This whole autumn and winter—a terribly severe one—seems to have been spent by these good men in trying to heal the strifes between the English and the Indians. Wanalanset had fled, true to his father’s policy of never resisting, and they were sent to invite him back again; but when he returned, he found that the maize grounds of his settlement had been ploughed up by the English and sown with rye, so that his tribe had most scanty subsistence.
Several settlements of Christians were deported to Deer Island. One large party had been made prisoners by their heathen countrymen and had managed to escape, but when met with wandering in the woods by a party of English soldiers, were plundered of the little the heathens had left them, in especial of a pewter cup, their communion plate, which Mr. Eliot had given them, and which was much treasured by their native pastor. The General interfered in their behalf, but could not protect them from much ill-usage. The teacher was sent with his old father and young children to Boston, where Mr. Eliot saw and cheered him before he was conveyed to Deer Island. There, in December, Eliot, with Gookin and other friends, frequently visited the Indians, now five hundred in number, and found them undergoing many privations, but patient, resigned, and unmurmuring. The snow was four feet deep in the woods by the 10th of December that year, and the exertion and exposure of travelling, either on snow-shoes or sledges, must have been tremendous to a man of Mr. Eliot’s age; but he never seems to have intermitted his labours in carrying spiritual and temporal succour to his people, and in endeavouring to keep the peace between them and the English.
The hard winter had had a great effect in breaking the strength of the enemy, and they were much more feeble on the renewal of the war in the spring. The good conduct of the praying Indians had overcome the popular prejudice so much that it was decided to employ them to assist the scanty forces of the English in hunting down the hostile tribes, and Gookin boasts of their having taken and slain more than 400 foes in the course of the summer of 1676, which one would scarcely think was very good for their recent Christianity. In the mean time, the absence of all the able-bodied men and hunters reduced their families to such distress that serious illness broke out among them, and Major Gookin caused them to be brought to the neighbourhood of Cambridge, where there was good fishing, and where he could attend to them, and provide them with food, clothing, and medicine.
In August Philip was killed, the English believing themselves to “have prayed the bullet straight into his heart;” and his head was carried about on a pole, in a manner we should have called worthy of the Indians themselves, did we not recollect that there were a good many city gates at home with much the same kind of trophy, while his wife and children—miserable fate!—were, like many others of the captives, sold into slavery to the sugar planters in Jamaica.
After this the war did not entirely cease, but the Christian Indians were allowed to creep back to their old settlements at Nonantum, and even at Natick, where Mr. Eliot continued periodically to visit and instruct them; but after this unhappy war there were only four instead of fourteen towns of Christian Indians in Massachusetts, and a blow had been given to his mission that it never recovered.
Still there was a splendid energy and resolution about this undaunted old man, now writing a narrative of the Gospel History in his seventy-fourth year, now sending Robert Boyle new physical facts, now protesting hard against the cruel policy of selling captive Indians into slavery. What must not the slavery of the West Indian isles, which had already killed off their native Caribbeans, have been to these free hunters of the North American forest, too proud to work for themselves, and bred in a climate of cold, dry, bracing air? And even in the West Indies, a shipload of these miserable creatures was refused in the over-stocked market, and the horrors of the slave-ship were prolonged across the Atlantic, till at last Mr. Eliot traced the unhappy freight to Tangier. He at once wrote to conjure the excellent Mr. Boyle to endeavour to have them redeemed and sent home,—with what success, or if any were left alive, does not appear.
He had the pleasure of seeing a son of good Major Gookin become the minister of a district including Natick, and likewise of the ordination at Natick of an Indian named Daniel Takawombgrait. Of his own six children only one son and one daughter survived him. Benjamin, the youngest son, was his coadjutor at Roxbury, and was left in charge there while he circulated amongst his Indians, and would have succeeded him. The loss of this son must have fallen very heavily on him; but “the good old man would sometimes comfortably say, ‘I have had six children, and I bless God for His free grace; they are all either with Christ or in Christ, and my mind is now at rest concerning them.’”
When asked how he could bear the death of such excellent children, his answer was, “My desire was that they should have served God on earth, but if God will choose to have them rather serve Him in heaven, I have nothing to object against it, but His will be done.”
His last letter to Mr. Boyle was written in his eighty-fourth year, and was a farewell but a cheerful one, and he had good hopes then of a renewal of the spirit of missions among his people. But though his Christians did not bely their name in his own generation, alcohol did its work on some, consumption on others; and, in 1836, when Jabez Sparks wrote his biography, there was one wigwam at Natick inhabited by a few persons of mingled Indian and Negro blood, the sole living remnants of the foundation he had loved so well. Nevertheless, Eliot’s work was not wasted. The spark he lit has never gone out wholly in men’s minds.
His wife died in 1684, at a great age, and her elegy over her coffin were these words from himself: “Here lies my dear faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful wife. I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”
He had become very feeble, and was wont to say, when asked how he did, “Alas! I have lost everything: my understanding leaves me, my memory fails me, my utterance fails me, but, I thank God, my charity holds out still; I find that rather grows than fails.”
He was forced to give up the duties of his office to a new pastor, and though often entreated to preach again, he would hardly ever do so, by reason, he said, that it would be wronging the souls of his people, when they had an able minister; and when he preached for the last time on a fast day, on the 63rd Psalm, it was with an apology for what he called the poorness, and meanness, and brokenness of his meditations.
“I wonder,” he used to say, “for what the Lord lets me live. He knows that now I can do nothing for Him.”
Yet he was working for Him to the utmost of his power. A little boy in the neighbourhood had fallen into the fire, and lost his eyesight in consequence. The old minister took him into his house to instruct, and first taught him to repeat many chapters in the Bible, and to know it so thoroughly that when listening to readers he could correct them if they missed a word; after which he taught him Latin, so that an “ordinary piece” had become easy to him.
The importation of negro slaves had already begun, and Mr. Eliot “lamented with a bleeding and a burning passion that the English used their negroes but as their horses or oxen, and that so little care was taken about their immortal souls. He look’d upon it as a prodigy, that any bearing the name of Christians should so much have the heart of devils in them, as to prevent and hinder the instruction of the poor Blackamores, and confine the souls of their miserable slaves to a destroying ignorance, merely through fear of using the benefit of their vassalage.” So, old as he was, he induced the settlers around to send him their negroes on certain days of the week for instruction; but he had not made much progress in the work before he became too feeble to carry it on. He fell into languishments attended with fever, and this he viewed as his summons. His successor, Mr. Nehemiah Walters, came to live with him, and held a good deal of conversation with him.
“There is a cloud,” he said, “a dark cloud upon the work of the Gospel among the poor Indians. The Lord renew and prosper that work, and grant it may live when I am dead. It is a work which I have been doing much and long about. But what was the word I spoke last? I recall that word. My doings. Alas! they have been poor and small, and lean doings, and I’ll be the man that shall throw the first stone at them all.”
Mather