Never, however, did their numbers approach those of the English colonists along the Atlantic coast. Both Massachusetts and Virginia were grown into important commonwealths, almost independent of England, and well able to support the weaker settlements rising around them. After the great Puritan exodus to New England to escape the oppression of Charles I, there had come a Royalist exodus to Virginia to escape the Puritanic tyranny of Cromwell's time. Large numbers of Catholics fled to Maryland. Huguenots established themselves in the Carolinas and elsewhere. Then came Penn to build a great Quaker state among the scattered Dutch settlements along the Delaware.[1] The American seaboard became the refuge of each man who refused to bow his neck to despotism of whatever type. [Footnote 1: See _William Penn Receives the Grant of Pennsylvania: Founding of Philadelphia_, page 153.] Under such settlers English America soon ceased to be a mere offshoot of Europe. It became a world of its own; its people developed into a new race. They had their own springs of action, their own ways of thought, different from those of Europe, more simple and intense as was shown in the Salem witchcraft excitement, or more resolute and advanced as was revealed in Bacon's Virginia rebellion.[2] [Footnote 2: See _Salem Witchcraft Trials_, page 268.] The aboriginal inhabitants, the Indians, found themselves pressed ever backward from the coast. They resisted, and in 1675 there arose in New England, King Philip's war, which for that section at least settled the Indian question forever. The red men of New England were practically exterminated.[3] Those of New York, the Iroquois, were more fortunate or more crafty. They dwelt deeper in the wilderness, and formed a buffer state between the French in Canada and the English to the south, drawing aid now from one, now from the other. [Footnote 3: See _King Philip's War_, page 125.] Each war between England and Louis XIV was echoed by strife between their rival colonies. When King William supplanted James in 1688 there followed in America also a "bloodless revolution."[4] Governor Andros, whom James had sent to imitate his own harsh tyranny in the colonies, was seized and shipped back to England. William was proclaimed king. The ensuing strife with France was marked by the most bloody of all America's Indian massacres. The Iroquois descended suddenly on Canada; the very suburbs of its capital, Montreal, were burned, and more than a thousand of the unsuspecting settlers were tortured, or more mercifully slain outright.[5] [Footnote 4: See _Tyranny of Andros in New England: The Bloodless Revolution_, page 241.] [Footnote 5: See _Massacre of Lachine_, page 248.]