I missed this, but last week was the anniversary of the first extermination campaign launched by Puritans. On May 26, 1637, New Hampshire founder John Mason, professional mercenary John Underhill, 90 Puritans, and 70 Narragansett and Mohegan allies, advanced on the Pequot village of Mystic. The warriors were away, the town was inhabited by women, children, and elders.
The Puritans formed a circle around the town, set the town on fire, and gunned down everyone who tried to escape. According to John Mason, they killed 700 noncombatants. Only seven escaped, and seven more were taken prisoner. The Puritans then sold those seven into slavery, and hunted down every Pequot left alive. Those they didn’t kill outright, they also sold into slavery.
When there was no one left to own the name of Pequot, they renamed every landmark which bore their name. They then outlawed the word Pequot. They weren’t content to wipe the Pequot from the face of the Earth, they wiped them from human memory.
The name resurfaced two hundred years later in Melville’s Moby Dick as the name of his ship of state, the Pequod, described as “a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies”.
John Mason’s description of the Mystic massacre in A Brief History of the Pequot War:
And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very flames, where many of them perished…(And) God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven: Thus were the Stouth Hearted spoiled, having slept their last Sleep, and none of their Men could find their Hands: Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies!
William Bradford’s, from the History of the Plymouth Plantation:
Those that scraped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escapted. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.
John Underhill’s from Newes from America:
Down fell men, women, and children. Those that ‘scaped us, fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us. Not above five of them ‘scaped out of our hands. Our Indians came us and greatly admired the manner of Englishmen’s fight, but cried “Mach it, mach it!” – that is, “It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.” Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.
The day after the massacre John Winthrop ordered a day of Thanksgiving in celebration.
The Mystic massacre of 1637 fundamentally changed Puritan discourse about Indians. After the massacre, there was very little further talk of learning to live with the Indians. Instead, Indians were more and more presented as bloodthirsty savages for which there was no solution but extermination. As Francis Jennings writes in The Invasion of America:
The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise. They therefore made preparations of two sorts: guns and munitions to over power Indian resistance and quantities of propaganda to overpower their countrymen’s scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics. We live with it still.
One interesting point: the motive for this extermination wasn’t solely land. Jean Baudrillard posits a more pathological drive in Simulacra and Simulation:
We are fascinated by Rameses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians: those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ. Thus, at the beginning of colonisation, there was a moment of stupor and amazement before the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel. There were two possible responses: either to admit that this law was not universal, or to exterminate the Indians so as to remove the evidence.
