Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/362

342 of the English. Most summary was the vengeance which they had thus provoked. No feature of savage warfare was lacking in the night assault, the burnings, the impalings, the promiscuous slaughter, the pursuit into swamps, by which the whites with red allies extinguished that fierce tribe, reserving only a remnant to be sold for slaves. A modern historian must be excused from relating, as he could not essay to relieve, the sadness and shame of the truthful record of the conduct of the English in that dark episode, closed with their perfidy in sacrificing the noble Miantonomo.

We may infer somewhat of the opinion held beforehand by the Plymouth Pilgrims of the sort of human beings they were to find here, from what the excellent Governor Bradford tells us was in the minds of his associates in Holland when they were hesitating in their purpose to cross the ocean as exiles. He writes: “The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only salvage and brutish men, which range up and down little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same.” This was written many years after Bradford had been living here among the Indians, and had had full knowledge of them.

Cotton Mather writes: “These parts were then covered with nations of barbarous Indians and infidels, in whom the Prince of the power of the air did work as a spirit; nor could it be expected that nations of wretches, whose whole religion was the most explicit sort of Devil-worship, should not be acted by the Devil to engage in some early and bloody action for the extinction of a plantation so contrary to his interests as that of New England was.” He calls Satan “the old landlord” of the country. It certainly must have seemed to the Indians that the landlord