Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Brooks sent the skeleton with the pipe to Harvard, where the university had recently set up its Museum of Comparative Zoology. In December 1862, he spoke about the find at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, speculating that the bones from what he called the “Indian Necropolis” belonged to Nanepashemet himself.9 This may have been wishful thinking, but there could be no doubt that the land around the Mystic ponds had once been a Native American stronghold. Twenty years later, workmen digging another hole for the Brooks family at West Medford came upon eighteen more skeletons, with weapons and tobacco pipes, dating, it seems, from the earliest period of contact with Europeans.

  Nothing remains, barring a street called Winslow Avenue, to record the first visit made by the English to the tomb of Nanepashemet, on September 21, 1621, but the early settlers understood the importance of the place. Nearly a decade later, when the Massachusetts Bay Company began to allocate slices of land to its investors, they gave the north bank of the Mystic to one of their richest supporters at home, Matthew Cradock. The choice of this spot for Cradock’s plantation showed just how attractive the land was felt to be. Its qualities were equally clear to the Pilgrims from the moment they first saw it. In order to reach it, however, they had to first leave the sphere of influence of Massasoit and enter what might be hostile territory.

  Bradford picked ten men, with Tisquantum and two other native people as interpreters, and on September 18 he sent them north by boat to find a woman. They were looking for the widow of Nanepashemet, known to the English as the Squa Sachem. Because she outlived her first husband by more than three decades, she may have been no more than thirty at the time, and like Massasoit she had her enemies.

  Her late husband, Nanepashemet, had not died from natural causes. It seems that the Micmac from the east and north had probed this far along the coast and killed him during a raid. Because the Pilgrims left only a brief account of their visit to the Mystic valley—even combined, the two accounts left by Bradford and Winslow run to fewer than thirteen hundred words—it is hard to say how much they knew about this before they set off. But it looks as though they saw an opportunity to replicate the alliance they had made with Massasoit, offering the Squa Sachem a measure of protection, backed by English guns and ammunition.10

  On the morning of September 19, the Pilgrim expedition landed somewhere on the shore south of Boston. They aimed to make contact with Obbatinewat, the most northerly of the sachems who looked to Massasoit as leader. This they did only to find that while he was friendly, he too lived in fear of the Micmac, and he had his differences with the widow of Nanepashemet. Nevertheless, he agreed to help, and on the twentieth they crossed the bay between the islands that dotted Boston Harbor. They sent out scouts to reconnoiter the country on the other side. On the twenty-first, they went ashore, on one or the other bank of the Mystic River—it could have been either, because, as its name implies, Medford was a crossing place—and then they marched inland.

  Today, thanks to cars and to a dam named after Amelia Earhart, the river valley has been tamed or violated, depending on your point of view. Floods no longer spill over the marshes and meadows as once they did, and the Atlantic tide no longer gives the Mystic Lakes a saline tang, as it would have done in 1621. the water is clear and fresh to the taste. However, enough of the topography remains intact, even beneath the avenues of Medford, to explain the area’s immediate appeal to any Jacobean Englishman with an eye for land.

  Edward Winslow mentions two hills. Nanepashemet had lived on one of them, in a house raised on a wooden scaffold built on planks and poles. On the other, where apparently he lost his life, there was another dwelling, abandoned after his death. Nearby the Pilgrims found his tomb. It lay in a glen or a valley, inside a fort protected by a high palisade, by a ditch four feet deep crossed by a single footbridge. Inside was the house where the Moon Sachem lay buried.

  It may never be possible to know the locations exactly, since it seems that only rudimentary maps survive from the colonial period. But in 1865 the Pilgrim historian Henry Martyn Dexter identified the site of the first hill as Rock Hill, beside the Mystic. There, ten minutes’ walk east of the commuter rail station at West Medford, it can still be found, and it made an obvious bastion. A steep granite outcrop, softened by lichen and partially obscured by modern houses, birch trees, and Norway maples, Rock Hill climbs in steps and ledges to a height of more than a hundred feet above the flat bottom of the river valley.11

  At its base runs the Mystic Valley Parkway, wide and noisy but not quite as poisoned by gasoline as it might seem at first. Undeterred by the automobile, in late October a squawking colony of migrating waterfowl live between the road and the river, Canada geese, feeding in their dozens. A thin covering of grass extends across the valley bottom, but a single scoop of soil shows that the earth is a dark alluvium which made this an ideal place to grow corn. Winslow mentioned the crops of maize, and later English visitors described the splendid fishing hereabouts, and the game that filled the woodlands.

  On arrival, the Pilgrim party looked for the Squa Sachem, but instead they met the frightened survivors of the people of Nanepashemet. They were mostly women, with their harvest only just complete, the corn in heaps. The Englishmen did their best to calm them down, and a rapport of some kind was established. According to Winslow’s narrative, the women boiled cod for the colonists, but it took time to persuade them to summon down their menfolk to open a trading relationship. When at last one man came, he too shook and trembled in fear. He was prepared to sell skins, but he would not say where the Squa Sachem had gone.

  According to Winslow, Tisquantum suggested stealing the skins, because the man and the women were hostiles. It seems that the Pilgrims did not follow his advice. Even so, the women sold the coats from off their backs, coat beaver perhaps, the best kind of pelt for a hat, and then they covered their nakedness with branches. As Winslow put it, “They are more modest than some of our English women are.” Still the Squa Sachem remained elusive, and that was the end of the expedition. That night, with rations running low, the Pilgrims set sail back to New Plymouth.

  Ruefully, they took with them the realization that this, the hinterland of Boston, offered the environment that should have been theirs from the outset, much more suitable for livestock, corn, and hunting than the terrain surrounding the Plymouth Colony. They had also seen the route of what later became the Middlesex Canal: a natural highway along woodland paths toward streams and rivers leading to far better beaver country than the sandy wastes of southern Massachusetts. In the words of William Bradford, “They returned in saftie, and brought home a good quantity of beaver, and made reporte of ye place, wishing they had been ther seated.”12 Nevertheless, they had done the best they could, and they had found the commodity that the investors in England wanted most.

  THE FATE OF THE FORTUNE

  After the commercial failure of the Mayflower’s voyage, Bradford and the Pilgrims knew that it was imperative to get a cargo of fur and timber back to London as soon as possible. They swiftly turned the Fortune around and sent her home with pelts acquired along the Mystic River and from Massasoit. After giving his sermon, Robert Cushman sailed back with her on December 13, 1621, taking two hogsheads of beaver skins, otter skins, clapboard, and sassafras, worth about four hundred pounds. Then, five weeks later, disaster struck her too, when on January 19 she met a French warship off the coast of the Vendée, to the north of La Rochelle.

  Cushman and the Fortune were unlucky, but the circumstances were typical of the period. Navigation remained imperfect, and naval affairs were always liable to disrupt or divert the path of western enterprise. The French skipper caught them not far from the fortified Île d’Yeu, but this lies more than 350 sea miles from Land’s End and the Lizard Peninsula. It seems that the Fortune had made a familiar error. She mistook the long snout of Brittany for the southwestern end of England, and then she strayed off down the French Atlantic coast at the worst possible time.

&nbs
p; Under the law of the sea, even though England and France were at peace a French captain could legally seize the Fortune if she was a pirate, or in reprisal for plunder taken by English ships, or if she was aiding France’s enemies. Only two months previously, as part of their defiance of Louis XIII, the Huguenots of La Rochelle had sent out their armée navale to fight the royal fleet, and given it a thrashing. The king’s ships fled back into harbor, while the Huguenots prowled up and down the coast. The fortress on the Île d’Yeu remained in the hands of the Crown, but any English vessel coming close was liable to search and seizure in case she was ferrying supplies to the rebels. The French warship stopped and boarded the Fortune and carried her back to the island.

  It soon emerged that she was neither a pirate nor carrying contraband. All the same, the French governor seized her guns, cargo, and rigging. He locked her master in a dungeon and kept Cushman and her crew under guard on board the vessel. He also confiscated the manuscript of Mourt’s Relation. After thirteen days, he let them go, with the book but minus the beaver skins. They made it back into the Thames on February 17, 1622. They found commerce in London paralyzed by the depression and the Mayflower investors in deep trouble, and none more deeply so than Thomas Weston.13

  By this time he was already nearly ruined, and the loss of the Fortune’s beaver fur dealt the final blow. When the alum racket blew up in his face the previous summer, Weston wrote one IOU after another as he tried to carry on trading, but he had very nearly reached his limit. For many years, he had expected the Pilgrims’ friend Edward Pickering to guarantee his debts, but by the time the Mayflower reached America, their ties were already weakening. Each man came to distrust the other. In March 1621, Pickering came over to London to try to settle their differences, and an agreement was patched together; but as his problems mounted, Weston continued to issue bills of exchange, which he expected Pickering to honor. By early 1622, the relationship had collapsed entirely, after a heated argument in London. Weston killed it for good by having Pickering arrested for debt, and at about the same time he broke with the rest of the Mayflower investors. He sold his share in the venture for whatever they would give him. By this time, the Shrewsbury draper John Vaughan was chasing Weston for payment for a consignment of Welsh cotton, and he owed still more money to the men who had bought his smuggled alum and to the Crown. The authorities were determined to recover Weston’s unpaid fines and customs duties.

  Few men attempted anything as daring or as dangerous as his next maneuver. As the Fortune docked in London, Weston made one bold last gamble. The records of what happened remain in Cranfield’s papers, as crisp and legible now as they were four hundred years ago.

  Weston had fitted out another ship, the Charity, to sail from Portsmouth with a cargo of settlers and artillery, accompanied by a smaller fishing vessel called the Swan. Perhaps with his elder brother’s help—Richard Weston was by now a successful London lawyer—he obtained an export license from the Privy Council to send the cannon to New England. Issued on February 17, 1622, the day on which the Fortune reached the Thames, the license covered thirty pieces of ordnance. They included big guns each weighing nearly two tons. Allegedly intended for the use of the Plymouth Colony, the consignment came from the royal arsenal at the Tower of London, but it never reached America. It appears that Thomas Weston planned to run the guns elsewhere and then sell them to the highest bidder. There would be many takers in the North Atlantic, Arab pirates, Huguenots, Dutchmen, or Spaniards, all of them in need of extra armaments.

  News of the imminent departure of the Charity came to the attention of the man who ran the alum monopoly. They reminded the Lord Treasurer about Weston’s debts to them and to the king. Weston had vanished from his London home, and from what Mrs. Weston told them on the doorstep, it seemed that he was preparing to flee to New England. Lionel Cranfield swiftly alerted the authorities in Portsmouth, and they found Philemon Powell, posing as the purser of the ship. With him were eighty colonists, bound for New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay.

  Under arrest, Powell refused to talk. Because this was a very serious matter, Cranfield sent an Exchequer judge down to Portsmouth to interrogate the suspect. Unimpressed, Powell kept his mouth shut, claiming that by law no servant could be made to give evidence against his master. On March 21, the exasperated judge reported back to Whitehall. Three days later Lord Cranfield ordered Powell’s detention in the Fleet Prison in London.

  Thomas Weston, meanwhile, had managed to evade arrest, hiding behind the silence of his accomplice. He had the gall to petition Lord Cranfield for Powell’s release, arguing that he was losing five pounds for each day that the Charity lingered in Portsmouth Harbor. Then Weston disappeared entirely, only to surface briefly in New Plymouth the following year, after crossing the Atlantic disguised as a blacksmith. Most likely, he traveled on a Devon fishing vessel, and then he quietly slipped off one or another ship at one of the fishing posts along the coast of Maine.

  Meanwhile, in the spring of 1622, the rest of the Mayflower investor group were wondering what to do next. Some were close friends of Pickering, who wanted to file suit against Weston: that autumn Pickering did so, issuing a futile subpoena. His case had little prospect of success, seeking money that Weston did not have, and tortuous litigation in London could not save New Plymouth. Whatever the long-term outlook, the colony urgently needed supplies that year. The investors did the best they could.

  Led by James Sherley and John Pocock, at first they struggled. They could barely assemble enough money to pay for twenty tons of stores and send thirty passengers across the ocean. So in the spring Robert Cushman approached John Peirce, the London merchant who had obtained the new patent of 1621 from the Council for New England. Peirce agreed to help finance another voyage, and somehow he and the Mayflower investors raised four hundred pounds. This was still a modest sum, but at least it was enough to buy thirty tons of supplies and trading goods and a ship called the Paragon.

  Even so, she did not leave London until October 1, and the voyage ended almost as soon as it had begun. The ship had barely reached the English Channel when she sprang a leak in a gale. Two weeks later she was back in the Thames. Her second attempt fared little better, and nearly ended in catastrophe. In January 1623, the Paragon set off again, with 109 passengers, many of them women and children. By the middle of February, she was only halfway across the Atlantic when she came close to sinking in another storm. At the storm’s height, to save the ship, the master cut away the mainmast. With three men at the helm, the Paragon struggled back to Portsmouth, but minus her superstructure, shorn away by the sea.14

  Hearing of her return, Pocock and Sherley promptly told Peirce to repair the vessel and send her out again within fourteen days. When he did not, they went to court and sued him. Their attempt to rescue the colony ended in yet another exchange of recriminations. Four years later Peirce was still demanding compensation in the courts. An extra reason for the animosity lay in the fact that Peirce had apparently tried to double-cross both his fellow investors and the Pilgrims.

  Six months before the Paragon sailed out on her first voyage, Peirce had gone to the Council for New England and asked them to amend the patent in such a way as to make himself and his business partners the landlords of the Plymouth Colony. It seems unlikely that this was outright swindling; probably Peirce simply wanted a sort of insurance policy, an element of collateral for the money he put up to finance the ship and her stores. When the Pilgrims, Sherley, and Pocock complained, the authorities upheld the original patent. Even so, the dispute rumbled on until John Peirce died.15

  The Paragon affair had been a shambles, but during the course of 1622 the Pilgrims had achieved something else, less tangible but with far-reaching effects of its own. Quite apart from founding a new colony, they had also helped to invent journalism in its modern form.

  TWO GREYHOUNDS AND THE WEEKELY NEWES

  When the Fortune reached London stripped of her cargo, she still had on board the manuscri
pt of Mourt’s Relation. It rapidly found a publisher. Fresh, exciting, and narrated in the clearest English, it told with a mass of visual color and the odd joke or two the story of the colony’s first year. The book began in England, on the way out of Plymouth Sound, and it ended in America after the first Thanksgiving and the mission to the Mystic. It went on sale in London, at a shop in Cornhill only yards from the home of John Slany, at the very time when a new vogue for topicality created a ready market for this sort of thing. The city’s bookstores were just beginning to sell periodical news sheets, or corantos, as they were known. The publisher the Pilgrims found was a man schooled in this new segment of the trade.

  London had fewer than twenty printers, but the city had ten times as many booksellers. Under King James their business grew almost as fast as sales of wine and silk. In 1620, more than 400 new books hit the streets to satisfy a rapidly expanding reading public. And in their search for new titles, printers like Winslow’s former employer John Beale tried pretty much everything.

  Beale published not only travel writers, such as Fynes Moryson, but also self-help books (Directions for a Maide to Choose Her Mate, of 1619), as well as sermons, sheet music, ballads, histories, how-to books on arithmetic and handwriting, and cautionary tales of city life. Another Beale title was something called The Roaring Gallantes, Contayning a Short Narracion of the Lifes and Deaths of William Nicholls and John Welsh, Broker: sadly, no copy seems to survive. However, perhaps the boldest of London’s book entrepreneurs were two men called Bourne and Butter. They became the founders of the English newspaper.16

  Edward Winslow certainly knew Nicholas Bourne, because at his bookshop Bourne stocked the titles that Beale had printed. Everyone in the business knew Nathaniel Butter, because he was the most audacious and flamboyant bookseller of his time. Butter began to publish sensational news as far back as 1605, when he issued a gruesome account of a murder in Yorkshire, with a sequel describing the execution of the culprit. In 1608, after publishing the first edition of King Lear, he followed it up with Newes from Lough-Foyle in Ireland. It chronicled the equally bloody career of O’Doherty, the rebel from Donegal.