Mayflower

the young warriors. He compared them to “sticks laid on a heap, till by the multitude of them a great fire came to be kindled.” He also spoke of spiritual matters. Annawon said that the course of the war had convinced him that “there was a great god that overruled all; and that he had found that whatever he had done to any of those, whether Indians or English, the same was brought upon himself in after-time.”
    At daybreak, Church marched his prisoners to Taunton, where he met up with Lieutenant Howland, “who expressed a great deal of joy to see him again and said ’twas more than ever he expected.” The next day, Church sent Howland with the majority of the prisoners to Plymouth. In the meantime, he wanted Annawon to meet his friends in Rhode Island. They remained in Newport for several days and then finally left for Plymouth.
    In just two months’ time, Church had brought in a total of seven hundred Indians. He hoped that the debt the colony owed him might make Governor Winslow listen to his pleas that Annawon and, if he should turn himself in, Tuspaquin be granted clemency. He could use them Down East.
    Massachusetts governor John Leverett had requested to meet with him to discuss the possibility of his leading a company in Maine, and Church quickly left for Boston. But when he returned to Plymouth a few days later, he discovered “to his grief” that the heads of both Annawon and Tuspaquin had joined Philip’s on the palisades of Fort Hill.

EPILOGUE
Conscience
    A S EARLY AS the fall of 1675, they had begun to sail from the coast of New England: the slave ships. It began in September when a Captain Sprague departed from Plymouth with 178 Indians. By July of 1676, Plymouth had formalized the process of removing potentially dangerous Native men and boys by determining that “no male captive above the age of fourteen years should reside in the colony.” That fall, the English were not sure what to do with Philip’s nine-yearold son. Some ministers argued that the Bible granted the magistrates the power to execute the boy; others insisted on a more moderate course. In the end, Philip’s son, like his mother before him, was shipped off as a slave.
    It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip’s War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope, once the crowded Native heart of the colony, was virtually empty of inhabitants. Fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims’ children had not only defeated the Pokanokets in a devastating war, they had taken conscious, methodical measures to purge the land of its people.
    In the years before the war, Native Americans had constituted almost 30 percent of the population of New England. By 1680, they made up less than 15 percent. But if the English had succeeded in asserting their demographic dominance, the war was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory for the colonists. The crushing tax burden required to pay for the conflict stifled the region’s economy. When the Mount Hope Peninsula went up for sale in 1680, there were no Plymouth residents with the resources to purchase it, and the land went to a group of investors from Boston. Not for another hundred years would the average per-capita income in New England return to what it had been before King Philip’s War.

    John Foster’s 1677 map of New England
    The war that was to have removed forever the threat of Indian attack had achieved exactly the opposite of its original intention. By cutting such a wide and blood-soaked swath between themselves and the Indians, New Englanders had thrown the region out of balance. Without “friend Indians” to buffer them from their enemies, those living in the frontier were left open to attack. Over the course of the following century, New England was ravaged by a series of Indian wars. Unable to defend themselves, the colonies that had once operated as an autonomous enclave of Puritanism were forced to look to the British Crown for assistance. Within a decade of King Philip’s War, James II had appointed a royal governor to rule over New England, and in 1692 Plymouth became a part of Massachusetts. By doing their best to destroy the Native people who had welcomed and sustained their forefathers, New Englanders had destroyed their forefathers’ way of life.
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    The Pilgrims had