Things were going badly in another area of Massachusetts during that eventful year of 1614. As though the expeditions of Block, Smith, and Hunt were not sufficient for one year, Nicholas Hobson now made his appearance at Martha’s Vineyard. Sent out by Sir Ferdinando Gorges in an attempt to establish a fur-trading post in that region, Hobson was using the Indian, Epenow, captured by Harlow’s expedition in 1611, as his pilot through the shoals of Nantucket Sound. Epenow cleverly contrived his escape, and a full-scale battle ensued. “Divers of the Indians were then slain by the English, and the Master of the English vessel and several of the Company wounded by the Indians.” Hobson’s party “returned to England, bringing nothing back with them, but the News of their bad Success, and that there was a War broke out between the English and the Indians.” Increase Mather later remarked that “Hunt’s forementioned Scandal, had caused the Indians to contract such a mortal Hatred against all Men of the English Nation, that it was no small Difficulty to settle anywhere within their Territoryes.” It was at this point in history that another strange series of events took place, of much more far-reaching significance. With English expeditions defeated and sent back to England empty-handed, with an Indian war “broke out,” fate, or Providence, or whatever you call that destiny which seems at times to intercede for civilization in its remorseless quest for progress, now took a hand. Some European disease, to which the natives had no resistance and the Europeans complete immunity, swept the coasts of Massachusetts clear of Indians. Suddenly it appeared in all the river villages along the Mystic, the Charles, the Neponset, the North River, and at Plymouth. No one knows what it was--whether chicken pox or measles or scarlet fever. The Indians believed it was the product of a curse leveled at them by one of the last survivors of a French crew wrecked on Boston Harbor’s Peddock’s Island in 1615. By analogy with what later happened to other primitive races in the Americas and the Pacific islands, it was probably one of the children’s diseases. The Indians died in thousands. A population of a hundred thousand shrank to five thousand in the area from Gloucester to New Bedford. “They died on heapes,” Thomas Morton wrote, “and the living that were able to shift for themselves would runne away and let them dy and let there Carkases ly above the ground without buriall.... And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my comming into those parts that as I travailed in that Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new-found Golgotha.”