IX. sion. In the choice of governor, the rotation principle CHAPTER was still followed up by electing the youthful Henry Vane; and, "because he was son and heir to a privy 1636. counselor in England," the ships in the harbor, fifteen in number, lately arrived with passengers and goods, congratulated his election by a volley of great guns. But the new governor soon found himself in trouble with these same complimentary shipmasters. They readily assent, ed, indeed, to a regulation for anchoring below the new fort, and not coming up to the town without the governor's pass; but the neglect of the fort to display the king's colors, laid aside, as we have seen, by order of the mili tary commissioners, on account of scruples about the red cross, excited the ire of the English sailors, who did not hesitate to accuse the colonists of treason and rebellion. A mate of one of the ships, who had spoken freely upon this subject, was arrested and compelled to sign a retraction; but the shipmasters, intimating that they might be questioned on their return to England, requested the magistrates to remove all grounds of suspicion by order. ing the king's colors to be spread at the fort. Here was a dilemma. All the magistrates were fully persuaded that the cross was idolatrous. In this emergency Vane practiced a little dissimulation, of which, indeed, during his term of office, he exhibited, according to Winthrop, more than one instance. He pretended that he had no colors. But the shipmasters very promptly offered to lend. Driven thus into a corner, after consultation with the elders, Vane, Dudley, and a majority of the magistrates so far compromised matters with their consciences as to accept the proffered flag. Since the fort was the king's a proposition which, on some other occasions, they might not have been so ready to admit the king's colors, they thought, might be spread there, at the king's IX. CHAPTER Own personal peril—an ingenious piece of casuistry, from which, however, Winthrop and others dissented. 1636. The alarm of interference from England had partially subsided; but the colony, under Vane's administration, became involved in new troubles—a violent internal con troversy, and a dangerous Indian war. The most powerful native tribes of New England were concentrated in the neighborhood of Narraganset Bay. We have already had occasion to mention the Wampanoags or Pocanokets, on the east side of that bay, within the limits of the Plymouth patent; also the Narragansets, a more powerful confederacy, on the west side. Still more numerous and more powerful were the Pequods, whose chief seats were on or near Pequod River, now the Thames, but whose authority extended over twenty-six petty tribes, along both shores of the Sound to Connecticut River, and even beyond it, almost or quite to the Hudson. In what is now the northeast corner of the State of Connecticut dwelt a smaller tribe, the enemies, perhaps the revolted subjects of the Pequods, known to the colonists as Mohegans-an appropriation of a general name properly including all the Indians along the shores of Long Island Sound as far west as the Hudson, and even the tribes beyond that river, known afterward to the English as the Delawares. The Indians about Massachusetts Bay, supposed to have been formerly quite numerous, had almost died out before the arrival of the colonists, and the small-pox had since proved very fatal among the few that remained. Some tribes of no great consideration-the Nipmucks, the Wachusetts, the Nashawaysdwelt among the interior hills, and others, known collectively to the colonists as the River Indians, fished at the falls of the Connecticut, and cultivated little patches of its rich alluvial meadows. The lower Merrimac, the IX. Piscataqua, and their branches, were occupied by the CHAPTER tribes of a considerable confederacy, that of Penacook or Pawtucket, whose chief sachem, Passaconaway, was re- 1636. ported to be a great magician. The interior of New Hampshire, and of what is now Vermont, seems to have been an uninhabited wilderness. The tribes eastward of the Piscataqua, known to the English by the general name of Tarenteens, and reputed to be numerous and powerful, were distinguished by the rivers on which they dwelt. They seem to have constituted two principal confederacies, those east of the Kennebec being known to the French of Acadie as the Abenakis. All the New England Indians spoke substantially the same language, the Algonquin, in various dialects. From the nature of the country, they were more stationary than some other tribes, being fixed principally at the falls of the rivers. They seem to have entertained very decided ideas of the hereditary descent of authority, and of personal devotion to their chiefs. What might have been at this time the total Indian population of New England, it is not very easy to conjecture; but it was certainly much less than is commonly stated. Fifteen or twenty thousand would seem to be a sufficient allowance for the region south of the Piscataqua, and as many more, perhaps, for the more easterly district. The Pequods, esteemed the most powerful tribe in New England, were totally ruined, as we shall presently see, by the destruction or capture of hardly more than a thousand persons. The provocation for this exterminating war was extremely small. Previous to the Massachusetts migration to the Connecticut, one Captain Stone, the drunken and dissolute master of a small trading vessel from Virginia, whom the Plymouth people charged with having 1634. been engaged at Manhattan in a piratical plot to seize January. CHAPTER one of their vessels, having been sent away from Boston IX. with orders not to return without leave, under pain of 1636. death, on his way homeward to Virginia had entered the Connecticut River, where he was cut off, with his whole company, seven in number, by a band of Pequods. There were various stories, none of them authentic, as to the precise manner of his death, but the Pequods insisted that he had been the aggressor-a thing in itself suffi ciently probable. As Stone belonged to Virginia, the magistrates of Massachusetts wrote to Governor Harvey to move him to stir in the matter; but no notice seems to have been taken of that letter. Nov. The Pequods, soon after, quarreled with the Dutch, by whom, hitherto, they had been supplied with goods, and being also at war with the Narragansets, who intervened be1634. tween them and the English settlements, they sent messengers to Boston desiring an intercourse of trade, and the aid of the colonists to settle their pending difficulties with the Narragansets. They even promised to give up -so the magistrates understood them-the only two survivors, as they alleged, of those concerned in the death of Stone. These offers were accepted; for the convenience of this traffic, a peace was negotiated between the Pequods and the Narragansets, and a vessel was presently sent to open a trade. But this traffic disappointed the adventurers; nor were the promised culprits given up. The Pequods, according to the Indian custom, tendered, instead, a present of furs and wampum. But this was refused, the colonists seeming to think themselves under a religious obligation to avenge blood with blood. Thus matters remained for a year or two, when the crew of a small bark, returning from Connecticut, saw close to Block Island a pinnace at anchor, and full of Indians. This pinnace was recognized as belonging to Old 1636. July. IX. ham, the Indian trader, the old settler at Nantasket, and CHAPTER explorer of the Connecticut. Conjecturing that something must be wrong, the bark approached the pinnace and 1636. hailed, whereupon the Indians on board slipped the cable and made sail. The bark gave chase, and soon overtook the pinnace; some of the Indians jumped overboard in their fright, and were drowned; several were killed, and one was made prisoner. The dead body of Oldham was found on board, covered with an old seine. This murder, as appeared from the testimony of the prisoner, who was presently sentenced by the Massachusetts magistrates to be a slave for life, was committed at the instigation of some Narraganset chiefs, upon whom Block Island was dependent, in revenge for the trade which Oldham had commenced under the late treaty with the Pequods, their enemies. Indeed, all the Narraganset chiefs, except the head sachem, Canonicus, and his nephew and colleague, Miantonimoh, were believed to have had a hand in this matter, especially the chieftain of the Niantics, a branch of the Narragansets, inhabiting the continent opposite Block Island. Canonicus, in great alarm, sent to his friend and neighbor, Roger Williams, by whose aid he wrote a letter to the Massachusetts magistrates, expressing his grief at what had happened, and stating that Miantonimoh had sailed already with seventeen canoes and two hundred warriors to punish the Block Islanders. With this letter were sent two Indians, late sailors on board Oldham's pinnace, and presently after two English boys, the remainder of his crew. In the recapture of Oldham's pinnace eleven Indians had been killed, several of them chiefs; and that, with the restoration of the crew, seems to have been esteemed by Canonicus a sufficient atonement for Oldham's death. But the magistrates and min |