by Nick Bunker
Howland went on to spend five decades in America, acting as manager of the beaver trading post at Cushnoc. Lusty young John became, in Bradford’s words, a “profitable member” of the community, not least when, much later, in a gunfight on the Kennebec Howland and his men killed an English fur-trading competitor. Howland lived on until 1673, surviving William Bradford by more than fifteen years. He and his wife, Elizabeth, founded a lineage with perhaps more descendants than any other Mayflower couple.
He ended his days on his farm close to the cove at Rocky Nook, still the quietest and prettiest place in what was once the Plymouth Colony, looking out across mudflats, wading birds, and salt marsh toward the modern town of Duxbury. When he died, Howland left his widow, ten children, and eighty-eight grandchildren, and an ample herd of cows, sheep, and goats, but he also left something else. He owned an item that, like a key, unlocks the meaning of the journey as he and Bradford understood it.
We need the key because Bradford tells the story in such an unusual way. He describes the voyage and the arrival at Cape Cod in the ninth chapter of the first book of his history of New Plymouth, but in a manner that, if we are honest, most readers will find odd, or even evasive. The more often we read it, the stranger it becomes, like a message in code in search of decipherment.11
Chapter 9 contains fewer than eighteen hundred words, and barely seven hundred concern the passage across the open sea. Another three hundred describe the landfall, the dangers of Pollock Rip, and the double back around Race Point. The remaining paragraphs consist of a long, eloquent contemplation of the wilderness, as Bradford first saw it. But in telling the story of the voyage, the Pilgrim left out almost every fact that most readers, then and now, would consider relevant or essential.
The name, design, and dimensions of the ship and the number of crew members: none of these appear in Bradford’s history, and he says very little about Jones. We have to fill in the details from other sources, using a few clues scattered here or in Mourt’s Relation. Chapter 9 leaves out the birth at sea of Oceanus Hopkins, son of a Pilgrim couple. It makes only the briefest mention of the death of William Butten. Bradford never talks about food, drink, armaments, pirates, the last view of land, or meetings with other craft, such as the Newfoundland ships, some of which they must have seen. He says nothing whatever about the route.
These gaps were unusual, even by the standards of his age. Travel books were popular, and navigation fascinated laypeople who had never set foot on a ship. When John Winthrop kept his journal of his voyage in 1630, he listed all the facts and figures that Bradford omits, and far more besides. Winthrop recorded sixteen calculations of the ship’s latitude made, clouds permitting, with sightings of the noonday sun as the vessel, the Arbella, tacked westward from the Lizard along the forty-third parallel. He drew sketches of the coast of Maine and a rough map of the shore leading to the ship’s destination at Salem. Winthrop even mentions the venison pies they ate when they arrived.
Bradford gives us none of this. From what must have been many incidents, during the sixty-six days between the English Channel and the Cape, he selected only very few, of which Howland’s narrow escape was one. Before describing it, Bradford tells us about another lusty youth, Howland’s ungodly double, a “proud … & profane” seaman who jeered and cursed the seasick passengers, saying that he expected to dump half of them over the side before journey’s end. It pleased God to smite the young man with disease, and he was tossed overboard himself.
William Bradford’s most famous anecdote concerns a flaw in the ship. When the Mayflower left Plymouth, the wind was “prosperus,” says Bradford, for what he calls “a season”—again, he does not say how long it was—until the ship encountered headwinds. Shaken and leaking, the ship struggled on against gales so fierce that the crew had to strike her sails and lie hull down among the steep waves, or risk losing her masts. During one of these episodes, as the Mayflower lay without a sheet of canvas to catch the wind, Howland came up on deck and was nearly lost. The flaw appeared amidships, when one of the beams that supported the main deck bent and began to crack.
Causing alarm and agitated discussion, the incident could not have happened at a worse moment. They were almost exactly halfway across. It would be hard to weigh the hazards of a return in winter past the Lizard against the risk of finding no means to make repairs in America. But, confident in his vessel, Jones eventually convinced passengers and crew that her timbers were sound underwater. As for the sagging beam, they heaved it back to the horizontal with an iron screw—these can still be seen today, in the few working windmills preserved in eastern England, used like a wheel jack to lift sacks of flour—end then the Mayflower’s carpenter wedged a post beneath it, supported by the lower deck.
And yet again Bradford leaves a hole in his narrative. The beam must have been more than twenty feet long and a foot in diameter. It would have been as heavy as six grown men. A joiner who knows English oak will tell you that such a beam will split only under extreme force from above. William Bradford never tells us how this could have happened, while the other beams remained unscathed. Perhaps the timber was rotten, which might explain why the splitting wood aroused so much anxiety. But Bradford never says that this was so, leaving rot merely as a possibility lingering in the margin. Even his account of Howland’s narrow escape contains a perplexing feature. Bradford calls the rope that saved him a halyard, used to raise a topsail. Only a very shoddy boatswain would let a halyard dangle into the water, instead of making it fast to a cleat: Bradford offers no explanation.
But then why should he? William Bradford did not claim to be a seafarer. Unlike three other Pilgrims—Winslow, Miles Standish, and Isaac Allerton—he never made business trips back across the Atlantic. He did not write a sailor’s yarn, dense with salty detail. For Bradford, the voyage possessed deeper meanings that mattered far more than blocks, tackle, and belaying pins. We can find the key to them in a book possessed by John Howland, listed in the inventory of his estate.
THE PILGRIMS AND THE RABBIS
The Pilgrims respected few men more than a destitute scholar called Henry Ainsworth, the author of the book in question. Like them, he was an exiled Separatist. It was said that Ainsworth lived in Amsterdam on ten pence per week, little more than a day’s pay for an English field laborer. But Ainsworth was a brilliant writer, with a prose style so lucid that it can still be read with ease. Bradford called him “a man of a Thousand,” modest, sociable, and friendly, “pregnant in the Scriptures as if the booke of God had been written in his hart.”12 The proof of this could be found in Ainsworth’s masterpiece, Annotations upon the Five Books of Moses, the book that belonged to Howland, and the commentary on the Psalms that Ainsworth wrote to go with it.
The Annotations traveled to New England with the Pilgrims. This we know because, in 1622, William Brewster gave it to a friendly visitor from Virginia who wanted to study it on the boat home. Bradford owned another copy, and reading Ainsworth left a deep mark on him. By way of Ainsworth, William Bradford fell under the influence of Judaism, its rabbis of the Middle Ages, and their manner of interpreting the Bible and the vagaries of human life. It was because of this that Bradford wrote about the Mayflower as he did.
Born at the end of the 1560s, Henry Ainsworth came like Bradford and John Robinson from a family of yeoman farmers. Like Robinson, he rode up on a rising tide of erudition at Cambridge University. In 1586, a donor endowed a lectureship in Hebrew at the college where Ainsworth was a student. He belonged to a generation that took to the language with enthusiasm. Preachers trained at Cambridge liked to baffle their congregations with phrases from the Old Testament original. Even Mr. Jones, sitting in his pew at Rotherhithe, may have endured something of the kind. His parish minister enjoyed expounding the book of Job in Hebrew at enormous length.
Hebrew possessed a special appeal for Puritans. They wished to swim back up the stream of learning, and to absorb the wisdom of the Bible from as close to the source as possible, fr
ee from what they saw as Roman Catholic duplicity or errors in translation. But they did not expect the meaning of the text to be simple, and they did not simply dismiss the scholars who preceded them. Some of them did exactly the reverse. They read with sympathy the rabbis of the Roman Empire, Egypt, and medieval Spain, authors whose books were preserved by the Jews of Germany or Venice.
By 1600, England’s finest scholar of Hebrew was a man called Hugh Broughton. Pedantic and abrasive, he insulted the archbishop of Canterbury, fell out with the authorities, and made his own home in Amsterdam, where his circle of contacts included Ainsworth. Eager to meet German rabbis, Broughton traveled to Frankfurt, debated Scripture in the synagogue, and made a list of twenty-two essential books by Jewish authors. Besides grammars and dictionaries, it included classical texts of Judaism such as the Midrash and the Babylonian Talmud, vast rabbinic commentaries on the Torah, the five books of Moses, and on the laws and rituals of the Jewish faith.13 Henry Ainsworth found within them a subtle method for deepening the meaning of the Bible, and for giving resonance to daily life as well.
Inspired by the work of the rabbis, Ainsworth made new translations of the Psalms and the Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. He wrapped around them a commentary, verse by verse and word by word, trying to distill every drop of meaning conveyed by their authors. He pointed out that when Jewish scholars turned the Bible into Greek, a single Hebrew term often required several Greek words in its place. This was a sign of what he called “the copiousnesse of matter” contained in the original.
For the rabbis, everything in the Bible had a connection to everything else. They compared the task of looking for the Word of God to the hard labor of dropping a bucket into a very deep well and then lifting it back by arduous effort.14 Ainsworth developed a similar technique, calling it “the exquisite scanning of words and phrases.” He drew upon many rabbis, but Ainsworth named one thinker as by far the most exquisite of all. This was the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who lived in the twelfth century. During the Jacobean era, Maimonides came to enjoy the highest prestige among English scholars, and Ainsworth was no exception. He called Maimonides “the wisest of the Hebrew Rabbins,” and in his Annotations he quotes him many times.15
Up to a point, the technique of Maimonides was familiar. Henry Ainsworth was certainly not the first Englishman to adopt it, at least in its simpler forms. For many centuries orthodox, mainstream writers had looked for depth and double meaning in the Old Testament. For a Christian, each of its stories could be read as a forecast, an anticipation or a prophecy of the ultimate truth of the Gospel. Jonah in the belly of the whale foreshadowed, for example, the descent of Christ into hell between the afternoon of Good Friday and the Sunday morning of resurrection. To this way of thinking, when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, they enacted in advance the passage of a Christian soul to salvation. In the wilderness, God gave the Israelites manna to eat. It symbolized the bread of life, the body of Christ, or the Eucharist granted to the faithful at the Last Supper.
Ainsworth certainly thought in this way, in terms of typology, a way of reading Old Testament events as types or parallels of some later, Christian revelation. But his “exquisite scanning” went much further, into a territory far more subtle. Typology was often rigid, preprogrammed, like a spreadsheet on a laptop, mechanically making each biblical passage carry fixed meanings sanctioned by tradition. Ainsworth took from Maimonides something far more agile and nuanced. Like the authors of the Midrash, he looked not for two or three meanings but for scores of them, in a free-floating, poetic, almost playful way of reading the Scriptures. As Ainsworth said: “The Hebrew Doctors have a saying, that the Law hath seventie faces … and all of them truth.” When Bradford read the Bible, or meditated on his life, he looked for seventy meanings too.16
SEVENTY MEANINGS OF THE MAYFLOWER
Nearly forty years after landing on Cape Cod, William Bradford began to teach himself Hebrew. “I have had a longing desire,” he said, “to see with my owne eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue … and what names were given to things, from the Creation.” To help him, he had a Hebrew grammar, bequeathed by William Brewster, and the same early American library contained a Hebrew dictionary.
Paper was scarce. For that reason, Bradford copied out his exercises on blank pages at the front of the manuscript of his history of the plantation. He covered the white space with nearly nine hundred Hebrew words, starting with eight names for God. Among his vocabulary, he carefully spelled out the Hebrew consonants of the word midbar. In the book of Exodus, it describes the wilderness of Sinai, crossed by the Israelites on their way to Canaan.17
Although Bradford came late to the Hebrew alphabet, he had known the word midbar for most of his adult life. Midbar appears in more than ninety verses in the Torah, and Ainsworth referred to it often, spelling it out in English in his Annotations. In Genesis, Hagar wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba, with her son Ishmael trailing behind her. In another wilderness, on the slopes of Mount Horeb, the prophet Moses found the angel of Jehovah in a burning bush. In the wilderness the Israelites turned their backs on God, and in the wilderness Christ endured temptation. From these stories, Ainsworth extracted a host of meanings, and they lay near Bradford’s elbow as he wrote.
Midbar, said Ainsworth, meant a place where men go wild and go astray, a land without order, a dwelling fit only for beasts, a place where God puts his people to the test of affliction. It might also refer to “the wilderness of peoples” in the book of Ezekiel, meaning the many nations of the world, with dispersed among them the wandering Jews. The wilderness was a place of hunger and thirst, bodily starvation but also a famine of the spirit. Midbar symbolized the human soul lost in sin, but the word could carry opposing connotations at the same time. It referred to danger, destitution, and loss but also to salvation.
Midbar meant the wasteland across which men and women traveled to Egypt to enter servitude, but it also offered their escape toward the promised land. In the wilderness, the Israelites starved and then fed on the manna provided by God. The book of Numbers described their itinerary to Canaan, but in Hebrew its name was Bemidbar. According to Ainsworth, in the book of Bemidbar the journeys of the tribes of Israel were “the figure of our spirituall warfare; whereunto we are mustered and armed to fight the good fight of faith.”
When Bradford used the word “wilderness” four times on one page, he did so with these meanings crowding in on his own imagination. When he mentions the thickets of Cape Cod, he has in mind not only the physical reality, the dense stands of pitch pine and the undergrowth of scrub oaks at Provincetown, but also the religious meaning that they might conceal. From Ainsworth’s notes, he knew that the name Sinai came from the Hebrew seneh, or “bramble.” In the vegetation of the Cape, the Pilgrim saw the brambles of Horeb and the burning bush. Ainsworth said that the brambles symbolized the Church, confined and persecuted in Pharaoh’s Egypt. They meant the same perhaps to William Bradford. Tangled scrub made the Outer Cape a fearful wilderness, but also a place of epiphany. Here a Pilgrim found an echo of his reasons for leaving England, another wasteland of a metaphorical kind.
The Pilgrims believed that everything followed a plan, laid down by God before the beginning of the world, but it was a secret plan. That was the teaching of John Calvin. Veiled from sinful humanity, the plan was obscure, as hard to decode as a blazing star. By way of the Bible, clues might be found to the will of God, but only after prayer, study, and discussion, and with the aid of faith, itself a gift of God issued only to the elect. A Calvinist like Bradford came at experience in an exploratory manner, searching back and forth for scattered truth just as Ainsworth scanned the Bible. And when he came to tell his own story, he would do so in the same style. Even without conscious effort, if Bradford used the language he knew best, the diction of Genesis, Saint Paul, or the Psalms, he would write a resonant narrative, filled with connotation and nuance. His text would gleam with latent hints of the unseen.
A voyage was a parable, each episode an intimation of mystery. For pious men and women, the sea made visible the ways of God to man. Calvin likened the souls of the elect, chosen for salvation, to a sailor who lived through a storm, escaping death. Sinners talked about luck or good fortune, but a true Christian knew that every rescue was foreordained by God, so that a sea story might become another avenue of revelation. In the harbor towns of Devon, the preachers scattered maritime metaphors in their sermons. At Plymouth in 1620, the town preacher was a Puritan, and in his sermons he compared the human soul on earth to a seaman pursued by pirates.18
The sea was a fertile symbol. On the face of the waters, men found redemption and terror alike. Encircling the earth, without end or beginning, unknowably deep, a source of life and wealth, but also an instrument of punishment, the ocean evoked the majesty of God, the unfathomable power of Calvin’s divinity. For his own just purposes, God made the sea the home of monsters and devils, still believed by many to be the cause of hurricanes and storms. Inconstant, uncertain, ebbing and flowing, sometimes placid, but often deadly, the ocean signified the sinful world of men, filled with unseen hazards. In the voyage of life, the soul must steer between the sands of self-love, the gulf of intemperance, and the rock of blasphemy. Sitting on the rock were mermaids, symbols of lust and earthly pleasure.
All of these similes appeared in sermons and in poetry. A ship was more than a wooden hull, topped by masts and rigging, propelled by canvas filled with moving air. She was an image of the true Church, the Church Militant, carrying as ballast the fear of God. Her sails represented faith, her masts were the cross of Christ, and the wind that blew her forward was the Holy Spirit. Her cannon were the Ten Commandments, her helm was conscience, and her compass was the Bible. A tempest symbolized the persecution of the godly, and the leaks in her planks were the wounds in the flanks of the Church caused by heresy and schism.19
