Mayflower

inhabitants watched from their garrisons, forty houses, thirty barns, and two mills went up in flames. Only one person was killed—a man who believed that as long as he continued to read the Bible, no harm would come to him. Refusing to abandon his home, he was found shot to death in his chair—the Bible still in his hands.
    The next day, March 29, the Indians fell on Providence. Most of the town’s five hundred inhabitants had left for the safety of Aquidneck Island, but there remained in Providence a hardy contingent of thirty men, including seventy-seven-year-old Roger Williams. All that day the Indians wandered up and down the streets of the town, firing the houses. Providence was situated on a steep hill overlooking a large salt cove, and when a group of Indians appeared on the opposite shore, Williams, a long staff in his hand, strode out to the end of a point to speak with them. For the next hour, with only a narrow sliver of water between him and the enemy and with Providence burning behind him, Williams conversed with this group of Nipmucks, Pokanokets, Pocassets, Narragansetts, and Connecticut River valley Indians.
    â€œI asked them,” he wrote in a letter to his brother in Newport, “why they assaulted us with burning and killing who ever were [kind] neighbors to them, (and looking back) said I, ‘This house of mine now burning before mine eyes hath lodged kindly some thousands of you these ten years.’” The Indians replied that even though Rhode Island had remained neutral, it had provided assistance to the other colonies during their assault on the Narragansetts that winter. But Williams would have none of it. “I told them they…had forgot they were mankind and ran about the country like wolves tearing and devouring the innocent and peaceable…. They confessed they were in a strange way.”
    Williams warned them that planting time was approaching. A valley sachem said that “they cared not for planting these ten years. They would live upon us, and dear. He said God was with them…for [the English] had killed no fighting men but…they had killed of us scores.” He then invited Williams to go to the site of the Pierce battle and “look upon three score and five now unburied.” These words provoked Williams into angrily challenging the Indians to fight the English in the open field instead of “by ambushes and swamps.” In the end, however, he offered his services as a peacemaker. The Indians said that after another month spent burning Plymouth Colony, they might speak to him again. “We parted,” Williams wrote, “and they were so civil that they called after me and bid me not go near the burned houses for there might be Indians [who] might mischief me, but go by the water side.” Williams closed his letter with a word of warning to his brother: “prepare forts for women and children at Newport and on the island or it will be shortly worse with you than us.”
    By the beginning of April, it looked as if the Indians might do as they had once threatened and drive the English to the very edge of the sea. Adding to the Puritans’ troubles was the outbreak of disease. That spring, a lethal influenza claimed the lives of inhabitants in just about every New England town, including several military officers and the governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop Jr. Then, on April 9, an event occurred that changed the course of the war.
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    Unlike Massachusetts and Plymouth, Connecticut had relied on friendly Indians from the very start of the conflict. In addition to the Mohegans, there were two factions of Pequots, as well as the Niantic Indians, a subset of the Narragansetts, who had remained loyal to the English. In early April a Connecticut force under Captain George Denison was in the vicinity of modern Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when they captured an Indian woman who revealed that Canonchet was nearby. Over the course of the next few days, Denison’s eighty or so Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics competed with one another for the honor of capturing the great Narragansett sachem.
    In the last few months, Canonchet had earned the reputation for charismatic leadership that had so far eluded the more famous Philip. Dressed in the silver-trimmed jacket the Puritans had given him during treaty negotiations in Boston, with a large wampum belt around his waist, the young sachem was passionate and decisive and