Mayflower

60 and 80 percent. Philip’s local squabble with Plymouth Colony had mutated into a regionwide war that, on a percentage basis, had done nearly as much as the plagues of 1616–19 to decimate New England’s Native population.
    In the end, the winner of the conflict was determined not by military prowess but by one side’s ability to outlast the other. The colonies had suffered a series of terrible defeats, but they had England to provide them with food, muskets, and ammunition. The Indians had only themselves, and by summer they were without the stores of food and gunpowder required to conduct a war. If Philip had managed to secure the support of the French, it might all have turned out differently. But the sachem’s dream of a French-Pokanoket alliance was destroyed when, at New York governor Andros’s urging, the Mohawks attacked him in late February. The Puritans never admitted it, but it had been Andros and the Mohawks who had determined the ultimate outcome of King Philip’s War.
    By August it had become apparent that the fighting was drawing to a close. But as everyone knew, the war would not be over until its instigator, Philip of Mount Hope, had been taken.
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    By Friday, August 11, most of the English forces that had once been roaming across Plymouth Colony had been disbanded. Only Benjamin Church and his loyal Sakonnets were still out on patrol. They had just spent the day in Pocasset but had come up with nothing. Church decided that he did not care what the authorities back in Plymouth said; he was going to visit Alice.
    Church and his men took the ferry to Aquidneck Island. Alice and the boys were now staying at the home of the noted merchant Peleg Sanford in Newport, and Church and half a dozen of his company rode their horses the eight miles to Sanford’s house. When she first glimpsed her husband, Alice was so overcome with surprise that she fainted dead away. By the time she had begun to revive, Church noticed that two horsemen were approaching at great speed. He turned to the members of his company and said, “Those men come with tidings.”
    They proved to be Sanford and Church’s old friend, Captain Roger Goulding, the mariner who had saved him more than a year ago during the Pease Field Fight, and sure enough, they had news. An Indian had appeared earlier that day at the southern tip of the Mount Hope Peninsula. He reported that he had just fled from Philip, who had killed his brother for proposing that they sue for peace. The Indian was now on Aquidneck Island and willing to lead Church to Philip’s camp.
    Church turned to Alice and smiled ruefully. He and his men had not yet had the chance to unsaddle their horses. “[H]is wife,” he later wrote, “must content herself with a short visit, when such game was ahead.” Church asked Sanford and Goulding whether they wanted to come along. They readily agreed, and soon they were back on their horses and riding north toward Mount Hope.
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    The deserter was waiting for them at the ferry. He was, according to Church, “a fellow of good sense, and told his story handsomely.” Philip, the Indian reported, was on a little patch of high ground surrounded by a miry swamp at the base of the rocky heights of Mount Hope. The sachem had returned to the symbolic if not literal center of his territory, and the disaffected Indian offered to lead Church to him “and to help kill him, that he might revenge his brother’s death.”
    It was after midnight by the time they approached Philip’s camp. In addition to Sanford and Goulding, Church had a few of his Plymouth regulars, including Caleb Cook, grandson of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cook, to augment his veteran band of Sakonnets. There was also the Pocasset Indian named Alderman, who had left Weetamoo at the beginning of the war and had offered to lead Church to her headquarters soon after the Pease Field Fight—a battle in which Church had fought against the very same Sakonnets who were now his loyal followers. It was a small company of no more than two dozen men, but it epitomized the tangled loyalties of a biracial community that had been ruptured and reconstituted amid the trauma of war.
    Church assigned Goulding, the man to whom he already owed his life, to lead the group that would fall upon Philip’s headquarters. With the Pokanoket deserter to guide them, Goulding and his men would creep on their stomachs