eed to Block Island, burn every wigwam, destroy all the corn,
shoot every man, and take the women and children captive. Thus the
island was to be left a solitude and a desert.

On the 25th of August, 1636, the detachment sailed from Boston. The
Indians were aware of the punishment with which they were threatened,
and were prepared for resistance. Captain John Endicott, who was in
command of the expedition, anchored off the island, and seeing a
solitary Indian wandering upon the beach, who, it afterward appeared,
had been placed there as a decoy, took a boat and a dozen armed men,
and rowed toward the shore. When they reached within a few rods of the
beach, suddenly sixty warriors, picked men, tall, athletic, and of
established bravery, sprang up from behind the sand-hills, rushed to
the water's edge, and poured in upon the boat a volley of arrows.
Fortunately, the boat was so far from the land that not much injury
was done, though two were seriously wounded. As the water was shoal,
the colonists, musket in hand, sprang from the boat and waded toward
the shore, piercing their foes with a well-directed volley of bullets.
Had the Indians possessed any measure of the courage of the English,
the sixty savages might have closed upon the twelve colonists, and
easily have destroyed them all; but they had no disciplined courage
which would enable them to stand a charge. With awful yells of fury
and despair, they broke and fled into the forests and the swamps.

Captain Endicott now landed his force and commenced the work of
destruction. There were two Indian villages upon the island,
containing about sixty wigwams each. The torch was applied, and they
were all destroyed. Every canoe that could be found was staved. There
were also upon the island about two hundred acres of standing corn,
which the English trampled down. But not an Indian could be found. The
women and children had probably been removed from the island, and the
warriors who remained so effectually concealed themselves that the
English sought them in vain. After spending two days upon the island,
the expedition again embarked, and sailed across the Sound to the
mouth of the Thames, then called Pequot Harbor. As the vessel entered
the harbor, about three hundred warriors assembled upon the shore.
Captain Endicott sent an interpreter to inform them that he had come
to demand the murderers of the English, and to obtain compensation for
the injuries which the Indians ha