Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Books such as these were one-offs, not periodicals, but then in 1618 the first corantos went on sale in Amsterdam to meet the demand for regular news about the war breaking out in Germany. As the Mayflower lay at anchor off Provincetown, the first English translations of these corantos appeared in London. The following autumn, the first true English newspaper was born, when on September 24, 1621, someone called “NB” published the first issue of a weekly. It was called the Corante and subtitled Weekely Newes, but it apparently survived for only seven editions. Most likely, “NB” was either Bourne or Butter, sheltering behind initials in case of official disapproval.

  Then, in May 1622, as the Pilgrim manuscript sat in a printing shop awaiting the typesetter, a second wave of periodicals began to appear. Soon afterward, Butter and Bourne joined forces to dominate the new market. On October 15, they began to publish a weekly newspaper called The Relation. It ran without a break until the summer of 1624, when the first editor died during an epidemic. Filled with news of foreign wars, natural disasters, and the doings of kings and queens, it firmly established a taste for topical sensation, available to anyone who could afford twopence to buy a copy. Butter and Bourne had their own connections with the Pilgrims; and in London they did more than anyone else to create the environment in which the Plymouth manuscript found readers.

  Of course, the two men lived in close proximity to the Mayflower investors: that came about simply because London was so densely concentrated. Nathaniel Butter lived in Bread Street Ward, where he attended the same church as John Pocock. The newspaper office was Butter’s shop, at the sign of the Pied Bull on Watling Street, a few yards from Pocock’s front door. It was Bourne, however, who supplied a direct link with the Pilgrims, an affiliation they could not do without.

  For nine years, Nicholas Bourne had an apprentice called John Bellamy, a young man with radical views. Many years later, when he was Colonel John Bellamy, part of the Puritan leadership in London during the civil war, it was revealed that in his youth Bellamy belonged to the group of semi-Separatists who met across the river in Southwark. These were the very same people who acted on behalf of the Pilgrims in the year of the comet, in their early negotiations with the Virginia Company.

  John Bellamy clearly knew Edward Winslow, and like his employer he knew a commercial opportunity when he saw one. Early in 1620, Bellamy finished his time as an apprentice, but he went on working with Bourne until, at some time in 1622, he set up his own shop a few yards away, at the sign of the Two Greyhounds in Cornhill. There he began to publish and sell books. Among the very first was the Pilgrim narrative. Close behind it came Bellamy editions of the works of William Bradford’s beloved author, the Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth, volumes bound and printed with such skill that they remain a pleasure to examine today, on paper with barely a mark of age.17

  At the end of June, as the second wave of newspapers started to go on sale, John Bellamy obtained his official license to print the story of the Plymouth Colony’s adventures. It bore a title intended to appeal to exactly the same appetite for vivid news of current affairs.

  Although historians call it Mourt’s Relation, when it first appeared on bookstalls, it carried a much longer title. Cascading down the page in such a way as to attract even the most jaded browser, it ran for eight paragraphs, filled with the names of Indian chiefs. Of course it began as though it were a coranto: the book, said the title page, was A Relation or Iournall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth. Two years later, they came up with a simpler title for Winslow’s second book of Pilgrim adventures, but it was directed at the same audience. John Bellamy published that book too, and it was called Good Newes from New-England.

  For the next twenty-five years, Bellamy went on issuing books relating to North America. He did so far more consistently than any other London publisher and printer. No method exists for quantifying the impact they had, but we can be sure of one thing. Colonies did not survive by themselves. They needed supplies, reinforcements, and new flows of stores and capital, and so they needed publicity too. Without the Pilgrim books published by John Bellamy, this would have been lacking. Since Bellamy learned his trade from Bourne and Butter, we can say with confidence that Puritan America relied on journalism from the very start: almost as much as it depended on the beaver, on Tisquantum, and on Massasoit.

  * Describing the native people he met, Winslow says that they wore “long hosen up to their groins, close made … altogether like the Irish trousers.” Moryson wrote this about the Irish: “Among them the Gentlemen or Lords of Countries weare close breeches and stockings … their said breeches are so close, as they expose to full view, not only the noble, but also the shamefull parts.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  DIABOLICAL AFFECTION

  Three things are the overthrow and bane, as I may term it, of Plantations … 1. The vain expectation of present profit … 2. Ambition in their governors and commanders, seeking only to make themselves great … 3. The carelessness of those that send over supplies of men unto them, not caring how they be qualified: so that ofttimes they are rather the image of men endued with bestial, yea diabolical affections, than the image of God, endued with reason, understanding and holiness.

  —EDWARD WINSLOW,16241

  The Pilgrim fort on Burial Hill looked east across the sea and west toward the forest. As late as 1830, an official map showed that even then the light and shade of the woodlands behind New Plymouth reached to within a thousand yards of the water’s edge. In the time of William Bradford the cleared margin between the beach and the trees was far narrower still. One August day in 1623, a sentry posted on the parapet of the fort would have seen emerging from among the oaks and pines a procession of men and one woman. All of them were naked from the waist up.

  They numbered as many as 120, and they were painted, some black and some yellow, but mostly a purple-red, the color of mulberries. Their dark uncut hair was greased with oil. On their shoulders or behind them they carried or dragged as gifts the carcasses of slain deer and a turkey. At their head, most likely, was Massasoit, with his long knife slung across his muscular chest on a cord. The black skin of a wolf would have encircled his shoulders, while behind his neck there hung a pouch of tobacco.2

  As he descended the wooded slope toward the Pilgrim town, and followed a path that led along the north side of Burial Hill, Massasoit would have looked up and seen on a pike above the fort a severed human head, a few months old. In the summer sky close to it a scrap of linen flapped or dangled in place of a flag. The linen too was colored red, but red of a different shade, the dull red of dried blood.

  What Massasoit made of the severed head we cannot say, but the intention of the Pilgrims was clear. On August 14, Massasoit, his warriors, his fellow sachems, and one of his five wives joined in celebrating the second wedding of William Bradford. The governor made sure that the head and the blood-soaked rag were starkly visible above the fort, as reminders to Massasoit that the Pilgrims were men of terror as well as men of God. For this period, the most detailed source is Edward Winslow’s Good Newes from New-England, and its opening paragraph praises the work of divine providence for “possessing the hearts of the salvages with astonishment and fear of us.” But anxiety and alarm were not one-sided, and the English felt them too.

  Writing for public consumption, Winslow manfully defended the colony’s achievements, and especially those that concerned security. Profits remained elusive, but the Pilgrims were “safely seated, housed and fortified, by which means a great step is made unto gain,” he wrote. As we shall see, much of Good Newes is military history, an account of the exploits of Miles Standish as he quelled an attempted assault on the Pilgrims by the people of the Massachusetts. It was the head of a Massachusetts warrior that Standish and Bradford stuck up on a pole, and his blood that dyed the linen. But interwoven with this chronicle of violence were other themes that preoccupied Winslow and William Bradford alike. In the second period of t
he colony’s history, the fear of conspiracy or civil strife became for them an overriding concern.

  During the first eighteen months in America, the secret of survival was morale. In the next phase, this remained the case, but the relevance of morale expanded to encompass more than physical endurance. It widened to include the need to prevent the colony from falling victim not to external forces, but to its own internal discontents, or worst of all to a combination of the two. This was the motive for the brutal gesture of erecting a decapitated head on a spike. It was something far from customary in the England of the time, where felons were hanged but decapitation was reserved for the most dangerous of offenders, English traitors or Irish rebels. It was a gesture of deterrence, aimed perhaps at some of the colonists as well as at Massasoit.

  Two troubled episodes dominated the long second act of the drama at New Plymouth. The first, and most notorious, was the fight at Wessagussett, at the southern end of Boston Harbor, when the failure of a colony founded by Thomas Weston led to bloody conflict with the native people and to the stern reprisals meted out by Captain Standish. The second episode concerned the mutinous activities of two newcomers. These were a settler called John Oldham and a clergyman, John Lyford, sent out to New England by the London investors to minister to the spiritual needs of the colony.

  Most accounts of the Pilgrims canter swiftly through the Lyford business. They treat it as a tedious, slightly baffling diversion, scarcely worthy of the space and the intense emotion that William Bradford committed to it. But while later historians have found the Lyford affair unworthy of close attention, for Bradford it represented a spiritual danger more potent than any attack with arrows and spears. For Bradford and Winslow, the common motif linking Lyford and Wessagussett lay in what Winslow called “diabolical affections,” the inner agencies of degradation that threatened to subvert the work of godliness.

  In the person of John Lyford, we also encounter another man who, like John Pocock, embodied connections between the Pilgrim narrative and the wider history of Britain at the time. Lyford came to New Plymouth after nearly a decade in Ulster, where he was engaged in a colonial project of another kind. The early years of New England coincided with imperial beginnings elsewhere, in India and Ireland. As we shall see, the links between these three locations were close, direct, and very personal.

  DISORDERLY WESSAGUSSETT

  Phase two of the Plymouth Colony began in the winter of 1621–22, a few months after the departure of the Fortune, and in ominous fashion. The Narragansett people of Rhode Island made apparent threats of war, sending over a sheaf of arrows wrapped in the skin of a rattlesnake: Bradford sent it straight back, stuffed with bullets. Doubts also arose about Tisquantum when he fabricated a story that Massasoit was planning his own attack, apparently as a means to restore his own status as a necessary mediator. This enraged Massasoit. Under the terms of his pact with the Pilgrims, he had every right to demand that Tisquantum be handed over to him for punishment.

  This Bradford refused to do, but the incident served as a reminder of how frail such alliances might be and how insecure the colony remained.

  As yet, Bradford had no idea of the fate that had befallen the Fortune, but he knew how little the colony possessed by way of resources. In order to survive, and to live at peace with Massasoit and the other people of the region, the colony needed supplies and trading goods from home and new settlers who were able-bodied and self-sufficient. In fact, during that year and in 1623 the colony suffered a drain on what small reserves it had, and one that very nearly brought it to its knees. For this, they could thank Thomas Weston.

  By now Weston was a ruined man and a fugitive. Even so, and with financial help from Beauchamp, he managed to send across the Atlantic another small craft, the Sparrow. She made landfall in Maine, joining the rest of the modest English fishing fleet in those waters. Somehow, too, Weston saved Philemon Powell from prison and secured the release of the Charity from arrest at Portsmouth, along with now only fifty or sixty passengers.

  With the Swan, the Charity duly set sail and reached New Plymouth in midsummer, but when she arrived, the thirty guns were missing. Their fate remains a mystery, but Weston’s foes were quick to allege that the worst possible crime had been committed. Weston’s brother Andrew sold the cannon “for extraordynary and excessive gaine to the Turkish pyrates or other enemyes or strangers,” the Pilgrim investor James Sherley claimed in legal papers. The guns were certainly sold to someone, but no proof exists that the buyers were pirates. Gunrunning to corsairs was an offense that would have sent the Weston brothers to the gallows, but no serious attempt was made by the Crown to pursue them. The authorities knew that the cannon had not reached New England; but they cared far more about the money the Westons owed in unpaid fines and taxes.3

  Before he went to ground, leaving his wife to cope with years of litigation, Weston wrote a final letter to Bradford, dated April 10, 1622. Carried on the Charity or the Swan, and arriving nearly three months later in New England, it consists of excuses, diatribes against his enemies, and empty pledges of help. Weston also candidly admitted that the latest reinforcements he had sent to America were not England’s finest. “Now I will not deney that ther are many of our men rude fellows, as these people terme them,” he wrote. “Yet I presume they wil be governed, by shuch as is set over them; and I hope not only to be able to reclaime them from yt profanenes that may scandalies the vioage, but by degrees to draw them to god.”

  Whether Weston meant this seriously we will never know. Wary as ever, Bradford did not believe it. For him Weston’s letter marked his final loss of confidence in his former backer. When Weston turned up at New Plymouth, in disguise, he cadged some beaver skins and supplies before heading to Virginia. Perhaps Weston had done his best, but he created for the Pilgrims more problems than he solved. On the Charity and the Swan, he sent over raw new settlers with inadequate supplies, and in doing so, he put the colony in grave danger. The native inhabitants of southern New England could not afford to allow into their land parasites who upset the economy they had created.

  If the Pilgrims added something to the life of the region, by way of trading goods, or by assisting the native people against enemies inland or up the coast, then they might serve a purpose. If, on the other hand, the English became a leech on the area’s resources, consuming other people’s corn and game and offering little in return, then they had no legitimate reason to be there and should be expelled. This is a truth that Edward Winslow recognized. Perhaps this was because he had read widely in the new travel books, such as Moryson’s, which pointed out that those who went to strange lands must pay their way and learn the customs of the country.

  Weston’s new settlers failed this test at a time when the Plymouth Colony could least afford to make mistakes. Within a few months of the arrival of the newcomers, the Pilgrims reaped their second harvest of corn from the little fields laid out around New Plymouth, but it was meager. Crop raising in England and America alike required intense labor, by way of weeding and the application of manure, and in the New World without carts and livestock everything had to be carried and done by hand. But during the growing season of 1622, again the Pilgrims found their attention diverted from cultivation to defense.

  An English ship fishing on the coast brought news from the south of a native uprising, which came close to destroying the settlement at Jamestown. Bradford promptly ordered the construction of a blockhouse on the top of Burial Hill, with emplacements for six cannon. The effort required took precious time away from agriculture. Since they were mostly too poorly nourished for manual work, the effect was all the worse, leaving food reserves depleted. Bradford also blames Weston’s new settlers for stealing corncobs as they hung on their stalks in the fields, but the facts of the case are disputed.

  There is an alternative version of what took place more sympathetic to Weston’s men, and written by a different type of migrant. The author was an English lawyer and adventurer, Thomas Morton.
He arrived in New England at some point in the middle of the 1620s and made himself the leader of a small fur-trading settlement at Mount Wollaston, between New Plymouth and Boston. In due course he quarreled violently with the Pilgrims.

  As far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne and beyond, historians have argued about Morton, his reliability, and the true explanation for the mutual hatred between him and William Bradford. Since Morton was a man who enjoyed drink, dancing, and making fun of Puritans, and since he may have been another Roman Catholic, it is hardly surprising that his account of events fails to match the story as told by a Separatist. Nonetheless, Morton must be treated with respect. Published in London in 1637, but apparently written much earlier, his book New English Canaan contains details that can only have been learned by somebody who knew the landscape intimately, and had listened carefully to the native people around the shores of Boston Harbor. He differs fundamentally from Bradford.4

  Morton agreed that Weston’s men were wasters—“many of them lazy persons,” he writes—but he accuses the Pilgrims of pushing them out of New Plymouth, because they might topple the Separatists from their position of control. According to Morton, Weston always intended that the beaver fur trade should be the basis of the colony, and the men he sent were entirely suitable for that purpose. The Pilgrims, Morton says, wanted to keep the fur trade for themselves, and they resented the need to share sparse supplies with the newcomers.

  Whatever the reason, that autumn the Weston men left and founded a village of their own, at a place called Wessagussett. The name means “at the edge of the rocks,” and so it is: a few hundred yards from the settlement site, close to the shore lie a cluster of rocks exposed at low water.5 Today Wessagussett goes by the name of North Weymouth, beside an Atlantic inlet called the Fore River, ten miles south of downtown Boston. Like many another colonial location, the banks of the Fore River have long since become industrial, lined with oil tanks, a power plant, and what was once a naval shipyard. Nonetheless, the geography survives, never entirely subdued, and the seascape retains its beauty, with the familiar New England counterpoint of overcast eggshell skies and speckled sandy woods.