The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

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  On 1 March 1625, John Robinson died after eight days of illness. He never saw the little colony he had inspired. Despite his illness he had insisted on preaching twice on the Sunday preceding his death. There was some comfort to be found in the fact that the funeral of Robinson, who had been treated so harshly by his mother country, was attended by all Leiden’s most eminent intellectuals. His grave is beneath the Pieterskerk, surrounded by the most celebrated professors and powerful members of the town government.

  Robinson’s wife Bridget, the sister of Mrs Carver, lived for almost another twenty years. One of her sons, Isaac, went to join the pilgrim colony in 1631, while another, John, became a doctor and returned to England. In 1629 a last remnant of the church would make their way over the waters in a ship hired by the powerful Massachusetts Bay Company and then be guided south by delighted members of the church. After that the congregation in Leiden slowly disintegrated. There is a rumour that Bridget Robinson joined the Dutch Reformed Church at Amsterdam and moved there. She made her will in Leiden in 1643, though the date of her death is not known.

  Extremely sad too for Edward and the other colonists was the sudden death of Robert Cushman in the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1625. Despite his fussy ways he had been one of the colony’s most important figures.

  The plague killed 40,000 Londoners that year. Trade was at a standstill, and this stasis may have convinced the Adventurers to rid themselves at last of their investment and release Plymouth to the colonists, who bought themselves out. The Adventurers eventually sold the colony’s debt for £1,800 to fifty-eight people, known as the Purchasers, four of whom were the religious London merchants who remained interested. A smaller group (eight from Plymouth, four from London) called the Undertakers ‘undertook’ to repay the Adventurers within the next six years. The debts in fact would not be properly discharged until 1645 due to inaccurate accounts. Edward and other Undertakers had to give money from the sale of their homes to make up the shortfall. In return for taking on this burden the Undertakers had special rights. They were to have a monopoly on the trade with the Indians, and the rest of the Purchasers were bound to produce annual payments of corn and tobacco over the next six years to help with the debt. Buying out the Adventurers resulted in huge changes for the Pilgrims. The land and future profits would now be divided between the shareholders, who were mainly the settlers themselves.

  They were divided into twelve groups, each of which received a cow and two goats. Although all the surrounding meadowland and all fishing and fowling was free to all or held in common, it was feared that the colonists might not be efficient enough to make the payments on the huge debt. Their farming activities would have to be expanded, but they had come to realise the area around Plymouth had poor soil. It was inevitable that a small township would no longer contain them.

  On 22 May 1627, at the usual solemn and ceremonial court that marked a Plymouth Colony gathering to deliberate on matters of importance, it was announced how the assets of the company – ‘to wit the cows and the goats’ – would be divided. Still surviving is a list of the 156 colonists, divided into twelve lots of fifteen colonists each. Thanks to animals brought on the Anne and other ships, by 1627 Plymouth had a herd of sixteen cattle, over twenty goats, around fifty pigs and many chickens. Sheep are not mentioned but probate inventories show the settlers owned some. Their wool would have been spun and carded to make stockings and jerseys.

  Around this time Edward’s brother John married Mary Chilton, who, legend has it, was the first European woman who stepped on what has become known as Plymouth Rock. She had got three shares in the 1623 Division of Land, one for herself and one for each of her parents, who had died during the first terrible winter.

  The Division of Cattle not only gives all the names of those living at Plymouth in 1627, it also shows how tightly the settlers had to cooperate with one another. The company did not have a huge number of animals. It was not a parish pump they gathered round, but the heifers.

  The Winslows’ house is the best-documented original house of what are usually called the ‘First Comers’. It would last into the 1660s, being substantial enough to serve as the colony court house. When they sold it in 1639 to another merchant named Thomas Wallis for £120, the details of the sale show the first property included land stretching to the water. There was a barn and stabling for the family’s horses (the subject of much envy to the Wampanoags, who had no horses), a ‘backhouse’, an outhouse and some fruit trees. Despite the first years of very hard graft Plymouth people had not lost their taste for the accoutrements of pleasant English life which they wished to reproduce in America. When Edward sold the house he uprooted the fruit trees and took them across the bay by boat. Tradition has it that plants had come over on the Mayflower. Although crab apple trees were native to North America these may have been cuttings from the renowned pear trees of Edward’s native Worcestershire.

  Showing signs of being a careful businessman like his brother John (and unlike his father), Edward retained the barn, stables and fold yard for his sheep, and the right to come and go through his old garden. Locks were itemised as a precious resource and always removed by the vendor, who used them in their next building.

  The house was comfortably equipped with wainscoting, and neatly fenced. Recent archaeological excavations have shown that the early buildings in Plymouth Colony lacked stone foundations because the Pilgrims did not have the tools, and wood was plentiful. They were post-in-earth constructions, as were the later grander dwellings at Duxbury and Marshfield.

  The Pilgrims soon imported furniture, though iron rusted and material was corroded by the salty winds. Traditionally the bed was the most expensive item of furniture and in the parlour was a ‘wainscot bedstead’ which would have been built with the house.

  Edward’s younger brother Kenelm would be one of the key carpenters in the colony. Almost all furniture for the houses of Plymouth was produced by them; and as time went on and better houses were built, carpenters would also be largely responsible for their design.

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  Edward Winslow’s life flipped between England and the wild American frontier, between conducting business with merchants in London and trading with half-naked Indians beside vast unknown rivers. One thing the relationships with Indians and the merchants of the City had in common was that they thrived on trust. Just as much as the keen-eyed merchants (whose grandiose portraits of themselves slung about with gold and ermine hung in their livery companies), the Indians (who were the key to the hugely profitable fur to be got from their connections in Hudson Bay) believed their word was their bond.

  Edward spent time in London with Emanuel Altham and with one of the investors, James Sherley. The Puritan Sherley was a man of property with a goldsmith’s shop on London Bridge, a villa in Surrey and a house in Crooked Lane. Edward had letters sent there. Since Sherley became an executor of Edward’s will, it seems likely Edward stayed there, as well as using it as a poste restante. Over the years, as Edward became one of the chief people going back and forth to London to raise money, he became friends with the other Puritan merchants who had kept faith with the colony. One such investor, a wholesale linen draper named Thomas Andrewes, was one of the greatest financiers of the day. He and his Puritan businessman brother Richard both had shares in the Plymouth Colony.

  By 1627 the experiment was regarded as a success. The late 1620s were delightful years. Bradford wrote nostalgically that they suddenly felt the sweetness of the country. Plymouth was a haven for wildlife: to the north were the cranberry bogs, full of fowl, that were the headwaters of the Eel River and its large watershed with its many wild birds and flora and fauna. Plymouth Beach, the sandbar stretching out for three miles at right angles to the harbour and forming a protective wall, was an important nesting point for migratory birds, the piping plover and the tern. The Pilgrims named a section of the coast across Plymouth Bay Brant Rock due to the Brant geese they saw there. Thoreau wrot
e in Walden that the sound of geese was like a ‘tempest’ when they flew low over his house, ‘their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat’.

  In a few years the colonists would start farming in the low-lying lush green pastures of the Eel River, inland from the grassy sand dunes and pebbled beaches that formed Plymouth’s natural habitat. It was sheltered from the high Atlantic winds. Salt marshes transformed their lives, providing winter fodder for cattle without the necessity of having to prepare the land for hay. Coastal salt marsh in New England opened up great areas of land for profitable farming. No wonder the Plymouth colonists believed at times they were saved from God’s wrath.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Good Farms

  Over the next decade, more scattered settlements began to appear forty miles north of the Pilgrims. When news spread in the City of London that people could live there despite the harsh environment, merchants backed a flurry of small plantations, mostly along the coast. The settlers made their living fishing and trading.

  English ships left crew behind in an exercise called double-manning. They grew vegetables and caught and dried fish to be sent back on the next ships. Dim smoky interiors sheltered grimly determined people clinging to subsistence.

  The haphazard new settlements were a source of some irritation to the Pilgrims. There were no proper maps so the Council of New England often granted licences to huge tracts of land which overlapped with existing claims. Inevitably on an unknown coastline, ignorance of London grants meant fishermen felt free to set up stages in whatever bays they came upon, pitching their tents until their drying frames had enough fish on them to make the return worthwhile.

  Nevertheless, the fact that the Pilgrims had managed to survive meant that New England became a plausible destination for the anxious godly. In The Planter’s Plea the Dorchester clergyman John White described how ‘men but of mean and weak estates of themselves’ had conceived ‘God’s Providence had directed them unto that place’. They had sent home tidings of ‘the soil and inhabitants … which occasioned other men to take knowledge of the place, and to take it into consideration’.

  Serious-minded Puritans in England increasingly believed the Church of England was under threat from Charles I, who became king in 1625 and was married to the Catholic Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria. Roger Conant’s influential Puritan connections meant he was the beneficiary of a new mission to colonise New England and save the Puritan religion, inspired by White and merchants in the west of England. The enterprising White knew Roger Conant’s brother, and he now invited the exiled Conant to join the Dorchester Company’s little settlement, Gloucester on Cape Ann. Conant gave a description of Myles Standish losing his already short temper with some of the company’s fishermen because Plymouth had a patent to fish there. They would have come to blows or worse had Conant not intervened.

  Roger Conant was a man of character and integrity. In 1626, after the Dorchester Company went out of business, he founded a settlement at a place the Indians called Naumkeag north of Boston Bay. Two years later the vigorous John Endecott arrived as the representative of a new Puritan colonising entity – the Massachusetts Bay Company. It absorbed both the Dorchester Company and Roger Conant’s group. Endecott renamed Naumkeag Salem. It was intended to have the sense of the Hebrew word ‘shalom’, meaning peace.

  At least the small settlements were a source of the goods which Plymouth always needed. When it came to the Plymouth government’s ears that the short-lived Monhegan plantation started by West Country merchants was about to break up, William Bradford and Edward Winslow dashed off to see if any goods could be salvaged. What they got there, and from a French ship cast away at Sagadahoc with textiles on board, enabled further trading with the Indians.

  The Pilgrims’ hope that they were going to make their fortune by fishing had come to an end when the Little James sank in 1624. Fishing was never going to be the solution. There were too many professional deep-sea fishing operations to compete with. Plymouth had proved too shallow a harbour for transatlantic trade and had too few ships. Their fish salter burnt to the ground and the experiment ended.

  In the forests of the north were the beaver that would bring the profits the colony needed.* Edward did not have all the necessary information, but he was now beginning to make informed guesses as to where they were. After one expedition yielded fur worth £700 (around £70,000 in today’s money), it was seen as the best way forward. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, who were always short of the trinkets and tools Indians liked, the tribes of north-eastern Maine wanted the colonists’ corn. The recent plague had killed many Indian farmers, whose fields were overgrown with weeds and many were starving. It had been a strange and moving moment for the colony when their own harvest was bountiful, and the pleasure was enhanced because their crop was so valuable.

  The Pilgrims’ first trading post was by Buzzards Bay on the Manomet River, with another by Massasoit’s longhouse in Sowams. They initially believed the best skins were to the west because that was where the Dutch were. But in fact the thickest furs came from the north-east. Europeans were believed to lack the skills and patience to capture beavers, which were the architects of the New England woods. Their lodges dammed thousands of streams and made deep ponds.

  The Indians navigated by canoe the many small rivers of the Kennebec watershed, as they did most New England streams and rivers. At a time without horses the innumerable waterways of Maine meant they could travel wherever they pleased. Steeply forested Maine, which lies between Plymouth and Canada, was swiftly traversable in a canoe. Skilled canoeists travelled hundreds of miles a day, utilising the rapids and system of portage routes (carrying the canoe between waterways was called ‘portaging’) which were thousands of years old. Canoeing was a method of travel all early seventeenth-century travellers took to with delight and wonder. The town of Salem, surrounded by rivers and brooks, was believed to possess more canoes than all the rest of Massachusetts, with every household having ‘a waterhouse or two’.

  Once the Pilgrims discovered that the best furs came down from Hudson Bay they deserted their first trading post in favour of one miles up the 170-mile Kennebec River. Here, in the echoing Indian hunting grounds of the north, was where Plymouth needed to have agents awaiting the loaded canoes that came south.

  The Kennebec was a direct route to the Chaudière River in Canada. Edward became a veteran of journeys towards Canada to meet representatives of the northern tribes. The territory was harsh and bleak. He passed endless middens of oyster shells sometimes fifteen feet high along the riverbanks. Local tribes had eaten oysters for centuries. Two hundred miles from Plymouth the great unmapped tidal river recalled thousands of years of tribal history. The Abenaki people lived on these most important trade routes.

  The trading season started in April when the snows melted and the Indians began their helter-skelter ride down through the forests, furs piled up high in their canoes. Observers recounted their amazing ability to live and travel in the wilderness, which Edward himself was privileged to witness. By now he was bilingual, a man with impressive diplomatic skills, picked to be in charge of the two most important trading expeditions to the Kennebec River in 1625 and 1626.

  Maine had been the place of the failed Popham Colony of 1607. Even the intrepid John Smith thought it was a country ‘rather to affright, than delight one’. Its sublime scenery could be forbidding. The New England winters were sharp enough but in Maine the snow stayed on the ground for two months longer. The densely wooded interior concealed an amazing network of ancient pathways and river routes, and Edward had his first glimpses of the great unbroken pine forests of North America, full of otter, deer and beaver.

  Because of his special links with Massasoit, the energetic Edward had found himself journeying to within a hundred miles of the Canadian border. Ten years later most of the local Indians – especially the Massachusetts, after Myles Standish’s attack on them – were too scared to trade with the Pilgrims. This made t
he colonists even more dependent on Massasoit for intelligence and protection, for negotiating the wilderness and for bringing them valuable furs.

  For Massasoit’s part, being Plymouth’s ally meant he profited as a middleman, taking his cut on the wampum trade and extracting tribute from local tribes who had to negotiate with him before they could deal with the English. Being allied to the English enhanced his own power amongst the struggling communities who had suffered badly from the plague.

  Edward had the goodwill of the Indians to rely on. He portaged the secret single-file paths which the Indians had created with their signs called ‘blazes’ marked on the trees. Above Cushnoc, the last navigable place on the Kennebec, Indians poled their canoes upriver through multiple rapids till they reached the river’s headwaters at Moosehead Lake.

  Skowhegan, in the Kennebec River Valley midway between Cushnoc and Moosehead Lake, was part of the 1629 Pilgrim grant made by the New England Council in London. The Pilgrims called a unique inland delta on the lower Kennebec, Merrymeeting Bay. It is a freshwater tidal estuary into which no less than six rivers empty. Thanks to its saltwater tide it never freezes in the winter and is a meeting point for colonies of migrating birds which feed on the migratory fish such as salmon and eels.

  As the years passed Edward became the principal go-between for the colony and the Indians. Bargaining with the Indians brought out his exuberance. He showed them beads, and other goods, and England’s proudest export, cloth. Indians began to adopt cloth mantles in contrast to the furs they skinned and dried with such skill.