[92-93] The winters at Shawmut must have been long and somewhat dull, although Mr. Blaxton had his books as a solace. If, as seems the case, he acted as the agent of the Gorges family at Shawmut, he must have watched the drift of current happenings with lively interest. We know that he had a Pequ…
[92-93] The winters at Shawmut must have been long and somewhat dull, although Mr. Blaxton had his books as a solace. If, as seems the case, he acted as the agent of the Gorges family at Shawmut, he must have watched the drift of current happenings with lively interest. We know that he had a Pequot squaw who did his housework, and he probably had a man also if his grant of land at Muddy River "for three heads" refers to the number in his home. In 1637 Governor Winthrop reported to Roger Williams at Providence that runaway servants from Boston were supposed to have gone past Williams's place in their flight. Williams replied on November 10th that two Pequot squaws had been brought to his house in a starving condition by the Narragansetts. He had promised that if they would not run away again he would write to Boston to ask if they could not be used kindly. The bigger girl had worked at "Mr. Coles's," probably Samuel Coles's tavern, where she was "the worst used of all natives in Boston," being beaten with fire sticks by other servants. The morals of his place were disgraceful. The smaller squaw with no grievance had run away from Winnesimmet (which Mr. Maverick had recently left) in company with Mr. Blaxton's squaw. The passage in Williams's letter is confused, but it would seem that when Maverick left Winnesimmet in 1634-35 and Blaxton left Shawmut in 1635 these two girls who had become friends, just as their masters were friends, became unhappy and ran away to the Pequot nation. The Winnesimmet girl fell in with Coles's girl and they were taken to Mr. Williams. The Blaxton girl reached Nayantick, now Westerly, Rhode Island, on the Connecticut border, where the Pequots lived.