The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  Many feared the divisions could herald the end of the plantation. It was already overwhelmed by extra immigrants who arrived without stores to support them and at the wrong time of year to secure a harvest the next. This very public spat would be a perfect excuse for Charles I to rescind the charter. In the houses spread out round the Shawmut peninsula there was anxiety lest the dangerously outspoken Anne spoiled everything with her message that they were the elect and the clergy were no longer to be listened to. Anne and her followers began to be called Antinomians (a Lutheran term meaning people who were against the law), or Familists. If a sense of the Holy Spirit was relied on too much it could lead to anarchy. It did not privilege biblical learning and law as laid down by ministers and scholars.

  The emotional and idealistic Vane wept at the anger unleashed in Boston as he was forced to return to England. John Wheelwright preached an alarmingly inflammatory sermon against the Boston church, calling the clergy who did not agree with him Antichrists. Convicted of contempt and sedition, his behaviour was deplored because it increased the corrosive bitterness in the colony, and he was banished. Those who petitioned in his favour had their weapons confiscated because it was feared they might use them against the government.

  Anne continued to defy the authorities, saying she was receiving instruction from the Holy Spirit. She was arrested and two trials followed, one in 1637 for sedition, one for heresy a year later. It was a very painful experience. Staring angrily at Anne and her brother-in-law during their trials were former friends and colleagues, including Governor Dudley, Governor Winthrop and Simon Bradstreet, who had been part of her Lincolnshire community in England. She and others of her views were evicted from Massachusetts. Insulted but unashamed, they made their way to the Narragansetts where, with land from their sachems, they too founded a new colony in Rhode Island at Aquidneck, the island below the Mount Hope peninsula. To many of the profoundly religious colonists, the division Anne had caused suggested satanic influences were abroad.

  Anne did not help matters by pronouncing the colony cursed if it did not listen to her. After her devastating trial she shouted that God would deliver her out of their hands, ‘Therefore take heed how you proceed against me; for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state.’

  Sadly John Winthrop could not let this rest. And in the hysteria about the colony’s future he and his orthodox friends did not behave well. As the shattered Anne Hutchinson was leaving the church after having been excommunicated, a woman named Mary Dyer emerged from the crowd and took her hand. Feelings were running so high that Winthrop was delighted to hear that someone asked was that not the woman ‘which had the monster’? It emerged that during Hutchinson’s trial Mary Dyer had given birth to a misshapen stillborn child. On John Cotton’s advice it had been buried at night by Anne and her friend Jane Hawkins, another midwife. Cotton believed the foetus had served as divine instruction, but only for the parents. Unfortunately in a tense and overwrought atmosphere, to John Winthrop and his friends it was proof of devilry, so much so that it would be the subject of an essay sent to London. It was recalled that when Mary Dyer had given birth the baby had strange features which were regarded as signs of evil. By an ‘unexpected providence’ this had taken place when its father was being questioned in the church for ‘monstrous errors’. Winthrop insisted on having the corpse exhumed and the midwife Jane Hawkins questioned. She was expelled from the colony with the Dyers and Hutchinsons.

  Winthrop and many other leaders were obsessed with the idea that wickedness could become physically manifest in the world. The miscarriage Anne Hutchinson herself suffered not long after she moved to Rhode Island was the subject of a lecture in the Boston church. The apparently misshapen foetus (in fact a mass of cells which had never developed into an embryo, what is known as a hydatidiform mole) was used as evidence of Satan at work.

  She had given birth to a monster. To her former friend John Cotton her ‘unnatural birth’ symbolised her errors ‘in denying inherent righteousness’. The clergyman Thomas Weld went further: ‘the wisdom of God fitted this judgement to her sin every way’. Anne had ‘vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters’.*

  What were the views of the Winslows and the rest of Plymouth of this scandal? Perhaps like many women of the time Susanna Winslow thought the analysis of a miscarriage was a great deal of nonsense. However, it is true to say that from this point on Edward’s happy-go-lucky ways became coloured with a more troubling eschatological sense.

  CHAPTER X

  The Pequot War

  For years Plymouth had heard rumours about an immense river stretching to the northern hunting grounds. Beginning on the Canadian border and emptying into Long Island Sound, it runs through five states, but in the seventeenth century its origins were known only to Indians and trappers. Edward’s ceaseless exploring meant that he was the first Englishman to see the 400-mile stretch of water called Quinetucket, ‘the long tidal river’ – Connecticut, as it became anglicised. His jerkin and breeches constantly wet from undergrowth and streams, he had pushed past foliage to be shown the great river, whose headwaters rise in a hidden lake.

  By the early 1630s – thanks to Edward’s network of Indian friends – Plymouth had been contacted by a group of river Indians seeking protection against the most powerful tribe of the area, the Pequots, who had expelled them from their territories. The river Indians were probably linked to the Narragansetts of Rhode Island who wanted to disrupt the Pequot system of alliances with a tributary system of their own.

  To have access to a new area held considerable attraction for Plymouth, whose trading posts in north-eastern Maine were coming to the end of their natural life because of competition. In the summer of 1632 the French raided the Penobscot trading house and carried off a very valuable quantity of furs. They claimed the territory as part of Acadia in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, signed that year, which returned control of the French colonies to France after the British had seized them three years earlier.

  Edward and his brother John continued to have dealings with the Abenaki Indians on the Kennebec River valley for another twenty years, but the Connecticut River valley offered a chance to break away from an area which was becoming crowded. Plymouth was invited by local Indians to have a trading house there and help the Connecticut Indians to re-establish themselves. Edward led the expedition. He was in the mood for adventure and new vistas. Since around 1628 he had been farming land at Marshfield, twelve miles from Plymouth town. It lay north of Duxbury and he had plans to move there.

  Unfortunately the invitation to trade had unwelcome consequences. The countryside seemed deserted but the river valley, which had huge agricultural potential as well as being a conduit to furs, was about to become a battleground for trade rivalries between not only the English and Dutch but also between the Narragansett Indians and Pequot Indians. The great river would be the scene of converging and conflicting designs as the English and Dutch competed to trade with Indians whose lives had been dramatically changed in so many ways by the coming of the Europeans. It would also be the site of a horrible war.

  The rivalry was exacerbated by a relentless new smallpox epidemic in 1633, heralded by what Bradford described as ‘a great sort of flies, like (for bigness) to wasps, or bumble bees’. They came out of holes in the ground and were probably some kind of locust which stripped all green leaves from the trees. Plymouth’s Indian friends told them sickness would follow, and it did. What they did not appreciate was that this plague made not only the colonists ill, but it would go on to kill a staggering eighty per cent of the southern New England tribes in the next fifteen years. The Narragansetts had escaped the earlier plague which had depleted Massasoit’s men, which was how they had become his overlords. But now the Narragansetts and the Pequots suffered hideously. Vast numbers of Indians died and Bradford described how ‘they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering, and
running one into another, their skin cleaving (by reason thereof) to the mats they lie on; when they turn them, a whole side will fly off at once’.

  The Narragansetts’ chief Canonicus correctly attributed the coming of smallpox to the English, as did the Pequots, although he was thinking in terms of powerful magic or a manitou, rather than it being another of the many contagious European diseases to which the Indians had no immunity.

  The net effect of disease was to increase pressures on the Indian leadership, which was already searching for responses to the English settlements. It made the tribes unsettled and insecure, as did the threat to their territories when the English and Dutch began to move into the valley. The Narragansetts were proprietorial about the lower reaches of the Connecticut River because the shells from which wampum was made proliferated there. Being the manufacturers of wampum made them the most wealthy and powerful tribe in New England. They were, as historian Karen Kupperman has described them, the ‘mintmasters of New England’. Just as the Europeans needed the Indians to reach the furs of the interior, the Indians needed European manufacturing skills: the use of iron tools had already speeded up the production of wampum unquantifiably.

  Although the Narragansetts were the most numerous tribe, they were also the most peaceful and Canonicus was determined to keep relations with the English amicable. He spread the word of peace amongst the New England tribes who were his tributaries, partly because he realised that a struggle with the English would be unequal, and partly because he had the natural confidence of a member of the royal family of the area, and assumed that life would continue as it had for many centuries. The fact the Narragansetts escaped the first plague which hit Massasoit so badly was believed to be due to their superior priests’ burning ritual in a great temple hidden in the depths of their territories in Rhode Island.

  However, the Pequots had become powerful middlemen, frequently insisting on a cut on transactions, to the Narragansetts’ indignation. Moreover, the 1633 epidemic made the Narragansetts less confident about their powwows’ magic as their numbers rapidly declined from over 30,000 to 4,000 in the next fifteen years.

  In 1633 some Pequots spotted a group of Narragansetts tracking towards the new Dutch trading house north of Hartford: they took the quickest method of prevention and murdered two of them.

  The Pequot attack on the Narragansetts was dealt with harshly by the Dutch traders. With no possibility of help from Holland thousands of miles away, these hard men living in the forest were not going to have the Pequots dictate who they traded with. The Narragansetts were especially valuable to them as the manufacturers of wampum.

  The Dutch kidnapped the Pequot chief, Tatobem. Anguished and alarmed, the Pequots spent the equivalent of millions on wampum to pay the ransom on him. But the Dutch showed the utmost contempt for regional custom. They kept the ransom, handed up by the Indians from their canoes where they were patiently waiting their leader’s release. Then they threw out the dead body of the Pequots’ mighty chief.

  Thanks to their good relations with Massasoit the Pilgrims had never experienced Indians on the warpath. But now blood called for blood.

  Shortly afterwards a disreputable alcoholic English privateer trader named John Stone outrageously kidnapped two western Niantics – a tributary tribe of the Pequot – and forced them to show him the way to the Connecticut River. Unlike the Wampanoags and other coastal Indians, the Pequots were not used to differentiating between European nationalities and assumed that Stone was the same nationality as the Dutch murderers. They killed him in direct revenge for the murder of Tatobem. Stone was a drunken good-for-nothing, an adulterer and possibly a thief – but he came from Massachusetts, and his murder could not be allowed to pass.

  Tatobem’s successor, Sassacus, attempted to placate the Bay with a huge gift of beaver and wampum. More importantly he offered access to Pequot areas of the Connecticut Valley, and his blessing to establish a plantation on Pequot land. The Pequots would thus have a good new defender against the Dutch, and indeed against the Narragansetts. But this was not part of the Bay’s plan. Winthrop insisted they would not be the Pequots’ protectors, though they would trade with them. To the Bay’s intense annoyance, meanwhile, the Pequots refused to hand over the murderers. Inconclusive negotiations proceeded between the Pequots and Massachusetts for two years. In the meantime, increasing numbers of English settling in Connecticut ramped up the unrest amongst both Narragansetts and Pequots. In today’s terms of immigration, the flood of English into the Connecticut valley was small, but it was threateningly large for the Indian tribes.

  Into their hunting grounds came the settlers for Hooker’s new town at Hartford, as well as Plymouth’s trading house at Windsor under William Brewster’s son Jonathan. The Puritan rebels Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke had also planted a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Called Saybrook after its owners, the fort was designed and manned by a caustic but commonsensical engineer named Lion Gardiner who had worked for the House of Orange in the Thirty Years War.

  * * *

  In the mid-1630s, the new colonies of Massachusetts and its satellite Connecticut leapfrogged the longer-established but tiny Plymouth to become the dominant English power in the region. They changed the Indian/English dynamic. By the end of the 1620s, Plymouth’s population was officially estimated at 300; ten years later it was around 2,000, but Massachusetts had thousands more, and their colonists were very different people who saw things in categorical and absolute terms. For them the plague was another clear sign that their God wanted the country to be free of Indians.

  Previous generations of historians assumed that the Pequots were attacking the English as a first act in a deliberate war. But modern authorities are now convinced that the Pequot attack was a knee-jerk reaction without thought of its long-term consequences. Official Pequot policy towards the Europeans was peaceful. The Indian tribes and their leaders were just as anxious to use the Europeans’ technology as the Europeans were anxious to gain access to the Indian fur trade. Pequot numbers meant they could have attacked various European trading posts at any time in the early 1630s, but it was not in their interest. Most historians today believe the Pequots could easily have destroyed the vulnerable new settlements on the Connecticut River had they wanted to, likewise Plymouth’s trading post. They did not.

  The Pequots were legendarily fearsome warriors. The Massachusetts government, on the other hand, had only been in America for a few years and was ignorant of Indian behaviour, unlike Edward and the Plymouth colonists, who were well used to the manners of the New World. Aggressive behaviour did not necessarily mean the Indians had any intention of launching a full-scale war against the English. The male Indians were a sporting, heroic, warlike people who, like the Spartans, trained their young people to be fit for battle. Being on the warpath was an activity they enjoyed. Like their athletic competitions, it gave them an opportunity to demonstrate their powers.

  Aggressive stand-offs were second nature to the Indians. As Roger Williams, who had studied the Indians and lived among them, put it, Canonicus, ‘the great Sachem of the Narragansetts’, and Massasoit, ‘the great Sachem on Plymouth side’, were ‘at deadly feud and enmity’. Williams’ need for shelter in the disputed lands meant he had been forced to win the ‘agreement of these two great mortal foes’.

  The Massachusetts Bay Colony felt acutely vulnerable. Their settlers were surrounded by Indian tribes as far as the eye could see. Analytical and learned, the people of the Bay were not open to the wilderness. They were also determined to impose their own ideas on its inhabitants.

  As Plymouth’s destiny became more closely linked with Massachusetts, the cordial relations between the Pilgrims and Indians came to an end. Even the weather seemed menacing. On 15 August 1635 there was a great storm followed by an eclipse of the moon. Thousands of trees were uprooted. The sea below Plymouth swelled to twenty feet high.

  Into this highly combustible mix came the ambitious and opportunistic
figure of Uncas, a minor chief of the small Mohegan tribe, a subset of the Pequots. For some time Uncas had had his eyes on Pequot territories. The other Indians considered him an upstart; he had been exiled for attempting to seize land from the Pequots, though he was married to the sister of the new Pequot leader Sassacus. The cool-headed Uncas saw his chance. Hungry for power, in effect a poor relation, he was looking to make trouble for the Pequots by stepping into their territories under English protection.

  Uncas’s scheming helped destroy not only his kin, the Pequots, but the peaceful relations of the Narragansetts with the English. From 1637 onwards Uncas became the favoured Indian ally of the English. For the next forty years, in order to make himself the dominant Indian leader in New England, he created a situation of perpetual anxiety. Thanks to the stories of Narragansett treachery with which he perpetually provided the Massachusetts government, all tribes other than the Mohegans seemed dangerous. Only Uncas was to be trusted.

  The Mohegans’ territories centred on a fort at Shantok, near the small settlement named Windsor which Jonathan Brewster had founded and which now had a number of settlers. Among them was a recently arrived soldier, Captain John Mason, who had eight years’ experience in the brutal Thirty Years War and was now a representative to the General Court. Mason was a man of energy and determination who had recently put paid to the depredations of a pirate named Dixie Bull on the north-east coast. The charismatic Uncas struck up a friendship with the mystical Jonathan Brewster, who had a passion for alchemy and astrology. Both Mason and Brewster found Uncas fascinating and intriguing. Perhaps they were flattered to be taken into his confidence; perhaps Brewster saw him as a mythical figure come to life. Mason became Uncas’s close friend and defender.