Three years later however, on a trading voyage in the Sound, Oldham was murdered at Block Island by Indians under Pequot control. His boat was plundered and two English boys with him at the time were carried off into captivity. This episode fused the Pequot War, the chief results of which was a bloody purge by the New Englanders that cleared the shores of the Sound for settlement. The campaign commenced against the Pequots in 1637 quickly became a hundredfold more terrible than the murderous episode the white men set out originally to avenge. Under the leadership of Captain John Endicott of Massachusetts, a devastating blow was first delivered at Block Island. A hundred men went there with him in three ships. They burned the native wigwams, spoiled the corn, and slew all the Indians they could catch. Then they repaired to the mainland, where they invaded the heart of the Pequot country and repeated their brutal chastisement of the red men. This grim Puritan punishment came close to uniting all the Indians in those parts against the English. Only the diplomacy of Roger Williams, who traded for furs with the Narragansetts while preaching the gospel, prevented the great Narragansett tribe from joining the Pequots in the fierce revenge they now took against any isolated Englishmen they could find. Meanwhile the Pequots scourged the countryside--until, by a final campaign, the New Englanders set out to remove this powerful tribe from the face of the earth! An army composed mostly of mercenary savages was assembled by the Englishmen for this gory task. It originated with a party of ninety white men from the Connecticut River towns under the command of John Mason. Together with an equal number of Mohegans, they went down to Fort Saybrook to meet Captain John Underhill who had been sent from Massachusetts with twenty soldiers. This nucleous force then proceeded to the Bay of the Narragansetts where it was joined by some 500 of those savages, all bent on scalps and loot. From the bay the army marched overland to the Mystic River to attack one of the chief Pequot towns, occupied at the time by some six or seven hundred men, women and children. The English and their Indian allies took the inhabitants of the town by surprise. They put the torch to the wigwams before the sleeping natives could offer any resistance. All who were not burned to death were slaughtered as they tried to escape--all except seven who managed to escape and seven others who were taken captive. It was a terrible affair--for the Pequots. Only two Englishmen died in the encounter.