by Nick Bunker
It is also fashionable to claim that writers and politicians in the north invented a Pilgrim myth in the nineteenth century. It is said that this Yankee myth gave the Mayflower and New Plymouth far more significance than they deserved, compared with Jamestown, or with the Great Migration of the 1630s. Some argue that the Mayflower Compact was no more than a short-term, temporary measure, drawn up in a hurry, containing nothing new and nothing original. That being so, the argument runs, it could not possibly be the foundation stone of American democracy, but was simply one source among many.
We can debate the legacy of the compact as it was seen by later generations, or we can ask how a Jacobean Englishman or Englishwoman might have regarded it. Did they think it was merely a temporary fix? Or was it much more? Would the Mayflower Compact have struck them as something new and different? If it did, and if it contained some radical elements, going beyond the usual English way of running a town or village, then the case for the compact is proven. If it was new, it was new. If it possessed originality, then it deserves to be given back its status as the earliest manifesto for a distinctive, American form of democratic government.
What did the document mean to William Bradford? It was certainly improvised, but in his eyes there was nothing mythical or temporary about it. For him, the compact always remained fundamental, a permanent, necessary source of authority as long as the colony lasted. If it had simply been a short-term fix, the compact would have ceased to matter in 1630, when the Plymouth Colony obtained a definitive new patent from the Earl of Warwick, as president of the Council for New England. Instead, Bradford and Winslow made it plain that the compact remained very much alive.
In 1636, they codified the rules of the Plymouth Colony in a new Book of Laws. On page one, they called the Mayflower Compact “a solemne & binding combinacon,” and they treated the compact and the Warwick Patent as the double-barreled source of the colony’s right to exist and to run its own affairs. If one or the other could claim seniority, then it was the compact, not the patent. This was because the compact depended on the vote of the governed, while Warwick issued his patent under authority delegated from King Charles.
In the same Book of Laws, they added an extra paragraph that explains how they interpreted the documents. They say that they came to America as “freeborne subjects of the state of England.” Helpfully they explained the meaning of the words. Freedom meant that nobody could force on the colony any “imposicon law or ordnance”—and, incidentally, an imposition meant a tax—except “by consent according to the free liberties of the state & Kingdome of Engl. & no otherwise.” In other words, obedience to the law required freely given consent, just as it did in the paper they signed at Provincetown.
In a crisis, if the Pilgrims could not agree to a law passed in England, and if they had to choose between obedience and liberty, then the king would have to yield. In the Book of Laws, they wrote out the form of words used when every new freeman of the colony swore allegiance to it. All the men pledged “to advance the growth & good of the severall plantations,” but they also swore to be “truly loyall to our Sovereign Lord King Charles.” Some time later, doubtless during the English Civil War, they neatly crossed out the mention of the king. Although the Mayflower Compact began with a promise of loyalty to the monarch, in extremity he could be deleted from the constitution, while the consent of the governed could not. The people outranked the Crown.
All of this happened a very long time after the landing at Cape Cod. It might be thought that the question of resistance to the Crown never arose at the moment when the compact was signed. Actually, it did arise, or almost certainly so, in the mind of William Brewster. Because of his education and his career, Brewster stands out as the man most likely to have drafted the document. He owned works by an author notorious for justifying rebellion in circumstances where the sovereign failed to honor his side of his bargain with his subjects.
In 1622, the archbishop of Canterbury ordered the public burning of books written by a German Calvinist called David Pareus, professor of theology at Heidelberg. They were, said the archbishop, “seditious, scandalous and contrary to the scriptures,” but four volumes by Pareus sat on Brewster’s library shelves at New Plymouth.8 Among them was the most seditious of them all, the professor’s commentary on Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans. No book within the Bible carried more weight with the Pilgrims than this one, and David Pareus gave it a startling new interpretation.
In a famous passage, Saint Paul told Christians to obey their rulers, the powers that be, because they were divinely ordained. Boldly, Pareus reread this to mean that the same Christians had a duty to overthrow a tyrant, and especially an irreligious one, because such a man was clearly an enemy of God. “Obedience hath certaine limits,” Pareus wrote. “When tyrants go about to force their subjects to manifest idolatry, or to some wickednesse, against the expresse word of God; in this case the scripture commands us, that in no wayes we obey such tyrannical Edicts, but that every man, according to the condition of his calling, make resistance.”9 Of course, Brewster did not insert anything of such an outspoken kind in the Mayflower Compact. All the same, if this was the world of ideas within which he lived, then we would expect to find them leaving radical traces within the words he did employ. And so we do, though mingled and blended with other language that was more common.
At Provincetown, they had to find a substitute for the patent granted by the Virginia Company. So whoever drafted the compact modeled it partly on the words these patents usually contained. Examples survive, from 1619 and 1622, when the company gave planters the power “to frame and make orders ordinances and constitucions.” Although the original patent granted to the Pilgrims has been lost, it would have included a similar clause. Whoever drafted the compact simply carried over the same language. This was because the need for it arose only from an accident of seafaring, and not from defects in the original document.10
Any educated Jacobean would have noticed something else as well. When the Pilgrims used the term “a civill bodie politick,” and awarded themselves the power to make laws and ordinances, they used phrases from the royal charters that gave English boroughs their rights and powers. Early in the reign of King James, many towns renewed their charters, tightening up the wording to prevent legal challenge by people who, for example, disliked paying local tolls or taxes. They included towns that Brewster and Christopher Jones knew intimately: Doncaster, Harwich, and Retford. All three obtained new charters between 1604 and 1607. If New Plymouth was a sort of colonial borough packaged up and shipped across the Atlantic, then again it made sense to use the same sort of language.
So was the compact trite and commonplace, a ready-made replica of the arrangements by which any town in England already ran its affairs? No, most definitely not. A mass of legalese, designed to thwart any hostile litigation, an English borough charter often ran to four thousand words, twenty times longer than the compact. It was intended to be exclusive. Most of the new charters placed the right to rule in the hands of a few citizens, like the oligarchy to which Jones belonged at Harwich. That was not the case at Provincetown. Brief, clear, more a statement of principles than a charter, the compact carried the signatures of the vast majority of the men on board, and it treated them all equally. Menservants did not sign, and because dates of birth are missing for many passengers, we cannot be certain exactly how many adult males made the crossing. But at the very least the forty-one signatures accounted for 90 percent of the men on the Mayflower.
During the reign of Elizabeth, experiments in democracy took place in small English towns and villages, but in this respect, the number of those who signed, the Mayflower Compact went far beyond them. A case in point was Blyth in Nottinghamshire, three miles from Scrooby. Like the Plymouth Colony, Blyth had a common house, a common store of arms, and an annual election. Every April the townspeople gathered to choose a mayor, and they recorded the outcome in a town book that still survives. In 1587, the lord of the mano
r of Blyth died without an adult male heir, and the people of Blyth seized their chance to assert themselves.
They rewrote the language used for an election to make it clear that the townspeople could freely elect whomsoever they wished, without following a recommendation from the local landowner. Again, the words they used closely resembled those of the compact. At Blyth, the citizens decided that in future the mayor would be “chossen by the consent of all the inhabitants … he will endeavoure himself to doe the best that he cane for the common wealthe of the towne.” They widened the franchise, from eleven voters in the 1570s to as many as ninety-two in the 1590s. Even so, the electorate represented less than one-third of the adult males at Blyth, so that “all the inhabitants” meant something far less than it did at New Plymouth.11
Although it drew on experiments like the one at Blyth, the compact went much further, simply by allowing every freeman full participation. As for its guiding principles, they flowed from another, deeper source in the political ideas that Brewster came cross either at Cambridge or during his time with William Davison. Brewster, as we saw, owned a copy of the manual of government written by Sir Thomas Smith. In the 1560s and 1570s writers such as Smith and Sir Philip Sidney began to speak of England as though the realm were really a republic, like the ancient city of Rome. Of course they had a queen, but she ruled by way of consent, expressed through Parliament and the Privy Council—or so they suggested. According to Smith, in a sentence evoked at Provincetown in the language of the compact: “A common wealth is called a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre.”12
When the Pilgrims picked the term “association” to describe the document they signed, again they chose a word with a loaded meaning embedded in the politics of the Elizabethans. Only in the 1580s did people start to use the word in this sense, to mean a paper signed by a number of people with a common purpose. This usage of the word became current in the name of the so-called Bond of Association drawn up by the Privy Council in 1584. Drafted by Burghley and Walsingham, it circulated up and down the country, attracting the signatures of thousands of local dignitaries and members of the gentry. They swore to resist by force of arms anybody who made an attempt on the life of Queen Elizabeth, or tried to claim the throne.
Two decades ago, the British historian Patrick Collinson showed that the Bond of Association was itself a republican document. It was drawn up in such a way that, if worse came to worst, and Elizabeth died without an heir, the signatories of the bond would elect a new Protestant sovereign. Brewster entered public service, working for one of Walsingham’s closest aides, during the period when the bond was very much a talking point.
Were all these echoes of earlier documents merely unconscious or coincidental? Perhaps they were: but given what we know about Brewster, it seems unlikely. Assuming that he drafted it, he assembled the Mayflower Compact from a mosaic of the best precedents he could find. He made it simple and clear, but he also filled it with resonance. He did not insist on a religious creed, or require sectarian faith from those who signed it. In 1620, a Roman Catholic could have put his name to it without offending the pope, since all the compact demanded was a brief, ecumenical nod in the direction of King James. It contained not a single phrase with a specifically Puritan meaning or source.*
The Pilgrims drew up the agreement in a new location, at the moment of creation of a new colony. They did so in terms that, two decades later, could be used as a rationale for outright resistance to the Crown. This, the right of disobedience, existed within the language of the Mayflower Compact from the very start. Most radically of all, they produced a document that nearly every man signed, including those who in England were only laborers. This was all very new indeed, as new and different as a school of pilot whales.
THE MEETING WITH SAMOSET
As the winter went on, hardship and deaths continued. After the Mayflower arrived at New Plymouth, five weeks passed before the first Sunday when the Separatists could gather for a Sabbath assembly on land. Until that point, the colonists remained mainly on the ship, where so many of them had died, six in December and another eight in January. In the meantime, they had laid out a settlement with two streets and plots of land around them. On Christmas Day, they began to build a common house to hold stores and provide temporary shelter. They also started to make an emplacement for cannon on the hill.
Thanks to atrocious weather and the toll taken by sickness, each of these tasks took far longer than it should: the common house remained unfinished until January 20. At times as few as six or seven men and women remained on their feet. As the number of deaths neared its peak, they began to see signs of more activity among the native people of the interior. Up to that point, they had caught glimpses of fires in the distance, but now, on February 16, a man out shooting wildfowl saw a band of twelve warriors. He took cover, then hurried back to the colony to sound the alarm. In the next few days the Pilgrims made ready to receive an attack. It was at this point that Jones and his seamen unloaded four pieces of artillery from the ship and dragged them up Burial Hill.
The onslaught never came, but death from disease continued. They were still dying in March, thirteen that month, even as the weather began to brighten. Edward Winslow’s wife, Elizabeth, died on March 24, the last day of the old year 1620, as the English reckoned their calendar at the time. On March 3 they heard birdsong, and on March 7 they planted their first vegetables. On the same day Governor Carver led their first fishing and hunting expedition to Billington Sea and the other ponds close by. Within weeks he too would be dead, apparently from a heart attack while working in the fields in April. Less than two months later, his widow, Katherine Carver, of Sturton, died too.
Bradford never said much about John Carver. Only one seventeenth-century historian gives us even the briefest character sketch, and that was William Hubbard, author of an official history of New England, begun in 1682. However, Hubbard clearly had sources that have since been lost, and so his comments about Carver carry weight. Hubbard writes about his piety, his humility, and his public spirit, but also he refers to the man’s “public purse.” Carver, he wrote, “disbursed the greatest part of that considerable estate God had given him for the carrying on of the interest of the company.”13 Carver also lived long enough to accomplish the principal duty of any colonial governor: diplomatic affairs, the making of pacts and treaties. Shortly before he died, he reached an accord with Massasoit, the foremost sachem of the native people of southeastern New England. It came about by way of the intervention of two intermediaries.
On Friday, March 16, “a fair warm day,” as they completed their fortifications, at last the settlers saw a man break cover close to their huts. He was tall, with long black hair swept back from a shaved forehead, beardless, and almost naked, except for a leather loincloth. He carried a bow and two arrows, one tipped with a warhead and the other not: that was symbolism. This was a man the English mariners on the coast of Maine called “Somerset.” It was no doubt a garbled, joking sailor’s version of whatever his name was in his own language.
Three years later, far away near Boothbay Harbor in Maine, an English naval officer met Somerset, or Samoset, as Winslow knew him. The officer, Captain Christopher Levett, remembered Samoset as a sachem himself. He was a leader among his people, eager to talk and trade beaver pelts, and to make an alliance with Levett against their enemies, the raiding Micmac from farther up the coast. Captain Levett recommended him as a man “very faithfull to the English.” Samoset, Levett said, had “saved the lives of many of our Nation, some from starving, others from killing.”
Samoset also spoke English, learned from the seamen at Monhegan. Already, English and French were becoming the trading dialects of the coast, as the economies of western Europe began to annex the region. Algonquian is a family of different languages, and as Levett pointed out, two native peop
le from settlements separated by as little as seventy miles could understand each other no better than the English could the Welsh. Today, the Native American linguists who keep alive the ancient tongues of Rhode Island or Massachusetts do not claim to know the languages of Maine or Quebec. As Levett remarked, “They were glad to use broken English to expresse their mind each to other.”14
So it was with Samoset. He strode up to the Plymouth colonists, and he began to pour out a description of the coast, its people, its chiefs, and their military resources. By now, he clearly knew that these details fascinated the English, just as they enthralled Ferdinando Gorges at old Plymouth fifteen years before. Samoset asked for beer, and so the Pilgrims gave him brandy: doubtless they and the sailors had long since finished off the Mayflower’s ale. That afternoon Samoset began to explain the politics of the hinterland, and the reasons why the native people had seemed so likely to attack.
He told the Pilgrims that bitter recollections remained, arising from the activities of Thomas Hunt, an earlier visitor. Hunt was a ship’s master who came with Captain John Smith on his voyage to New England in 1614. By the time the Pilgrims came ashore, Hunt himself was dead. He was lost at sea or succumbed to disease in 1619, after a trading voyage or two to Russia: his will survives, and so does a record of the bullion Hunt carried to Archangel. In his lifetime he almost destroyed New England before it began.
Thomas Hunt was a religious man who made bequests to pay for Good Friday sermons by “a godlie preacher” in his hometown.* However, in Cape Cod Bay, at the site of New Plymouth and farther east and around toward Hyannis, under cover of commerce in 1614 Thomas Hunt tricked onto his ship some twenty-seven people. Twenty came from Patuxet, the native name for Plymouth, and seven from among the Nauset, who lived along the Cape. Hunt took them captive and carried them back across the Atlantic, to be sold as slaves in Málaga: as Captain John Smith put it, Hunt “sold those silly Salvages for Rials of Eight.”
