"Captain Church ordered Philip's body to be pulled out of the mire on to the upland. So some of Captain Church's Indians took hold of him by his stockings, and some by his small breeches, being otherwise naked, and drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast he looked like. Captain Church then said that, forasmuch as he had caused many an Englishman's body to lie unburied and rot above ground, not one of his bones should be buried. And, calling his old executioner, bid him behead and quarter him. Accordingly he came with his hatchet and stood over him, but before he struck, he made a small speech, directing it to Philip, and said 'he had been a very great man, and had made many a man afraid of him, but so big as he was, he would now chop him in pieces.' And so went to work and did as he was ordered. Philip having one very remarkable hand, being very much scarred, occasioned by the splitting of a pistol in it formerly, Captain Church gave the head and that hand to Aldermon, the Indian who shot him, to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him, and accordingly he got many a penny by it. This being on the last day of the week, the Captain with his company returned to the island (Aquidneck), tarried there until Tuesday, and then went off and ranged through all the woods to Plymouth, and received their premium, which was 30 shillings per head for the enemies which they had killed or taken, instead of all wages, and Philip's head went at the same price. Methinks it is scanty reward and poor encouragement, though it was better than what had been some time before. For this much they received four shillings and sixpence a man, which was all the reward they had, except the honor of killing Philip."
When the party brought Philip's head to Plymouth, the Puritan meeting was celebrating a solemn thanksgiving, and quoting, again, the words of old Cotton Mather, "God sent them in the head of a leviathan for a thanksgiving feast." This head was exposed on a gibbet at Plymouth for twenty years, as the arch-enemy of the colony. But things were different afterwards. The "monster" of the seventeenth century became a martyr in the nineteenth century. Irving wrote King Philip's biography; Southey was his bard; and Edwin Forrest nobly impersonated him. Thus the great Metacomet, in the light of history, is regarded as sinned against as well as sinning, for he was trying to drive the invader from his native land. The resistless westward march of the white man overcame him, the first of a long line of famous Indians to fall in front of American colonization.