d inflicted. To this the Pequots
defiantly replied with a shower of arrows. Captain Endicott landed on
both sides of the harbor where New London now stands. The Indians
sullenly retired before him to the adjacent rocks and fastnesses,
rendering it necessary for the English to keep in a compact body to
guard against assault. Two Indians were shot, and probably a few
others wounded. The wigwams along the shore were burned, and the
canoes destroyed, and then the expedition again spread its sails and
returned to Boston, having done infinitely more harm than good. They
had merely exasperated their haughty foes. They had but struck the
hornets' nest with a stick. The Connecticut people were in exceeding
terror, as they knew that savage vengeance would fall mercilessly upon
them.

Sassacus was a stern man of much native talent. He laughed to scorn
this impotent revenge. To burn an Indian wigwam was inflicting no
great calamity. The huts were reared anew before the expedition had
arrived in Boston. The Pequots now despised their foes, and, gathering
around their council fires, they clashed their weapons, shrieked their
war-whoop, and excited themselves into an intensity of rage. The
defenseless settlers along the banks of the Connecticut were now at
the mercy of the savages, who were roused to the commission of every
possible atrocity. No pen can describe the scenes of woe which, during
the autumn and winter of 1636 and 1637, transpired in the solitudes of
the wilderness. The Indians were every where in marauding bands. At
midnight, startled by the yell of the savage, the lonely settler
sprang to his door but to see his building in flames, to be pierced
with innumerable arrows, to fall upon his floor weltering in blood,
and to see, as death was stealing over him, his wife and his children
brained by the tomahawk. The tortures inflicted by the savages upon
their captives were too horrible to be narrated. Even the recital
almost causes the blood to chill in one's veins.

Sassacus was indefatigable in his endeavors to rouse all the tribes to
combine in a war of extermination.

"Now," said he, "is our time. If we do not now destroy the English,
they will soon prove too powerful for us, and they will obtain all our
lands. We need not meet them in open battle. We can shoot and poison
their cattle, burn their houses and barns, lay in ambush for them in
the fields and on the roads. They are now few. We are numerous. We can
thus soo