Mayflower

Sudbury Fight. That night they performed a similar ritual. But instead of preparing to fight against the English, they were now preparing to fight for the people they had once considered their enemies. After each warrior had danced around the fire with a spear in one hand and a wooden club in the other and vowed to fight against the enemies of the English, Nompash stepped forward and announced to Church that “they were making soldiers for him.”
    In the weeks ahead, Church’s Sakonnet warriors would take him to places that no Englishmen—except perhaps for Joshua Tefft, the renegade from Rhode Island—had been before. With the Sakonnets’ help, Church’s company would penetrate the hitherto impenetrable swamps of the New England wilderness—the same kind of physical and spiritual landscape in which, fifty-five years before, Massasoit had gathered his people after the arrival of the Mayflower.
    We will never know what Massasoit’s powwows had told him about the future, but we do know that his son Philip took encouragement from his own powwows’ insistence that he would never die at the hands of an Englishman. With the Sakonnets’ entry into the war on the side of the colony, that prophecy gave the Pokanoket sachem little consolation. Learning of the defection of the Sakonnets was said, according to William Hubbard, to have “broke[n] Philip’s heart.” From that day forward, he was fighting not just the English; he was fighting his own people.
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    Church and his new Sakonnet recruits reached Plymouth the next day. Having already acquired a reputation for daring and unconventionality, Church attracted several new English volunteers, including Jabez Howland’s brother Isaac, Caleb Cook, Jonathan Delano, and Jonathan Barnes. In their late twenties and early thirties, many of these men were, like Church, either the sons or grandsons of the original Pilgrims. With the help of the Sakonnets, this hardy group of Mayflower descendants was about to develop a new way to fight a war.
    Church was by no means the first to utilize friendly Indians against the enemy. The Connecticut forces had relied on the Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics since the beginning of the conflict. Under the leadership of Major John Talcott, Connecticut forces had become known for their relentless pursuit of the enemy—and for massacring almost all those they encountered. In many ways, Talcott had become another Samuel Moseley, but unlike Moseley and his roughneck band of privateers, who enthusiastically butchered Native men, women, and children, Talcott preferred to let his Indians do much of the dirty work. He claimed to be appalled by the brutality of his Mohegan and Pequot scouts, but that did not prevent him from giving them free rein when it came to killing and torturing the Narragansetts.
    In early July, Talcott’s company surprised several groups of Narragansetts, and in the course of a few days killed more than two hundred of them, including the female sachem known as Queen, whom Talcott described as “that old piece of venom.” Talcott decided to keep one of the Narragansetts alive so that his own Native warriors could torture him to death while providing “an ocular demonstration of the savage, barbarous cruelty of these heathen.” Ritual torture was a long-standing part of Indian warfare, and Talcott later provided the Puritan historian William Hubbard with a detailed account of how the Mohegans cut the young warrior apart, finger by finger and toe by toe, “the blood sometimes spurting out in streams a yard from his hand,” before clubbing him to death.
    No matter how shocking such incidents might have seemed in English eyes, they obfuscated an essential truth about King Philip’s War. Atrocities were expected in both European and Native conflicts. And yet, the English had to admit that compared to what was typical of European wars, the Indians had conducted themselves with surprising restraint. As Mary Rowlandson could attest, the Native warriors never raped their female captives—a common occurrence in the wars of seventeenth-century Europe.
    But that did not prevent the level of violence in King Philip’s War from escalating during the summer of 1676. As in the final stages of the English civil war, what has been described as “a kind of victor’s justice” began to assert itself. Confident that the Indians were about to