The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World*

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  One of the Frenchmen was quite religious. He learned enough of the Natives’ language to tell his captors that “God was angry with them for their wickedness, and would destroy them and give their country to another people.” scorning the prophecy, a sachem assembled his subjects around a nearby hill and, with the Frenchman beside him on the hilltop, demanded if “his God had so many people and [was] able to kill all those?” The Frenchman responded that he “surely would.” In three years’ time, everything the captive had predicted had come to pass.

  •••In the spring of 1619, the English explorer Thomas Dermer sailed south from Maine in a small open boat. Accompanying Dermer was a Native guide who’d been abducted by Thomas Hunt in 1614. The Indian’s name was Tisquantum, or squanto, and after five long years in spain, England, and Newfoundland, he was sailing toward his home at Patuxet, the site of modern Plymouth. In a letter written the following winter, Dermer described what they saw: “[We] passed along the coast where [we] found some ancient [Indian] plantations, not long since populous now utterly void; in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness. Their disease the plague, for we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who descried the spots of such as usually die. When [we] arrived at my savage’s native country [we found] all dead.” squanto’s reaction to the desolation of his homeland, where as many as two thousand people had once lived, can only be imagined. However, at some point after visiting Patuxet, he began to see the destruction of the plague as an opportunity.

  ◆ John Smith’s map of New England, 1634.

  Upon Epenow’s return to Martha’s Vineyard, the former captive had become a sachem, and it seems that squanto had similar ambitions. squanto took Dermer to Nemasket, a settlement about fifteen miles inland from Patuxet, where squanto learned that not everyone in his village had died. several of his family members were alive and well. He may already have begun to think about reestablishing a community in Patuxet that was independent of Pokanoket control. In the aftermath of the plague, Massasoit was obviously vulnerable, and as Bradford later said of the former Indian captive, “squanto sought his own ends and played his own game.” But first he had to see for himself the condition of Massasoit and the Pokanokets, so he convinced Dermer that they should push on to the sachem’s village.

  It took about a day to walk from Nemasket to Pokanoket. There they met what Dermer described as “two kings,” who were undoubtedly Massasoit and his brother Quadequina, and fifty warriors. Massasoit was quite happy to see the Englishman and his Native guide. Dermer wrote that the sachem and his brother were “well satisfied with [what] my savage and I discoursed unto them [and] being desirous of novelty, gave me content in whatsoever I demanded.” Massasoit still had one of the French captives in his possession and agreed to hand him over to Dermer. After locating yet another Frenchman and meeting Epenow on Martha’s Vineyard, Dermer left squanto with Native friends near Nemasket and headed south to spend the winter in Virginia.

  When Thomas Dermer returned to the region the following summer, he discovered that the Pokanokets possessed a newfound and “inveterate malice to the English,” and for good reason. That spring, an English ship had arrived at Narragansett Bay. The sailors invited a large number of Massasoit’s people aboard the vessel, then proceeded to shoot them down in cold blood.

  Almost everywhere Dermer went in the summer of 1620, he came under attack. He would certainly have been killed at Nemasket had not squanto, who had spent the winter in the region, come to his rescue. But not even squanto could save Dermer when he and his men arrived at Martha’s Vineyard. Epenow and his warriors fell on Dermer’s party, and only Dermer, who was badly wounded, and one other Englishman escaped, while squanto was taken prisoner. soon after reaching Virginia a few weeks later, Dermer was dead.

  Epenow appears to have distrusted squanto from the start. He understood that if the English should ever try to settle in this land, those such as squanto and himself, who could speak the Englishmen’s language, would possess a powerful and potentially dangerous advantage. They could claim to know what the English were saying, and no one would know whether or not they were telling the truth. For his part, Epenow had proven his loyalty to his people by attacking Dermer and his men. But squanto’s true motives were anyone’s guess. six years ago, squanto had been abducted by pale, hairy-faced men whose weapons killed with blasts of fire and smoke. He had been thrust inside a huge, birdlike vessel that had taken him across an endless ocean. He had found himself in one of the largest cities in Europe: a crowded, dirty, smelly place of narrow streets and tall wooden houses.

  But most disturbing of all had been his return home. Almost everyone he had once known was dead and the village of Patuxet abandoned. Because of his years among the English, he was now looked to with suspicion. Perhaps there was anger growing inside of him. Perhaps it was ambition.

  Massasoit shared Epenow’s distrust of squanto, and by the fall of 1620, squanto had been moved from Martha’s Vineyard to Pokanoket, where he remained a prisoner. When the Mayflower arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims would do little to change that assumption.

  In the meantime, squanto waited for his chance.

  FOUR

  Beaten with Their Own Rod

  THE MAY FLOWER HAD arrived at Provincetown Harbor on saturday, November 11. since the next day was a sunday, the Pilgrims remained aboard ship, worshipping God under the direction of Elder Brewster. As Puritans, they believed that the entire sabbath must be devoted to worship—both a morning and an afternoon meeting along with personal and family prayers throughout the day. Work and especially play on a sunday were forbidden.

  On Monday, the four battered pieces of the shallop were taken ashore in the smaller rowboat. As the carpenter and his assistants began to put the vessel back together, the passengers enjoyed their first day ashore. After more than two months at sea, there was a “great need” for washing, and the women found a small freshwater pond near the present site of Provincetown. For generations to come, Monday would be wash day in New England, a tradition that began with the women of the Mayflower.

  At low tide, amid the barnacles and seaweed, they found plenty of blue mussels attached in clumps to the shoreside rocks. Passengers and sailors alike enjoyed the first fresh food any of them had tasted in a very long time, only to fall victim to vomiting and diarrhea from shellfish poisoning.

  The harbor also contained thousands of ducks and geese—“the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw.” But it was the whales that astounded them. “[E]very day we saw whales playing hard by us,” they wrote. These were Atlantic right whales, huge creatures that feed on plankton. Jones and one of his mates, who had experience hunting whales in Greenland, claimed that if only they’d had some harpoons they might have taken between three thousand and four thousand pounds’ worth of valuable whale oil.

  For the Pilgrims, who were expected to provide the Adventurers with a regular supply of goods, it was extremely frustrating to be surrounded by all this potential wealth and yet have no way of capturing any of it. One day a whale, apparently enjoying the afternoon sun on her dark, blubbery back, lay on the water’s surface within only a few yards of the Mayflower, “as if she had been dead.” It was just too much of a temptation. As a small crowd looked on, two muskets were loaded, but when the first was fired, the barrel burst into pieces. Amazingly, no one was injured, and the whale, after issuing “a snuff,” swam leisurely away.

  The shallop was proving to be a problem. Instead of days, it was going to be weeks before the boat was completed. some of the passengers began to insist that they should launch a land expedition. When the Mayflower first sailed into the harbor, the mouth of a river had been sighted several miles to the southeast. some of them, probably headed by Captain Miles standish, wanted to take a small party to investigate this potential settlement site.

  The
dangers of such a trip were considerable. so far they had seen no local inhabitants, but for all they knew, huge numbers of hostile Natives might be waiting just a few miles down the Cape. It was eventually decided, however, that the expedition was worth the risk. standish’s party consisted of sixteen men, including William Bradford, stephen Hopkins, and Edward Tilley. Each man was equipped with a musket, sword, and corselet, a light form of body armor that included a metal breastplate.

  On Wednesday, November 15, they were rowed ashore. Provincetown Harbor, as well as much of the bay side of the lower Cape, is characterized by wide tidal flats. Even a small boat runs aground many yards away from the beach, and during the fall of 1620 the passengers were forced to wade through the shallows to shore. With the temperature on the verge of freezing, it was a long, cold slog to the beach, especially weighted down with armor and weapons. standish soon had them marching single file along the shore. He was not a tall man—in the years ahead he won the nickname Captain shrimp—but his courage was never questioned. Before leaving for America, the Pilgrims had contacted another potential candidate for the position of military leader: Captain John smith. No one in England knew more about America than smith. He had been at the founding of Jamestown in 1607; in 1614, he had led a voyage of exploration to what he named New England, creating the most detailed map of the region to date. (It was smith’s companion on that voyage, Thomas Hunt, who had abducted squanto.) When the Pilgrims approached him in London, smith wanted desperately to return to America, particularly to “the country of the Massachusetts,” which he described as “the paradise of those parts.” But the Pilgrims decided that they wanted no part of him. smith bitterly related how they had insisted that his “books and maps were better cheap to teach them than myself.”

  ◆ Title page of Captain John Smith’s book, A Description of New England 1616.

  Smith’s fatal flaw, as far as the Pilgrims were concerned, was that he knew too much. In the beginning of the settlement, they would have had no choice but to do as he said, and this could be dangerous. smith possessed a strong personality, and a man of his worldly nature might come to dominate what they intended to be a mostly religious society. “[T]hey would not ... have any knowledge by any but themselves,” smith wrote, “pretending only religion their governor and frugality their counsel, when indeed it was ... because ... they would have no superiors.”

  If the Pilgrims did possess smith’s map of New England, though, they failed to make good use of it. Rivers were considered essential to a settlement site, and smith’s map clearly indicated that the nearest major river was the Charles River, less than a day’s sail to the northwest, at present-day Boston. The Pilgrims, however, insisted on exploring the entire bay side of Cape Cod, even though there was no evidence on smith’s map of a decent river along this more than fifty-mile stretch of coastline.

  As smith later wrote, much of the suffering that lay ahead for the Pilgrims could easily have been avoided if they had paid for his services or, at the very least, used his map. “[s]uch humorists [i.e., fanatics] will never believe ... ,” he wrote, “till they be beaten with their own rod.”

  ◆◆◆ Standish and his men had marched just a mile or so down the beach when up ahead they saw half a dozen people and a dog walking toward them. They initially assumed it was Master Jones and some of the sailors, who they knew were already ashore with the Mayflower’s spaniel. But when the people started to run inland for the woods, they realized that these weren’t sailors; they were the first Native people they had seen. One of the Indians paused to whistle for the dog, and the group disappeared into the trees.

  They followed at a trot, hoping to make contact. But as soon as the Indians saw that they were being pursued, they made a run for it—setting out “with might and main” along the shore to the south. standish and his party did their best to chase them, but it was slow going in the ankle-deep sand, and after several months aboard ship, they were in no shape for a sprint across a beach.

  Even though they were quickly left behind, they followed the Indians’ footprints. From the tracks, they could tell that the Indians ran up each hill and then paused to look back to see whether they were still being pursued. After what the Pilgrims judged to be ten miles of marching, they stopped for the night. With three men on guard at a time, they gathered around a large fire and tried to get some sleep.

  The next morning standish and his men once again set off in pursuit of the Indians. They followed the tracks past the head of a long tidal creek into a heavily wooded area, “which tore our armor in pieces.” Finally, around ten in the morning, they emerged into a deep, grassy valley, where they saw their first American deer. But it was water they truly needed. The only liquid they had brought with them was a bottle of aqua vitae (a strong liquor), and they were now suffering from violent thirst. At last, at the foot of a small rise of land, they found a pool of freshwater—called today Pilgrim spring. They claimed to have “drunk our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives.” From a group of lifelong beer and wine drinkers, this was high praise indeed.

  Once they’d refreshed themselves, they marched to the shoreline, where they could see the Mayflower just four miles to the northwest across the arc of the bay. They made camp, and that night they built a large fire as part of a prearranged signal to let their friends and loved ones know that all was well.

  As they continued south the next morning, they came across evidence that they were not the first Europeans to have visited this place. First they found some sawed planks and an old iron ship’s kettle—perhaps from the French shipwreck of 1615. Then, near the river mouth that they’d seen from the Mayflower, they discovered the remains of what must have been Martin Pring’s seventeen-year-old fort. But it was evidence of a Native sort that soon attracted their attention.

  On a high shoreside hill, they found an area where the sand had recently been patted smooth. As three of them dug, the others gathered around in a defensive ring with their muskets ready. Not far down, they found a basket made of woven reeds filled with so much corn that two men could barely lift it. Nearby, they found a basket containing corn that was still on the cob, “some yellow and some red, and others mixed with blue.” One of the more remarkable characteristics of Indian corn, or maize, is that, if kept dry, the kernels can be stored forever. In Mexico, storage pits containing perfectly preserved corn have been dug up that were at least a thousand years old.

  The Pilgrims paused to discuss what they should do next. They had brought wheat, barley, and peas with them aboard the Mayflower for planting in the spring. Most European settlers in a similar situation would have had enough faith in their own, supposedly superior, technology that they would have had no use for a buried bag of Native seed.

  But the Pilgrims were not the usual European immigrants. For one thing, they were desperate. Due to the sad state of their provisions, as well as the lateness of the season, they knew they were in a survival situation from the start. Hence, they were willing to try just about anything if it meant they might survive their first year. They decided they had no choice but to take the corn. The place where they found the buried seed is still called Corn Hill.

  The decision to steal the corn was not without risks. They were, after all, taking something of obvious value from a people who had done their best, so far, to avoid them. The Pilgrims might have decided to wait until they had the chance to speak with the Indians before they took the corn, but the last thing they had was time. They told themselves that they would pay back the corn’s owners as soon as they had the chance.

  They poured as much corn as would fit into a kettle, which they hung from a tree branch, and with two men shouldering the burden, they started back to the Mayflower. They planned to retrieve the rest of the corn once the shallop had been completed. They also hoped to explore more of the two creeks. If some earlier European visitors had thought the location suitable for a settlement of some sort, perhaps it might serve their
own needs.

  By dusk it was raining. After a long, wet night spent within a quickly constructed barricade of tree trunks and branches, they continued on to the north only to become lost, once again, in the woods. Deep within a grove of trees, they came across a young sapling that had been bent down to a spot on the ground where a Native-made rope encircled some acorns. stephen Hopkins explained that this was an Indian deer trap similar to the ones he’d seen in Virginia. As they stood examining the device, William Bradford, who was in the rear, stumbled upon the trap. The sapling jerked up, and Bradford was snagged by the leg. Instead of being annoyed, Bradford could only marvel at this “very pretty device, made with a rope of their own making, and having a noose as artificially made as any roper in England can make.” Adding the noose to what soon became a collection of Native specimens and artifacts, they continued on to the harbor, where they found a welcoming party on shore headed by Master Jones and Governor Carver. “And thus,” Bradford wrote, “we came both weary and welcome home.”

  ◆◆◆ It took another few days for the carpenter to finish the shallop, and when it was done on Monday, November 27, yet another exploring mission was launched, this time under the direction of Christopher Jones instead of standish. As the master of the Mayflower, Jones was not required to help the Pilgrims find a settlement site, but he obviously thought it in his best interests to see them on their way.

  There were thirty-four of them, twenty-four passengers and ten sailors, aboard the open shallop. The wind was out of the northeast, and the shallop had a difficult time getting away from the point within which the Mayflower was anchored. After being blown to the opposite side of the harbor, they spent the night tucked into an inlet that is now part of Pilgrim Lake. As the temperatures dipped to well below freezing, their wet shoes and stockings began to freeze. “[s]ome of our people that are dead,” Bradford later wrote, “took the original of their death here.”