Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  In his Penobscot Iliad, Nicolar wrote about blazing stars in the heavens that preceded the arrival of the white newcomers. He described a sailing ship—a “large canoe … propelled by a brown colored cloth spread in the wind”—and he chronicled the wars between the native people, between the Abenaki, the Micmac, and the Iroquois. He recorded native memories of kidnapping by the Europeans on the coast. He gave an alternative account of wampum. Nicolar said that it was never intended to be a form of currency, but only to function as a gift, a pledge of goodwill.

  Little known and rarely studied, like the rock art at Embden, Nicolar’s book records from the native side the beginnings of colonization in New England. Like the rock by the Kennebec, his book reminds us that our knowledge of the past is incomplete, meager, and fragmentary. Both the book and the rock teach us about the extent of what remains to be discovered, about stories and occurrences that seem familiar but that in reality are distant, remote, and strewn with ambiguity.

  Far too many sources such as these, Nicolar’s book and the rock, lie neglected and ignored, not only by the Kennebec, but also in the record offices of England. In London, the National Archives contains thousands of forgotten papers from the period, documents arising from litigation, from shipping, from taxes, or from diplomacy. Where great matters of politics are concerned, such as the causes of the English Civil War, or where the Crown took a close interest in affairs, as it did with the Virginia plantation, researchers have mined the archives deeply; but the very early settlement of New England was achieved entirely by private enterprise. The traces it left linger in obscure, unfashionable places, in archives relating to trade, lawsuits, and the sea. These are often hardly touched at all.

  No single fact, stone, or document will change our picture of the period. History is not a secret code waiting to be cracked with a simple key or a password. We have to examine it from all sides, and find as many sources as we can. Only by doing so can we hope briefly to see things as perhaps they were, for the Eastern Abenaki or for the native people of southern New England, as well as for the Pilgrims. So it is not only in a record office filled with manuscripts but also in the terrain on both sides of the Atlantic.

  When we slither down a wooded hillside in Nottinghamshire and come upon a stand of maples or a hedgerow that a Pilgrim might have passed, for an instant the centuries slip away. On a winter afternoon, as darkness falls over an English parish church, we find in a dim corner an alabaster monument, pink and white, made for a family who were allies of William Brewster; so, in that place, a fugitive epiphany occurs. And when we leave a highway in rural Maine and follow a winding trail down through the forest to the stream, suddenly we see beneath the dying autumn leaves the uncanny rock at Embden.

  By the water, we have a fleeting intimation of what a shaman meant by manitou. In a small moment of vision of our own, we glimpse the same objects that John Howland might have seen as he came up the Kennebec. We see, as perhaps he first saw them, the foaming river and the white pines, an eagle’s nest and the tracks of deer, and, in the distance and the sunset blue slate hills, a glowing palisade against the western sky.

  Acknowledgments

  The research for this book required three trips to the United States between 2006 and 2008, and my own peaceful expeditions to Holland, La Rochelle, and Ulster. Besides exploring all the locations associated with the Pilgrims on foot or on a bicycle, visiting each one at least twice, I made countless forays to record offices in many different parts of England. In the process I incurred many obligations, to local farmers, churchwardens, bed-and-breakfast landladies, and friendly staff in remote American motels and diners: far too many to list by name.

  Principally, I have to express my gratitude to the archive collections referred to in my notes, for access to their material and for the courteous assistance of their staffs. In England, I spent more time at the National Archives at Kew than at any other repository. The speed and efficiency with which it produces documents enabled me to make the most of long and crowded days.

  I am particularly grateful to Dr. John Alban, county archivist at Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, and to Dr. Dorothy Johnston, keeper of manuscripts and special collections at the University of Nottingham. Both of them kindly allowed me to use Elizabethan papers that either were too fragile for routine inspection or required conservation work before I could do so.

  I would also like to mention help received from Dr. Nicholas Bennett, vice-chancellor and librarian, Lincoln Cathedral; Dr. Glyn Coppack of English Heritage; Robin Harcourt Williams, librarian and archivist to the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House; Steve Hill of Steve Hill Photography, Lincoln; Alice Millea, assistant keeper of the Oxford University Archives; Helen O’Neill of the London Library; Theresa Thom, librarian, Gray’s Inn, London; Katie Vaughan of the Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds; Tim Wormleighton, principal archivist, North Devon Record Office, Barnstaple; and Peter Young, archivist to the dean and chapter of York, York Minster.

  At Cambridge, I had the benefit of guidance from Dr. Elisabeth Leedham-Green, honorary archivist of Corpus Christi College, and from Malcolm Underwood, her opposite number at St. John’s. Also at St. John’s, I received invaluable assistance from Jonathan Harrison, the special collections librarian.

  My cousin Nigel Bunker, station officer of the Tamar Coastguard Rescue Team, gave me the benefit of his expert knowledge of Plymouth Sound with several days sailing its waters. Captain Paul Jagger, Royal Navy, came with us and explained how it looks to a submariner.

  In Dublin, Dr. Raymond Refaussé, librarian and archivist of the Church of Ireland, swiftly identified John Lyford as the prebendary of Loughgall. That led me to Ulster and a little-known eighteenth-century jewel, the Armagh Robinson Public Library, where I received the charming help of Carol Conlin. Dr. Greer Ramsey, acting curator, allowed me to read papers relating to Jacobean Loughgall at the Armagh County Museum.

  In the United States, I wish to thank (heading from north to south) Paul du Houx of Polar Bear and Company, Solon, Maine; Bruce Bourque, archaeologist at the Maine State Museum in Augusta; Nick Noyes, head of library services, and his team at the Maine Historical Society in Portland; Professor David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, Petersham, Massachusetts; Peter Drummey, research librarian, and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Historical Society, especially Tracy Potter; Graham Giese of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, who explained the geology of Cape Cod; and Peggy Baker, director and librarian, Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Massachusetts. For expert help with Native American languages, I am very grateful to Dr. Francis J. O’Brien Jr. (Moondancer) of the Aquidneck Indian Council in Rhode Island.

  My opening and closing chapters could not have been written without the people who helped me to trace the fur trade on the Kennebec River. Dave Cook, past president of the Maine Archaeological Society, shared his unrivaled knowledge of the canoe trails of his state; Joe Miller of Starks, near Madison, showed me the site of the village at Naragooc; and at Embden, Arthur Arsenault told me where to find the petroglyphs.

  For specific permission to cite or to quote from unpublished documents for which they hold the copyright, I am grateful to the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library, for the Bacon and Talbot Papers at Lambeth; the Merchant Taylors’ Company and the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, for their records deposited at the Guildhall Library in London; at Cambridge, the masters and fellows of Corpus Christi College, Christ’s College, and St. John’s College, and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library; and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  To help in drawing my map of Mayflower London, the Historic Towns Trust kindly permitted me to use material from their map of the city in the Tudor period, published in Mary D. Lobel, ed., The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c. 1520 (Oxford, 1989). I am grateful to the Churches Conservation Trust for permission to reproduce my photograph of the Helwys monument at Saundby.

  I am immensely grateful to Professor Patrick Collinson and to Pegg
y and Jim Baker for reading the typescript, awarding appropriate encouragement and censure, and pointing to errors and omissions. My literary agents, Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath and Company and George Lucas of Ink Well Management, gave enthusiastic support, as did my splendid editors, Carol Janeway of Alfred A. Knopf in New York and Will Sulkin of the Bodley Head in London. Both Will and Carol immediately saw the potential of the book. This would not have happened at all without David Waller, a former colleague of mine at the Financial Times, who introduced me to Bill Hamilton. Reginald Piggott drew the maps beautifully, and David Nee and Elizabeth Lee at Knopf and Kay Peddle at the Bodley Head were diligent editorial assistants.

  The dedication records an obligation dating back more than twenty-five years. Ms. Mahoney presided over the foundation that awarded me the Harkness Fellowship that allowed me to spend two years in America in the early 1980s. However, my greatest debt of all is to my wife, Sue Temple, who has been a rock of support, love, and friendship since 1985.

  Two months before the deadline for submission of the manuscript, my father was suddenly taken ill and died. It is a source of great sadness to my mother and to me that he never saw the book he had waited for.

  Notes

  MANUSCRIPT AND ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS: ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

  BI (York) Borthwick Institute, University of York, UK

  BL British Library, London

  Bodleian Bodleian Library, Oxford

  CKS Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, UK

  ECRO Essex County Record Office, Chelmsford, UK

  LAO Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln, UK

  LDRO Diocesan Record Office, Lichfield, UK LPL Lambeth Palace Library, London

  LRCRO Leicestershire and Rutland County Record Office, Leicester

  NAK National Archives, Kew, UK

  NAN Nottinghamshire Archives, Nottingham, UK

  NDRO North Devon Record Office, Barnstaple, UK

  Norfolk RO Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, UK

  Northants RO Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton, UK

  PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast

  SROB Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds, UK

  U Nott University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections

  OTHER ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS REFERRED TO IN THE NOTES

  Archives Départementales de la Charente-Maritime, La Rochelle, France

  Armagh County Museum, Armagh, Northern Ireland

  Armagh Robinson Public Library, Armagh, Northern Ireland

  Cambridge University Archives, University Library, Cambridge, UK

  Christ’s College, College Archives, Cambridge, UK

  Corpus Christi College, Muniment Room, Cambridge, UK

  Doncaster Archives, Doncaster, Yorkshire, UK

  Guildhall Library, Manuscript Collections, London

  Lancashire Record Office, Preston, UK

  London Metropolitan Archives

  Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

  Massachusetts State Archives, Boston

  St. John’s College, College Archives, Cambridge, UK

  Sheffield Archives, Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK

  York Minster Archives, York, UK

  OTHER ABBREVIATIONS USED FREQUENTLY IN THE NOTES

  HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission

  NEHGR New England Historical and Genealogical Register

  ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  PCC Prerogative Court of Canterbury

  PMHS Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society

  EPIGRAPH

  1. Robert Ryece to John Winthrop, Aug. 12, 1629, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers (Boston, 1931), vol. 2, p. 130.

  PRELUDE: THE BEAVER OF MAWOOSHEN

  1. John Winter to Robert Trelawny, Richmond Island, Me., June 18, 1634, in Trelawny Papers, ed. James Phinney Baxter (Portland, ME, 1884), p. 29.

  2. Beaver fur prices and ecology: See chapters 12 and 17, below. Land in England: Eric Kerridge, “The Movement of Rent, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review, n.s., 6, no. 1 (1953), pp. 24–31; and Robert C. Allen, “The Price of Freehold Land and the Interest Rate in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41, no. 1

  3. Mark V. Stalmaster, The Bald Eagle (New York, 1987), pp. 23–25, 41–42, 56–64, and 113–15.

  4. The name Kennebec: Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, Indian Place Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (1941; repr., Orono, ME, 1977), pp. 142–43; and Gordon M. Day, “A St. Francis Abenaki Vocabulary,” International Journal of American Linguistics 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1964), p. 384. Eastern Abenaki: Dean R. Snow, “Eastern Abenaki,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, DC, 1978), pp. 137–48.

  5. “The Description of the Countrey of Mawooshen, c. 1606–7,” in The English New England Voyages, 1602–1608, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (London, 1983), pp. 469–76.

  6. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Survey of Somerset County, Maine, Southern Part (1972), p. 16. digitized soil maps from USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Web Soil Survey; and Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH, 1976), pp. 42 and 132–33.

  7. For the excavation report, see Ellen R. Cowie, “Continuity and Change at Contact-Period Norridgewock” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2002), esp. pp. 15–39 an 336–72. Dr. Cowie led the archaeological investigations carried out in the central Kennebec valley between 1988 and 1995 by the University of Maine at Farmington. Although it has not yet been possible to prove with physical data that maize was cultivated at Naragooc before contact with Europeans, Cowie believes that it probably was, and I have assumed the same. On the important debate about the northern limit of Abenaki maize farming and its earliest date, see Elizabeth S. Chilton, “So Little Maize, So Much Time: Understanding Maize Adoption in New England,” Current Northeast Palaeobotany II, ed. John P. Hart, New York State Museum Bulletin 512 (2008), pp. 53–58.

  8. Râle’s lexicon: Sebastian Râle, “A Dictionary of the Abnaki Language of North America,” ed. John Pickering, Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, n.s., 1 (1833); and Day, “St. Francis Abenaki Vocabulary.” Taste of beaver: Christopher Levett, A Voyage into New England (London, 1628), reprinted in J. P. Baxter, Christopher Levett of York: The Pioneer Colonist in Casco Bay (Portland, ME, 1893), p. 110.

  9. Canoes: David S. Cook, Above the Gravel Bar: the Native Canoe Routes of Maine (Solon, ME, 2007). Birch trees: Charles V. Cogbill et al., “The Forests of Presettlement New England, USA: Spatial and Compositional Patterns,” Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002), pp. 1279–1304.

  10. On English archives relating to Barnstaple, the White Angel and the Pleasure, and the beaver fur trade in 1628, see chapter 19 below. The English on the coast of Maine: Henry S. Burrage, The Beginnings of Colonial Maine, 1602–1658 (Portland, ME, 1914), pp. 178–96; and Edwin A. Churchill, “English Beachheads in Seventeenth-Century Maine,” in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, ed. Richard W. Judd et al. (Orono, ME, 1995), pp. 51–57.

  11. Cushnoc excavations, 1985–87: Leon E. Cranmer, Cushnoc: The History and Archaeology of Plymouth Colony Traders on the Kennebec (Augusta, ME, 1990), pp. 39–66 and 81–88. Kennebec patent: Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, by William Bradford (New York, 1979), pp. 201–2.

  12. Hakluyt (1584), in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor (London, 1935), vol. 2, p. 274.

  13. R. G. Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 36, Lower Canada, Abenakis, 1650–1651 (Cleveland, 1899), pp. 83–102.

  14. Colonial State Papers (American), CO 1/6, fols. 106–10, depositions regarding Edwar Ashley, NAK.

  15. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610), in The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. J. Gouws, (
Oxford, 1986), pp. 69–70.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE YEAR OF THE BLAZING STAR

  1. John Bainbridge, An Astronomicall Description of the Late Comet from the 18 of November 1618 to the 16 of December Following, with Certaine Morall Prognosticks Drawn from the Comets Motion (London, 1619), pp. 9–10, 19, and 33. Cambridge student: Memoirs of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Harleian MS 646, fol. 42, BL. French journalist: Estienne Richer, Le Mercure françois (Paris, 1620), vol. 5, pp. 290–92.

  2. Kepler and the comet: Gary W. Kronk, Cometography: A Catalog of Comets (Cambridge, UK, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 338–41. Grassi and Galileo: Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley, eds., The Controversy on the Comets of 1618 (Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 6–7 and 360.

  3. A. B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers (Venetian), vol. 15, 1617–19 (London, 1909), p. 366.

  4. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of the Indians of New England (1643), in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society for the Year 1794 (Boston, 1810), vol. 3, pp. 217–18.

  5. Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman, OK, 1996), pp. 191–93. Ojibwa legends: Thor Conway, “The Conjurer’s Lodge: Celestial Narratives from Algonkian Shamans,” in Earth & Sky: Visions of the Cosmos in Native American Folklore, ed. Ray A. Williamson and Claire R. Farrer (Albuquerque, NM, 1992), pp. 236–37 and 242–44.