Mayflower

spent the rest of the war living among friends in Boston.
    But Rowlandson found it difficult to leave her captivity behind. “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together,” she wrote, “but now is other ways with me….[W]hen others are sleeping, mine eyes are weeping.”
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    It was a new era in the war. With the success of Tom Doublet and Peter Conway in negotiating the release of Mary Rowlandson and with increasing numbers of Massachusetts-Bay officers using Praying Indians as scouts (even Samuel Moseley came to see the light), New Englanders began to realize that it was both stupid and inhumane to keep hundreds of loyal Indians sequestered against their will. In the middle of May, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that the Praying Indians be removed from Deer Island. “This deliverance…,” Daniel Gookin wrote, “was a jubilee to those poor creatures.”
    On May 18, Captain William Turner with 150 volunteers from Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton attacked a large Native fishing camp on the Connecticut River. Although Turner and his men were ambushed during their retreat and more than 40 Englishmen, including Turner, were killed, they had succeeded in killing hundreds of Indians. On June 9, the Nipmuck leader Sagamore Sam lost his wife in another English assault. The Nipmucks decided they must sue for peace.
    Unwilling to become a Nipmuck bargaining chip, Philip, accompanied by Quinnapin and Weetamoo, left Wachusett Mountain and headed south into familiar territory. With his brother-in-law Tuspaquin, the Black Sachem of Nemasket, leading the charge, Philip’s people attacked towns throughout Plymouth and Rhode Island.
    From his temporary home on Aquidneck Island, Benjamin Church could see the smoke rising from locations up and down Narragansett Bay. Communication was difficult in these dangerous times, and they were all anxious for any word about their loved ones and friends. On May 12, Alice gave birth to a son named Constant in honor of her father.
    A few days later Church took up a knife and stick and began to whittle. He’d been out of the war now for more than three months, and he wasn’t sure what he should do now that his son had been born. Perhaps he should take up carpentry. But as he whittled the stick, his hand slipped, and he badly gashed two of his fingers. Church smiled. If he was going to injure himself, he might as well do it in battle.
    It was time he returned to the war.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Better Side of the Hedge
    O N T UESDAY, J UNE 6, Benjamin Church attended a meeting of the General Court in Plymouth. Travel in the colony was still dangerous, but Church had managed to hitch a ride on a sloop from Newport to Cape Cod. The Cape and islands had remained free of violence throughout the first year of the war. Instead of treating their large Praying Indian population with cruelty and distrust, the English inhabitants had relied on them for their protection. As a result, the Cape had become the colony’s one oasis of safety, and Church used it to good effect, securing a horse in modern Falmouth, then known as Saconessett, and riding north along the eastern shore of Buzzards Bay to Sandwich and then on to Plymouth.
    More than three months had passed since the Council of War had refused his request to lead a large group of Native Americans against Philip. Over that brief span of time, English attitudes toward the Praying Indians had undergone a fundamental change just as the main theater of the war shifted back to Plymouth Colony. Church sensed that his time had finally arrived.
    As it so happened, the Council of War had decided to do almost exactly as Church had proposed back in February. They planned to send out in a few weeks’ time a force of three hundred soldiers, a third of them Indians, under the command of Major Bradford. Connecticut and the Bay Colony had also promised to provide companies that included significant numbers of Native scouts.
    This was all good news, of course, but Church had no intention of serving under Bradford. Bradford was a trustworthy and loyal officer, but Church had his own ideas about how to fight the war. He must find an army of his own.
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    Two days later, Church was in a canoe with two Cape Indians headed back to Aquidneck Island. They were approaching the rocky shore of Sakonnet at the southeastern corner of Narragansett Bay. This