Mayflower (44 page)

It was a small victory to be sure, but in the winter of 1677 it was the best that Benjamin Church could do.

T
HIS BOOK BEGAN
on Nantucket Island in 1995 with a Native American symposium sponsored by the Nantucket Historical Association. There I met John Peters, or Slow Turtle, then Wampanoag tribal medicine man and executive director of the Massachusetts Commission of Indian Affairs; Tony Pollard, or Nanepashamet, then curator of Plimoth Planatation’s Wampanoag Indian Program; and Russell Gardner, or Great Moose, then Wampanoag tribal historian. Gardner, in particular, was a huge help to me in researching the book I subsequently wrote about Nantucket’s Native American legacy,
Abram’s Eyes.
Sadly, all three had passed away by the time I began work on this book—a work that draws on many of the insights they provided, both in writing and in person, a decade or more ago. I also owe a debt to Wampanoag tribal members Helen Vanderhoop Manning and June Manning, who guided my earlier researches on Martha’s Vineyard, and the late Elizabeth Little, whose knowledge of Nantucket Native Americans was unmatched. Thanks also to the late Albert “Bud” Egan and to his wife Dorothy Egan and their support through the Egan Foundation and the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies.

Over the course of the last three years, I have benefited from the help of many individuals and institutions: James Baker at the Alden House; Ellen Dunlap, John Hench, Nancy Burkett, Georgia Barnhill, Thomas Knoles at the American Antiquarian Society; Jeremy Bangs at the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum; Eleanor Hammond and John York at the Aptucxet Trading Post Museum; Michael Volmar at the Fruitlands Museum; Stuart Frank and Michael Dyer at the Kendall Institute at the New Bedford Whaling Museum; Barbara Hail and Kevin Smith at the Haffenreffer Natural History Museum; Betsey Lowenstein at the Massachusetts Archives at the State House; William Fowler, Peter Drummey, Anne Bentley, and Kimberly Nusco at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Richard Peuser at the National Archives; Jane Hennedy and her staff at the Old Colony Historical Society; Peg Baker and Jane Port at the Pilgrim Hall Museum; Nancy Brennan, Liz Lodge, Carolyn Freeman Travers, Linda Coombs, Peter Arenstam, Pret Woodburn, and Rick McKee at Plimoth Plantation; and Chuck Turley at the Provincetown Monument and Pilgrim Museum. Thanks also to the staffs of the Jabez Howland House and Isaac Winslow House. Special thanks to the professional staffs of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the Mayflower Society for their important and ongoing contributions to the scholarshp of seventeenth-century New England.

My research in England was assisted immeasurably by Malcolm Dolby in Scrooby and by Russell Kirby, Mag Kirby, and Tim Connolly in London. Larry Anderson and Fred Bridge showed me the King Philip War sites in Little Compton, Rhode Island. Thanks also to Revell Carr, Alfred Crosby, Jeffrey Crowley, Jud Judson, Jeff Kalin, Frances Karttunen, Dr. Timothy Lepore, Beth Mansfield, Richard and Mary Philbrick, Timothy Philbrick, Andrew Pierce, Michael Tougias, and Charles Soule. Special thanks to Narragansett medicine woman and tribal historian Ella Wilcox Sekatau.

I benefited greatly from the input provided by the following readers: Robert C. Anderson, James Baker, Peggy Baker, Jeremy Bangs, Susan Beegel, Thomas Congdon, Peter Drummey, Peter Gow, Barbara Hail, Michael Hill, Jennie Philbrick, Melissa Philbrick, Marianne Philbrick, Thomas Philbrick, Neal Salisbury, Eric Schultz, Ella Sekatau, Keith Stavely, Carolyn Travers, Len Travers, and Gregory Whitehead. All errors of fact and interpretation are mine alone.

A special thanks to Michael Hill, whose research assistance and wise counsel are greatly appreciated. Thanks also to Celeste Walker and to Timothy Newman.

Many, many thanks to my editor at Viking Penguin, Wendy Wolf, who has once again shown me the way. Thanks to Hilary Redmon and Hal Fessenden for their editorial input and to Cliff Corcoran, Francesca Belanger, Kate Griggs, Michael Brennan, Gretchen Koss, Greg Mollica, and copyeditor Adam Goldberger. Thanks also to Jeffrey Ward for the maps.

At HarperCollins UK, I am indebted to Richard Johnson for his editorial advice and to Rachel Nicholson for her assistance in planning my research trip to England.

The history of Plymouth Colony is a topic I have been thinking about for a long time, but it was my agent Stuart Krichevsky who first prodded me to turn it into a book. Thanks, Stuart, for all your help. Thanks also to Shana Cohen and Elizabeth Coen Kellermeyer.

Most of all, thanks to my wife, Melissa D. Philbrick, and our two children, Jennie and Ethan, and to my parents, Marianne and Thomas Philbrick, and to my brother, Sam Philbrick, and his family, all of whom were with me every step of the way.

Abbreviations

AAS American Antiquarian Society

CCR Colonial Connecticut Records

EPRPW Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War
by Benjamin Church, edited by Henry Martyn Dexter

GNNE Good News from New England
by Edward Winslow

HIWNE
History of the Indian Wars in New England
by William Hubbard, edited by Samuel G. Drake

HKPW History of King Philip’s War
by Increase Mather, edited by Samuel G. Drake

MHS Massachusetts Historical Society

MR Mourt’s Relation,
edited by Dwight B. Heath

NEHGR New England Historical and Genealogical Register

NEQ
New England Quarterly

OIC The Old Indian Chronicle,
edited by Samuel G. Drake

OPP Of Plymouth Plantation
by William Bradford, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison

PCR Plymouth Colony Records,
edited by David Pulsifer and Nathaniel Shurtleff

PM The Plymouth Migration
by Robert Charles Anderson

SGG The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
by Mary Rowlandson, edited by Neal Salisbury

WMQ William and Mary Quarterly

PREFACE-
The Two Voyages

On America’s obsessive need for a myth of national origins, see Terence Martin’s
Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings
and Ann Uhry Abrams’s
The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin.
My brief account of the voyage of the
Seaflower
is indebted to Jill Lepore’s
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity,
pp. 150–70. As Lepore points out, in addition to slaves from Plymouth Colony, there was a group from Massachusetts, requiring the
Seaflower
’s captain to have certificates from both Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow and Massachusetts governor John Leverett. Winslow’s “Certificate to Thomas Smith concerning the transportation of Indian prisoners, August 9, 1676” is in the Stewart Mitchell Papers II at MHS. As Almon Wheeler Lauber makes clear in
Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States,
the
Seaflower
was one of many New England ships that transported Native American slaves to Bermuda and the Caribbean during and after King Philip’s War. See also Margaret Newell’s “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670–1720” in
Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience,
edited by Colin Calloway and Neal Salisbury, pp. 128–29. In a letter dated November 27, 1683, and cited by Lepore in
The Name of War,
the Puritan missionary John Eliot refers to some Indians who may have been part of the
Seaflower
’s cargo: “A vessel carried away a great number of our surprised Indians, in the time of our wars, to sell them for slaves; but the nations, wither they went, would not buy them. Finally, she left them at Tangier; there they be, so many as live, or born there. An Englishman, a mason, came thence to Boston: he told me, they desired I would use some means for their return home. I know not what to do in it,” MHS Collections, vol. 3, p. 183. James Drake in
King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England,
1675–676 writes convincingly about the degree to which New England was a bicultural community prior to the war: “By 1675 Indian and English polities had so intermeshed that in killing one another in King Philip’s War they destroyed a part of themselves,” p. 196; Drake also insists that “it should not be assumed that the English and the Indians had invariably been headed toward a dramatic confrontation,” p. 3. William Hubbard in
HIWNE
writes of the region’s Indians being “in a kind of maze,” p. 59. Douglas Leach in
Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War
tells of the proposal to build a wall around the core settlements of Massachusetts, pp. 165–66. For statistics on the death toll and carnage from King Philip’s War, see Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias’s
King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict,
pp. 4–5; James Drake’s
King Philip’s War,
pp. 168–70; and Neal Salisbury’s introduction to Mary Rowlandson’s
SGG,
p 1.

CHAPTER ONE-
They Knew They Were Pilgrims

I have adjusted the spelling and punctuation of all quotations to make them more accessible to a modern audience—something that had already been done by the editors of
OPP
and
MR.
When it comes to dates, I have elected to go with the Julian calendar or “Old Style” used by the Pilgrims, with one exception. The Pilgrims’ new calendar year began on March 25; to avoid confusion, I have assumed the new year began on January 1. To bring the dates in synch with the calendar we use today, or the “New Style,” add ten days to the date listed in the text.

My account of the
Mayflower
’s voyage to America is largely based on
OPP,
pp. 58–60, and
MR,
pp. 4–5. The two dogs are mentioned in
MR,
p. 45. W. Sears Nickerson’s
Land Ho!—
1620
: A Seaman’s Story of the
Mayflower,
Her Construction, Her Navigation, and Her First Landfall
is an indispensable analysis of the voyage. Nowhere in
OPP
or
MR
is the name of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America mentioned. If not for the 1623 land division, in which is listed the land given to those who “came first over in the May-Floure,” we might not know it today, although there has been plenty of research that corroborates the name of the Pilgrim ship. Concerning the state of the
Mayflower
’s bottom, Nickerson writes that it “must have been extremely foul with grass and barnacles from being in the water all through the hot months,”
Land Ho!,
p. 28. Although Nickerson’s experience at sea during the late nineteenth century prompted him to speculate that many, if not most, of the passengers were put up in bunks built in the aft cabins of the ship,
MR
places the Billingtons’ cabin in the ’tween decks, p. 31. Also, Edward Winslow advises future voyagers to America to “build your cabins as open as you can,” suggesting that they were temporary structures built in the ’tween decks,
MR,
p. 86. On the dimensions of the ’tween decks, see William Baker’s
The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels,
p. 37. On the importance of beer in seventeenth-century England and America, see James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz’s
The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony,
p. 8.

There has been much speculation as to the nature of the “great iron screw” used to repair the
Mayflower.
In his introduction to
The Pilgrim Press,
edited by R. Breugelman, J. Rendel Harris maintained that it was part of a printing press the Pilgrims were bringing over to the New World, pp. 4–5, but as Jeremy Bangs convincingly demonstrates in
Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat,
it was undoubtedly a device “to draw heavy timber to a considerable height”—from Joseph Moxon’s
Mechanick Exercises of the Doctrine of Handy-Works,
first published in 1678–80, and cited by Bangs, pp. 9–10.

Bradford discusses the Pilgrims’ motives for leaving Holland in
OPP,
pp. 23–27. See also Jeremy Bangs’s
Pilgrim Life in Leiden,
pp. 41–45. The statistics concerning the mortality rate in early Virginia are from Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,”
Journal of American History,
June 1979, p. 24. The passage about the brutality of Native Americans is in
OPP,
p. 26. On the Pilgrims’ belief in England’s leadership role in the coming millennium, see Peter Gay’s
A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America,
pp. 5–7; William Haller’s
The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs, pp. 68–69; and Francis Bremer’s
The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards,
p. 42. On the English disdain for Spain’s treatment of the Indians in America and Richard Hakluyt’s insistence that it was England’s destiny to colonize the New World, see Edmund Morgan’s
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,
pp. 15–24. On the comet of 1618, see Keith Thomas’s
Religion and the Decline of Magic,
p. 354. Interestingly, Phineas Pratt’s
A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People That First Inhabited New England
refers to the comet as a prelude to the Pilgrims’ settlement in Plymouth: “in the year 1618 there appeared a blazing star over Germany that made the wise men of Europe astonished there,” p. 477. John Navin’s dissertation “Plymouth Plantation: The Search for Community on the New England Frontier” provides an excellent analysis of social, cultural, and interpersonal dynamics at work among the Pilgrims during their time in Holland, pp. 141–83. The comments about the Pilgrims’ strong spiritual bonds are in a December 15, 1617, letter by John Robinson and William Brewster in
OPP,
pp. 32–34. The full passage in which Bradford uses the term “pilgrim” is as follows: “So they left that goodly and pleasant city [Leiden] which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits,”
OPP,
p. 47. This passage bears many similarities to the words Robert Cushman had used in “Reasons and considerations touching the lawfulness of removing out of England into the parts of America,” which appears at the end of
MR:
“But now we are all in all places strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners, most properly, having no dwelling but in this earthen tabernacle; our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding but as a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere, but in the heavens,” pp. 89–90.

Almost all the information we have about Bradford’s childhood in Austerfield, short of baptismal records, comes from Cotton Mather’s
Magnalia Christi Americana,
pp. 203–7. See also the biographical sketch of Bradford in Robert Anderson’s
The Pilgrim Migration,
pp. 62–66. I am indebted to local historian Malcolm Dolby for a tour of both Austerfield and Scrooby and whose monograph
William Bradford of Austerfield
is extremely helpful; see also Bradford Smith’s
Bradford of Plymouth.
On the Geneva Bible, which was in essence the Puritan Bible, see Adam Nicolson’s
God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible,
pp. 58–59, 68, 229–30. Edmund Haller in
The Elect Nation
writes of the importance of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
to England’s sense of historical and spiritual entitlement, pp. 14–15.

My account of the Pilgrims’ spiritual beliefs is drawn from a wide range of sources, but I found the following works to be especially helpful: Horton Davies’s
Worship and Theology in England: From Cranmer to Hooker,
1534–1603;
The Worship of the American Puritans,
also by Davies; Francis Bremer’s
The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards;
Keith Thomas’s
Religion and the Decline of Magic;
Theodore Bozeman’s
To Live Ancient Lives;
Philip Benedict’s
Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism;
Diarmaid MacCulloch’s
The Reformation;
and Patrick Collinson’s
The Religion of Protestants.
On covenant theology, the stages by which a Puritan tracked the workings of the Holy Spirit, and Separatism, I have looked to Edmund Morgan’s excellent summary of Puritan beliefs in
Roger Williams: The Church and the State,
pp. 11–27, as well as his
Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea,
especially pp. 18–32. I am also indebted to James Baker’s invaluable input.

An unattributed pamphlet entitled
St. Helena’s Church, Austerfield, Founded
1080 refers to an article by the Reverend Edward Dunnicliffe that claims the date of the stone carving of the snake over the south doorway of St. Helena’s “is much earlier than the rest of the church Viz:—Probably the Eighth Century.” For information on William Brewster and the manor house at Scrooby, see Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter’s
The England and Holland of the Pilgrims,
pp. 215–330, and Harold Kirk-Smith’s
William Brewster: The Father of New England.
Bradford’s account of the Pilgrims’ escape from England is in
OPP,
pp. 12–15. On the challenges English Separatists experienced in Holland, see Francis Bremer’s
The Puritan Experiment,
pp. 30–32. Jeremy Bangs, who provided me with an illuminating tour of Pilgrim sites at Leiden, describes De Groene Poort in “Pilgrim Homes in Leiden,”
NEHGR
154 (2000), pp. 413–45. Bangs tells of the working life in Leiden in
Pilgrim Life in Leiden,
pp. 22–23, 28, 41. Edmund Morgan in
American Slavery, American Freedom
writes, “[T]here were times when the most industrious farmer could find no good way to keep himself and the men he might employ continuously busy…. John Law, writingin 1705…took it for granted that the persons engaged in agriculture would be idle, for one reason or another, half the time,” p. 64. Francis Dillon in
The Pilgrims: Their Journeys and Their World
provides an insightful analysis of the Pilgrims’ attitude toward the rest of the world: “The Pilgrims were never slow in finding little defects in a man’s character and would pounce very quickly on minor sins, but were continually being foxed by major rogues. Perhaps they suffered from moral myopia caused by staring too hard at the Whore of Babylon,” p. 84.