Then one of the most remarkable instances of gallantry recorded in the annals of border warfare occurred. Gallup, with his single sailor and his two little boys, armed only with a couple of rusty muskets, two pistols, and some buck-shot, prepared for action, and this though fourteen savages, heated by carnage and drunk with blood, stood ready with guns, and pikes, and swords, to repel his assault. The wind was fresh, and the audacious captain steered directly for the pinnace, and striking it stem foremost, nearly upset it; which so frightened the Indians that six of them jumped overboard and were drowned. Repeating this manœuvre—in unconscious imitation of the Athenian naval tactics—he came stem on again; for there were still too many Indians for him to venture to carry the pinnace by boarding. After this thump, Gallup had the satisfaction of seeing, as he cleared his vessel and stood off once more, four more savages leap into a watery grave—for they all sank. Then he steered for the battered craft for the third time; whereupon the remaining Indians sought refuge in the hold beneath the hatches. Gallup sprang on the deck of poor Oldham’s vessel, and there, stretched out before his eyes, was the late owner himself, still warm, but with cloven skull and amputated hands and feet.[937] The savages in the hold were now anxious to surrender. Two of them at Gallup’s bidding came up and were bound; and then, maddened by the sight of Oldham’s disfigured corpse, the sailor plunged the victims into the river. The two remaining savages would not give up their arms or come up from under the hatches. Gallup could not dig them out; so he secured the cargo, buried Oldham, and then tying the pinnace to the stern of his own victorious shallop, he set sail to tow her to the settlements. But in the night it blew hard; his capture was detached, and, drifting to the Narragansett shore, the secreted warriors escaped—two only out of fourteen[938]—a swift and sweeping retribution. The knowledge of these dismal tragedies crept slowly into the colonies. News was carried only by some coastwise vessel, whose progress, crab-like, was backwards; by some Indian runner often interested in being sluggish; or by some pale sufferer who, traversing forest, morass, and mountain, was frequently his own messenger of woe; for the Pilgrims had no stage-coaches like their immediate descendants; no good roads, like the men of ’76; no railway and no steamboat, like ourselves; and above all, no telegraph, annihilating space, to “Speed the swift intercourse from soul to soul, Or waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.”