The Fight of the Pease Field, 9 July 1675

Near Pocasset Neck, Massachusetts

From “Mayflower,” by Nathaniel Philbrick:

After a night spent sleeping in the countryside, they were off in search of Indians. While Fuller went north with half the men, Church took the other half south toward his home in Sakonnet. With luck, he might make contact with Awashonks. Several hours later, his men began to complain that they had not yet found any of the Indians he had promised them. As they made their way along the shore of the Sakonnet River, Church assured them "that if it was their desire to see Indians, he believed he should now soon show them what they should say was enough."

Fifty-five years earlier, Miles Standish had led a similar patrol along the south shore of Cape Cod. The Pilgrims' search for Indians had been part of a voyage of discovery to a new and unknown land. Church was conducting his search just a few miles from his own farm land made just as new and strange by the transformative power of war.

They could see signs of recent Indian activity all around them – a network of sinuous trails that crisscrossed the woods and fields. They came upon a wigwam loaded with cooking utensils and clothing. A few of the men asked if they could take some of the goods with them, but Church forbade it, "telling them they might expect soon to have their hands full" with Indians instead of plunder.

On Punkatees Neck, between a ridge of dense forest and the stony shore of the Sakonnet River, they found a newly cultivated field of peas. They also saw two Indians walking through the field toward them. When the Indians turned and started to run, Church called out that he only wanted to talk and would not hurt them. But the Indians continued to run, with Church and his men in pursuit. There was a fence between the field and the woods, and as the Indians scrambled over it, one of them turned and fired his musket. A soldier fired back, and even though the Indians quickly disappeared into the woods, the English heard a strangled cry of pain suggesting that one of them had been hit.

They followed the Indians into the woods. Suddenly the sun dappled darkness erupted with the roar of dozens of muskets firing simultaneously. Like many other English officers would do in the months ahead, Church had led his men into an ambush. He glanced back, "expecting to have seen half of them dead." But all were still standing and firing blindly into the thick cloud of gray smoke that billowed toward them from the trees. Church ordered them to stop firing. If they discharged their muskets all at once, the Indians might charge them with their hatchets. It was time to retreat to the field.

As soon as they reached the fence, Church ordered those who had not yet fired their muskets to hide themselves behind the fence while the others moved well into the field and reloaded. If the Indians should pursue them to the fence, there would be a trap waiting for them. Church was quickly learning how to use the Indians' own tactics of concealment and surprise against them.

But when Church glanced back to the heavily wooded rise of land from which they'd just come, he immediately began to reevaluate his strategy. From where he stood, the wooded hill appeared to be moving.

He soon realized that the rise of land was completely covered with Indians, "their bright guns glittering in the sun" as they poured out of the woods and Onto the field. The field bordered the Sakonnet River, and the Indians were attempting to surround the Englishmen before they reached the water's edge.

Church quickly scanned the river. There were supposed to be several boats waiting to take them back to Aquidneck Island. On the other side of the river, less than a mile away, were some boats on the Aquidneck shore. They were too far away to be of much help now.

Near the water were the remnants of a stone wall. He ordered his men to run across the field and take the wall before the Indians reached it. He also told them to strip down to their white shirts so that the men across the river would know that they were Englishmen. In order to get their attention, he ordered three of his men to fire their guns one after the other. Soon they were all dashing across the field, the Indians' bullets cutting through the leaves of the pea plants and sending up spurts of dust as the Englishmen threw themselves over an old hedge and tumbled down the bank to the wall beside the shore.

Unfortunately, it was not much of a wall. As the Indians took up positions around them, using the ruins of an old stone house and any available stumps, rocks, trees, and fence posts for protection, Church and his men were left wide open to shots from the north and south. They grabbed whatever rocks they could find and began widening the wall.

But their biggest problem was not a lack of protection; it was their lack of gunpowder. Church estimated that they were up against several hundred Indians, and there were only twenty of them. Once they ran out of powder, the Indians would be on them in a moment, and they would all be massacred.

Church marveled at how his men "bravely and wonderfully defended themselves" in the face of such an overwhelming force. But there was reason for hope. A sloop had started to sail toward them from Aquidneck Island. But as soon as the vessel came to within hailing distance, the Indians turned their guns upon it. The wind was blowing onshore from the northwest, and Church asked the boat's master if he might send them the canoe that was tied to his stern so that they could use it to paddle back to his boat. But the sailor refused. One of Church's men cried out, "For God's sake, take us off. Our ammunition is spent!" This was not the kind of information Church wanted the Indians to know. It was time to end the conversation. Marshaling the same kind of fury he had displayed at the Miles garrison, he ordered the boat's master to "either send his canoe ashore or else be gone presently, or he would fire upon him." The vessel promptly headed back for Aquidneck, and the Indians, "reanimated" by the boat's departure, "fired thicker and faster than ever."

Some of Church's men began to talk about making a run for it. Church insisted that their best chance at survival was to stay together. It was already a miracle that they were still alive. God, in his "wonderful providence," had chosen to preserve them. Church was confident that no matter how bad it looked now, "not a hair of their head[s] should fall to the ground" if they continued to be "patient, courageous, and prudently sparing of their ammunition." It was a soldier's version of predestination: God was in control, and he was on their side.

One of the men had become so frightened that he was unable to fire his musket. Church ordered him to devote his energies to reinforcing the wall. As Church delivered his speech, the soldier was in the midst of laying a rock down in front of him when a bullet ricocheted off the stone's face. It was exactly the example Church needed. "Observe," he cried out to his men, "how God directed the bullets [to] . . . hit the stone" and not the man. Whether through Providence or not, from that moment forward, everyone "in his little army, again resolved one and all to stay with and stick by him."

All afternoon, beneath a hot sun, Church and his men held their ground as the Indians made the surrounding woods echo with their whoops and shouts. With night approaching, one of Church's soldiers said he could see a sloop sailing toward them from a tiny island several miles up the river. "Succor is now coming!" Church shouted.

He recognized the vessel as belonging to. Captain Roger Gaulding, "a man," he assured them, "for business."

The sloop glided with the diminishing northwesterly breeze dawn to the besieged soldiers. Captain Gaulding proved as trustworthy as Church had claimed. He anchored his vessel to windward of them and floated a buoy with his canoe tied to it to Church and his men. The sails and hull of his sloop were soon riddled with bullet hales, but Gaulding stayed put.

The canoe was so tiny that only two men could fit in it at a time. It took ten agonizingly slow trips back and forth, but at least there was a growing number of soldiers in the sloop to provide cover far those in the canoe. Finally, only Church was left ashore. As he prepared to climb into the canoe, he realized that he had left his hat and cutlass at a nearby well, where he had stopped to get a drink of water at the beginning of the siege.

When he informed his men that he was going back to collect his possessions, they pleaded with him to get into the canoe. But Church was adamant; he was not about to leave without his hat and sward. He loaded all the gunpowder he had left in his musket and started far the well.

Since he was the only remaining Englishman, all the Indians' guns were trained on him as he made his way to the stone-encircled spring that today bears his name. A ceaseless stream of bullets flew through the air and drove into the ground at his feet, but none hit Church. On returning to the canoe, with the hat on his head and the cutlass at his side, he fired his musket one last time, but there was barely enough of a charge to push the bullet out of the barrel. Just as he settled into the canoe, a bullet grazed his hair while another splintered the wooden brace against which he'd nestled his chest, but he reached the sloop unscathed.

It had been a remarkable day. For six hours, twenty men had held off three hundred Indians (a number that was later confirmed by the Indians themselves) without suffering a single casualty. It was a deliverance that Church looked to for the rest of his life as indisputable proof of "the glory of God and His protecting providence." William Bradford had learned of it in a dream, but for Benjamin Church it had been revealed in battle: he was one of the elect.

He'd also learned something else during what came to be known as the Pease Field Fight. When it came to Awashonks and the Sakonnets, the time far diplomacy had passed.