The Wordy Shipmates

The Pequot War of the mid-1630s was a “pure war […] fueled by misunderstanding, jealousy, hatred, stupidity, racism, lust for power, lust for land, and, most of all, greed, all of it headed toward a climax of slaughter” (166). The English and Dutch fought this war against “The Pequot, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan [which were] sovereign nations with a long history of resentment that predates European contact” (167). Vowell compares preexisting intertribal conflicts to those of European countries who regularly warred, like England and France, or competed for trade, like England and the Netherlands.

The Pequot War was “a destructive tantrum brought on by an accumulation of aggravation” (172). Puritans in Boston suffered internal strife as the Puritan Thomas Hooker left Boston to establish Hartford in Connecticut. Simultaneously, the Dutch had just unleashed violence on Native people they encountered in trade lands. Meanwhile, fighting among the Mohegan, the Pequot, and the Narragansett was mounting, just as a smallpox epidemic was killing members of all three Indigenous nations.

The Pequot established an alliance with the English, with recently exiled Williams playing the role of “Indian ambassador, negotiator, and spy” (176). But after Niantic Indians killed a Puritan settler, the English instead allied with the Narragansett who avenged the murder and moved on the Pequot in retribution for an earlier murder.

Skirmishes led to the Mystic massacre: The English and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies ambushed a Pequot village, set it on fire, and blocked the exits until the Pequots inside burned to death. For many Christians, “biblical justification is enough of an air freshener to erase the smell of burning human flesh” (194)—God had sanctioned the murder or women and children throughout scripture. 

Vowell’s sister and young nephew accompany her on one of her research trips. In school, standard history curriculum has exposed the young boy to the Thanksgiving myth—that settlers and Indians existed harmoniously as friends and equals. When the family visits Mashantucket Pequot Museum and watches a movie about the aforementioned massacre, Vowel’s nephew is confused and upset. American children seldom learn the brutal elements of foundational American history. Vowell tells her nephew about the volume of warfare across the continent and centuries.

Vowell considers the Pequot War, thinking about the various Indian nations involved in it—those that got slaughtered and those that did the slaughtering. The history is complex. For instance, in facilitating and contributing to English-endorsed violence against the Pequot, the Mohegan headman Uncas ensured Mohegan survival: “What he did wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even right. But it worked” (202).

Vowell and her family stay at the Mohegan Sun Casino, owned and operated by the tribe. The enterprise is proof that the Mohegan maintained a piece of their homelands through challenges to Native sovereignty.

When the complicit Narragansett sachem, Miantonomi, attempted to resist the English following the Mystic massacre by attempting to unite Native tribes, the English had him assassinated. Future Native leaders from various nations would adopt similar pan-Indian rhetoric and goals, but the consequences for the Narragansett were disastrous. The English and their Anglo-American descendants committed massacres against Native communities for several centuries.