Saybrook Colony (English)

English theologian Roger Williams, a notable proponent of religious toleration and the separation of church and state and an advocate for fair dealings with Native Americans, has secured land from Canonicus, a chief of the Narragansett, and established a settlement with twelve "loving friends" (several settlers had joined him from Massachusetts since the beginning of spring).

Williams' settlement is based on a principle of equality.

It is provided that "such others as the major part of us shall admit into the same fellowship of vote with us" from time to time should become members of their commonwealth.

Obedience to the majority is promised by all, but "only in civil things."

The English, the main rival of the Dutch in North America, had established several settlements on the eastern coast of New England, including Plymouth Colony in 1620, New Hampshire Colony in 1623, and Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.

King James I of England had granted the Earl of Warwick, president of the Council for New England, the right to settle the area west of Narragansett Bay to the Pacific Ocean.

Warwick had conveyed the grant in 1631 to fifteen Puritan lords in England as a potential refuge in North America.

The patentees, who included William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, as well as Lord Brooke, and Colonel George Fenwick, had in 1635 commissioned John Winthrop, Jr., son of the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as "Governor of River Colony".

Winthrop, on arriving in Boston in October 1635, had learned that the Dutch were planning to occupy the mouth of the Connecticut River at a place called Pasbeshauke, meaning "place at the mouth of the river" in the Algonquian language.

To counter the Dutch, Winthrop had sent a small bark (canoe) to the mouth of the Connecticut with twenty carpenters and other workmen under the leadership of Lieutenant Edward Gibbons and Sergeant Simon Willard.

The expedition had landed near the mouth of the river, on the west bank in present-day Old Saybrook, on November 24, 1635 and located the Dutch coat of arms nailed on a tree.

Tearing down the coat of arms and replacing it with a shield painted with a grinning face, they established a battery of cannon and built a small fort.

When the Dutch ship returned several days later, they sighted the cannon and the English ships and withdrew.

Winthrop had renamed the point "Point Sayebrooke" in honor of Fiennes (Viscount Saye) and Lord Brooke.

John Oldham and a handful of Massachusetts families had built temporary houses in the area of Wethersfield, a few miles south of the Dutch outpost, in 1634.

Thirty families from Watertown, Massachusetts have joined Oldham's followers at Wethersfield during the past two years.

The English population of central Connecticut explodes in 1636 when clergyman Thomas Hooker leads one hundred settlers, including Richard Risley, with one hundred and thirty head of cattle in a trek from Newtown (now Cambridge) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the banks of the Connecticut River, where they establish Hartford directly across the Park River from the old Dutch fort.

English settlers from other New England colonies had moved into the Connecticut Valley in the 1630s, where tobacco is already being grown by the native population.

William Holmes had led a group of settlers in 1633 from Plymouth Colony to the Connecticut Valley, where they had established a colony a few miles north of the Dutch trading post.

Natives refer to the area as Matianuck.

It is about fifty miles (eighty kilometers) up river, at the end of waters navigable by ship and above the Dutch fort at Hartford, offering an advantageous location to trade with the natives before the Dutch. (The Sicaog tribe had made a similar offer to mediate to the Dutch in New Amsterdam, but New Netherlands has far fewer European settlers than New England and is not in a position to take up the opportunity.)

Sixty or more people led by the Reverends Maverick and Warham had arrived in 1635, having trekked overland from Dorchester, Massachusetts, where they had first settled after arriving in the New World five years earlier on the ship Mary and John from Plymouth, England.

Reverend Warham had promptly renamed the settlement Dorchester.

The colony's General Court changes the name of the settlement in February 1636 from Dorchester to Windsor, named after the town of Windsor, England, on the River Thames.

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 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 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.