The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  CHAPTER IX

  Massachusetts Begins

  Puritan issues – such as their opposition to the English church’s practice of making the sign of the Cross – had not gone away after the Mayflower left England. The godly had had hopes of reforming the church from within. However, by the end of the 1620s, under the Church of England’s rising star William Laud (who became Bishop of London in 1627 and would be made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633), the emphasis on sacraments, ceremonial, and ecclesiastical hierarchy meant the church was widely feared to be travelling further towards Roman Catholicism. Lectureships – preachers paid for by the community – the solace of Puritans, were stopped. Like the Pilgrims, these immigrants were convinced that a terrible judgement was coming to England, and New England would be a Noah’s Ark in which they could shelter.

  Edward became a close personal friend of the man appointed governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, a thoughtful if somewhat austere personality. Winthrop’s yearning for a life of proper godliness meant he had long been considering emigration, though he was a member of a key administrative English institution, the Court of Wards and Liveries, and would have to leave behind his large estate in Suffolk. As part of the local elite he had had aspirations to be a Member of Parliament. Many of the people who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had similar issues. They held important positions in England such as landowners and lawyers, but as serious Puritans their careers were blocked. All were forced out of England by their commitment to their beliefs.

  In the intimidating atmosphere created by Laud and Charles I, many wealthy and eminent men – some of whom, such as John Pym, Lord Saye and Sele, and Lord Brooke, were the most vocal of Charles I’s parliamentary critics – saw a future in backing godly colonies abroad. Even Oliver Cromwell had feelers out for a place to settle away from the great tyranny,* either in New England or Providence Island off the coast of today’s Nicaragua.

  Plymouth could not avoid being involved in the changes brought by the thousands of Massachusetts immigrants. Edward Winslow was attracted by their keen minds. Highly educated, they were accompanied by some of the most cerebral of the Puritan clergy who disagreed with Laud. They brought a new element to America.

  The Massachusetts Bay Company settled along the broad rivers in the coastal country forty miles north of Plymouth. As they spread out west over the next few years, seeking larger farms in the Connecticut Valley, their original homes were occupied by a continuous flood of new immigrants, particularly from East Anglia. To the poet George Herbert, so large were the numbers leaving England it seemed that ‘Religion stands on tiptoe in our land / Ready to pass to the American strand.’

  The Salem group’s leaders in the summer of 1629 were two pastors, Samuel Skelton and Francis Higginson (who was to be Skelton’s assistant). Both had Lincolnshire links. A friend of John Endecott, Skelton had probably once been the vicar of Sempringham, and Higginson was a charmingly enthusiastic Church of England clergyman whose nonconformism was initially tolerated by the bishop. He recently had lost his licence. Since he was about to be prosecuted in the English Court of High Commission, he seized the opportunity to escape on the first ships of what became a mass exodus.

  Skelton and Higginson deepened the interaction begun with John Endecott over Morton. They were not censorious about the Plymouth church, and the pastors asked the Pilgrims’ advice about how to worship in America. The Plymouth Elders and Salem ministers alike shared the desire to recreate a purified church on the lines of Christ’s ancient church – and that drew them together.†

  Skelton and Higginson were anxious not to separate from the mother church in England. However, they found much to like and reassure them about Plymouth church’s practices. The Pilgrims’ church was an inspiration for the system they instituted in America known as Congregationalism. Despite complaints from some of their fellow colonists who feared being regarded as outlaws (about which the Pilgrims remained highly sensitive), Skelton and Higginson decided to abandon the English Book of Common Prayer at Salem. Such practices would eventually become known as New England Congregationalism, or the New England Way. Their decision to make a covenant with God and one another gave the congregation the lead role in deciding the way of the church. After some debate, this got the approval of the Salem community.

  The Reverend Higginson enthused about the country: the curious flies named ‘musquetos’, and the rattlesnakes, bears, and a moose. He reported there were said to be lions at Cape Ann – although he had no evidence for their existence, whereas he had seen the skins of all the other beasts. He discoursed on the ‘fat black earth’ round Massachusetts Bay and Charlestown, and the good stone, slate, limestone, ironstone and ‘marble stone also in such a store, that we have great rocks of it, and a harbour hard by. Our plantation is from thence called Marble Harbour.’ There were wonderful roots and berries. The Indians dyed their clothes what he described as ‘excellent holiday colours that no rain nor washing can alter’.

  Higginson reported that he had not gone without a cap in the daytime for many years due to ill health, but now wore only a nightcap. ‘And whereas beforetime I clothed myself with double clothes and thick waistcoats to keep me warm even in the summer time, I do now go as thin-clad as any, only wearing a light stuff cassock upon my shirt and stuff breeches of one thickness without linings.’ One of his children who had suffered from scrofula, a tuberculotic inflammation of the lymph nodes, seemed almost cured because ‘the very wholesomeness of the air’ was ‘altering, digesting and drying up the cold and crude humours of the body’. The sharp invigorating climate meant ‘a sup of New England’s air is better then a whole draft of old England’s ale’.

  He also cautioned that the average colonist – unless he was sufficiently wealthy to have servants to send ahead to build for him – was going to have to build his own home.* Not only were there ‘no taverns nor alehouse, nor butchers, nor grocers, nor apothecaries’ shops to help what things you need’, there were ‘neither markets nor fairs to buy what you want’ – especially ‘all manner of carpenters’ tools, and a good deal of iron and steel to make nails, and locks, for houses, and furniture for plough and carts … and many other things which were better for you to think of them than to want them here’.

  In fact this portrait was extraordinarily rosy. New England was far harsher than they had expected.

  * * *

  An emigration process of such large numbers required a businesslike and sensible approach with proper records kept. John Endecott was instructed to make detailed notes as to who was arriving off the various boats, and who intended ‘to remain in the country; as also a note of the cattle and all manner of goods, of what kind soever, landed out of them, with the several marks, and names of the owners thereof’. A register was to be taken by an overseer and paper books filled in.

  When the first four ships of the Winthrop Fleet landed at Salem in 1630 they ‘found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and many of those alive weak and sick’. Despite his reports of his own health, the Reverend Higginson was dead. The deputy governor, Thomas Dudley, reported they scarcely had enough corn and bread for a fortnight. Other than a lucky few, most of his fellow shipmates found themselves living in tents, cellars or in the open air, ravaged by sickness, pneumonia and scurvy.

  The colonising organisers were overwhelmed by the amount of labour needed to build a settlement for such numbers and could not cut down enough trees or make enough wattle. Wolves were always trying to kill the weaker specimens of cows, hogs and goats which had come on the Arbella.

  Dudley’s daughter Anne Bradstreet, America’s first published poet, wrote that when she first came to America ‘I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose’ (meaning it rose in horror or anger). However, ‘convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston’. During her cultured adolescence the learned Anne had had access to the magnificent library
at Sempringham, the seat of the Earl of Lincoln, for whom her father was a steward. She was conversant with all kinds of poetic forms and Renaissance high culture, as was common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England for women of the educated classes. Now her friends in America had scarcely enough to eat and slept on the beach amidst their drenched belongings. Trunks of books were either ruined by seawater or never arrived.

  Not impressed by the look of Salem, and anxious about a future which now seemed far from what they had imagined, they set about exploring to find other places to live. Time was short, as Thomas Dudley put it, ‘lest the winter should surprise us before we had builded our houses’. As the death toll rose, a hundred people lost their nerve and returned to the ships going back to England. Half the cows and almost all the mares and foals had died on board. The horses ordered from Ireland never appeared at all. It was such a cold winter that the Charles River froze. The only good thing about that was settlers could travel from plantation to plantation on the ice, instead of waiting for the boats which in future became town ferries.

  The exhausted settlers could not agree as to where their main town and church should be planted. The leaders moved the capital to what they called Boston and built the first church there because of better water supplies, yet many preferred to live along the Charles River in the area now called Charlestown. Others thought Newtown, which became Cambridge, was better. Thomas Dudley had moved there with many of the more socially prominent settlers, who created the streets around Harvard.

  The unfortunate Dudley was publicly excoriated by John Winthrop for trying to build a mansion at a time when no one should crave personal distinction. Dudley told his patroness the Countess of Lincoln that he had ‘yet no table, nor other room to write in than by the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter’. All he wanted was the elaborate wainscoting which he had enjoyed at home. But it was wrong and embarrassing in a new colony where it was important for there not to be too many social differences between the colonists. John Winthrop rolled up his sleeves with the best of them: he was ‘a discreet and sober man, wearing plain apparel, assisting in any ordinary labour, and ruling with much mildness and justice’.

  * * *

  The Massachusetts settlers decided they must secure the eastern seaboard, and they fanned out. After five years there were small plantations at Dorchester, Roxbury, Watertown, Lynn, Newbury, Hingham and Weymouth – Weston’s old colony. Concord, twelve miles west of Watertown, was noted for being ‘right up into the woods’ (which might have amused its future resident Thoreau).

  Three hundred people died in the first winter. They included the Earl of Lincoln’s daughter, Lady Arbella (after whom Winthrop’s ship was named), and her husband, Isaac Johnson – one of the colony’s wealthiest men. Both died only three months after their arrival. People who came from wealthy backgrounds were simply not used to living in such conditions. Instead of farming their new land, they were buried in it. It forms the site of the first cemetery in Boston (now known as the King’s Chapel Burial Ground on Tremont Street).*

  The Pilgrims’ doctor, Samuel Fuller, tended to the camps of new immigrants. If he could not stop them dying, he could at least make their passing more comfortable and less frightening. Edward Winslow was at Salem with Fuller tending to the sick when John Winthrop wrote despondently that the hand of God seemed to be against them at Charlestown, ‘in visiting them with sickness … not sparing the righteous, but partaking with the wicked in these bodily judgements’. This was a bad omen for a company which believed God was on their side. To try to regain His all-powerful favour, a message was sent to Plymouth asking them to take part in a day of prayer. If it worked, it did not do so for long.

  In 1633–4 smallpox carried away many of the old Leiden community, including Thomas Blossom and Richard Masterson. It also killed William Brewster’s two daughters, Fear and Patience. Nor could his medical skills save the sympathetic Samuel Fuller; he who had held the hands of the dying now expired himself. In a cruel blow William Brewster was left quite alone except for his son Jonathan – who was usually lost in his books.

  Once more the Leiden Pilgrims sought God and humbled themselves. At least this time their friends died with their families round them, amongst their possessions and in their own sheets, even if they were worn and patched. Ten years previously they were living twenty to a room. The dead were buried in the peaceful graveyard overlooking the great blue ocean.

  * * *

  Edward was relieved that Plymouth’s separatism was not held against them. And to the Pilgrims’ awe, Governor Winthrop and other Massachusetts dignitaries condescended to visit Plymouth. It was a considerable occasion when the new Bostonians walked along the Indian ways to Plymouth. They had sailed to Wessagusset in Winthrop’s boat The Blessing of the Bay, were guided through the forests and the swamps, and then carried across the cold rushing waters of the North River. The governor sternly rechristened what was known to Edward and his friends as Hugh’s Cross, Hugh’s Folly. (Winthrop had been worried that it ‘might give the Papists occasion to say that their religion was first planted in these parts’.) Edward was impressed by the sombre Winthrop’s sense of history. Here was the sort of defined man of strong opinions Edward could not but admire and aspire to. Winthrop had the magistrate’s sense of order imported from old England and a supple legal mind, as well as the sort of decent common sense Edward himself possessed.

  The Massachusetts settlers had no experience of the local tribes. They were by turns alarmed and yet fascinated by the Indians who surrounded their settlements. They were everywhere: dark, enigmatic figures in the forest, observing the English in the fields or removing fishes from the spikes of their weirs which showed at low tide all over the bay. The Indians delighted in English technology, especially the cloth, the tools and the guns. They slipped in and out of the market near Boston harbour.

  Dudley built a 1,000-foot palisade round the houses at Cambridge, but Plymouth’s good relations with the Indians encouraged the Massachusetts colony to keep an open mind, especially once they realised that Plymouth controlled the fur trade because of their network of Indian tribal friendships. They saw that the Pilgrims, especially Edward Winslow, frequently stopped by Massasoit’s longhouse to hitch a lift home in a canoe or to be guided back by a friendly Wampanoag. John Winthrop recorded with some amazement an example of Indian humour:

  One pleasant passage happened which was acted by the Indians: Mr Winslow coming in his bark from Connecticut to Narragansett and he left her there, and intending to return by land, he went to Osamequin [another name for Massasoit] the Sagamore his old ally, who offered to conduct him home to Plymouth. But before they took their journey Osamequin sent one of his men to Plymouth to tell them that Mr Winslow was dead and directed him to show how and where he was killed: whereupon there was much fear and sorrow at Plymouth. The next day when Osamequin brought him home, they asked him why he sent such word, etc. He answered, that it was their manner to do so, that they might be more welcome when they came home.

  By the end of the 1630s wampum became one of several official currencies of New England. The others were silver pieces of eight captured from the Spaniards, as well as corn and cattle, which were barter, and not very portable. Wampum was given an exact official equivalent value in English shillings and pence and adopted by every colony. All arriving English colonists who wished to join in the lucrative fur trade handled this curious shell currency so valued by the northern Indians. It was measured in fathoms, strings of beads about six feet long. Wampum gave an air of novelty to every transaction, as of course did the presence of Indians wearing it. Naked other than for leather breeches, often holding large stone pipes which were purchased by the tobacco-mad English, they sported belts and necklaces covered with the famous shells.

  Edward’s friendship with Massasoit continued to be warm and playful. Edward and the other Pilgrims encouraged Massachusetts to treat the Indians as they had done, by having the leaders stay in their ho
uses and introducing them to Puritan ways. The Massachusett chief Chickatabot, who lived nearby, came with his chiefs and squaws, and presented the governor with a hogshead of Indian corn. He, one squaw and one chief stayed the night. Winthrop gave them some clothes. As a man used to the formalities of life in a manor house he was not tolerant of the Indian tradition of wearing very little. Once Chickatabot was ‘in English clothes, the governor set him at his own table, where he behaved himself as soberly … as an Englishman. The next day after dinner he returned home, the governor giving him cheese, and pease and a mug, and some other small things.’

  Narragansett leaders including Miantonomo, the rising power in the tribe – nephew of the brilliant grand sachem Canonicus (who had sent the arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to the Pilgrims in 1622 but who had since been friendly) – visited and spent the night. Gifts of skins were exchanged with pewter pots. Miantonomo visited with his squaw in August 1632, and listened to a sermon. However, some of the twelve exuberant warriors whom he brought with him broke into a house during the sermon. But it did not stop Governor Winthrop entertaining another Narragansett tribal leader and making ‘much of them’, as he wrote in his diary.

  Amongst the more highly educated, the fascination with Indian culture and ethnography first encouraged by the Virginia Company had not gone away. It was an appetite which grew as the American colonies attracted larger numbers and could report on the reality of life amongst the Indians. Edward’s own interest had produced an ethnographic study. His fondness and admiration for the Indians meant he had wanted to do them justice by being accurate in his representations of them. Now that the English were living amongst the Indians, European correspondents could write for corroboration about signs of similarities between the Indians and the Jews that fitted the theory they were the Lost Tribes of Israel, which was exciting in those millennial times.* In 1635 one of its most vocal theorists, the Norfolk clergyman Thomas Thorowgood, wrote to Roger Williams asking him for his observations. (By 1650, Thorowgood had published his thesis affirming that the Indians were, as he titled his work, Jews in America.)