The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (40 page)

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Benjamin Church's sword.

In the meantime, Church had his hands full in the swamp. Two enemy warriors surrendered, but the third, whom Church described as “a great stout surly fellow with his two locks tied up with red [cloth] and a great rattlesnake skin hanging to the back part of his head,” refused to give up. This, it turned out, was the sachem Totoson.

While the sakonnets guarded the others, Church chased Totoson. They were running through some dense bushes when the Indian tripped on a grapevine and fell flat on his face. Before he could get back up, Church raised the barrel of his musket and killed him with a single blow to the head. But as Church soon discovered, this was not Totoson. The sachem had somehow evaded him for the moment, and now, filled with rage, Totoson was coming up from behind, “flying at him like a dragon.” Just in the nick of time, the sakonnets opened fire. The bullets came close to killing Church, who claimed “he felt the wind of them,” but they had succeeded in scaring off Totoson, who escaped into the swamp.

They had not captured Philip or, for that matter, Totoson, but Church's band of eighteen English soldiers and twenty-two sakonnets had nonetheless managed one of the more spectacular feats of the war. Once the fighting had ended and they had rounded up all their prisoners, they discovered that they had taken a grand total of 173 Indians.

Church asked some of them if they could tell him anything about their sachem. “sir,” one of them replied, “you have now made Philip ready to die, for you have made him as poor and miserable as he used to make the English, for you have now killed or taken all his relations.”

When they reached Bridgewater that night, the only place that could handle all the prisoners was the pound, a fenced-in area used to collect the town's herds of sheep and cattle. The sakonnets were assigned guard duty, and Church made sure to provide both the guards and their prisoners with food and drink. “[T]hey had a merry night,” Church remembered, “and the prisoners laughed as loud as the soldiers, not [having been] so [well] treated [in] a long time.”

 

◆◆◆ By early August, most of the Indian leaders had been captured or killed, or had turned themselves in. On sunday, August 6, two days after Church delivered his prisoners to Plymouth, Weetamoo and what remained of her Pocasset followers were near Taunton when a group of local militiamen attacked. The English took twenty-six prisoners, but Weetamoo escaped. soon after, she tried to cross the Taunton River, but before she reached Pocasset on the eastern shore, her raft broke apart and she drowned.

Her naked body was discovered on the shore of Gardner's Neck, once the village site of her father, Corbitant. Not knowing who it was, an Englishman cut off the woman's head and sent it on to Taunton. Upon its arrival, the nameless head was placed upon a pole within sight of the Indians taken prisoner just a few days before. soon enough, the residents of Taunton knew whose head it was. According to Increase Mather, the Pocassets “made a most horrid and diabolical lamentation, crying out that it was their Queen's head.”

A few days later, Weetamoo's husband, Quinnapin, was taken captive, and on August 25, he was executed in Newport. A month later, sagamore sam and several other Nipmuck sachems who had been tricked into surrendering were also executed on the Common.

By that time, Totoson was dead. An old Indian woman later reported that after the sachem's eight-year-old son died from disease, Totoson's “heart became as a stone within him, and he died.” The woman threw some brush and leaves over Totoson's body and surrendered herself to the authorities in sandwich, where she, too, became ill and followed her sachem to the grave.

 

◆◆◆ In terms of the percentage of population killed, the English had suffered losses that are difficult for us to imagine today. During the forty-five months of World War II, the United states lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population; during the Civil War, the death rate was somewhere between 4 and 5 percent; during the fourteen months of King Philip's War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8 percent of its men.

But the English losses appear almost tiny when compared to those of the Indians. Of a total Native population of approximately twenty thousand, at least two thousand had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; three thousand had died of sickness and starvation; a thousand had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated two thousand eventually fled to join either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England lost somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of its people. Philip's local fight with Plymouth Colony had grown into a regionwide war that had done nearly as much as the plagues of 1616-19 to diminish New England's Native population.

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John Foster's 1677 map of New England.

In the end, the winner of the war was the side who was able to outlast the other. The colonies had suffered a series of terrible defeats, but they had England to provide them with food, muskets, and ammunition. The Indians had only themselves, and by summer they were without the food and gunpowder necessary to fight a war. By August, it had become obvious that the fighting was coming to a close. But as everyone knew, the war would not be over until Philip of Mount Hope had been taken.

 

◆◆◆ By Friday, August 11, most of the English forces from Plymouth Colony had been disbanded. Only Benjamin Church and his loyal sakonnets were still out on patrol. They had just spent the day in Pocasset but had come up with nothing. Church decided he was going to visit his wife, Alice.

Church and his men took the ferry to Aquidneck Island. Alice and the boys were now staying at the home of the merchant Peleg sanford in Newport, and Church and half a dozen of his company rode their horses the eight miles to sanford's house. When she first glimpsed her husband, Alice was so overcome with surprise that she fainted. By the time she had begun to revive, Church noticed that two horsemen were approaching at great speed.

They proved to be sanford and Church's old friend Captain Roger Goulding, the sailor who had saved him more than a year ago during the Pease Field Fight. They had news: An Indian had appeared earlier that day at the southern tip of the Mount Hope Peninsula. He reported that he had just fled from Philip, who had killed the Indian's brother for proposing that they surrender. The Indian was now on Aquidneck Island and willing to lead Church to Philip's camp.

Church turned to Alice and smiled apologetically. He and his men had not yet had the chance to unsaddle their horses. “[H]is wife,” he later wrote, “must content herself with a short visit, when such game was ahead.” Church asked sanford and Goulding whether they wanted to come along. They quickly agreed, and soon the men were back on their horses and riding north toward Mount Hope.

◆◆◆ The Indian was waiting for them at the ferry. He was, according to Church, “a fellow of good sense, and told his story handsomely.” Philip, the Indian reported, was on a little area of high ground surrounded by a swamp at the base of the rocky heights of Mount Hope. The sachem had returned to the center of his territory, and the Indian offered to lead Church to him “and to help kill him, that he might revenge his brother's death.”

It was after midnight by the time they approached Philip's camp. In addition to sanford and Goulding, Church had a few of his Plymouth regulars, including Caleb Cook, grandson of the
Mayflower
passenger Francis Cook, to fill out his veteran band of sakonnets. There was also a Pocasset Indian named Alderman.

Church assigned Goulding to lead the group that would attack Philip's headquarters. With the Pokanoket to guide them, Goulding and his men would creep on their stomachs until they came within sight of the enemy. By that time, Church would have stationed the rest of his men around the edge of the swamp.

Experience had taught them that the Indians always built their shelters so that they were open to the swamp. They also knew that it was, in Church's words, “Philip's custom to be foremost in the flight.” When Goulding and his men attacked, the sachem would immediately flee into the swamp, and Church and his men would be waiting for him.

It was always difficult to tell friend from foe in the early-morning darkness of a swamp, so Church told Goulding and his men to shout at the top of their lungs once the fighting began. The rest of them would fire on only those “that should come silently through the swamp.”

 

◆◆◆ It had come down to just a handful of Philip's toughest and most loyal men. There was the young warrior who supposedly fired the first shot back in June of 1675. He would be one of the first to die that morning. There was also the great survivor: Annawon.

The old warrior had fought alongside Philip's father, Massasoit, decades before. It is likely that he had been one of the warriors to carry the dying Alexander on his shoulders back to Mount Hope. For more than a year now, he had been with Philip every step of the way. In just the last month alone, they had covered hundreds of miles as they crisscrossed their homeland, always on the run.

When the Indians had fallen asleep that night, their exhaustion had been mixed with more than the usual fear. After the brother of the executed warrior left, they all knew the English would be coming soon. As day approached, Philip awoke from a dream. They must leave immediately, he told Annawon and the others. In his dream, he had been captured by the English. They had been betrayed.

One of the warriors stood up. A musket fired, and the yelling began. Philip leaped to his feet, threw his powder horn and petunk (a pouch containing bullets) over his shoulder, and, with his musket in hand, started to run. It would be left to Annawon and the others to gather their belongings and hold the English off for as long as possible.

 

◆◆◆ The first noise of the musket took Church by surprise. He thought one of his soldier's guns might have gone off by accident. But other shots soon followed, and he knew the ambush had begun.

In the eastern part of the swamp stood two men, Caleb Cook and the Pocasset Indian named Alderman. They could see an Indian coming toward them. He was running, they later reported, “as fast as he could scamper.” He was dressed in only his breeches and stockings. They waited until he had come within range, and now confident that he was one of the enemy, Cook pulled the trigger of his musket. But his weapon refused to fire. It was up to Alderman.

The Pocasset pulled the trigger, and his musket fired two bullets, one of which hit Philip's rapidly beating heart. He fell facedown into the mud with his gun beneath him. The warriors coming up from behind heard the shots and turned in the opposite direction. Hidden in the dark shadows of the swamp and not yet aware of his sachem's death, Annawon could be heard calling out in a booming voice, “Iootash! Iootash!”—“Fight! Fight!”