Mystic - Connecticut
MYSTIC, CONNECTICUT
Brian Landers, author of EMPIRES APART: THE AMERICANS AND RUSSIANS FROM THE VIKINGS TO IRAQ, writes:
This beautiful tourist village is located in southeastern Connecticut, on the Mystic River as it flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Picnics are welcome on the town green. There are a host of restaurants and shops, many with a nautical theme. Among the many tourist attractions are an aquarium and Mystic Seaport, a replica of a working seaport at the end of the nineteenth century. Nearby there are vineyards and a casino. The township is steeped in history, most of it prominently displayed although the most important event to have happened in Mystic is ignored. For further information visit www.mystic.org
Extract from EMPIRES APART:
In the annals of terrorist atrocities 5/27 should resonate with Americans as much as 9/11. The events of the 27th of May 1637 changed the American psyche forever. History has yet to show that 9/11 will have anything like as seismic a long-term impact. In both cases an act of unprecedented carnage was coldly planned and callously inflicted. In both cases the victims were “civilians” perversely regarded as “combatants” only in the eyes of men blinded by religious bigotry. In both cases the objective was to terrorize populations who had no comprehension at all of what was happening to them or of what could possibly be motivating their attackers. In both cases surprise was total.
The villagers of Missituck (present day Mystic), Connecticut, had gone to bed as usual on the 26th of May. Many of the menfolk were away but four hundred, (in some versions seven hundred), women, children, elderly and infirm remained. They could have had no idea that all but five of them would never see another sunset.
Just before dawn an English militia leader, Captain John Underhill, looked down on the sleeping village with grim satisfaction. As the first rays of the new day’s sun tinged the eastern sky he gave the order to attack. The killing began. Seven years after the founding of Boston ethnic cleansing had arrived in New England.
‘Down fell men, women and children” Underhill wrote triumphantly in his journal, “Newes from America”. “Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that had never been in a war, to see so many souls lay gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along”.
Underhill returned to Boston a hero. William Bradford, the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers, gave praise for the “sweet sacrifice” of natives “frying in the fire”. Seven years later when the Dutch, who had founded a colony on the Hudson, needed to cleanse their own land they called on Underhill’s services again. This time he was even more “successful”, killing more than five hundred Algonquian in a single raid on a native village. But it was the Mystic Massacre that had the most profound impact on the development of America. From that moment European settlers realised that the continent was theirs for the taking.
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