This was the opportunity chosen by Kieft, to cross the river with his Dutch soldiers from Fort Amsterdam, make an attack upon the defenseless savages, peacefully sleeping in their wigwams, "just at midnight, the winter's night being cold and still." " Eighty Indians were killed at Pavonia, Hoboken, and forty at Corlaer's Hook that night, with horrible barbarities that might have given the savages themselves a lesson in the art of torture." The consequence was, that "all about the lower river and the bay, and on Long Island, the Algonquin people rose furiously against the whites." The terrors of an Indian war broke forth with a suddenness which appalled the colonists, and every swamp and wood from the country of the Hackensacks, New Jersey, to the Connecticut seemed all at once to be swarming with hostile savages. The outlying "bouweries" and plantations were laid waste, their men killed and their women and children made prisoners. After this there was a brief respite, from March until midsummer. But the war broke out again in August with renewed fierceness among i the tribes above the Hudson Highlands. By September the conflict was raging with lull force. In the south a band of savages fell upon the quiet home of Anne Hutchinson, at Anne's Hoeck, Pelham Neck, and she, her son-in-law Collins, her son Francis and all the other members of her family, with one exception, were killed.

The youngest daughter, a little girl, was carried into captivity and lived for four years among the Indians. The sad fate of this woman has tinged with romance her whole history. She was not so bad as her enemies have painted her, nor was she, on the other hand, the mild and blameless saint, some recent historians have imagined. But she was a religious ' enthusiast ; a female theological polemic, armed with a tongue and a temper which made her no unequal match even for the stern and unyielding fathers of New England.