He also enjoyed debating with the Indians. The historian Karen Kupperman has pointed out that Edward and the Pilgrims believed the Indians lived in a ‘civil society’: ‘Indians and English did not come to these confrontations with set, preconceived categories for describing others; both the native Americans and the English were evolving definitions of themselves as groups in this period, so the processes of defining self and other went forward together and were mutually reinforcing.’
It seems likely the widely read Edward was influenced by John Smith’s ideas of the moral duty of cultural dissemination to improve the lot of indigenous peoples. Smith believed the English must transmit to the people whose country ‘we challenge, use and possess’ the civilisation passed on to the English by their own ancestors. In his magisterial Manitou and Providence, the historian Neal Salisbury singles Edward out for remaining ‘the single exception, albeit a partial and timid one, to the colony’s aversion to preaching to Indians’. Salisbury sees Edward’s natural tact and diplomatic ability harnessed to make sure the Indians were their friends and allies.
* * *
The skilled artisans and radical thinkers who made up the colony at Plymouth had to adapt for any eventuality. When their ship’s carpenter died, the house carpenter had to solve the problem of taking corn up rivers in the rain so it was not ruined. In this land of rivers, lakes and bays, the carpenter – an ‘ingenious man’ – invented a covered sailing ship. One of the shallops had a special deck nailed across her ‘and so made her a convenient and wholesome vessel, very fit and comfortable for their use’. She lasted them for seven years, during which she went up and down the rocky coast, and she was shallow-draught so could also go up tidal rivers. The same carpenter probably also built the frame houses carried up the rivers and erected on site at the new trading posts.
By the late 1620s Plymouth had a successful import–export operation of their surplus corn and was also a fierce participant in the territorial wars for control of the lucrative fur trade. With the French in Canada, the Dutch on the Hudson and the English in New England, the European powers began to converge in a deadly combination. In 1629 the mild-mannered Pilgrims seized the French Fort Pentagouet at the foot of the Penobscot River, sending its commander packing. It became their most north-easterly trading post until it was retaken by the French in 1635.
The Pilgrims’ main trading post at this time was a strong wooden building on the Kennebec about a hundred miles from the Canadian border at Cushnoc, just below the falls.* They had fifteen miles on each side of the river. Cushnoc had to be manned all year round. John Howland, the young man who had been swept overboard the Mayflower, took on this lonely job, protected only by palisades against bears and wolves. A former indentured servant who had the force of personality to become a leading colonist and one of the Undertakers, Howland had a fierce temper, a brave heart and cool nerves. They were needed in the isolated pine forests of north-east Maine where he might not see a fellow Englishman for months (although Edward and other Pilgrims did visit this dramatic spot, sometimes staying for weeks at a time). They were put up in the twenty-foot-square trading house which had been constructed in Plymouth and taken upriver. Here they waited for the Indian canoes to come downriver in the spring. Howland’s wife Elizabeth (née Tilley) and their children spent time there too in the summer, fishing and hunting while Howland bargained with the local Indians. Elizabeth may even have given birth there, high up in the mountains.
* * *
At some point a serpent was bound to enter paradise. The arrival of many more English from 1630 was the death knell of easy relations between them and the Indians. After John Endecott had settled in Salem in 1629 as the advance guard of the Massachusetts Bay Company, 20,000 people poured into New England over the next decade, the majority of them living in Massachusetts. In 1629 at a great Puritan meeting at Sempringham in Lincolnshire near Tattershall Castle, home of the 4th Earl of Lincoln, some of the most famous names in New England history – Governors John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut – took the decision to depart. They knew that they had to have their own way of worshipping in dignity and peace, and left their comfortable homes in the belief that they were imperilling their mortal souls if they stayed. Their most brilliant clergymen, such as Thomas Shepard, were being arrested, expelled from their pulpits and forbidden to preach.
Endecott had the power to organise everything for the patentees, while they tied up details about their charter. In a cunning move, they took the charter with them so it could not be revoked. The aim was that there should be nothing about the colony to which the king could take exception. It was very important they appeared to obey the Church of England so that there would be no excuse for the Crown to send soldiers.
But times were changing at Plymouth. Ever since the Division of Land, Governor Bradford had been distraught that colonists farming far away from the town would unravel the bonds that had tied the settlers together. As Bradford had rightly feared, they would establish their own small churches, and would forget the Covenant. The Pilgrims – and especially Bradford – had longed to banish all the worst elements of human nature in a genuinely utopian fashion; but in practice this was hard. The simple life – once yearned for – governed by very strict laws, began to feel restrictive and oppressive. The leaders had wanted all single men to live in families so they could benefit from the good example of godly older couples, but this custom was soon ignored. Bradford himself quoted Pliny approvingly, that in the virtuous days of early Rome, he was ‘a dangerous man, that would not content himself with seven acres of land’; but to the Plymouth colonists, seven acres was now paltry.
One hundred acres was felt to be a reasonable size for a farm for a family of five members. The colonists started to agree territories and fields. Their land stretched up the Eel River with its low green banks and away from the little double street of Plymouth. Inevitably people begin to think about settling across the bay and up the coast, expanding into what became the New England towns of Duxbury, Scituate and Marshfield.
There seems no reason to doubt the colony had bought the extra land from Massasoit or indeed that he had granted the area to them in the 1621 peace treaty. The Aldens and the Standishes were the first to move away permanently. It had become too time-consuming to move backwards and forwards between their land and their old houses in the township. The new settlement was called Duxbury, probably named after Myles Standish’s ancestral home, Duxbury Hall, near Chorley in Lancashire. Alden put a wide fence round his property, which had fields and orchards. These first buildings were small and very narrow. As the years went by colonists added porches and elaborate floor plans, but in the earliest days the frame timber houses were probably ten feet wide and around forty feet long, as per the Alden house. Records show how the ‘bounds of the land of Mr John Alden at Duxburrow’ were laid out or walked by Edward, and other members of the colony. It was an exciting if bittersweet moment. The Duxbury-dwellers were meant to return to Plymouth every week for the Sabbath service, but during the harsh winters travel was impossible – hence they founded their own churches, to William Bradford’s great sorrow.
Edward and Susanna were already farming fields they had north of Duxbury. Encouraged by the good corn harvests, they made plans to relocate to what was then called Green Harbour.* As Bradford lamented, the lure of the land was like a magnet pulling the original town apart, an early example of the expansion into new territories that became one of the great themes of American history.
Like all great achievers and leaders, William Bradford was an obsessive. Plymouth Colony depended on his vision and passion. He had thought by giving special ‘good farms to special persons, that would promise to live at Plymouth, and likely to be helpful to the church or commonwealth’, it would tie their owners to Plymouth. But ‘alas’, he wrote, ‘this remedy proved worse than the disease; for within a few years those that had thus got foot
ing there rent themselves away’. They had gone on and on petitioning to be allowed to leave ‘by wearing the rest with importunity and pleas of necessity, so as they must either suffer them to go, or live in continual opposition and contention’. In ten years there was another dispersal of the inhabitants to different parts of the colony. Recalling it, Bradford could not stop a cry of lament: ‘and thus was this poor church left like an ancient mother, grown old and forsaken of her children … she that had made many rich became herself poor’.
Perhaps it was inevitable once families had adapted to making a satisfactory life in the wilderness they had less need to cling together, especially as there was so much unclaimed land. The colonists pushed out, buying and exchanging land in an energetic and successful way. Wealth came to Plymouth too with the arrival of the Massachusetts settlers, to whom the Pilgrims provided animals.
During the 1630s seven new towns were created. Each clapboard house stood in its own neatly fenced lot, not far from its neighbours. At the centre of most New England towns, just as it was at the centre of the inhabitants’ lives, was the congregational church which also did duty as the meeting house for the town government. Interiors had floorboards sawn mainly from the stately white cedar, which never seemed to warp. Furniture was usually made of black walnut.
And a few Pilgrims moved back to England. One seems to have been Edward’s brother Gilbert. The whole New England adventure had been too much for him. Five years younger than Edward, Gilbert was not present for the Division of Cattle in 1627. Sadly life did not go so well for this Winslow. On 11 October 1631 he was buried in Ludlow, Shropshire. It was not far from his old home. He never made a will, though he left an estate valued at £30.
Edward’s reaction to everything seems to have been a sort of stubborn patience and an amazing confidence that the Lord would provide. In a couple of years his brothers Kenelm and Josiah appeared in Gilbert’s stead.
* * *
Plymouth’s community ideals crumbled a little more when it was discovered Isaac Allerton was secretly trading for his own benefit. Isaac had married Fear, the daughter of the church’s beloved Elder William Brewster. She was much younger than him and had arrived in America in 1623. Being the saintly Brewster’s son-in-law had given Isaac countenance. Brewster’s wife had died in 1627 and he was considerably more frail after her loss. Perhaps it was the additional strain of Isaac’s behaviour that made him seek refuge in the new settlement at Duxbury with his old friend from Leiden days, Myles Standish. There was anger in the colony about Isaac Allerton and, though Brewster remained a hallowed figure, he must have found it upsetting for contempt to be directed at his daughter Fear’s family. It turned out Isaac had been abusing his position as the London agent to make deals for himself, even while he was pursuing a new grant at the end of the 1620s. Isaac had always been a slightly slippery character but now it was discovered he was not playing straight with the colony. On his trips to London he was creaming off a personal profit from the goods. He even established a trader and trapper named Edward Ashley to operate solely on his behalf up at Penobscot.*
The colonists’ outrage increased when Isaac began colluding with Thomas Morton. Morton had been a sophisticated lawyer, a member of Clifford’s Inn. In 1624 he moved from London to what is now Quincy, twenty miles north of Plymouth, with a man named Captain Wollaston and a number of indentured young men. Their employer was Sir Ferdinando Gorges. As far as the royalist Gorges could help it, not all the people settling New England would be rebellious Puritans. Thomas Morton was certainly no Puritan. Under different circumstances Edward, who had a good sense of humour, might have liked Morton, who was as interested as he was in the origins of the Indians and their customs.
Morton had the sort of metropolitan witty temperament that found little to recommend in many Plymouth-dwellers. Thinking their gruff earnestness unsophisticated and tedious, he presumed they were all ignorant men. In fact it was more that they were busy, having to spend an inordinate amount of time in hard physical labour to keep their farms going. Morton found Plymouth’s strict laws ridiculous and their military ceremonies foolish. His nickname for Myles Standish was Captain Shrimp.
The sarcastic and dissolute Morton was a difficult neighbour. Antipathetic to its sincere ideals, he saw a great chance for amusement in the democratic way of life at Plymouth, noting with deep irony that what he called ‘a Parliament’ was called for the most banal occasions. A highly educated man, he was easily bored by the people at Plymouth, whom he called ‘the illiterate multitude’. He began secretly (or not so secretly) to refer to the settlers as the Moles.
The Pilgrims had been brought this great distance by the power of their religion but it was neither witty nor sophisticated. Trust in God gave them an inner confidence which allowed them to survive every life-shaking disaster. They took pride in the plainness of their living. Their making of an incorruptible new world, into which all the sinful things such as pride would not intrude, made for a simplicity which could appear dull and dour. Badmouthing them when he got back to London, Morton said the Pilgrims’ default position was against learning, an unfair but successful slur. They were ‘vilifying the two universities [i.e. Oxford and Cambridge] with uncivil terms; accounting what is there obtained by study is but unnecessary learning; not considering that learning does enable men’s minds to converse with elements, of a higher nature than is to be found within the habitation of the Mole’. The Pilgrims’ religious scrupulousness meant they were always ‘troubling their brains more than reason would require about things that are indifferent’. The Venetian ambassador to England in 1637 read Morton’s New English Canaan describing his time in New England, and was appalled that ‘the Brownists’ (i.e. the Pilgrims) thought ignorance the key to heaven: ‘For this reason their followers have ceased to associate with others and have withdrawn to New England, which is further north than Virginia, calling it New Canaan, which to the Hebrews was the land of Promise.’
As traders whose hard work had made them masters of the area’s fur trade, Plymouth was suspicious of Morton’s intentions. But their greatest concern – which other settlements shared – was that he would sell the Indians guns. The cynical and worldly Morton believed, since all European colonists were secretly selling the Indians guns, there was nothing wrong with doing so openly – especially if it gave him and his associates access to the beaver market.
Morton and his men began to have parties with Indian ladies. The Pilgrims were admiring, friendly and fair to the Indians but they were disturbed by the natives’ free attitude to sexuality. The licentious Morton relished it. He wrote songs to the squaws, one of which contained what were regarded as infamous lines: ‘Lasses in beaver coats, come away, Ye shall be welcome to us night and day’. Such antics infuriated Plymouth, not just because it was dissolute but because Indian men were very possessive of their wives. The Pilgrims feared such abuses might lead them to turn on the English colonies en masse.
To the Pilgrims, Morton did not have the sense of a personal boundary between the colonist and the Indian which they believed was necessary. He hung obscene verses on an eighty-foot maypole which may or may not have been a phallic symbol. Bradford wrote that Morton was celebrating in a pagan fashion – similar to ‘the beastly practices of the mad bacchanalians’. Morton’s house, Merrymount, was becoming a den of iniquity, but it was only when the Pilgrims became worried about guns, and were asked to get rid of Morton by his neighbours because of people being killed in the woods, that they took action. They could put up with his mockery, but drew the line at weapons.
Most of the little English plantations – especially that of David Thompson at Piscataqua, on the border between New Hampshire and Maine, and Roger Conant at Naumkeag (i.e. Salem) – asked Plymouth to try to reason with Morton. Twice he was instructed to desist, but Morton would not listen to their argument that trading in guns was against their common safety and indeed the king’s proclamation, telling them that the king was dead. Captain Standish w
as sent to seize him. This was not difficult. Though they were armed, most of his men were too drunk to fight. Morton was put on a ship headed for England.
But he returned, employed as Isaac Allerton’s secretary and helpmeet, living in his house in Plymouth. Morton had not reckoned with the character of John Endecott, governor of Salem. Endecott took himself and his role very seriously. As hot-tempered as Myles Standish, he not only hacked down the maypole, he took summary action, seizing Morton again, binding him in chains and sending him back to England in disgrace.
Further strain came at this time of change in 1630 when John Billington shot a man named John Newcomen. Anxious about how to punish Billington – they had a horror of shedding blood – the Pilgrims asked the advice of Governor Winthrop, who had just arrived in Massachusetts. Billington and his family were constantly in hot water with the authorities and were one of the ‘profanest families amongst them’. Nevertheless, the government was reluctant to execute John. Back came the harsh answer. The Old Testament was unequivocal. Billington had to die so the land could be purged of blood.
Billington’s death struck a dark and sombre note. The idyll was drawing to its close. Meanwhile, in England Morton was busy doing damage to the Puritan colonies. Working once more for his old employer Sir Ferdinando Gorges, this time in a legal capacity, Morton stirred up trouble. Nathaniel Hawthorne would later poke fun at the Pilgrims’ treatment of Morton, but he represented a considerable threat to their existence by damaging their reputation. Thanks to Morton’s information, Gorges denounced the colonists in a petition to the king as treasonously allying with the Dutch, saying they nursed ‘disaffections both to his Majesty’s government and the state ecclesiastical’, including the habit of magistrates (including Edward) performing civil marriages quite illegally. When Edward next set foot in London on business, he was slung into prison.
The Mayflower Page 15
