The Pequots, esteemed the most powerful tribe in New England, were totally ruined, as we shall presently see, by the destruction or capture of hardly more than a thousand persons. The provocation for this exterminating war was extremely small. Previous to the Massachusetts migration to the Connecticut, one Captain Stone, the drunken and dissolute master of a small trading vessel from Virginia, whom the Plymouth people charged with having been engaged at Manhattan in a piratical plot to seize one of their vessels, having been sent away from Boston with orders not to return without leave, under pain of death, on his way homeward to Virginia, in 1634, had entered the Connecticut River, where he was cut off, with his whole company, seven in number, by a band of Pequots. There were various stories, none of them authentic, as to the precise manner of his death, but the Pequots insisted that he had been the aggressor--a thing in itself sufficiently probable. As Stone belonged to Virginia, the magistrates of Massachusetts wrote to Governor Harvey to move him to stir in the matter. Van Cuyler, the Dutch commissary at Fort Good Hope, in fact revenged Stone’s death by the execution of a sachem and several others. This offended the Pequots, who renounced any further traffic with the Dutch, and sent messengers to Boston desiring an intercourse of trade, and assistance to settle their pending difficulties with the Narragansets, who intervened between them and the English settlements. They even promised to give up--at least so the magistrates understood them--the only two survivors, as they alleged, of those concerned in the death of Stone. These offers were accepted; for the convenience of this traffic a peace was negotiated between the Pequots and the Narragansets, and a vessel was presently sent to open a trade. But this traffic disappointed the adventurers; nor were the promised culprits given up. The Pequots, according to the Indian custom, tendered, instead, a present of furs and wampum. But this was refused, the colonists seeming to think themselves under a religious obligation to avenge blood with blood.