His design in
founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree
benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected
to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.
Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe,
the smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly
from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags. The more
powerful tribes--Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans--furnished very
few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the
weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange
gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed
that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white
tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate,
such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind,
whereas the nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the
Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and
began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends,
they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage
experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world
for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbours by adoption, and thus
increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other
neighbours.
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