The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  In July 1669 she married the richest entrepreneur in New England, George Curwen of Salem. Curwen was one of the most dynamic and extraordinary of Salem’s merchants. It was an amazing coup for a widow in her thirties with a young son who had travelled from London to New England in not very good financial shape.

  * * *

  Herbert Pelham remained not only financially interested but emotionally attached to the colony he had played such a role in establishing. Massachusetts was still the place where God’s kingdom was earnestly being created on earth. He made himself a first port of call for cash-strapped delegations from the colony of Massachusetts.

  In the mid-1660s Penelope’s teenaged half-brother Edward, Herbert Pelham’s third son, came to live in New England and was supervised by the Winslows. It was sensible for at least one member of the Pelham family to escape what was not a favourable period for any family identified with the Interrregnum.

  Young Edward went to John Eliot’s Latin School and attended Harvard University, matriculating in 1673. He probably lived with Josiah and Penelope in the holidays. He would eventually inherit the land he was being trained up to look after. Josiah in his responsible way took Edward under his wing just as he had looked after Edward’s elder brother Nathaniel. Herbert’s will shows that he expected Josiah to handle financial affairs for Edward. (It also states grudgingly that Josiah was to be paid back money ‘in satisfaction of a debt which (he says) my son Nathaniel Pelham owes him’.)

  The cattle brand with the initials HP on it found by archaeologists in the ruins of Josiah and Penelope’s house suggests Herbert Pelham had a herd which Josiah managed. But despite Penelope and Josiah’s kindness to Edward, of whom Josiah was clearly fond (he would leave his brother-in-law ‘a young horse for his own riding’), over the next twenty years relations between Herbert Pelham and the Winslows became increasingly distant. Josiah no longer had a reason to travel to England and he had other preoccupations, such as the rising disquiet about the Indians.

  The Puritan impulse had been faltering for a while. In 1657 the Half-Way Covenant was drawn up by a ministerial convention. It slackened the rules for membership of the churches. Previously, members of the congregational churches who were baptised but had not given an account of their own conversion, as was the custom, were not allowed to baptise their children. Now they were. The children could proceed to full membership and not lose their political rights. It was hoped that falling membership might be halted.

  In 1669 Half-Way Covenanters in the First Church of Boston broke away to form the Third Church, now known as the Old South Church. John and Mary Winslow became members.* But Governor Bellingham became upset that the covenant was being diluted, and tried to have the seceders arrested.

  The Quakers refused to compromise. Their insistence on listening to their inner voices, their refusal to swear oaths, their pacificism and their individualism made them alarming. In Boston, the reaction was explosive. The hanging of four Quakers known as the Boston Martyrs – one of whom, Mary Dyer, was a supporter of Anne Hutchinson – reinforced Massachusetts’ reputation for severity. Charles II himself was shocked by their execution. He intervened in 1661 and banned the death penalty being applied to Quakers; he allowed William Penn, son of Admiral Penn, to found Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers. Nevertheless thousands of them were imprisoned and several hundred transported.

  The Quakers’ sincerity made these new fugitives from England the subject of curiosity amongst leading families of the Pilgrims who had their own history of religious individualism and separatism. Plymouth’s official policy was to ban Quakers. The death penalty was passed against them, but unlike in Massachusetts it was never used. Plymouth Colony inhabitants were interested in hearing what the Quakers had to say. Governor Prence imprisoned Arthur Howland for holding a conventicle, but seven years later his own daughter married Howland.

  There were some overzealous characters in Plymouth but nevertheless it was the one New England colony where Quakers were allowed to preach. They were not allowed to vote but, as Josiah himself reported, the Quakers ‘are not disturbed except they disturb the peace’. Peace was what Josiah was determined to safeguard, wherever the threats came from.

  CHAPTER XVI

  The Coming of War

  Massasoit died around 1660, leaving a great void. The older generation of colonists and Indian leaders who had mutual respect for one another were dying out. The Wampanoags were becoming less friendly. They could not help but be affected by the way the Narragansett royal family had been treated. Meanwhile English nerves had been set on edge by disturbances on the frontier. There were constant rumours that the Narragansetts might be aligned with the Dutch, made more serious in 1654 when their leader Ninigret spent the winter in the New Netherland colony. The Dutch produced special light weapons for the Native American market. When Ninigret attacked the Long Island Indians, settlers in Massachusetts thought they would be next. Another war threatened.

  Praying Towns began to mushroom all over New England, a development which alarmed the Narragansetts, who begged their faithful friend Roger Williams to present their petitions to ‘the high sachems of England that they might not be forced from their religion’. They had been told by other tribes who lived nearer Massachusetts ‘if they would not pray they would be destroyed by war’. Williams asked Boston to think the best about the Narragansetts, not the worst. The Indians had been ‘more friendly in this wilderness than our native countrymen in our own land’, and had entered what he called ‘Leagues of love’ with the English. English families and towns had grown up in peace with them.

  But twenty years of skirmishing with Indians since the Pequot War had had a corrosive effect. New Englanders had more brutal attitudes to the Indians. Many, including Josiah, believed they were essentially treacherous.

  Equally for two decades Ninigret enjoyed playing with the colonists. The Narragansetts were the largest tribe in southern New England. They had been terribly reduced by smallpox – and the demographic balance of power had shifted decisively to the English* – but they were still believed capable of putting warriors into the field. Ninigret constantly brought the two peoples to the brink of war. There were isolated attacks, which resulted in fines, which were never paid. Such behaviour increased the colonists’ perceptions that the Narragansetts were a dangerous enemy who would one day fall upon them with the help of the Dutch and the Mohawks. Josiah became convinced the Wampanoags, too, had to be kept under control; it was always possible the tribes could join together and pose a real danger to Plymouth.

  Uncas continued to be a source of instability. He and his neighbour Jonathan Brewster remained close. Brewster provided arms, and encouraged Uncas to defend their mutual interests on the frontier.

  When a Narragansett killed one of the Brewsters’ Mohegan servants at the feet of Jonathan’s wife Lucretia, this was regarded as ‘a breach of etiquette in the eyes of the English that could not go unpunished’. Another huge and unpayable fine was demanded, or else the United Colonies would go to war. In an act then and now regarded as sharp practice, a group of New England entrepreneurs – the Atherton Company – said they would assist the anxious Narragansetts with paying the fine. The Atherton Company demanded a mortgage over 400 square miles of Narragansett land, much of the tribe’s total territory. If the Narragansetts failed to repay over 500 fathoms of wampum in four months, the company had the right to foreclose on this land. In England at this point the law of the equity of redemption prevented mortgagees from closing on the indebted – generally land-rich country gentry like Herbert Pelham. But there was no such help for the Narragansetts.

  By 1662 the land had fallen into the hands of the Atherton Company. In order to outwit Rhode Island’s stringent laws about land purchase from Indians, the company’s leader, Humphrey Atherton, cunningly wrote loving messages into contracts, implying that they were gifts. The Narragansetts were already close to bankruptcy because of the previous fines imposed for their wars against Unc
as. Although Humphrey Atherton was the managing director, John Winthrop junior was also heavily involved. He was also the commissioner of the United Colonies who imposed the fine.

  The Narragansetts soon understood the land was no longer theirs. In 1664 Charles II’s Royal Commissioners reported: ‘These Indian princes gave a long petition complaining of violence and injustice from the Massachusetts’, who ‘had caused them to be fined, and then took their whole country in mortgage, according to the remonstrance sent to his Majesty’. Atherton had violently tried to extract the wampum fine from Pessicus (the Narragansett chief who had succeeded Miantonomo) by dragging him out of his wigwam with a pistol at his throat.

  The Narragansetts wished to be allowed to live in their own way. They felt oppressed by the English, as did the Wampanoags. The punishment of Ninigret for continuing to avenge the death of Miantonomo was regarded as another nail in the coffin of the Indian way of life. Wampanoag anxiety began to reach new heights.

  The English were intruding on every aspect of Indian life. Praying Towns, in which Indians lived after the English fashion and prayed to the English God, were growing up across the country, a sign of colonial authority. There was constant pressure to sell land to which the Indians yielded because the English had been indisputably proved to be more powerful than them. But that was resented. Tribal land was shrinking, though many Indians continued to assume that they still had hunting rights, which was an additional source of tension. As they were driven inland from their fishing grounds by the new English coastal towns, the Indian fever for guns grew, because they were a more effective method of hunting.

  Some historians have blamed Massasoit for selling so much of the territory that was his birthright. Others argue it was for the Indians’ benefit that there was a technology transfer. The Indians were indeed extremely excited by advanced European tools. But there was no equivalence. Like other chiefs all over southern New England, Massasoit sold miles of land for objects which would have made Englishmen laugh: a few hatchets, trousers, cloth.

  As early as the 1640s and 1650s the Indians were complaining about the haemorrhaging land sales to the English. But after Massasoit’s death the Plymouth colonists’ acquisition of land increased six times as fast as before (although his sons cannily insisted on cash). The scholar Jeremy Bangs puts it dryly. It was a process which was ‘the erosion of the possessions of the five or six major landowners, Wamsutta and his brother Metacom, Quachatassett the sachem of Manomet, Tispaquin the Black Sachem of Namassaket, Charles Ahaz alias Paupmumit, and Josias Wampatuck alias Chickatabut’.

  At the Restoration, wampum was demonetised. It no longer had an official value in English pounds and ceased to be the currency of New England, emphasising the waning power of the Indians. Since beaver had been hunted to near extinction and the little shells were worthless, it was now almost impossible for Indians to pay for English goods, especially the tools they craved. Like the other Indian tribes the Wampanoags had nothing the Europeans wanted – except their land. So they traded that.

  * * *

  In this uneasy atmosphere, in which all Indians were suspect, Massasoit attempted to pour oil on troubled waters and remind Plymouth of the goodwill of the past. Before he died he had taken his two sons, Wamsutta and Metacom, to his neighbour John Brown, who lived near Mount Hope. He said solemnly he hoped ‘there might be love and amity after his death, between his sons and them as there had been betwixt himself and them in former times’. On Massasoit’s death, Wamsutta confirmed the peace treaty with Plymouth. He asked Plymouth General Court to confer English names upon himself and his brother. He was to be known as Alexander, and his brother Metacom as Philip.

  Yet as Alexander, Wamsutta had no intention of being dominated by Plymouth. He and his brother were less in awe of the English than their father had been. They saw that Massasoit’s technique of using the English as a shield against the Narragansetts had become a harmful pact that was destroying their patrimony. The nineteenth-century historian Samuel Green Arnold put it brutally: Massasoit’s ‘fatal alliance which had released him from his recent subjection to the Narragansetts, was destined to place a severer yoke upon his own neck, to weaken, instead of strengthening, his influence over the subordinate tribes, and finally to effect the extermination of his race’.

  Alexander attempted to turn back the clock, and he stopped the transfer of land that Massasoit had agreed to sell to the new town of Taunton. Unlike his more emollient father, Alexander was insulted that new laws meant all land sales should go through Plymouth General Court for its approval. He took issue with the number of land sales, but he also wished to be able to sell where he pleased as the Wampanoag chiefs had always done.

  Plymouth now took a more aggressive stance. In 1662 it was decided that Alexander was behaving in a rebellious and potentially dangerous fashion. Alexander had not only sold more land without permission to Plymouth’s unpopular neighbour Rhode Island, he was also said to have visited the Narragansett country. Alexander was sent for, a command he regarded as disrespectful. And thereupon a major tragedy unfolded.

  Although there are several versions as to what happened, what is known for sure is that Alexander refused to attend court. By now the Indian royal families had a sense of their own difference from mere elected English officials and did not see why they should obey them. A party of officials, including Josiah, went out to bring him in. The minister who wrote a contemporary history of the war, William Hubbard, described Josiah as a ‘prudent and resolute gentleman’ who was neither afraid of danger, ‘nor yet willing to delay in a matter of that moment’. He set out, ‘taking eight or ten stout men with him well armed’. One story had Josiah drag Alexander by the hair out of his wigwam holding a pistol to him, as his friend Humphrey Atherton had done to Pessicus.

  Hubbard could not believe that someone with the manners and ‘so noble a disposition’ as Josiah would allow anyone to ill-treat or be uncivil ‘to a person allied to them by his own as well as his father’s league’. But when it came to dealing with Indians Josiah had a short fuse. Like many of the leading members of the government he expected the Indian chiefs to be under the control of the English bureaucrats.

  Alexander asked to go home, leaving his son as a hostage. Halfway there, he fell sick. Hubbard dismissed the rumour that Alexander had been made to walk too fast behind the English and that he was subsequently badly treated by the local physician. Nevertheless Hubbard had Josiah saying that if Alexander stirred or refused to go, he was a dead man, surely uncivil behaviour in itself. Hubbard thought that it was ‘the pride and height of his spirit’ which made Alexander so angry and indignant at being arrested in such an insulting fashion as to bring on a fever.

  Other near-contemporary accounts insist that Alexander came along quite happily with the Plymouth party. They had found him on a hunting expedition at Munponset River eating breakfast. Having denied any involvement in any plots, Alexander set off west to Sowams.

  What can be said for sure is that in the middle of the journey home Alexander felt unwell. He turned back to Careswell, Josiah’s house at Marshfield, where he became extremely ill. From there the sachem was taken by canoe along the rivers leading to Narragansett Bay. A few days later he died at Mount Hope, surrounded by his people.

  The Wampanoags were horrified by their leader’s death. His brother Philip’s accession was marked by the wild dancing that usually preceded an attack. A suspicious number of Indians were reported to be gathering at Mount Hope.

  Whatever the reasons for Alexander’s death, three crucial events emerged from it. First, Philip became king; secondly, Josiah was believed by Philip to have poisoned his brother; and thirdly, Alexander’s widow, Weetamoo, queen of the Pocassets who controlled an area opposite Rhode Island, became immensely distrustful of Plymouth – although she concealed her feelings.

  Philip had known Careswell when he was a child, accompanying his father and brother to Edward’s warm house in Marshfield. They had been an honoured
delegation inside its thick walls. Now Philip had a particular animus against Josiah. Contemporary accounts of Alexander’s death stress that the story circulated that the English had deliberately poisoned him. Whether these rumours were true or not, Alexander’s death, and a much harsher policy towards the Indians, hardened Philip’s heart. He was made angrier by being hauled into Plymouth Court in 1662 to take a vow of loyalty in a humiliating fashion. From then on it seems that Philip began privately to think that he could defeat the English only with a major extirpative war. And he was not alone. Many of the other Indian tribes coexisted with what were now their overlords in a tense way. The Indians remained superficially friendly, but secretly they festered. They seemed calm, but it was the calm of a people biding their time. The new generation of English were becoming associated with nothing but trickery, as far as the Indians and their land were concerned.

  Life in Plymouth was becoming far more comfortable for the English. But for their Indian neighbours the reverse was true. Philip’s proud nature made it impossible for him to overlook the past. Alexander’s death, and the punishment of the Narragansetts, were still raw.

  As one of the magistrates formulating Plymouth’s responses to Indian aggression, Josiah believed firm handling was the only answer. Josiah was a more tolerant man than his father when it came to religion and was regarded as far less rigid as a governor when it came to the Quakers. Where he was rigid was with the Indians. If Plymouth could not have her will done because of affection, it must be done by fear. And with the proud and ambitious brother and son known as ‘King’ Philip, that was utterly the wrong tactic. English observers thought Philip was too haughty. Yet what they had forgotten – though it clearly was not forgotten by Philip himself – was that he had been brought up to live as an exalted member of the ruling family. The English had already made the same mistake with the Narragansetts’ proud chiefs.