King Philip / Makers of History

by John S. C. Abbott

Block Island, where these scenes occurred, belonged to the Narragansets; but many who were engaged in the murder, as if fearful of the vengeance of Canonicus, their own chieftain, fled across the Sound to the Pequot country, and were protected by them. The Pequots thus became implicated in the crime. Canonicus, on the other hand, rescued the captives taken from the boat, and restored them to their friends. The English now decided that it was necessary for them so to punish the Indians as to teach them that such outrages could no longer be committed with impunity. It was a fearful vengeance which was resolved upon. An army of one hundred men was raised, commissioned to proceed to Block Island, burn every wigwam, destroy all the corn, shoot every man, and take the women and children captive. Thus the island was to be left a solitude and a desert.

The expedition.
The first attack.
The English victorious.

On the 25th of August, 1636, the detachment sailed from Boston. The Indians were aware of the punishment with which they were threatened, and were prepared for resistance. Captain John Endicott, who was in command of the expedition, anchored off the island, and seeing a solitary Indian wandering upon the beach, who, it afterward appeared, had been placed there as a decoy, took a boat and a dozen armed men, and rowed toward the shore. When they reached within a few rods of the beach, suddenly sixty warriors, picked men, tall, athletic, and of established bravery, sprang up from behind the sand-hills, rushed to the water's edge, and poured in upon the boat a volley of arrows. Fortunately, the boat was so far from the land that not much injury was done, though two were seriously wounded. As the water was shoal, the colonists, musket in hand, sprang from the boat and waded toward the shore, piercing their foes with a well-directed volley of bullets. Had the Indians possessed any measure of the courage of the English, the sixty savages might have closed upon the twelve colonists, and easily have destroyed them all; but they had no disciplined courage which would enable them to stand a charge. With awful yells of fury and despair, they broke and fled into the forests and the swamps.

The work of devastation.
Inefficiency of the punishment.

Captain Endicott now landed his force and commenced the work of destruction. There were two Indian villages upon the island, containing about sixty wigwams each. The torch was applied, and they were all destroyed. Every canoe that could be found was staved. There were also upon the island about two hundred acres of standing corn, which the English trampled down. But not an Indian could be found. The women and children had probably been removed from the island, and the warriors who remained so effectually concealed themselves that the English sought them in vain. After spending two days upon the island, the expedition again embarked, and sailed across the Sound to the mouth of the Thames, then called Pequot Harbor. As the vessel entered the harbor, about three hundred warriors assembled upon the shore. Captain Endicott sent an interpreter to inform them that he had come to demand the murderers of the English, and to obtain compensation for the injuries which the Indians had inflicted. To this the Pequots defiantly replied with a shower of arrows. Captain Endicott landed on both sides of the harbor where New London now stands. The Indians sullenly retired before him to the adjacent rocks and fastnesses, rendering it necessary for the English to keep in a compact body to guard against assault. Two Indians were shot, and probably a few others wounded. The wigwams along the shore were burned, and the canoes destroyed, and then the expedition again spread its sails and returned to Boston, having done infinitely more harm than good. They had merely exasperated their haughty foes. They had but struck the hornets' nest with a stick. The Connecticut people were in exceeding terror, as they knew that savage vengeance would fall mercilessly upon them.

Exultation of Sassacus.
Scenes of blood.

Sassacus was a stern man of much native talent. He laughed to scorn this impotent revenge. To burn an Indian wigwam was inflicting no great calamity. The huts were reared anew before the expedition had arrived in Boston. The Pequots now despised their foes, and, gathering around their council fires, they clashed their weapons, shrieked their war-whoop, and excited themselves into an intensity of rage. The defenseless settlers along the banks of the Connecticut were now at the mercy of the savages, who were roused to the commission of every possible atrocity. No pen can describe the scenes of woe which, during the autumn and winter of 1636 and 1637, transpired in the solitudes of the wilderness. The Indians were every where in marauding bands. At midnight, startled by the yell of the savage, the lonely settler sprang to his door but to see his building in flames, to be pierced with innumerable arrows, to fall upon his floor weltering in blood, and to see, as death was stealing over him, his wife and his children brained by the tomahawk. The tortures inflicted by the savages upon their captives were too horrible to be narrated. Even the recital almost causes the blood to chill in one's veins.

Energy of Sassacus.

Sassacus was indefatigable in his endeavors to rouse all the tribes to combine in a war of extermination.