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A Man Hated and Hailed

Englishman John Underhill led the slaughter of Indians in defense of European settlers

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

For a few months after the Dutch summoned Indian leaders from Long Island to their fort at New Amsterdam, there was peace across the region. But by the fall of 1643, the killing had begun anew. As panicky settlers across western Long Island fled to the fort at New Amsterdam, Gov. Willem Kieft and his advisers reached out for help from the English community in Connecticut. While offering no troops, the English allowed for the raising of a small army of English mercenaries.

Enter John Underhill, a man with a reputation.

In Long Island history, there is no one like Underhill. He sailed from England to the Plymouth Colony in Massachussets in the early 1630s. By written accounts, he was no Puritan. He did not like being told how to live his life by church leaders.

But he was useful when it came to fighting. When the English made war against the Pequots in Connecticut in 1637, Underhill helped lead the murderous assault against the Indians' log fort near present-day Mystic. By his own account, he and his men killed more than 1,000 Pequots - men, women and children - and put the torch to their fort and wigwams. As a people, the Pequots all but disappeared from the landscape after Underhill was through with them.

As the Dutch huddled behind pallisaded walls on Manhattan Island through the winter of 1643-44, Indian attacks along the fringes of their settlement picked up. In response, Dutch troops attacked Indian villages on Staten Island and in Westchester County.

Soon, Underhill, leading the army of mercenaries, arrived at New Amsterdam. Long Island historians of the 19th Century often wrote flattering lines about him, calling him a heroic Indian fighter who ``saved'' Europeans from extinction. But there is a markedly different view supported by the evidence.

``Underhill changed the history of Long Island, and southern New England,'' said John Strong, a professor at the Southampton Campus of Long Island University. ``Before Underhill, the Indians on Long Island could think they could share the land with Europeans. After the Pequot War, and after other slaughters he participated in, that changed.''

Underhill's claim to a bloody piece of Long Island history began in April, 1644. Dutch records of the day say that ``seven savages'' were arrested at Hempstead, an English village within the Dutch sphere of influence, on charges of killing pigs ``though it was afterwards discovered that some Englishmen had done it themselves.''

Hearing of the arrests, the Dutch governor in New Amsterdam, Kieft, sent Underhill and 15 or 16 soldiers, who promptly killed three of the seven Indians. ``They then took the other four with them in the sailing boat, two of whom were towed along by a string around their necks till they were drowned, while the two unfortunate survivors were detained as prisoners at fort Amsterdam,'' according to a Dutch account written at the time. The report went on:

When they had kept them a long time ... the director (Kieft) became tired of giving them food any longer and they were delivered to the soldiers to do as they pleased with.

The prisoners were immediately dragged out of the guard house and soon dispatched with knives of from 18 to 20 inches, which director Kieft had made for his soldiers for such purposes ... that these knives were much handier for bowelling them. The first of these savages having received a frightful wound ... dropped down dead. The soldiers then cut strips from the other's body ... Kieft ... stood laughing heartily at the fun.

The bloodbath on Long Island escalated when Underhill and his troops attacked a peaceful community of Indians, apparently at a site in modern-day Massapequa. When the shooting stopped, Underhill's troops had killed 120 Indians - the first and last Indian ``battle'' on Long Island.

Although this incident is well-documented in colonial records, the exact location of the massacre has been debated among historians for years. Some said the massacre occurred in present-day Queens; Strong and others, including famed archeologist Ralph Solecki, say the evidence strongly suggests it occurred at a site in Massapequa called Fort Neck. Confirmation would appear to have come in 1935, Strong has written, when the bones of 24 people were dug up during an excavation at the site.

In the late 19th Century, an Oyster Bay historian named Samuel Jones wrote this account:

After the battle of Ft. Neck, the weather being very cold and the wind northwest, Capt. Underhill and his men collected the bodies of the Indians and threw them in a heap on the brow of the hill, and then sat down on the leeward side of the heap to eat their breakfast. When this part of the county came to be settled, the highway across the neck passed directly over the spot where, it was said, the heap of Indians lay, and the earth in that spot was remarkably different from the ground about it, being strongly tinged with a reddish cast, which the old people said was occasioned by the blood of the Indians.

A historical marker noting the site of the slaughter stood on the corner of Merrick Road and Cedar Shore Road. It was evidently stolen in the early 1990s and never replaced.

Next, Underhill turned his attention to an Indian village in Westchester County. There, as he had in Mystic, he attacked Indians assembled in a fort, shot them and torched their wigwams. More than 180 Indians were killed.

Later, Underhill bought an estate in Oyster Bay called Killingworth, where he died in 1672. A marker on Factory Pond Road and Locust Valley-Bayville Road, in Lattingtown, notes the location of Killingworth. The marker describes Underhill as a ``distinquished military officer, statesman and pioneer.''

A huge obelisk to Underhill's memory was erected in 1907 by the Underhill Society of America, a genealogical group, on Factory Pond Road, in Mill Neck. It features four plaques on its base showing Underhill reading to a group of Indians who are kneeling worshipfully at his feet. On the cover of the book are the words, ``Love One Another.''