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Description
Lion Gardener (1599-1663) was an English military engineer, formerly in the service of the prince of Orange, who was hired by members of the Connecticut Company in 1635 to oversee construction of fortifications for their new colony. On arriving in Connecticut in early 1636, his first assignment was to finish and garrison Saybrook Fort, at the mouth of the Connecticut River. In August 1636, the area was visited by a punitive military expedition from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, led by John Endicott, intent upon intimidating the Pequot and Niantic tribes and demanding delivery of the killers of a group of Indian traders (John Stone, Walter Norton, and six crewmen), who had been killed late in 1633. Endicott's force plundered and burned crops and villages and returned to Boston, touching off the Pequot War that lasted until the fall of 1637. Gardener's command of Saybrook Fort placed him in the center of the action, and his military background made him an astute observer and critic.
Gardener's Relation is one of four contemporary English accounts of the Pequot War; the others are by John Underhill, John Mason, and Philip Vincent, the last derived from an unidentified informant.
Publication Date
1660
Recommended Citation
Gardener, Lion, "Relation of the Pequot Warres, manuscript, 1660" (1660). Watkinson Library Rare Books. 9.
https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/watkbooks/9
