I said, “God forgive us for being felons.”
Butts said, “A felon, you say? A felon? Fie, sir! I am already a murderer. My mother died on a January night when I was twelve years old, and my drunken father cast me out onto a freezing street in the Borough of Colchester in Essex. I lived upon the victuals that I stole from starving beggar children smaller than me. Once, when I hadn’t eaten in three days, I strangled a red-haired girl half my age for a stale crust of bread that she was saving for her supper.”
• • •
We made our way back to Wessagusset, wherein there was now a score of Indians living in small wattle-and-daub houses in the glade around the stockade. There were no sentinels standing watch at the gates.
We found Captain Green and three sailors tending eight prostrate men stricken with the catarrh. They were all suffering from high fever, chills, running at the nose, and chronic coughs. Green and his sailors were weak from hunger and hadn’t changed the sick men’s soiled bedclothes in three days.
I asked Captain Green why there were not sentinels in the stockade. He said, “I’m ashamed to say that the men will not take orders from me.”
Rigdale and I set about changing the foul bedclothes. Butts went off with Martin Hook to gather shellfish on the muddy beach.
Butts said, “I dare not steal any corn for a while from the Indians. They are on their guard. I’m starved for nokake. Look at me! I am all skin and bones!”
Indeed, Butts looked thinner. His cheekbones now protruded from his face.
Rigdale and I concealed our stolen corn in our hats. Green and his three sailors shared their victuals with us: ground nuts, acorns, mussels, and clams. The four men shuffled along with their heads bowed, gasping for breath. Their gums bled, and their eyesight had deteriorated. Green could not see objects farther away than the length of his arms.
Two of his sailors, Andrew Kellway and a boy named Nicholas Pittfold, were stricken by the catarrh. Rigdale and I nursed them for six days. Pittfold’s lungs became congested. He sank into a delirium and cried out, “Anon, anon! I’ll come to you by and by.” Then he said, “Bid me, farewell, mother.”
I said, “Go to sleep, my son, go to sleep.”
He brought forth a guttural, gurgling death rattle from deep in his throat and died.
Captain Green told me that, like himself, Pittfold was a member of the Church of England and would be buried according to its rites. Pratt made a coffin. Green ordered a grave dug in the glade without the south gate and conducted the funeral according to the Book of Common Prayer. Held late in the afternoon of the same day, it was attended by two score of our famished company, many of whom were stricken by scurvy and the bloody flux. Some had swelled faces; others had sunken cheeks covered with black stubble. Rigdale and I absented ourselves from the papist service.
Kellway died the next morning at about four of the clock. Six of us had barely enough strength to dig a shallow grave. He was hastily buried without a coffin next to Pittfold in the freezing rain. Green conducted the lengthy service of the Church of England that was attended by five of Kellway’s friends. Afterwards, one of them named John Sheave asked me about Puritan funerals, and I explained that we Separatists consider them, like marriages, to be civil, not religious services.
He said, “Do you read the Psalms over the dead?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “I caught me a chill today listening to all them Psalms in the rain.”
The next day, he was stricken with a bad chest cold and a fever. He lay shivering under three blankets on the earthen floor, where I fed him shellfish soup and boiled acorns. God forgive me, I did not share my corn with him.
He said, “I brought this on myself. God punished me for complaining about the holy Psalms. Can you recite one for me?”
I recited Psalm 90, and he said, “Another.”
I recited Psalm 121, and he said, “More.”
I recited Psalm 130, Psalm 139, Psalm 23, Psalm 27, and Psalm 106.
He said, “Which one do you like best?”
I said, “Psalm 130.”
He said, “Which one is that?”
“‘Out of a deep place I have called unto Thee, O Lord.”’
“That’s the one that touched my heart.”
Shreave gradually recovered and went about the stockade, telling the sick, “Get Master Wentworth to recite Psalm 130 to you. It cured me. It’s magic. Master Wentworth is a magician.”
Thereafter, day and night, I was beset by the sick begging me to recite Psalm 130 to them. I refused them all, saying, “You want me to make magic. That’s a sin.”
Those men who were literate read the Psalm aloud to gatherings of the sick. For a few days, the words of Scripture resounded throughout the stockade. Then two of the sick men died, and the recitations ceased.
Hook attended their funerals. Afterwards, he took me aside and removed red and yellow seed corn from his cap, in the amount of two cupfuls, saying, “Do with it as you will.” Craving to devour it all myself, I gave it to Rigdale and bade him feed it to the patient that he felt would most benefit from it. He fed a bowl of nokake to a gaunt young man named Tristram Burt, who said, “What weather is it abroad?”
Rigdale said, “It is cold and stormy. The rain is mixed with snow.”
Burt said, “Behold, my last day on earth! I am no longer hungry. Don’t mourn for me when I am dead, for I shall be rejoicing in heaven. Yea, I long for my death. Come quickly, sweet Jesus, and receive my soul.”
He fell asleep for a few minutes.
When he awoke, he said, “Don’t let me go to sleep again, for I want to know when I die.”
Rigdale said, “You are young and strong and shall yet live a long while.”
Then Burt said, “I see the lights, sweet Jesus. I see the lights! I commit my spirit into Thy care.”
He was the fifth member of our company to die.
Rigdale, Pratt, and I gathered shellfish from the muddy shore at low tide. Pratt and I devoured them all on the beach. Rigdale divided his second catch of the day among the sick in their house. Their number increased daily.
There was now a second house filled with twelve men stricken by scurvy. This was my first close encounter with scurvy. I became familiar with its symptoms: pallor, swelled bleeding gums, and foul-smelling breath. Almost all of the five men sick with scurvy suffered from melancholia. One of them constantly cried out, “God help me, I am damned!”
Rigdale exhorted them all to have faith, but to no avail. He said, “This is the Devil’s own disease.”
The stricken men could not chew because of their swelled, bloody gums. We fed them shellfish broth. I often stole a savoury spoonful.
The next day, the Indians caught two of our men stealing corn and delivered them to Captain Green for a flogging. They were given twelve lashes each. I could not bear to witness their suffering. But it did not restrain three other starving thieves, who broke into the hidden stores in the Indian village. They were also caught and whipped. Once again, I could not bring myself to watch them suffer.
Late in the afternoon of New Year’s Day in the year of Christ 1623, Wittuwamat, Memsowit, and ten Indians arrived at the stockade with Hook, whose hands were bound behind him. Memsowit said to Captain Green, “We caught this thief with a leathern bag filled with stolen red seed corn. Seed corn for next spring’s planting! They will grow into next summer’s corn that will feed our children. This askook—what’s the English word? ‘Worm!’ This worm stole nokake from our children.”
He showed us Hook’s leathern bag filled with husked and shelled red Indian corn and said, “My sovereign lord gives him to you for punishment. What will you do with him?”
Captain Green said, “He will receive twelve lashes.”
This time, diabolical curiosity got the better of me, and I watched. Hook was forced to kneel
in the mud and embrace a big chopping block about which his wrists were bound together. A tall sailor named John Drake tore the shirt from Hook’s back, put a stick between his teeth, and said, “Bite down on this as hard as you can.”
Then he gave Hook twelve stripes with a leathern whip that had nine knotted lashes. Hook bit the stick hard. His spittle frothed in the corners of his mouth. He screamed and moaned. Drake was weak from hunger, and after giving the sixth blow, he paused to catch his breath. The wounds across Hook’s back were streaming blood.
Drake resumed the whipping. After the ninth stroke, Hook fainted. His chin struck the chopping block, bringing forth more fresh blood. Captain Green raised Hook’s head by his hair, Drake threw a bucket of water in Hook’s face, and he revived. The gnawed stick dropped from his mouth. Drake replaced it with a longer one. Hook fainted again after the final blow. Drake cut the bonds on Hook’s wrists, and Captain Green caught his body under the arms, laid him down in the mud, and bathed his bloody wounds.
Rigdale said to me, “Did you see that seven out of those twelve savages wanted bells on their leggings? Let’s truck with ’em. We shall exchange four of our bells with each savage for a goodly portion to eat.”
We had left in our possession four-and-fifty brass bells. Rigdale and I traded eight-and-twenty of them with the seven savages for seven roasted squirrels, of which Rigdale and I ate one each. The meat was tough to chew. I sucked the marrow from the little bones. Rigdale fed Hook some squirrel meat, but he retched it up. Said he, “I thirst, I thirst.”
I fetched him a big bowl of water, and he drank it.
Afterwards, he lay abed upon his stomach and spake in a hoarse voice. Said he, “I want revenge. Harken unto me. I found a hidden store of seed corn under a mound of earth in the southern part of the village. Go and steal a basketful and share it with me.”
Rigdale said, “Is that the mound at the foot of a dead oak?”
“No. It’s the one on the west side of the stream that flows near Wittuwamat’s house. Now let me sleep.”
Captain Green divided the five squirrels that were left among his lusty sailors. I kept the six-and-twenty remaining bells in my knapsack.
One evening, Pratt said to me, “Alas, my design for our stockade has turned out to be a trifle of my brain. ’Tis useless without the proper protection afforded by a disciplined company of defenders.”
I said, “What can we do?”
He said, “Discipline ourselves! Act like soldiers!”
The next day, Butts told Rigdale and me that he had seen Pratt leaving the stockade at dawn, with a pack on his back, and his tool box and a hoe in either hand.
“A hoe?” said I. “Wherefore a hoe?”
Butts said, “Wherefore a hoe? I will now let thee know. I followed him at a distance. He never spied me. He made his way directly to one of the Indian houses a short distance from the stockade and made a show of digging with his hoe in the mud in search of ground nuts. Then, satisfied that no Indian was about, he walked into a thicket and hurried off to the south, in the direction of Plymouth.
“Then I saw three armed savages emerge from a hut and follow Pratt across the glade.
“One of them was carrying a big, carved wooden club.”
Rigdale said, “Tom Ford, Bradford’s messenger, told me the Plymouth Plantation is but five-and-twenty miles south of here, through the trackless forest over yonder, beyond the meadow. He said that wolves and savage Indians roam amongst the huge trees. He crossed the wild North River. Ford almost drowned therein.
“This time of year there are still deep snow drifts on the north slopes of the hills. The journey took Ford two and one-half days.”
I bestirred myself and gazed at the woods to the south. So I was only a five-and-twenty mile march from Abigail, but irrevocably separated from her by a trackless forest, deep snow drifts, savage Indians, and my cowardice.
The clouds gathered as the day wore on, until at length the sun became so obscured that I felt sure that unable to determine his direction, Pratt would lose his way in the forest.
Rigdale said to me, “You have a compass, Charles. Why don’t you try to make your way to Plymouth?”
“Because Abigail would take me for a cowardly deserter.”
He said, “Let us steal some corn from the Indians!”
“How can we do so?”
“I will think on it.”
It rained and snowed for the next two days. Rigdale and I tended the starving and the sick.
Rigdale went at noon each day to fish for eels that were twisted together in the frozen mud. Each night, he returned with six eels. They were fat and sweet. Nevertheless, two more men died with their bellies swelled up from hunger. Toward the end, one of them cried out, “Behold, I am heavy with child. How can that be?”
Rigdale and I joined a score or so of our company and digged up some shellfish with hoes at low tide from the muddy beach. Hook digged alongside us until high tide at about ten of the clock at night. His effort opened one of his wounds that would not close. The fresh blood stained the back of his shirt.
Too many of us digged in one place. Our catch diminished day by day. Just after sunrise one morning, Hook went off to search for shellfish alone. I watched him walk east along the muddy beach as the tide went out. He was walking slowly, with a basket in one hand, leaning on his hoe. The thick mud clung to the soles of his shoes.
A sailor named George Wells found Hook’s corpse the next morning. It was stuck fast in the mud on the beach about two miles to the east. He was lying on his back, his head toward the shore. His face was covered by sea weed. I surmised that he had slipped and fallen over backwards and was trapped at low tide in the thick, glutinous mud, wherein, too weak from hunger and his open wound to raise his head or limbs, he was compelled to wait six hours, until noon, for the high tide to come in and drown him.
It took four of us an hour to free his body and wash the mud from it with seawater. His wide-open blue eyes protruded from his face. His bloated hands were red. His fingernails were bloodless. His fingers and lips were a purplish blue in color.
Six of us carried him back to our graveyard, where he was buried according to the rite of the Church of England. Neither Rigdale nor I attended the service. Our churchyard now contained ten dead men.
I told Rigdale about Hook’s terror of drowning.
I said, “Imagine his thoughts, for six hours, as the tide rose slowly about him. He felt the rising sun shining upon the right side of his face. Hour after hour, whilst the tide rose, the sun climbed higher in the sky. He knew the high tide would encompass him about noon. He must have screamed and prayed for help. He felt the rising tide lap at his feet, then his knees, his thighs, his waist, his breast, his neck, the back of his head. The water covered his ears.
“By now, the sun was almost directly above him. The light must have dazzled his eyes. Did he shut them? Or did he gaze upon the sky for one last time? The water covered his mouth and nose. I would think that he held his breath for as long as he could. Then he died the death he had feared the most: he drowned.”
Rigdale said, “I hope I would have made a Christian end, praying, ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’”
On the morrow, which I reckoned to be the fifteenth day of March, the floor of the forest was covered by fragrant pinkish-white blossoms. Each flower had five petals. They thrived in the moist shade. None of us had ever seen such a flower. At dusk, we were astonished by flying squirrels that glided through the air from tree to tree on outstretched limbs.
Rigdale and I spent the following Sabbath praying and reading aloud from Scripture. Rigdale tried to preach a sermon on Lamentations 4:9: “They that be slain with the sword are better than they that are killed with hunger: for they fade away, as they stricken through for the fruits of the field.” But no words on that text from Scripture came to him, and he spake
instead of a dinner he enjoyed every Michaelmas at the Company of Joiners on Friars Lane, in London. He said, “To begin with, we had a fat, roasted goose and a savoury roasted veal, then a boiled beef, then a fat woodcock. Afterwards, we were served claret and Canary sack.”
Then Rigdale said, “By heaven, the fruit! I forgot the fruit! We were served apples, pears, chestnuts, oranges, grapes, figs, raisins, cherries, and melons. Fruits, if you remember, are very plentiful in England around Michaelmas.”
I said, “Let us talk about something else.”
Rigdale said, “Let us discuss how to steal corn from the Indians. I reckon that a full knapsack of it will be about a bushel, which will feed four of our people two cupfuls a day for more than a week. Whom will we choose to feed? That’s the question. I do not relish the idea of playing God.”
I said, “Let us first secure the corn before we worry about dispensing it.”
Then I said, “To tell you true, I am a coward. A base coward. I could not bear to be whipped. Hook screamed. I’ll howl. Did you not see the froth in the corners of his mouth? Like a mad dog. What of his deep, bloody wounds? One lash laid upon another. I am very sensitive to pain. No, my friend, I could not bear to be whipped. I beg you, steal the seed corn by yourself. Do not share any with me. Keep it all. Let me go hungry. Forgive me for not accompanying thee, and promise not to tell Abigail.”
Rigdale said, “Come, weep not! You have my word.”
I removed the flint and steel, the burning glass, the needle and thread, the awl, the compass, and the horn cup from the knapsack. Rigdale dropped the six-and-twenty brass bells therein and put it upon his back.
I said, “Butts stole some Indian corn hidden in an earthen mound in the eastern part of the village, under an oak tree. I would search there first.”
Rigdale said, “I will.”
Then we fell upon our knees and prayed that God would forgive Rigdale for the sin of stealing.
The Pilgrim Page 18
