In 1636 the Massachusetts colony, under Vane’s administration, became involved in new troubles--a violent internal controversy and a dangerous Indian war. The most powerful native tribes of New England were concentrated in the neighborhood of Narragansett Bay. The Wampanoags, or Pocanokets, were on the east side of that bay within the limits of the Plymouth patent, and the Narragansets, a more powerful confederacy, on the west side. Still more numerous and more powerful were the Pequots, whose chief seats were on or near Pequot River, now the Thames, but whose authority extended over twenty-six petty tribes, along both shores of the Sound to the Connecticut River, and even beyond it, almost or quite to the Hudson. In what is now the northeast corner of the State of Connecticut dwelt a smaller tribe, the enemies, perhaps the revolted subjects, of the Pequots, known to the colonists as Mohegans--an appropriation of a general name properly including all the Indians along the shores of Long Island Sound as far west as the Hudson, and even the tribes beyond that river, known afterward to the English as the Delawares. The Indians about Massachusetts Bay, supposed to have been formerly quite numerous, had almost died out before the arrival of the colonists, and the smallpox had since proved very fatal among the few that remained. Some tribes of no great consideration--the Nipmucks, the Wachusetts, the Nashaways--dwelt among the interior hills, and others, known collectively to the colonists as the River Indians, fished at the falls of the Connecticut, and cultivated little patches of its rich alluvial meadows. The lower Merrimac, the Piscataqua, and their branches were occupied by the tribes of a considerable confederacy, that of Penacook, or Pawtucket, whose chief sachem, Passaconaway, was reported to be a great magician. The interior of New Hampshire and of what is now Vermont seems to have been an uninhabited wilderness. The tribes eastward of the Piscataqua, known to the English by the general name of Tarenteens, and reputed to be numerous and powerful, were distinguished by the rivers on which they dwelt. They seem to have constituted two principal confederacies, those east of the Kennebec being known to the French of Acadie as the Abenakis. All the New England Indians spoke substantially the same language, the Algonquin, in various dialects. From the nature of the country, they were more stationary than some other tribes, being fixed principally at the falls of the rivers. They seem to have entertained very decided ideas of the hereditary descent of authority, and of personal devotion to their chiefs. What might have been at this time the total Indian population of New England it is not very easy to conjecture; but it was certainly much less than is commonly stated. Fifteen or twenty thousand would seem to be a sufficient allowance for the region south of the Piscataqua, and as many more, perhaps, for the more easterly district.