I was first drawn to this story by the female experiences left out from accounts by early seventeenth-century colonists in America. Particularly, I was intrigued by the knowledge that William Bradford, who wrote the history of the Mayflower passengers in his book Of Plymouth Plantation, scantly mentions the death of his first wife, Dorothy. Much later, another writer who was not on the ship writes that Dorothy slipped off of the Mayflower, which was moored, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. Why didn’t Bradford mention the cause of his first wife’s death? Is it possible her death was not an accident? These questions led me down various paths for a number of years until I was able to imagine the voice of Dorothy’s close friend, Alice. Finally, while in London one summer, Eleanor’s voice came to me; the story of a fed-up indentured servant, economically and socially disadvantaged in this new colony, who represented an experience that I hadn’t seen enough of. Was the Billington family a collection of troublemakers, as the leader of Plymouth described, or were their actions indicative of nascent unrest in the colony?
In telling this story, I wanted to add more possibilities to our collective imagination about “the pilgrims.” I also wanted to challenge certain myths, such as the belief that all the Mayflower passengers were seeking freedom to practice their religion. The separatists living in Holland were already able to practice their religion. What else motivated them? The people on the Mayflower arrived to Patuxet from a variety of backgrounds and for different reasons—indentured servants who signed up out of various necessities, craftsmen hired to assist in the physical creation of the colony, people looking for economic gain, one soldier paid to protect the settlers, and a set of children sent away by their father without their mother’s knowledge. The Mayflower, in fact, was the ship organized to carry the non-separatists across the ocean. But when the Speedwell was abandoned in England, perhaps due to leaks, or perhaps because the captain did not wish to make the journey, the separatist puritans added themselves to the Mayflower.
Though this is a work of fiction, I have tried to take care with depictions of people real and imagined in and around Patuxet, the place later named Plymouth. This novel takes place mostly within the palisade of Plymouth and aims to investigate factions within the “pilgrim” community, therefore the novel is primarily told from the point of view of the English. The stories of the Indigenous people of the Wampanoag Nation were a part of my research, though, and I am grateful to a member of the Wampanoag Nation, who asked not to be named, for her invaluable assistance in this aspect of the novel.
I am also grateful for the help of several scholars, particularly my correspondence with David Silverman, who was kind enough to share an advance copy of his new book, This Land Is Their Land (Bloomsbury, 2019), with me. Thank you to numerous people who responded to my email inquiries, offering various (and oftentimes contradictory!) perspectives: Clark Davis, Lisa Brooks, Peg Baker, James Baker, Jeremy Bangs, and Cynthia Tinney, among many others. Thank you to Kimberly Toney at the American Antiquarian Society, who drew my attention to the Foster Map, her curation “From English to Algonquian,” and several other primary documents, including multiple execution sermons, as well as Elizabeth Pope, Ashley Cataldo, and Nan Wolverton, who offered various materials from the stacks that further illuminated this novel. I’m thankful for several critical books including, but not limited to: Martha L. Finch’s Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England, David Silverman’s Thundersticks, Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin, and Amy E. Den Ouden’s Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England, as well as several primary documents including Plymouth court records and estate listings, letters, Amsterdam court records, New England’s Prospect by William Wood, William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, John Smith’s The General History of New England, Thomas Morton’s The New English Canaan, and Edward Winslow’s Good News from New England. I am also appreciative of the resources and materials from Plymouth Hall Museum, the Plymouth Colony Archive Project, and the Plimoth Plantation living history museum. All of the above have contributed to the imaginative development of this novel.
A challenge in writing this novel was how to retain the terminology used in 1630 though it is not the language of today. Alice, for instance, sometimes uses the offensive term “Savages” for Indigenous people of the Northeast Woodlands, as her husband did at times. For Eleanor, I’ve chosen “Indian” or named the tribal affiliation specifically, to align with the sentiment of Thomas Morton, who oversaw the trading post at Merrymount, before he was banished, and who wrote The New English Canaan. One other note: the English settlers often did not call people by their correct names. For instance, they either mistakenly thought the Wampanoag massasoit Ousamequin was named Massasoit, or they rejected his name because “Massasoit” was deemed easier to say than his actual name. But “Massasoit” is a title rather than a name. Instead, his name was Ousamequin and would be translated as “Yellow Feather” in English. According to the member of the Wampanoag Nation I consulted with, the Wampanoag Nation had over sixty-nine sachem districts with several villages within each district and the massasoit was the sachem chosen as the nation’s spokesperson. Similarly, “Squanto” is the incorrect name for the Wampanoag man who spoke English and acted as a translator between the Wampanoag people and the English settlers: His name was Tisquantum.
One might wonder why I do not use the term “pilgrim” much in the novel. The term “pilgrim” is a general term that suggests one who travels and is used only briefly in William Bradford’s account. More specifically, I am attempting to show the social space of the time and therefore Eleanor Billington uses the pejorative term “puritan.” The terms “Puritan” and “puritan”—the capitalization was initially inconsistent—is first noted in the 1560s, appearing as a term against those Protestants who wanted more church reforms to Queen Elizabeth’s 1559 Religious Settlement. The term was not used by any religious group to describe their own affiliations. Rather, it was a term more closely aligned with “stickler” and “hypocrite,” as Eleanor uses it. Unlike other religious groups of the time, including Calvinists, Catholics, or Lutherans, puritans were not clearly defined, nor did they self-identify as puritans. Instead, they were part of various churches and not even aligned in their desire for particular reformations. “Puritan” was a term used by their enemies. More accurately, we would call the Plymouth elders Separatist Puritans or separatists, because they wanted reform within the church but chose to separate rather than further trying to purify from within, but these were not terms used at the time.
Exploring these stories necessitated—and, thankfully, welcomed—fiction. These fabrications are numerous and include the compression of time and the creation of composite characters. However, each character in the novel was a real person and the murder and the trial really did take place.