Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  By the middle of the seventeenth century, the trade in beaver fur had come to lie at the heart of the life of the Abenaki. At Naragooc the evidence is plain, and it takes two forms, material and linguistic. In the 1990s, when archaeologists explored the village sites beside the Kennebec, they found scores of beaver bones, from the animal’s jawbone, skull, and legs. But the beaver left a still deeper mark on the language that the people spoke.7

  It survives in the form of a lexicon compiled more than three hundred years ago by a French Catholic missionary, Father Sebastian Râle. He listed more than thirty nouns, verbs, and phrases used by the people of Naragooc to describe the animal, its skin, its behavior, and the manner in which they pursued it. They called the beaver temakwe, meaning “tree cutter.” They gave different names to male and female adults, and they called a young beaver a temakwesis. They had separate words for beavers as they appeared in winter and as they were in warmer weather when their pelts had thinned. Then they were known as nepenemeskwe, from nipen, meaning “summer.”

  The people of Naragooc called the skin of a beaver matarreh, and they added extra syllables to grade the pelts into categories of size and quality. The beaver’s kidneys, rognons de castor, had their own Abenaki word—awisenank—and this suggests that once skinned, the beaver was cooked and eaten: an English visitor to Maine in the 1620s compared the taste to roast lamb. Father Râle recorded phrases referring to the beaver’s motion, as its tail beats the surface of a pond, as it lifts its head from the water, or as it dives back to hide. At home, the English hunted otters with packs of web-footed hounds. Râle tells us that the Abenaki did something similar: they pursued the beaver with a chien à castor, a “beaver dog,” or in their language a temakwekkwe.8

  They inhabited a place ideal for the purpose. From the highland plateau, three river systems descend to the north, south, and east: the Kennebec, the St. John, and the Chaudière, the Canadian river that drains away from the far side of Coburn Gore and down into the St. Lawrence. If the sheer quantity of mammals was the first great attraction of the region, the second lay in the ease of entry and exit along these great waterways. To the Eastern Abenaki, the chain of ponds and lakes around Hathan Bog were the high road that led from Mawooshen to Quebec and back.

  After the British seized control of Canada in 1759, they sent a military engineer called John Montresor to find the path, as a means to move men and guns from Quebec to Boston and back. He found the bog and the beaver dams, but Colonel Montresor remembered how reluctant the people of Mawooshen were to disclose the secret of the forest highway.

  The Abenaki, he said, were “the natural proprietors of the country … No nation having been more jealous of their country than the Abenaquis, they have made it a constant rule to leave the fewest vestiges of their route.” In the early days of New England, long before Montresor, no European had trod the path at all. The first were Râle’s forerunners, French Jesuits, in the 1640s, coming over the watershed southward. This was a journey a skilled Abenaki could accomplish in a week or so, if the weather were benign.

  With a birch-bark canoe, eighteen feet long, fit to carry two men and one thousand pounds of cargo, the Abenaki could pole and paddle along streams as little as five inches deep. But to make canoes like these, they needed sheets of bark from birch trees at least four feet in circumference. In the seventeenth century, paper birch of such a size grew rarely in southern New England, but the trees existed in plenty in Maine. For this reason, the birch-bark canoe was chiefly a tool of the people of Mawooshen and the country that lay behind it.9

  With their canoes, they could travel for hundreds of miles, from the headwaters of the Connecticut River in the west to Nova Scotia in the east. Up on the plateau, the belt of land around Coburn Gore could be crossed on foot. Down in the lowlands, the pattern of lakes and low ridges left behind by the ice sheets created natural canoe trails, by way of short overland carries between the waterways. By this means, the Abenaki could make detours around obstacles in the Kennebec, cross from it to another river, the Androscoggin, and reach the mountains of northern New Hampshire. In the other direction, going east from Naragooc by way of the Sebasticook, they could enter the vast basin of the Penobscot and the St. John. In turn, those rivers led them across the modern border into what is now the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

  If there were boundaries to movement, they arose only from hostile opponents. In 1626, on the Hudson River, the Mohawk killed and ate seven Dutch fur traders, and two years later they ejected from the same region their foes the Mohican. So, for the people of Naragooc, the Mohawk and their fellow Iroquois fixed the limit of commerce to the west.

  To the east, the St. John marked a frontier with the Micmac, known then as the Tarrentines, long the enemies of the Abenaki. They were seagoing raiders and middlemen, passing up and down the coast between the French in Canada and the people of Massachusetts to the south. Even so, between these limits there remained forty thousand square miles of uncontested country. And that was why, in the spring of 1628, our bald eagle saw the English coming up the Kennebec.

  THE PILGRIMS AT CUSHNOC

  If she flew south and gazed out over the ocean, she would notice white specks rising and falling on the swell. A convoy of sailing ships, thirty or forty in number, they were trawling for cod or calling at the fishing post on Damariscove Island. Behind them lay a voyage of fourteen days from Newfoundland, or eight or nine weeks if their track across the ocean had brought them without a stop from the harbors of southwestern England.

  Somewhere out on the Gulf of Maine were two ships in particular. One was small, a fishing boat called the Pleasure, with a capacity of thirty-five tons. The other had a volume five times larger, and she was the White Angel, an armed merchant ship with a privateering license to take any French or Spanish vessel she met.

  Both ships had come from Barnstaple, in the English county of Devon. On January 23 and 24, duly recorded by customs officers, they left their home port loaded with supplies for the Pilgrims at New Plymouth. The White Angel and the Pleasure crossed the Atlantic, handed over their freight, and began to look for a cargo to bring back. Most of all they wanted beaver skins.10

  So did the crew of another English vessel in the region. If the eagle remained inland and wheeled over the site of the modern city of Augusta, she would pass over a smaller craft, coming upstream along the Kennebec toward the rocks that marked the end of the river’s tidal reach.

  The boat was bound for a small cove where a path wound up a bluff toward another flat riverside terrace. On board were guns, ammunition, and trading goods: knives, hoes, hatchets, and perhaps a few shining copper kettles. By way of rations, she would have brought casks of cider and beer and red ceramic jars, each one filled with pickled fish or olives.

  The boat also carried men from New Plymouth. They were led most likely by Edward Winslow, aged thirty-two, but possibly also by William Bradford, the colony’s governor, a man of thirty-eight. Probably Winslow had with him John Howland, in his late twenties, since Howland later became the manager of the Pilgrim fur business in Maine. They were English Separatists, or radical Puritans. All three had first traveled to America on board the Mayflower, after leaving their place of exile in the Dutch city of Leiden in the summer of 1620.

  With a patent from the authorities in London, they were on their way to build a trading post to dominate the traffic in fur from the interior. Known as Cushnoc, the place can easily be found today, above the bluff, in the center of modern Augusta. In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered on the site the remains of a wooden house, a ring of timber postholes, and pieces of English red pots, dating from roughly this period. They came from Barnstaple, where shipowners gave their crews cider to drink, because it kept well on long voyages.11

  At Cushnoc, the Pilgrims at last corrected the mistake they made when they landed inside the hook of Cape Cod. Decades earlier, an Elizabethan writer had urged new settlers to plant themselves “upon the mouthes of the greate navigable
rivers,” as a means of finding trading partners or a route to the Pacific.12 This was common sense. It was what the settlers at Jamestown did when they chose a home in Virginia close to the entrance of Chesapeake Bay.

  But because the Mayflower wandered off course, failing to reach the Hudson, her planned destination, she deposited her passengers on one of the longest stretches of shoreline on the Atlantic seaboard without a waterway reaching far inland. Eight years later, the Kennebec provided a solution. It came by way of contact with the hunting bands of the Eastern Abenaki and their network of communication. For this reason, even in later decades, when the fur trade began to slacken as competition increased and profits fell, the Pilgrims remained determined to maintain their grip on Cushnoc and its river.

  They established what colonial officials in Victorian Africa would later call a protectorate. Like Uganda or Swaziland, the Kennebec valley became a region whose defense and security the British tried to control. When a French Jesuit visited Naragooc in 1650, he found that its inhabitants lived under what he called “la protection de cette colonie de Plymouth.” He wished to enlist the support of the Puritan English, on behalf of the Abenaki on both sides of the mountains, in a war against the Iroquois. The Pilgrims readily agreed to help him, Catholic though he was, for the sake of the furs that came down the river.13

  By building their post at Augusta, Winslow and Bradford began to transform forever the lands that they entered. They drew the Abenaki ever more tightly into the circuits of commerce that led back across the sea like submarine cables. The consequences were profound, and ambiguous too. Besides the bones of beavers, archaeologists found armaments at Naragooc, lumps of lead and flints used to fire a musket. The Pilgrims did not sell guns, since King Charles had strictly forbidden it, but they were not the only English traders on the coast. In the early 1630s the asking price for a beaver skin in Maine was a third of a bar of lead, or five beakers of gunpowder and two pounds of shot.14

  Meanwhile, on the eastern side of the ocean, the results of their activities were equally far-reaching. Before Cushnoc, the French and the Dutch easily surpassed the English in the quantities of fur they acquired in North America. As many as six thousand beaver skins reached Amsterdam each year from Dutchmen on the Hudson. In Quebec, Samuel de Champlain and his French colony dealt in quantities that were still larger. Until very late in the day, the English were dabblers, barely clinging to their footholds along the coast. This first began to change in 1625, when the Pilgrims started dealing at the mouth of the Kennebec, buying pelts from the Abenaki with surplus corn. But it was the trading season of 1628 that marked the great turning point for English enterprise.

  That summer, the White Angel and the Pleasure sailed home with beaver skins in quantities far larger than any their home ports had seen before. And they arrived at a decisive moment when, for other reasons, men and women suddenly began to take a far closer interest in emigration westward. That same year, because of defeat in war, events were converging in London toward a political crisis.

  Puritans, mariners, and businessmen lost patience with the king’s bungling of hostilities with France. They complained about squandered taxation, about dwindling civil liberties, about losses of ships and men, and about a failing economy. Most of all they feared that King Charles was conniving to bring back the Roman Catholic faith.

  The following spring, in 1629, an embittered session of Parliament ended in failure from everyone’s point of view. At that moment, New England ceased to be merely a zealous eccentricity. Instead, it became a Puritan demand. This was because it offered a place where alternatives might be found; but it could only do so if it paid its way.

  In 1630, a much larger fleet of migrant ships sailed to Massachusetts Bay under the leadership of John Winthrop. Its organizers had closely monitored the slow progress of the settlers at New Plymouth. They began to make plans for the Winthrop colony only after they saw proof, by way of beaver skins, that New England made financial sense.

  For more than five decades, the idea of a mission to America had excited energetic Protestants in England. Although little had been achieved, they had expected from the outset that religion would go hand in hand with profit. Who was the first man to think of such a project? There are several candidates, and they were French as well as English. Among them, as we shall see, perhaps the most relevant to the Pilgrims was a poet, Sir Philip Sidney.

  He was a soldier as well as a writer, and he was also an eager Calvinist. In the 1580s, Sidney dreamed of a colony that would combine Christianity, economics, and patriotic adventure. His friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, spoke of Sidney’s “hazardous enterprize of planting upon the main of America.” Sir Philip wished to create, said Greville, “an Emporium for the confluence of all nations that love or profess any kind of virtue, or commerce.” In 1586, Sidney died of a war wound, inflicted by a Spanish musketeer. He never crossed the western ocean, and so it was left to the Mayflower Pilgrims to build the plantation he had wished to see.

  It would be godly, but lucrative too. Both Christian and commercial, it would be an instrument of empire, as well as a manifestation of faith.15 In due course, New England became the emporium of virtue that Sidney had envisaged; but it was a complicated kind of virtue, and one that not everybody wished to share.

  In this book you will find a new account of the Mayflower Pilgrims, their origins, and their first decade in North America. It is new in two respects. First, it draws on the multitude of neglected primary sources on the old side of the ocean. And, second, it replaces the Pilgrims within their true setting, in all its Jacobean density, in Europe as well as in Massachusetts and Maine.

  This is not a simple story. Like the project imagined by Sir Philip Sidney, it has many layers, overlapping strata of piety, politics, and business. Molded by the random processes of chance, events also took the shape they did because exceptional people were involved. This, the role of character, and morale, adds yet another element of complication. Fortunately, however, we have a set of charts that can guide us through the labyrinth. The maps exist, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the tangible form of terrain.

  Within the landscape lay the harsh imperatives of economic stress in an age when survival could never be taken for granted. This was true in England and in America alike. By exploring the space in which events took place, in the Old World and the New, we can begin to explain why they happened at all. We can also hope to escape from sentimentality and fiction. There is no need to indulge in mythology about the Pilgrims, when we can interrogate the land and the documents that remain. In the earth, and in the archives, we find the hard traces of motivation: assuming, of course, that we know where to look.

  Perhaps Puritan New England would have happened anyway, without Cushnoc or the Mayflower. But, as things were, the Plymouth Colony became a permanent settlement because of the land, the animals, and the people that our eagle saw. For this reason, we start and finish on the Kennebec, among the mountains. We end and begin with the river, and the trees, with the Eastern Abenaki, the People of the Dawn, and with the temakwe, the slaughtered beaver of Mawooshen.

  Part One

  THE HEAVENS AND THE SEA

  The title-page illustration from a book about the comet of 1618, published the following year by the Dutch poet Jacob Cats and called Remarks on the Current Shooting Star. The text beneath, from the book of Isaiah, warns of God’s anger against the sinful and promises salvation to the godly. (Boerhaave Museum, Leiden)

  Chapter One

  THE YEAR OF THE BLAZING STAR

  Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

  Comets, importing change of times and states,

  Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.

  —SHAKESPEARE, KING HENRY VI PART ONE (1589–92)

  An hour before dawn on November 28, 1618, a physician looked up from his house on the northern edge of London and gazed over the city between the steeples and the chimneys. Above them, in the darkness to the sout
heast, he saw a blazing star. It was colored a shade between green and blue, with a long white triangular tail. The comet gleamed with what he later called “a bright resplendence.”

  Medicine gave John Bainbridge a livelihood, but astronomy and mathematics excited him far more. An ambitious man of thirty-six, he believed in the ideas of Copernicus, and he read what Johannes Kepler wrote about the orbit of planets around the sun. In the comet he saw a chance to defend their findings. In the frost of early winter, Bainbridge tracked the apparition for four weeks, with the help of his “telescopion, or trunkespectacle,” one of the first in England. Peering through its lenses, he plotted the position of the star with a wooden cross-staff, collecting the data he needed to calculate its speed, altitude, and distance from the earth. Day by day, he watched its colors fade and the comet diminish as it soared toward the northwest. He followed it past Scorpius and the Great Bear, until it veered away into oblivion beyond the Pole Star.

  Swiftly the doctor completed a book about his observations. In the manner of its time it combined algebra, verse, and abject flattery of King James. Bainbridge pointed out that the gleaming star followed a course between New Guinea and the Arctic, and this could only mean one thing. As it traveled across the sky, the doctor said, the comet promised that God would reveal to the English the shining secret of another northwest passage, the icy route that led around the top of Canada, to reach the East Indies by way of the Pacific. In the star they beheld God’s gift of wealth. From the Lord, the people of Great Britain would soon receive “healthfull spices, precious Jewels, and Orientall riches,” as Bainbridge put it in his most exalted prose.