According to their habit, the Indians were cautious at the outset. Isolated instances announced their hostility. In 1634, Captains Stone and Norton sailed up the Connecticut in a coasting smack, manned by a crew of eight men. They were steering for a Dutch trading station on the river side, when their vessel was becalmed. In a flash a fleet of canoes were launched from either bank of the river, and a swarm of savages surrounded the smack. Suspecting no danger, twelve of them were permitted to board, and Stone engaged two of these to pilot a boat higher up the stream. The guides at night murdered the two sailors in charge of this shallop, and at the same hour their companions on the vessel assailed the sleeping crew. Stone was killed secretly in his cabin, and, to conceal the body, a light covering was thrown over it. Then the massacre extended to the deck and forecastle. Soon all were dead save Norton. “He had taken to the cook-room on the first alarm, and here he made a long and resolute defence. That he might load and fire with the greatest expedition, he placed powder in an open bowl, just at hand, which, in the hurry of action, taking fire, so burned and blinded him that he could fight no longer; whereupon he too was tomahawked.”[933] Then the smack was pillaged and sunk.[934] Two years later, John Oldham,[935] while trading fairly on the Connecticut, was suddenly set upon and brained. His companions, two Narragansett Indians and a couple of boys, were kidnapped.[936] A few days after this sad catastrophe, an old English sailor, John Gallup, floating on the tranquil bosom of the treacherous river in his little shallop of twenty tons, manned only by himself, his two sons, and one old salt, espied Oldham’s pinnace off Block Island. He tacked for it and hailed. No answer; a closer survey showed him a deck crowded with Indians. Gallup’s suspicion was aroused, and when the clumsy savages attempted to make sail and get away, he regarded the movement as a cover to foul play.