Whether or not incited thereto by intolerable wrongs, Indians of the mainland had begun to make trouble, and information now came to the Pilgrims, through their ally, Massasoit, of a plot against the whites in which not only Indians near Weymouth, but some of the Cape Indians, were said to be implicated. Weston’s colony of adventurers there had from the first been a thorn in the side of Plymouth; but when one of the Weymouth men, eluding the Indians, made his way across country to report the dangerous conditions there Standish waited not upon the order of his going. With eight whites and an Indian guide, he set sail for Weymouth, where he seems to have met with little resistance, and having slain a due number of the savages, returned to Plymouth with the head of their chief, Wittaumet, “a notable insulting villain,” as a trophy. Very likely thereby a serious rising of the natives was averted. To Wittaumet’s men a white was a white; it was all one to them whether he were blameless Pilgrim or Merrymount royster; and as for the Patuxets and Pamets and Nausets, we know they had old scores to settle. It is true, moreover, that any long contact of Indians and whites was fairly sure to end in a quarrel and bloodletting. And if the purpose of Standish’s expedition was to create terror, it was a success. Natives of the seacoast, whom the plague had spared, innocent and guilty, fled to the swamps and waste places, where disease attacked them more effectually than the English could have done, and many of them died; among them Canacum of Manomet, Aspinet of the Nausets, and even the “princely” Iyanough, who seems to have been blameless in intention and act. More than two hundred and fifty years later, the bones of a chief were discovered near a swamp in East Barnstable, and, believed to be those of Iyanough, were encased suitably and placed in Pilgrim Hall near relics of Miles Standish who had as surely done him to death as if slain by his hand. The name of Iyanough is preserved in that of the modern town of Hyannis. How much fault in all this deplorable business may be charged to Miles Standish, one may not say. He was not a “Pilgrim,” nor of their faith, but from the first, on account of his experience and skill, had been chosen for their military leader. Hubbard writes of him: “A little chimney is soon fired; so was the Plymouth captain, a man of small stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper.” And when wise John Robinson, at Leyden, heard of Standish’s bloody reprisals, he wrote the brethren at Plymouth that he “trusted the Lord had sent him among them for good, but feared he was wanting in that tenderness of the life of man, made after God’s image, which was meet; and thought it would have been better if they had converted some before they killed any.” CHAPTER III THE TOWNS I