almost twenty thousand due to the continued arrival of ships bearing Puritan settlers fleeing the increasing levels of religious persecution during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and natural increase, as settlers often arrived as family units and raised large numbers of children. The Pilgrims feared the Native presence, as they were a numerical majority when all the different groups of New England were taken together and were dependent on them for survival and trade and the colonists were unable to expand. The Native populations continued to fall, with diseases such as scarlet fever, typhus, measles, mumps, influenza, tuberculosis, whooping cough taking large tolls. However, a smallpox epidemic in 1633 and 1634 also took a very heavy toll, afflicting not only peoples of the coast still recovering from the losses of 1617-1619 but far inland. The Massachusett population dwindled to fewer than two thousand individuals. Other epidemics occurred in 1648 and 1666, although not as devastating, outbreaks of disease continued to inflict heavy tolls well into the 19th century. With so many areas depopulated, the Pilgrims believed that God had cleared New England for their colonization efforts. By the 1630s, the Indians of New England were already a minority in their own lands. The Massachusett put up little armed resistance to colonial settlement, but other Native peoples of New England who did were subjugated during and after Pequot War in 1638. The colonists aided local Indian tribes in subduing the Pequot, resulting in massacres of Pequot non-combatants, such as in the Mystic Massacre, and the selling of many of the Indians into slavery in Bermuda. The war resulted in the complete destruction of the Pequot as a tribal entity, opening up further land in New England to colonial settlement. Adoption of Christianity As stated in the royal charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1628, "according to the Courſe of other Corporations in this our Realme of England ... whereby our ſaid People, Inhabitants thee ... maie wynn and incite the Natives of Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie true God and Savior of Mankinde, and the Chriſtian Fayth, which ... is the principall Ende of this Plantation." The colonists were more occupied with their survival and propagation of a Puritan refuge. Although not the first to attempt to Christianize the Natives, it was not until the missionary John Eliot, "Apostle to the Indians", arrived in the