Meanwhile, the remainder of the troops from Massachusetts, whom the Government had not thought it necessary to send with Captain Mason, had landed at Saybroke, led by Captain Houghton, and attended by Wilson as their spiritual guide.  They arrived just in time to hear of the successful issue of the campaign; and had, therefore, nothing left for them to do, except to join a small band from Connecticut, and keep down or destroy the few Pequodees, or other hostile Indians who still lurked about the district, and kept the settlers in fear and anxiety.  These wretched natives were chased into their most secret haunts, where they were barbarously slain; their wigwams were burnt, and their fields desolated.  Nor were the English the only foes of the once terrible Pequodees.  Their Indian rivals took advantage of their present weak and scattered condition, to wreak upon them the suppressed vengeance of bygone years; and pursued, with ruthless cruelty, those whose very name had once inspired them with awe and dread.  And yet—­with shame be it said!—­the Christian leader of the troops of Massachusetts, himself a member of the strict and exclusive Church of Boston, surpassed these savages in cruelty.

On one occasion, he made prisoners of nearly a hundred Pequodees.  Of these miserable creatures he sent the wives and children into servitude at Boston, while he caused the men—­thirty-seven in number—­to be bound hand and foot, and carried in a shallop outside the harbor, where they wore thrown overboard.  If this barbarous deed was not committed by the directions of the Christian Fathers of Massachusetts, yet they certainly neither disclaimed nor censured it.  Indeed, so little were cruelty and oppression, when exercised against the red men, regarded as crimes by many of the settlers, that one of their learned divines, even of the age succeeding the perpetrations of the above appalling event, expressed it as his opinion that ’Heaven had smiled on the English hunt’; and added, with horrible and disgusting levity, ’that it was found to be the quickest way feed the fishes with the multitude of Indian captives!’

The other tribes who had joined the Pequodees in opposing the conquering white men, were pardoned on their submission; but that devoted race, who fought like heroes to the very last, were extirpated as a nation from the face of the earth.  The very name in which they had so long gloried, and which had been a terror to all the neighboring tribes, was not permitted to remain, and to tell where once they had dwelt and reigned unrivalled.  The river, which had been called the Pequod, received the appellation of the Thames; and the native township, on the ruins of which an English settlement was founded, was afterwards called New London.  Numbers of the women and boys, who were taken captive from tune to time by the British troops, were sold and carried as slaves to Bermuda, and others were divided among the settlers, and condemned—­not nominally to slavery, for that was forbidden by the laws of New England, but—­to perpetual servitude, which must, indeed, have been much the same thing to free-born Indian spirits, accustomed to the wild liberty of the forests and the prairies.