Mayflower

welfare. With this remarkable recovery, everything had changed. “Now I see the English are my friends and love me,” Massasoit announced to the assembled multitude; “and whilst I live, I will never forget this kindness they have showed me.”
    Before their departure, Massasoit took Hobbamock aside and had some words with the trusted pniese. Not until the following day, after they had spent the night with Corbitant, who now declared himself to be one of the Pilgrims’ staunchest allies, did Hobbamock reveal the subject of his conversation with Massasoit.
    Plymouth, the sachem claimed, was in great danger. Pushed to the limit of their endurance by Weston’s men at Wessagussett, the Massachusetts had decided they must wipe out the settlement. But to attack Wessagussett would surely incite the wrath of the Pilgrims, who would feel compelled to revenge the deaths of their countrymen. The only solution, the Massachusetts had determined, was to launch raids on both English settlements. But the Massachusetts had just forty warriors; if they were to attack Wessagussett and Plymouth simultaneously, they needed help. Massasoit claimed that they had succeeded in gaining the support of half a dozen villages on Cape Cod as well as the Indians at Manomet and Martha’s Vineyard. An assault was imminent, Massasoit insisted, and the only option the Pilgrims had was “to kill the men of Massachusetts, who were the authors of this intended mischief.” If the Pilgrims waited until after the Indians had attacked Wessagussett, it would be too late. By then the regionwide Native force would have been assembled, and the “multitude of adversaries” would overwhelm them. They must act “without delay to take away the principals, and then the plot would cease.”
    It was terrifying to learn that they were, in Winslow’s words, “at the pit’s brim, and yet feared nor knew not that we were in danger.” They must return to Plymouth as soon as possible and inform Governor Bradford. After more than two years of threatened violence, it now appeared that the Pilgrims might have no choice but to go to war.
    Â 
    As Winslow, Hobbamock, and John Hamden were hurrying back to Plymouth, Phineas Pratt, a thirty-year-old joiner who had become, by default, one of the leaders of the sorry settlement of Wessagussett, was beginning to think it was time to escape this hellhole and find his way to Plymouth.
    Their sufferings had become unendurable. They had nothing to eat, and the Indians were becoming increasingly belligerent. The warriors, led by a pniese named Pecksuot, gathered outside the wall of the Wessagussett fort. “Machit pesconk!” they shouted, which Pratt translated as “Naughty guns.” An attack seemed at hand, so the English increased the number of men on watch. But without food, the guards began to die at their posts. One bitterly cold night, Pratt reported for guard duty. “I [saw] one man dead before me,” he remembered, “and another [man dead] at my right hand and another at my left for want of food.”
    Word reached the settlement from an Englishman living with the Indians that the Massachusetts planned to attack both Wessagussett and Plymouth. Sachem Obtakiest was waiting for the snow to melt so that his warriors’ footprints could not be tracked when they left for the other settlement. “[T]heir plot was to kill all the English people in one day,” Pratt wrote. He decided he must leave as soon as possible for Plymouth. “[I]f [the] Plymouth men know not of this treacherous plot,” he told his compatriots, “they and we are all dead men.”
    With a small pack draped across his back, he walked out of the settlement as casually as he could manage with a hoe in his hand. He began to dig at the edge of a large swamp, pretending to search for groundnuts. He looked to his right and to his left and, seeing no Indians, disappeared into the swamp.
    He ran till about three o’clock in the afternoon. There were patches of snow everywhere, and he feared the Indians had followed his footprints and would soon be upon him. Clouds moved in, making it difficult to determine the position of the sun and the direction in which he was traveling. “I wandered,” he wrote, “not knowing my way.” But at sunset, the western sky became tinged with red, providing him with the orientation he needed.
    As darkness overtook