Strange as it may seem, they never offered any injury or insult to
the inmates.
In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and
several persons were killed and wounded. Early in the fall a small
party made their appearance in the northerly part of the town,
where, finding two boys at work in an open field, they managed to
surprise and capture them, and, without committing further
violence, retreated through the woods to their homes on the shore
of Lake Winnipiseogee. Isaac Bradley, aged fifteen, was a small
but active and vigorous boy; his companion in captivity, Joseph
Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size, and heavier in
his movements. After a hard and painful journey they arrived at the
lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of a man and
squaw and two or three children. Here they soon acquired a
sufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn
from the conversation carried on in their presence that it was
designed to take them to Canada in the spring. This discovery was
a painful one. Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody
Indians, was the especial terror of the New England settlers, and
the anathema maranatha(1) of Puritan pulpits. Thither the Indians
usually hurried their captives, where they compelled them to work
in their villages or sold them to the French planters.
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