Mayflower (26 page)

By 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.

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 begun with the best of intentions, but by the end of the 1660s he was on his way to a prodigious sell-off of Native land, aided and abetted by his brother’s former friend Thomas Willett. From 1650 to 1659, there had been a total of fourteen Indian deeds registered in Plymouth court; between 1665 and 1675, there would be
seventy-six
deeds.

Governor Prence and Major Winslow prided themselves on the strategy they had developed to deal with the Indians in the colony. With the help of Willett, the governor served as Philip’s primary contact, while Winslow devoted most of his energies to cultivating a relationship with the sachem of the Massachusetts to the north. It was a division of alliances that the two officials modeled on how Governor Bradford and Captain Standish had handled Squanto and Hobbamock in 1622. But as William Hubbard observed, while Bradford and Standish’s strategy appears to have worked reasonably well, Prence and Winslow’s approach proved far less effective when Prence died in 1673 and Winslow became governor. With Prence gone, Philip was now forced to deal with the one official he detested above all others. Not only was Winslow linked to his brother’s death, he had proven himself to be one of Plymouth’s most aggressive and unethical purchasers of Indian real estate.

In 1671, Winslow sued William, the son of Philip’s sister Amie, for the money he owed on a horse. Without any means to pay, William took out a mortgage on a parcel of his own land in Nemasket. It was not long before Winslow had used the mortgage to acquire an even larger tract of William’s land. The dubious practice of mortgaging property to pay off debt, which one historian has called “tantamount to confiscating land,” was not legal in Plymouth, and so Winslow revised the law. By the time he became governor in 1673, Winslow had come to embody Plymouth’s policy of increasingly arrogant opportunism toward the colony’s Native Americans.

It may have been true that from a strictly legal standpoint there was nothing wrong with how Winslow and the other Plymouth officials acquired large amounts of Pokanoket land. And yet, from a practical and moral standpoint, the process removed the Indians from their territory as effectively—and as cheaply—as driving them off at gunpoint. Philip had to do something to stanch the long series of reversals that had come to typify his tenure as leader.

In the beginning, when the English had been, according to Philip, “as a little child” and his father had been “a great man,” Massasoit had offered the Pilgrims his protection. Now that the roles were reversed, it was time, Philip insisted, that the English “do…as [the Pokanokets] did when they were too strong for the English.” Instead of pressing every advantage until they had completely overwhelmed the Indians, Plymouth officials should honor their colony’s obligation to the Pokanokets and allow them to exist as an autonomous people.

But as was becoming increasingly apparent, the children of the Pilgrims had very short memories. Now that their daily lives no longer involved an arduous and terrifying struggle for survival, they had begun to take the Indians for granted. In what is the great and terrible irony of the coming conflict—King Philip’s War—by choosing to pursue economic prosperity at the expense of the Indians, the English put at risk everything their mothers and fathers had striven so heroically to create. By pushing the Pokanokets until they had no choice but to push back, the colonists were unintentionally preparing the way for a return to the old, horrifying days of death and despair.

In March of 1671, Hugh Cole of Swansea reported that Indians from all over the region were flocking to Mount Hope. At one point, Philip led a group of sixty armed warriors on a march up the peninsula to the edge of the English settlement. Josiah Winslow reported the rumor that in addition to winning the support of the Narragansetts, Philip had hatched a plot to abduct the Plymouth governor and (as the sachem had done with John Gibbs on Nantucket) use him to secure a large ransom. Though not a shot had yet been fired, many in Plymouth believed that after years of rumors, war had finally come to the colony.

It’s unclear what triggered Philip to begin preparing for war. The Puritan historian William Hubbard claimed he took up arms “pretend ing some petite injuries done him in planting land.” Whatever the specific cause, it was a momentous decision for a leader who had, prior to this, consistently backed away from the threat of any genuine conflict.

The “Seat of Philip” at the eastern shore of Mount Hope

Some New Englanders dared to suggest that the Indians were not entirely to blame for the threatened insurrection and that Plymouth was guilty of treating the Pokanokets in an unnecessarily high-handed manner. In an attempt to prove otherwise, Plymouth magistrates invited a delegation from Massachusetts to attend a meeting with Philip at the town of Taunton on April 10, 1671.

Philip and a large group of warriors—all of them armed and with their faces painted—cautiously approached the Taunton town green, where an equally sizable number of Plymouth militiamen, bristling with muskets and swords, marched back and forth. Fearful that he was leading his men into a trap, Philip insisted that they be given several English hostages before he ventured into town. Tensions were so high that many of the colony’s soldiers shouted out that it was time for them to attack. Only at the angry insistence of Massachusetts-Bay officials were the Plymouth men made to stand down. Finally, after the exchange of several more messages, Philip and his warriors agreed to meet inside the Taunton meetinghouse—the Indians on one side of the aisle, the colonists on the other.

It was a scene that said much about the current state of Plymouth Colony. Forty-four years before, the Dutchman Isaack de Rasiere had described how the Pilgrims assembled in their fort for worship, each man with his gun. Now the children of the Pilgrims had gathered with the Pokanokets in a proper meetinghouse, not to worship but to settle their growing differences—the English on one side of the aisle in their woolen clothes and leather shoes, the Indians on the other with their faces painted and their bodies greased, and all of them, Puritans and Pokanokets alike, with muskets in their hands.

It did not go well for Philip. Once again, the Plymouth magistrates bullied him into submission, insisting that he sign a document in which he acknowledged the “naughtiness of my heart.” He also agreed to surrender all his warriors’ weapons to the English. According to William Hubbard, one of Philip’s own men was so ashamed by the outcome that he flung down his musket, accused his sachem of being “a white-livered cur,” and vowed that “he would never [follow Philip] again or fight under him.” The son of a Nipmuck sachem left Taunton in such a rage that he was moved to kill an Englishman on his way back to his home in central Massachusetts. He was eventually tried and hanged on Boston Common, where his severed head was placed upon the gallows, only to be joined by the skull of his father five years later.

In the months that followed, the colony required that the Indians from Cape Cod to Nemasket sign documents reaffirming their loyalty to Plymouth. The magistrates also insisted that Philip and his warriors turn over all their remaining weapons. When Philip balked, it seemed once again as if war might be imminent. Fearful that Plymouth was about to drive the Pokanokets and, with them, all of New England into war, the missionary John Eliot suggested that Philip come to Boston to speak directly with Massachusetts-Bay officials.

Philip appears to have been thankful for the missionary’s intervention. However, Eliot made the mistake of suggesting that his two Indian envoys bring John Sassamon, who was now living in Nemasket, to their meeting with Philip. The sight of his former interpreter appears to have ignited a fresh outburst of anguished rage in the already beleaguered sachem. In early September, when a messenger from Plymouth arrived at Mount Hope, he found “Philip and most of his chief men much in drink.” Philip angrily knocked the messenger’s hat off his head and “exclaimed much against Sassamon.” According to Philip, the hated Praying Indian had told Plymouth officials that the Pokanokets had been secretly meeting with some Narragansett sachems.