Episode Details

In July 1636, a Boston trader named John Gallop sailed alongside a drifting pinnace off Block Island and found his friend John Oldham dead inside it — head crushed, body mutilated, two surviving nephews captive in the hold. Oldham’s murder was real. What followed was not just a response to it.

The Pequot War of 1636 to 1638 was the first full-scale military conflict between English colonists and a native nation in New England — and it was the first time on this continent that two war cultures, optimized for two different problems, met in the field. European war culture by 1637 had been forged in the Thirty Years War, where six years earlier the city of Magdeburg had been reduced from twenty-five thousand inhabitants to fewer than five hundred in four days. Total defeat was the contemporary professional norm. Native war culture in southern New England was operating on the opposite arithmetic — submission and tribute, the living enemy who now owed you, the population resource you were fighting to acquire rather than to destroy.

This episode tells the story of how those two systems met. Endicott’s disastrous opening expedition. The siege of Fort Saybrook. Roger Williams alone in a tent for three days arguing for the colony that had tried to kill him. The predawn attack on the fortified village at Mystic — where the English surrounded a town of sleeping families, set it on fire, and shot the ones the fire didn’t take. And the Narragansett warriors, watching it, finding that they had allied with a system whose operating premise their own system had no defense against.