The best medical skill was summoned to attend him, but he sank rapidly, and his terrified followers, believing him poisoned by the English, entreated to be allowed to carry him to Mt. Hope, promising to return with him as soon as he should recover and offering to send his son[20] as a hostage. Their request was granted and with all possible speed they started on the homeward journey. They bore their chief on a litter until they reached Titicut where they embarked in canoes, but had proceeded only a short distance down the river ere they perceived that he was dying. They immediately drew their frail barks to the shore, lifted him from the canoe, and tenderly placed him upon the grass. In stoical silence they awaited the end; and, when, the last fluttering sigh had escaped the pallid lips, they replaced the form of the dead sachem in the canoe, grasped their paddles and, with hearts burning with grief, anger, and thirst for revenge, pushed swiftly and silently down the stream. The tragic death of Alexander,――the direct result of the bold and perhaps unwise policy of the Plymouth government――broke the first link in the chain of friendship that had bound Wampanoag and Englishman together. The sullen attitude of the savages awakened anxiety among the colonists, and it was with some alarm that those dwelling at the Sowams’ settlement beheld a vast concourse of savages gathered at Mt. Hope to mourn for the dead chief and to celebrate his brother Philip’s accession to the sachemship. But the feared outbreak of hostilities did not occur. Whatever Philip’s real feelings were, he apparently desired to live in amity with the English; and a few months after becoming the head of his tribe renewed the “covenant” which Massasoit had made with the government of Plymouth. He does not seem to have, at first, felt a prejudice against the Christian religion for, in the winter of 1663-4, he and his people sent to John Eliot for “books to learn to read and to pray unto God.” Eliot’s son twice visited Pokanoket and taught among the Wampanoags, and from a letter addressed by Eliot to the United Colonies in 1664, it appears probable that the apostle, himself, labored at Mt. Hope in 1664-5.