A Relation of the Indian War
by
John Easton

Technical Details

Edition Used

This text was transcribed from the 1858 edition by Franklin B. Hough, Albany, N.Y. (J. Munsell). It is thus now in the public domain: details here on the copyright law involved. I had already started my transcription — from a print copy, once beautiful but now falling into dust, in the University of Chicago Library — when I discovered the work satisfactorily photocopied on Google Books from the Bodleian's exemplar: so I limit myself here to the most important item, the Narrative of the Causes which led to Philip's Indian War, of 1675 and 1676 by John Easton, a contemporary Deputy Governor of Rhode Island (and later, Governor, 1690‑1695). If Easton's Relation, as it is commonly called, is important enough to be regularly referred to in studies of King Philip's War, and therefore linked to from other parts of my site, the bulk of Hough's volume is taken up with a miscellany of fairly minor documents: Hough was a specialist in the colonial history of New York and many of them deal with the rather peripheral question of just how much that Colony did — or in Hough's view, did not — involve itself in the war, and it seemed a case of diminishing returns to transcribe them here.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are therefore shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; otherwise the backgrounds would be red. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The inconsistent and idiosyncratic spelling of the 17c writer make it very hard to say what might have been a typographical error; here and there I flagged what seemed like one to me, but it hardly matters. I marked my corrections, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

Any mistakes, drop me a line, of course: but only if you can refer to the printed text, please! Gov. Easton wrote with abandon such things as Voiolanc for violence and reseue for receive; at times he is almost unintelegabell, or at least requires very careful reading.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p22 ); these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a facsimile of Governor Easton's signature that concludes his report, as given on p31 of Hough's edition.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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