They were still far from safe. The men who had left their guns and armour down by the shallop rushed out of the barricade and ran across the broad beach for their weapons. The Indians came streaming out of the woods to cut them off. These savages were no fools; they had evidently been watching the white men all night and had chosen to attack the moment they had separated themselves from their weapons. But a few of those who had stacked their guns and armour had retained their swords, and they met the first shock of the Indian assault while the others went on to the muskets. The scuffle on the sand ended abruptly when two or three of their clumsy matchlocks going and fired. The Indians fled back into the woods.
Meanwhile, those around the fire were still under fierce assault. Their barricade was a three-sided affair with an opening to leeward, and through this opening the red men poured clouds of arrows. Standish temporarily discouraged them with a single shot from his more modern snaphaunce. Another man fired into the trees immediately after the captain, but when William Bradford and a fourth marksman stepped to the opening, Standish ordered them to hold their fire.
It was too dark to see anything out there in the trees, and if the Indians tried a frontal assault they would need every bullet. The bloodcurdling whoops and howls continued to come from the woods. “Woach! Ha! Ha! Hach! Woach!” was how they sounded to William Bradford.
Through the din, those at the barricade shouted to those at the shallop: “How is it with you?”
“Well, well,” they shouted back. “Be of good courage!”
“Give us fire. Give us fire,” several other voices called. They needed a flame to light their matchlocks. One of the barricade defenders grabbed a log out of the fire and raced down the beach to them. Everyone was armed now, but split into two groups. The explorers’ position was precarious. Those around the shallop hesitated to return to the barricade, which looked more and more like a trap. They assumed that Standish and his three musketeers would fall back to the boat, but the sturdy captain declined to surrender the food and equipment around the campfire without a fight.
He rightly guessed that the Indians were awed by the white men’s muskets, and now it was light enough to see their enemies flitting back and forth through the trees. Though the howls continued, the attack seemed to be dwindling. Only one man, obviously their leader, drew close enough to do any real damage. “A lusty man, no wit less valiant,” Bradford says, “he stood behind a tree within half a musket shot of us and there let his arrows fly at us.” The chief shot three arrows which were “all avoided,” while the white men blasted at him with three musket shots at a range of about forty yards. Finally one man took full aim at him and “made the bark and splinters of the tree fly about his ears.”
The chief gave “an extraordinary cry” and fled. His cohorts vanished with him like so much smoke. The shaken white men were left alone once more on the edge of the silent forest.
Miles Standish decided there was only one way to counter such aggression. Leaving six men to guard the shallop, he marched the other thirteen a quarter of a mile into the woods after their attackers. He drew them up in a rank, and they shouted defiantly several times and shot off a couple of muskets. Standish wanted the Indians to see they were neither afraid nor discouraged.
The exact number of their attackers was difficult for the explorers to determine. “We could not guess there were less than thirty or forty,” William Bradford says, “though some thought that there were many more. Yet in the dark of the morning, we could not so well discern them among the trees.” They collected eighteen of their arrows. They were well made, some headed with brass, others with horn, and others with eagles’ claws. Miraculously, so it seemed to the explorers, not a man among them was touched, although “many being close by us and on every side of us and some coats which hung up in our barricado were shot through and through.” Governor Carver suggested that they give thanks to God for their deliverance. They knelt on the sand and did so. Then after christening the beach “The First Encounter,” a name it still possesses, they boarded the shallop and set sail for “Thievish Harbor” of Robert Coppin’s description.
They continued to hug the coast hoping to find a closer river or bay, but they saw neither. Meanwhile the weather began to grow ugly, snow and rain mixing in a mounting wind. By midafternoon it was a roaring gale, and they were plunging through heavy seas. Now the beating that the shallop had taken in the Mayflower’s gun deck began to tell. The hinges of the rudder suddenly broke, and two men had to steer with oars. “The seas were grown so great that we were much troubled and in great danger,” William Bradford says.
Night began to fall over the angry water, making their situation even more precarious. Then Robert Coppin called out: “Be of good cheer! I see the harbor!” They began running before the furious northeast wind, with the sea leaping mountainously around them. A prudent captain would have shortened his sail, but they were desperate to make the harbor while there was still some light. Then came a wilder blast of wind, and with a sickening crack the mast split in three pieces and went overboard.
Furious work now in the dark foaming water. Men leaped; at the remnants of the mast and clinging halyards to cut them free before the shallop wallowed into the trough and capsized. In sixty seconds of frantic hacking they cut everything away and seizing the oars pulled with all their dwindling strength for the harbor ahead.
They had a flood tide and the wind at their stern, and for a few minutes progress was good, but up in the bow Robert Coppin suddenly peered through the dusk and lost his head completely.
“Lord be merciful unto us,” he cried. “I have never seen this place before.” Through the gloom, Coppin saw a cove full of pounding breakers. Wildly he shouted to first mate John Clark to run her ashore there. Clark, equally rattled, was about to do so - a decision that could well have destroyed the shallop and drowned everyone.
But one of the Mayflower seamen who was steering with the other oar unexpectedly took command. “If you be men,” he roared, “about with her or we are all cast away!” The men at the oars put their backs into it and brought the heavy boat around. Their new commander bade them to be of good jeer and “row lustily,” for he saw a “fair sound” before them where they could ride out the storm in safety. Groping along total darkness now, the explorers did indeed soon find calmer water and next worked their way into the shelter of some kind of land.
They had no idea where they were. After their morning clash with the Indians, most were afraid to go ashore. Some were afraid they would freeze to death huddled there in the cold rain. Around midnight, the wind shifted to northwest and the temperature plunged even lower. “It froze hard,” Bradford says.
This was too much for John Clark, who had regained his composure and announced that he was going ashore and build a fire. If there were Indians around, it was better to die quickly under a tomahawk stroke than freeze to death inch by inch out here on the water. A few men followed him and soon had a big blaze roaring on the beach. After watching for awhile from the pitching, ice-encased boat and seeing no war party leap out of the darkness, everyone decided it was the kind of a night that would keep even Indians at home and joined the Mayflower’s courageous first mate around the fire.
Warmth was their only consolation that night. Everything else that had happened could only plunge them even further into desperate gloom. They had no idea where they were. This so-called Thievish Harbor of Robert Coppin’s memory might not even exist. They knew now that the Indians were ferociously hostile. Everything seemed to point to dwindling chances of success and even survival.
But the next day they felt better. “God gave them a morning of comfort and refreshing,” William Bradford says. They awoke to a clear, fair world full of brilliant winter sunshine. They found themselves to be on an island “secure from Indians, where they might dry their stuff, fix their pieces and rest themselves.”
Robert Coppin, calmer now, declared it was indeed the Thievish Harbor of his memory. Entering last nig
ht in the gloom and storm, he had mistook the first headland, the Gurnet, for Saquish Head. They decided to name the island after John Clark in gratitude for his courage in leading them to safety on it.
The view from the island was heartening after so many weeks of fruitless searching along the shore. Wooded hills, glistening with snow, formed a great amphitheater around the almost completely landlocked bay. The silence was broken only by the sea and a gull’s occasional cry, giving the; meditative explorers time to wonder and stare. Had they finally found their home?
The next day was Sunday and anxious as they were to explore the harbor, they once more refused to violate their Sabbath. They spent the day in prayer and meditation. The following morning, December 11, they were up at dawn. The weather continued to be sunny and mild. They had set a new mast in the shallop, and after a short sail across the quiet harbor they made their first landing in Plymouth.
William Bradford, the eyewitness historian of the day, neglects to tell us where. It may well have been upon the historic rock, which made a convenient landing place at half tide. This is the only possible resemblance to the traditional image of the occasion. There were no Indians to greet them. No women, no children by their sides, no Mayflower in the background. Only an empty harbor and a barren, silent land greeted this weather-beaten, bedraggled band of desperate men.
They formed up under Miles Standish’s stern orders, lit their matches, and, with muskets ready, “marched onto the land.” They liked what they saw. There were “diverse cornfields and little running brooks,” William Bradford says . “A place . . . fit for situation. At least it was the best they could rid, and the season and their present necessity made them glad to accept of it.”
We do not know whether they immediately christened the place. It would seem likely, since they had named many other sites they had discovered en route. But the confusion and hesitation which had marked their exploration hardly suggest that they possessed a copy of John Smith’s map, on which the harbor was already called Plymouth. Later, they would tell visitors that they had named it Plymouth themselves, because “Plymouth in Old England was the last town they left in the native country; and for that they received many kindnesses from some Christians there.”
For now, names were not important. It was the place itself, the promise of its soil, the protection of the ample harbor, that made their pulses beat. They were so anxious to bring the good news back to the Mayflower, they decided to sail straight across the twenty-five miles of open water to the tip of Cape Cod, rather than hug the coast as they had done on their outward voyage. It was a dangerous move for a small boat at that time of year. But for once the weather proved kind. They skimmed across the bay in brilliant sunshine and tied up alongside the Mayflower that afternoon.
Exclamations of joy, tears of relief greeted the explorers as they climbed aboard. They had been gone a full week, and many had given them up for lost. Young husbands, such as Edward Winslow, joyfully embraced their wives. William’ Bradford looked eagerly for Dorothy’s smile, but she was not, on deck. Then he noticed the uneasy eyes, the hesitating mouths of those closest to him. Perhaps then his old friend and foster father, William Brewster, stepped out of the crowd and took him by the arm. One look at his solemn face and Bradford knew the worst.
Mournfully, on the Mayflower’s high poop, the man who had led William Bradford on this long voyage told him that his young wife had died. In some unknown way, she had fallen overboard and drowned before anyone could come to her aid with a rope or spar. Though neither spoke it, both knew the dreaded word that lay between them. After six weeks of contemplating the melancholy winter face of the New World, Dorothy Bradford had lost her faith in her husband and her God and had killed herself.
William Bradford must have wept. Had his own carefully concealed doubts which had tempted him to leave his son behind destroyed the woman who trusted in his strength? A chorus of ifs and might have beens echoed in Bradford’s numb mind. If young John had come with them, if Bradford himself had not been so preoccupied with his enthusiasm for exploring, his involvement in the decisions and debates on where to settle. . . .
We have no certain proof that Dorothy Bradford took her own life. But the strange circumstances of her death, and Bradford’s total silence on the subject for the rest of his long life have raised the conjecture to near certainty in the minds of many Plymouth historians. It was a bitter homecoming for the young leader, and it would have broken many men. But William Bradford was not alone. His friends crowded around to comfort him. They had been inclined to lean on him. Now he needed help. It was the first of many moments when they would demonstrate the meaning of their covenant to love and cherish one another with the unhesitating charity urged by St. Paul.
Dorothy was not their only loss. The day the shallop sailed, little Jasper More, one of the three orphaned brothers whom Thomas Weston had hired out as servants to John Carver, died of the same combination of scurvy and pneumonia-like fever that had taken William Butten while at sea. The next day, James Chilton had died, leaving a grief-stricken wife and daughter to be cared for by the colony. A dozen others were prostrate in their bunks with the same sickness.
To a vigorous young man such as William Bradford, with natural gifts of leadership, it must have seemed vital for them to get the Mayflower to Plymouth harbor without losing another day. But Governor John Carver, older and less incisive, was anxious to give everyone a voice in the final decision. So they spent three more days in debate and deliberation before finally voting to settle in Plymouth. On December 15, the Mayflower weighed anchor and stood across the bay from their new home.
But Captain Jones, careful sailor that he was, did not at all like the looks of the narrow channel into Plymouth harbor and flatly refused to negotiate it under a northwest wind. They bore up and spent another night at sea. Cruising idly back and forth in the deep water, another debate broke out between those who favored Plymouth and those who still clung to the idea of settling at the tip of Cape Cod. It might take them days to work their way into this harbor, days they could not afford to waste. The Plymouth party was on the defensive and agreed that if serious difficulty developed the next day, they would consider a return to Cape Cod.
But in the morning, the wind came up fair and Captain Jones eased his old ship down the narrow channel and past the Gurnet and Saquish Head into the placid waters near Clark’s Island. Within a half hour after they dropped anchor, the wind changed. Again many saw it as a sign of God’s hand in helping them choose the place. William Bradford says, “If we had been leaded [hindered] but a little, we had gone back to Cape Cod.”
The next day was Sunday, and once more the leaders from Leyden refused to violate their Sabbath, though they were doubly eager to explore this harbor. By now, Captain Jones and his sailors had become resigned to this aspect of their passengers. In fact, a small admiration had begun to creep among many of the crewmen. These people did not have the kind of wordy religion that they heard from country parsons back home. They lived their faith.
On Monday, Captain Jones, his explorer’s instincts revived, volunteered to command the shallop for a trip ashore. Taking four of his sailors and a well-armed party of passengers under the command of Miles Standish, they marched seven or eight miles into the woods. They found neither Indians nor Indian corn, but there were cleared fields where corn had obviously once been planted. There were no navigable rivers, but four or five brooks with “very sweet, fresh water” ran into the harbor. They liked the looks of the soil, “excellent black mould,” and trees for lumber were abundant. There were also sand and gravel and “excellent clay” for pots. All in all it was “a most hopeful place.”
They spent the night aboard the Mayflower and the nextmcorning went ashore again in the shallop for more exploring. This time they found “a very pleasant river and sailed up it or three miles.” They named it after the Mayflower’s captain, and it is still called Jones River today. At high tide a thirty-ton ship could go up it, but
at low tide even the shallop scraped bottom.
In spite of this, many people thought that it would be best to settle up the river. There would be less danger of attack by French or Spanish privateers. Others thought it would be too far from fishing, which was to be their -principal profit,” and surrounded as it was by woods, they would be in constant danger of an Indian attack, not to mention the problem of clearing the ground with their dwindling number of able-bodied men.
Those who feared the Indians most began to favor Clark’s Island, but a close examination of it found no fresh water except three of four small pits which were likely to be brackish in summer. Also there was no land cleared for planting corn, and much of the available soil was rocky. Yet the safety of the place attracted many people, and the debate raged far into the night aboard the Mayflower.
The next morning, the twentieth, they decided to make one more trip ashore. “We could not now take time for further search or consideration,” William Bradford says, “our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” They went ashore, surveyed the upriver site, and then took a vote among those who had signed the compact. The majority chose to settle on the mainland, on the shore of the bay where corn land had been cleared, though not planted for three or four years, and “a very sweet brook” ran into the harbor.
One Small Candle: The Pilgrim's First Year in America (The Thomas Fleming Library) Page 11
