Even then, nothing went straightforwardly, and for two days, the ship was lashed with rain from squalls.
Although the Mayflower ’s crew were experienced sailors – Captain Jones had spent a lifetime transporting wine, while the two pilots or mates, John Clarke and Robert Coppin, had previously been to Virginia and New England – Jones had never travelled beyond Europe and he became alarmed by the huge waves, roaring breakers and shoals between Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. Instead of continuing south towards Virginia, he decided it was safer to turn the ship round and sail back up the coast to Cape Cod. Where Provincetown now stands on a slender peninsula curved round like a lobster claw, the Mayflower made anchor at sunrise on 11 November 1620, after just over two months at sea.
William Bradford remembered that the whole congregation, including Elizabeth and Edward, knelt in prayer at having arrived at all. But for all their feelings that God had saved them, the congregation were half-starved. Those who ran ashore and gobbled green mussels contracted food poisoning. The ship’s sanitation, always unsatisfactory, was even more of a health hazard at anchor.
Provincetown had trees, which were reassuring to see. The same species as back home grew round the bay in a harmonious way. There were oaks, pines, and sassafras – nowadays the chief ingredient of root beer, but then reputed a medicine – and other sweet wood. Juniper was cut down and taken back to be burnt on deck to fumigate the ship and cheer the weaker passengers shivering with the cold and incessant damp. Two days after the Mayflower had landed, the women felt brave enough to disembark. They washed themselves and some of their clothes on the beach in a discreet fashion, holding up towels with relief at having some privacy and being clean at last (which, Bradford remarks in a down-to-earth way, was very much needed).
There was, however, the real problem of order with some of the ‘strangers’ who had come on board at Southampton. They did not share the Leiden church’s unifying sense of purpose. There were mutinous mutterings that since they were not within Virginia, they had no patent and were not bound by anyone or anything. They said, accurately, that when ashore they could do as they pleased. No one could command them.
The Pilgrims’ initial problems about permission to depart meant their new colony did not have the advantage of a royal charter. Therefore just before they landed, they decided that they had to draw up an agreement so that everyone would abide by the same laws, which included many of John Robinson’s suggestions. This is now known as the Mayflower Compact. By and large the colonists were sensible people who obeyed the rules and accepted that the energetic Myles Standish should be their military leader, as it was obvious that discipline might be needed at first – authority had to be laid down or the colony would not last. Some of their new companions – especially the chaotic, boisterous Billington family and their ringleader, the obstreperous John Billington – were an argumentative and easily aggrieved group, who were perpetually discontented. One Billington son, the mischievous fourteen-year-old Francis, almost killed some of the passengers when he set off his father’s gun inside a cabin full of people. Luckily no one was hurt. Billington’s troublemaking and his refusal to obey Standish’s orders made John Carver, in many ways the kindliest soul imaginable, lose his temper. Billington was called before the whole company and condemned to having his neck and heels roped together in a humiliating fashion, until he begged for mercy and was forgiven. Bradford described Billington as ‘a knave’.*
The Mayflower Compact shows that the more educated – including Brewster, Carver and Edward – had some understanding of early seventeenth-century social-contract theory. So long as they were adults, i.e. twenty-one, all males on board were allowed to sign it, including the indentured servants. It bound these forty-one people into ‘a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience’. There was no necessity to be a member of the Leiden church.
The Mayflower Compact has been much romanticised. The signing took place in no special cabin. It is unlikely that women or children were present for it, as many representations suggest. Yet artists are right to depict the scene as a moment of great drama and historical import. The act of creating such a colony was revolutionary. Plymouth Colony was the first experiment in consensual government in Western history between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch. The colony was a mutual enterprise, not an imperial expedition organised by the Spanish or English governments. In order to survive, it depended on the consent of the colonists themselves.* Necessary in order to bind the community together, it was revolutionary by chance.
The Mayflower Compact has a whisper of the contractual government enunciated in the 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers ‘from the consent of the governed’. It anticipated the eighteenth-century American Republic’s belief that political authority was not bestowed by a monarch but a contractual agreement of free peoples, articulated at the end of the seventeenth century by the philosopher John Locke. The eminent American historian George Bancroft has called the Compact ‘the birth of constitutional liberty … in the cabin of the Mayflower humanity recovered its rights and instituted government on the basis of “equal laws” for the general good’.
These ideas were not hashed about all the time in the community. They were simply a consequence of their endeavour. But of course since the Pilgrims were interested in political concepts, devising the rules by which they were to be governed was extraordinarily empowering, especially after all they had suffered. Once the rules were established, the decision-making powers of ordinary people were validated as a way of life.
* * *
As the forty-one men lined up to sign, these printers, merchants, serge weavers, wool combers, carpenters, indentured servants, a sexton, a hatmaker and a barrel maker had no idea of the future resonance of their act. It was pleasing enough in the present.
Goodwill, religious faith and fellowship, and an agreement setting out codes of behaviour for people with not much formal training, all stopped the colony degenerating into a lawless place. Some of the settlers had been members of guilds and in a couple of cases members of corporations, but most had no personal experience of government except through being persecuted by it. Nevertheless they were eager to learn. As colonists they became agents of their own government, personally agreeing their local administration, land boundaries, systems of government, courts and punishments. They had to set taxes, and make sure they were gathered in. They rose to the challenge of holding office and dealing with an utterly new people, their Indian neighbours.
Fortunately John Carver was now elected governor instead of Christopher Martin. Carver was a natural choice as leader, not only because he had negotiated much of the nitty-gritty of the expedition and because he was ensured support from the community, but also because he was a man of wealth and status. He possessed character, empathy and force of personality, and had been a commanding and well-to-do merchant. The educated and rich were respected. After all, their wealth and their contacts had underwritten the expedition. But people of character and leadership rose by their own efforts. William Bradford and Edward Winslow came into their own when their combination of authority and kindliness were essential features in encouraging confidence in what could have been very alarming situations. During the worst times Carver also seems to have acted as general nursemaid.
Brewster, similarly, was a sympathetic and sensitive figure whose manner was so inoffensive that any criticism ‘was well taken from him’. He undervalued himself and sometimes overvalued others’ importance, yet he was still very much the spiritual head of the expedition. He did not want to be elected governor, concentrating instead on his religious role as preacher or Elder. He preached twice on Sundays and would like to have been their minister, ordained by the congregation itself, as was their separatist belief. However, John Robinson seems to have felt uneasy about authority for ordination. A minister also needed a university degree, which Brewster did not have. His ordination never took place, and of course the congregation were eagerly awaiting the arrival of John Robinson.
Brewster’s ordeal – being hunted through the Netherlands – had changed him and aged him, and his ‘humble and modest mind’ was not what was really needed. A striving merchant such as John Carver or a young man with pizzazz such as Edward Winslow had the necessary attack. Brewster was longing for his books. He possessed no less than nine copies of a Christian guide of how to interpret the Bible which he may have used for teaching. He was referred to as an old man, but though frail he embraced manual labour, building his own house – as every man and woman in the new colony would shortly find out they had to.
* * *
Elizabeth was not quite well. She may have contracted a form of scurvy on board. One can imagine her lying uncomplainingly in damp bedclothes in the November fog. Presumably Edward was by her side when he could be, but the rest of the time he was exploring with the other men. Whales bumped around the boat every day. There were all varieties, humpback, minke and finback, forty tonnes in some cases. Sometimes the Pilgrims heard the low boom of their whale-song, and the sailors pointed at them excitedly because their oil was extremely valuable. In Europe they were still perceived as half-mythological. In the New World they contributed to Edward’s sense of wonder.
Edward was so curious about Indian culture that he would write a detailed account of his Indian friends and their language. Indian culture had been the subject of discussion in the travel literature of the colonisation movement ever since the discovery of Virginia. Shakespeare’s play The Tempest had been performed as part of the marriage celebrations in 1613 of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. It was inspired by the shipwreck off Bermuda which Edward’s new friend Stephen Hopkins had experienced. Revelry included a masque put on by two of the Inns of Court on the theme of Indian priests and Virginian life, orchestrated by Inigo Jones. ‘The chief maskers were in Indian habits, with high sprigged feathers on their heads, their vizards of olive colour, hair black and large waving down to their shoulders.’ Like Edward, the whole company was extremely excited by seeing these legendary Virginian Indians whom they knew through the popular engravings of John White’s paintings, which stirred up sympathy and interest in Algonquian customs.
The Pilgrims were still living on the Mayflower anchored in Provincetown harbour. While the women remained on board, the men – led by Captain Standish in full armour – marched through the countryside to try to meet some of the Indians. Their pockets were full of Dutch cheese; the odd gulp of aquavit warmed them in the distinctly chilly air. Because Stephen Hopkins had already been to the New World, he was prized for his knowledge of Indian lore. He recognised the bent trees which were Indian traps for deer. One of William Bradford’s first encounters in the New World was to have his leg caught in a noose lying in the grass. He spiritedly admired the subtlety of it.
On 15 November, with trepidation and excitement, having been enchanted by their first sight of a canoe, around sixteen colonists on one of these expeditions suddenly glimpsed other people in America. Initially they thought they were sailors whom they knew to be on shore: five or six people were coming towards them with a dog, who then ran off into the woods. The English followed, but the Indians turned down onto the sands and vanished.
The next morning a small party followed the Indian tracks, but ‘fell into such thickets as were ready to tear their clothes and armour into pieces’. But they found water and drank it to no ill effect: ‘the first New England water they drunk of, and was now in great thirst as pleasant unto them as wine or beer had been in foretimes’.
Meanwhile a small sailing boat or shallop was put together by the Mayflower ’s carpenter to explore the coast. Provincetown was too small, sandy and exposed to be a main base for a permanent colony. They needed fields to grow corn and other grains, and fresh running water – Provincetown had ponds, not springs. Also important was a good harbour, as survival depended on trading with ships from Europe. There was an additional problem: the shallow bar meant the Mayflower had to be anchored quite far away. There was a long shelf reaching out from shore so boats could not get very close to the beach, and passengers had to wade to land. Soaking clothes added to the strain on their constitutions.
The incessant exposure to damp increased the coughs and colds they were already prey to after so long at sea. They were also affected by the dreaded scurvy ‘whereof many died’, Edward reported in Mourt’s Relation. Having so many people at such close quarters was a health hazard, necessarily endured during the voyage, but now they needed to get ashore. The leaders were increasingly worried as it was now the end of November. They decided to have another shot at finding a better harbour across the bay.
A group (including Edward) exploring down the inside coast of Cape Cod in their flimsy shallop, led by Captain Jones, had to spend two nights in the open, in snowy weather. They were attacked at what they somewhat euphemistically called First Encounter Beach (now the site of the famous Nauset lighthouse). Their assailants were from a tribe called the Nausets.*
The Pilgrims had tried to speak to some Indians busy on the shore cutting up a grampus, a kind of dolphin, but they ran away. They then built themselves what they called a barricado with logs and boughs to spend the night in. On the second night, still not having found a good harbour, they were lying round their fire when they heard a terrifying sound. Bradford described it as a ‘hideous and great cry’. Edward, who would become an expert Indian linguist, carefully noted it as ‘Woach woach ha ha hach woach’. The sound stopped when they shot off one of their guns.
The next morning at about 5 a.m. they were debating whether to take all the arms down to the shallop before or after they had decamped, when they heard one of their party bellow ‘Men, Indians, Indians’, followed by a volley of arrows which came flying in among them. They ran for their weapons, some of which were already in the shallop on the shoreline, and one of the Pilgrims took a log out of the fire and advanced with it towards the Indians. One of the Indians – ‘a lusty man and no less valiant’ – took up position behind a tree as close as possible and let fly three arrows. He withstood three musket shots, till the bark splintered round his ears, then ‘he gave an extraordinary shriek and away they went, all of them’.
Leaving some to guard the shallop, the Pilgrims ran after them shouting and loosing off shots to show that they were not afraid. Amazingly none of them had been hurt, though their coats in the barricado were riddled with arrows. They gathered up the arrows to send them back to England. As they would find out, the Nausets were suspicious of any Europeans because of their horrible experiences with slaver ships. They had additionally been offended because in their explorations the Pilgrims had found an apparently deserted Indian village and had taken some corn they discovered buried in abandoned Indian huts.
Amazingly, they had brought no seed with them on the Mayflower. In a gloomy situation, finding this corn was a providential sign. Bradford says: ‘here they got seed to plant them corn the next year, or else they might have starved, for they had none nor any likelihood to get any till the season had been past’. Moreover if they had left it any longer they could not have even planted it for, in another week, he reported, ‘the ground was now all covered with snow and hard-frozen’ and it had to be levered up with their swords.
* * *
By early December the rivers froze and snow blotted out the landscape. It was so cold the water froze on their clothes and made them like iron. There was a new soul too in the wilderness, mewling in his mother’s arms. The baby was born on the Mayflower during the two last weeks of November’s winds. Like Oceanus Hopkins, he was given a meaningful name. His proud parents, William and Susanna White, called him Peregrine, which means Pilgrim. Peregrine was the first English baby to see the light of day in New England. Edward Winslow wrote in Mourt’s Relation: ‘it pleased God that Mistress White was brought a bed of a son’. Swaddled as was the fashion, he was placed in the wicker cradle brought out of Holland.*
But at the same time on board there was a passenger who was sinking into a depression under the cold snowy light and the mysterious backdrop of the new continent. She could not find a way back from her despair and she could not talk about it. In all the anxiety about landing and organising arrangements, no one noticed William Bradford’s wife Dorothy was becoming unreachable. Had the return to England from Leiden and the weeks in Southampton reminded her too painfully of the hustle and bustle of the fishing port of Yarmouth she lived in as a girl? Was it thoughts of her own young son, left behind? All we can guess is that the thought of the isolation of America terrified her.
The sick and the well lay side by side. There was beginning to be an epidemic of deaths. Funerals became a daily ritual. Jasper, one of the unfortunate More children, died two days after Edward Thompson, a servant with the White family. James Chilton, Mary Chilton’s father, followed two days later. That stoning and beating by youths in Leiden had probably weakened an already fragile frame. The closing of eyes, the huddle of anxious women and then the sorrowful turning away when there was no more to be done were impossible to avoid. Burying former shipmates was a grim substitute for planting new homes, and still they did not know where they should decide to settle.
Perhaps the frightening atmosphere – God was not reaching out His arms to save them – and the tragic deaths were the last straw that tipped Dorothy into preferring to die rather than to live. On 7 December, after some of the men had gone off on another exploring expedition, her body was found floating beside the ship. She was twenty-three.
The circumstances of Dorothy Bradford’s death are disputed. There is no evidence to show she committed suicide, but equally no evidence to say that she did not. It is hard to believe she did not plan her death. There were so many people on the small crowded ship. If Dorothy had slipped and fallen overboard by accident, someone would have heard her cry. It seems likely she had taken care to plunge into the water when she knew no one would notice a splash. Nevertheless, whatever the reason, the mysterious death of a lovely young woman married to one of the most trusted leaders of the Leiden community cast another shadow.
What William Bradford felt about this tragedy he does not reveal. Perhaps he could not allow himself to break down when every atom of energy had to be used to survive. Moreover, as a religious man he believed all things were in God’s hands. Death – even of loved ones, even of one’s own young wife – had to be accepted as part of God’s plan. Bradford was to become the official chronicler of the story of the Pilgrims, but any expression in his writings of personal grief was out of the question. Yet in Of Plimmoth Plantation, he was to ask himself if people were any worse for their sufferings. Every biblical text told him they were ‘the better … It is a manifest token (saith the Apostle 2. Thes: I. 5, 6, 7) of the righteous judgement of God that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdome of God, for which ye also suffer.’
For all the women of the expedition, these were hard times. They experienced none of the excitement of exploration of their male comrades, for they remained cooped up in the ship at anchor. The children needed to be got onto land, not just for their health but because they were starting to run amok, especially the Billingtons. Stores were beginning to run out. Though stocks were supplemented by the fowl they shot such as geese and partridges, they could not shoot enough to feed everyone every day. The Mayflower remained their only lodging until they built their homes.
One of their pilots, Robert Coppin, had been to New England before. He suggested heading west and making for a river he remembered being on the other side of Cape Cod. He was convinced that further round the bay lay a bigger, safer harbour, and better land for planting. The cruel weather was making it a necessity to begin building houses fast. As William Bradford would remember years later from his snug New England fireside, it was winter and ‘they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts’.
By 9 December, despite appalling winds and snow, an explorer party in the shallop – Edward, Bradford, Mr Coppin and various others – had discovered what became Plymouth harbour. Their mast had broken in three places and the wind made the sea so rough their rudder split, so they had to steer with oars. They landed on Clark’s Island, spending the night there. Pausing for the Sabbath the next day, amazed by their survival in the raging seas, they went round the harbour sounding it for depth and shipping and decided it was good. They also went onto the land, which was gently sloping down to the shore with a great hill behind. They were encouraged by finding many former Indian cornfields. Brooks ran down the hill. In the days before piped water and sewage systems, all urban sites needed running water for clothes washing and ablutions, and for taking waste and dirty water away.
On 15 December 1620 the Mayflower weighed anchor and set out from Provincetown. But even now the elements were unfriendly: the wind meant they could not get there straight away because of the harbour’s protective sandbar. Luckily the next day the wind was fair and they ‘came safely into a safe harbour’.
The big issue now was where in the bay they should settle. The paramount needs of a defensive position and paying off their debts to the Adventurers with fish decided it.* It should be on high ground, facing the sea where a great deal of land had already been cleared ‘and hath been planted with corn three or four years ago’. There was also a ‘very sweet brook’ which ran under the hillside, ‘and many delicate springs of as good water as can be drunk’. Below them in the bay there were places to shelter the shallop, and the boats they would build in the future. In one field was a tall hill on which they intended to make a platform and mount their cannon. This would command all views, because from it ‘we may see into the bay, and far into the sea, and we may see thence Cape Cod’. The greatest labour was going to be fetching wood, which was far off, although there was plenty of it. Edward wrote optimistically that the soil was thick and good.
The Pilgrims still did not know what people had inhabited their chosen site because they had seen no more Indians. They continued to find Indian graves and untended cornfields. Previously on Cape Cod they had uncovered several items which pointed to Europeans having stayed on this land before. One was their first find, a big ship’s kettle; another was an English pail. They also found a large grave which yielded what they believed was the remains of a European, because of his yellow hair. The grave at first appeared to be Indian because of the bow in it and mats and trinkets, but the bones were wrapped in a sailor’s canvas shirt and a pair of cloth breeches, and bound up with it was a packneedle that sailors used for mending sails. Mysteriously, too, with the man was a smaller bundle, that of a child bound about with white beads as well as a little bow. Whether they were victims of sacrifice was not known. The Pilgrims were impressed by the good quality of the embalming and they reverently reburied them.
And, alas, burial was to become the activity that occupied the settlers over the next three months, as much as building houses. Their optimistic plans for getting most people other than the sick off the boat to chop down trees were hampered by the dreadful weather. On 21 December twenty people who were exploring were stranded ashore by the high seas. It proved impossible to build a shelter which protected them against the driving rain. For two days they were soaking, freezing and starving, unable to be rescued.
By that time one person was dying every day. There was no time for the sort of pious observances the Pilgrims would have liked to have shown, and little dignity in their deaths. As sleet and snow blinded the mourners it was difficult enough to get spades into the frozen ground to bury their loved ones. The settlers buried their dead quietly on Cole’s Hill without headstones, which is why today graves cannot be found even for the most celebrated Pilgrims who died that winter. The burials took place hurriedly because half the colonists had either died or were dying, and at one point they had only five able-bodied people to tend to the sick.
The Indians, regarding the strangers from camouflaged vantage points, were very surprised at the lack of memorialising of the dead by the Pilgrims: ‘they marvel to see no monuments over our dead, and therefore think no great Sachem is yet come into those parts, or not as yet dead; because they see the graves all alike’.
Many Puritans hated all manifestations of ritual which they felt were tainted by popery. Back in England, their funerals were notable for their plainness. Even the vicar meeting the corpse at the lychgate, as was the ancient English custom, was thought to be superstitious. Certainly there were no lychgates on Cole’s Hill, and there was no church either. The heroism and endurance of the dead were not noted. Their graves were disguised by leaves. The Pilgrims did not want the Indians – whom they felt around them, rather than saw – to know how very few they now were.
Those that had the strength to cut down trees and carry timber began building what they called the Common House. This was a wooden building twenty feet square on the shore which was to be a gathering place. For a while it was also going to be their meeting house (where separatist churches held their services) as well as where they stored the provisions they had brought with them. They began building on Christmas Day, grimly refusing to be put off despite the snow and ice.
From the ship amidst flurries of snow the company could dimly see little black figures against the pale background raising a gun platform on what is now called Burial Hill, which rises 160 feet sheer above the shore. They had cannon to frighten off the Indians and the position commanded ‘all the plain and the bay, and from whence we may see far into the sea, and might be easier impaled, having two rows of houses and a fair street’. That was the plan at least, but they remained very short of labour. Some were too ill even to move, and stayed prostrate on the Mayflower.
The sailors were restive and anxious to get their passengers off the boat as soon as possible so that they could return to London, even though the Pilgrims had finished only one house. A spark from the thatch almost burnt it down. Some of the shelters were made of little more than branches. Their first homes were very fragile, frame houses filled with wattle and daub. (In February it was so wet that the daub holding these houses together dissolved and fell off the wattle.) The Pilgrims had not yet begun to use overlapping clapboards as a layer against the snow and sleet pouring through the walls as the wind howled round.
Of the original 102 people, 50 did not survive the next three months. About three-quarters of the women died. Not so long after the death of her husband, the daring, opinionated Mrs Chilton succumbed to disease, her forceful personality no match for the insidious invasion of pneumonia and dysentery. That bold presence was silenced, leaving her daughter Mary an orphan. The women were worse equipped for coping with the wintry conditions than the men, perhaps because they took no exercise and were confined to quarters.
In early January the Pilgrims began marking out the family lots, in two rows for safety. But half the plots measured out with string and sticks were never used. Christopher Martin, the aggressive representative of the Adventurers, took ill very suddenly. The colonists had to quiz the dying businessman about accounts with the Adventurers and bills for provisions.
Three out of the four little exiled More children were already dead of the epidemic they called the ‘common infection’. Their tiny bodies might have been a reproach to the settlers under other circumstances, but the Pilgrims were too unwell to ponder their sad short lives. The Tilley brothers, John and Edward, and their wives, who were in their thirties, died after they came ashore, though John’s thirteen-year-old orphaned daughter Elizabeth survived. Death took the camlet merchant Thomas Rogers, leaving his eighteen-year-old son Joseph to seek other father figures. The Tinkers – he was a wood sawyer or carpenter with a wife and one child – died as did many others, sometimes two or three a day.
So many were ill – even the barrelling Edward succumbed – that there were only about half a dozen people, including Brewster and Myles Standish, who were able to stay on their feet, fetch wood, make fires and prepare what meat they could find. With some danger to their own health they looked after their colleagues, ‘washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them. In a word did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least.’
That prosperous, confident merchant William Mullins of Dorking, who had such hopes of the New World and his stocks in the Virginia Company, faced his death in the efficient way he lived his life. He swiftly settled his affairs formally, and Captain Jones and John Carver witnessed his will.
* * *
The colonists had now seen the odd Indian ‘skulking about them’, though they always ran away when they were approached. But in mid-February they noticed the Indians were becoming bolder in the woods – no less than twelve were seen running by when one of the community was standing near a creek waiting for birds to fly overhead. The next day two Indians appeared on top of the hill. The Pilgrims made beckoning signs, and Stephen Hopkins and Captain Standish laid down one of their guns, but the Indians vanished again. Alarmed and uncertain as to what this meant, Captain Jones and the other sailors came on shore with the several impressive cannons, which they dragged up onto the hill to command the area. The largest was a saker, whose barrel was ten feet long.
At last in March the weather improved. In better health, the Pilgrims began to plant their gardens. On 7 March those who were fit went exploring, and among them must have been Edward exulting at the many excellent fishing places he could spy, and cheered – as were all – that there were paths ‘exceedingly beaten and haunted with deer’. They saw a curious ‘milk white fowl with a very black head’ and ‘this day some garden seeds were sown’. Edward remembered that at last the wind stopped blowing from the north and ‘birds sang in the woods most pleasantly’.
* * *
On 16 March to the Pilgrims’ great excitement one of the fabled beings they had read about at last came and made friends. In the most matter-of-fact way – as the colonists were bent over their spades sweating with the labour – an Indian walked out of the forest and up to the Common House. Stark naked except for a leather fringed belt round his waist, to their amazement he spoke in their own language, saying, ‘Hello English.’ His name was Samoset and he was a minor sachem or chief of the Wampanoag tribe but based in Pemaquid in Maine, where Monhegan Island was a rendezvous for English trading ships. Although they did not know it, his arrival signalled that at last the colony’s fortunes had begun to turn.
Samoset was chatty and informative and he spent several days in Plymouth. His land was a day’s sail away, or five days by land. The area they were living in was known to the Indians as Patuxet. Formerly it had been a thriving village, which was why all the land had been ploughed. The reason there were so many graves, and no Indians, was a plague had devastated the area and killed most of the inhabitants.
Although Samoset spoke good English – he learned from the ships passing his home – it was his friend Squanto who would be the key to the Pilgrims’ prosperity. Squanto was the emissary of Massasoit, the head of the Wampanoags. A few days after Samoset had spent time with the Pilgrims – who plied him with food, alcohol, pudding, mallard, cheese and beer, as well as a horseman’s coat because the wind was beginning to rise and he was naked – Squanto appeared.
Samoset had already introduced the Pilgrims to five braves – ‘tall proper men’ as Edward described them – who were just as quiet and well behaved as Samoset despite their savage appearance. They danced and sang ‘like antics’ or clowns, and they brought back tools they had stolen in the woods. They had deerskins over their shoulders and one a wild cat’s skin over his arm. Leather chaps stretched to their groins and their faces were painted black. Edward noted that they had a ‘complexion like our English gipsies, no hair or very little on their faces, on their heads long hair to their shoulders, only cut before, some trussed up before with a feather, broad wise, like a fan, another a fox tail hanging down’.
The Mayflower legend has sometimes given the impression the Pilgrims were the first Europeans to know about Cape Cod. In fact the part of New England they were in, including this harbour, had already been explored by information-gathering Europeans for nearly a century. In 1602 the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold had sailed between what he called Martha’s Vineyard and what the Pilgrims named Buzzards Bay after its circling birds. Gosnold tried to create a trading post on the island now known as Cuttyhunk, though it was abandoned after some reconnaissance trips into the interior. In search of a passage to the Far East, Giovanni da Verrazzano had given the name Arcadia to Virginia after his voyages in the 1520s (the mythical name was also later used, with a variant spelling, to refer to the French colony Acadia, what is now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia). But diseases to which the Indians had no immunity had spoilt the idyll, killing ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants. Squanto might well have died of measles or smallpox spread by the Europeans but, ironically, his life had been saved through being carried off by a slaver captain named Hunt.
Squanto escaped and lived in Cornhill in the heart of the City of London with a merchant named John Slaney, who was the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company. Slaney sent him to Newfoundland to act as a guide and interpreter to the New World for the company, and he was befriended by another explorer named Captain Thomas Dermer. Previously an associate of the explorer John Smith, Dermer worked for Ferdinando Gorges, one of the keenest early investors in New England colonies. Squanto was hired for Dermer’s exploratory expedition which visited what was now Plymouth. He was much needed as the Nausets, the Indians who had attacked the Pilgrims at First Encounter Beach, were still raging against Europeans on account of Hunt kidnapping so many of their clan.
A savage desire for revenge beat in the breasts of the Indians of Nauset, as had been shown by that fight on the beach. Only months before, Dermer had been very nearly killed when exploring for potential fishing settlements. Squanto saved Dermer’s life. Now Squanto was to do something similar for the Pilgrims.
However, the really important person was waiting in the wings, to judge the reaction to his messenger. This was Massasoit, king of the Pokanoket tribe, part of the wider Wampanoag federation of tribes whose name means ‘the people of the eastern dawn’. Massasoit lived forty miles away at what is now Rhode Island but ruled most of the area from there to the east coast. He was hidden up in the woods above Plymouth with sixty of his men and his brother Quadequina.
Samoset now indicated that the Pilgrims should raise their eyes. Above them on the horizon was the extraordinary sight of the powerful Indian king and his magnificent entourage of braves.
Massasoit in fact needed the bedraggled travellers as much as they needed him. He had some awareness of the English, their tools and their useful guns as he and his brother had met Thomas Dermer a couple of years before. The forward-thinking chief was determined to use an alliance with the newcomers to his advantage against another local tribe, the Narragansett Indians who had escaped the plague that had wiped out so many. To Massasoit’s great resentment, now that his people were so diminished and weakened, the Narragansetts who were once his rivals had become his overlords. The Pokanokets had been particularly badly affected by the plague, being reduced from 15,000 to less than 1,000. But for the Pilgrims, this terrible tragedy was a piece of great good luck because it meant that the land was free and that Massasoit was prepared to make an alliance with them.
Massasoit had been spying on the Pilgrims all winter. They had often felt they were being watched when they were alone or in twos and threes in the woods setting traps or shooting birds. The Indians could have attacked but did not do so. The rapid depletion of the numbers of settlers convinced Massasoit that they were not going to harm him and that some kind of treaty could be negotiated. In the past historians tended to believe the Indian populations were innocent dupes of the early English settlers. The development of ethnohistory has shown the Indians had their own agendas to use powerful newcomers against other tribes.
In the same daring spirit that got him to Holland, Edward now volunteered to go up the hill and parley with the Indians. He rushed towards the braves, bearing two knives as a present for Massasoit, as well as a copper chain with a jewel on it, while to his brother Quadequina he gave a ‘jewel to hang in his ear’, as well as a ‘pot of strong water’, i.e. alcohol, and a good quantity of butter, all of which were warmly accepted.
Massasoit was ‘grave of countenance, and spare of speech’, in fact all that a king should be. Fired up by the exciting sense of occasion, Edward made a grandiloquent speech that King James saluted the chief with words of love and peace and did ‘accept of him as his friend and ally’, and that the governor wished to trade with him. Massasoit listened to this eagerly, although Edward felt his elaborate language was not adequately translated. The king gave him three or four groundnuts and some tobacco.
It was the beginning of years of listening, observing, and trying to keep the peace. Edward’s account in Mourt’s Relation suggests his fascination with this new world, these new peoples so outside his experience – yet for whom he seems to have felt no fear.
After eating and drinking and expressing admiration for Edward’s sword and armour, Massasoit left Edward as a hostage with Quadequina, whom Edward approved of as ‘a very proper tall young man, of a very modest and seemly Countenance’.
Placing his bows and arrows on the ground, Massasoit and twenty followers set off to parley with Governor John Carver. Despite the Pilgrims’ unprepossessing appearance – their clothes were now very raggedy and dirty after their ordeals – they managed to greet the Indians with considerable ceremony and a musket salute. The Wampanoag leaders were led to a green rug with cushions. John Carver’s presence was heralded by the blowing of a trumpet and someone beating a drum. He appeared and kissed Massasoit’s hand, whereupon Massasoit embraced him.
Then they sat down and had more strong drink, probably aquavit, and a little meat. Observers noticed that Massasoit, who was heavily oiled with dark red paint, trembled throughout the event. In fact, despite the chief’s friendliness, there had also been a secret powwow among the Wampanoags to put a curse on the Pilgrims, in case they were not going to be the allies they needed. The Wampanoags had strong suspicions that, as well as firearms, English people carried in their luggage a plague which they could unleash at will – an imaginative theory which had an element of truth.
Nevertheless a glorious and moving peace treaty was celebrated that day between the great Indian chief and his new friends, as the two allies agreed six articles of peace:
I. That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people.
II. And if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him.
III. That if any of our tools were taken away when our people were at work, he should cause them to be restored, and if ours did any harm to any of his, we would do the like to them.
IV. If any did unjustly war against him, we would aid him; if any did war against us, he should aid us.
V. He should send to his neighbour confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong us, butmight be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.
VI. That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them.
Lastly, that doing thus, King James would esteem of him as his friend and ally.
The king approved this and his followers clapped. The simple but businesslike agreement kept the peace for thirty years.
The Indians liked the trumpet, which they took in turns to blow. Edward recorded the king and his men ‘lay all night in the woods, not above half an English mile from us, and all their wives and women with them’. The Wampanoags said that within eight or nine days they would come and set corn on the other side of the brook, and stay there all summer. Slightly alarmed by this and not knowing what to make of it, the Pilgrims had various of their number keep watch, ‘but there was no appearance of danger’. As another token of friendship, they asked the king to send over his kettle and they filled it full of peas. Squanto ended what had been a most successful day by tickling ‘fat and sweet’ eels with his feet, catching them ‘with his hands without any other instrument’, and bringing them to the Pilgrims. Enchanting, unexpected elements of Elysium had begun creeping into the lives of the settlers.
Edward gives us a wonderful description of the Indian king: Massasoit was ‘a very lusty man, in his best years, an able body’. A great chain of what Edward called ‘white bone beads’ hung about his neck, from which at the back hung ‘a little bag of tobacco’. Edward did not know that what he was looking at was not bone but the little white shells known as wampum, which was the Indians’ currency.
* * *
Edward’s vivid account of these days, Mourt’s Relation, breaks off on 23 March. He had to face what he had been avoiding and ignoring in the vast forest: his wife Elizabeth would not see another day. Their personal dream was not to be. Elizabeth had been slowly declining for some time but now she was too feverish to take in her surroundings, perhaps mercifully.
She may never really have recovered after the deaths of Ellen More and Mary Allerton. Just before Christmas Mary had been delivered of a son, but he was born dead. Probably weakened by haemorrhaging and what was turning into a multiple epidemic of tuberculosis and scurvy, Mary herself died two months later on 25 February. She was just thirty years old.
Of eighteen adult women on the Mayflower only five were left alive at the end of the first winter. Captain Standish’s wife Rose died on 29 January. The Winslows’ two servants had died very soon after arrival. Having a dogged belief in a better future for themselves and their descendants had taken the colonists through the worst times. But determination, even if heightened by a religious excitement, could not prevail against immune systems too weakened by poor food and weather to make a proper recovery. Among those who witnessed the deaths of their loved ones was there, perhaps, a secret depression at the fear of a wretched future, that would not be worth their sacrifices?
In her last hours did Elizabeth mentally return to Holland and the carefree existence she had there? She had been ignorant then of what the future really held. The longed-for journey – for her – would end quickly. But to someone of her fervent belief, death was not to be feared. She passed away on 24 March 1621 and was buried in another unmarked grave on Cole’s Hill.
It may be that one of the reasons Edward threw himself with such abandon into the New World was a determination not to be destroyed by the vanishing of his dear companion in the great adventure.
* * *
The last of the Mayflower passengers were disembarked three and a half months after they had first made landfall. The next month, April, those who were strong enough were working in the fields to sow the seed for harvest, using rotting fish for fertiliser, as they had been shown by Squanto. Because he came from Plymouth he told them to wait a week until shad came up the town brook.
The Mayflower sailors had become very restive and rude. They did not share any enchantment with the Indians or the New World. After showing some interest in exploring the coast they became impatient. To try to avoid disease they had insisted many of the sick leave the ship before they were well, despite the weather and even though some were delicate women and small children. But the sailors themselves could not escape the epidemic. Half of the thirty-five-man crew died of disease. One lay ‘cursing his wife, saying if it had not been for her he had never come this unlucky voyage’. It would have been alien to their creed for the charitable Pilgrims not to help them. They nursed the once-abusive dying men in the most thoughtful manner, providing pillows and brewing herbal infusions.
The settlers saw the Mayflower depart on 5 April 1621. The surviving seamen had been testy in case they lost the tide. The messages for the Pilgrims’ friends in Europe that Captain Jones had stuffed in his canvas pockets sailed with them.
Over two centuries later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – descendant of two of the Pilgrims who subsequently married, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins – imagined the secret tears as the Mayflower left. It had been bobbing at anchor in the bay so comfortingly. He wrote: ‘Long in silence they watched the receding sail of the vessel / Much endeared to them all, as something living and human.’ The last glimpse of the Mayflower ’s departing sail going towards England, ‘Sun-illumined and white, on the eastern verge of the ocean’, seems ‘like a marble slab in a graveyard; / Buried beneath it lay forever all hope of escaping’. Such ideas may have been handed down to Longfellow as historic truths in his family: that many momentarily wanted to abandon ‘this dreary land’.
But whatever their material deprivations, and there would be many, returning was not an option for most of the colonists. England had not been home to the Leiden church members for over a decade. Edward himself believed the Pilgrims were being sheltered against God’s coming wrath. God had ‘brought His people hither, and preserved them from the range of persecution, made it a hiding place for them whilst He was chastising our own nation’. The caves of the misty Atlantic, the ‘measureless meadows of sea-grass / Blowing o’er rocky wastes, and the grottoes and gardens of ocean!’ were a protective barrier against an unfriendly English state.
Meanwhile there was not the lading that the Merchant Adventurers were expecting. Weston wrote to the settlers that if they did not spend so much time seeking biblical precedent and arguing, they could have filled the returning Mayflower.
In fact, there was little time for any sort of philosophical speculation. Their every breath was taken by clearing the land and ploughing fields. It was hard, grinding work without horses or oxen. A third of the indentured servants had died, the tough young men whose strong arms and firm muscles many families were relying on. Most colonists built their own homes with their own bare hands.
Not long after the Mayflower left, the gentle governor, John Carver, collapsed. He was in the fields planting – something he had never done before – when he felt a sudden pain in his head. It was the beginning of the stroke that killed him. He had to be carried back home by the stronger men, to his bed in a half-built house where he was attended by his distraught wife. The community was appalled at yet another blow from the blue. His death was ‘much lamented, and caused great heaviness amongst them’. But because they were now friendly with the Indians the Pilgrims no longer had to bury at night. Governor Carver was given a proper send-off, with volleys of shot fired over his grave.
Six weeks later his wife Catherine was laid beside him. Close family ties and an affectionate heart had taken her from her Yorkshire home to live with her sisters in Leiden. With the loss of her husband she too collapsed. The very subdued community believed she died of grief.
There was something of a breakdown of spirit. Though William Brewster had been such a force in Leiden, Bradford hints that going to America was almost too much for him physically. Brewster was in no way unwilling ‘to take his part’ and to bear his burden working in the fields alongside the rest of the colony, but he was too frail to live on what at times was a starvation diet.
William Bradford was now elected governor, a position he would largely occupy for the next forty years.
* * *
On 30 June 1621 John Robinson wrote a letter from Leiden to the colony. ‘The death of so many of our dear friends and brethren; oh how grievous hath it been to you to bear, and to us to take knowledge of.’ He was full of agonising sorrow for the horrendous mortality rate, as well as the great personal loss of his brother-in-law John Carver. He longed to come to them, but he could not desert the wives and children of many of them and the rest of the community until they were all placed on ships with support from the merchants. Trying to boost their morale, he told them: ‘Much beloved brethren, neither the distance of place, nor distinction of body, can at all either dissolve or weaken that bond of true Christian affection in which the Lord by his spirit hath tied us together.’ He continually prayed for a way to bring the rest of the community over. Nevertheless they should remember that in all battles some must die: ‘It is thought well for a side, if it get the victory, though with the loss of divers, if not too many or too great.’ He hoped God had given them that victory ‘after many difficulties’, even though there were more to come.
At a time of such sorrow and anxiety, and in such an isolated situation, the colonists clung to one another for emotional support. Strong relationships formed suddenly. One such was between Edward and the recently widowed Susanna White.
William White had died in late February. An exhausted Susanna was left with two small children, one of them a demanding newborn. Edward and Susanna were married less than two months after Elizabeth’s death. Were they in love? Perhaps not in any twenty-first-century sense, but they were a good partnership. Susanna needed male protection. Who was to say affection would not follow, especially with someone as warm and engaging as Edward?
They were married on 12 May by an Elder, as Edward and Elizabeth had been in Holland. The Dutch system of marriage was much admired by the church. Nowhere in the Bible was it shown to be a sacrament or part of the minister’s office. It was ‘a civil thing’ upon which ‘many questions about inheritances do depend’. In any case there were no ordained ministers in the new colony.
Edward now had another good woman to look after him and comfort him. And there was another relationship in his life which also offered hope – his growing friendship with the Indian chief Massasoit.