At Plymouth similar activity was displayed; and a levy of forty men was made.[948] But it was in Connecticut, the menaced spot, that the most herculean exertions were put forth. Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, placed ninety men in the field, under the command of stout John Mason—a sometime soldier in the Low Countries under Sir Thomas Fairfax, who held him in such esteem that in after-years, when at the head of the parliamentary muster, he wrote his truant _protégé_ urging his return to England, that he might lend his skilful sword to the patriot cause.[949] Mason, with Hooker’s benediction, immediately opened a vigorous campaign. Saybrook was reinforced.[950] A subsidiary detachment of Mohegans, under Uncas, was recruited.[951] The mouth of the Connecticut was made the base of operations, and thither the united levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, were transported. Here a council of war was held. After Stone, the chaplain, had sought the divine direction in prayer, it was decided to march directly upon the Pequod village off Point Judith.[952] All embarked; the objective point was safely reached. Then a storm intervened; it was impossible to land. The next day was Sunday; it was spent devoutly on shipboard; nor was it until Tuesday evening, the third day after they had dropped anchor, that the eager Pilgrims touched land.[953] Mason bivouacked on the sea-shore, and in the gray of the next morning commenced the memorable march. “Seventy-seven brave Englishmen—the rest were left in charge of the vessels—sixty frightened Mohegans, and four hundred more terrified Narragansetts, entered the war-trail, and went twenty miles westward towards the Pequod country, to a fort occupied by some suspected neutrals. There a pause for the night was made, and, lest any Indian should give the doomed Pequods the alarm, the citadel was girt by the sentries of the shrewd English captain.”[954] Before noon, on the following morning, they broke camp, and marched fifteen miles farther inland, pausing at nightfall under a hill “which, according to information received from their dusky allies—who had now all fallen in the rear, ‘being possessed with great fear’—stood the chief stronghold of the Pequods.”[955] Mason could hear the savage revelry of the ill-fated and unsuspecting Indians very distinctly, as the wind wafted the laughter, the yells, the vaunts, from the village over the little hill. The din sank and fell till midnight. All were enjoying a general guffaw over the English, whose ships they had seen sail eastward on the sound, bearing, as they imagined, the pale-face warriors to tell their squaws of their discomfiture.[956]