Mayflower

pistol. Within a week, the Pokanoket leader was dead.
    In years to come, the rumors would abound: that Alexander had been marched unmercifully under the burning summer sun until he had sickened and died; that he had been thrown in jail and starved to death. In an effort to counter such hearsay, one of the men who’d accompanied Winslow—William Bradford’s son William junior—provided an account of the incident in which he insisted that Alexander had accompanied Winslow “freely and readily.”
    Alexander’s younger brother Philip, on the other hand, became convinced that Winslow had poisoned the sachem. Indeed, Philip’s hatred of the Plymouth military officer became so notorious that once war did erupt, Winslow felt compelled to send his wife and children to Salem while he transformed his home at Marshfield into an armed fortress. Intentionally or not, Winslow had lit the slow-burning fuse that would one day ignite New England.
    Â 
    For days, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Indians gathered at Mount Hope to mourn the passing of Alexander. Then the despair turned to joy as the crowds celebrated Philip’s rise to supreme sachem of the Pokanokets.
    On the eastern shore of Mount Hope is the huge outcropping of rock from which the peninsula gets its name. More than three hundred feet high, Mount Hope provides panoramic views of Narragansett and Mount Hope bays. It is a towering, majestic chunk of gneiss and quartz that puts the relatively minuscule Plymouth Rock to shame.

    Approaching Mount Hope from the south
    There is a legend that Philip once stood upon the summit of Mount Hope and, turning west, hurled a stone all the way across the peninsula to Poppasquash Neck more than two miles away. It is a tradition that reflects the sense of power and strength that many Pokanokets may have projected upon their new leader, who was just twenty-four years old in August 1662. That summer, the “flocking multitudes” at Mount Hope became so uproarious that the Plymouth magistrates feared Philip had convened a council of war. Only a few weeks after hauling his brother into court, Governor Prence made the same demand of Philip.
    The young sachem who appeared at Plymouth on August 6, 1662, was not about to cower before the English. As Philip made clear in the years ahead, he considered himself on equal terms with none other than Charles II. All others—including Governor Prence and the deceitful Major Josiah Winslow—were “but subjects” of the king of England and unfit to tell a fellow monarch what to do. Philip’s “ambitious and haughty” demeanor at the Plymouth court that day moved one observer to refer to him mockingly as “King Philip”—a nickname he never claimed for himself but that followed the sachem into history.
    No matter how self-possessed Philip appeared that day in court, he knew that now was not the time to accuse the English of murdering his brother. Alexander’s death had thrust him into a difficult and completely unexpected situation. If Philip truly suspected that his brother had been assassinated, he must have believed that Alexander’s boldness had gotten him killed. Philip was young enough to be his late brother’s son. He had no choice but to be very careful, particularly in the early days of his sachemship.
    Instead of indignantly accusing Winslow of murdering his brother—something he did not say openly to an Englishman until near the outbreak of hostilities thirteen years later—Philip told the members of the court exactly what they wanted to hear. He promised that the “ancient covenant” that had existed between his father and Plymouth remained inviolate. He even offered his younger brother as a hostage if it might ease the magistrates’ concerns, but it was decided that this was not necessary. As far as Governor Prence was concerned, relations with the Indians were once again back to normal.
    Â 
    Over the next few years, as Philip settled into his new role as leader of the Pokanokets, New England grew more and more crowded. Both the English and the Indians depended on agriculture, and only about 20 percent of the land was suitable for farming. Adding to the pressure for land was the rapid rise of the English population. The first generation of settlers had averaged an astonishing seven to eight children per family, and by the 1660s those children wanted farms of their own.
    The