The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  And, alas, burial was to become the activity that occupied the settlers over the next three months, as much as building houses. Their optimistic plans for getting most people other than the sick off the boat to chop down trees were hampered by the dreadful weather. On 21 December twenty people who were exploring were stranded ashore by the high seas. It proved impossible to build a shelter which protected them against the driving rain. For two days they were soaking, freezing and starving, unable to be rescued.

  By that time one person was dying every day. There was no time for the sort of pious observances the Pilgrims would have liked to have shown, and little dignity in their deaths. As sleet and snow blinded the mourners it was difficult enough to get spades into the frozen ground to bury their loved ones. The settlers buried their dead quietly on Cole’s Hill without headstones, which is why today graves cannot be found even for the most celebrated Pilgrims who died that winter. The burials took place hurriedly because half the colonists had either died or were dying, and at one point they had only five able-bodied people to tend to the sick.

  The Indians, regarding the strangers from camouflaged vantage points, were very surprised at the lack of memorialising of the dead by the Pilgrims: ‘they marvel to see no monuments over our dead, and therefore think no great Sachem is yet come into those parts, or not as yet dead; because they see the graves all alike’.

  Many Puritans hated all manifestations of ritual which they felt were tainted by popery. Back in England, their funerals were notable for their plainness. Even the vicar meeting the corpse at the lychgate, as was the ancient English custom, was thought to be superstitious. Certainly there were no lychgates on Cole’s Hill, and there was no church either. The heroism and endurance of the dead were not noted. Their graves were disguised by leaves. The Pilgrims did not want the Indians – whom they felt around them, rather than saw – to know how very few they now were.

  Those that had the strength to cut down trees and carry timber began building what they called the Common House. This was a wooden building twenty feet square on the shore which was to be a gathering place. For a while it was also going to be their meeting house (where separatist churches held their services) as well as where they stored the provisions they had brought with them. They began building on Christmas Day, grimly refusing to be put off despite the snow and ice.

  From the ship amidst flurries of snow the company could dimly see little black figures against the pale background raising a gun platform on what is now called Burial Hill, which rises 160 feet sheer above the shore. They had cannon to frighten off the Indians and the position commanded ‘all the plain and the bay, and from whence we may see far into the sea, and might be easier impaled, having two rows of houses and a fair street’. That was the plan at least, but they remained very short of labour. Some were too ill even to move, and stayed prostrate on the Mayflower.

  The sailors were restive and anxious to get their passengers off the boat as soon as possible so that they could return to London, even though the Pilgrims had finished only one house. A spark from the thatch almost burnt it down. Some of the shelters were made of little more than branches. Their first homes were very fragile, frame houses filled with wattle and daub. (In February it was so wet that the daub holding these houses together dissolved and fell off the wattle.) The Pilgrims had not yet begun to use overlapping clapboards as a layer against the snow and sleet pouring through the walls as the wind howled round.

  Of the original 102 people, 50 did not survive the next three months. About three-quarters of the women died. Not so long after the death of her husband, the daring, opinionated Mrs Chilton succumbed to disease, her forceful personality no match for the insidious invasion of pneumonia and dysentery. That bold presence was silenced, leaving her daughter Mary an orphan. The women were worse equipped for coping with the wintry conditions than the men, perhaps because they took no exercise and were confined to quarters.

  In early January the Pilgrims began marking out the family lots, in two rows for safety. But half the plots measured out with string and sticks were never used. Christopher Martin, the aggressive representative of the Adventurers, took ill very suddenly. The colonists had to quiz the dying businessman about accounts with the Adventurers and bills for provisions.

  Three out of the four little exiled More children were already dead of the epidemic they called the ‘common infection’. Their tiny bodies might have been a reproach to the settlers under other circumstances, but the Pilgrims were too unwell to ponder their sad short lives. The Tilley brothers, John and Edward, and their wives, who were in their thirties, died after they came ashore, though John’s thirteen-year-old orphaned daughter Elizabeth survived. Death took the camlet merchant Thomas Rogers, leaving his eighteen-year-old son Joseph to seek other father figures. The Tinkers – he was a wood sawyer or carpenter with a wife and one child – died as did many others, sometimes two or three a day.

  So many were ill – even the barrelling Edward succumbed – that there were only about half a dozen people, including Brewster and Myles Standish, who were able to stay on their feet, fetch wood, make fires and prepare what meat they could find. With some danger to their own health they looked after their colleagues, ‘washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them. In a word did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least.’

  That prosperous, confident merchant William Mullins of Dorking, who had such hopes of the New World and his stocks in the Virginia Company, faced his death in the efficient way he lived his life. He swiftly settled his affairs formally, and Captain Jones and John Carver witnessed his will.

  * * *

  The colonists had now seen the odd Indian ‘skulking about them’, though they always ran away when they were approached. But in mid-February they noticed the Indians were becoming bolder in the woods – no less than twelve were seen running by when one of the community was standing near a creek waiting for birds to fly overhead. The next day two Indians appeared on top of the hill. The Pilgrims made beckoning signs, and Stephen Hopkins and Captain Standish laid down one of their guns, but the Indians vanished again. Alarmed and uncertain as to what this meant, Captain Jones and the other sailors came on shore with the several impressive cannons, which they dragged up onto the hill to command the area. The largest was a saker, whose barrel was ten feet long.

  At last in March the weather improved. In better health, the Pilgrims began to plant their gardens. On 7 March those who were fit went exploring, and among them must have been Edward exulting at the many excellent fishing places he could spy, and cheered – as were all – that there were paths ‘exceedingly beaten and haunted with deer’. They saw a curious ‘milk white fowl with a very black head’ and ‘this day some garden seeds were sown’. Edward remembered that at last the wind stopped blowing from the north and ‘birds sang in the woods most pleasantly’.

  * * *

  On 16 March to the Pilgrims’ great excitement one of the fabled beings they had read about at last came and made friends. In the most matter-of-fact way – as the colonists were bent over their spades sweating with the labour – an Indian walked out of the forest and up to the Common House. Stark naked except for a leather fringed belt round his waist, to their amazement he spoke in their own language, saying, ‘Hello English.’ His name was Samoset and he was a minor sachem or chief of the Wampanoag tribe but based in Pemaquid in Maine, where Monhegan Island was a rendezvous for English trading ships. Although they did not know it, his arrival signalled that at last the colony’s fortunes had begun to turn.

  Samoset was chatty and informative and he spent several days in Plymouth. His land was a day’s sail away, or five days by land. The area they were living in was known to the Indians as Patuxet. Formerly it had been a thriving village, which was why all the land had been ploughed. The reason there were so many graves, and no Indians, was
a plague had devastated the area and killed most of the inhabitants.

  Although Samoset spoke good English – he learned from the ships passing his home – it was his friend Squanto who would be the key to the Pilgrims’ prosperity. Squanto was the emissary of Massasoit, the head of the Wampanoags. A few days after Samoset had spent time with the Pilgrims – who plied him with food, alcohol, pudding, mallard, cheese and beer, as well as a horseman’s coat because the wind was beginning to rise and he was naked – Squanto appeared.

  Samoset had already introduced the Pilgrims to five braves – ‘tall proper men’ as Edward described them – who were just as quiet and well behaved as Samoset despite their savage appearance. They danced and sang ‘like antics’ or clowns, and they brought back tools they had stolen in the woods. They had deerskins over their shoulders and one a wild cat’s skin over his arm. Leather chaps stretched to their groins and their faces were painted black. Edward noted that they had a ‘complexion like our English gipsies, no hair or very little on their faces, on their heads long hair to their shoulders, only cut before, some trussed up before with a feather, broad wise, like a fan, another a fox tail hanging down’.

  The Mayflower legend has sometimes given the impression the Pilgrims were the first Europeans to know about Cape Cod. In fact the part of New England they were in, including this harbour, had already been explored by information-gathering Europeans for nearly a century. In 1602 the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold had sailed between what he called Martha’s Vineyard and what the Pilgrims named Buzzards Bay after its circling birds. Gosnold tried to create a trading post on the island now known as Cuttyhunk, though it was abandoned after some reconnaissance trips into the interior. In search of a passage to the Far East, Giovanni da Verrazzano had given the name Arcadia to Virginia after his voyages in the 1520s (the mythical name was also later used, with a variant spelling, to refer to the French colony Acadia, what is now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia). But diseases to which the Indians had no immunity had spoilt the idyll, killing ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants. Squanto might well have died of measles or smallpox spread by the Europeans but, ironically, his life had been saved through being carried off by a slaver captain named Hunt.

  Squanto escaped and lived in Cornhill in the heart of the City of London with a merchant named John Slaney, who was the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company. Slaney sent him to Newfoundland to act as a guide and interpreter to the New World for the company, and he was befriended by another explorer named Captain Thomas Dermer. Previously an associate of the explorer John Smith, Dermer worked for Ferdinando Gorges, one of the keenest early investors in New England colonies. Squanto was hired for Dermer’s exploratory expedition which visited what was now Plymouth. He was much needed as the Nausets, the Indians who had attacked the Pilgrims at First Encounter Beach, were still raging against Europeans on account of Hunt kidnapping so many of their clan.

  A savage desire for revenge beat in the breasts of the Indians of Nauset, as had been shown by that fight on the beach. Only months before, Dermer had been very nearly killed when exploring for potential fishing settlements. Squanto saved Dermer’s life. Now Squanto was to do something similar for the Pilgrims.

  However, the really important person was waiting in the wings, to judge the reaction to his messenger. This was Massasoit, king of the Pokanoket tribe, part of the wider Wampanoag federation of tribes whose name means ‘the people of the eastern dawn’. Massasoit lived forty miles away at what is now Rhode Island but ruled most of the area from there to the east coast. He was hidden up in the woods above Plymouth with sixty of his men and his brother Quadequina.

  Samoset now indicated that the Pilgrims should raise their eyes. Above them on the horizon was the extraordinary sight of the powerful Indian king and his magnificent entourage of braves.

  Massasoit in fact needed the bedraggled travellers as much as they needed him. He had some awareness of the English, their tools and their useful guns as he and his brother had met Thomas Dermer a couple of years before. The forward-thinking chief was determined to use an alliance with the newcomers to his advantage against another local tribe, the Narragansett Indians who had escaped the plague that had wiped out so many. To Massasoit’s great resentment, now that his people were so diminished and weakened, the Narragansetts who were once his rivals had become his overlords. The Pokanokets had been particularly badly affected by the plague, being reduced from 15,000 to less than 1,000. But for the Pilgrims, this terrible tragedy was a piece of great good luck because it meant that the land was free and that Massasoit was prepared to make an alliance with them.

  Massasoit had been spying on the Pilgrims all winter. They had often felt they were being watched when they were alone or in twos and threes in the woods setting traps or shooting birds. The Indians could have attacked but did not do so. The rapid depletion of the numbers of settlers convinced Massasoit that they were not going to harm him and that some kind of treaty could be negotiated. In the past historians tended to believe the Indian populations were innocent dupes of the early English settlers. The development of ethnohistory has shown the Indians had their own agendas to use powerful newcomers against other tribes.

  In the same daring spirit that got him to Holland, Edward now volunteered to go up the hill and parley with the Indians. He rushed towards the braves, bearing two knives as a present for Massasoit, as well as a copper chain with a jewel on it, while to his brother Quadequina he gave a ‘jewel to hang in his ear’, as well as a ‘pot of strong water’, i.e. alcohol, and a good quantity of butter, all of which were warmly accepted.

  Massasoit was ‘grave of countenance, and spare of speech’, in fact all that a king should be. Fired up by the exciting sense of occasion, Edward made a grandiloquent speech that King James saluted the chief with words of love and peace and did ‘accept of him as his friend and ally’, and that the governor wished to trade with him. Massasoit listened to this eagerly, although Edward felt his elaborate language was not adequately translated. The king gave him three or four groundnuts and some tobacco.

  It was the beginning of years of listening, observing, and trying to keep the peace. Edward’s account in Mourt’s Relation suggests his fascination with this new world, these new peoples so outside his experience – yet for whom he seems to have felt no fear.

  After eating and drinking and expressing admiration for Edward’s sword and armour, Massasoit left Edward as a hostage with Quadequina, whom Edward approved of as ‘a very proper tall young man, of a very modest and seemly Countenance’.

  Placing his bows and arrows on the ground, Massasoit and twenty followers set off to parley with Governor John Carver. Despite the Pilgrims’ unprepossessing appearance – their clothes were now very raggedy and dirty after their ordeals – they managed to greet the Indians with considerable ceremony and a musket salute. The Wampanoag leaders were led to a green rug with cushions. John Carver’s presence was heralded by the blowing of a trumpet and someone beating a drum. He appeared and kissed Massasoit’s hand, whereupon Massasoit embraced him.

  Then they sat down and had more strong drink, probably aquavit, and a little meat. Observers noticed that Massasoit, who was heavily oiled with dark red paint, trembled throughout the event. In fact, despite the chief’s friendliness, there had also been a secret powwow among the Wampanoags to put a curse on the Pilgrims, in case they were not going to be the allies they needed. The Wampanoags had strong suspicions that, as well as firearms, English people carried in their luggage a plague which they could unleash at will – an imaginative theory which had an element of truth.

  Nevertheless a glorious and moving peace treaty was celebrated that day between the great Indian chief and his new friends, as the two allies agreed six articles of peace:

    I.  That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people.

   II.  And if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him.<
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  III.  That if any of our tools were taken away when our people were at work, he should cause them to be restored, and if ours did any harm to any of his, we would do the like to them.

  IV.  If any did unjustly war against him, we would aid him; if any did war against us, he should aid us.

   V.  He should send to his neighbour confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong us, butmight be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

  VI.  That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them.

  Lastly, that doing thus, King James would esteem of him as his friend and ally.

  The king approved this and his followers clapped. The simple but businesslike agreement kept the peace for thirty years.

  The Indians liked the trumpet, which they took in turns to blow. Edward recorded the king and his men ‘lay all night in the woods, not above half an English mile from us, and all their wives and women with them’. The Wampanoags said that within eight or nine days they would come and set corn on the other side of the brook, and stay there all summer. Slightly alarmed by this and not knowing what to make of it, the Pilgrims had various of their number keep watch, ‘but there was no appearance of danger’. As another token of friendship, they asked the king to send over his kettle and they filled it full of peas. Squanto ended what had been a most successful day by tickling ‘fat and sweet’ eels with his feet, catching them ‘with his hands without any other instrument’, and bringing them to the Pilgrims. Enchanting, unexpected elements of Elysium had begun creeping into the lives of the settlers.