to levy a force in assistance of the expedition; and, while the fleet was busied at Manhattan, prepared a forcible and eloquent remonstrance, addressed to the king. Reciting the privileges of their charter, the sacrifices they had made to obtain it, and the liberties they had enjoyed under it; they foretold the trouble and ruin which any persistance in controlling the affairs of the colony would occasion. "God knows," they say, "our greatest ambition is to live a quiet life, in a corner of the world." Any thing but their liberties, they declared, they were willing to offer in testimony of their loyalty. Meanwhile, the commissioners, not caring to make themselves unnecessarily odious, had busied themselves, in harmony with the colonists, in settling certain matters in Connecticut and Rhode Island-the "dutifulness and obedience" of which former, they averred, was "set off with the more lustre by the contrary deportment of Massachusetts." Plymouth, which was promised a separate charter, if it would submit the nomination of its governor to the commissioners, protested much loyalty, but declined the intermeddling proposition. These gentlemen, returning to Boston, demanded that all the men should be assembled to hear the king's message; but their requisition was refused, though they denounced as traitors those who opposed the proceeding. The Massachusetts authorities refused to state directly whether they would obey the commission or not; and the members of it, to try their power, gave notice that they would hold a court for the trial of a cause to which the colony was a party. But the general court, by sound of trumpet, and proclamation of a herald, forbade all persons to take part in their proceedings. Foiled in this point, the visitors proceeded to intermeddle in the affairs of Maine and New Hampshire. The court, with equal promptitude and fearlessness, met them by an order to the inhabitants of the latter to forbear obeying or abetting them, at their peril. In Maine, indeed, they set up a royal government; but not long after their departure, Massachusetts, by force of arms, reestablished its authority there. They finally returned to England in much wrath and disappointment, without having accomplished any permanent alteration in the condition of the provinces. The king, in very natural displeasure, now summoned (1666) some of the chief persons of Massachusetts to appear before him, and answer for the doings of that refractory province. The general court, which met to consider this demand, after protracted prayer, refused compliance, declaring that they had already expressed their views in writing, "so that the ablest person among us could not declare our case more fully." In all this peremptory resistance, and almost defiance of the authority of the crown, there was no lack of patriotic feeling, or of affection for the mother-country; for very effective assistance, in provisions and materials, was rendered to the English navy, in the contest with France, commencing at this time; and whether from fear or negligence, the king, immersed in sensuality, took no active measures to vindicate his claims. After much discussion in the council, it was considered that the refractory colony was too strong to meddle with; that it might, at a moment's warning, throw off its allegiance; and that the safest policy was to overlook its transgressions, and wait a more favourable opportunity for enforcing the obnoxious claims. Meanwhile, the province, left to its own management, by the enterprise and industry for which its people have ever been distinguished, prospered in an extraordinary degree. Foreign commerce (for the Navigation Act was set at naught) sprung up with surprising rapidity; fish and furs were exported in quantities; and lumber, which, by the then recent invention of saw-mills, was prepared with unaccustomed ease from the almost exhaustless forests of Maine and New Hampshire, had already assumed high importance as an article of traffic. CHAPTER VII. CONDITION OF THE NEW ENGLAND INDIANS: CONVERSION OF SOME OF THEM: THEIR NUMBERS AND STRENGTH. -METACOMET, OR KING PHILIP: THE POKANOKETS. - HIS GRIEVANCES: DISSIMULATION: SCHEME FOR THE CHURCH: HIS CHARACTER, ETC.: HE DIS- THOUGH liable to the imputation of blame, for too persistent en croachment, even under the guise of purchase, upon the domains of the native tribes adjoining them, the English colonists, to their credit, were sincerely desirous of civilizing and converting their Indian neighbours. Many of the latter, by the praiseworthy pains of their white friends, had learned to read and write, and one of them even graduated at the university of Cambridge. The mission ary labours of the admirable John Eliot and of the two Mayhews, had been crowned with much success in their conversion. The former, with wonderful patience and diligence, had even prepared and published, for their benefit, a translation of the Bible, in the Indian tongue. The race for whose salvation this pious and laborious. monument of learning was erected, has passed entirely away. The Bible may still be found on the shelf of an ancient library, but no man living is able to peruse it. Around Boston, and on the cape and its adjoining islands, villages of "praying Indians" had been established, and friendship with the settlers had been thus confirmed and strengthened. But the powerful tribe of the Narragansetts, and that of the Pokanokets, at this time (1675) nearly as numerous, still clung, with a jealous fidelity, to the religion of their fathers. In 1675, the number of Indians in New England was roughly computed at fifty thousand. Unprincipled traders had supplied them with fire-arms, which they had learned to use with deadly accuracy, and the possession of which gave them a dangerous consciousness of power. Confined, in a good measure, by the continual extension of the English settlements, to peninsulas and necks of land on the coast, many of the tribes began to suffer from insufficient room to procure their customary subsistence. On the death of Massasoit, the earliest and firmest friend of the English, his son, Wamsutta, or, as he was called by the latter, Alexander, succeeded him in the sway of the Pokanokets. Only a few months after his accession, on some vague suspicion, he was seized by a party of English, and carried prisoner into Plymouth, where, in a few days, he died of a fever, brought on by anger and irritation. His brother, Metacomet, more commonly known as the famous King Philip, succeeded to the throne, and, from profound policy, maintained an appearance of great friendship for the whites. For nine years, with extraordinary dissimulation, though cherishing feelings of revenge for the death of his brother, and the encroachments on his territory, he maintained the appearance of amity. Some disputes, indeed, caused by the latter grievance, as early as 1671, had occurred; and Philip, strangely enough, subscribed a set of articles, yielding almost every point in question, and, in a manner, “deliver ing himself, body and soul, into the hands of the Plymouth author itics. His motive, doubtless, was to blind his enemies as to the extent and dangerous nature of the conspiracy he was meditating. His plan was nothing less than the complete extermination of the whites, and in its prosecution he displayed a policy, courage, ard perseverance, which, in a savage, have never been surpassed. To knit the clans of New England, immemorially dissevered by traditional feud and enmity, into a confederacy against a foe so terrible as the English, might well have seemed to the most sanguine a hopeless task; yet such was the object to which Philip bent all his policy and energy, and in which, to a great extent, he succeeded." Argument, persuasion, and menace, were each, in turn, applied with the utmost adroitness. In the spring of 1675, he sent six ambassadors to Awashonks, queen of the Sogkonates, demanding, on pain of his own vengeance, and of exposure (by an artful device) to the resentment of the English themselves, that the tribe should join his league. A solemn dance was appointed, to decide the question, and Awashonks, that the opposite party might not be unrepresented, sent for her neighbour, Captain Benjamin Church, the only white man in her domains. This celebrated man, one of the most famous Indian fighters in New England history, had just settled in the wilderness of Sogkonate. "He was a man of undaunted courage, of a sagacity fitted to cope with the wiliest tactics of Indian warfare, and, withal, of a kindly and generous disposition, which, except when engaged in immediate hostilities, seem to have secured for him the respect and attachment of the wild tribes which he so often encountered. His narrative,* written in his old age, by his son, from his own notes and dictation, is one of the choicest fragments of original history in our possession. As a literary performance, it is just respectable; but for vividness of detail and strength of expression, it is something more, and may well be entitled to rank with such rude but stirring productions as the 'True Conquest' of Bernal Diaz, and the 'True Adventures' of Captain John Smith." On his arrival, a grand council was held, at which the six Wampanoags appeared in great state, making, says Church, "a formidable appearance, with their faces painted, and their hair trimmed back in comb fashion, with their powder-horns and shot-bags at their backs, which among that nation is the posture and figure of preparedness for war." A fierce discussion ensued, and a privy counsellor, named * "The Entertaining History of King Philip's War." Little Eyes, attempted to draw Church aside, to privately dispatch him, but was prevented by others. The Englishman, with great boldness, advised Awashonks, "to knock those six Mount Hopes* on the head, and shelter herself under the protection of the English Upon which, the Mount Hopes were for the present dumb." He then sharply rebuked them, as faithless wretches, thirsting for the blood of their neighbours, and assured them, that if they would have war, he should prove a sharp thorn in their sides. The queen and her people, overmastered by his eloquence and energy, dismissed the embassy, and, for a time, observed neutrality, if not fidelity. CHAPTER VIII. COMMENCEMENT OF PHILIP'S WAR.-EXPLOIT OF CHURCH ENGLISH.-SPRINGFIELD BURNED. It was soon evident that Philip was preparing for active war. He sent all the women and children of his tribe into the Narragansett country, and held a great dance, lasting for several weeks, with all the warriors of his neighbourhood. The first blow was struck on the 24th of June, in an attack on the little town of Swansey. Nine of the settlers were killed, and the rest fled, while the Indians fired their deserted dwellings. Soldiers were sent from Massachusetts, and Church, with a company from Plymouth, hastened to the frontier. Philip was compelled to flee, but only to ravage the country in other remote spots. Church, with only nineteen men, holding on in pursuit, at last, on the site of the present town of Tiverton, fell in with three hundred of the enemy. "The hill," he tells us, "seemed to move, being covered over with Indians, with their bright guns glittering in the sun, and running in a circumference with a design to surround them." From a place of vantage, the English defended themselves with much courage and desperation till taken off by a vessel which came to their aid, covering their *So called, from Mount Hope, the favourite seat of Philip. |