Mayflower

1667, Philip was five years into his reign as sachem of Mount Hope. Almost thirty years old, he and his wife Wootonekanuske had just had a son, and the birth of the boy appears to have prompted Philip to draft a will. When Philip’s interpreter, John Sassamon, read the will back to him, all seemed as the sachem had intended. But, as it turned out, Sassamon had written something else entirely. Instead of leaving his lands to his intended heirs, Philip had, according to the will as written by Sassamon, left his lands to his interpreter. As had happened forty years before with Squanto, a cultural go-between had surrendered to the temptations of using his special powers to his own advantage. When Philip discovered what his trusted interpreter had done, Sassamon, it was reported, “ran away from him.” Soon Sassamon was back with his former mentor, John Eliot, working as a teacher and minister to the Praying Indians.
    Philip came to blame the interpreter’s disloyalty on the influence of Christianity. He later claimed that the Praying Indians were “only dissemblers” and intended “by their lying to wrong their [Indian] kings.” John Eliot reported that Philip told him he cared less for Christianity than he cared for the button of his coat. The sachem was talking metaphorically, but his newfound bitterness toward the religion flowed from one man: his former confidant, John Sassamon.
    Sassamon’s betrayal was just one setback in what proved to be a difficult year for the Pokanoket sachem. That spring Plymouth governorPrence heard a disturbing rumor. Informants from Rehoboth reported that Philip had been talking about joining forces with the French and Dutch against the English. Not only would this allow the Indians to get back their lands, Philip had claimed; it would enable them to “enrich themselves with [English] goods.” Once again, it was time to send Major Josiah Winslow to Mount Hope.
    After confiscating the Pokanokets’ guns, Winslow found an Indian who asserted that Philip had indeed been talking about a possible conspiracy against the English. Described as “one of Philip’s sachem’s men,” the witness described the circumstances of Philip’s boast with so many specific details that Winslow felt the accusation was “very probably true.”
    Philip, on the other hand, claimed a Narragansett sachem named Ninigret had put the Indian up to it. When that did not prove to be the case, Philip continued to insist that he had been set up, “pleading how irrational a thing it was that he should desert his long experienced friends, the English, and comply with the French and Dutch.” As he stood before the Plymouth magistrates, more than a hint of desperation began to creep into Philip’s increasingly urgent plea for forgiveness. Should the English decide to withdraw “their wonted favor,” he asserted, it would be “little less than a death to him, gladding his enemies, grieving and weakening his friends.”
    In the end, the Plymouth magistrates decided that even if Philip’s “tongue had been running out,” he was not about to attack anybody. Quite the contrary, they were now concerned that this most recent debacle had so weakened Philip’s stature that he was in danger of being spurned by his own people. From the colony’s perspective, it was better to have a vacillating and ineffective leader in place among the Pokanokets than a sachem who might rally his people against them. “[N]ot willing to desert [Philip] and let him sink,” the court decided to continue its official backing of Philip and return the confiscated weapons. This did not prevent the magistrates from charging the sachem £40 to help defray the cost of Winslow’s fact-gathering mission.
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    Reputed to be Ninigret II, son of the Niantic sachem who sided with the English during King Philip’s War
    More than matching Philip’s growing need for money was the English need for land. “[M]any in our colony are in want of land…,” the record reads; “all such lands as the Indians can well spare shall be purchased.” In 1667 Thomas Willett, who was completing his last year as mayor of Manhattan, was given permission to purchase additional lands in the neighborhood of his longtime home in Wannamoisett and create the township of Swansea contiguous with the Pokanoket lands at Mount Hope.
    Philip had