So far as the mere bargaining went, the Indians were not individually the sufferers in the early days; but we must remember that behind all these transactions there often lay a theory which was as merciless as that of the Spanish “Requisition,”[20] and which would, if logically carried out, have made all these bargainings quite superfluous. Increase Mather begins his history of King Philip’s War with this phrase, “That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession”; and it was this attitude of hostile superiority that gave the sting to all the relations of the two races. If a quarrel rose, it was apt to be the white man’s fault; and after it had arisen, even the humaner Englishmen usually sided with their race, as when the peaceful Plymouth men went to war in defence of the Weymouth reprobates. This fact, and the vague feeling that an irresistible pressure was displacing them, caused most of the early Indian outbreaks. And when hostilities had once arisen, it was very rare for a white man of English birth to be found fighting against his own people, although it grew more and more common to find Indians on both sides. As time went on each party learned from the other. In the early explorations, as of Champlain and Smith, we see the Indians terrified by their first sight of firearms, but soon becoming skilled in the use of them. “The King, with fortie Bowmen to guard me,” says Capt. John Smith, in 1608, “entreated me to discharge my Pistoll, which they there presented to me, with a mark at six-score to strike therewith; but to spoil the practise I broke the cocke, whereat they were much discontented.” But writing more than twenty years later, in 1631, he says of the Virginia settlers, “The loving Salvages their kinde friends they trained up so well to shoot in a Peace [fowling-piece] to hunt and kill them fowle, they became more expert than our own countrymen.” La Hontan, writing in 1703, says of the successors of those against whom Champlain had first used firearms, “The Strength of the Iroquese lies in engaging with Fire Arms in a Forrest, for they shoot very dexterously.” They learned also to make more skilful fortifications, and to keep a regular watch at night, which in the time of the early explorers they had omitted. The same La Hontan says of the Iroquois, “They are as negligent in the night-time as they are vigilant in the day.”