The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World*

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  There was one man, however, who refused to forgive the Pilgrims for “the killing of those poor Indians.” When he heard about the incident back in Leiden, Pastor John Robinson sent Governor Bradford a letter. “Oh, how happy a thing had it been,” he wrote, “if you had converted some before you had killed any! Besides, where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after.” The real problem, as far as Robinson saw it, was Bradford’s willingness to trust standish, a man the minister had come to know when he was in Leiden. The captain lacked “that tenderness of the life of man (made after God’s image) which is meet.”

  Robinson concluded his letter to Bradford with words that proved ominously prophetic, given the ultimate course of New England’s history: “It is ... a thing more glorious, in men’s eyes, than pleasing in God’s or convenient for Christians, to be a terror to poor barbarous people. And indeed I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others should be drawn to affect a kind of ruffling course in the world.”

  ◆◆◆ That summer the supply ship Anne arrived with sixty passengers, including the widow Alice southworth. The southworths and Bradfords had known each other in Leiden, and just a few weeks after the Anne’s arrival, William Bradford and Alice were married on August 14, 1623.

  The festivities that followed were much more than the celebration of a marriage. A new order had come to New England. Massasoit attended the wedding ceremony, with a black wolf skin draped over his shoulder. Also attending were about 120 of his warriors, about twice as many men as he had been able to gather a little more than a year ago. They danced “with such a noise,” one witness reported, “that you would wonder.”

  As Indians on Cape Cod to the east and in Massachusetts to the north continued to be gripped by fear and confusion, a supreme confidence had come to the Pokanokets. Massasoit was now firmly in control, and it had been standish’s assault at Wessagussett that had made it possible.

  Prior to Wessagussett, Aspinet, sachem of the Nausets, had commanded more warriors than Massasoit. But now Aspinet was dead, and his people had scattered in panic. Over the next few years, Massasoit emerged as the leader of the Indian nation we now refer to as the Wampanoag. It was exactly the scenario squanto had envisioned for himself the year before. But it was Massasoit who pulled it off. Just a few words, delivered from what had almost been his deathbed, had unleashed a chain of events that had completely changed the region. serving as a grim reminder of the power of the Pokanoket-Pilgrim alliance was the skull of Wituwamat, still planted on a pole above the fort roof.

  It was only appropriate that a new flag be raised for Massasoit’s benefit. Instead of the English flag, the Pilgrims raised a blood-soaked piece of linen. It was the same cloth that had once covered Wituwamat’s head, and it now flew bravely above the fort: a reddish brown smear against the blue summer sky.

  TEN

  A New England

  AS PASTOR ROBINSON had suggested, the Pilgrims had lost more than a little of their collective soul at the battle of Wessagussett. But so had the Pokanokets. By siding with the English, Massasoit had allied himself with a culture and technology on which his own people increasingly came to depend. Whether it was iron hoes and kettles, blankets, liquor, or guns, the English had what the Pokanokets wanted. There would be some good years ahead as the Pilgrims eagerly traded with them for furs. But as the beavers and other fur-bearing animals grew scarce, the only thing the Indians had to sell to the English was their land.

  It had begun innocently enough in 1621, when Massasoit had given Patuxet to the Pilgrims as a gift. Back then it had been difficult to imagine a time when land would be anything but an endless resource. From the start, Plymouth authorities insisted that all Native land purchases must have prior court approval. By controlling the buying and selling of Indian land, the colony hoped to avoid possible confusion in the future while protecting the Natives from people who might cheat them out of their property.

  Today, the sums paid for Massasoit’s lands seem tiny. However, given the high cost of clearing Native land and the high value the Indians attached to English goods, the prices are almost justifiable. Certainly, the Pilgrims felt they were paying a fair price, and their descendants later insisted that they “did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.” What these later Pilgrim generations failed to recognize, however, was that the Indians had a very different relationship with the land. Instead of giving up their property to the English through a land sale, they assumed they were simply granting the English the right to share the land with them. When it became clear what the Pilgrims were up to, the Indians had already lost much of their land.

  ◆◆◆ The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had all grown crops together—the approach first used at Jamestown and other English settlements. But in April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot of land, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was dramatic. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before. In previous years, the men had tended the fields while the women tended the children at home. “The women now went willingly into the field,” Bradford wrote, “and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

  In 1625, William Bradford received the stunning news that the congregation’s minister, John Robinson, had died in Leiden. A profound sense of sadness settled over the Plymouth church. Elder William Brewster kept on as their spiritual leader, but the Plymouth congregation would always feel as if something was missing.

  ◆ A chest reputed to have been brought aboard the Mayflower by William Brewster.

  About the same time as Robinson’s passing, a new settlement was started just to the north of Wessagussett. One of the settlement’s founders was a jolly, down-on-his-luck lawyer from London named Thomas Morton, who arrived with a handful of servants. Morton named the new settlement Merrymount.

  As the name of his settlement might suggest, Morton represented everything the Pilgrims had come to America to escape. In addition to being, in Bradford’s words, of “more craft than honesty,” Morton was an Anglican for whom a sunday was best spent, not in prayer, but in hunting with his falcon or, better yet, sharing a drink with the local Indians. Instead of building a wall around Merrymount, Morton erected an eighty-foot-high maypole that he and his men danced around with their Native neighbors, making a mockery of the solemn religiousness of the Plymouth settlement. What was worse, Morton’s friendship with the Indians quickly made him the favored trading partner in the region. He even dared to give them guns, since this helped the Indians provide more furs. It was because of this that Bradford decided to send standish on yet another raid to the north—not to kill any Indians but to seize this “Lord of Misrule,” who was eventually sent back to England.

  In 1626, Holland purchased Manhattan from the Indians and established the colony of New Netherland. since many of the Pilgrims knew the language, it was perhaps inevitable that Plymouth developed a strong relationship with the Dutch colony. The Dutch trading agent Isaack de Rasiere visited Plymouth in 1627, and his description of the English community on a typical sunday provides fascinating evidence of just how strong standish’s influence continued to be, despite Pastor Robinson’s warnings about the military leader.

  They assembled by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain’s door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order, three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Governor, in a long robe; beside him on the right hand, comes the preacher with his cloak on, and on the left hand, the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him. Thus they are constantly on their guard night and day.

  seven years after the Mayflower had sailed, Plymouth Plantation was stil
l an armed fortress where each man worshipped with a gun at his side.

  ◆◆◆ By 1626, the Adventurers in London had disbanded. William Bradford and seven others—Winslow, Brewster, standish, Alden, Howland, Allerton, and Thomas Prence, who had come over on the Fortune in 1621—agreed to take on the colony’s debt with the understanding that they would be given total control over the fur trade. The following year, Isaack de Rasiere introduced the Pilgrims to wampum.

  Wampum consisted of strings of beads made either from white periwinkle shells or the purple portion of quahog shells, with the purple beads being worth approximately twice as much as the white beads. To be accepted, wampum had to meet strict guidelines, and both the Indians and the English became expert in identifying whether or not the beads had been properly cut, shaped, polished, drilled, and strung. Wampum quickly became used as money in New England and revolutionized trade with the Indians. But despite some remarkable profits in the fur trade, Bradford and his fellow investors still struggled to pay off the colony’s debt. Even though Winslow claimed that Plymouth was a place where “religion and profit jump together,” the colony was unable to achieve any sort of financial success.

  ◆◆◆ In 1630, a fleet of seventeen ships arrived off the New England coast. Until that point, Plymouth had been the only significant English settlement in the region. In a matter of months, approximately a thousand Puritan English men, women, and children—more than three times the entire population of Plymouth—had been delivered to the Boston area. In the years ahead, the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay grew to include modern New Hampshire and Maine, while other Puritan settlers headed south to Connecticut.

  Adding to the mix was the Massachusetts exile Roger Williams, who in 1636 founded what became the religiously tolerant colony of Rhode Island, a home for Baptists, Quakers, and other non-Puritans. New England had become exactly what its name suggested, a new England composed of separate colonies.

  Over the course of the next decade, as King Charles made life more and more difficult for Puritans in England, an estimated twenty-one thousand Puritan immigrants flooded across the Atlantic to New England. Minimal from the beginning, the religious distinction between the “Pilgrims” and “Puritans” quickly became meaningless. Instead, the terms “Puritan” and “Pilgrim” came to signify two different groups of settlers—Pilgrims referred to those who arrived in Plymouth between 1620 and 1630, and Puritans were those who came to Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut after 1629.

  In the beginning, the Massachussetts Bay settlement to the north provided much-needed financial help for the Pilgrims. What the new arrivals wanted more than anything else were cattle and hogs, which the Pilgrims now had. Over the course of the next decade, Plymouth experienced an economic boom fueled, in large part, by the rising price of livestock. By the 1630s, the Pilgrims had established a series of trading posts that extended all the way from the Connecticut River to Castine, Maine. But inevitably, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay wanted to get in on this profitable trade, and as Massachusetts moved into the region with outposts of its own, tensions rose between the Pilgrims and Puritans.

  It was only a matter of time before Massachusetts Bay’s economic ambitions brought the Puritans into conflict with the region’s other occupants, the Native Americans. In the lower portion of the Connecticut River valley lived the Pequots, a tribe whose economic power more than equaled that of the Puritans. When the captains of several English trading vessels were killed by Indians in the region, Massachusetts Bay launched an attack on the Pequots. In many ways, the Pequot War of 1637 was the Puritans’ Wessagussett: a terrifyingly brutal assault that changed the balance of power in the region for decades to come.

  Much as Massasoit had done more than a decade before, a Mohegan sachem named Uncas used the conflict between the Indians and English as an opportunity to advance his own tribe. Before the Pequot War, Uncas was a minor player in the region. But after pledging his loyalty to the Puritans, he and his people were on their way to overtaking the Pequots as the most powerful tribe in Connecticut.

  The Narragansetts were less enthusiastic in their support of the English. The Pequots were their traditional enemies, but they were reluctant to join forces with Uncas and the Mohegans. Only after Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, personally asked for help on Massachusetts Bay’s behalf did Narragansett sachem Miantonomi agree to assist the Puritans against the Pequots.

  The Puritans attacked a Pequot fortress on the Mystic River in southern Connecticut near the Rhode Island border. After setting the Indians’ wigwams on fire, the soldiers shot and hacked to pieces anyone who attempted to escape. By the end of the day, approximately four hundred Pequot men, women, and children were dead. “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same,” William Bradford wrote, “and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”

  Bradford saw the killing as the work of the Lord. The Narragansetts, however, saw nothing divine in the slaughter. As Roger Williams observed, Native American warfare was more about the bravery and honor of the fighters than the body count, and usually only a handful of warriors were killed in battle. Prior to the attack on the Pequot fort in Mystic, sachem Miantonomi had tried to get Williams to promise that no women and children would be killed. Unfortunately, Williams, who had been thrown out of Massachusetts Bay just two years before for his unorthodox religious views, had been unable to make any kind of deal with the Puritans. As the flames devoured every living thing in the village, the Narragansetts angrily protested the slaughter, claiming “it is too furious, and slays too many men.” With the Pequot War, New England was introduced to the horrors of European-style genocide.

  ◆ An engraving showing the Puritans’ 1637 attack on the Pequot fort in Mystic, Connecticut.

  ◆◆◆ Before the massacre, the Pequots had urged the Narragansetts to join them against the Puritans, claiming that the English would soon “overspread their country” and force them off their own lands. In the years ahead, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi would come to realize that the Pequots had been right. By the late 1630s, when he saw that there were more Puritans in Massachusetts Bay than Native Americans in all of New England, he decided to eliminate the English threat before the Narragansetts suffered the same fate as the Pequots.

  In 1642, he traveled to the Montauks on Long Island in hopes of persuading them to join the Narragansetts against the English. To accomplish this, he proposed that all Indians work together to retake New England. Miantonomi’s speech to the Montauks included an insightful account of the ecological problems that had come to New England: “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.” Miantonomi knew from experience that to pick a fight with the Puritans was to fight to the death. He proposed that they now “kill men, women, and children, but no cows,” since the Indians would need the English livestock for food.

  But instead of joining with Miantonomi and the Narragansetts, the Montauks reported his speech to the English. And in the end, Miantonomi was unable to follow his own advice. Instead of attacking the English, he attacked Uncas and the Mohegans. Like Massasoit before him, Uncas had used his allegiance with the English to increase his power and influence, and by 1643, Miantonomi had had enough of him. After an assassination plot against Uncas failed, Miantonomi and a thousand of his warriors launched an assault on the Mohegans.

  ◆ A 1634 map of New England.

  Before the attack, Miantonomi put on a protective iron corselet, like the English wore in battle. But instead of saving his life, the armor led to his death. When the fighting turned against the Narragansetts and the sachem
was forced to flee, he staggered under the weight of the metal breastplate and was easily captured.

  At the same time as the Narragansetts and the Mohegans were fighting, it had become clear to many New Englanders that the English colonies had to act as one body in their dealings with the Indians. so they established the United Colonies of New England. Each colony had its own representatives, called “commissioners.” Noticeably missing from the union was Roger Williams’s Rhode Island—the only non-Puritan colony in New England.

  According to John Quincy Adams, the United Colonies of 1643 was “the model and prototype of the North American Confederacy of 1774,” which, in turn, became the basis of the United states. More than a hundred years before the colonies’ war with England, the United Colonies of New England showed the importance of looking beyond local concerns and prejudices. If Miantonomi had succeeded in creating the same kind of confederacy for the Native Americans of the region, the history of New England might have been very different.

  Miantonomi was still being held prisoner by Uncas when the commissioners of the United Colonies met for the first time in Hartford, Connecticut, on september 7, 1643. Uncas asked the commissioners what he should do with the Narragansett sachem. After long discussions, they decided to let Uncas do as he wished.

  There is evidence that the Miantonomi tried one last time to unite the Native peoples of New England by proposing that he marry one of Uncas’s sisters. It was, however, too late to make up. On the path between Hartford and Windsor, Connecticut, Uncas’s brother walked up behind Miantonomi and “clave his head with a hatchet.” For the time being, the threat of a united Native assault against Puritan and Pilgrim New England had been laid to rest.