1620 Once ashore, they ‘espied five or six people with a dog … who were savages’, but they ran away, ‘whistl[ing] the dog after them’. That night they camped out. ‘Some kindled a fire, and others fetched wood, and there held our rendezvous.’ The next morning they ‘saw a deer, and found springs of fresh water … and sat us down and drank our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives’.
These were the Scrooby Separatists, so called because they had come from that village in Nottinghamshire, though by way of a twelve-year sojourn in the Netherlands, and had formed a Puritan church entirely separate from the Church of England. In this they differed from the Congregationalist Puritans who would settle around Boston ten years later, and who kept communion with the C of E, while dissenting from some aspects of its ceremony and governance.
The settlers’ first encounter with New England is told in Mourt’s Relation, a short account of their first year, published in London in 1622 – less than a year after the last events (including the first Thanksgiving) covered in the narrative. It was a booster’s tract, an attempt to attract further settlement and financial backing for the settlement.
No doubt that’s one reason why, despite the season and their exposure to the wilderness, they manage to make their first steps sound like a delightful adventure, in a land where ‘grew … many fine vines, and [where] fowl and deer haunted’, and where the natives, far from threatening them, had run away, leaving behind curious artefacts, like a ‘basket … round, and narrow at the top … very handsomely and cunningly made’.
Ten years later, when William Bradford re-told the story (see 11 November), the discourse would be aimed not at potential backers in London, but at posterity. The Scrooby Settlers would be promoted to Pilgrim Fathers, and their story nothing less than the founding myth of America.