Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Stories of the incident spread around the region, and worse was to follow. Another English skipper massacred a trading party of native people with a barrage of shot from his “murderers,” small shipboard guns carried for use at point-blank range. Because of episodes such as this, in 1620 another ship’s captain sent out by Gorges, Thomas Dermer, very nearly met his end at the hands of the inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard. Not long before the arrival of the Mayflower, he lost all his crew and had to flee south to Jamestown.

  It was not surprising, then, that the Plymouth colonists encountered hatred and distrust. However, among the captives taken by Hunt was another native, a man about to join Samoset in helping them bargain with Massasoit. This was Tisquantum, the Native American who became famous as Squanto, the friend of the Pilgrims.15 At Málaga, Spanish monks saved him and his fellow prisoners from slavery, and Tisquantum found his way to London. There he learned English, and met a different kind of merchant, before he shipped back to America with Dermer. Thanks to what he saw by the Thames, he stood ready to mediate between the Pilgrims and the native people inland.

  In the meantime, in the same city of London, Thomas Weston faced a gathering crisis of a different kind. As the depression deepened, men like him found their affairs disintegrating. They turned to dangerous expedients, including some that took them outside the law.

  * The Mayflower Compact uses the word “covenant” to refer to the agreement between the colonists. Although the word could have religious connotations, equally often it simply meant a legally binding contract.

  * Aldeburgh, in Suffolk.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE MYSTIC AND THE THAMES

  You may guesse in what case we are (for all our fair shewes) when neither Lord Maior, Alderman, farmers no nor whole companies, as the East Indian … are able to hold out and pay their debts.

  —JOHN CHAMBERLAIN TO SIR DUDLEY CARLETON, NOVEMBER 10, 16211

  Very early one morning, in the darkness between one and two, a barge filled with heavy sacks approached a wharf beside the river Thames. The sacks weighed ten tons, and if any had split or burst, they would have spilled a fine white powder onto the mud or the timbers of the jetty. A group of men waited for the barge at a spot on the north bank almost opposite the Globe Theatre. Their leader was Philemon Powell, aged about twenty-five.

  There was, it seems, some delay, an altercation by the water’s edge. At last a deal was struck, and Powell and his accomplices loaded the sacks into carts or wheelbarrows. They trundled them along the lane that sloped up and away from the river toward the sheds and houses of Bread Street Ward, where that night they made their delivery.

  On the wharf with Powell was Andrew Weston, younger brother of Thomas. Both men were under surveillance. An informer patrolled the wharf, Brook’s Wharf, between Stew Lane and Queenhithe, a few hundred yards upstream from London Bridge. He spotted Powell and the sacks, which contained alum, more scientifically known as aluminum sulfate. It was a chemical essential for the textile trade, because it helped to fix dyes into woolen cloth.

  Smuggling alum was a racket, one of many in Jacobean England, a contraband activity that could yield a profit of nine pounds per ton, before paying off those whom you had to pay off. This, it seems, was one of the ways in which Thomas Weston tried to recoup the losses he made from the voyage of the Mayflower. The legal records describing the incident give it no precise date, but others that survive show that Weston was dealing heavily in alum in the spring of 1621. He had every reason to turn to desperate alternatives, because the expedition to New England had been a commercial fiasco.

  As the settlers emerged from their first winter, in London their backers soon learned that the venture had fallen at its first hurdle. The Mayflower made a swift return passage, leaving America on April 5 and docking back in England on May 6, but she came back empty, with neither fish nor fur. That was the worst possible outcome for Weston and his associates. One mishap they could cope with, but only one: the error in navigation, which had caused Jones to disembark his passengers a long way from the intended destination by the Hudson.

  The investor group quickly dealt with that. They obtained a new patent for the colony from the Council for New England. The council happily granted the permission required for the Pilgrims to occupy a spot north of the fortieth parallel: the document, the so-called Peirce Patent, hangs today in Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth, Massachusetts. This, however, was just a legal matter, necessary but not sufficient. It did not pay their bills, and as the economy shrank, the investors found their resources diminishing too. Instead of writing off the Pilgrims instantly, they began to assemble finance for a second voyage, to reinforce the colony. Even so, it took another two months to prepare the second ship, the Fortune, and she was small.

  She had a volume of only fifty-five tons. Although she carried thirty-five new settlers, she was almost entirely devoid of supplies and trading goods. The Fortune did not reach New England until November. When she did so, at first she hovered oddly around Cape Cod, causing alarm: reports from the native people suggested that she was a hostile French vessel. William Bradford armed his men, loaded the cannon on Burial Hill, and prepared to blow the Frenchman out of the water.

  At last the Fortune entered Plymouth Bay, and she was passed as friendly. Her passengers swiftly panicked after seeing the conditions at the colony and after listening to the customary words of encouragement from the Fortune’s crew, seamen as jaundiced as those on board the Mayflower. They very nearly reembarked and left, until the Fortune’s master talked them out of it, promising in an emergency to carry them on down the coast to Virginia. Even so, as Bradford recorded, “ther was not so much as Bisket, cake, or any other victials, neither had they any beding, but some sory things … nor over many cloaths.” But at least they added labor. Almost all the passengers were grown men but young, and they had their uses: one of them was Philip De La Noye, the distant ancestor of Franklin Roosevelt.

  In London, the depression worsened. Since England had no banks, there were no banks to fail, but there were many loans to foreclose and many speculators on the brink of ruin. Within the Mayflower investor group, the stronger men such as Pocock and Beauchamp clung on, and staked their hopes on the Fortune, but they had built sound businesses with deep roots in provincial supply and demand. Thomas Weston had not. He spiraled down toward insolvency. Worse still, he offended the authorities, by way of “wilful contempt and abuse offered to the State,” as they put it when later they issued a warrant for his arrest.2

  Was Thomas Weston a rogue? Perhaps, but if he was, he had good company. That year, many men saw their businesses go under, and it should not be surprising that commercial ethics went the same way as their money. In the same month that the Fortune reached New Plymouth, the Lord Mayor of London fled his creditors, emptying his house and vanishing one dark night. As for the alum scam, it was commonplace: in 1620, the Crown prosecuted more than a hundred merchants, up and down the length of the kingdom, for illegally shipping in four thousand tons of the stuff. The fraud, if that is what it was, arose because of the way in which the Crown had riddled the economy with perverse regulations and monopolies, creating incentives for cheating.3

  There were alum mines in Yorkshire, and they were considered to be strategic assets for the kingdom. Sadly, the owners failed to make a profit. So King James took the mines into state control and then farmed them out to a private monopoly, which paid him a rent. To ensure that they could afford to do so, James banned imports of European alum—the Pope, as it happened, owned the best available—and he insisted that English customers pay a fixed price per ton: twenty-six pounds. Meanwhile, the English monopoly exported its alum to continental Europe and dumped it on the market for eleven pounds less.

  So, of course, men such as Weston picked it up abroad, mainly in Rouen, and shipped it back. They passed it off as Yorkshire alum bought legally in England, and sold it for twenty-four pounds per ton to customers in the cloth trade. This could easily
be done because English alum was white, while the pope’s was red.

  Of course a racket as lucrative as this could not be expected to last. Unhappily for Weston, in April 1621 the king gave a new patent to a man called Guest, making him an official searcher for alum. Guest would receive a reward for each ton of contraband he found. A copy of the patent survives, in the immaculate archives of the Lord Treasurer of the time, Lionel Cranfield, along with a set of documents that relate to Weston. The informer at Brook’s Wharf contacted Guest, it appears, and Guest filed a lawsuit against Weston in June in the Court of the Exchequer, the forum that handled matters relating to royal revenues. Guest demanded unpaid customs duties on the smuggled alum, and tried to impound the consignment. Predictably, Weston had bought it on credit: if he lost the case he faced ruin.

  For merchants such as he, reliant on IOUs, the only working capital available was reputation. Once that was gone, they were virtually doomed. Of course, the Exchequer jury found against him, and so Thomas Weston’s affairs began to unravel. For one thing, the two men who bought the alum from Powell were throwing all the blame in his direction, insisting that Weston alone was liable for the heavy penalty imposed by the court. It came to no less than £345, a huge multiple of the profit that Weston had hoped to make. The sum was far beyond his reach.

  Weston survived for a little while, since he had a few weak cards left to play, and a last flimsy line of credit, but the inevitable could not be delayed for long. As we shall see, Weston reached his lowest ebb in the early months of 1622. At the same time the Plymouth Colony very nearly collapsed, and for reasons that were closely related. In the meantime, before the Fortune arrived, Bradford and his comrades had begun to lay some foundations for the future. Even so, nearly seven years of uncertainty lay ahead, until at last the turning point came in 1628.4

  SAMOSET AND TISQUANTUM

  When the Pilgrims met Samoset in March 1621, they gained access to the networks of trade between the native people, the French, and the English that circled back and forth along the shores of the Gulf of Maine. This was not a new phenomenon. At least as early as the 1590s, sachems from among the Micmac to the east and north had begun to act as middlemen, translators, and procurers of beaver pelts. However, there was something very unusual about Tisquantum. It swiftly emerged after Samoset introduced him to the Pilgrims on March 22. It transformed a fraught and dangerous situation.

  In the six days since he first came striding out of the forest, Samoset had been entirely friendly, but on this part of the coast his value was limited. He was not a local man. With him, on March 18, he had brought five warriors: tall long-haired men like him, but dressed differently, with deerskins wrapped around their shoulders and long leggings that Winslow likened to the trousers worn by the Gaelic Irish. They offered the Pilgrims a few skins, but these exchanges remained hesitant on the English side, with Carver and his men still nervous about the danger of an attack. At one point, two or three warriors appeared a few hundred yards away on the top of Watson’s Hill, making threatening gestures, until Standish took out a patrol and warned them off with his muskets. A better intermediary was needed.

  Tisquantum arrived with Samoset, bringing a few skins to trade and some fresh dried red herring—Winslow carefully noted details such as these—and he too spoke English. In his case, however, he had learned it in a remarkable location, while staying at the London home of John Slany, a merchant who ranked far above the likes of Weston in the commercial hierarchy.

  Slany lived on Cornhill, at the very center of the City, barely five minutes’ walk from Bread Street. Since 1610, he had been treasurer of the Newfoundland Company, a small colony, even smaller than New Plymouth. It was so small that even in 1617 the annual supply ship from England carried among its stores only twenty-four gallons of beer.

  Slany owed his stature not to this disappointing venture but to his position among the Merchant Taylors, the largest of the London livery companies. We do not know the exact dates of Tisquantum’s period in London, but it seems to have been in 1617. In that year Slany, aged about fifty, served as one of the company’s three wardens, while in 1619 the Merchant Taylors chose him as their master, a post carrying so much prestige that the Dutch ambassador attended his election.

  A man of substance, John Slany had close ties to the largest clients of Christopher Jones: in 1619, Jones’s associate William Speight joined the ruling committee of the same company, and John Slany’s brother Humphrey imported wine on the Mayflower less than nine months before she sailed to America. The records show that Slany knew John Pocock well, since Pocock was a rising man among the Merchant Taylors. We can also be sure of something else: that if the social life of the City of London bore any resemblance to the same thing today, then Tisquantum would have swiftly become a celebrity, in the street, in taverns, or paraded at formal dinners.5

  Was it simply a coincidence that Tisquantum turned up again at New Plymouth in the spring of 1621, just as the Pilgrims emerged from their first winter? Perhaps: but it seems equally likely that ships which arrived off Maine or Virginia in March knew about the Mayflower, that news about her traveled up and down the coast, and that Tisquantum came looking for the Pilgrims when he heard the word “London.” At this point, Jones and his command were still anchored in Plymouth Bay. As soon as Jones and Carver heard the name “Slany” from Tisquantum, they would have known that they had found someone they could trust.

  Tisquantum spoke the language of the Wampanoag, the people led by Massasoit. He could describe in detail the city from which Jones had sailed, with its merchants, its ships, its king, its wine, and its weapons of war. He could also explain that while most Englishmen might be vicious hypocrites like Thomas Hunt, an occasional exception could be found. At the Newfoundland Company, Slany gave specific instructions that native people should be treated with respect.

  However Tisquantum came to be there at exactly the right moment, he made the essential introduction to Massasoit. That same afternoon of March 22, with sixty of his warriors the sachem himself appeared above the settlement, most likely again on Watson’s Hill. Actors in a pioneering drama, playing parts in a scene to be repeated many times in the ensuing history of the British Empire, from the Ganges and Lucknow to the African veld, the Pilgrims made peace on behalf of the Crown of England.

  They had no Maxim guns or Enfield rifles, but they did have Standish, his muskets, and the ordnance unloaded from the Mayflower. They also had a small stock of trading goods, knives, bracelets, a copper chain for Massasoit, and alcohol too: Winslow mentions the brandy they gave the sachem to drink. And, of course, they had Tisquantum as translator.

  In the name of King James, Edward Winslow crossed the Town Brook toward Massasoit and then opened the negotiations, offering trade, a peace treaty, and an alliance against his enemies. This Massasoit required, because of the dangers he faced from his enemies to the west, the Narragansett of Rhode Island. Hostages were exchanged as sureties, with Winslow remaining on the perilous side of the water. Then Massasoit forded the stream, under an armed escort led by Standish, and walked up the short but steep slope toward the English houses.

  His conference with John Carver took place in a half-finished dwelling in the colony, where the Pilgrims had placed a green rug and some cushions. Again, it was a scene awaiting reenactment many times in a later period. To the beat of a drum, Governor Carver kissed the hand of Massasoit. As the sachem returned the compliment, they sat down on the cushions and the rug, and Massasoit ate and drank the food and liquor he was offered.

  According to Mourt’s Relation, the deal they struck contained six heads of agreement: essentially, a pact of nonaggression, and an alliance against enemies who might attack either the Pilgrims or Massasoit and the Wampanoag. We have to say “according to,” because no record exists from the side of Massasoit to show how he understood the terms of the arrangement. As Mourt’s Relation also emphasizes, at this early stage the language barrier remained high. Tisquantum lacked a perfec
t command of English. Although in London some men had studied the languages of the Algonquians, the vocabulary they knew came from Virginia, where the idioms and diction were entirely different.

  For the short term, the agreement reached on March 22 evidently marked a turning point, since the military threat from Massasoit fell away. That is as much as we can honestly say. The peace held: but how and why did it do so? Even Bradford, describing it more than two decades later, offered no explanation. The reality, perhaps, was that the English at New Plymouth had accepted a territorial boundary, whether they understood it or not.

  They were about to learn far more about the geography of the land they entered. They would soon see the limits it placed on them, but also the opportunities it offered.

  THE MISSION TO MASSASOIT

  Even today, in a car or on a bicycle and with a map, you may lose your way very quickly in the labyrinth of bogs, woods, and hillocks that stretch away west and south behind the town of Plymouth. Like the interior of Cape Cod, it was a very un-English landscape, but with an extra difficulty: here the ocean was invisible, and without it the land offered no directions.

  Follow the Town Brook on foot, as the Pilgrims would have done, and after a mile and a half you will come to a spot near a grove of majestic pines where suddenly the vegetation thins and a horizon appears. This is the place where the brook flows out of Billington Sea, the wide still pond where John Carver went to hunt.

  Then on the far side of the water, the terrain becomes entirely incomprehensible. Today, bulldozers have opened clearings many hundreds of yards wide to make artificial bogs for growing cranberries, separated from the road by the narrow slits of drainage ditches. A skirt of suburban housing encircles the rim of Billington Sea. Even so, it is easy to understand why the Pilgrims did not try to cross this landscape until the midsummer of 1621, and with a native guide.