Mayflower

alliance.
    The wedge? A thirty-eight-year-old English captive named Mary Rowlandson.
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    By late March, a large number of Indians had gathered at Wachusett Mountain to the north of modern Worcester. The steep and rocky terrain provided them with protection from the English yet was far enough east that they could easily attack the towns between them and Boston. On April 5, the Praying Indian Tom Doublet arrived at Wachusett with a letter from colonial officials in Boston. In addition to the possibility of opening peace negotiations, the letter mentioned the release of English prisoners.

    An early-twentieth-century view of Wachusett Mountain
    On April 12, Doublet returned to Boston with the Indians’ response. They were in no mood, as of yet, to discuss peace: “you know and we know your heart great sorrowful with crying for you lost many many hundred men and all your houses and your land, and women, child and cattle… [you] on your backside stand.” They were willing, however, to discuss the possibility of ransoming hostages. As a minister’s wife, minis-ter Mary Rowlandson was the Indians’ most notable captive, and she inevitably became the focus of the negotiations.
    In mid-April, Rowlandson, who was still in the vicinity of the Connecticut River with Weetamoo, learned that her presence was required at Wachusett, where Philip and her master, Quinnapin, were already meeting with the Nipmucks. Before receiving this news, she had reached a new nadir. Her son, she had learned, was racked by the flux and was infested with lice; she had heard nothing about her daughter. Without Quinnapin to intervene, Rowlandson’s relationship with Weetamoo—difficult from the start—had deteriorated to the point that the sachem had threatened to beat her with a log. “My heart was so heavy…that I could scarce speak or [walk along] the path,” she remembered. But when she learned that she might soon be ransomed to the English, she felt a sudden resurgence of energy. “My strength seemed to come again,” she wrote, “and recruit my feeble knees and aching heart.”
    Rowlandson arrived at Wachusett Mountain in the midst of preparations to attack the town of Sudbury. With the death of Canonchet having already begun to erode Native confidence, the Indians urgently needed a major victory. They were winning the war, but they were without significant reserves of food. Even if they succeeded in growing a significant amount of corn, they couldn’t harvest the crop until late summer. In June, the groundnuts went to seed and became inedible. They must force the English to sue for peace before the beginning of summer. Otherwise, no matter how great their military victories, they would begin to starve to death.
    On April 17, Rowlandson became one of the few Westerners to witness a Native war dance. In the center of a large ring of kneeling warriors, who rhythmically struck the ground with their palms and sang, were two men, one of whom held a musket, and a deerskin. As the man with the gun stepped outside the ring, the other made a speech, to which the warriors in the ring enthusiastically responded. Then the man at the center began to call for the one with the gun to return to the deerskin, but the outsider refused. As the warriors in the ring chanted and struck the ground, the armed man slowly began to yield and reentered the ring. Soon after, the drama was repeated, this time with the man holding two guns. Once the leader of the dance had made another speech, and the warriors had “all assented in a rejoicing manner,” it was time to leave for Sudbury.
    It was a smashing Native victory. Two different companies of English militia fell victim to ambush. The Indians killed as many as seventy-four men and suffered minimal losses. And yet, the Sudbury Fight failed to be the total, overwhelming triumph the Indians had hoped for. “[T]hey came home,” Rowlandson remembered, “without that rejoicing and triumphing over their victory, which they were wont to show at other times, but rather like dogs (as they say) which have lost their ears.” Even though they had inflicted terrible damage, there were still plenty of English left to fight another day, and for the Indians the days were running out.
    The negotiations with the English took on a new urgency. The sachems ordered Rowlandson to appear before them in what they described as their “General