Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [40]
He didn’t, however, abandon the idea of punishing and extracting tribute from the Lenapes. Over the summer of 1642 another Dutch colonist was killed by a Hackensack near Pavonia, just across the Hudson River. Kieft told the Hackensacks to give him the murderer, but they refused. Some months later, at the very beginning of 1643, a large and well-armed raiding party of Mahicans attacked Tappan and Wiechquaesgeck settlements above Manhattan, killing seventy and driving over a thousand survivors to seek protection of the Dutch at New Amsterdam. The Wiechquaesgecks still hadn’t turned over the murderer of Claus Smits, and when they chose to make camp at Pavonia with the Hackensacks, who also continued to harbor the murderer of a Dutchman, Kieft saw the opportunity to strike.
On the night of February 25, vowing to “wipe the mouths of the savages,” he launched a surprise attack on the Pavonia encampment. Company troops massacred scores of men, women, and children, Wiechquaesgecks as well as Hackensacks. At daybreak, wrote David De Vries, the exulting soldiers returned to Manhattan with stories of how infants were “torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone.” Some of the victims, De Vries added, “came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms.” Volunteers attacked a smaller Wiechquaesgeck camp at Corlear’s Hook, the bulge on the East River side of Manhattan, with similar results. The heads of more than eighty victims were brought back to New Amsterdam for display, and Kieft made a little speech congratulating his forces on their valor.
The carnage at Pavonia and Corlear’s Hook touched off full-scale war. Within weeks eleven major Lenape groups representing virtually the entire native population of the lower Hudson Valley had banded together to fight the Dutch. According to one contemporary account, the enraged Indians “killed all the men on the farm lands whom they could surprise” and “burned all the houses, farms, barns, stacks of grain, and destroyed every thing that they could come at.” Among the casualties that year were the New England exile Anne Hutchinson and fourteen of her followers, slain on the banks of the river that now bears her name.
As the panic-stricken survivors streamed into New Amsterdam for safety, Kieft’s authority crumbled. Two attempts were made on his life in March. In September, with an angry crowd gathered outside his house, he agreed to the formation of a Council of Eight to advise him in the crisis. The Eight at once dispatched a memorial to the company directors, detailing the colony’s desperate circumstances. Virtually every other settlement had been abandoned, and their former inhabitants now “skulk, with wives and little ones that still survive, in poverty together, in and around the Fort at the Manahatas where we are not safe for an hour.” There were only a few score poorly equipped company soldiers in the fort and two hundred men able to bear arms—hardly enough to hold off an estimated fifteen hundred Lenape warriors. The fort itself looked more like “a molehill than a fort against an enemy.”
Salvation arrived in the person of John Underbill, a hard-drinking, short-tempered Indian fighter renowned for his brutality in the Pequot War of 1637 as well as for a pamphlet extolling the charms of New Netherland. Underhill and a small contingent of New England troops rallied the Dutch over the winter of 1643-44, attacking Indian villages in Connecticut, on Staten