Mayflower

but finding a gap in the English line on the west end of the swamp, most of the enemy, now led by Annawon, escaped.
    Church gathered his men on the rise of land where the Indians’ shelter had been built and told them of Philip’s death. The army, Indians and English alike, shouted “Huzzah!” three times. Taking hold of his breeches and stockings, the Sakonnets dragged the sachem’s body through the mud and deposited him beside the shelter—“a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast,” Church remembered.
    With his men assembled around him and with Philip’s mud-smeared body at his feet, Church pronounced his sentence: “That for as much as he had caused many an Englishman’s body to lie unburied and rot above ground, that not one of his bones should be buried.” He called forward a Sakonnet who had already executed several of the enemy and ordered him to draw and quarter the body of King Philip.
    The Sakonnet took up his hatchet, but paused to deliver a brief speech. Philip had been a “very great man,” he said, “and had made many a man afraid of him, but so big as he was he would now chop his ass for him.” Soon the body had been divided into four pieces. One of Philip’s hands possessed a distinctive scar caused by an exploded pistol. Church awarded the hand to Alderman, who later placed it in a bottle of rum and made “many a penny” in the years to come by exhibiting the hand to curious New Englanders.
    Â 
    Almost exactly a month earlier, on Thursday, July 18, the congregation at Plymouth had formally renewed the covenant their forefathers had struck with God more than a half century before in Leiden. “[W]e are,” they had vowed, “though descended of a noble vine, yet become the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto God; we have been a proud generation, though we are the sons and daughters of Zion.”
    From that day forward, victory had followed victory, and on Thursday, August 17, Pastor John Cotton led his congregation in a day of Thanksgiving. Soon after the conclusion of public worship that day, Benjamin Church and his men arrived with the preeminent trophy of the war. “[Philip’s] head was brought into Plymouth in great triumph,” the church record states, “he being slain two or three days before, so that in the day of our praises our eyes saw the salvation of God.”
    The head was placed on one of the palisades of the town’s one-hundred-foot-square fort, built near where, back in 1623, Miles Standish had placed the head of Wituwamat after his victory at Wessagussett. Philip’s head would remain a fixture in Plymouth for more than two decades, becoming the town’s most famous attraction long before anyone took notice of the hunk of granite known as Plymouth Rock.
    Â 
    Philip was dead, but Annawon, the sachem’s “chief captain,” was still out there. Old as Annawon was, the colony would not be safe, the governor insisted, until he had been taken. There was yet another well-known warrior still at large: Tuspaquin, the famed Black Sachem of Nemasket. Tuspaquin was both a powwow and a sachem and was, according to the Indians, impervious to bullets.
    Church was expected to hunt down and kill these two notorious warriors, but he had other ideas. He had recently been contacted by Massachusetts-Bay about assisting the colony against the Abenakis in Maine, where fighting still raged. With Tuspaquin and Annawon at his side, Church believed, he might be able to subdue the hitherto unconquerable Abenakis.
    On August 29, he learned that the Black Sachem was in the region known as Lakenham, about six miles west of Plymouth. But after two days of searching, he’d only managed to take Tuspaquin’s wife and children. He left a message for the sachem with two old Nemasket women that Tuspaquin “should be his captain over his Indians if he [proved to be] so stout a man as they reported him to be.” With luck, Tuspaquin would turn himself in at Plymouth, and Church would have a new Native officer.
    About a week later, word came from Taunton that Annawon and his men had been seen at Mount Hope. On Thursday, September 7, Church and just five Englishmen, including his trusted lieutenant Jabez Howland, and twenty Indians left Plymouth in search of Annawon.
    They ranged about Mount Hope for several days and took a large number of Indians near the abandoned English fort. When