by Nick Bunker
Miles Standish fitted perfectly into a New England transformed by cows carried on ships like the Charles. They were the last element necessary to allow the Great Migration to prosper in the 1630s, attracting immigrants in thousands, rather than hundreds. Cattle, their manure, and their hauling power for plows allowed the colonies to step away from a lifestyle based on maize, and instead they began to give men and women the quality of life that they aspired to in the old country. Cattle offered independence, status, meat, and a chance to accumulate wealth, and their effects went far beyond those that can be quantified. Cattle farming dispersed the colonists, creating an array of scattered settlements, soon bearing little resemblance to the villages they knew in England. While the physical space in which they lived changed profoundly, their mental landscape underwent a transformation too.4
No longer insecure, the Plymouth Colony became an element within a new and dynamic series of townships snaking up the coastline and eventually leading into the interior, unified by buying and selling as much as by shared religion. And while this process alarmed William Bradford, who feared that greed and mobility would subvert the values of the Pilgrim community, the process also contained the seeds of conflict with the native peoples of the region. In 1633, a year after the Charles reached Boston, the demands of the new cattle economy led to the first documented case in New England of the legalized theft of native lands. As we shall see, it occurred with the dispossession of the Pawtucket people. They occupied the best stretch of cow country along the shores of Massachusetts Bay.
Standish and Winslow first entered their territory in 1621, when they went up the Mystic River in pursuit of beaver skins. And because of his background, Standish was ideally qualified to see the possibilities of the coastal strip where the Pawtucket lived. Besides his cattle, his house, and his land in Duxbury, Miles Standish bequeathed to his children another item of property. The old soldier died convinced that he had been cheated of his inheritance in England. In his will, he claimed ownership of estates in six villages in Lancashire. Some unnamed person had swindled his family out of the land, but it was rightfully his, said Standish; and the land in question bore a remarkable resemblance to the place where he settled in America.
Ten miles north of Liverpool, the six villages sat on a wide coastal plain, dotted with moss and peat. In the time of Elizabeth I, two-thirds of the usable land was under grass, for rearing cattle: the sturdy black long-horned beasts for which the county was renowned. Of the six places, the northernmost was Croston, beside an enormous wetland along the estuary of the river Ribble, still today one of the largest salt marshes in the British Isles. Between the spring tides it provided grazing for hundreds more cows. When the waters rose, they could be herded safely to the higher ground where the Standishes had once lived.5
So, in England, Standish already knew a kind of terrain that he saw in replica along the shores of Massachusetts Bay. To an English settler, the most striking feature of the new American landscape would have been just this: the long fringes of salt marsh. The grasses cling like a beard to the shore, colored in winter a muddy brown, when the cordgrass has died back, under Boston skies the color of moist mother-of-pearl. Then, in the months of summer sunlight, the whiskers turn a deep amber gold, of a grandeur no Englishman sees at home. Ten degrees of latitude separate his native soil from the wide beaches that reflect the New England sun into a windy blue cloudless sky.
When the Mayflower arrived, nearly a quarter of a million acres of salt marsh edged the coast from Rhode Island to Maine. Inside the Provincetown hook, and south toward Wellfleet, along the inner rim of the Cape they found classic locales for creating salt marsh, where the curve of the land depleted the energy of waves rolling in from the Gulf of Maine and allowed sediment to accumulate. It formed habitats ideal for grasses, shellfish, insects, and feeding birds: the environment that Bradford and Winslow described in Mourt’s Relation, with its salt ponds filled with mud snails and oyster crabs.6
A Massachusetts salt marsh in October. This example is at Wellfleet Bay, on Cape Cod, and forms part of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Wildlife Sanctuary. (Photography: Nick Bunker)
To begin with, the Pilgrims were more concerned about fish, fur, and corn, but as chance would have it, they blundered into a region where nature created a rich endowment for farming cattle. A North American salt marsh can produce more organic carbon per acre than a tropical rain forest, thanks to the rich blend of nutrients created by the mixing of freshwater from estuaries and salt water from the open sea. Tall cordgrass, which grows in the lowest, wettest part of the marshes, produces more carbohydrate per square yard than wheat or barley.
As it happens, with the exception of Winslow, all the early leaders of the Plymouth Colony came from places close to similar wetlands in the old country. The two Williams, Brewster and Bradford, grew up beside the Humberhead Levels. Allerton apparently came from the coast of Suffolk, where in the years around 1600 landowners and tenants actively reclaimed marshes for grazing land. John Howland’s family lived at Fenstanton, north of the city of Cambridge, a mile from the edge of the Great Level. A belt of tow-tying bog and swamp twice as large as the salt marshes of Massachusetts, the Level extended all the way to the North Sea, where it joined the fens that reach as far as old Boston in Lincolnshire.
So, when the time and the opportunity were right, the Pilgrims began to farm the marshes along the coast. This process had its origins in 1627, when they divided their livestock. To understand it, we have to step a pace backward, to the land and the fields as they were in the colony’s earliest phase.
A GREAT DEAL OF GROUND
In 1835, a medical doctor called James Thacher published a history of New Plymouth, from the Pilgrims to the age of Andrew Jackson. He gave a candid assessment of the qualities and defects of the place. “The land in this town is hilly, barren and sandy,” he wrote. So much so that by the nineteenth century the townspeople preferred not to farm but to ply the sea, make rope, or trade as merchants.
Most of the earth is pretty much the same as it is by Billington Sea, a coarse sand called Carver soil. Very acid, and prone to let water soak straight through, in its natural state it made for meager crops. Even so, a few patches of fertility existed, listed by Thacher with approval. One was called Plain Dealing, the second was Hobbs Hole, and the third was Warren Farm. All possessed excellent earth, said Thacher, and nearby was the beach, with rockweed and kelp as additional manure.7
Plot these locations, and what do we find? Plain Dealing is right at the northern limit of modern Plymouth, just inside the town line. Warren Farm lies at the town’s very opposite, southern end, four miles from Plain Dealing along the shore. Hobbs Hole sat between Warren Farm and Plymouth Rock, fifteen minutes’ walk from Burial Hill. Because of the pattern of the soil, and the need to stay close to water for the sake of natural fertilizer, the town Thacher knew was a strung-out, elongated sort of place. It had been that way for a very long time, since the early days of the colony. That being so, New Plymouth bore very little resemblance to a village of the kind the Pilgrims knew at home.
Bradford made many sensible decisions as governor, and one of his best was to make wills and inventories obligatory, and to insist that title to land be carefully recorded. In 1645, the court made a strict law against forging deeds, altering public records, or bribing officials to do so. Malefactors might be whipped in public and branded on the face with an F for “fake” or “forger.” Draconian though it was, the system had its merits. In old England title to land was mostly unregistered, and counterfeit deeds were commonplace.8 By making the rules he did, Bradford eliminated a source of conflict. He also ensured that later generations could trace exactly who owned what, and how the colony’s outline changed. In 1886 another Plymouth historian, William T. Davis, collated the early records and charted the locations against the streets he knew. From his book, and the topography, we can see how the Pilgrims first tried to copy an English village, and then how swiftly they gave
up and did something else.9
At the very beginning, they had no choice but to cling to the Town Brook and Burial Hill. Too few to cultivate a wide area, they had to use the fields already cleared by Tisquantum’s people, and they needed the stream for freshwater and for the fertilizing alewives that swam up it. And since defense remained a paramount concern, men and women working in the open dared not stray over even the lowest ridge, which might conceal them from a sentry on the fort.
Then, in 1623, decisions had to be made. Under the terms of the contract with Thomas Weston, which made the colony a common stock, for the first seven years no individual settler could own a plot of land. To ensure that each farmer received his fair share of good or bad land, the slices were rotated each year, but this was counterproductive. Nobody had any reason to put in extra hours and effort to improve a plot if next season another family received the benefit. So, as Bradford says, they abandoned what he calls the “common course and condition,” and began to allocate the soil in lots that, in due course, the owners could keep or sell. This led to a rapid increase in output, and it followed models familiar from their homeland. Side by side with the open field system, fully commercial, individualistic farming had existed in England for at least three centuries. The Pilgrims knew it well.
Also in 1623, the Anne arrived with reinforcements, and these new settlers needed land too. So the Pilgrims responded by dividing up a much larger expanse of ground, and in doing so, they copied the layout of an open field village, such as Austerfield. Most of the lots were small, just one or two acres, like the strips laid out within the open fields at home. In Nottinghamshire, each village usually possessed three or four of them, encircling the settlement. At New Plymouth the Pilgrims began by creating something very similar.
About five hundred yards from Burial Hill, on a flat area of ground, watered by two brooks flowing down into the sea, they laid out a North Field. Covered today by a parking lot, where Plymouth keeps its school buses, the field gently slopes down to the water, with one of the brooks still gurgling away beneath it in a sewer. There was also an East Field, between Burial Hill and the sea, and a South Field off in the distance on the good land around Hobbs Hole and a stream called the Wellingsley Brook. The Pilgrims did not use all these field names, but they laid out the lots in these three locations all the same.
It was all very English, but did it make sense? At home, villages like Sturton and Austerfield had evolved over many centuries. They arranged their space as they did because of all sorts of English circumstances, to do with drainage, crop rotation, and the need to stop livestock trampling corn. Landlords set limits to what a tenant might do, and the manor, the parish, and the law knit the villagers together, willingly or not. Since men and women walked to church, the parish could not extend beyond a maximum radius of two miles or so, with a fixed perimeter and fields and houses clustered inside it. Above all, by 1600 in England, a village was a place where there were many people and relatively little land. The puzzle to be solved was how to find an equilibrium between the two.
In America, circumstances differed entirely. At New Plymouth, there were no landlords, and no hedges, and certainly no Anglo-Saxon boundary marks. New England had puzzles of its own, looming conflicts about the earth, but they took an unfamiliar shape. Sooner or later, the Plymouth Colony was bound to veer away from old English models—and all the more rapidly, because they were Separatists. When Brownists made the act of separation, they voted with their feet to abolish the parish system. They did away with the church, its compulsory tithes, and the legal obligation to worship in a single building every Sunday. That being so, how could the Pilgrims insist that men and women remain within a walkable distance of Burial Hill? And if the colony had ample land, and still few people, why should they remain tightly knit, tending fields arranged like satellites around Plymouth Rock, where the soil was scarcely ideal?
In 1627, the Pilgrims began to experience space in a new, un-English manner. They agreed to give each resident twenty acres, each one a perfect rectangle, arrayed in series, with the long side of each one adjoining the water’s edge. The colony took on its narrow pencil shape. To the south, a belt of rocky hills fixed a natural boundary, and so the colony marched up the coast to the north, toward the cove at Rocky Nook Point. Up here Fuller owned his second home, and John Howland laid out his farm.
Beyond the river and Rocky Nook lay another waterway, the Jones River. On its far side, Miles Standish discovered what he was looking for: pasture and meadow to replace the birthright he had lost. North of the Jones, a chain of tidal marshes swings off to the right to form a thick margin around the coastline. The belt of marsh extends for eight miles, as far as the town of Marshfield, founded by Winslow in 1632. Even today, when some of it has been reclaimed, Duxbury Marsh encompasses thirteen hundred acres. To its north at Green Harbor the salt marsh is still wider. Standish took the name for his new settlement from Lancashire, where the English Duxbury lies beside the Ribble, near the six townships where he claimed his inheritance.10
As cattle started to arrive in quantity in the early 1630s, it began to make even more sense to move northward. “The people of the plantation begane to grow in their outward estats,” wrote William Bradford. “No man now thought he could live, except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keepe them.” So the migrants laid out their new estates in a long line, from Duxbury to Marshfield. They made not the slightest effort to copy the design of a tightly clustered village in the east of England. As they established their marsh farms, men such as Standish founded a way of life that survived along parts of the New England coast almost unaltered until the 1890s, when men still cut the hay with a scythe. They also deeply worried their governor.
Based on data extracted from maps produced from the Massachusetts state survey of 1830, and then digitized by the Harvard Forest project at Harvard University, this map of Plymouth County in the early nineteeth century shows a very un-English pattern of settlement, following the fringe of salt marsh along the coast.
For William Bradford, dispersal was new, and threatening. Many men and women soon lived much too far away to come to the meetinghouse on Sunday. This in itself might undermine the religious mission of the Pilgrims. By 1643, the colony had exploded outward into eight distinct townships, scattered across forty miles, reaching north toward Boston and spilling out eastward toward the elbow of Cape Cod. Although Plymouth remained the largest, with 148 adult males, it accounted for less than a quarter of the total population.
A few years later, as he wrote his history, Bradford made plain his fears that the loss of solidarity endangered the very purpose of New England. His alarm may have been exaggerated: perhaps he had forgotten the quarrelsome nature of the focused villages he knew in the valleys of the Idle and the Trent. By scattering as they did, in all likelihood the colonists eased tensions and made godliness more attainable, rather than less. Even so, Bradford was right to register the fact that disorienting change was under way.11
He was far less likely to understand its economic origins on the other side of the Atlantic. Among the Pilgrims, perhaps Robert Cushman saw them most clearly. Born near the most expensive meadow and pasture in the south of England, on the coast of Kent, Cushman possessed the sharpest eye for the material realities of his native land. Transmitted three thousand miles across the ocean, they destroyed the way of life of the Pawtucket along the Mystic River.
GEORGE NO-NOSE AND THE MARSH
Two marshes bear the name of Romney. One of them forms a green wedge that pokes out into the English Channel, seventy miles from London, with at its farthest extremity the lighthouse at Dungeness. To find the other, simply look down as you drop toward Boston’s Logan Airport from the north, at a spot where two blue coils of shining water creep inland amid the brown of the tidal flats. A highway cuts across them in a sweeping arc. The road is the Salem Turnpike, and the water marks the course of two rivers, the Saugus and the Pines. They flow down between the towns of Lynn and
Revere, reaching the sea about six miles from downtown Boston. Along the Pines lies the boundary between two counties, Essex and Suffolk, named after coastal shires in England.
Together with Chelsea, the next town to the south, the modern suburbs of Lynn and Revere cover an area that acquired in the 1630s a reputation as the best place to farm in English North America. Winthrop logged the date, 1633, when settlers first reaped a harvest of English wheat. It grew on the American Romney Marsh. The wetland formed the northern extension of a belt of marshes that began on the Mystic at Medford and then curved around the shore to Lynn, encompassing eighteen square miles.
It is hard to imagine what valuable soil this made, now that Greater Boston has swallowed up the region. What remains of the salt marsh lies concealed behind apartment buildings and a state police post, along the boulevard at Revere Beach, where the only vestige of a cow is a stand selling roast beef sandwiches. By far the richest slice of earth was some elevated ground called Oak Island, where many centuries of dying plants and trees created a dark bed of compost. Today it remains the best place to see the dense grass that attracted the early settlers. The island itself has disappeared into suburbia, covered with a grid of streets and houses, but the view of Romney Marsh remains.
