In so far as they could – with 102 passengers on board – Edward and Elizabeth Winslow kept their cramped living quarters tidy and orderly. They were squashed into an area about eighty feet by twenty, and five feet high, known as the ‘between decks’ or gun decks where cannons were kept. In such a small space, divided by the masts and the cargo hatch, the heap of luggage surrounding them looked like a gypsy encampment.
On board was William Brewster’s feather bed, mentioned in the inventory made after his death, with its bolster pillow, as well as an ‘old white Welsh blanket’ – which may be another expression for flannel as Welsh farmers seem to have specialised in a soft woven fabric brushed for greater comfort. He took items useful for farming, as well as leather drawers, canvas sheets, a lamp, a burning glass, a dagger and knife, a pistol, bellows, a chamber pot. A ‘silver beater and a spoon’ reminds one of his gentry origins and his days as an Elizabethan diplomat. He was now a tired elderly man of fifty-six.*
There could be no greater contrast: he had passed his glamorous youth in a world of great houses and state secrets, of extravagant clothes so studded with pearls and gold thread that they were stiff enough to stand up by themselves, and now he was surrounded by chickens, hogs, smoked herring, vinegar, cheese and salt beef. Yet every piece of evidence suggests he never lost his affability and cheerfulness, and that flowed from his absolute conviction that his course was right. A tiny notebook of Brewster’s has survived to the present, and the pages of notes give the feel of this orderly and sensible man. It contains a copy of the licence to Thomas Weston, directions for transporting passengers to New England, and lists of articles necessary for fitting out a fishing vessel for a transatlantic trip.
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The Leiden church believed they had a covenant like the Jewish people of old. Their constant comparison and justification was the Bible’s description of the Jews’ search for the Promised Land. America was the new Promised Land.
The Winslows’ bedding was trussed up in bales with spare clothes, and somewhere at the bottom of the bags were the precious books which would make them feel civilised in the face of considerable indignity. For Edward the voyage had an extra dimension, a secret rapture at the thought of the New World which he viewed romantically through the popular sixteenth-century prisms of a new Arcadia and Utopia, vaguely intermingled with a New Israel. He had the sort of enthusiastic temperament which was attracted to ideas. Being a printer requires a fascination with the written word.
Edward’s world view was mistily framed by a sense of universal reformation, the dominating intellectual Puritan idea of the period. He maintained contact with John Durie, the Protestant ecumenical clergyman, who had been educated at Leiden in Edward’s time. Durie’s father, Robert, the exiled Church of Scotland clergyman, had been a minister to various congregations in Holland.
Edward’s millenarianism was of a mild but constant kind. He was not one of the New England settlers who experimented with alchemy. The Leiden church did not consist of full-blown ‘typologists’ like the more learned clergy of Massachusetts who compared episodes in the Bible to life in the colony in order to reveal the working out of a preordained holy destiny. But most of the church, including Edward, wanted to model their lives on the Israelites. The Bible would be consulted for solutions as frequently as the few law books they took with them. One of the most touching relics of William Bradford is his revelation on the front leaves of Of Plimmoth Plantation that he is applying himself in extreme old age to study Hebrew: ‘Though I am grown aged, yet I have had a longing desire, to see with my own eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue, in which the Law, and oracles of God were writ; and in which God and angels, spake to the old patriarchs, of old time; and what names were given to things, from the creation.’ One senses in him an almost palpable yearning.
Edward and Elizabeth were also at a very emotionally intense moment in their lives, in the middle of an enthralling love affair. It is generally assumed that Puritans disapproved of sexuality. In fact Protestants disliked the celibacy revered in the Roman Catholic Church, where all sexual intercourse was to some degree sinful. The Puritans emphasised the importance of close relationships between men and women. The future founder of the New England colony Connecticut, the clergyman Thomas Hooker, preached a famous sermon celebrating conjugal love. He wrote romantically, ‘The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place where he comes.’
The journey lasted just over two months. From between decks where the passengers lived they could see and smell the sea, and hear the dash and smash of the waves. Most of the couples were close. To travel on such a perilous journey required the greatest trust and confidence in one another. And Elizabeth trusted her husband absolutely.
There was exhilaration for Edward and his church in moving to a newer, purer, better world knowing that in America their descendants would no longer be liable ‘to degenerate and be corrupted’. Among many of the Leiden Pilgrims was a yearning for the pristine and innocent New World, a common theme in the work of authors of the day including Francis Bacon, whose writings were well represented in William Brewster’s library. Brewster was contemptuous of those who became haughty, ‘being risen from nothing and having little else in them to commend them but a few fine clothes’. It confirmed Francis Bacon’s description that ‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair.’
Against a background of European cynicism, religious wars and Tudor and Stuart despotism, America offered escape. Against tyranny, even the wildness of the New World’s inhabitants seemed attractive. In his startling essay ‘Of Cannibals’, the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne favourably compared the ‘natural’ New World to ‘civilised’ European society: ‘The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them.’
The settlers made a strength of the simplicity their poverty imposed upon them. They were disapproving of frivolous adornment, in speech or in diplomatic relations, and impatient with the pomposity and corruption of the European past. When the nineteenth-century New England transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon’, he reflected a mindset that remains powerful in America even today. Lives driven by moral imperatives meant the Pilgrims rejected pretension in anything. What was wanted in the New World, wrote Thoreau in Walden, was not noblemen but ‘noble villages of men’. There was real excitement about leaving the wicked old world behind. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison called the Pilgrims ‘the spiritual ancestors of all Americans, all pioneers’, because of their ‘ardent faith in God, a dauntless courage in danger, a boundless resourcefulness in the face of difficulties, an impregnable fortitude in adversity’. Edward’s writings show they believed they had embarked on a unique enterprise, and William Bradford would write with conviction and strange prescience: ‘Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many.’
New England became noted for its settlers coming in family groups, which is believed to have been a key element in its stability. Edward’s ebullience was enhanced by his brother Gilbert, a carpenter, who sailed with him on the Mayflower. Edward’s three other brothers would also emigrate to America, and eventually settled in a little town named Marshfield founded by Edward himself, overlooking the dunes by the great ocean on which they had all ventured with such high hopes.
Edward and Elizabeth had assistance from their two indentured servants, George Soule and Elias Storey. At the end of seven years’ training, both servants were expecting to get land from Edward’s own holding. Indentured servants made up one-fifth of the voyagers.
However, like all capable seventeenth-century housewives, Elizabeth and her friends were able to manufacture just about anything themselves, from clothes to soap to candles. Their skills in identifying the best plants for salves or cold remedies were to help them find on the American continent plants they were familiar with for cures – from feverfew, to turpentine, to sassafras. Indeed in the future the redoubtable ladies of Plymouth Colony soon observed from the Indians that they cut strips of wood from the pine trees referred to as ‘candle wood’ which was full of sap. That made a quick and useful light, obtainable at all times from the vast forest that surrounded them.
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Puritans were people of the book who believed in prescription. They spent much time defining husbands’ and wives’ roles, and many of the Pilgrims took etiquette books with them on the long voyage, including the Bradfords and the Brewsters. William Brewster had at least two: one was the fashionable poet Richard Braithwaite’s Description of a Good Wife (1618), a witty description in verse of the best feminine qualities. The other was the English translation of the Italian bestseller Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation, which addressed the reforming of Italian manners.
Sadly there would not be much time for refined discussions in the months ahead. Good manners would be the least of their problems. In fact all their preconceptions of leading a civilised life were to take an almighty hammering. Etiquette books seem curiously touching and optimistic. Building a colony would be yet another sacrifice they would make for their religion.
What they did not need to read was how important it would be to be able to comfort one another, even if it were just with the warmth of their bodies. Although they set off from England in golden September days, they arrived in America at the darkest and least prepossessing time. The Pilgrims had not anticipated that the ground froze in mid-November, making planting impossible until the spring. In fact they had scarcely anticipated anything in the rush to get away, including that they would need fishing rods. They especially had not known that snow from the Arctic would suddenly sweep in, which made New England impassable unless one had snowshoes, like the Indians.
Although Edward and Elizabeth were on a holy mission, they were also Europeans, used to permanent buildings and a certain way of life, with a sense of history. The merchant community had been involved in the fish trade off the Newfoundland coast for over a century. Edward and Elizabeth knew that they would have to be entirely self-reliant. They would have no friends to welcome them, and no inns to offer warmth and shelter. There were no towns. But despite all the warnings it was very hard for the settlers to get out of the habit of thinking secretly that ‘civilisation’ would suddenly materialise. Once the Pilgrims got off the Mayflower they described looking for Indian ‘towns’, not aware that the Indians lived nomadically within their territories. Edward was to write sarcastically: ‘Can any be so simple as to conceive that the fountains would stream forth wine or beer, or the woods and rivers be like butchers’ shops or fishmongers’ stalls?’ Eight years after the Mayflower sailed the philosopher Blaise Pascal was born. One of his most famous sayings was ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.’ Deep down in the Pilgrims there must have been an almost overwhelming fear of the infinite, countered only by the thought of their God protecting them.
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The Pilgrims were lulled into a sense of false security on a journey that began in warm sunlight. They gathered on deck and marked the bells for 8 a.m. and the noon watch with Psalms and prayers. The sea voyage suspended life. As David Cressy has written, ‘the ship became a liminal space, floating free of conventional considerations’. Voyagers bonded in the cramped space and emerged ready to face change and a new beginning. In some ways it was like a form of birth, as it is for immigrants everywhere.
The image the Leiden church had most readily to hand was the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses to bring his people to the Promised Land. The sea as providential metaphor would be one of the constant themes in the Puritan sermons preached to the 20,000 English immigrants who arrived in America over the next twenty years. Surviving the dramas of the ocean confirmed the Puritan sense that God was looking after them. The verse in Psalm 107 – they ‘that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep’ – became one of their favourites. The Reverend Francis Higginson, who followed the Pilgrims ten years later, wrote that those who stayed in ‘their own chimney corner’ and ‘dare not go far beyond their own town’s end’ would ‘never have the honour to see these wonderful works of Almighty God’ which were an instruction and a delight.
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Elizabeth was fortunate in having several good female friends on board. Though the two women with whom she had travelled from England to join the church remained in Leiden, she was close to Mary Allerton which must have been comforting.
Mary had three children with her, Bartholomew, Remember and Mary (another child had died in Leiden), and she was pregnant again. In fact no fewer than three of Elizabeth’s fellow wives were pregnant. Labour could begin at any time. The women huddled together, longing intensely to see land. Although giving birth was then very much a public event for women, even the most elementary hygiene considerations could not be provided on board. Hot water was hard to guarantee, while keeping linen dry and sanitised was an impossibility. Every surface could be invaded by seawater at any time. Three hundred years before flush toilets, life’s lowlier details were something everyone had to deal with. Those unused to ships found it overwhelming. Travellers could be ticked off for being ‘very nasty and slovenly’, while ‘beastliness’ ‘would much endanger the health of the ship’. There was constant scrubbing and perhaps some discussion with the ship’s surgeon barber, young Giles Heale, who had just got his licence from the College of Barber–Surgeons. The Pilgrims also had their popular and courageous medical man Samuel Fuller to rely on for minor aches and pains. One of the Leiden church’s deacons, he was a self-taught medic specialising in herbal medicine, who may have attended medical lectures in Leiden. But Samuel and Giles would not be nearly as important as the female community when it came to childbirth. All grown-up women had to know about midwifery.
One day on the ship, it suddenly became clear that Stephen Hopkins’s wife Elizabeth was going into labour. While Stephen hustled his children up the other end of the boat, Elizabeth Winslow helped the more experienced married women rig up some kind of curtain for privacy. Amazingly, despite the conditions, a little boy was safely delivered. In wonder his parents named him Oceanus.
* * *
Although Oceanus had been safely delivered and the baby was the source of much joy, the pregnant Mary Allerton and Susanna White remained of special concern. The Pilgrims had anticipated nausea but not the poor health a voyage at sea produced. They were wearing all the clothes they possessed for warmth, but they were constantly wringing wet. Sunny days were longed for to hang the clothes out to dry but nothing stopped mould from forming. Some passengers were beset by intense fears which they had found hard to fight against but which they tried to conceal. They were not helped by the ship’s crew, who were irreligious and offensive. The Speedwell ’s alarming leak was believed by many to have been intentional. One group of sailors had lost their nerve about landing on the unknown shores of America.
The absence of Dorothy and William Bradford’s three-year-old son left behind in Leiden may have contributed to Dorothy’s increasingly desperate mood. There were lots of children on board to remind her of him. The Hopkins children were mainly clustered round Mrs Hopkins in her makeshift bed and delighting in the tiny baby at her breast. Doubtless playing together were Mary’s daughters Remember and Mary, six and four, and Love and Wrestling, ten and six, children of the Brewsters.
While Elizabeth Winslow looked after Ellen More, her special charge during the voyage, Edward and the rest of the more articulate church leaders struggled with the problems of how to organise the disparate colony. Coordination was made more difficult by Christopher Martin’s unsympathetic manner and bullying ways. When the Pilgrims arrived there had to be some rules of a self-evident kind – crimes like murder and theft were obviously forbidden. Transgressors were tried in a simple procedure by the governor and his assistants sitting in a makeshift court, with a number of freemen (as people who held stock in the colony became known) entitled to vote.
Because there had been so many stops and starts, the Pilgrims were worried that their victuals would be half eaten up before they left the coast of England. The excitement began to become more a mood of endurance as the weather set in the nearer they got to America. After 1,500 miles of good weather, storms suddenly blew up. The boat pitched continuously as they were attacked by fierce cross-winds, and the top sails started to shake, a danger signal. One of the main beams in the midships cracked. If something was not found to hold it up, the ship would not complete the journey. As the passengers crouched in semi-darkness beneath battened hatches there was a parley by the leaders and ship’s officers about whether they should return to England. But it was decided that the mast could be replaced by a great iron screw the Pilgrims had brought with them.
In the past scholars believed the iron screw was part of the old Leiden printing press rescued from William Brewster’s attic, but the historian Jeremy Bangs suggests it was probably a house jack used to raise heavy timber frames for houses. It held the boat together for the next 1,500 miles, and the crew caulked any holes with pitch.
The weather grew worse, with storms so violent the swell rose to a hundred feet. As the ship was tossed on mountainous waves the passengers thought the wild sea would drag them to their deaths. The men held on to their wives, and the wives sheltered their children as they were thrown backwards and forwards. Water was everywhere, soaking their hair and in their mouths. The sails were taken down and the masts lashed to the ship. The Pilgrims’ Ark had simply to trust in being borne by the waves. In the hold they prayed God would make the storm calm and the waves still, as Psalm 107 said He would, and bring them to their desired haven. And they were preserved, despite conditions so appalling they could hardly see for the spray in their faces.
At one point John Carver’s servant John Howland, a lively, chatty young man, fell overboard but was rescued when the sailors fished him out with a boathook. And in what was for once a clear demonstration of the Almighty’s providence, a haughty and brutal young seaman who had tormented the poorer passengers was suddenly struck by a terrible disease. He had been cursing them to their nervous faces and delighting in his own good health, saying he hoped to throw half of them overboard before they reached America. Instead it was his body, wrapped in a white winding sheet, which would be the first to be thrown overboard. A detailed description of crossing the ocean in the autumn, written in November 1619, reveals how the mood of emigrants veered between annoyance at being becalmed and terrible anxiety when storms lasted all day ‘in the surging and overgrown seas’. Women were the ones who suffered most because, believed to be more delicate, they tended to spend most of the voyage cooped up under the hatches. What calmed the Leiden people, as it had done for the past twelve years, was their faith, and their habit of praying together and fasting to ‘seek the mind of God’. We know from Edward that many of the congregation were very musical. As the storms subsided and the ship sailed on, contrapuntal melody rose faintly from the decks, as the Pilgrims sung their Psalms.
Later emigrants would note the increasing cold as they neared America. All who were strong enough to go up on deck felt the touch of a sharper climate on their skin, and a brighter, stronger, harsher light in their eyes which was quite different from the soft tints of rain-washed England. Edward thought other people thinking of emigrating should profit by the experience of the Mayflower passengers and in 1621 sent the following advice back to England: ‘Be careful to have [on board your ship] a very good Bread-room, to put your biscuits in.’ On the Mayflower they became soggy. The casks for beer and water must be iron-bound so that they did not rot. Passengers should not do the dry salting themselves – no one could do it better than the sailors. Meal, i.e. flour, should be tightly packed in a barrel and in an accessible place for the journey so passengers could take it out for pancakes and pasties. Travellers must also bring plenty of lemons. Edward does not mention it by name but he was aware of scurvy, a terrible disease which could wipe out whole navies. They should ‘bring juice of lemons, and take it fasting; it is of good use. For hot waters, aniseed water is the best; but use it sparingly.’ Would-be colonists should build their cabins on the between deck as openly as possible, for conditions became fetid. They must take a ‘good store of clothes and bedding’. On a journey over two months everything became wet, even clothing that was packed away.
There were no glassmakers in America, but a temporary solution was ‘paper and linseed oil, for your windows’, and cotton yarn to make wicks for lamps. Every man should bring a shotgun, with a long barrel ‘for big fowls’. But travellers should not worry about the weight of it because most of their shooting was from stands. If settlers wished to bring anything as a bit of a luxury, butter or salad oil were very good.
Meanwhile the dazed passengers were saddened by the death of Samuel Fuller’s apprentice William Button, a youth of about twenty-one. While it did not exactly inspire confidence in Samuel Fuller’s remedies, young Button was the only passenger to die on the journey. Three days after his boyish corpse wrapped in a sheet had sunk to the depths of the ocean, the Pilgrims heard birdsong. The sailors told them that was a sign of land even though it might be 200 miles away. On 9 November 1620, with huge joy they saw what they correctly presumed to be what John Smith had called Cape Cod. It looked like ‘so goodly a land’ which was pleasantly wooded down to the sea.