Every little while there would be some dispute, usually ending in bloodshed, between Indians and white men. Two white traders, venturing into the country between the two rivers now known as the Pawcatuck and the Thames, were killed by chiefs of the Pequods, who were the strongest tribe in all New England. News of this came to Plymouth, and was sent from there by messenger to the governor of Massachusetts Bay. Not long afterward a settler named John Oldham was killed by a party of Indians as he was sailing his own boat off Block Island. The white men, putting this and that together, decided that the Pequods were planning to kill all the settlers that came into their country, and thought it likely they were trying to get the Narragansett chiefs to join them in this. If these two tribes joined forces it would go hard with the white men, and so the people of Massachusetts Bay sent a message to Roger Williams, urging him to see his friends the Narragansetts, and try to keep them from joining with the Pequods. Williams was brave, and he had need to be when he made his visit to the wigwam of the chief, Canonicus. He found men of the Pequods there, trying to induce Canonicus and the other Narragansett sachems to join them in war on the whites. He came as a friend, he showed no fear, and he stayed for several days, sleeping among them at night, as if he had no suspicion that the Pequods might want to kill him, alone and unarmed among so many of them. And the Pequods did not touch him. He had learned something of the Indian tongue while he lived at Plymouth and Salem, and he talked with them and the Narragansetts, urging them to be friends with the white men who had come to live among them. His visit to Canonicus was successful. The Narragansett chiefs renewed their promises of friendship for Roger Williams' men and sent the Pequod envoys away. The disappointed Pequods, however, told the Narragansetts that the English were treacherous folk and warned them that they would not always find these new settlers as friendly as Roger Williams had said. And in part the Pequods were right, for there were white men who were fully as treacherous as any Indians.