They wasted the morning on this wandering, covering about twelve miles without finding a sign of a living man or woman. They came back to the beach by another route, and as they emerged into the “plain ground” they saw a long, low mound resembling a grave. It was also covered with boards which made them think it might be more corn. They promptly started to dig.
They found first a mat, under that a bow in good condition, and under that another mat and then a board about three-quarters of a yard long and finely carved and painted with prongs on the top like a crown. Between the mats there were bowls, trays, dishes, and other trinkets. Next was mother mat and finally two bundles, one large, one small. Opening the larger one they found a quantity of fine red powder and the bones and skull of a man. There was also a knife, a packing needle, and “two or three old iron things,” all bound up in a sailor’s canvas blouse and cloth britches. The red powder seemed to be a kind of embalming agent; it had a strong but not unpleasant smell and was as fine as any flour.
In the second bundle they found more of the same powder and the bones and head of a small child. About the legs and the other parts of the withered body were bound strings and bracelets of what the explorers called “fine white beads.” They would soon learn to recognize these beads as wampum, Indian currency. But the real mystery in these two graves grew from the skull of the man - a fine shock of blond hair. Some wondered if it were an Indian lord or king, but Stephen Hopkins and others who knew more about the natives vowed that no one had ever seen an Indian with brown, much less yellow hair. Others thought it was the grave of a Christian man and child - perhaps a lord on the way to Virginia with his son, shipwrecked here and buried with honors by the awed natives. But several others looked around them at the silent land with nervous shivers and wondered if they were not looking on the victims of a savage slaughter.
Meanwhile the shallop arrived from the Mayflower, and, armed with mattocks and spades, they began wandering through the woods in search of more likely places to dig. Two of the sailors joined them and soon proved they had sharper eyes than the settlers. They spotted two Indian houses hidden in the trees. The explorers had walked within a hundred yards of them without noticing them.
Their muskets at ready, the two salts had ventured inside and, finding both places empty, invited the rest of the party to join them. The houses were made from long, young sapling trees, with both ends stuck in the ground. They were rounded on top, somewhat like an igloo, and covered down to the ground with “thick and well-wrought mats.” The door was not over a yard high and was covered by another mat, but inside there was room enough to stand. In the center there were four little stakes knocked into the ground and small sticks laid over these. Here the residents did their primitive cooking; the smoke went out through a small hole in the top. Around the fire were more mats where the inhabitants slept and lounged.
The visitors were fascinated to find wooden bowls and trays, dishes, earthen pots, and hand baskets made of crab shells. There was also an English pail lacking a handle, and many different kinds of baskets, some with interesting black and white patterns on them. On the walls were hung three deer heads, one fresh killed, as well as an astonishing number of deer feet and eagle claws. Finally there were two or three baskets full of parched acorns, pieces of fish, and a piece of broiled herring.
Obviously, the inhabitants had not been gone long. They might be somewhere in the silent forest now, watching. The empty houses seemed another even more positive sign of alien hostility. Perhaps this was why the visitors felt free take “some of the best things” with them. Once more they promised each other they would make restitution. In fact, there were some beads and other trinkets in the shallop which they would bring back immediately as proof that they were not stealing but only wanted to trade.
But then the sailors were bellowing from the shore that the tide was running out fast and if they did not hurry, they would never launch the shallop and would all end up spending another night on the freezing beach. Forgetting about the beads, they seized their loot and hurried down to help shove the heavy boat into the deep water.
Back at the Mayflower they found both good and bad news. Susanna White had given birth to a son, a healthy boy whom the parents decided to call Peregrine. The rest of the ship’s company was not so healthy. Everyone was racked with coughs, wearier than ever, if possible, with the awful food and almost pathologically anxious to get off their wooden prison and walk in freedom on the earth once more.
William Bradford was particularly disturbed by his wife Dorothy’s drawn face and harried eyes. The sweet and smiling girl he had loved in Holland seemed to have been replaced by a listless, sulky woman who barely responded to his questions and caresses. There was no psychiatric language in 1620; the word “depression” had not yet been invented. Worse, William Bradford had little time to give Dorothy the help she so desperately needed. More and more, during the two exploring expeditions, the men had turned instinctively to him for leadership in the dozens of small decisions. Inevitably now he played a dominant role in the intense discussion that engulfed the Mayflower’s passengers and radically threatened the precarious harmony they had thus far maintained.
Some were for settling right where they were. There was ground already cleared for corn, and they had seen its rich fruits. The harbor was convenient enough. They had no wish to set up a rival to London Port, did they? A landing for fair-sized boats was all they needed. Third, the fishing here on Cape Cod was superb. Whales had continued to gambol about the ship. They could make a fortune from the sea alone. Moreover, there were no swamps in the vicinity, and the hilly terrain made it easily defensible. But all these arguments were frills to the central urgency - the growing harshness of the weather, the deterioration of everyone’s health, the dwindling food supply.
Others, led by Bradford, differed violently. They cried that it would be folly to settle for a second-rate place when an ideal site might be only a few miles away. The decision, they pointed out, was irrevocable. They were going to build houses, a fort, the sort of things that could not be picked up and moved. Moreover the fresh water around Corn Hill was all in ponds. No one knew if it would dry up in the summer heat. If they settled on top of Corn Hill, every drop of water would have to be lugged up the steep slope.
There had to be better places along the coast than their newly named Cold Harbor. Several excited speakers urged a place called Anguum, some sixty miles to the north (probably present-day Ipswich). According to the sailors there was a good harbor for ships there, better soil, and better fishing.
The settle-now party angrily demurred at such a trip. With the sudden storms of winter they might lose both men and boat, and that would ruin everything. Who could say how long such a trip might take in foul weather? They might be gone for weeks. They all had to get off this ship before they rotted away! Grimly underscoring their urgency, Edward Thompson, William White’s young servant, died on December 4.
The death sobered both sides, and they agreed to compromise. Those who wanted further exploration would make one more trip, but it would be within the limits of the present bay. Anguum was absolutely ruled off limits. The explorers turned now to second mate Robert Coppin, the man who knew the coast best. Pointing to the bluff across the bay, now called Manomet, he said there was a navigable river and good harbor there, less than twenty-four miles away.
Last year Coppin and some sailors had gone ashore there and tried to trade with the Indians. They had offered them a harpoon, and one of the tricky savages had run off into the woods with it. Whereupon the disgusted sailors had named the place Thievish Harbor. The would-be explorers exultantly brought this news to Governor Carver. Peering nervously across the gray, wintry water, Carver wondered if even this was too far to risk the few healthy men left and the precious shallop. But he finally agreed, cautioning them that they were not to go a foot beyond the place.
The explorers nodded in grim and reluctant agreement. Those with foresight, such as William Bra
dford, knew that it was their last chance to find a place where they could hope to survive. But a last chance was better than no chance at all.
The day before the explorers were to leave, the whole ship had a fright that redoubled their anxiety to get ashore. Crowded into the Great Cabin along with personal possessions were the weapons the men took ashore with them on the various expeditions and landings. To save steps, they had moved a small barrel of powder into the cabin. It was now half full. Into this explosive situation crept fourteenyear-old Francis Billington to play Bold Hunter.
Standing within four feet of the open barrel of gunpowder, he proceeded to prime a handy musket, and pull the trigger. The muskets of 1620 emitted a tremendous flash from the powder in the firing pan. If a single spark had leaped into the barrel of gunpowder, the Mayflower would have become an instantaneous shambles. Several people were standing about the cabin at the time, yet they, too, were unharmed by the flash. The shaken passengers saw it as a miracle of God’s mercy.
The explorers had planned to leave on Tuesday, December 5, the same day that Francis Billington almost blew them up. The weather was too foul. Wednesday’s weather was not much better, but they decided they could not waste another day. The numbers and the composition of the exploring party were, in themselves, ominous signs of deterioration. Only the leaders and the sturdiest young men were now willing to venture out on the winter sea. Miles Standish, John Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Edward and his brother John Tilley, and John Howland volunteered. From the London group came Richard Warren and Stephen Hopkins and his servant Edward Dotey. Two of the seamen they had hired to man their shallop were well enough to go, but Captain Jones was still feeling the effects of the last venture. However, the two mates, John Clark and Robert Coppin, volunteered along with the master gunner and three sailors.
Not even this handful of volunteers were all healthy. William Bradford says that as they beat about the harbor trying to get clear of the sandy point that enclosed it, two men were “very sick” and Edward Tilley fainted with the cold. The ship’s gunner was also “sick unto death,” but he stayed with them largely because he hoped that this time they would meet some Indians with whom he could trade trinkets for beaver skins.
It took them two hours of dreadful sailing to reach the shore of Cape Cod, where the northeast wind was less ferocious. Out on the open water it had come howling down on them, drenching boat and men in a freezing spray. “The water froze on our clothes and made them, many times, like coats of iron,” Bradford says.
They sailed along the shore for about twenty miles but “saw neither river nor creek.” Finally they rounded a point and found themselves in what is now called Wellfleet Bay. For a moment they thought they had found their home. There was more than enough shelter for good-sized ships here, but night was coming on and there was no time to explore the shoreline. They made for the nearest beach, and as they drew close they saw “ten or twelve Indians very busy about a black thing.”
The red men became extremely agitated when they saw the explorers and ran up and down as if they were carrying something away, and finally vanished into the woods. Sandbars made landing difficult. The explorers finally worked their way to shore five or six miles from the Indians. By now it was dusk. It would be dangerous to follow the Indians in the darkness. They made a “barricado, cut some fire wood and set out sentinels.” As they shivered around their fire they suddenly saw another glow many miles down the wide beach. It was the Indians, and all through the long night the two campfires glowed while the darkness remained an impassable gulf between them.
In the morning, the beach was deserted. Once more the Indians had vanished, leaving the white men alone on the edge of the silent winter wilderness. They decided to divide their group, eight men going in the shallop and twelve marching along the shore to explore what they hoped was their new home. They were swiftly disappointed. “We found it only to be a bay, without either river or creek coming into it,” William Bradford says.
The land was level, but the soil was not especially fruitful. They did find two small streams of fresh water, the first they had seen. They also found one of the “black things” around which the Indians had been working. It was a “great fish” which the sailors called a grampus, about fifteen feet long, black on top and white in the belly. It was “fleshed like a swine” with about two inches of fat under its skin. The shallop found two others farther down the bay, also dead on the sands. The explorers studied them wistfully. There was valuable oil in their fat, if only they had the time and tools to extract it. Farther up the beach they found the grampus that the Indians had been cutting up. They had sliced strips about forty-five inches long and eight inches broad from the dead fish and carried them away to boil down for oil.
The explorers followed the Indians’ tracks along the sand until they “struck into the woods” beside a large pond (Great Pond in Eastham). Someone thought they saw an Indian wigwam among the trees, and leaving the shallop out on the bay, the twelve landsmen marched into the woods. They found a path that led them to a clearing where corn had once been planted, but for some reason the ground had not been tilled that year.
Not far away they made an even more puzzling discovery. In a silent clearing stood a great, square fence made of young saplings four or five yards high, each planted two or three feet in the ground. Within the square was an immense graveyard. Some graves were bigger than others; a few had small fences around them. One or two even had Indian wigwams built over them. Outside the main fence were other graves, not so sumptuous. Here surely was the site of some immense disaster. Hundreds of people were buried here. Not far away they found more corn ground, also unfilled, and four or five wigwams, abandoned, with only two or three old mats and a little sedge hanging from them.
What was the explanation? The desolate winter woods seemed even more eerie to the baffled explorers as they exchanged bewildered glances. Was there nothing in this land but death? Where were the living people they had seen on the beach yesterday? “We went ranging up and down till the sun began to draw low,” Bradford says. “All this while we saw no people.”
They hurried out of the woods just before dark, and signaled the shallop, which was a long way off down the bay. The men in the boat were vastly relieved to see the party emerge from the woods. The sailors had expected them to stay on the beach, and when they vanished - it had been about ten o’clock when they turned into the woods - the alarm had been great.
After some waiting for the tide, the shallop made it ashore. The marchers were “both weary and faint.” They had eaten nothing all day, but before they could dine they had to chop more wood for a barricade and for their fire. The work seemed more exhausting each time they did it. Their strength was ebbing fast.
Huddling once more around the campfire, they dined on “such victuals as we had” - the nauseating salt meat and brick-hard biscuits. They then set out their sentinels and tried to get some sleep. About midnight, as the sentinels paced wearily up and down, beating their hands and stamping their feet against the cold, the woods suddenly erupted with “a great and hideous cry.” A battalion of demons seemed to be rushing down on them. “Arm! Arm!” the sentries shouted. The sleepers scrambled wildly for their guns and rushed to their barricade. The howling chorus seemed to engulf them from all sides, but there was no attack. They shot off a couple of muskets, and the noise abruptly ceased. One of the sailors told of a similar experience when he had spent the night ashore in Newfoundland. The noisemakers, he assured them, were not men or demons but wolves.
Those who could went back to sleep until 5 A.M. By mutual agreement, in this first gray light, the camp began to stir. Two or three, still somewhat nervous about the previous night’s uproar, fired off their muskets to make sure they were in working order. After morning prayer, they stoked their fire and prepared to make some breakfast.
While the food was heating, someone suggested they could begin to carry their things down to the shallop, several hund
red yards away across the broad beach in the shallow water. Those who were still nervous thought “it was not best to carry the armour down.” Others scoffed and said they would be all the readier to start once they got rid of their heavy iron corselets. Two or three others said they would carry their own armour when they went themselves. All told, sixteen of the twenty surrendered their guns and armour, and the working party lugged them down the beach to the shallop. There they discovered the tide was not high enough to launch the boat, and they piled the guns and armour by the water’s edge and came back to breakfast. It was an almost fatal mistake. The weeks of wandering through the deserted woods had made even Captain Standish somewhat careless.
Suddenly, as they sat down to breakfast, the woods erupted with the same awful cry that had shaken them at midnight. “We knew [them] to be the same voices,” Bradford says, “though they varied their notes.” Wolves howling again at dawn? The explorers exchanged uneasy glances. Then came another cry beneath the ear-shattering howl. “They are men. Indians! Indians!” In the same instant a barrage of arrows came hissing out of the semidarkness to thud against the barricade, inches away from the horrified white men’s heads.
The warning cry had come from one of the sentinels who had wandered into the woods while waiting for breakfast. He was no longer on duty but simply doing some idle exploring. Were it not for his morning constitutional, the whole group probably would have been slaughtered around the campfire.
One Small Candle: The Pilgrim's First Year in America (The Thomas Fleming Library) Page 10
