Historic Events of Colonial Days

by Rupert Sargent Holland

Williams was brave, and he had need to be when he made his visit to the wigwam of the chief, Canonicus. He found men of the Pequods there, trying to induce Canonicus and the other Narragansett sachems to join them in war on the whites. He came as a friend, he showed no fear, and he stayed for several days, sleeping among them at night, as if he had no suspicion that the Pequods might want to kill him, alone and unarmed among so many of them. And the Pequods did not touch him. He had learned something of the Indian tongue while he lived at Plymouth and Salem, and he talked with them and the Narragansetts, urging them to be friends with the white men who had come to live among them.

His visit to Canonicus was successful. The Narragansett chiefs renewed their promises of friendship for Roger Williams' men and sent the Pequod envoys away. The disappointed Pequods, however, told the Narragansetts that the English were treacherous folk and warned them that they would not always find these new settlers as friendly as Roger Williams had said. And in part the Pequods were right, for there were white men who were fully as treacherous as any Indians.

Not long afterward four young men set out from Massachusetts Bay to go to the Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island. Somewhere between Boston and the Providence Plantations they sat down to rest and smoke. A Narragansett Indian came in sight, and they called to him to stop and smoke a pipe with them. The Indian accepted their invitation. The white men saw that he was a trader and had a large stock of wampum, and also cloth and beads with him, and so, as he sat with them, they suddenly attacked him, and, robbing him, left him for dead. The Narragansett, though very badly wounded, was able after a while to drag himself back to the wigwams of his tribe. There he told his story before he died. Some of the chiefs set out on the trail at once, and capturing three of the whites, took them to the settlers at Aquidneck. They were tried for the robbery and murder, found guilty, and executed, though some settlers murmured against Englishmen being condemned for doing harm to Indians. But wise men such as Governor Bradford and Roger Williams knew that they must use the same justice toward Indians as toward white men if they were ever to live in peace with their neighbors.

So the Narragansetts kept peace with the newcomers who were building their homes on the shores of the great bay that bore the name of the Indian tribe, and Roger Williams turned his attention to the needs of his people. He wanted a charter from the king of England for his new colony, and to get it he had to go back to England. Instead of going to Boston or Plymouth to take ship he traveled south to the Dutch seaport of New Amsterdam. The Dutch were also having trouble with their Indian neighbors, and Roger Williams was urged to try to pacify the red men. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay kept record of most of the important things that were taking place in the English colonies, and this is what he wrote:

"1643. Mo. 4, 20.—There fell out hot wars between the Dutch and the Indians thereabout. The occasion was this. An Indian being drunk had slain an old Dutchman.... The Indians also of Long Island took part with their neighbors upon the main, and as the Dutch took away their corn, so they fell to burning the Dutch houses. But these, by the mediation of Mr. Williams, who was there to go in a Dutch ship for England, were pacified and peace reëstablished between the Dutch and them."

Roger Williams sailed from New Amsterdam in June or July, 1643, and on the voyage he spent much time in writing a remarkable book, "A Key into the Languages of America," as he called it. He reached England at a most exciting time. Parliament had rebelled against King Charles the First, the king had fled from London, the battle of Edge Hill had been fought between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, and the country was an armed camp. Williams tried to get his charter from the Parliament, but matters were so upset that such business took a long time. The people of London were suffering for fuel, and he busied himself in plans to provide coal and wood for them, and he went on with his writings, most of which were religious arguments, such as many men of that period, among them William Penn, were fond of writing.

At last he was able to get his charter from Parliament, and set out on his return journey. He had not sailed from Boston on his outward voyage because of the order of exile from the colony of Massachusetts Bay that still stood against him. But he asked permission of that colony to let him return by way of Boston, and this was granted. He landed at the same place where he had made his first landing in America; journeyed, probably on foot, to the Blackstone River, and paddled his canoe to Narragansett Bay. As he approached the Bay he was met by a fleet of canoes manned by the chief settlers of his colony, who gave him a royal welcome. In return for his services in obtaining the charter for the new Providence Plantations the three settlements of Newport, Portsmouth and Providence agreed to pay him one hundred pounds.

Roger Williams' wife had joined him at the Providence Plantations, and they now had a family of six children. He did not approve of a minister being paid for his services, and so he, like many other preachers of the Puritans, found other means to supply his family with bread and meat. He had traded with the Indians for furs while he was at Salem, and since then he had built a trading house on the west shore of Narragansett Bay, at a place called Cawcawmsquissick by the Indians, about fifteen miles south of Providence, and near where the town of Wickford now stands. Ninigret, one of his powerful Indian friends, lived near by, and saw to it that the best furs went to Roger Williams' house. It was a convenient place for the hunters to bring their stores, and it was not far across the bay to Newport, which was becoming the main shipping port of the colony. To Newport he took his furs to sell them in the market or send them by trading-vessel to England, and there he bought the stock of cloth and beads, sugar and other supplies that he paid to the Indians. He made at his trading-house at least one hundred pounds a year, the equal of five hundred dollars in American money, and with a much greater purchasing power in those days than now.

Meantime the Narragansetts and the Mohegans had been at war with each other, and the former tribe winning, had made an alliance with the Mohegans, and threatened a joint attack on the English colonies. Williams and two or three others went out to the Indian chiefs and again made a treaty of peace with them, for there was no white man in New England for whom all the Indians had such affection as they had for Roger Williams. Time and again he saved his own colony, and the neighboring ones of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth and Connecticut from Indian attacks. His knowledge of the Indian tongues was of great assistance to him, and his desire to be perfectly fair and frank with them was even more valuable.

Once more he went to England, for a Mr. Coddington of Newport had obtained from Parliament a commission as governor for life of the settlements at Aquidneck, which interfered with the charter already granted to the Providence Plantations. There he succeeded in having the claims of his colony adjusted, there he wrote more religious pamphlets and preached and lectured, and there he met Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, and John Milton the poet, and told them about the Indians of New England, their language and their customs and the missionary work the colonists were doing among them.