ANIMALS

IN 1623, chickens traveled from Plymouth village to the winter encampment of the Wampanoag leader known to the English as Massasoit. Carried by an unknown runner—an unnamed Native man—the chickens were intended for a broth to help the seriously ill leader. The fowl’s journey had been prompted when Edward Winslow sent a messenger to the settlement to request that some birds be hastily delivered. The healing qualities of chicken broth would, he hoped, provide a cure. Doing what he could, Winslow attempted to prepare a number of foods used in England to nurture the sick. Substituting local plants when English medicinal plants were unavailable, he also dispatched one of Massasoit’s men to Plymouth for chickens. By the time the messenger returned with the birds, however, Massasoit had mended enough that instead of drinking a broth he asked Winslow to give him the chickens. He hoped to breed them in his own community.¹ Winslow did not speculate as to whether Massasoit saw the domesticated fowl simply as a potential addition to Wampanoag diets or expected to use them as status objects, to demonstrate his ability to acquire the exotic European birds.

Since the Wampanoags kept no farm animals, such creatures invoked European dietary and agricultural practices. The desire for English fowl readily explained why the chicken crossed the Atlantic: they made the transatlantic voyage in the settlement’s very first years. Along with dogs, they were the first animals brought to Plymouth.² Whether Massasoit’s birds made the sea voyage or had been bred subsequently in Plymouth, their presence made a striking addition to a Native village that previously kept no animals for food.

While a chicken in a Wampanoag village would serve as an exotic addition, poultry and other farm animals formed a routine part of English farm life and of the English diet. English people regularly ate meat—if they could afford it—and that meat was acquired almost exclusively through the slaughter of animals raised for the purpose. Except for wealthy elites whose deer parks yielded venison or for the poor who trapped small game in common lands or as poachers on estates owned by others, meat seldom entered the English diet through hunting. Wild fowl were more readily available, although hunting them was reserved for those with sufficient wealth to own a gun. Many of the guns brought to Plymouth were in fact intended for taking birds, the oft-mentioned “fowling piece.” Although Winslow’s description of the first Thanksgiving made no mention of wild turkeys specifically, that bird was presumably consumed in New Plymouth; in its wild form it would have been scrawnier than the modern farm-raised bird, the latter having been bred for its outsized breast. The men who came to Plymouth, although they brought guns to take fowl, were not adept hunters of larger game. Given their lack of skill in hunting and their familiarity with farm-raised meat, they wanted English poultry and livestock as part of their diets. Chickens came first—small and easily transported, they also had the benefit of laying eggs that sustained hungry people. Winslow appreciated their healthful qualities. Dairy cattle—which could also continually provide milk—were harder to bring and more difficult to maintain in an early settlement without fences or barns. As Winslow intimated, access to English foods was familiar and comforting.

Those who thought about making the region habitable placed great emphasis on the need for imported animals. Before any English people had settled there, John Smith promised in his description of the land that cattle would thrive, allowing settlers to recreate that aspect of their lives and diets.³ The first residents, in their earliest writings, declared that if they had “Kine [plural term for cows], Horses, and Sheep, I make no question, but men might live as contented here as in any part of the world.”⁴ When minister Francis Higginson described what New England needed, he listed “Horses, Kine and Sheep to make use of this fruitful Land.”⁵ His account also printed “A Letter from New-England, by Master Graves, Engineer now there resident” who attested to the fruitful nature of the country. Graves mentioned in particular the prospects for raising cattle as well as growing barley and vines. Had he been right on all three counts, New England would not have needed to import wine, as England did; but the other items (barley and cattle) aimed precisely at reproducing what England provided itself. Animals—whether European or American—meant food, but English creatures meant familiarity, a recreation of the foodways of their home. In a land without cattle or familiar breads—where Natives hunted wild game and ate corn—the English adapted somewhat but longed to ignore local foods and sit down to familiar English fare. Looking back, Nathaniel Morton noted how the difficult conditions dismayed the first arrivals. While some had apparently realized “they could not expect it should be better,” even they were shocked to find they had not only no bread but also no cattle. This situation made them less well-off than the biblical Jacob, who in his lowest moment at least enjoyed meat.⁶

Edward Winslow wrote Good Newes from New England describing events in the first years in Plymouth Plantation. An essential source for understanding this early history, Good Newes contains the story of Massasoit’s chicken, among many others.

Within the first half decade, a great variety of domesticated animals traveled to New England to fulfill this wish for familiar flesh. A year after Winslow and Hampden journeyed to Massasoit’s bedside, the first livestock (larger farm animals) arrived. The English investors wrote to announce that they were finally able to send cattle.⁷ Both Nathaniel Morton and John Josselyn thought the arrival of three heifers and a bull worthy of note when they wrote about early New England.⁸ Writing in 1631, John Smith enumerated the human population and noted the presence of livestock. He reported “In this Plantation there is about an hundred and fourscore [or 180] persons, some Cattell, but many Swine and Poultry.”⁹ Sheep arrived in numbers more slowly. After a few decades, a Plymouth poet felt the need to urge people to bring in more sheep in order to reduce the population’s dependence on imported clothing.¹⁰ Animals for food came first, and sheep for wool, although important, were a lower priority.

Some livestock were more readily introduced than others. As William Morrell reported after his visit to New England, “Hogs and Goats are easy, present, and abundant profit, living and feeding on the lands, almost without any care of cost.”¹¹ Goats had the benefit of being relatively small and transportable; they could be penned onboard ship or staked in a farmyard once in New England. While clearly in residence, goats garnered little notice from authors and from the courts. Pigs were especially hardy and thus became the imported animal of choice, since they could be let loose to fend for themselves until slaughter time. As a result, pigs rose in importance in the diets of English Americans. Transporting the larger animals proved more difficult. For instance, the Handmaid on its 1630 voyage had a rough crossing, during which it lost ten out of the twenty-eight cows that it carried.¹² Higginson thought settlers should bring cows and goats. He did not mention pigs except in the form of bacon, but in fact pigs would proliferate in colonial New England.¹³ Large draft animals also crossed the ocean. They could haul wood out of the forests, to be burned in fireplaces or used in construction. Besides those brought for meat, such livestock eased burdens otherwise borne by people and sped the process of building.

Pigs, which adapted best to the new environment, introduced problems of their own. Building pens for animals was time-consuming work, and pig owners were tempted to avoid the effort by leaving swine free to forage on their own. The practice of turning them out into the woods became so common by midcentury that it could be used metaphorically to refer to the neglect a young person experienced if they were left without proper spiritual guidance. In addition to providing rhetorical fodder, pigs created conflict by indiscriminately damaging neighbors’ garden plots. Plymouth court ordered owners to pay for any damage caused by semi-feral animals and further declared that great swine in particular be driven out of town.¹⁴ In addition to conflicts among planters over damages caused by free-ranging animals, the pigs’ destructive tendencies caused numerous legal conflicts between European and Native residents. Those great swine driven out of town to spare English gardens instead attacked Native plots. Indignant Indians sometimes killed foraging pigs and thereby infuriated their neglectful owners.¹⁵

It took some time, but New England eventually became a center of livestock production. Plymouth farmers initially used the imported animals to meet pressing local needs. Once the deluge of settlers began pouring into the newly founded Massachusetts Bay Colony, a local export market opened. Plymouth men sold animals to the new arrivals, helping them fend off hunger but also allowing them to start their own herds. The authorities wanted the few sheep in the plantation as of 1633 retained rather than sold away, ordering that no sheep be sold out of Plymouth’s jurisdiction.¹⁶ When migration to Massachusetts dropped drastically at the end of that decade, Plymouth’s leaders worried that the loss of income from the local livestock economy would hamper their ability to pay off the plantation’s lingering debt.¹⁷ After midcentury, they, along with other New Englanders, sold locally raised animals to Caribbean island colonies to work in the sugar mills. By that time the presence of cattle and other English farm animals was sufficiently entrenched that one visitor noted that where the animals churned up the ground, new plants had begun to take root. Environmental degradation followed the introduction of numerous new species and of novel herding and farming practices. Before the descendants of livestock from Europe could sail south to the West Indies, however, animal husbandry was made to flourish—just as John Smith promised that it would—in New England.