Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Finally, on October 15, they turned their attention to the beaver. Copying the scheme devised by the Pilgrims, they gave the company a monopoly on the fur trade in its territory for seven years, excluding from it the individual settlers. This allowed the company to finance the outlay required for the initial voyages, before the new planters established themselves. In return, the company bore half the cost of fortifications, churches, public buildings, and the salaries of clergymen. From the outset, Cradock and his colleagues understood that only the beaver could pay for the colony that they wanted to establish. Five days later, on October 20, John Winthrop replaced Cradock as governor, because Cradock had so many business interests that tied him to London. Immediately, Winthrop began to organize and to recruit for the fleet expected to sail in the spring of 1630.

  Was this enough to create a durable New England? Not quite, but John Witheridge was about to add a last, ambiguous foundation stone. He did so two years later. Again the sequence of events had its origins in Barnstaple. In 1632, Witheridge made the first link between the colonies along the shores of Massachusetts Bay and the slave islands of the Caribbean.

  THE VOYAGES OF THE CHARLES

  This phase of the story begins with a minor catastrophe in Boston Harbor. Until World War II, ships heading out from the Charlestown Navy Yard toward the open sea passed a grassy island on their left. Created by glacial debris, and rising to nearly a hundred feet above the water, Governors Island was bulldozed in 1946 to become part of the landfill that now forms Logan Airport. On July 29, 1631, at the time of year when fogs are most frequent, a Bideford fishing ship called the Friendship ran aground just here. She beached on the mudflats beyond the island, close to the seaward tip of Logan’s longest runway.

  She was not a total loss—in 1633, the ship was back home in the Taw, carrying tobacco—but her mishap at Governors Island wrecked an ambitious first attempt to extend the New England trade to the Caribbean. Hired by Allerton and James Sherley, the ship had left Barnstaple the previous winter and spent eleven choppy weeks on the Atlantic before foul weather forced her back to Devon. In May, she set out once more and reached Boston in July. There she landed cattle and sheep. She went aground as she was on her way out again toward the Caribbean island of St. Kitts.25

  A little cluster of colonies existed in the Lesser Antilles, where sixteen hundred English settlers lived on St. Kitts, using slaves to grow tobacco. The colony had started life in 1624, and the first English slave ship arrived with sixty slaves two years later. Nearby, on the small island of St. Martin, salt ponds supported Dutch pioneers who sold the salt to fishing ships. To the south at Barbados, another new English colony produced tobacco and cotton wool.

  If these settlements grew crops to be sold for cash, they would need to import food, and this the Barnstaple men could supply. First they would ship to New England fare-paying emigrants, livestock, and stores, in the form of Barnstaple rugs and woolens. These could be sold for fur. Off the coast, the Barnstaple men would fish for bass and cod. Then they would sail south to the Antilles, sell the fish, and pick up tobacco, salt, and cotton wool. They could head straight back to England, or stop on the way in Ireland or, now that peace had returned, at La Rochelle or in the ports of Spain. The goods could be sold wherever they fetched the best price. The Friendship failed in what seems to have been the earliest venture of this kind, but the Charles of Barnstaple succeeded.26

  The master of the Charles was the same John Witheridge who sailed for Palmer and the Pilgrims in the tiny Content in 1628. His ship this time was a larger vessel, of 150 tons. Preparations apparently began in Barnstaple in September 1631, when Witheridge took delivery of six hundred pounds of peas from Somerset: peas in this sort of quantity were used as cattle feed. On April 10, 1632, the Charles duly set off for America, carrying twenty human passengers and some eighty cows and six mares. No comparable cargo of livestock had ever sailed to Massachusetts, and probably none of such a size had ever traveled to Virginia in the twenty-five years since Jamestown began.

  To carry animals in these numbers required fine seamanship. When cows and horses traveled from Ireland to Barnstaple, the vessels involved had more than a ton of carrying capacity for each animal, to allow for stall space, fodder, and freshwater. But the two-hundred-mile journey from Cork to Devon took only four days. Even for that short voyage, the number of animals taken on the Charles would require 112 tons of shipboard volume, or three-quarters of the space on board. The passage to America was fifteen times longer.

  Cattle breeds were scrawny in the seventeenth century, and doubtless the animals were allowed to lose more weight, in the hope of feeding them out in Massachusetts. But even so, and even if Witheridge cut the journey time by loading the cows in Ireland, he would need one thousand bales of hay and forty-five thousand gallons of drinking water to sustain the cattle until they reached New England.* Since the freshwater alone would fill the ship to bursting, the journey could not have been made nonstop. John Witheridge must have sailed by way of the Azores to replenish his stores, and possibly he called at Newfoundland too.

  Finding these landfalls was no easy matter. To do so within a tight schedule called for excellence in navigation. Witheridge must have stowed much of his cargo on the open deck, and so he must have loaded his vessel not only with speed but also with great care. This too required skill and experience. And yet John Witheridge took the Charles from Barnstaple to Boston in only fifty-six days, ten days faster than the voyage of the Mayflower. She arrived on June 5, John Winthrop recorded, with her passengers “all safe and in healthe.”

  Witheridge showed his caliber again that autumn. The Charles lingered off New England until September 22, presumably to fish. Little more than three months later, on December 31, 1632, she reentered the Taw estuary, carrying tobacco from St. Kitts, salt from St. Martin, and wool from Ireland. There are two possibilities. Either Witheridge collected his Caribbean cargo from some middleman in Jamestown or Bermuda, or, and this is more likely, the Charles sailed more than five thousand nautical miles in one hundred days, from Boston to the Caribbean and then back across the Atlantic to Devon.*

  For the first time, Witheridge completed a vast elliptical circuit of trade between the British Isles, New England, Virginia, and the West Indies: the circuit that eventually came to form the colonial system of the eighteenth century. Other Barnstaple men swiftly followed, while John Pocock helped finance the trade from London. In June 1633, another ship arrived in Barnstaple, aptly named the Gift. On board were tens of thousands of pounds of cotton wool from Barbados, and the importers were led by William Palmer. In these voyages, we can see the future in embryo, and more futures than one.27

  The first Irish immigrants to Boston were skittish cows, oxen, and frightened horses, taken on board at Waterford or Kinsale by ships bound out under masters such as John Witheridge. Between decks crammed with fodder and stinking with filth, they went south to the Azores and then on along the fortieth parallel to the far side of the Atlantic. To understand why the livestock were so essential, and the consequences that they had, we must go back to the Plymouth Colony. We have to return to the colony’s soil, and to the special properties of New England’s coastal strip, from the Connecticut River to Maine.

  * Records of three cattle shipments from Barnstaple to America in 1636 show that ships’masters dealt with the problem of transportation by carrying only young livestock, or yearlings. Even so, each animal required 1.3 tons of shipboard capacity, and the largest cargo consisted of no fewer than 115 bullocks.

  * The second possibility is more likely because the Barnstaple records specifically name St. Kitts as the point of origin of the tobacco.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE EXPLODING COLONY

  We are all free-holders: the rent day doth not trouble us.

  —WILLIAM HILTON, PLYMOUTH COLONIST, 16211

  In the summer of 1633, an epidemic of smallpox struck New England. It lasted until the cold weather returned, and at New Plymout
h it killed more than twenty men, women, and children. Among them was Samuel Fuller, their surgeon and physician. He was fifty-three and one of the original settlers from the Leiden community. Like eight other men who died, he left an inventory of his possessions. It shows that by sailing on the Mayflower, Samuel Fuller advanced himself in every conceivable way.

  He found the religious liberty he needed, he improved his material well-being, and his status was far higher in America. Unusually, and perhaps uniquely, in Fuller’s case the evidence exists for an exact comparison between his existence across the sea and his kinfolk’s way of life at home.

  Samuel Fuller was born in 1580, the third son of a butcher and tenant farmer called Robert Fuller, an unlettered man who signed his name with a mark like an H. Being unable to read and write was not yet an infallible symptom of poverty, and the Fuller clan were modestly well-off. They lived in a village in Norfolk called Redenhall. It was located not far from the highway from London to Norwich, and only ten miles from the port of Great Yarmouth, where Separatists were active. As so often, the size of the church is an index of prosperity. Even in a county renowned for great churches, the edifice at Redenhall was special, with a tall flint tower leaping up from the brow of a hill: a little too tall, perhaps, since lightning destroyed the steeple in 1616.

  There were two manors at Redenhall, and they belonged to a family called Gawdy. They were successful lawyers, and they lived a mile from the church at Gawdy Hall, later enveloped by a handsome shooting estate of a typically Norfolk kind. If you go in search of the Mayflower Fullers today, you must drive carefully, to avoid the plump pheasants that stray out from underneath the hedges. About fifty men rented land from the Gawdys, and they included two Fullers, Robert and John. The latter was either the uncle or the eldest brother of the Pilgrim.

  John Fuller ranked near the top of the rent roll, as one of the largest tenants. When he died at the end of 1608, his family made an inventory of his belongings too, listed room by room and marked with Robert’s mark. Thanks to this document, and the records left by the Gawdys, we can see precisely how well the Fullers lived at home, and how much better they could do on the other side of the Atlantic.2

  If Samuel went to prepare the appraisal, first he would pass the stables where John Fuller kept his cart, his plows and harrows, his scythes and mattocks, and the harness for his horses and colts. Four spotted pigs and a sow rooted nearby, while in a barn the Fuller cattle were wintering on hay. Eight lambs sheltered in another barn, while twelve shillings’ worth of hens and chickens pecked their way across the yard. Set apart from the house was a dairy, with churns, tubs, and a press for making cheese, and the shed where the Fullers made their beer. It was kitted out with skillets, pots, and “two Brasse thinges.” If the family were eating, Samuel Fuller would find them in the hall, the largest room in the house. It served as the kitchen, with an open fire equipped with bellows and iron tongs. They dined around a long table, sitting on benches and four stools.

  Six sides of bacon hung from the ceiling, while a musket leaned against the wall. In the corner was a cradle, awaiting an occupant, since John Fuller’s widow was three months pregnant when he died. In the parlor, the only room with a carpet, they kept their most valuable item, a four-poster bed, and nine cushions to go with it. Margaret Fuller owned a fine collection of linen, stored in three chests in a separate bedchamber: towels, pillowcases, six tablecloths, four dozen napkins, and thirty-six sheets. Somebody could read, because the inventory listed a desk and five shillings’ worth of books.

  If he were hardworking, lucky, and an eldest son, this was the way a yeoman farmer might live in old England, but Samuel did far better in the new. He had two homes—a town house at New Plymouth and a country place by the Smelt River—and he could do far more with his assets. Horses were still in short supply, and so Samuel Fuller rode an ass, but he owned three firearms, a musket for defense and two fowling pieces. It was against the law for his brothers to shoot game birds in Norfolk, thin or fat, but at New Plymouth it was positively encouraged. When the Pilgrims divided up their land in 1628, they made a provision that “ffowling, fishing and hunting be free.”To help him hunt and fish, Samuel had a share in a boat.

  In 1608, John Fuller had five beds, while in 1633 Samuel possessed only three, and his widow’s stock of linen was a little smaller than it might have been in England. Even so, the American Fullers had eight tablecloths, twenty-three napkins, and twelve sheets, and something new, rarely seen in the homes of English farmers: ten yards of calico, cloth sent back from India by traders such as Emmanuel Altham. Both John and Samuel owned much the same by way of tools, pots, pans, brass, and pewter, but in three categories Samuel far outdid his kinsman in England. Each of the three had something in common, because they were goods that conferred status of a special kind on their owner.

  Apart from his houses and his livestock, Fuller’s most valuable asset was his surgeon’s chest. And besides his medical manuals, his inventory listed twenty-six books, including three Bibles and, of course, works by John Robinson and Henry Ainsworth. Finally, while John Fuller’s brothers never troubled to itemize his clothes, Samuel’s inventory carefully listed his apparel: two cloaks, five suits, a gown, and nine shirts, some of them apparently brand-new and unworn.

  His chest, books, and garments showed that Samuel Fuller was an educated, professional man, a distinction denied to him in England. As a Separatist, he had no chance of obtaining a license to practice medicine, since these were granted by the Church of England, and he lacked the money required to become an apprentice barber-surgeon or apothecary. When his father died in 1615, Samuel received only fifteen pounds, since his three sisters needed larger sums if they were to live respectably. Instead, he went to Leiden, where he worked as a weaver. Somehow or other he acquired his medical training, possibly from lectures at the university’s medical school, one of the most advanced in Europe. Then he practiced freely in North America.

  A learned profession made a man a gentleman, and so Fuller became a gentleman by sailing on the Mayflower. He did not use the phrase—none of the nine men who died in 1633 classified themselves by rank, as they would have done in England—but he received the respect a gentleman commanded. Among his bequests were a pair of gloves, which Fuller left to John Winthrop, a member of the English landed gentry, from a background similar to the Gawdy family’s. Winthrop and Fuller dealt with each other as equals, something inconceivable on the old side of the Atlantic.

  At home, the Fullers were indelibly inferior to the Gawdys, or the Winthrops, because the Fullers belonged to a class of tenants called copyholders. A copyholder occupied his homestead by virtue of a copy of an entry in a document, the court roll of the manor, of the kind that has survived from Jacobean Redenhall. He kept his land for life and handed down his tenancy to his children, but the landlord’s demands often increased sharply each time such a transfer occurred. At the tenant’s death the landlord could also ask for a due called a heriot, often defined as the tenant’s best ox, horse, or ram. Copyholders had rights, litigation was frequent, and it was not one-sided, but this was not the same thing as independence. At New Plymouth, Bradford and his colleagues simply swept copyholding away, along with the rest of the paraphernalia of English manorial law. Men such as Fuller owned land in the colony outright, to buy and sell as they pleased, with no heriots to pay.

  By the time of the epidemic, for men like Fuller emigration had accomplished everything they could have wished. Severe though it was, even the rate of mortality from smallpox was less than 10 percent, far lower than in bouts of plague in Leiden or London. In time, it became apparent that life expectancy in New England far outstripped that in the old. And by 1633, beneath the colony lay a bedrock of prosperity, modest but more than adequate. Although Samuel Fuller’s inventory was drawn up four months after harvest, it included a hundred bushels of corn, enough to feed nine people for a year, and if grain was plentiful, livestock was ample too.

  In 1623, Alth
am counted only fifty pigs, a few goats, and some hens at New Plymouth. Since poor Altham tended to exaggerate, this must be an upper limit. Although the first cattle arrived the following spring, when Edward Winslow brought them back from England, even in 1628 the cattle still numbered only fourteen. But in the next five years, thanks to voyages like those of the Charles, the stock of animals expanded rapidly. Samuel Fuller owned three dairy cows, two calves, eight sheep, and thirty pigs, and he was a long way from being the wealthiest man in the settlement. That distinction belonged to Isaac Allerton, who clearly dealt well for his personal account during his trips to Barnstaple. When the colony levied a tax in 1633, Allerton paid twice as much as Bradford, and four times as much as Fuller.

  How had all this been achieved? The beaver played its part, but there was another answer too. To find it, and the implications, we need to interrogate another Pilgrim, the old warrior Miles Standish.

  STANDISH THE CATTLEMAN

  Perhaps he understood the American landscape best, but if he did so, it was for very English reasons. To Standish, most of all among the Pilgrims, the coastal fringe of land from Cape Cod to Cape Ann promised material opportunities of a kind that the Old World had denied.

  Miles Standish was a cattleman, and he lived in a cattleman’s homestead. At his death he owned four oxen, five horses, nine cows and heifers, and a calf. In 1863, an early archaeologist unearthed the foundations of his house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and made a plan of what he discovered. The old soldier had built himself something a modern English hill farmer would recognize: a Devon long house. A long, rectangular structure, it accommodates human beings at one end and animals at the other. Examples, made of stone, still exist on the slopes of Dartmoor today. Since a door between the two segments of the house allowed the stockman to tend his calves without going outdoors, the design was ideal for cold English moorlands and Massachusetts winters too.3