The Exploit of Hannah Dustin and her Companions
On the day before the plan was to be carried out, Mrs. Dustin ascertained, through inquiries made by the lad, how to kill a man instantly, and how to take off his scalp. "Strike him here," said the Indian inquired of, placing his finger on his temple, "and take off his scalp so," showing the lad how. With this information, the plot was ripe. Before daylight the next morning, when the whole family were in deep slumber, Mrs. Dustin arose, awakened her nurse and the lad, and with their assistance instantly killed ten of the twelve sleepers, she slaying her captor and the lad killing the man who told him how to do it. A squaw and a child fled to the woods; and the prisoners, after scuttling all the boats there but one, to prevent pursuit, started in that one down the river, with provisions from the wigwam. They had not proceeded far when Mrs. Dustin, reflecting that they had not scalped their victims, and that her friends might demand ocular proof of the truth of her thrilling story, went back with her companions, took off the scalps, and carried them away in a bag.
With strong hearts the three voyaged down the Merrimac to their homes, every moment in peril from savages or the elements, and were received as persons risen from the dead. Mrs. Dustin found her husband and children saved. Soon afterward she went to Boston, carrying with her a gun and tomahawk which she had brought from the wigwam, and her ten trophies; and the General Court of Massachusetts gave these brave sufferers fifty pounds as a reward for their heroism. Ex-Governor Nicholson, of Maryland, sent a metal tankard to Mrs. Dustin and Mrs. Neff, as a token of his admiration. That tankard is now (1875) in the possession of Mr. Emery Coffin, of Newburyport, Massachusetts. During the summer of 1874, one hundred and seventy-seven years after the event, citizens of Massachusetts and New Hampshire erected on the highest point of Dustin's Island an elegant monument commemorative of the heroic deed. It displays a figure of Mrs. Dustin, holding in her right hand, raised in the attitude of striking, a tomahawk, and a bunch of scalps in the other. On it are inscribed the names of HANNAH DUSTIN, MARY NEFF, and SAMUEL LEONARDSON, the English lad.
Other places suffered dreadfully during the summer of 1697. Haverhill was again attacked and desolated. The treaty at Ryswick (a small village near the Hague, in Holland), soon afterward stayed the flow of blood in Europe and America. There a peace was agreed upon between Louis the Fourteenth of France, and England, Spain, Holland and the German Empire, which ended a war of more than seven years duration. Louis was compelled to acknowledge William of Orange to be the sovereign of England. That war cost Great Britain one hundred and fifty million dollars in cash, besides a hundred million dollars loaned. The latter laid the foundations of the enormous national debt of Great Britain, now amounting to about four thousand million dollars.
A little before the treaty at Ryswick a Board of Trade and Plantations was established in England, whose duty it was to have a general oversight of the affairs of the American colonies. It was a permanent commission, the members of which were called "Lords of Trade and Plantations." It consisted of seven members, with a president, and was always a ready instrument of oppression in the hands of the sovereign. It became, as we shall see, a powerful promoter of those discontents in the colonies which finally broke out into a flame of rebellion in 1775.