Mayflower Chronicles

One day, Standish and Francis Cooke went hunting in the woods in search of something for the women to cook. Standish heard a sound first. He put his finger to his lips, signaling Cooke to be quiet. Off in the distance, they spotted a group of Natives. “Must be ten or twelve of them,” whispered Standish.

“Looks like they’re marching straight for us,” Cooke whispered back.

“From the sound of it, there’s many more not far away. We must warn the others.”

Standish and Cooke ran as fast as they could over the rough, frozen forest ground, calling out to alert others as they went. “Savages! Savages in the woods. Run!”

Others hunting nearby heard their warning and ran to the common house.

 Once inside, Standish barked, “Have your muskets ready!” The men all stood, muskets pointed toward the door. Behind them, the women gathered into a circle with all of the children inside it. Some of the women cried out in fright. Standish shouted, “Quiet! I gotta listen to hear how close they are.”

They waited. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. The only sound heard was their own uneasy breathing, and a few children and women crying softly.

“We must go see where they are,” announced Standish. He signaled for Hopkins to come with him. They walked back into the woods where Standish and Cooke had been a half hour earlier, but, as had happened so many times before, they saw no one. “But they have been here. In our haste, we left some of our things right there.” He pointed to a fallen log. “They stole our things and left.”

With the threat of attack over for the moment, Hopkins took several others with him to deliver more wood and water to the Mayflower. Some of the crew told Hopkins they too had seen smoke from a fire. Comparing notes, they decided it must have been a fire from a Native village not far from their own common house. When Hopkins returned with this information, Standish organized shifts to keep watch though the night.