eir part, regarded the Indians less as men
than as vicious and dangerous wild animals. In fact, the benevolent and
philanthropic view of the American savage is for those who are beyond
his reach: it has never yet been held by any whose wives and children
have lived in danger of his scalping-knife. In Boston and other of the
older and safer settlements, the Indians had found devoted friends
before Philip's War; and even now they had apologists and defenders,
prominent among whom was that relic of antique Puritanism, old Samuel
Sewall, who was as conscientious and humane as he was prosy, narrow, and
sometimes absurd, and whose benevolence towards the former owners of the
soil was trebly reinforced by his notion that they were descendants of
the ten lost tribes of Israel.[240]

The intrusion of settlers, and the building of forts and blockhouses on
lands which they still called their own, irritated and alarmed the
Norridgewocks, and their growing resentment was fomented by Rale, both
because he shared it himself, and because he was prompted by Vaudreuil.
Yet, dreading another war with the English, the Indians kept quiet for a
year or two, till at length the more reckless among them began to
threaten and pilfer the settlers.

In 1716 Colonel Samuel Shute came out to succeed Dudley as governor; and
in the next summer he called the Indians to a council at Georgetown, a
settlement on Arrowsick Island, at the mouth of the Kennebec. Thither he
went in the frigate "Squirrel," with the councillors of Massachusetts
and New Hampshire; while the deputies of the Norridgewocks, Penobscots,
Pequawkets, or Abenakis of the Saco, and Assagunticooks, or Abenakis of
the Androscoggin, came in canoes to meet him, and set up their wigwams
on a neighboring island. The council opened on the ninth of August,
under a large tent, over which waved the British flag. The oath was
administered to the interpreters by the aged Judge Sewall, and Shute
then made the Indians a speech in which he told them that the English
and they were subjects of the great, good, and wise King George; that
as both peoples were under the same King, he would gladly see them also
of the same religion, since it was the only true one; and to this end he
gave them a Bible and a minister to teach them,--pointing to Rev. Joseph
Baxter, who stood near by. And he further assured them that if any wrong
should be done them, he would set it right. He then condescended to give
his hand