New England was trembling on the verge of death. For the distressed and harassed Pilgrims there seemed no alternative but speedy extermination, or such an exercise of courage and skill as should effectually overawe the Indians in the full flush of their success. Measures were at once matured. Massachusetts Bay acted with her accustomed vigor. It was declared that “the war, since it was waged on just grounds and for self-preservation, ought to be vigorously prosecuted.”[946] Six hundred pounds were levied; one hundred and sixty men were recruited.[947]
At Plymouth similar activity was displayed; and a levy of forty men was made.[948] But it was in Connecticut, the menaced spot, that the most herculean exertions were put forth. Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, placed ninety men in the field, under the command of stout John Mason—a sometime soldier in the Low Countries under Sir Thomas Fairfax, who held him in such esteem that in after-years, when at the head of the parliamentary muster, he wrote his truant protégé urging his return to England, that he might lend his skilful sword to the patriot cause.[949]
Mason, with Hooker’s benediction, immediately opened a vigorous campaign. Saybrook was reinforced.[950] A subsidiary detachment of Mohegans, under Uncas, was recruited.[951] The mouth of the Connecticut was made the base of operations, and thither the united levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, were transported. Here a council of war was held. After Stone, the chaplain, had sought the divine direction in prayer, it was decided to march directly upon the Pequod village off Point Judith.[952] All embarked; the objective point was safely reached. Then a storm intervened; it was impossible to land. The next day was Sunday; it was spent devoutly on shipboard; nor was it until Tuesday evening, the third day after they had dropped anchor, that the eager Pilgrims touched land.[953]
Mason bivouacked on the sea-shore, and in the gray of the next morning commenced the memorable march. “Seventy-seven brave Englishmen—the rest were left in charge of the vessels—sixty frightened Mohegans, and four hundred more terrified Narragansetts, entered the war-trail, and went twenty miles westward towards the Pequod country, to a fort occupied by some suspected neutrals. There a pause for the night was made, and, lest any Indian should give the doomed Pequods the alarm, the citadel was girt by the sentries of the shrewd English captain.”[954]
Before noon, on the following morning, they broke camp, and marched fifteen miles farther inland, pausing at nightfall under a hill “which, according to information received from their dusky allies—who had now all fallen in the rear, ‘being possessed with great fear’—stood the chief stronghold of the Pequods.”[955]
Mason could hear the savage revelry of the ill-fated and unsuspecting Indians very distinctly, as the wind wafted the laughter, the yells, the vaunts, from the village over the little hill. The din sank and fell till midnight. All were enjoying a general guffaw over the English, whose ships they had seen sail eastward on the sound, bearing, as they imagined, the pale-face warriors to tell their squaws of their discomfiture.[956]
The Pequod fort was a citadel of straw. It “was merely a circular acre or two enclosed by trunks of trees some twelve feet high, set firmly in the ground, and so closely ranged as to exclude entrance, while the interstices served as port-holes for marksmen. Within, ranged along two parallel lanes, were upwards of seventy wigwams, covered with matting and thatch. At the two points for entrance or egress, spaces were left between the timbers, the intervals being protected only by a slighter structure, or by loose branches.”[957]
Something of all this the curious eyes of the Pilgrims took in as they patiently waited for the midnight order to advance. At length it came; the camp was broken; prayers were offered; the Indian allies fell back to a still safer distance. The drowsy Pequod stronghold was surrounded; Mason was on one side, Underhill was on the other. Cautiously the girdling band crept on, on, on, towards the sally-ports, looking like sheeted phantoms in the ghastly moonlight. Their hands were on the gates, when a dog barked. The Indians were aroused. “Owanux! Owanux!” “The Englishmen are here!” came in a hoarse shout from within. Then, with a wild “Huzza!” the Pilgrims plunged themselves like an avalanche upon the frail and creaking fortress, firing the straw in fifty different directions. The rest was death; for it was not a battle—it was a massacre. Shouting the watchwords of the Israelites in Canaan, the Pilgrims smote the Pequods hip and thigh, for they knew that safety and peace dwelt in every blow—that severity was mercy.
Soon the explosion of a powder-train made the village kick the heavens. Then the flames began to wink, and at last to go out. Darkness followed—a darkness made more frightful by the moans of the wounded, the fierce panting of those wretches who still struggled against fate, and the vindictive yell of the Mohegan and Narragansett warriors, now in full cry after the dazed and despairing fugitives.[958]