America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback by Kenneth C. Davis Page B

and convinced that a show of force was needed to deter further attacks, a ninety-man Puritan force attacked a Pequot village on Block Island in August 1636, burning it to the ground.
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    Hannah’s Escape
    Leading this army was John Endecott, the fiery Puritan father later described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock foundation of New England.” Endecott might have been the closest colonial American equivalent to an ayatollah or modern ji-hadist. He had arrived in Massachusetts in 1628 and was made governor of the fledgling Salem settlement established by Roger Conant a few years earlier. When Endecott landed with a fresh group of settlers, Conant turned over the reins of power to the military man.
    A veteran of the Protestant wars against Catholics in the Netherlands, Endecott was usually seen carrying his thirty-inch steel blade.
    It was the same sword he had used to hack down a “pagan” maypole shortly after his arrival in Massachusetts, a story recounted by Governor William Bradford, retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Maypole of Merry Mount, and very much at odds with the traditional view of the first English in Massachusetts.
    At the center of the maypole drama was Thomas Morton, a London lawyer and partner in a new crown-sponsored trading venture. Morton was among the colonists with interests that were more commercial than spiritual. He sailed to America in 1624 and quickly decided that life among the Puritans—including the diminutive Miles Standish, whom Morton derided as “Captain Shrimp”—was not for him. Leaving Plymouth with a band that consisted mostly of freed indentured servants, Morton moved to a nearby settlement called Mount Wollaston, renamed it Merry Mount, and soon earned a reputation among the Pilgrims as a libertine. As Pilgrim chronicler William Bradford recorded, “After this, they fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained as it were a School of Atheism.”27
    Morton also earned the ire of the Pilgrim fathers because he was | 69 \
    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory trading guns and powder with the Indians. He was arrested, put in the stocks, and later shipped back to London; his Merry Mount settlement was renamed Mount Dagon, after a god of the dreaded biblical Philistines. In 1629, the recently arrived John Endecott raided the town, destroyed the remains of the “pagan idol” maypole, and burned the settlement to the ground. (The site of Merry Mount, or Mount Wollaston, is marked in present-day Quincy, Massachusetts.) Five years later, Endecott argued that the women of the Bay Colony should be veiled in public, harking back to the Apostle Paul’s early church admonition for women to cover their heads. His proposal failed and Massachusetts goodies, as they were known, were spared the colonial-era equivalent of the Islamic chador. But Endecott was undeterred.
    That same year, he used his sword to filet an English flag in order to remove the red cross of St. George. Endecott believed “that the red cross was given to the king of England by the pope, as an ensign of victory and as a superstitious thing, and a relic of Antichrist.”28
    In 1636, Endecott set out after the Pequot Indians with the fury of an avenging angel. After destroying their village on Block Island, Endecott’s combined Massachusetts Bay Colony and Indian force moved on to the fortified English settlement at Fort Saybrook, Connecticut, and burned a nearby Pequot village before returning to Massachusetts. Endecott may have thought himself victorious. But as soon as his militiamen departed, the Pequot struck back, besieging Fort Saybrook and raiding other Connecticut towns, killing as many as a third of the colony’s settlers. In response to these raids, another militia army was gathered, now joined by Narragansett and Niantic Indian allies, and attacked a Pequot village on