Benjamin Nye

Of Sandwich, probably the son of Benjamin Nye and Katherine Tupper. On 29 Feb 1675/6, in the second winter of King Philip's War, Plymouth's council of war ordered the men pressed in the southern towns to march, "and with them 20 or 30 of the southeren Indians ... vnder the comaund of Captaine Michael Peirse and Leiftenant Samuell Fuller" (Records of the Colony of New Plymouth 5:187). Benjamin marched with them. On 26 Mar 1676, near Pawtucket Falls, Pierce's company was drawn into an ambush and surrounded, and most of it was killed (see Michael Pierce). The next day Rev. Noah Newman wrote from Rehoboth to Rev. John Cotton with the names of the dead, town by town: "Sandwich, 5 Slain. Benjamin Nye, Daniel Bessey, Caleb Blake, John Gibbs, Stephen Wing" (Soldiers in King Philip's War, pp. 359-360; Deane, History of Scituate, pp. 122-123; Vital Record of Rehoboth, p. 919). The Nye genealogy remembers him as "Benjamin, killed by the Indians at the battle of Rehoboth" (Nye 1907).

Two days after he fell, his grandfather Thomas Tupper died at Sandwich, and ten weeks later his grandmother Anne.

If Mercy, wife of Lt. Matthias Ellis, was born a Nye, she was his sister.

Open questions

• His birth, in the Sandwich records, and whether he married.