“I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land.”—King James I
London and Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1620
Two groups of English families crossed the Atlantic together on the Mayflower in 1620 to start the second permanent English colony in America. The groups weren’t natural allies. One sought fortune in a new world free of rules. The other wanted to practice its religion without being hunted down by the king’s men and thrown in jail. The youth of both groups had at least one thing in common: Many of them buried their parents soon after they reached America.
The people we know as Pilgrims called themselves Saints. Most British called them Separatists because they had separated from the Church of England—the only church allowed in England—and started their own outlaw church. When King James I ordered his men to arrest them as traitors, the Separatists fled to Holland, where they were promised free worship in exchange for their labor.
But after a few years the English children were speaking Dutch, fighting in the Dutch army, and marrying into Dutch families. Elders worried about the future of their church. One elder, William Bradford, wrote that “many of [the English] children … were drawne away by evill examples into extravagante and dangerous courses, getting the rains off their neks, and departing from their parents … tending to dissolutnes and the danger of their soules, to thee great greefe of their parents and dishonour of God.”
The elders thought about moving to South America but finally arranged with the Plymouth Company (Council of New England) to start a settlement near the mouth of the Hudson River, at the northern part of the Virginia colony. Here they would work for seven years in exchange for a free voyage and tools for building and planting. In September of 1620, forty-one Saints carried their belongings aboard a small sailing ship named the Speedwell in Southampton. About half the group were teenagers and children. Most of the girls were left behind because, as William Bradford wrote, girls had “weak bodies” and wouldn’t be able to survive the voyage or take the hard work of starting a colony.
The Speedwell began the journey alongside a second ship, the Mayflower, carrying sixty-one English passengers who were not Separatists. The two groups wanted little to do with each other. Some aboard the Mayflower enjoyed mocking the worshipful Saints. For their part, the Saints simply called the others Strangers.
The official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. A smiling Indian invites Europeans to “Come over and help us.”
WHAT THE SAINTS BELIEVED
They thought the Church of England was too much like the Roman Catholic Church. They built plain white wooden buildings, rather than churches decorated with images of saints. They rejected the authority of the pope. Other beliefs included:
• That God had made a script at the beginning of time, and that who would be saved and who would be condemned had all been “predestined,” or decided, long ago.
• That children should be baptized, or lowered into water, to wash away sin.
• That marriage was a contract between a man and a woman, and that weddings should be run by town officials rather than by church ministers.
• That the king had no authority to tell them what to believe. They wanted to listen to the voice of God as they heard it. To King James, this made them traitors.
The Pilgrims took this map from John Smith’s book about New England with them on their voyage. Smith offered to go along—for pay—but they told him his book was “better cheap” than he.
PILGRIMS?
If the voyagers who started in Holland called themselves Saints and others called them Separatists, why does history remember them as Pilgrims? William Bradford may have started it all when he wrote that “they knew they were Pilgrims” when they left Holland. The word means “religious travelers.” To make it even more confusing, Americans called them founders or forefathers until about 1800, when Pilgrims became the most popular term.
But the two groups weren’t strangers for long. The Speedwell leaked so badly that the ships had to return twice for repairs. Finally the Speedwell was abandoned, and passengers from both ships crowded aboard the Mayflower for a third and final try. Families staked out living space in the ship’s cargo compartment. Each adult was allowed seven feet by two and a half feet—barely room to stretch out. Children got even less. Heavy Atlantic storms sent the ship rising up and skidding down monstrous waves throughout the trip. Everyone but the crew stayed below deck for most of the two-month-long jouney. Food quickly ran low and many got seasick.
Some children accepted the discomfort. Elizabeth Tilley and Mary Chilton were Saints and Constance Hopkins a Stranger, but in violent seas it didn’t matter. They were all taking care of family members. Constance had her three-year-old sister to keep track of. Her mother, about to give birth, could offer little help; mostly she struggled just to brace herself as the ship tossed in the water. The three girls were bound by their work and, like the others, by hunger, danger, and hope.
But some young voyagers seemed to go stir-crazy. John and Francis Billington, fourteen and twelve, were the sons of an irreverent London merchant who took great pleasure in mocking the devout Saints. The Billington boys hated being cooped up below deck, where the smell of vomit was so bad that it came as a relief when a barrel of wine accidentally spilled all over the floor.
By the time they spotted land in November, many passengers were dying. The ship had been blown far off course to what is now Provincetown on Cape Cod. It was colder than they expected and they were too late to plant crops for the spring. The men rowed off to explore the coast while women and children remained on board the Mayflower, anchored in Cape Cod Bay. The confinement was too much for Francis Billington to take. One freezing day he decided to try to make a long-tailed firecracker called a squib. When he had it packed just right, he set it off by shooting his father’s gun near a barrel of gunpowder in the ship’s cabin. The explosion shattered the winter silence. The deck burst into flames, and Saints and Strangers alike raced to the deck to douse the fire. “By God’s Mercy,” wrote Bradford, “no harm done.” Francis was made to scrub the deck.
This 1877 painting shows young Mary Chilton stepping onto Plymouth Rock. Many believe she was the first British female to do so. Both her parents died in the first winter.
In December, the men found a place for the colony at what is now Plymouth Harbor. They sent for the Mayflower, which sailed across Cape Cod Bay on December 26, 1620. Legend has it that the first female ashore at Plymouth was fifteen-year-old Mary Chilton.
Fewer than half the colonists survived the first brutal winter. Young people proved hardier than their elders, and girls turned out to be the toughest of all. All seven girls aboard the Mayflower survived the voyage, as did ten of thirteen boys, including both Billingtons. All but two of the girls made it through the first winter.
THE DEAL
The Separatists from Holland were able to afford the journey to America by trading their labor for passage. They made a deal with London investors that eventually let them own property in the colony. But it was a hard bargain, especially for the young.
If you were sixteen or older you would have to work seven years for one share of ownership in the colony at the end. You got a free voyage and tools to clear the wilderness, plant crops, and build houses. Those ten to sixteen got a half share at the end, and children under ten got no share at all but received fifty acres of wild land after seven years of work. Everyone worked four days a week for the company, two for themselves, and had Sunday, the Sabbath, free to worship.
When spring arrived, both Saints and Strangers began to lay out streets and frame buildings. With much help from the Wampanoag Indians, they were able to turn their attention to making their settlement work.
The Billington boys continued to find trouble. Late one afternoon John hiked off into the woods and lost sight of the shore. For five days he wandered, totally lost. He survived on berries and slept in trees until a party of Nauset Indians discovered him and took him to their village. An English search party went out looking for him, but by then John was far away from Plymouth. Finally an Indian named Squanto, who was friendly to the settlers, found him. His captors refused to release John until Squanto informed them that the English had signed a peace treaty with a much stronger chief. It would be wise, he said, to return this boy unharmed and right away.
The next day nearly one hundred Nausets paraded John Billington home. When the gates of Plymouth came in view, one of the braves hoisted John up on his shoulders and carried the grinning boy into the settlement. He was wearing a necklace of beads. History doesn’t tell us whether or not John was punished.
Constance Hopkins stayed in the settlement, married, and became the mother of twelve children. Elizabeth Tilley stayed and married a man named John Howland, but only because Howland’s first choice, Desire Mintner, decided she liked Holland better and left. Mary Chilton stayed in the colony and became the mother of ten children. John Billington died in 1630 at the age of twenty-four. Francis Billington married, had eight children, and lived to be an old man. Though he had his share of problems in the colony, he is remembered for climbing a tree when he was thirteen and spying a beautiful lake, which turned out to be full of fish. In his honor, the colonists named it the Billington Sea.