Introduction

Algonquian Christians underwent two baptisms at the hands of English neighbours; the first in water and the second in fire. Water symbolically joined them with the English through identification with Christ. The flames of war consumed hopes of meaningful fellowship.

In 1673, Thomas Shepard Jr wrote to a minister in Scotland telling of the ‘success of the Gospel among the Indians’. They ‘celebrated’ the ordination of a native and communion ‘in the Indian Church’. The bilingual service featured long prayers ‘in the Indian tongue’ by one who preached on brotherly love from Hebrews 13:1. This fellowship was the fruit of John Eliot's missionary work. He planted ‘civil governement’ among Algonquians in 1650.1 Shepard appended correspondence from John Eliot to this 1673 letter sent across the Atlantic. Towards the end, Eliot wrote that ‘All the praying Indians have submitted themselves to the English government’. It was the western front of godly hegemony, and all seemed quiet. Accounts like this, though containing much truth, economically dispensed with less flattering details.

Algonquian Christians, like all followers of Christ, had a cross to bear. That cross was their English coreligionists. Two years after Shepard's optimistic letter, many English Christians treated Praying Indians as a fifth column. As Kristina Bross has shown, evidence of piety became symbols of perfidy; Praying Indians became ‘Preying Indians’. Christian Algonquians had no good options. Positioned between warring factions, they identified with both and were trusted by neither. They were attacked by English soldiers and mobs, forced to leave their Bibles and interned on Deer Island in the dead of winter. Another baptism, this time by fire, drove the communities apart. Some critics called these actions cruel, unchristian and counterproductive. Those who defended Praying Indians came under suspicion. The conflagration nearly engulfed Eliot and Shepard; though in very different ways. Englishmen violently targeted Eliot for defending Praying Indians. Shepard's trial looked more like a temptation.

While the English disarmed, starved and quarantined Christian Indians on Deer Island, some went further and plotted their extirpation. On 6 February 1676, a concerned citizen, Abram Hill, approached Thomas Shepard Jr with a proposition: ‘will you go with us to Deare Island to destroy the Indians’?