The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  These ideas were not hashed about all the time in the community. They were simply a consequence of their endeavour. But of course since the Pilgrims were interested in political concepts, devising the rules by which they were to be governed was extraordinarily empowering, especially after all they had suffered. Once the rules were established, the decision-making powers of ordinary people were validated as a way of life.

  * * *

  As the forty-one men lined up to sign, these printers, merchants, serge weavers, wool combers, carpenters, indentured servants, a sexton, a hatmaker and a barrel maker had no idea of the future resonance of their act. It was pleasing enough in the present.

  Goodwill, religious faith and fellowship, and an agreement setting out codes of behaviour for people with not much formal training, all stopped the colony degenerating into a lawless place. Some of the settlers had been members of guilds and in a couple of cases members of corporations, but most had no personal experience of government except through being persecuted by it. Nevertheless they were eager to learn. As colonists they became agents of their own government, personally agreeing their local administration, land boundaries, systems of government, courts and punishments. They had to set taxes, and make sure they were gathered in. They rose to the challenge of holding office and dealing with an utterly new people, their Indian neighbours.

  Fortunately John Carver was now elected governor instead of Christopher Martin. Carver was a natural choice as leader, not only because he had negotiated much of the nitty-gritty of the expedition and because he was ensured support from the community, but also because he was a man of wealth and status. He possessed character, empathy and force of personality, and had been a commanding and well-to-do merchant. The educated and rich were respected. After all, their wealth and their contacts had underwritten the expedition. But people of character and leadership rose by their own efforts. William Bradford and Edward Winslow came into their own when their combination of authority and kindliness were essential features in encouraging confidence in what could have been very alarming situations. During the worst times Carver also seems to have acted as general nursemaid.

  Brewster, similarly, was a sympathetic and sensitive figure whose manner was so inoffensive that any criticism ‘was well taken from him’. He undervalued himself and sometimes overvalued others’ importance, yet he was still very much the spiritual head of the expedition. He did not want to be elected governor, concentrating instead on his religious role as preacher or Elder. He preached twice on Sundays and would like to have been their minister, ordained by the congregation itself, as was their separatist belief. However, John Robinson seems to have felt uneasy about authority for ordination. A minister also needed a university degree, which Brewster did not have. His ordination never took place, and of course the congregation were eagerly awaiting the arrival of John Robinson.

  Brewster’s ordeal – being hunted through the Netherlands – had changed him and aged him, and his ‘humble and modest mind’ was not what was really needed. A striving merchant such as John Carver or a young man with pizzazz such as Edward Winslow had the necessary attack. Brewster was longing for his books. He possessed no less than nine copies of a Christian guide of how to interpret the Bible which he may have used for teaching. He was referred to as an old man, but though frail he embraced manual labour, building his own house – as every man and woman in the new colony would shortly find out they had to.

  * * *

  Elizabeth was not quite well. She may have contracted a form of scurvy on board. One can imagine her lying uncomplainingly in damp bedclothes in the November fog. Presumably Edward was by her side when he could be, but the rest of the time he was exploring with the other men. Whales bumped around the boat every day. There were all varieties, humpback, minke and finback, forty tonnes in some cases. Sometimes the Pilgrims heard the low boom of their whale-song, and the sailors pointed at them excitedly because their oil was extremely valuable. In Europe they were still perceived as half-mythological. In the New World they contributed to Edward’s sense of wonder.

  Edward was so curious about Indian culture that he would write a detailed account of his Indian friends and their language. Indian culture had been the subject of discussion in the travel literature of the colonisation movement ever since the discovery of Virginia. Shakespeare’s play The Tempest had been performed as part of the marriage celebrations in 1613 of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. It was inspired by the shipwreck off Bermuda which Edward’s new friend Stephen Hopkins had experienced. Revelry included a masque put on by two of the Inns of Court on the theme of Indian priests and Virginian life, orchestrated by Inigo Jones. ‘The chief maskers were in Indian habits, with high sprigged feathers on their heads, their vizards of olive colour, hair black and large waving down to their shoulders.’ Like Edward, the whole company was extremely excited by seeing these legendary Virginian Indians whom they knew through the popular engravings of John White’s paintings, which stirred up sympathy and interest in Algonquian customs.

  The Pilgrims were still living on the Mayflower anchored in Provincetown harbour. While the women remained on board, the men – led by Captain Standish in full armour – marched through the countryside to try to meet some of the Indians. Their pockets were full of Dutch cheese; the odd gulp of aquavit warmed them in the distinctly chilly air. Because Stephen Hopkins had already been to the New World, he was prized for his knowledge of Indian lore. He recognised the bent trees which were Indian traps for deer. One of William Bradford’s first encounters in the New World was to have his leg caught in a noose lying in the grass. He spiritedly admired the subtlety of it.

  On 15 November, with trepidation and excitement, having been enchanted by their first sight of a canoe, around sixteen colonists on one of these expeditions suddenly glimpsed other people in America. Initially they thought they were sailors whom they knew to be on shore: five or six people were coming towards them with a dog, who then ran off into the woods. The English followed, but the Indians turned down onto the sands and vanished.

  The next morning a small party followed the Indian tracks, but ‘fell into such thickets as were ready to tear their clothes and armour into pieces’. But they found water and drank it to no ill effect: ‘the first New England water they drunk of, and was now in great thirst as pleasant unto them as wine or beer had been in foretimes’.

  Meanwhile a small sailing boat or shallop was put together by the Mayflower ’s carpenter to explore the coast. Provincetown was too small, sandy and exposed to be a main base for a permanent colony. They needed fields to grow corn and other grains, and fresh running water – Provincetown had ponds, not springs. Also important was a good harbour, as survival depended on trading with ships from Europe. There was an additional problem: the shallow bar meant the Mayflower had to be anchored quite far away. There was a long shelf reaching out from shore so boats could not get very close to the beach, and passengers had to wade to land. Soaking clothes added to the strain on their constitutions.

  The incessant exposure to damp increased the coughs and colds they were already prey to after so long at sea. They were also affected by the dreaded scurvy ‘whereof many died’, Edward reported in Mourt’s Relation. Having so many people at such close quarters was a health hazard, necessarily endured during the voyage, but now they needed to get ashore. The leaders were increasingly worried as it was now the end of November. They decided to have another shot at finding a better harbour across the bay.

  A group (including Edward) exploring down the inside coast of Cape Cod in their flimsy shallop, led by Captain Jones, had to spend two nights in the open, in snowy weather. They were attacked at what they somewhat euphemistically called First Encounter Beach (now the site of the famous Nauset lighthouse). Their assailants were from a tribe called the Nausets.*

  The Pilgrims had tried to speak to some Indians busy on the shore cutting up a grampus, a kind of dolphin, but they ran away. They then built t
hemselves what they called a barricado with logs and boughs to spend the night in. On the second night, still not having found a good harbour, they were lying round their fire when they heard a terrifying sound. Bradford described it as a ‘hideous and great cry’. Edward, who would become an expert Indian linguist, carefully noted it as ‘Woach woach ha ha hach woach’. The sound stopped when they shot off one of their guns.

  The next morning at about 5 a.m. they were debating whether to take all the arms down to the shallop before or after they had decamped, when they heard one of their party bellow ‘Men, Indians, Indians’, followed by a volley of arrows which came flying in among them. They ran for their weapons, some of which were already in the shallop on the shoreline, and one of the Pilgrims took a log out of the fire and advanced with it towards the Indians. One of the Indians – ‘a lusty man and no less valiant’ – took up position behind a tree as close as possible and let fly three arrows. He withstood three musket shots, till the bark splintered round his ears, then ‘he gave an extraordinary shriek and away they went, all of them’.

  Leaving some to guard the shallop, the Pilgrims ran after them shouting and loosing off shots to show that they were not afraid. Amazingly none of them had been hurt, though their coats in the barricado were riddled with arrows. They gathered up the arrows to send them back to England. As they would find out, the Nausets were suspicious of any Europeans because of their horrible experiences with slaver ships. They had additionally been offended because in their explorations the Pilgrims had found an apparently deserted Indian village and had taken some corn they discovered buried in abandoned Indian huts.

  Amazingly, they had brought no seed with them on the Mayflower. In a gloomy situation, finding this corn was a providential sign. Bradford says: ‘here they got seed to plant them corn the next year, or else they might have starved, for they had none nor any likelihood to get any till the season had been past’. Moreover if they had left it any longer they could not have even planted it for, in another week, he reported, ‘the ground was now all covered with snow and hard-frozen’ and it had to be levered up with their swords.

  * * *

  By early December the rivers froze and snow blotted out the landscape. It was so cold the water froze on their clothes and made them like iron. There was a new soul too in the wilderness, mewling in his mother’s arms. The baby was born on the Mayflower during the two last weeks of November’s winds. Like Oceanus Hopkins, he was given a meaningful name. His proud parents, William and Susanna White, called him Peregrine, which means Pilgrim. Peregrine was the first English baby to see the light of day in New England. Edward Winslow wrote in Mourt’s Relation: ‘it pleased God that Mistress White was brought a bed of a son’. Swaddled as was the fashion, he was placed in the wicker cradle brought out of Holland.*

  But at the same time on board there was a passenger who was sinking into a depression under the cold snowy light and the mysterious backdrop of the new continent. She could not find a way back from her despair and she could not talk about it. In all the anxiety about landing and organising arrangements, no one noticed William Bradford’s wife Dorothy was becoming unreachable. Had the return to England from Leiden and the weeks in Southampton reminded her too painfully of the hustle and bustle of the fishing port of Yarmouth she lived in as a girl? Was it thoughts of her own young son, left behind? All we can guess is that the thought of the isolation of America terrified her.

  The sick and the well lay side by side. There was beginning to be an epidemic of deaths. Funerals became a daily ritual. Jasper, one of the unfortunate More children, died two days after Edward Thompson, a servant with the White family. James Chilton, Mary Chilton’s father, followed two days later. That stoning and beating by youths in Leiden had probably weakened an already fragile frame. The closing of eyes, the huddle of anxious women and then the sorrowful turning away when there was no more to be done were impossible to avoid. Burying former shipmates was a grim substitute for planting new homes, and still they did not know where they should decide to settle.

  Perhaps the frightening atmosphere – God was not reaching out His arms to save them – and the tragic deaths were the last straw that tipped Dorothy into preferring to die rather than to live. On 7 December, after some of the men had gone off on another exploring expedition, her body was found floating beside the ship. She was twenty-three.

  The circumstances of Dorothy Bradford’s death are disputed. There is no evidence to show she committed suicide, but equally no evidence to say that she did not. It is hard to believe she did not plan her death. There were so many people on the small crowded ship. If Dorothy had slipped and fallen overboard by accident, someone would have heard her cry. It seems likely she had taken care to plunge into the water when she knew no one would notice a splash. Nevertheless, whatever the reason, the mysterious death of a lovely young woman married to one of the most trusted leaders of the Leiden community cast another shadow.

  What William Bradford felt about this tragedy he does not reveal. Perhaps he could not allow himself to break down when every atom of energy had to be used to survive. Moreover, as a religious man he believed all things were in God’s hands. Death – even of loved ones, even of one’s own young wife – had to be accepted as part of God’s plan. Bradford was to become the official chronicler of the story of the Pilgrims, but any expression in his writings of personal grief was out of the question. Yet in Of Plimmoth Plantation, he was to ask himself if people were any worse for their sufferings. Every biblical text told him they were ‘the better … It is a manifest token (saith the Apostle 2. Thes: I. 5, 6, 7) of the righteous judgement of God that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdome of God, for which ye also suffer.’

  For all the women of the expedition, these were hard times. They experienced none of the excitement of exploration of their male comrades, for they remained cooped up in the ship at anchor. The children needed to be got onto land, not just for their health but because they were starting to run amok, especially the Billingtons. Stores were beginning to run out. Though stocks were supplemented by the fowl they shot such as geese and partridges, they could not shoot enough to feed everyone every day. The Mayflower remained their only lodging until they built their homes.

  One of their pilots, Robert Coppin, had been to New England before. He suggested heading west and making for a river he remembered being on the other side of Cape Cod. He was convinced that further round the bay lay a bigger, safer harbour, and better land for planting. The cruel weather was making it a necessity to begin building houses fast. As William Bradford would remember years later from his snug New England fireside, it was winter and ‘they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts’.

  By 9 December, despite appalling winds and snow, an explorer party in the shallop – Edward, Bradford, Mr Coppin and various others – had discovered what became Plymouth harbour. Their mast had broken in three places and the wind made the sea so rough their rudder split, so they had to steer with oars. They landed on Clark’s Island, spending the night there. Pausing for the Sabbath the next day, amazed by their survival in the raging seas, they went round the harbour sounding it for depth and shipping and decided it was good. They also went onto the land, which was gently sloping down to the shore with a great hill behind. They were encouraged by finding many former Indian cornfields. Brooks ran down the hill. In the days before piped water and sewage systems, all urban sites needed running water for clothes washing and ablutions, and for taking waste and dirty water away.

  On 15 December 1620 the Mayflower weighed anchor and set out from Provincetown. But even now the elements were unfriendly: the wind meant they could not get there straight away because of the harbour’s protective sandbar. Luckily the next day the wind was fair and they ‘came safely into a safe harbour’.

  The big issue now was where in the bay they should settle.
The paramount needs of a defensive position and paying off their debts to the Adventurers with fish decided it.* It should be on high ground, facing the sea where a great deal of land had already been cleared ‘and hath been planted with corn three or four years ago’. There was also a ‘very sweet brook’ which ran under the hillside, ‘and many delicate springs of as good water as can be drunk’. Below them in the bay there were places to shelter the shallop, and the boats they would build in the future. In one field was a tall hill on which they intended to make a platform and mount their cannon. This would command all views, because from it ‘we may see into the bay, and far into the sea, and we may see thence Cape Cod’. The greatest labour was going to be fetching wood, which was far off, although there was plenty of it. Edward wrote optimistically that the soil was thick and good.

  The Pilgrims still did not know what people had inhabited their chosen site because they had seen no more Indians. They continued to find Indian graves and untended cornfields. Previously on Cape Cod they had uncovered several items which pointed to Europeans having stayed on this land before. One was their first find, a big ship’s kettle; another was an English pail. They also found a large grave which yielded what they believed was the remains of a European, because of his yellow hair. The grave at first appeared to be Indian because of the bow in it and mats and trinkets, but the bones were wrapped in a sailor’s canvas shirt and a pair of cloth breeches, and bound up with it was a packneedle that sailors used for mending sails. Mysteriously, too, with the man was a smaller bundle, that of a child bound about with white beads as well as a little bow. Whether they were victims of sacrifice was not known. The Pilgrims were impressed by the good quality of the embalming and they reverently reburied them.