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A Man Named Lion

An English builder fights Indians at a Connecticut fort, then turns his eyes to Long Island

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

'In the year 1635, I, Lion Gardiner, Engineer and Master of works of Fortification . . .''

So begins the account written by an Englishman named Lion Gardiner of his extraordinary life. His story opens in the Netherlands, where he served in the English army, moves to the Connecticut frontier, where he witnessed a bloody war of extermination against the Pequot Indians, and ends in East Hampton, where his family and his legend still live.

Born in England in 1599, Gardiner was an adventurer at an early age. His exact birthplace is not known, nor who his parents were. A laudatory description of Gardiner, published in 1885, gushed, ``He was . . . of fine military presence, well proportioned although slightly under the average height, with quiet face, eyes keen, intelligent and deep-set, and the manners and bearing of a gentleman.''

His recorded history begins in his early 30s, when he served in the English army in the Netherlands. There, in a protracted war between Protestants and Catholics, Gardiner earned a reputation as a ``master of works of fortifications'' -- a fort builder.

His fame spread across the ocean, and in 1635 he was summoned by the backers of a fledgling English colony in what would become Connecticut. The tiny colony was in a precarious position -- Dutch traders from New Amsterdam had begun to make inroads into the area, trading from their boats with the local Indians and constructing permanent outposts. By doing so, the Dutch hoped to keep the English from expanding south from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

But the Dutch were the least of the colony's problems. Of even more immediate concern were the Pequots, a group with a fearsome reputation who lived along the same stretch of coastline where the English hoped to build settlements. Records of the day show the English feared and despised the Pequots, as did other Indian groups such as the Mohegans, who lived in the same territory.

Gardiner was 36 years old the year he and his Dutch-born wife, Mary, sailed to Massachusetts aboard the Bachelor, arriving in November after a stormy 31/2-month voyage. The couple spent the winter in Massachusetts, and by April, 1636, they were living with a small group of colonists near the mouth of the Connecticut River. They were well south of the English settlements in an area largely untracked by white men.

Gardiner supervised the construction of a fort near the mouth of the Connecticut River, and commanded it while farms and homesites were carved out of the surrounding wilderness. As the fort was being built, two momentous events happened in his life -- his wife gave birth to their son, David, the first white child born in what is now the state of Connecticut, and a war broke out with the Pequots that would forever change the fort-builder's life.

The event that historians call the Pequot War began with small-scale confrontations between Indians and Englishmen in the area of the fort and up and down the coastline. Distrust built, there were deaths on both sides, and officials of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decided to wage war on the Pequots. While it is clear in his own account -- written as a letter to officials in Connecticut -- that Gardiner distrusted and loathed the Pequots, he opposed an all-out war against them because he feared for his family as well as for the handful of others who were with him in the fort.

``It is all very well for you to make war who are safe in Massachusetts bay, but for myself and these few with me who have scarce holes to put our heads in, you will leave at the stake to be roasted,'' he wrote in his account. ``I have but twenty-four in all, men, women and children, and not food for them for two months, unless we save our corn field which is two miles from home, and cannot possibly be reached if we are in war.''

Gardiner's protests fell on deaf ears. When a group of soldiers -- led by John Underhill and another Englishman, John Mason -- reached the fort, Gardiner said, ``You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears, and then you will take wing and flee away.''

As the soldiers prepared for an attack on a nearby Pequot fort, Gardiner tried to keep his family and the others inside his own ramparts alive. Forays outside the walls to get food were dangerous events; some of his men were caught by Pequots and tortured -- some were burned alive at a stake, their skin peeled off, according to Gardiner's account. One group of men, out on a hay-cutting mission, was set upon by Pequots who ``rose out of the long grass . . . and took the brother of Mr. Mitchell, who is minister of Cambridge, and roasted him alive.''

Gardiner himself narrowly escaped death when he went outside the fort's walls with 10 armed men and three dogs. A half mile away, they met up with a small band of Pequots -- some of whom were wearing the clothes of murdered English settlers -- and a fight ensued. Almost immediately, two men were killed. As the group fled toward the safety of the fort, another man was shot through the thighs with an arrow, another man was hit in the back, and as Gardiner pulled back toward the fort, he was struck in the thigh. The group, he wrote, had to fight ``with our naked swords or else they (would have) taken us all alive . . .'' In another incident a day or two later, ``I was shot with many arrows . . . but my buff coat preserved me, only one hurt me.''

After these incidents, Underhill and Mason assembled an army of more than 80 men to stay with Gardiner. To beef up the numbers, the English recruited nearby Mohegans -- enemies of the Pequots. This army then attacked the Pequot fort near Mystic, slaughtering men, women and children and setting the building on fire. To historians today, the attack was a massacre unlike anything that had occurred in New England up to that point. To Englishmen at the time, it was a blessing. Gardiner wrote:

. . . and the Lord God blessed their design and way, so that they returned with victory to the glory of God and honour of our nation, having slain three hundred, burnt their fort, and taken many prisoners.

Underhill's account, published in London in 1639, boasted that more than 1,000 Pequots were killed, three times Gardiner's estimate. Historians say that English soldiers conducted mop-up operations for months after the attack on the fort, hunting down Pequots hiding in the woods, and killing hundreds more. In a few months in 1637, most members of the tribe were killed.

``It was a war of extinction,'' said Kevin McBride, an archeologist at the University of Connecticut.

The Pequots would agree. Today, the descendants of the survivors operate Foxwoods Resort Casino on a site not far from the massacre. They believe their history was distorted. ``The Pequots never wrote down their histories at the time of contact with Europeans,'' said Shannan McNair, a spokeswoman for Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. ``So it's hard to know what was true and was said about the Pequots to justify the massacre.''

After the massacre, Gardiner's life changed forever when an Indian from Long Island paddled his canoe over to Connecticut from Montauk. Spelling the Indian's name ``Waiandance,'' Gardiner wrote in his account:

Three days after the fight came Waiandance, next brother to the old Sachem of Long Island . . . He came to know if we were angry with all Indians. I answered No, but only with such as had killed Englishmen. He asked whether they that lived upon Long Island might come to trade with us.

Gardiner said he would only trade with the Long Island Indians ``if you will kill all the Pequots that come to you, and send me their heads . . . so he went away and did as I had said, and sent me five heads . . .''

And thus began the friendship of the English settler named Lion Gardiner and an Indian chief named Wyandanch. Two years later, his tour of duty in Connecticut over, Gardiner capitalized on his friendship with Wyandanch's people, whom the English called the Montaukett Indians, and bought some real estate on Long Island.