REFUGE
BEFORE ONE OF THE London presses issued a little book collecting various accounts of Plymouth Plantation’s first year, Robert Cushman penned a brief statement laying out “Reasons & Considerations touching the lawfulness of removing out of England into the parts of America.” Cushman had yet to cross the Atlantic, but he would soon journey to New England. Despite his belief in the “lawfulness” of leaving England to live in America, he would linger only a month, returning on the ship that carried him out. He had, however, been involved in the plantation from its inception. A member of the Leiden church, he helped to make the arrangements for the passengers who sailed in 1620. He had deeply pondered the undertaking, which he was prepared to defend. His “Reasons & Considerations” imagined the people who went to New England as analogous to the Jews of ancient times, wandering but finally ending in their appointed place. Except that, sadly for the Plymouth people, the promised land was not to be: for “now we are all in all places strangers and Pilgrims, travelers and sojourners, most properly, having no dwelling but in this earthen Tabernacle; our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding but as a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere, but in the heavens.”1 Cushman’s long-winded sentence constituted the first time that anyone involved in the settlement used the term “pilgrim” to refer to those who lived in the plantation. He understood pilgrimage to be, for this community, a lifelong journey rather than a temporary activity that would land them in their appointed place. Never resting, they lived without a real home until they died and went to heaven.
Cushman’s reference drew on an Old Testament passage, Hebrews 11:13: “All these died in faith, and received not the promises, but saw them afar off, and believed them, and received them thankfully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” In this vein, Cushman imagined the Plymouth people as wanderers. Their displacement was of little consequence, however, because they did not care about any earthly home, but only about heaven. Although John Bunyan’s great work Pilgrim’s Progress had not yet been written, Cushman’s use of the term was similar to Bunyan’s: pilgrimage constituted a journey through life toward a heavenly reward.2 He chose not to follow Samuel Purchas, another contemporary, who used the term in a different sense. A compiler and editor of travel writing, Purchas cast his stay-at-home self as a pilgrim who metaphorically journeyed around as he related the histories and attributes of distant locations.3 For Cushman (as for Bunyan), it did not matter where pilgrims lived, as long as they were faithful. Besides the spiritual journey through life, Cushman also emphasized the literal experience of displacement. For him, the sojourners in New England’s Plymouth were refugees, foreigners displaced from their homes and forced to live as strangers elsewhere. Their journey was not a purposeful mission but just one in a series of displacements.
Cushman’s concept of a refugee wandering resonated with one of his fellow Leiden church members, a man who did find a home in America. In 1630, William Bradford sat down to compose a history of the founding of Plymouth Plantation, a decade after he landed on New England’s shores. His narrative—which would become the first book of his manuscript “Of Plimoth Plantation”—carried the story forward only to the moment when the settlers prepared to move on shore from the shelter of the ship. He began his tale in the previous century, with the welcomed but incomplete reformation of the English church. This starting point has become standard for histories of Plymouth, which faithfully follow Bradford. In this telling, a religious awakening among a few Christians in sixteenth-century England led them to form a church outside of the established religious structure and later to move to Holland where they could pursue their vision free of harassment. Bradford’s story briefly considered the group’s interval in the Netherlands, then described the decision to migrate again, this time to a location in North America. As some of the church’s members parted from the rest of their community and journeyed to Delft Haven to sail to England as the first step of their voyage, Bradford paused his narration to ruminate on their status. “So they left that goodly and pleasant country which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”4
Again, like Cushman, Bradford saw “strangers and pilgrims” wandering, without a home but aware that what really mattered was their faith and prospects for life after death. Both men imagined departures, whether from England or, later, from Leiden, as exile. For them, the people who set off to cross the Atlantic in the fall of 1620 sought a refuge. Bradford described them as having “suffered this hazardous & voluntary banishment into this remote wilderness” in order to protect their church.5
Although Bradford only uses the term “pilgrim” once (and his example joined Cushman’s as the only two such references in the original sources), the first book of his manuscript history, taken as a whole, did present his community as refugees repeatedly in flight. The departure from Leiden, the occasion that prompted his reference to the passage from Hebrews, proceeded in an orderly fashion. The church held a day to pray for the success of the voyage in Leiden; the migrants then journeyed south to Delft Haven, the port where they were to meet their ship for travel back to England; and there they said a tearful goodbye to friends who had escorted them to the port.
The founders of Plymouth Plantation were English people, some of whom had lived for the previous decade or more in the Dutch city of Leiden. From the areas of Immingham and Killinghome, not far from the town of Scrooby where their church had been founded, they made two attempts to depart for Holland, which Bradford narrated so dramatically.
In contrast, the earlier departure from England had been harrowing. The church members who decided to migrate to the Netherlands did so illegally, attempting to sneak out of the country without being detected. The decision was difficult, since it took them “into a country they knew not but by hearsay, where they must learn a new language and get their livings they knew not how, it being a dear [expensive] place and subject to the miseries of war, it was by many thought an adventure almost desperate; a case intolerable and a misery worse than death.”6 Despite these worries, they agreed to go.
Their first attempt to leave England ended in catastrophe, as the ship’s captain they hired betrayed them. Meeting him in secret, they boarded his ship not at a dock in a regular harbor but in an out-of-the-way spot. Rowed out in small boats to board, they were at his mercy when he ordered his men to search through their belongings and take anything of value. The mistreatment they received shocked Bradford—and was intended to shock his readers—as he recounted the crewmen “searching to their shirts for money, yea even the women further than became modesty.” After this abuse, the captain carried them not to the Netherlands but to a nearby English port, that of Boston, where he turned them over to the authorities. Having broken the law by trying to sneak out of the country, they could not call upon the authorities to punish the duplicitous captain for theft. Rather, the local magistrates committed them to prison to await the word of the Privy Council, a body of noble lords who advised the king. After a month of hearing nothing, most were released, but seven were held to appear at the next session of the court of assizes. Bradford’s account of betrayal, theft, and incarceration calls to mind the human traffickers of today who abuse the refugees they are paid to aid.
The next attempt went only marginally better. This time they arranged to sail with an honest Dutch ship’s captain. Again meeting the ship in secret, the men who had arrived on foot boarded first. Before the sailors could row the women, children, and supplies out to the ship, the crew saw approaching “a great company, both horse and foot,”—by which he meant men mounted and on foot—“with bills [a staff with a hooked blade on the end] and guns and other weapons, for the country was raised to take them.” With this force advancing, the captain swore an oath, “and having the wind fair, weighed his anchor, hoised sails, and away.” This turn of events left some men, along with all the women, children, and belongings, to the mercy of the approaching force, while the majority of the men departed, panicked that their loved ones would be harmed. To make matters worse, the ship “endured a fearful storm at sea.” The passage, which normally took a week, lasted two weeks or more, a week of which “they neither saw sun, moon nor stars.” Indeed, they were driven far to the north, almost to the coast of Norway. Bradford believed that only the prayers of the faithful saved them.
His description of the sailing was so vivid, readers might assume he had been in the contingent that boarded early and endured the storm, but he was similarly eloquent about the fate of those who stayed behind. He described the plight of the “poor women in this distress,” with their “weeping and crying on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in the ship …, others not knowing what should become of them and their little ones; others again melted in tears, seeing their poor little ones hanging about them, crying for fear, and quaking with cold.” The authorities faced a problem of how to handle this group once it was apprehended. Bradford noted,
they were hurried from one place to another and from one justice to another, till in the end they knew not what to do with them; for to imprison so many women and innocent children for no other cause (many of them) but that they must go with their husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would cry out of them; and to send them home again was as difficult; for they alleged, as the truth was, they had no homes to go to, for they had either sold, or otherwise disposed of their houses and livings.
Again, the parallels to modern-day refugees are obvious. Luckily for those who remained, in the end they did make it to the Netherlands, although as Bradford observed, “in the meantime they (poor souls) endured misery enough.”
This dramatic and prolonged effort to get to Holland, so vividly told by Bradford, concluded with his theme of displacement. He underscored “their wanderings and travels both at land and sea” before they were finally reunited with their loved ones. Although he does not, in this passage, use the term “pilgrim,” the meaning here, that they were forced to wander and seek refuge, made a similar point to that which he offered as he ruminated about their departure from Holland years later. They had to leave their homes and roam, enduring misery. Bradford advised that they think of heaven as “their dearest country” and not ponder excessively on their worldly sufferings.7
Although Cushman (who in the end was not a Plymouth resident, dying in London in 1625) and Bradford were the only ones to use the term “pilgrim,” other participants in the plantation’s first years left hints that they considered themselves wanderers. Most tellingly, the two children who were born on the Mayflower were given names that accorded with the circumstances of the journey. Oceanus Hopkins, child of Stephen and Elizabeth Hopkins, bore his unusual name because of his birth during the crossing. While the Hopkins family joined the America-bound travelers in England, the other parents, William and Susannah White, were part of the Leiden contingent; William, in fact, was brother-in-law to the Leiden church’s pastor, his sister Bridget having married John Robinson. The Whites gave their baby an equally unusual name, Peregrine.8 The bird that bears the name, the peregrine falcon, migrates over great distances, and its name translates to “wandering falcon.” Although Peregrine’s parents and older siblings had wandered far—William and Susannah were born in England, migrated to Leiden, then left for America—Peregrine himself stayed close to home, living in the vicinity of his birthplace until his death in the next century in the nearby town of Marshfield. Like Cushman in 1622 and Bradford in 1630 looking back at the departure from Leiden a decade before, the elder Whites thought of themselves as displaced wanderers. For them, arrival in America meant refuge, a respite from their experience of repeated displacement.
Today we think of Pilgrims as synonymous with settlers in Plymouth Plantation, but that terminology in its modern form does not mean today what it meant in the 1600s. Modern Americans may not pause over the idea of a Pilgrim when they picture the first arrivals, in supposedly drab attire with buckles on their shoes. Pilgrims, for many, simply denote those English people who arrived first in New England. This branding campaign proved so successful that all modern accounts of Plymouth use the term as if it were a label used by that group at the time. If you could visit Plymouth Plantation in its first decade—rather than the living history museum that depicts life in 1627—no one would know why you were referring to them as “the Pilgrims.” In contrast, if you went to neighboring Massachusetts in the next decade and addressed the people you met as Puritans, they would know what the term meant, although they would assume you meant to insult them. “Puritan” was a critical term—a taunt—but it was at least in wide circulation, unlike the “pilgrim” moniker.
The association between Pilgrim and Plymouth came about many decades after Cushman and Bradford passed from the scene. It only came to refer to Plymouth planters in the late eighteenth century. The people who promoted the name (as opposed to mentioning it in passing as Cushman and Bradford did) imagined a more purposeful pilgrimage than what in fact took place. After the American Revolution, New England clergymen and historians promoted the idea of Plymouth as a defining moment in U.S. history (and advocated for it over the earlier but less—to them at least—satisfying tale of early Virginia). With the term, they suggested that those who journeyed to New England arrived with a purpose: that they meant to create the new nation that arose a century and a half later. In making this connection, they drew on a different version of the idea of pilgrim: one associated with pilgrimage as a purposeful religious journey. As used in medieval Europe, a pilgrim went on a religious mission to visit a holy place. Medieval Christianity revered holy sites where people could find comfort, healing, or forgiveness. This association is ironic, in that Catholic pilgrimage and even the concept of a holy site—indeed, all things Catholic—were anathema to Cushman and his associates. To view the early Plymouth people as pilgrims pursuing a goal—analogous to a pilgrimage to Mecca—misses the core idea of aimless but ultimately insignificant wandering found in Hebrews and picked up by Cushman and Bradford. If our image of a Plymouth Pilgrim includes any sense of purpose, it connotes a mission to found America or at least to establish the religious liberty that would become a founding principle of the United States. For that reason, nineteenth-century Americans began to visit Plymouth Rock as a sort of patriotic holy site. But in the 1620s, the people who founded Plymouth thought not of the United States—how could they?—but of themselves as refugees wandering in a strange land. They sought refuge, a temporary stopping place, and many of them found that in southern New England.