Stephen Hopkins was a promising addition: a merchant and tanner, he is believed to have previously travelled on the Sea Venture to Virginia. He was chosen to be on all embassies to the Indians and probably knew the explorer John Smith. He had two servants, and had developed a taste for a new life where he made his own rules. His first wife had died, and his second, Elizabeth, was heavily pregnant. A rugged, confident fellow (whose love of good living would later get him into trouble with the colony government), he was a reassuring man who did most of the looking after of his two elder children, Giles and Constanta, and his little daughter by Elizabeth, Damaris. Stephen was not religious but he had the sort of robustly individual temperament common to the Leiden congregation. As a result of having already been in the New World, Hopkins had some experience of the Indians and possibly could speak a little of their language. His knowledge put him ahead of everyone else on the voyage.
* * *
Edward felt truly sad to leave his mentor John Robinson, yet the happiness of youth bubbled over contagiously. For all the difficulties they faced, the entire group was full of excitement: something was happening at last. Optimism, burning faith and the group spirit of the church carried them on until the Speedwell reached England several days later. When they arrived at the port of Southampton, a ship called the Mayflower was waiting at the quay.
The Mayflower was a cargo ship of about 180 tonnes, which had travelled regularly between England and Bordeaux, mainly bringing cloth from England in return for wine.* She was not an ocean-going vessel, but she was the best they could find for the money. One quarter of the Mayflower was owned by its captain, Christopher Jones, a good-hearted and sympathetic fellow. (The Pilgrims named one of the two main rivers in the colony after him.) When not in use the ship was kept at Rotherhithe on the Thames, where the eponymous pub now stands not far from where Captain Jones is buried. Mayflower was a popular name for ships at this time. In this case it was apt. ‘Mayflower’ was another name for the hawthorn, the plant which, as legend has it, sprang from a drop of Christ’s blood on the crown of thorns at the Crucifixion. These passenger pilgrims certainly suffered for their beliefs.
The Mayflower was not in good shape. (In 1624, two years after Jones died, she was sold for scrap.) So we may imagine a rather battered-looking wooden ship with three central masts, and high sails or shrouds, waving above the sailors. The Pilgrims were to live on a deck one level above the hold where the foodstuffs were kept amidst the livestock. The ship was around one hundred feet long, and about twenty-five feet wide. Families had to build their own little living areas with their bags for screens. They used their chests as beds. It was airless and stuffy, and let in the water when the ship pitched in gales. Every male passenger was meant to bring a gun.
Before they could set sail, there was a frustrating period of waiting for their leader William Brewster, who was still in hiding. In the weary days to come, Weston produced four children aged between four and eight. Their Puritan father, Samuel More (from a Shropshire family), was disinheriting them because of their mother’s adultery.
According to court documents, ‘upon good and deliberate advice’ Samuel More thought it better to ‘provide for the education and maintenance of these children in a place remote from those parts where these great blots and blemishes may fall upon them’. Though his ex-wife tore her clothes and begged him to reconsider, it was agreed ‘to transport them into Virginia and to see that they should be sufficiently kept and maintained with meat, drink, apparel, lodging and other necessaries and at the end of seven years they should have fifty acres of land apiece in the country of Virginia’. They were to be looked after by John Carver, Edward Winslow and William Brewster, who were paid for their pains. Their father had also taken shares, and it was not a time to refuse investors.
We do not know what condition the children were in when they came on board, but they perhaps caught, even if they did not fully understand, some of the whispers which must have circulated about them. Elizabeth Winslow, not yet having children of her own, might have found it a fulfilling enhancement of her mission to try to make life kinder for Ellen, the six-year-old girl entrusted to Edward and herself.
* * *
Sometime towards the end of July, Brewster reappeared and fired up the faint-hearted with his usual enthusiasm.
After much hanging around, the Mayflower and the Speedwell finally departed on 5 August. What could have been a peaceful sailing was marred with bitter exchanges. The Adventurers refused to pay the last £100 to clear the Pilgrims’ debts and the colonists had to sell a good many of the provisions they had intended to take with them to pay the harbour master’s fees. They also lacked some of their armour and swords, having sold them to the beady and not very charitable people of the port.
The governor of the group of passengers on the Speedwell was the bullying Christopher Martin, whose purchase of foodstuffs was not satisfactory – £700 seems to have vanished into thin air. One of the small-time adventurers representing the merchants who had bought a few shares previously in the Virginia Company, Martin made life intolerable for everyone, being especially unpleasant to the least powerful passengers.
As the reality that they were leaving England dawned on Robert Cushman, he began to suffer from nervous palpitations. He now understood the more anxious of the Leiden church’s protests about the way they were being treated. Cushman wrote that Martin ‘so insulteth over our poor people, with such scorn and contempt, as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes’. Even John Carver, one of the leaders, was anxious about managing the expectations and destinies of so many personalities. John Robinson sent a last note of encouragement to Carver – he had always been good at comforting others in their trials. They would never think him negligent in his duty. It was a farewell to a brother-in-law who had been more like a brother, and his comrade-in-arms.
In theory the delay was a good thing. According to contemporary lore it was better to come to America in the autumn than in the summer so the colonists could plant their food for the next year. Most people tended to arrive in poor condition after three months at sea. If they arrived in the spring, the swampy summer heat of Virginia exacerbated matters, and could be disastrous, making even the healthy sick. If they came in early autumn the climate was much more pleasant. The cool killed off bugs such as those that caused diarrhoea, which was life-threatening in the seventeenth century. The ships had only got as far as the Devon coast when the Speedwell started leaking. They went a further hundred leagues (about 300 miles past Land’s End), but by then the Speedwell was taking in so much water that she had to return to Plymouth. The captain said it must be that the timbers were rotten, for she was filling up. The only answer was to get rid of the Speedwell, and put those who were prepared to continue onto the already crowded Mayflower. Unfortunately they included Martin. Among those electing to stay behind was Robert Cushman, who was afflicted by poor health and (Bradford thought) nerves. He returned to Leiden to await developments.
On 6 September 1620 the Mayflower finally set out for America alone. All the delays meant that the Pilgrims would arrive in the winter, not the autumn. The wind was ‘coming east-north-east’, as recorded by the journal of the expedition, most of which was written by Edward.
Edward Winslow possessed an almost muscular competence and self-confidence. He could not help but rejoice in his ability to work well, to make things happen. He had a sense of his own powers that only grew stronger through the years in America. The decades surviving in the wilderness saw him become quite a different person from the provincial Englishman he was born.
As the Mayflower set sail Edward felt the future beckoning. He was not a poetic man but a curious and thoughtful one. There is no evidence he revisited his old haunts in England, yet his earlier existence did not altogether leave his thoughts. He took away a civic sense which was Droitwich’s legacy to him, as well as a determination never to be disgraced as his father had been. He was a man continually looking forward
, never back. Yet when he built a permanent home in America, he named it Careswell after the home the Winslows once owned in Worcestershire.
CHAPTER IV
The Voyage
In so far as they could – with 102 passengers on board – Edward and Elizabeth Winslow kept their cramped living quarters tidy and orderly. They were squashed into an area about eighty feet by twenty, and five feet high, known as the ‘between decks’ or gun decks where cannons were kept. In such a small space, divided by the masts and the cargo hatch, the heap of luggage surrounding them looked like a gypsy encampment.
On board was William Brewster’s feather bed, mentioned in the inventory made after his death, with its bolster pillow, as well as an ‘old white Welsh blanket’ – which may be another expression for flannel as Welsh farmers seem to have specialised in a soft woven fabric brushed for greater comfort. He took items useful for farming, as well as leather drawers, canvas sheets, a lamp, a burning glass, a dagger and knife, a pistol, bellows, a chamber pot. A ‘silver beater and a spoon’ reminds one of his gentry origins and his days as an Elizabethan diplomat. He was now a tired elderly man of fifty-six.*
There could be no greater contrast: he had passed his glamorous youth in a world of great houses and state secrets, of extravagant clothes so studded with pearls and gold thread that they were stiff enough to stand up by themselves, and now he was surrounded by chickens, hogs, smoked herring, vinegar, cheese and salt beef. Yet every piece of evidence suggests he never lost his affability and cheerfulness, and that flowed from his absolute conviction that his course was right. A tiny notebook of Brewster’s has survived to the present, and the pages of notes give the feel of this orderly and sensible man. It contains a copy of the licence to Thomas Weston, directions for transporting passengers to New England, and lists of articles necessary for fitting out a fishing vessel for a transatlantic trip.
* * *
The Leiden church believed they had a covenant like the Jewish people of old. Their constant comparison and justification was the Bible’s description of the Jews’ search for the Promised Land. America was the new Promised Land.
The Winslows’ bedding was trussed up in bales with spare clothes, and somewhere at the bottom of the bags were the precious books which would make them feel civilised in the face of considerable indignity. For Edward the voyage had an extra dimension, a secret rapture at the thought of the New World which he viewed romantically through the popular sixteenth-century prisms of a new Arcadia and Utopia, vaguely intermingled with a New Israel. He had the sort of enthusiastic temperament which was attracted to ideas. Being a printer requires a fascination with the written word.
Edward’s world view was mistily framed by a sense of universal reformation, the dominating intellectual Puritan idea of the period. He maintained contact with John Durie, the Protestant ecumenical clergyman, who had been educated at Leiden in Edward’s time. Durie’s father, Robert, the exiled Church of Scotland clergyman, had been a minister to various congregations in Holland.
Edward’s millenarianism was of a mild but constant kind. He was not one of the New England settlers who experimented with alchemy. The Leiden church did not consist of full-blown ‘typologists’ like the more learned clergy of Massachusetts who compared episodes in the Bible to life in the colony in order to reveal the working out of a preordained holy destiny. But most of the church, including Edward, wanted to model their lives on the Israelites. The Bible would be consulted for solutions as frequently as the few law books they took with them. One of the most touching relics of William Bradford is his revelation on the front leaves of Of Plimmoth Plantation that he is applying himself in extreme old age to study Hebrew: ‘Though I am grown aged, yet I have had a longing desire, to see with my own eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue, in which the Law, and oracles of God were writ; and in which God and angels, spake to the old patriarchs, of old time; and what names were given to things, from the creation.’ One senses in him an almost palpable yearning.
Edward and Elizabeth were also at a very emotionally intense moment in their lives, in the middle of an enthralling love affair. It is generally assumed that Puritans disapproved of sexuality. In fact Protestants disliked the celibacy revered in the Roman Catholic Church, where all sexual intercourse was to some degree sinful. The Puritans emphasised the importance of close relationships between men and women. The future founder of the New England colony Connecticut, the clergyman Thomas Hooker, preached a famous sermon celebrating conjugal love. He wrote romantically, ‘The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place where he comes.’
The journey lasted just over two months. From between decks where the passengers lived they could see and smell the sea, and hear the dash and smash of the waves. Most of the couples were close. To travel on such a perilous journey required the greatest trust and confidence in one another. And Elizabeth trusted her husband absolutely.
There was exhilaration for Edward and his church in moving to a newer, purer, better world knowing that in America their descendants would no longer be liable ‘to degenerate and be corrupted’. Among many of the Leiden Pilgrims was a yearning for the pristine and innocent New World, a common theme in the work of authors of the day including Francis Bacon, whose writings were well represented in William Brewster’s library. Brewster was contemptuous of those who became haughty, ‘being risen from nothing and having little else in them to commend them but a few fine clothes’. It confirmed Francis Bacon’s description that ‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair.’
Against a background of European cynicism, religious wars and Tudor and Stuart despotism, America offered escape. Against tyranny, even the wildness of the New World’s inhabitants seemed attractive. In his startling essay ‘Of Cannibals’, the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne favourably compared the ‘natural’ New World to ‘civilised’ European society: ‘The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them.’
The settlers made a strength of the simplicity their poverty imposed upon them. They were disapproving of frivolous adornment, in speech or in diplomatic relations, and impatient with the pomposity and corruption of the European past. When the nineteenth-century New England transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon’, he reflected a mindset that remains powerful in America even today. Lives driven by moral imperatives meant the Pilgrims rejected pretension in anything. What was wanted in the New World, wrote Thoreau in Walden, was not noblemen but ‘noble villages of men’. There was real excitement about leaving the wicked old world behind. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison called the Pilgrims ‘the spiritual ancestors of all Americans, all pioneers’, because of their ‘ardent faith in God, a dauntless courage in danger, a boundless resourcefulness in the face of difficulties, an impregnable fortitude in adversity’. Edward’s writings show they believed they had embarked on a unique enterprise, and William Bradford would write with conviction and strange prescience: ‘Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many.’
New England became noted for its settlers coming in family groups, which is believed to have been a key element in its stability. Edward’s ebullience was enhanced by his brother Gilbert, a carpenter, who sailed with him on the Mayflower. Edward’s three other brothers would also emigrate to America, and eventually settled in a little town named Marshfield founded by Edward himself, overlooking the dunes by the great ocean on which they had all ventured with such high hopes.
Edward and Elizabe
th had assistance from their two indentured servants, George Soule and Elias Storey. At the end of seven years’ training, both servants were expecting to get land from Edward’s own holding. Indentured servants made up one-fifth of the voyagers.
However, like all capable seventeenth-century housewives, Elizabeth and her friends were able to manufacture just about anything themselves, from clothes to soap to candles. Their skills in identifying the best plants for salves or cold remedies were to help them find on the American continent plants they were familiar with for cures – from feverfew, to turpentine, to sassafras. Indeed in the future the redoubtable ladies of Plymouth Colony soon observed from the Indians that they cut strips of wood from the pine trees referred to as ‘candle wood’ which was full of sap. That made a quick and useful light, obtainable at all times from the vast forest that surrounded them.
* * *
Puritans were people of the book who believed in prescription. They spent much time defining husbands’ and wives’ roles, and many of the Pilgrims took etiquette books with them on the long voyage, including the Bradfords and the Brewsters. William Brewster had at least two: one was the fashionable poet Richard Braithwaite’s Description of a Good Wife (1618), a witty description in verse of the best feminine qualities. The other was the English translation of the Italian bestseller Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation, which addressed the reforming of Italian manners.
The Mayflower Page 6
