From First Encounter to “Fiery Oven”

Abstract

Much has been written on the evolution of Puritan relations with native Americans from the comparatively pacific “first encounters” on Cape Cod to the arguably genocidal approach taken to the Pequots of Connecticut in 1637, and some time later, to a larger mass of New England Indians in King Philip’s War. This change has been charted in paradigmatic terms by the literary scholar John Seelye, who in Prophetic Waters speaks of “the peaceful message of the Gospels giving way increasingly to the militant burden of the Pentateuch” and of “the prophet becoming the soldier of God as the wilderness becomes the threshold to Canaan.”¹ Seelye effectively depicts a shift from pastoral to polemic in the first 20 years of Puritan writing on the colonization of New England, with the collectively authored Mourt’s Relation (1622) displaying a “distinctly Hesiodic strain” that would soon yield to the martial beat of Puritan militancy recorded in John Mason’s Brief History of the Pequot War (1656) and other accounts of that conflict published by Lion Gardener (1660), John Underhill (1638), and Philip Vincent (1638), the latter two in the immediate aftermath of the war.²