The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (33 page)

The next day was a sunday, but Winslow decided he had no choice but to attack. Otherwise his entire army might freeze and starve to death. Most of his men had only enough food to last them a single day. With the garrison in ruins, his army had no shelter during one of the coldest nights in New England's history. Plus it had begun to snow. “That night was very snowy,” one of the captains wrote. “We lay a thousand in the open field that long night.” By morning, the snow was two to three feet deep. Even before the men headed out at 5 A.M., the hands of many were so frostbitten that they were unable to work their muskets.

For eight hours they marched without stop through the snow, with Moseley's company in the lead and with the soldiers from Connecticut taking up the rear. Finally, around 1 P.M., they came to the edge of a dense swamp. Indians began to fire from the trees and bushes, and Peter announced that they had arrived at their destination. Winslow appears to have had no real plan of what to do next. Two Massachusetts companies pursued the Indians into the swamp “without,” Hubbard wrote, “staying for word of command, as if everyone were ambitious who should go first.”

They had not gone far when they came upon a huge wooden fort. No one had ever seen anything quite like it. set on a five-acre island and containing approximately five hundred wigwams and thousands of Indians, the fort combined elements of Native and European design. In addition to an outside wall of tree trunks, the fort was surrounded by a sixteen-foot-thick “hedge” of clay and brushwork. At the fort's corners and exposed points were flankers and what the English described as blockhouses—structures made of tree branches from which the Indians could fire at anyone attempting to climb the wall. The fort had a single point of entry, where a massive tree trunk lay across a moatlike sheet of frozen water. Any Englishman who attempted to cross the tree trunk would be shot by the Indians long before he made it into the fort. They had to find another way in.

Peter, their Indian guide, was not sure whether there was, in fact, another entrance. But in a remote corner of the fort there was a section that appeared to be unfinished. Instead of vertical logs and a thick clay barrier, there was a section of horizontally laid tree trunks that was just four feet high and wide enough for several men to climb over and into the fort at a time. But what soon became known as the “trees of death” was probably not, as the English assumed, an unfinished portion of the fort. It may have been an intentional feature designed to lure the English to a single point. On either side of the gap were flankers, where Indians armed with muskets could shoot any soldiers who dared to climb over the opening; there was also a blockhouse directly across from the opening, which gave those inside the chance to kill anyone who managed to enter the fort.

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Illustration of the Great Swamp Fight, December 1675, at the Narragansett fort. The artist apparently believed that every English soldier had an identical goatee, mustache and hat!

In the end, the fort proved who the true aggressors in this conflict were. Instead of joining the Pokanokets and Nipmucks, the Narragansetts had spent the fall and winter doing everything in their power to defend themselves against an unprovoked Puritan attack. If ever there was a defensive structure, it was this fort, and now a thousand English soldiers were about to do their best to wipe out a community of more than three thousand Indian men, women, and children, who asked only to be left alone.

As soldiers spread themselves along the edge of the fort and fired their muskets, the Massachusetts companies, led by captains Isaac Johnson and Nathaniel Davenport, prepared to go in. With the officers leading the way, they charged the four-foot-high section of the fort. As soon as Johnson reached the logs, he was shot dead. Captain Davenport was hit three times, and after handing his musket to his lieutenant, died of his wounds. The fire from the flankers and blockhouse was so fierce that those soldiers who were not already dead fell on their faces and waited for reinforcements.

It was now time for captains Moseley and Joseph Gardner to give it a try. Moseley later bragged that once inside the fort he saw the muskets of fifty different Indians all aimed at him. Moseley survived the attack, but his men were unable to make any significant progress into the fort.

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Nineteenth-century engraving of the attack on the Narragansett fort during the Great Swamp Fight.

Next came Major Appleton and Captain James Oliver. Instead of a wild rush, they organized their men into “a storming column.” Crying out, “[T]he Indians are running!” Appleton's and Oliver's men were able to push past their comrades from Massachusetts Bay and take the flanker on the left side of the entrance. In addition to reducing the deadliness of the Indians' fire by approximately a third, the capture of the flanker provided the soldiers with some much-needed protection.

Holding back his own Plymouth companies, Winslow sent in the soldiers from Connecticut. One of the flankers had been taken, but no one had told the Connecticut officers of the danger presented by the blockhouse directly opposite the entrance. Major Treat and his men ran right into fire so deadly that four of five Connecticut captains were killed. The soldiers were, in Hubbard's words, “enraged rather than discouraged by the loss of their commanders,” and pushed on into the fort.

As the fighting raged on, Benjamin Church began to regret his decision not to lead a company of his own. “[I]mpatient of being out of the heat of the action, he importunately begged leave of the general that he might run down to the assistance of his friends.” Winslow reluctantly yielded to his request, provided that Church take some soldiers with him. Thirty Plymouth men instantly volunteered, and Church and his company were on their way into battle.

Church had no sooner entered the fort than he saw “many men and several valiant captains lie slain.” There were also many Indian bodies, with more than fifty corpses piled high in a corner of the fort. To his left, fighting amid the wigwams, was a friend of Church's, Captain Gardner of salem. Church called out to Gardner, and the two men exchanged glances when the captain suddenly slumped to the ground. Church ran up to him and, seeing blood trickle down Gardner's cheek, lifted up his cap. Gardner looked up at Church but “spoke not a word.” A bullet had passed through his skull, and before Church could say anything, Gardner was dead. studying the wound, Church realized that the bullet had come from an English musket. As soldiers pulled Gardner's body from the battle, Church sent word back to Winslow that English soldiers were being killed by their comrades behind them. With between three hundred and four hundred soldiers inside this extremely small space, the English were as much a threat to themselves as were the Narragansetts, who, after several hours of fighting, were beginning to run out of gunpowder.

Church could see that many of the warriors had started to abandon the fort, leaving large numbers of Native women, children, and old people trapped in their wigwams. Instead of running away, the warriors had taken up positions amid the bushes and trees of the swamp outside and were firing back on the English soldiers inside the fort.

It was clear to Church that the fort had been effectively taken. It was now time for him to take care of the Indians in the swamp. Church led his men out of the fort to a dense clump of bushes just a few yards behind a group of Narragansetts, who were preparing to fire in unison at the fort. As the Indians stood up in a group to shoot, Church and his men gave them such an “unexpected clap on their backs” that those who were not dead were soon running in confusion. About a dozen of them even ran back
into
the fort and took refuge in the blockhouse.

Church and his men quickly followed. They were running toward a group of Indians concealed inside another blockhouse within the fort when Church was suddenly hit by three pieces of lead. The first bullet buried itself harmlessly into a pair of mittens rolled up inside his pocket; the second cut through his breeches but only nicked him in the side; it was the third bullet that almost killed him—slicing into his thigh before bouncing off his hipbone. As Church fell to the ground, he made sure to fire his gun and wound the Indian who had shot him.

His men rushed to his side and began to carry him out of the fort. With the enemy on the run, the order now came to burn down the fort. In his weakened state, Church tried to protest—there were valuable supplies of corn and meat inside, as well as hundreds of Native women and children. But he was shouted down by Moseley, who had suddenly appeared from the edge of the swamp. And while Winslow, the Plymouth governor, might have been named commander of this army, Moseley and Massachusetts Bay were apparently in charge. The fort, along with all its provisions and perhaps hundreds of Native women, children, and elderly, was set on fire.

Many accounts of the battle focus on the bravery of the English officers and soldiers but make little mention of the slaughter that followed the taking of the fort. It must have been a horrendous and terrifying scene as Narragansett women and children screamed and cried amid the gunshots and the flames.

sometime after five o'clock, the order was given to begin the long march back to Wickford. It was the worst night of the soldiers' lives. They had spent the previous night trying to sleep on an open field in the midst of a snowstorm; that morning they had marched for eight hours and then fought for another three; now they were slogging their way through the snow—eight hundred men lugging the bodies of more than two hundred of the dead and wounded. “And I suppose,” Church wrote, “everyone that is acquainted with the circumstances of that night's march, deeply laments the miseries that attended them, especially the wounded and dying men.”

The first ones reached the smith garrison at 2 A.M. Winslow and his entourage became lost and did not arrive at Wickford until seven in the morning. Twenty-two of the army's wounded died during the march.