pierce, nor yet to save himself if he stayed any longer.” The Narragansetts and Nipmucks had all blackened their faces for battle. Smearing his face with gunpowder and stripping off his English clothes, Amos did his best to impersonate the enemy, and after pretending to search the bodies of the English for plunder, he disappeared into the woods.
    There were other instances of remarkable ingenuity on the part of the Cape Indians that day. As the fighting drew to a desperate conclusion, a Praying Indian turned to the English soldier beside him and told him to start to run. Taking up his tomahawk, the Indian pretended to be a Narragansett pursuing his foe, and the two of them did not stop running until they had left the fighting far behind. When word of the heroism of Pierce’s Cape Indians began to spread, public opinion regarding the use of friendly Indians in combat started to shift. It still took some time, but New Englanders came to realize that instead of being untrustworthy and dangerous, Indians like Amos, James, and Job might in fact hold the secret to winning the war.
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    Two days after slaughtering Pierce and his company, Canonchet and as many as 1,500 Indians attacked Rehoboth. As the