Читать книгу Historic Events of Colonial Days - Rupert Sargent Holland - Страница 4

Table of Contents

(Rhode Island, 1630)

The good ship Lyon had been sixty-seven days outward bound from the port of Bristol, in England, when she dropped anchor early in February, 1630, at Nantasket, near the entrance of Boston Harbor, in New England. The ship had met with many winter storms, and passengers and crew were glad to see the shores of Massachusetts. On the ninth of February the Lyon slipped through a field of drifting ice and came to anchor before the little settlement of Boston. On board the ship was a young man who was to play an exciting part in the story of the New World.

Yet this young man, Roger Williams by name, seemed simple and quiet enough, as he and his wife came ashore and were welcomed by Governor John Winthrop. He was a young preacher, filled with a desire to carry his teaching to the new lands across the Atlantic Ocean, and he had been asked to be the minister of the First Church in Boston. As it turned out, however, his ideas were not the ideas of the people of Boston, and he soon found that the First Church was not the place for him.

So after a short stay in Boston Roger Williams and his wife went to Plymouth, which was then a colony separate from Massachusetts Bay. William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, and his neighbors made the young preacher welcome, and there Roger Williams stayed for two years, teaching and exhorting and prophesying, as ministers were said to do in those days. There his daughter Mary was born. Roger Williams, however, was given to argument and could be very obstinate at times, and presently he fell out with his neighbors at Plymouth, and moved again, this time to Salem. There he was given charge of the church, and there he, like many other free-thinking men, fell under the displeasure of the governor of Massachusetts Bay. For some things he taught he was summoned before the General Court of the Bay, and the Court ordered him to leave the colony. He did not go at once, and Governor Winthrop let him stay until the following January, when rumors came to Boston that Roger Williams was planning to lead twenty men of his own way of thinking to the country about Narragansett Bay, and there establish a colony of his own. John Winthrop objected seriously to any such performance.

The governor sent Captain John Underhill in a sailboat to Salem, with orders to seize Roger Williams and put him on board a ship that was lying at Nantasket Roads, ready to sail for England. But when Captain Underhill and his men marched up to the house of Williams they found that the man they wanted had fled three days before. There was no knowing which way he had gone, the wilderness stretched far and wide to west and south, and so they gave up the search for him and reported to Governor Winthrop that Roger Williams had disappeared.

Five friends of Williams, knowing that he had been commanded to leave Massachusetts Bay, had gone into the wilderness and built a camp for him on the banks of a river which was called by the three names of the Blackstone, for the first settler there, the Seekonk, and the Pawtucket. There Williams joined them, and there they stayed during the winter and planted their crops in the spring. Then a messenger from the governor of Plymouth came, saying that their plantation was within the borders of the Plymouth Colony, and asking in a friendly way that Roger Williams and his friends should move to the other side of the river.

The settlers did not like to lose the harvest of their new crops, but neither did they want to make enemies at Plymouth, and so they launched their canoe and paddled down the river in search of a new site. As they went down the stream tradition says that a group of Indians, standing on a great rock near the river's bank, recognized Roger Williams as a man who had once befriended them. They cried their greetings to the white men, and the latter landed and went up the rock and talked with the Indians. Then, taking their canoe again, the white men went on down the river to its mouth, rounded a promontory, and came into an estuary of Narragansett Bay. Here they paddled north a short distance, until they reached the point where the Woonasquatucket and the Moshassuck Rivers joined, and there they landed, near a spring of sweet water. Here they pitched their camp, founding what was to be known in time as the Providence Plantations.

The little colony of six men was soon joined by others, and presently a government was formed, somewhat like those of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. There were many Indians along the shores of Narragansett Bay, and Roger Williams made it his concern to be on friendly terms with all of them. When he had lived at Plymouth and at Salem he had met many Indians and had been liked by them. Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomoh, chiefs of the Narragansetts, ruled over all this new region. When the six settlers reached their new plantation these chiefs were at odds with a chief to the north named Ausamaquin. Williams set to work to reconcile the hostile Indians, and while he did so he made such friends of the Narragansett chiefs that they gave him a large tract of land, stretching from the Pawtucket to the Pawtuxet Rivers. In his turn Roger Williams sold the land to his company for thirty pounds.

Here, as the little colony of Providence Plantations grew, Roger Williams tended to the government of it and preached constantly to his people. All was not smooth sailing, however, even here in the wilderness. Men disagreed with the preacher, and he found it hard to keep them from continually fighting with each other. When there was no danger of trouble with the Indians, the settlers stirred up trouble for themselves, and Roger Williams had his hands full trying to keep first the white, and then the red, men in order.

Every little while there would be some dispute, usually ending in bloodshed, between Indians and white men. Two white traders, venturing into the country between the two rivers now known as the Pawcatuck and the Thames, were killed by chiefs of the Pequods, who were the strongest tribe in all New England. News of this came to Plymouth, and was sent from there by messenger to the governor of Massachusetts Bay. Not long afterward a settler named John Oldham was killed by a party of Indians as he was sailing his own boat off Block Island. The white men, putting this and that together, decided that the Pequods were planning to kill all the settlers that came into their country, and thought it likely they were trying to get the Narragansett chiefs to join them in this. If these two tribes joined forces it would go hard with the white men, and so the people of Massachusetts Bay sent a message to Roger Williams, urging him to see his friends the Narragansetts, and try to keep them from joining with the Pequods.

Williams was brave, and he had need to be when he made his visit to the wigwam of the chief, Canonicus. He found men of the Pequods there, trying to induce Canonicus and the other Narragansett sachems to join them in war on the whites. He came as a friend, he showed no fear, and he stayed for several days, sleeping among them at night, as if he had no suspicion that the Pequods might want to kill him, alone and unarmed among so many of them. And the Pequods did not touch him. He had learned something of the Indian tongue while he lived at Plymouth and Salem, and he talked with them and the Narragansetts, urging them to be friends with the white men who had come to live among them.

His visit to Canonicus was successful. The Narragansett chiefs renewed their promises of friendship for Roger Williams' men and sent the Pequod envoys away. The disappointed Pequods, however, told the Narragansetts that the English were treacherous folk and warned them that they would not always find these new settlers as friendly as Roger Williams had said. And in part the Pequods were right, for there were white men who were fully as treacherous as any Indians.

Not long afterward four young men set out from Massachusetts Bay to go to the Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island. Somewhere between Boston and the Providence Plantations they sat down to rest and smoke. A Narragansett Indian came in sight, and they called to him to stop and smoke a pipe with them. The Indian accepted their invitation. The white men saw that he was a trader and had a large stock of wampum, and also cloth and beads with him, and so, as he sat with them, they suddenly attacked him, and, robbing him, left him for dead. The Narragansett, though very badly wounded, was able after a while to drag himself back to the wigwams of his tribe. There he told his story before he died. Some of the chiefs set out on the trail at once, and capturing three of the whites, took them to the settlers at Aquidneck. They were tried for the robbery and murder, found guilty, and executed, though some settlers murmured against Englishmen being condemned for doing harm to Indians. But wise men such as Governor Bradford and Roger Williams knew that they must use the same justice toward Indians as toward white men if they were ever to live in peace with their neighbors.

So the Narragansetts kept peace with the newcomers who were building their homes on the shores of the great bay that bore the name of the Indian tribe, and Roger Williams turned his attention to the needs of his people. He wanted a charter from the king of England for his new colony, and to get it he had to go back to England. Instead of going to Boston or Plymouth to take ship he traveled south to the Dutch seaport of New Amsterdam. The Dutch were also having trouble with their Indian neighbors, and Roger Williams was urged to try to pacify the red men. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay kept record of most of the important things that were taking place in the English colonies, and this is what he wrote:

"1643. Mo. 4, 20.—There fell out hot wars between the Dutch and the Indians thereabout. The occasion was this. An Indian being drunk had slain an old Dutchman.... The Indians also of Long Island took part with their neighbors upon the main, and as the Dutch took away their corn, so they fell to burning the Dutch houses. But these, by the mediation of Mr. Williams, who was there to go in a Dutch ship for England, were pacified and peace reëstablished between the Dutch and them."

Roger Williams sailed from New Amsterdam in June or July, 1643, and on the voyage he spent much time in writing a remarkable book, "A Key into the Languages of America," as he called it. He reached England at a most exciting time. Parliament had rebelled against King Charles the First, the king had fled from London, the battle of Edge Hill had been fought between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, and the country was an armed camp. Williams tried to get his charter from the Parliament, but matters were so upset that such business took a long time. The people of London were suffering for fuel, and he busied himself in plans to provide coal and wood for them, and he went on with his writings, most of which were religious arguments, such as many men of that period, among them William Penn, were fond of writing.

At last he was able to get his charter from Parliament, and set out on his return journey. He had not sailed from Boston on his outward voyage because of the order of exile from the colony of Massachusetts Bay that still stood against him. But he asked permission of that colony to let him return by way of Boston, and this was granted. He landed at the same place where he had made his first landing in America; journeyed, probably on foot, to the Blackstone River, and paddled his canoe to Narragansett Bay. As he approached the Bay he was met by a fleet of canoes manned by the chief settlers of his colony, who gave him a royal welcome. In return for his services in obtaining the charter for the new Providence Plantations the three settlements of Newport, Portsmouth and Providence agreed to pay him one hundred pounds.

Roger Williams' wife had joined him at the Providence Plantations, and they now had a family of six children. He did not approve of a minister being paid for his services, and so he, like many other preachers of the Puritans, found other means to supply his family with bread and meat. He had traded with the Indians for furs while he was at Salem, and since then he had built a trading house on the west shore of Narragansett Bay, at a place called Cawcawmsquissick by the Indians, about fifteen miles south of Providence, and near where the town of Wickford now stands. Ninigret, one of his powerful Indian friends, lived near by, and saw to it that the best furs went to Roger Williams' house. It was a convenient place for the hunters to bring their stores, and it was not far across the bay to Newport, which was becoming the main shipping port of the colony. To Newport he took his furs to sell them in the market or send them by trading-vessel to England, and there he bought the stock of cloth and beads, sugar and other supplies that he paid to the Indians. He made at his trading-house at least one hundred pounds a year, the equal of five hundred dollars in American money, and with a much greater purchasing power in those days than now.

Meantime the Narragansetts and the Mohegans had been at war with each other, and the former tribe winning, had made an alliance with the Mohegans, and threatened a joint attack on the English colonies. Williams and two or three others went out to the Indian chiefs and again made a treaty of peace with them, for there was no white man in New England for whom all the Indians had such affection as they had for Roger Williams. Time and again he saved his own colony, and the neighboring ones of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth and Connecticut from Indian attacks. His knowledge of the Indian tongues was of great assistance to him, and his desire to be perfectly fair and frank with them was even more valuable.

Once more he went to England, for a Mr. Coddington of Newport had obtained from Parliament a commission as governor for life of the settlements at Aquidneck, which interfered with the charter already granted to the Providence Plantations. There he succeeded in having the claims of his colony adjusted, there he wrote more religious pamphlets and preached and lectured, and there he met Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, and John Milton the poet, and told them about the Indians of New England, their language and their customs and the missionary work the colonists were doing among them.

After he went back to Providence George Fox, the famous Quaker leader, came to New England and preached to the people there. Roger Williams did not agree with Fox in many of his teachings, and took the opposite side at many public meetings. Whenever there was debate or argument over religious matters Roger Williams wanted to have his share in it. He held the same views as leader of the Providence Plantations that he had voiced when he first came as minister to the First Church at Boston.

In many ways Roger Williams was something like William Penn. He founded a colony that was in time to become one of the original Thirteen States of the American Union. He was a religious leader, and he was always fair in his dealings with the Indians. Probably he was greatest as a friend of the Indians, for his little colony was spared the frequent attacks and massacres that made life so hard for many of the small English settlements along the Atlantic coast. He came to the New World seeking liberty and justice between all men, and these he taught to the settlers who followed and built their homes around his log house on the shores of the great bay named for the Narragansetts.