The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (22 page)

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Opening page of William Bradford's
Of Plymouth Plantation,
his account of the Plymouth settlement, including the attack on Wessagussett.

They were scheduled to leave the same day Pratt staggered out of the forest. standish postponed their departure so that he could get as much information as possible from the young man. The Pilgrims found Pratt's story “good encouragement to proceed in our intendments,” and with the help of a fair wind, standish and his men left the next day for Wessagussett.

 

◆◆◆ Before landing, they stopped at the
Swan,
which was anchored just offshore from Wessagussett. The little vessel was deserted, but after standish's men fired off a musket, the ship's master and several other men from Wessagussett walked down to the water's edge. They had been gathering groundnuts and seemed surprisingly unworried, given what the Pilgrims had been led to believe. standish asked why they had left the ship without anyone on guard. “[L]ike men senseless of their own misery,” they replied that they had no fear of the Indians. In fact, many of them had hired themselves out as servants to the Indians and were living with the Massachusetts in their wigwams.

If this was indeed the case, then why was standish preparing to launch an attack? Had Pratt simply told the Pilgrims what they wanted to hear? standish was not about to allow anything—not even evidence that all was peace at Wessagussett—to stop his plan. He explained that he was going to kill as many Indians as he could, then the settlers could either return with him to Plymouth or take the
Swan
up to Maine, where they could look to English fishermen for help. standish had even brought along some corn for them to eat during their voyage.

It was their hunger, not their fear of the Indians, that was the main concern of Weston's men. so they quickly embraced standish's plan, since it meant they would soon have something to eat. swearing all to secrecy, the captain told them to tell any Englishmen living outside the settlement to return as soon as possible to the safety of the fort. Unfortunately, it had started to rain, so several of the English chose to remain in the warmth of the Indians' wigwams.

In the meantime, a warrior approached the fort under the pretense of trading furs with standish. The fiery captain tried to appear welcoming and calm, but it was clear to the Indian that standish was up to no good. Once back among his friends, he reported that “he saw by his eyes that [the captain] was angry in his heart.”

This prompted the Massachusett pniese Pecksuot to approach Hobbamock. He told the Pokanoket warrior that he knew exactly what standish was up to and that he and Wituwamat were unafraid of him. “[L]et him begin when he dare,” he told Hobbamock; “he shall not take us unawares.”

Later that day, both Pecksuot and Wituwamat brashly walked up to standish. Pecksuot was a tall man, and he made a point of looking down on the Pilgrim military officer. “You are a great captain,” he said, “yet you are but a little man. Though I be no sachem, yet I am of great strength and courage.”

For his part, Wituwamat continued to sharpen the same knife he had made such a show of when he last saw standish several weeks before at Manomet. On the knife's handle was the carved outline of a woman's face. “I have another at home,” he told standish, “wherewith I have killed both French and English, and that has a man's face on it; by and by these two must marry.”

“These things the captain observed,” Winslow wrote, “yet bore with patience for the present.”

 

◆◆◆ The next day, standish invited both Wituwamat and Pecksuot into one of the settlement's houses for a meal. In addition to corn, he had brought along some pork. The two Massachusett pnieses were suspicious of the Plymouth captain, but that did not prevent them from accepting standish's invitation. Wituwamat and Pecksuot were accompanied by Wituwamat's brother and a friend, along with several women. Besides standish, there were three other Pilgrims and Hobbamock in the room.

Once they had all sat down and begun to eat, the captain signaled for the door to be shut. He turned to Pecksuot and grabbed the knife from the string around the pniese's neck. Before the Indian had a chance to respond, standish had begun stabbing him with his own weapon. The point was needle sharp, and Pecksuot's chest was soon riddled with blood-spurting wounds. As standish and Pecksuot struggled, the other Pilgrims assaulted Wituwamat and his companion. “[I]t is incredible,” Winslow wrote, “how many wounds these two pnieses received before they died, not making any fearful noise, but catching at their weapons and striving to the last.”

All the while, Hobbamock stood by and watched. soon the three Indians were dead, and Wituwamat's teenage brother had been taken captive. A smile broke out across Hobbamock's face, and he said, “Yesterday, Pecksuot, bragging of his own strength and stature, said though you were a great captain, yet you were but a little man. Today I see you are big enough to lay him on the ground.”

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Detail from John Seller's 1675 map of New England.

But the killing had just begun. Wituwamat's brother was quickly hanged. There was another company of Pilgrims elsewhere in the settlement, and standish sent word to them to kill any Indians who happened to be with them. As a result, two more were put to death. In the meantime, standish and his cohorts found another Indian in the settlement and killed him too.

With Hobbamock and some of Weston's men in tow, standish headed out in search of more Indians. They soon came across sachem Obtakiest and a group of Massachusett warriors. The Indians quickly scattered along the edge of a nearby forest, each man hiding behind a tree. Arrows were soon whizzing through the brisk afternoon air, most of them aimed at standish and Hobbamock. Hobbamock was a pniese and was therefore supposedly invulnerable. Throwing off his coat, he began to chase after the Indians behind the trees. Most of them fled so quickly that none of the English could keep up with them.

There was a powwow who stood his ground and aimed an arrow at standish. The captain and another Englishman fired simultaneously at the powwow, and the bullets broke his arm. With that, the remaining Indians, which included sachem Obtakiest, ran for the shelter of a nearby swamp, where they paused to yell curses at the Plymouth captain. standish challenged the sachem to fight him man-to-man, but after a final exchange of insults, Obtakiest and the others disappeared into the swamp. several women had been captured back at the settlement during the scuffle with Pecksuot and Wituwamat. Now that the killing spree had finally come to an end, standish decided to release the women, even though he knew there were at least three of Weston's men still living with the Indians. If he had kept these women as hostages, standish could easily have bargained for the Englishmen's lives. But killing Native warriors, not saving lives, appears to have been the captain's goal at Wessagussett, and he released the female hostages. All three Englishmen were later executed.

Now that the violence had come to an end, the majority of the Wessagussett survivors decided to sail to Maine. The Pilgrims waited until the
Swan
had cleared Massachusetts Bay, then turned their shallop south for Plymouth, with the head of Wituwamat wrapped in a piece of white linen.

 

◆◆◆ Standish arrived at Plymouth to a hero's welcome. After being “received with joy,” the captain and his men marched up to the newly completed fort, where Wituwamat's head was planted on a pole on the fort's roof. This was a common practice back in England, where the heads of executed traitors were mounted above the entrance to London Bridge. As it turned out, the fort contained its first prisoner: an Indian who had been sent to catch Phineas Pratt.

The Indian was released from his chains and brought out for examination. After looking “piteously on the head” of Wituwamat, the captive confessed everything. The plot had not originally been sachem Obtakiest's idea. There were five—Wituwamat, Pecksuot, and three powwows, including the one standish had injured at Wessagussett—who had convinced their sachem to launch an attack against the Pilgrims. Bradford released the prisoner on the condition that he carry a message to Obtakiest: If the sachem dared to continue in “the like courses,” Bradford vowed, “he would never suffer him or his to rest in peace, till he had utterly consumed them.”

It took many days for the Pilgrims to receive an answer. Finally a Massachusett woman appeared at Plymouth with Obtakiest's response. she explained that her sachem was eager to make peace with the Pilgrims, but none of his men were willing to approach the settlement. Ever since the massacre at Wessagussett, Obtakiest had kept on the move, fearful that standish might return and “take further vengeance on him.”

The Massachusetts were not the only Indians in the region to have escaped into the wilderness. All throughout Cape Cod—from Manomet to Nauset to Pamet—the Native inhabitants had fled in panic, convinced that standish and his thugs were about to descend on their villages and kill every Indian in sight. “[T]his sudden and unexpected execution ... ,” Edward Winslow wrote, “hath so terrified and amazed them, as in like manner they forsook their houses, running to and fro like men distracted, living in swamps and other desert places, and so brought manifold diseases amongst themselves, whereof very many are dead.”

Huddled in swamps and on remote islands, afraid to go back to their villages, Indians throughout the region began to die at a startling rate. “[C]ertainly it is strange to hear how many of late have, and still daily die amongst them,” Winslow wrote. Just about every notable sachem on the Cape died in the months ahead, including Canacum at Manomet, and Aspinet at Nauset. Among the Massachusetts, the Pilgrims had earned a new name:
wotawquenange,
which one English settler later translated as meaning “cutthroats.”

 

◆◆◆ The Pilgrims knew that there were those back in England who would criticize them for launching an unprovoked attack on sachem Obtakiest and the Massachusetts. In the months ahead, Edward Winslow wrote a book called
Good Newes from New England.
As the title suggests, Winslow's account puts the Wessagussett raid in the best possible light. The Pilgrims, Winslow points out, had been operating in a climate of intense fear since learning about the massacres in Virginia the previous spring. When Massasoit revealed the plot against them, there was little else they could have been expected to do.

There was one man, however, who refused to forgive the Pilgrims for “the killing of those poor Indians.” When he heard about the incident back in Leiden, Pastor John Robinson sent Governor Bradford a letter. “Oh, how happy a thing had it been,” he wrote, “if you had converted some before you had killed any! Besides, where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after.” The real problem, as far as Robinson saw it, was Bradford's willingness to trust standish, a man the minister had come to know when he was in Leiden. The captain lacked “that tenderness of the life of man (made after God's image) which is meet.”

Robinson concluded his letter to Bradford with words that proved ominously prophetic, given the ultimate course of New England's history: “It is ... a thing more glorious, in men's eyes, than pleasing in God's or convenient for Christians, to be a terror to poor barbarous people. And indeed I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others should be drawn to affect a kind of ruffling course in the world.”

 

◆◆◆ That summer the supply ship
Anne
arrived with sixty passengers, including the widow Alice southworth. The southworths and Bradfords had known each other in Leiden, and just a few weeks after the
Anne
's arrival, William Bradford and Alice were married on August 14, 1623.