Philip
therefore gathered his fighting-men about him, persuaded all
strangers that he could to join his cause, sent the women and
children to the Narragansetts for safety, and wherever he
appeared was continually surrounded by armed warriors.
When the two parties were thus in a state of distrust and
irritation, the least spark was sufficient to set them in a
flame. The Indians, having weapons in their hands, grew
mischievous and committed various petty depredations. In one of
their maraudings a warrior was fired on and killed by a settler.
This was the signal for open hostilities; the Indians pressed to
revenge the death of their comrade, and the alarm of war
resounded through the Plymouth colony.
In the early chronicles of these dark and melancholy times we
meet with many indications of the diseased state of the public
mind. The gloom of religious abstraction and the wildness of
their situation among trackless forests and savage tribes had
disposed the colonists to superstitious fancies, and had filled
their imaginations with the frightful chimeras of witchcraft and
spectrology. They were much given also to a belief in omens. The
troubles with Philip and his Indians were preceded, we are told,
by a variety of those awful warnings which forerun great and
public calamities.
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