Book Description

Bristol, Rhode Island (Mount Hope) boasts a history unlike that of any other place in America. Home of the great Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and later his son, Philip, after King Philip¿s War Mount Hope belonged to the Pilgrims of Plymouth, then to the Puritans of Massachusetts, and finally, in 1747, became part of Rhode Island.The ¿legends¿ in this remarkable book are not legends at all, but historical fact, every word of which is true:Vikings who visited in the year 1000; a mysterious rock and its enigmatic engravings; the friendship between the Pilgrim Edward Winslow and the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit; the battle in which King Philip was killed by an Indian soldier serving under Benjamin Church; the squaw-sachem Awashonks, who sided first with Philip, then with the English;American patriots who burned the British ship Gaspee in 1772 (the first hostile act of the Revolution); the bombardment by the British in 1775 and the wanton burning of Bristol three years later; the friendship between George Washington and Senator William Bradford;extraordinary characters such as Jabez Howland, a lieutenant under Benjamin Church; John Crowne, Harvard¿s first playwright, who laid claim to the land at Mount Hope; housewife Smith who gave such a tongue-lashing to two British soldiers that they let her keep her silver teapot; and a shipwrecked sailor who so reeked of tobacco that the cannibals who ate his companions refused to eat him.Printed for private circulation in 1915, Some Legends of ¿Mount Hope¿ is now extremely rare, with only a handful of copies in existence. This Rock Village Publishing edition is an expansion of the original, with an introduction and addenda by Edward Lodi.with illustrations