Mayflower

she would still have been subjected to the border disputes that plagued all the colonies. It was true that the United Colonies of New England had been created, in part, to address this problem, but Rhode Island was not part of the confederation. Plymouth could not allow Alexander to continue selling land to Rhode Islanders and summoned him to appear.
    There were also unsettling rumors that the sachem had spoken with the Narragansetts about joining forces against the English. When Alexander failed to appear in court as promised, Governor Thomas Prence instructed Major Josiah Winslow to bring him in.
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    Winslow headed out in July of 1662 with ten well-armed men, all of them on horseback, trotting along the same old Indian trail that their forefathers had once walked to Pokanoket. They were in the vicinity of Nemasket, fifteen miles inland from Plymouth, when they learned that Alexander happened to be just a few miles away at a hunting and fishing lodge on Monponsett Pond in modern Halifax, Massachusetts.
    It was still morning when Winslow and his men arrived at the Indians’ camp. They found the sachem and about ten others, including his wife Weetamoo, eating their breakfast inside a wigwam, with their muskets left outside in plain view. Winslow ordered his men to seize the weapons and to surround the wigwam. He then went inside to have it out with Alexander.
    The Pokanoket sachem spoke to Winslow through an interpreter, John Sassamon’s brother Rowland, and as the exchange became more heated, the major insisted that they move the conversation outside. Alexander was outraged that Plymouth officials had chosen to treat him in such a condescending and peremptory manner. If there had been any truth to the rumor of a conspiracy would he be here, casually fishing at Monponsett Pond?
    Winslow reminded the sachem that he had neglected to appear, as promised, before the Plymouth court. Alexander explained that he had been waiting for his friend Thomas Willet to return from Manhattan so that he could speak to him about the matter.
    By this point, Alexander had worked himself into a raging fury. Winslow took out his pistol, held the weapon to the sachem’s breast, and said, “I have been ordered to bring you to Plymouth, and by the help of God I will do it.”
    Understandably stunned, Alexander was on the verge of an even more violent outburst, when Sassamon asked that he be given the chance to speak to his sachem alone. After a few minutes of tense conversation, it was announced that Alexander had agreed to go with Winslow, but only as long as “he might go like a sachem”—in the company of his attendants.
    It was a hot summer day, and Winslow offered Alexander the use of one of their horses. Since his wife and the others must walk, the sachem said that “he could go on foot as well as they,” provided that the English maintained a reasonable pace. In the meantime, Winslow sent a messenger ahead to organize a hasty meeting of the magistrates in Duxbury.
    The meeting seems to have done much to calm passions on both sides. What happened next is somewhat unclear, but soon after the conference, Alexander and his entourage spent a night at Winslow’s house in Marshfield, where the sachem suddenly fell ill. One contemporary historian claimed that it was Alexander’s “choler and indignation that…put him into a fever.” More recently, a medical doctor has hypothesized that the sachem may have been suffering from appendicitis. Whatever the case, a surgeon was called for and gave Alexander a “working physic,” a strong purgative that would only have exacerbated his condition if he was indeed suffering from an irritated appendix. The sachem’s attendants asked that they be allowed to take him back to Mount Hope. Permission was granted, and Alexander’s men carried him on their shoulders till they reached the Taunton River in Middle-borough. From there he was transported by canoe back to Mount Hope, where he died a few days later.
    It was an astonishing and disturbing sequence of events that put into bold relief just where matters stood between the English and Indians in Plymouth Colony. In 1623, Edward Winslow had earned Massasoit’s undying love by doing everything in his power—even scraping the sachem’s furred mouth—to save his life. Thirty-nine years later, Winslow’s son had burst into Alexander’s wigwam, brandishing a