Niantic people (Amerind tribe)

Verrazzano next sails along Long Island and enters Narragansett Bay, where he receives a delegation of Wampanoag and Narragansett people.

The words "Norman villa" are found on the 1527 map by Visconte Maggiolo identifying the site.

The historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote "this occurs at Angouleme (New York) rather than Refugio (Newport).

It was probably intended to compliment one of Verrazzano's noble friends.

There are several places called "Normanville" in Normandy, France.

The main one is located near Fécamp and another important one near Evreux, which would naturally be it.

West of it, conjecturally on the Delaware or New Jersey coast, is a Longa Villa, which Verrazzano certainly named after Francois d’Orleans, duc de Longueville".

Verrazano remarks that nearby Block Island appears similar to the Mediterranean island of Rhodes.

He stays here for two weeks, then moves northwards, …

Indigenous peoples have lived in the New England area for thousands of years.

Gradually the Narragansett and other historic tribes developed societies as descendants of earlier cultures.

At this time, the Rhode Island coast is home to five Algonquian-speaking tribes: the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Mohegan, Niantic, and Nipmuck.

The Narragansett are one of the leading tribes of New England, controlling the west of Narragansett Bay in present-day Rhode Island, and also portions of Connecticut and eastern Massachusetts, from the Providence River on the northeast to the Pawcatuck on the southwest.

The Narragansett culture has existed in the region for centuries.

They have extensive trade relations across the region.

The first European contact had been in 1524, when Verrazano visited Narragansett Bay.

The Connecticut River Valley is in turmoil in the 1630s.

A series of smallpox epidemics over the course of the previous three decades has severely reduced the indigenous populations, due to their lack of immunity to the disease.

As a result, there is a power vacuum in the area.

Tension have also increased as Massachusetts Bay Colony began to manufacture wampum, the supply of which the Pequot had controlled up until 1633, when an epidemic had devastated the entirety of the region's native population.

Historians will estimate that the Pequot had suffered the loss of eighty percent of their entire population.

At the outbreak of the Pequot War then, the Pequot may number only about three thousand.

The Pequot aggressively work to extend their area of control, at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, the Narragansett to the east, the Connecticut River Valley Algonquians and Mohegan to the west, and the Algonquian peoples of present-day Long Island to the south.

The tribes contend for political dominance and control of the European fur trade.

The Dutch and the English are also striving to extend the reach of their trade into the interior to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region.

Efforts to control fur trade access have resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks that have increased tensions on both sides.

Political divisions between the Pequot and Mohegan have widened as they aligned with different trade sources—the Mohegan with the English, and the Pequot with the Dutch.

The Pequot had attacked a group of Wangunk natives who had attempted to trade at Hartford.

The Niantic (or, in their own language, the Nehântick or Nehantucket) are divided by the due to intrusions of the Pequot into an eastern and a western division.

The Western Niantic are subject to the Pequot and live just east of the mouth of the Connecticut River while the Eastern Niantic have become very close allies to the Narragansett.

The division of the Niantic has become so great that the language of the eastern Niantic is classified as a dialect of Narragansett while the language of the western Niantic is classified as Pequot-Mohegan.

The Niantic are an Algonquian speaking people, speaking an Algonquian Y-dialect, similar to their neighbors the Pequot, Montaukett, Mohegan, and Narragansett.

The tribe's name "Nehantic" (Nehântick) means "of long-necked waters" believed by local residents to refer to the "long neck" or peninsula of land now known as Black Point; located in the village of Niantic, Connecticut.

The Nehântics spend their summers fishing and digging the abundant shellfish here.

They live on corn, beans, and squash, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and collecting.

Tatobem, a principal Pequot sachem, had boarded a Dutch vessel to trade in 1634, but instead of conducting trade, the Dutch had seized the sachem and demanded a substantial ransom for his safe return.

The Pequot had quickly sent a bushel of wampum, and received Tatobem's corpse in return.

John Stone, a privateer from the West Indies who had been banished from Boston for malfeasance, had set sail from Boston and was in the process of kidnapping women and children of the Western Niantic, tributary clients of the Pequot, to sell as slaves in the Virginia Colony when he is killed, along with seven of his crewmen, near the mouth of the Connecticut River.

Colonial officials in Boston had protested the killing.

The Pequot sachem, Sassacus, refuses the colonists' demands that the Western Niantic warriors responsible for Stone's death be turned over to them for trial and punishment.

The respected trader John Oldham, attacked on a trading voyage to Block Island on July 20, 1636, is killed, together with several of his crew, and his ship looted by Narragansett-allied natives who seek to discourage English settlers from trading with their Pequot rivals.

Puritan officials have become suspicious of the Narragansett, knowing that the natives of Block Island are allies of the Eastern Niantic, who are allied with the Narragansett.

In the weeks that follow the Oldham killings, colonial officials from Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, assume the Narragansett are the likely culprits.

Even so, the colonial English response to Oldham's death, the last in a series of escalating incidents, has traditionally been viewed as the beginning of the Pequot War.

News of Oldham's death has become the subject of sermons in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Governor Vane sends John Endecott to exact revenge on the natives of Block Island in August.

Endecott's party of roughly ninety men sails to Block Island and attacks a Niantic village.

Most of the Niantic escape, but fourteen are killed, while two of Endecott's men are injured.

The Puritan militia burns the village to the ground, carrying away crops which the Niantic have stored for winter, and destroying what they cannot carry.

Endecott goes on to Fort Saybrook.

The English at Saybrook are not happy about the raid, but agree that some of them will accompany Endecott as guides.

Endecott sails along the coast to a Pequot village, where he repeats the previous year's demand of payment for the death of Stone and more for Oldham.

After some discussion, Endecott concludes that the Pequot are stalling and attacks.

The Pequot ruse works: most escape into the woods.

Endecott has his forces burn down the village and crops before sailing home.

The three Connecticut River towns—Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford—set up a collective government in 1637 in order to fight the Pequot War.

These settlers seek to establish a new ecclesiastical society subject to their own rules and regulations.

According to historian Henry S. Cohn: "They resented the power of the Magistrates who were not elected by the people. But they also wanted to expand their land holdings...”