On one occasion, he made prisoners of nearly a hundred Pequodees. Of these miserable creatures he sent the wives and children into servitude at Boston, while he caused the men--thirty-seven in number--to be bound hand and foot, and carried in a shallop outside the harbor, where they wore thrown overboard. If this barbarous deed was not committed by the directions of the _Christian_ Fathers of Massachusetts, yet they certainly neither disclaimed nor censured it. Indeed, so little were cruelty and oppression, when exercised against the red men, regarded as crimes by many of the settlers, that one of their learned divines, even of the age succeeding the perpetrations of the above appalling event, expressed it as his opinion that ‘Heaven had smiled on the English _hunt’;_ and added, with horrible and disgusting levity, 'that it was found to be the quickest way _feed the fishes_ with the multitude of Indian captives!' The other tribes who had joined the Pequodees in opposing the conquering white men, were pardoned on their submission; but that devoted race, who fought like heroes to the very last, were extirpated as a nation from the face of the earth. The very name in which they had so long gloried, and which had been a terror to all the neighboring tribes, was not permitted to remain, and to tell where once they had dwelt and reigned unrivalled. The river, which had been called the Pequod, received the appellation of the Thames; and the native township, on the ruins of which an English settlement was founded, was afterwards called New London. Numbers of the women and boys, who were taken captive from tune to time by the British troops, were sold and carried as slaves to Bermuda, and others were divided among the settlers, and condemned--not _nominally to slavery,_ for that was forbidden by the laws of New England, but--to _perpetual servitude,_ which must, indeed, have been much the same thing to free-born Indian spirits, accustomed to the wild liberty of the forests and the prairies. Sassacus--the once mighty Chief of this mighty and heroic people--was basely slain by the Mohawks, among whom he had sought fellowship and protection, for the sake of the treasures that be had brought with him from his own lost dominions; and his heart was sent by his murderers as a peace-offering to the government of Connecticut.