Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  A description of his meeting with Staresmore survives in the great history of the Plymouth Colony written by William Bradford. Understandably, Bradford’s narrative has always provided the backbone for books about the Mayflower Pilgrims. Later writers have often relied on it as pretty much their only source. But for all his qualities, Bradford left an incomplete account of events. We have to use the evidence from British archives to check, confirm, and amplify what he wrote; if not, incidents such as the intervention by Wolstenholme simply lose their meaning.16

  Sir John was more than an average businessman, and the records that remain show that he had all manner of reasons to be cooperative. Although no evidence survives to suggest that he was a Puritan, Wolstenholme took his own Christianity very seriously. Near his country home at Stanmore, north of London, he built and endowed a new parish church. When he died, he left two hundred pounds for the repair of St. Paul’s Cathedral, ten times the annual wages of a highly skilled craftsman. Far from distrusting the Pilgrims, Sir John recommended them for a Virginia Company grant to pay for a school for Native American children.

  Besides his piety, Sir John was a practical man—his few surviving papers contain a mass of detail about the prices of pepper, silk, and indigo—and this would also make him listen sympathetically.17 Virginia badly needed new migrants, because fever had culled the number of settlers to about four hundred. Since Wolstenholme belonged to an inner clique of investors who made a monopoly profit by selling supplies to the colonists, he had an obvious incentive to encourage the Pilgrims to head westward. He was also something of a visionary, and a patriot, worried by the fragile state of English commerce.

  In business, the English lagged far behind the Dutch. Allies they might be, but the Dutch were also fierce competitors. They made better cloth than the English, they controlled the herring fisheries of the North Sea, and they fought bloody skirmishes with English whalers in the Arctic. Perhaps five times the size of England’s, their merchant marine consisted of bigger but cheaper vessels, manned lightly and hired by Amsterdam traders with far more capital than their counterparts in London. And in July 1617, word reached Whitehall Palace that the Dutch had found a new South American route to the East Indies by way of a channel avoiding Cape Horn. That autumn and winter, English diplomats sent home a stream of dispatches warning that England was falling behind its opponents everywhere.

  From Paris, the English ambassador reported that the French intended to create “a greate stocke and fleete for the undertakinge of remote trades, and particulerly to the West Indies.” A few weeks later, he heard that the merchants of Rouen and Dieppe were planning a whaling voyage to Greenland, flouting English claims to control the area. In Holland, Carleton used his network of agents to obtain the secret Dutch log of their discoveries in Patagonia, and he sent it back to Whitehall, only to learn that the king of Denmark was also fitting out ships for a voyage to the Spice Islands. With the French and Dutch doing business there too, said Carleton, “the well will be drawne drie with so many buckets.”18

  In the opening months of 1618, the race for control of oceanic trade extended across the North Atlantic. In Paris, Champlain lobbied hard for royal support for his colony at Quebec. He asked Louis XIII for money and soldiers to help him find “un chemin raccourcy pour aller à la Chine,” a quick way to China, via the Great Lakes, and to ward off his English and Dutch rivals.19 As things turned out, the French Crown never threw its full weight behind him, but no one in London could be sure of that yet.

  So, when Staresmore came to see him, Wolstenholme was busy with his own scheme to outflank Champlain and the Dutch. When a London author published the first English book on the ratios of trigonometry, vital for navigation, he dedicated it to Sir John, describing Wolstenholme as one “of the principall advancers of the Northwest discoverie,” and indeed he was.20 As a director of the East India Company, Sir John sponsored voyages to the Canadian Arctic, and when Staresmore made his approach, the quest was more urgent than ever. Wolstenholme knew about the Dutch discovery in South America, and his response was to press ahead with yet another effort to find a shortcut to the Indies.

  On January 20, Sir John urged the East India Company to send a new expedition to Hudson Bay, offering to put up the bulk of the money. Meanwhile, he worked closely with a mathematician named Henry Briggs, another Cambridge man, a contemporary of John Robinson. Briggs had another theory, one that made it all the more important to secure the future of Virginia.

  A Calvinist and a Puritan, Henry Briggs, like Robinson, had resigned his college fellowship during the purge of Puritans after King James first came to the throne. Briggs found a welcome in London from men of business, thanks to his own scientific expertise. He took the new tool called logarithms, first available in 1614, and showed mariners how to use them, combined with trigonometry, to calculate their course at sea. Like Bainbridge, to whom he was close, Briggs dreamed of making England the mistress of the Indies. He believed that while a route to the Pacific must exist through Canada, they could also reach the same ocean from Virginia by way of a portage across the Appalachians.21

  Hence arose the need to plant more Englishmen in this essential region. By approaching Sir John, the Pilgrims had chosen the right man, and he did not disappoint them. Bradford mentions another revealing detail, easily missed but rich with significance. After seeing Staresmore, Wolstenholme hurried off to find a member of the king’s Privy Council, the executive government of Jacobean England, to seek his support for the Pilgrim project. The statesman in question was Fulke Greville, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  It would be hard to imagine a more willing advocate for their cause. Under Queen Elizabeth, Greville had served as treasurer of the navy, but more to the point he was Sir Philip Sidney’s closest friend, the very same man who had composed Sidney’s biography and recorded his enthusiasm for America. A fine poet himself, and a Calvinist of high sophistication, Greville shared Sidney’s vision of godly English colonies on the same continent. By 1618 he had reached a peak of influence. He did so at a time when the political environment suddenly made the Pilgrims acceptable missionaries.

  THE RIGGING OF SHIPS

  For the king, 1618 had begun in typical Jacobean fashion, a mixture of high politics and farce, drenched in alcohol. In January, it was reported that James was indisposed, smitten with a sore toe, from which the pain spread to his knee. He had with him his favorite and lover, George Villiers, a young man of twenty-five, recently created Marquess of Buckingham. As he left the king’s bedchamber in the dark, Buckingham fell down the stairs. He sprained his foot, vomited massively, took to his own bed for fifteen hours, and then hobbled about for several days with a stick.22

  Buckingham gave rise to scores of anecdotes, but people wrote them down for reasons that were entirely serious. At first he was merely an exquisite courtier, but during the course of 1618 he also became a forceful statesman. His every move and mishap attracted close attention. His rise to power occurred by way of a silent coup d’état at the start of the year, a changing of the guard that secured for Buckingham the ascendancy he maintained for the next decade. It also brought to the fore in London a circle of men, including Greville, who sympathized with the Pilgrims. Their motives were partly religious, but also a matter of grand strategy. They arose from economics, and from the urgent need to strengthen the Royal Navy.

  For many years, James I had spent far more than the Crown received in revenue, staving off a crisis by selling assets. But by the end of 1617 the situation was becoming desperate. From the City of London, the king had borrowed the vast sum of £100,000, enough to build twenty of the largest English warships afloat. The money bled away, mostly to pay for a royal tour of Scotland, and the City refused to lend more. The episode wrecked the credit rating of the Crown.23 Only one option remained, a marriage between his son Prince Charles and a Spanish princess, the infanta, in return for a handsome dowry, but Spain knew that it held the upper hand. No swift agreement seemed likely.
As the marriage negotiations floundered, the king at last accepted the need for financial reform.

  James promoted a group of new, efficient men, allied with Buckingham, to cut expenditure and find new ways to raise money. Commissioners began to attack extravagance in the royal household, but if they were to make lasting improvements, they had to deal with the navy. Blighted by corruption, the fleet consumed far more cash than any other service, but it was ill equipped and poorly manned, barely capable of leaving harbor.

  Change was required, and not only for fiscal reasons. Nearly a year before the comet, reports had already reached London of naval rearmament in Spain. Added to that was the new threat from the pirates of North Africa. They had begun to raid outward into the Atlantic, attacking English fishing vessels, taking their crews hostage, and demanding ransom. At Alicante, three English merchant ships found themselves fighting off a forty-strong Arab fleet, while more pirates were sighted only sixty miles from the coast of Cornwall.24

  Sooner or later, England would have to mount a punitive foray against Algiers, but its ability to do so was doubtful. So, in 1618, Buckingham persuaded King James to make him lord admiral. Commissioners began to investigate the fleet, swiftly uncovering evidence of waste and embezzlement. Wolstenholme served on the naval commission, while Fulke Greville oversaw the process from his post at the Treasury. In the circumstances of the time, they had a further motive to encourage the Pilgrims, and again it was a matter of maritime concern.

  Greville belonged to the anti-Spanish party at court. They were men who hoped to revive English sea power and to repeat the victories of Sir Francis Drake. His closest colleague of all was Buckingham’s naval mentor, Sir John Coke, a man fascinated by warship design and logistics. Among the finest archives from the period are Coke’s papers, listing the navy’s requirements in intricate detail. A strong navy needed naval stores—“sea-arsenals,” said Greville in his life of Sidney, and dockyards filled with “ordnance, pitch, rosin, tar, masts, deal-boards, cordage”—and Coke itemized their quantities and cost in long memoranda. Hence the importance of establishing a new colony in the northern parts of Virginia, which contained these commodities in abundance. The same year Captain John Smith, the Jamestown man, shot off one of many letters, urging the Privy Council toward New England, as a source for “all things belonging to the building and rigging of Shippes.”25

  Coke and Greville shared another colleague, a man whose name leaps from the pages of the Pilgrim narratives. Both Winslow and Bradford singled out for gratitude a politician, Sir Robert Naunton. It was Naunton, says Winslow, who convinced the king that the Pilgrims were harmless, however much they might want liberty of conscience. It would cost him nothing to let them go, since the Pilgrims would pay their own way by fishing, Naunton said. This gave the king a chance to be witty. “So God have my soul,” James replied. “’Tis an honest trade; ’twas the Apostles’ own calling.”26

  We have no reason to doubt that this conversation occurred. It was exactly the kind of remark that James made, and in 1618 Naunton bathed in the glow of royal approval. Another loyal adherent of Buckingham, in January he became joint secretary of state, very nearly the highest rank within the government. Naunton saw all England’s diplomatic papers, he headed its secret service, he loathed the Spaniards, he feared Dutch rivalry, and he was a close friend of Greville and Coke. We need look no further for his motives for helping Pilgrims. Without bases in America, England could not challenge Spanish control of the western ocean. And without the supplies New England might provide, the Royal Navy could not put to sea. For Naunton, most likely it was all a matter of politics and naval doctrine, with Calvinism adding the impetus of zeal.27

  Naunton and Greville were on the same side as the Pilgrims, but of course Brewster and his colleagues were not merely tools of the English state. Even if they had been, an insolvent monarchy could not help them with hard cash. As it was, thanks partly to feuds within the Virginia Company, but also to some indiscretion on the part of William Brewster, even after royal approval it took nearly two years and two attempts for the Pilgrims to obtain the definitive patent allowing them to settle in the company’s territory. For funds they had to rely on young, untried investors from London, with little capital between them. Other exiles reached America first. In August 1618, long before the Mayflower, another party of one hundred Separatists left for Virginia, and more Puritans followed. These ventures ended in failure, the bulk of the colonists killed by dysentery, but the principle had been established. Separatists could go to America, and the Crown would not stop them.28

  During the years that followed the blazing star, while the Pilgrims struggled to find finance, events took an alarming course. Memories of the comet lingered, but its symbolism changed. At the time of the departure of the Mayflower, perhaps England’s most widely read new book was Vox Populi, a polemic that blamed every evil of the day on the machinations of the Spanish and the pope. For its author, Thomas Scott, memories of the comet now evoked only ambiguity and doubt.

  Scott recalled the excitement it caused, its sudden appearance as the war began in Germany, and the hope that the comet seemed to offer of victory over the wickedness of Rome. And yet, by the time he wrote, the outcome had been entirely different. Spain and Austria won battle after battle, until by the late summer of 1620 a Catholic army stood at the gates of Prague.

  When the city fell, the refugees included an English princess, Elizabeth, the daughter of King James. Her Calvinist husband, the Elector Frederick of the Rhineland, had accepted the throne of Bohemia, and led that kingdom against the Austrians. His defeat was the most alarming blow of all. Scott remembered that the green comet carried a long tail; he reminded his readers that it was “swift in the beginning, and slow in the ending.” It seemed to warn of a long, bloody, and uncertain conflict yet to come. Such was the atmosphere in which the Pilgrims set sail.29

  In September 1620, as the Bohemian phase of the war neared its end, the Mayflower lay at her mooring in the finest natural harbor in England. She carried 102 men, women, and children as passengers. About half of them came from Separatist families resident in Leiden. It seems that forty-seven were adult males, with an average age of roughly thirty-eight. Her crew numbered at least seventeen, and probably more like thirty.

  In Plymouth Sound, between the counties of Cornwall and Devon, the Mayflower prepared to leave for America under the command of her master, Christopher Jones. No record survives to show that Jones had crossed the Atlantic before; but for a while in Plymouth Sound he remained secure, among his fellow mariners in the companionship of the sea.

  * How he pronounced his name is anyone’s guess, but “Worsen-ham” seems most likely.

  Chapter Two

  MR. JONES IN PLYMOUTH SOUND

  Plymouth is generally considered, and not without good reason, as the most capacious and secure rendez-vous in Great Britain.

  —SAILING DIRECTIONS FOR SHIPS OF THE ROYAL NAVY, FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY1

  On Wednesday, September 6, a brisk wind blew over the sea outside the entrance to the sound. It came from the direction of an island, the Mewstone, a green pyramid of rock that leaps up from the waves like a small wet Matterhorn, situated offshore to the east. A Mayflower passenger called the wind “a fine small gale,” and it carried the ship rapidly into the English Channel and toward the Atlantic. As Christopher Jones took her out of the haven, on her starboard side the Mayflower passed a headland, facing the Mewstone across four miles of water. Made of slate dotted with quartz, and topped with grass and yellow furze, Penlee Point dips and tumbles from a height of three hundred feet down into the sea.

  When tankers or frigates enter or leave the approaches to Plymouth, they should keep the gray cliffs of Penlee half a mile away. At the foot of the promontory, crags spill out along the seabed to form a reef. At low tide the waves cover the Draystone, as it is known, to a depth of only one fathom. Fishermen will tell you that conger eels dwell within its crevices, waiting
to bite the unwary who find them in their nets. Whether that is so or not, the reef has killed seamen in their thousands. The approaches to Plymouth contain many hazards, with ancient names—the Panther, the Tinker, and the wicked little Shagstone, tiny, square, rising out of the water opposite Penlee—and mariners must know them all.

  For two-thirds of the year, southwesterly winds sweep up from across the ocean and into the wide, deep notch in the coast that forms the sound. Mostly the winds carry a sailing vessel into Plymouth in safety, but when they reach storm force, they will drive her straight onto the reef. Sometimes, too, the wind changes to come strongly from the east and south, while an ebbing tide pulls boats toward the west. Closer to shore another current pushes them out again as the water inside the sound piles back into the channel. When all this happens at the same time, wind one way and water another, the sea off the Draystone peaks upward to become a seething trap. A sailing ship, rudder gone or helpless in steep waves, loses her headway and slips back toward the rocks. Coastguards call the area Cannon Alley, because of the wrecks and armaments scattered offshore.

  Chart of Plymouth Sound in 1782, when the only significant changes in the geography since the time of the Mayflower had been the building of the Royal Dockyard at Devonport, shown at the top, and the naval hospital nearby (MR1/948, National Archives, Kew)

  So it is along much of the rest of the coast on the way out to the west, where spurs of uneroded rock jut into the sea to form dangerous headlands. A chain of them extends as far as the Lizard Peninsula, the last English landmark before America and the most dangerous promontory of them all. In Jones’s day mariners faced their greatest risks on the trip home, when they sometimes fatally mistook it for Ushant, one hundred miles to the south at the tip of France. So, the year before the Mayflower sailed, a Cornish squire built the first lighthouse on the Lizard.2