The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Instead of Carver and the Pilgrims, it may have been Massasoit’s interpreter who caused the sachem to shake. The Pilgrims later learned that squanto claimed they kept the plague in barrels buried beneath their storehouse. The barrels actually contained gunpowder, but the Pilgrims undoubtedly guarded the storehouse, which made squanto’s claims believable. If the interpreter told Massasoit of the deadly contents of the barrels during the meeting on March 22, it is little wonder Massasoit was seen to tremble.

  Bradford and Winslow recorded the agreement with the Pokanoket sachem as follows:1. That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people.

  2. And if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him.

  3. That if any of our tools were taken away when our people were at work, he should cause them to be restored, and if ours did any harm to any of his, we would do the like to him.

  4. If any did unjustly war against him, we would aid him; if any did war against us, he should aid us.

  5. He should send to his neighbor confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong us, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

  6. That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them.

  Once the agreement had been completed, Massasoit was escorted from the settlement, and his brother was given a similar reception. Quadequina quickly noticed something that his higher-ranking brother had not chosen to comment on. Even though the Indians had been required to lay down their bows, the Pilgrims continued to carry their muskets—a clear violation of the treaty they had just signed with Massasoit. Quadequina “made signs of dislike, that [the guns] should be carried away.” The English could not help but admit that the young Indian had a point, and the muskets were put aside. squanto and samoset spent the night with the Pilgrims while Massasoit and his men, who had brought along their wives and children, slept in the woods, just a half mile away. Massasoit promised to return in a little more than a week to plant corn on the southern side of Town Brook. squanto, it was agreed, would remain with the English. As a final gesture of friendship, the Pilgrims sent the sachem and his people a large kettle of English peas, “which pleased them well, and so they went their way.”

  After almost five months of uncertainty and fear, the Pilgrims had finally established diplomatic relations with the Native leader who, as far as they could tell, ruled this portion of New England. But as they were soon to find out, Massasoit’s power was not as widespread as they would have liked. The Pokanokets had decided to align themselves with the English, but many of Massasoit’s allies had yet to be convinced that the Pilgrims were good for New England.

  The next day, squanto left to fish for eels. At that time of year, the eels lay sleeping in the mud, and after wading out into the cold water of a nearby tidal creek, he used his feet to “trod them out.” By the end of the day, he returned with so many eels that he could barely lift them all with one hand. That night the Pilgrims ate the eels happily, praising them as “fat and sweet,” and squanto was on his way to becoming the one person in New England they could not do without.

  ◆◆◆ Two weeks later, on April 5, the Mayflower, her empty hold filled with stones from the Plymouth Harbor shore to replace the weight of the unloaded cargo, set sail for England. Like the Pilgrims, the crew had been cut down by disease. Jones had lost his boatswain, his gunner, three quartermasters, the cook, and more than a dozen sailors. He had also lost a cooper, but not to illness. John Alden had decided to stay in Plymouth.

  The Mayflower made excellent time on her voyage back across the Atlantic. The same winds that had battered her the previous fall now pushed her along, and she arrived at her home port of Rotherhithe just down the Thames River from London, on May 6, 1621—less than half the time it had taken her to sail to America. Master Jones learned that his wife, Josian, had given birth to a son named John. soon enough, Jones and the Mayflower were on their next voyage, this time to France for a cargo of salt.

  Perhaps still suffering the effects of that awful winter in Plymouth, Jones died on March 5, 1622, after his return from France. For the next two years, the Mayflower lay idle, not far from her captain’s grave on the banks of the Thames. By 1624, just four years after her historic voyage to America, the ship had become a rotting hulk. That year, she was found to be worth just £128 (roughly $24,000 today), less than a sixth of her value back in 1609. Her subsequent fate is unknown, but she was probably broken up for scrap, the final casualty of a voyage that had cost her master everything he could give.

  ◆◆◆ Soon after the Mayflower departed for England, the shallow waters of Town Brook became alive with fish. Two species of herring—alewives and bluebacks—returned to the fresh waters where they had been born in order to reproduce.

  squanto explained that these fish were essential to planting a successful corn crop. Given the poor quality of the land surrounding Plymouth, it was necessary to fertilize the soil with dead herring. Although Native women were the ones who did the farming (with the sole exception of planting tobacco, which was considered men’s work), squanto knew enough of their techniques to give the Pilgrims a crash course in Indian agriculture.

  The seed the Pilgrims had stolen on the Cape is known today as northern flint corn, with kernels of several colors, and was called weachimineash by the Indians. Using mattocks—hoes with stone heads and wooden handles—the Indians gathered mounds of earth about a yard wide, where several fish were included with the seeds of corn. Once the corn had sprouted, beans and squash were added to the mounds. The vines from the beans attached to the growing cornstalks, creating a blanket of shade that protected the plants’ roots against the hot summer sun while also keeping out weeds. Thanks to squanto, the Pilgrims’ stolen corn thrived, while their own barley and peas suffered in the soil of the New World.

  ◆ Corn that was called weachimineash by the Wampanoags, or northern flint corn today.

  In April, while laboring in the fields on an unusually hot day, Governor Carver began to complain about a pain in his head. He returned to his house to lie down and quickly lapsed into a coma. A few days later, he was dead.

  After a winter of so many secret burials, the Pilgrims laid their governor to rest with as much pomp and circumstance as they could muster—“with some volleys of shot by all that bore arms.” Carver’s brokenhearted wife followed her husband to the grave five weeks later. Carver’s one surviving male servant, John Howland, was left without a master; in addition to becoming a free man, Howland may have inherited at least a portion of Carver’s estate. The humble servant who had been pulled from the ocean a few short months ago was on his way to becoming one of Plymouth’s foremost citizens.

  Carver’s passing could not have come at a worse time. Just as the settlement was recovering from the horrors of the first winter, it had lost the man on whose judgment it had come to depend. The Pilgrims had hoped to load the Mayflower with goods for her return trip, but that had been impossible. With half the settlers dead and only a pile of stones in the ship’s hold and a few Native artifacts to show for the thousands of pounds the Adventurers had spent, Weston and the other merchants might begin to doubt the profitability of the settlement and withdraw further financial support.

  The new treaty with Massasoit had greatly reduced the threat of Indian attack, but there was still dissent inside the settlement. The tension of that terrible winter had led to angry words among many, most notably Miles standish and John Billington. In June, stephen Hopkins’s servants Edward Doty and Edward Leister injured each other in a duel and were sentenced to have their heads and feet tied together. There was a desperate and immediate need for strong and steady leadership.

  William Bradford was the natural choice. Even though he was still sick, Bradford agreed to take on the greatest challenge of his life. In addition to Isaac Allerton, who served as his assistant, he had William Brews
ter, Edward Winslow, and Miles standish to look to for advice. But as governor, he inevitably came to know the loneliness of being Plymouth’s ultimate decision maker. More than ever before, Bradford, who had left his son in Holland and lost his wife in Provincetown Harbor, was alone.

  SEVEN

  Thanksgiving

  A FEW WEEKS after William Bradford’s election to governor, Edward Winslow and susanna White showed the rest of the settlement that it was indeed possible to start anew. susanna had lost her husband, William, on February 21; Edward had lost his wife, Elizabeth, on March 24. Just a month and a half later, on May 12, Edward and susanna became the first couple in Plymouth to marry. six weeks may seem too short a time to grieve, but in the seventeenth century, it was quite normal for a widow or widower to remarry within three months of his or her spouse’s death.

  In accordance with “the laudable custom of the Low Countries,” Edward and susanna were married in a civil ceremony. Bradford, who presided over the union, explained that “nowhere ... in the Gospel” did it say a minister should be involved in a wedding. In the decades to come, marriages in Plymouth continued to be secular affairs, one of the few traditions they kept from their time in Holland.

  ◆◆◆ By the beginning of July, Bradford decided that they should visit “their new friend Massasoit.” They had not, as of yet, had an opportunity to explore the interior of the surrounding countryside, and it was time they made their presence known beyond Plymouth and Cape Cod. They also needed to address an unexpected problem. Ever since establishing diplomatic relations with Massasoit in March, the Pilgrims had hosted a continual stream of Indian visitors, particularly from the village of Nemasket just fifteen miles to the west. If they continued to entertain and feed all these guests, they would not have enough food to survive the next winter.

  They proposed a clever solution: They would present Massasoit with a copper chain; if the sachem had a messenger or friend he wanted the Pilgrims to entertain, he would give the person the chain, and the Pilgrims would happily provide him with food. All others, however, would be turned away.

  On July 2, Edward Winslow and stephen Hopkins left Plymouth at around 9 A.M., with squanto as their guide. Besides some gifts for Massasoit (the copper chain and a red cotton horseman’s coat), they carried their muskets and a cooked partridge for food. They might have a horseman’s coat, but they did not, as of yet, have any horses. Like the Indians, they had to walk the forty or so miles to Pokanoket.

  They soon came upon a dozen men, women, and children who were returning to Nemasket after gathering lobsters in Plymouth Harbor—one of the seasonal rituals that kept the Indians constantly on the move. As they talked with their new companions, the Englishmen learned that to walk across the land in southern New England was to travel in time. All along this narrow, hard-packed trail were circular foot-deep holes in the ground that had been dug where “any remarkable act” had occurred. It was each person’s responsibility to maintain the holes and to tell fellow travelers what had once happened at that particular place so that “many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory.” Winslow and Hopkins began to see that they were crossing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. “so that as a man travelleth ... ,” Winslow wrote, “his journey will be the less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses [that] will be related unto him.”

  They also began to appreciate why these memory holes were more important than ever before to the Native inhabitants of the region. Everywhere they went, they were stunned by the emptiness of the place. “Thousands of men have lived there,” Winslow wrote, “which died in a great plague not long since: and pity it was and is to see, so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.” With so many dead, the Pokanokets’ connection to the past was hanging by a thread—a connection that the memory holes and their stories helped to maintain.

  At Nemasket, they enjoyed a meal of corn bread, herring roe, and boiled acorns. squanto suggested that they push on another few miles before nightfall to give themselves enough time to reach Pokanoket the next day. soon after leaving Nemasket, the path joined a narrow, twisting river called the Titicut, which was used as a kind of Native American highway. Whether by dugout canoe or by foot, the Indians followed the river between Pokanoket and Plymouth, and in the years ahead, the Titicut, which the English eventually renamed the Taunton River, led the Pilgrims to several new settlement sites above Narragansett Bay.

  But the Titicut was much more than a transportation system; it also provided the Indians with a seasonal source of herring and other fish. Around sunset, Winslow and Hopkins reached a spot on the river where the Indians were catching striped bass, and that night they “lodged in the open fields.”

  ◆ A present-day photograph of the Taunton River where it meets Mount Hope Bay.

  Six Indians decided to continue on with them the next morning. They followed the riverbank for about half a dozen miles until they came to a shallow area, where they were told to take off their pants and wade across the river. They were midstream, with their possessions in their arms, when two Indians appeared on the opposite bank.

  In the aftermath of the plague, the Narragansetts had started to raid Pokanoket territory, and the two Pokanoket Indians probably feared that Winslow and Hopkins’ group was the enemy. Winslow judged one of the Indians to be at least sixty years old, but despite their age, both men displayed great “valor and courage” as they ran “very swiftly and low in the grass to meet us at the bank” with their arrows drawn. On realizing that they knew the Native people with Winslow and Hopkins, the old warriors “welcomed us with such food as they had.” Winslow later learned that these were the last two survivors of a once thriving village.

  As the sun reached its height, the traveling became quite hot, and the Indians cheerfully offered to carry guns and extra clothing for the settlers. They came upon other Indians along the way, but all proved friendly, and before the day was over, they reached Massasoit’s village, known as sowams. In the years to come, as the Pilgrims began to purchase land from the Pokanoket sachem, they spoke of sowams as “the garden of the patent”—a fertile sweep of land with two rivers providing easy access to Narragansett Bay. As anyone could plainly see, Massasoit was positioned at a place that made Plymouth seem, by comparison, a hilly wasteland.

  The sachem invited them into his wigwam, where the Pilgrims presented him with the copper chain and horseman’s coat. Winslow reported that once the sachem had “put the coat on his back and the chain about his neck, he was not a little proud to behold himself, and his men also to see their king so bravely attired.”

  The sachem gathered his people around him and began to deliver a long and exuberant speech. “Was not he Massasoit commander of the country about him?” he proclaimed. He spoke of the many villages that paid him tribute with corn, furs, or other gifts, and of how those villages would all trade with the Pilgrims. With the naming of each place, his men responded with a refrain about Massasoit’s power over the village and how the village would be at peace with the English and provide them with furs. This went on until thirty or more settlements had been named. “[s]o that as it was delightful,” Winslow wrote, “it was tedious unto us.”

  By this time, Winslow and Hopkins were desperate for something to eat. It had been more than a day since they’d had a decent meal, but the entire village of sowams appeared to be without any food. Massasoit had only recently returned to the village after a long time away, and his people had not yet been able to hunt for any fish or birds. By arriving unannounced, Winslow and Hopkins had unintentionally placed Massasoit in a difficult and potentially embarrassing situation. He was happy to see them, but he had no food to offer.

  Once he’d completed his speech, Massasoit lit his pipe and encouraged all of them to smoke as he “fell to discoursing of England.” He said he was now “King James his man,” and so the French were no longer welcome in Narragansett Bay. When he learne
d that the English king had been a widower for more than a year, Massasoit expressed wonder that James had chosen to live “without a wife.”

  It was getting late, and it was now clear to the Pilgrims that there was nothing for them to eat. so they asked to go to bed. Much to their surprise, the sachem insisted that they share the wigwam’s sleeping platform with himself and his wife, “they at the one end and we at the other.” What’s more, two of Massasoit’s warriors crowded onto the platform with them.

  That night, neither Winslow nor Hopkins slept a wink. Not only were they starving, they were kept awake by the Indians’ habit of singing themselves to sleep. They also discovered that the dirt floor of the wigwam was alive with lice and fleas, while mosquitoes buzzed around their ears.

  The next day, several minor sachems made their way to sowams to see the two Englishmen. The increasingly crowded village took on a carnival atmosphere as the sachems and their men entertained themselves with various games of chance in which painted stones and stiff reeds were used, much like dice and cards, to gamble for an opponent’s furs and knives. Winslow and Hopkins challenged some of them to a shooting contest. Although the Indians declined, they requested that the English demonstrate the accuracy of their muskets. One of them fired a round of small shot at a target, and the Natives were amazed “to see the mark so full of holes.” Early that afternoon, Massasoit returned with two large striped bass. The fish were quickly boiled, but since there were more than forty mouths to feed, the bass did not go far. small as it was, it was the first meal Winslow and Hopkins had eaten in two nights and a day.