Mayflower (45 page)

Bradford provides a moving, heartfelt sketch of Brewster in
OPP,
pp. 325–28. For a documentary history of King James’s pursuit of William Brewster, see Edward Arber’s
The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers,
pp. 197–228. John Navin in
Plymouth Plantation
argues that had Brewster been allowed to carry forward the negotiations, “the separatist vanguard might not have lost a major portion of its members,” p. 201. For information on the Virginia Company and the British colonization of America, I have looked to Viola Barnes’s
The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy,
pp. 1–9, and Bernard Bailyn’s
The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century,
pp. 2–5. Samuel Eliot Morison in “The Plymouth Colony and Virginia” in the
Virginia Magazine,
vol. 62, 1954, provides an excellent account of the procedure by which a patent was procured from the Virginia Company, pp. 149–50. See also Peggy Baker’s “The Plymouth Colony Patent” in
Pilgrim Society News,
fall 2005, pp. 7–8. In
England and the Discovery of America,
1481–1620. David Beers Quinn writes of the Blackwell voyage in the context of the English Separatist scene in Holland, pp. 362–63. Bradford’s account of their troubled preparations to leave for America, which include letters from Robert Cushman and others, are in
OPP,
pp. 356–67. The passage about how Bradford interpreted his financial setbacks in spiritual terms is from Mather’s
Magnalia,
p. 204. For an account of the Merchant Adventurers and how the deal with the Pilgrims was organized, see Ruth McIntyre’s
Debts Hopeful and Desperate,
pp. 17–20. Bradford writes of their moving farewell at Delfshaven in
OPP,
pp. 47–48. In
Hypocrisie Unmasked,
written in 1646, Edward Winslow looks back to that same scene, pp. 88–91; he also mentions the “large offers” of the Dutch concerning a possible settlement in America.

For information about the
Mayflower,
I’ve relied on Nickerson’s
Land Ho!—
1620. pp. 14–37, and William Baker’s
The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels,
pp. 1–64. Much of the original historical sleuthing regarding the
Mayflower
and her master and crew is to be found in the following articles: R. G. Marsden’s “The
Mayflower
” in
English Historical Review,
October 1904; J. W. Horrocks’s “The
Mayflower
” in several volumes of the
Mariner’s Mirror,
1922; and R. C. Anderson’s “A
Mayflower
Model,” in the 1926
Mariner’s Mirror.
Mary Boast’s
The
Mayflower
and the Pilgrim Story: Chapters from Rotherhithe and Southwark
provides a good overview of the maritime scene from which the ship and her master came. Charles Banks’s “The Officers and Crew of the
Mayflower,
1620–21,” MHS
Proceedings,
vol. 60, pp. 210–21, is a useful summary. Concerning Master Christopher Jones and his officers, I’ve also relied on the information compiled by Carolyn Freeman Travers in 1997 in “The
Mayflower
’s Crew,” an unpublished research manuscript at Plimoth Plantation. Important information regarding one of the ship’s pilots is contained in Irene Wright’s “John Clark of the
Mayflower
” in MHS
Proceedings,
vol. 54, November 1920. For a more general discussion of the maritime culture of the seventeenth century, see David Beers Quinn’s
England and the Discovery of America,
1481–1620. pp. 197–226.

When it comes to the origins of the
Mayflower
’s passengers, there is an incredible wealth of genealogical research on which to draw. Upon its publication in 1986, Eugene Stratton’s
Plymouth Colony: Its History and People,
1620–1691. with biographical sketches written with the research help of Robert Wakefield, became
the
single source for information about the Pilgrims. Since then, the publication of Robert Anderson’s
The Great Migration Begins,
1620–1633 has set a new standard—recently surpassed by the updated biographies contained in Anderson’s
The Pilgrim Migration,
which incorporates important new research, such as Caleb Johnson’s “The True History of Stephen Hopkins of the
Mayflower
” in the
American Genealogist,
which established, almost for a certainty, that Hopkins was the same Stephen Hopkins who had previously been shipwrecked on Bermuda during a passage to Virginia in 1609. Working in the archives in Leiden, Holland, Jeremy Bangs has done much to broaden our understanding of the Dutch origins of the Pilgrims in articles such as “
Mayflower
Passengers Documented in Leiden: A List” in the
Mayflower Quarterly,
May 1985, pp. 57–60, and “The Pilgrims and Other English in Leiden Records: Some New Pilgrim Documents” in the
NEHGR,
July 1989, plus a series of articles in
New England Ancestors,
a publication of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, from 2000 to 2005. See also B. N. Leverland’s “Geographic Origins of the Pilgrims” in
The Pilgrims in Netherlands—Recent Research,
edited by Jeremy Bangs, pp. 9–17. Bradford describes the Billingtons as “one of the profanest families amongst them” in
OPP,
p. 234. For an intriguing account of the three More children aboard the
Mayflower,
see David Lindsay’s
Mayflower Bastard,
which draws largely on Donald Harris’s “The More Children of the
Mayflower:
Their Shropshire Origins and the Reasons Why They Were Sent Away,”
Mayflower Descendant,
vols. 43 and 44.

In
Saints and Strangers,
published in 1945, George Willison set forth a new interpretation of the Pilgrim experience based on the claim that more than half the passengers on the
Mayflower
were not part of the original congregation from Leiden. In Willison’s view, the Mayflower Compact was an instrument of repression by which the Separatists from Holland were able to assert control over the non-Separatist majority. In the decades since, research by Jeremy Bangs and others has revealed that there were more Leideners aboard the
Mayflower
than was originally thought and that many of those from London and other parts of England had close connections with the congregation. Although the precise number of Saints aboard the
Mayflower
is impossible to determine, Bangs has established that there were at least fifty-two (personal communication), putting the Leideners in the majority. The fact remains, however, that a significant number of the passengers aboard the
Mayflower
were not aligned with the Separatists and that, as Bradford so graphically illustrates, internal conflicts were a problem before, during, and after the voyage to America. As John Navin has shown, the nightmarish preparations for the voyage caused many Leideners to elect to stay in Holland; as a result, “[o]nly a fraction of Robinson’s followers remained in the vanguard headed for New England, perhaps less than one-sixth of the whole,”
Plymouth Plantation,
p. 264.

Cushman’s colorful letter concerning the tyrannical Christopher Martin and the leaking
Speedwell
was written to Cushman’s good friend Edward Southworth in London on August 17, 1620; after her husband’s death, Southworth’s wife, Alice, would marry William Bradford in 1623, and it is presumably through Alice that the Cushman letter came into Bradford’s possession. Bradford writes of Reynolds’s duplicity in
OPP,
p. 54. Concerning the
Speedwell,
Edward Arber writes in
The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers,
“Imagine for a moment, what might have occurred had not the trim of the
Speedwell
been so unfortunately altered…. Most certainly the overmasting of the
Speedwell
…is one of the Turning Points of modern history,” p. 346. Nathaniel Morton’s claims concerning Christopher Jones’s complicity in the subterfuge of the Dutch are in his
New England Memorial:
“For [the Pilgrims’] intention…was to Hudson’s river: but some of the Dutch, having notice of their intentions; and having thoughts, about the same time of erecting a Plantation there likewise, they fraudulently hired the said Jones (by delays while they were in England; and now under the pretence of danger of the shoals, &c.) to disappoint them in their going thither,” p. 22. As commentators from Edward Arber to Sears Nickerson have argued, all the evidence points to Jones being a friend to the Pilgrims; it was Reynolds, not Jones, who worked secretly against them. John Robinson’s letter to the Pilgrims is in
OPP,
pp. 368–71. Edward Winslow speaks of Robinson’s moderating Separatism in
Hypocrisie Umasked,
pp. 92–93. Jeremy Bangs discusses Edward Winslow’s account of Robinson’s beliefs in
Pilgrim Edward Winslow,
pp. 414–18. Bradford’s account of the
Mayflower
’s voyage is in
OPP,
pp. 58–60. David Cressy in
Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century
makes an excellent case for a kind of “bonding” between passengers during a typical transatlantic voyage. Given the discord that erupted between the Leideners and Strangers when the
Mayflower
reached Cape Cod, it’s doubtful whether much positive interaction occurred between the two groups during the two-month-long voyage. Both Cressy and I use the phrase “in the same boat,” p. 151. Alan Villiers’s description of the
Mayflower II
lying ahull is in his “How We Sailed the New
Mayflower
to America” in
National Geographic Magazine,
November 1957, p. 667. Sears Nickerson speaks of the effects of the Gulf Stream on the
Mayflower,
as well as her average speed during the voyage and Jones’s use of a cross-staff in
Land Ho!—
1620. pp. 28–33.

CHAPTER TWO-
Dangerous Shoals and Roaring Breakers

Anyone writing about the
Mayflower
’s first few days on the American coast is indebted to Sears Nickerson’s
Land-Ho!—
1620. first published in 1931 and recently reissued by the Michigan State University Press and edited by Delores Bird Carpenter. Nickerson brought a lifetime of sailing the waters of Cape Cod to his analysis of the existing evidence. By determining the phases of the moon and tides on November 9–11, 1620, he was able to reconstruct, as only a veteran sailor could, the conditions experienced by Master Jones and the rest of his crew. Even Samuel Eliot Morison in his own extremely useful “Plymouth Colony Beachhead,”
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings,
December 1954, deferred to Nickerson, calling him the “ancient mariner of the Cape who has full knowledge of the winds and currents of those waters,” p. 1348. I have relied on Nickerson throughout this chapter.

Bradford describes them as “not a little joyful” to see land in
OPP,
p. 59–60; the description of the land being “wooded to the brink of the sea” is in
MR,
p. 15. John Smith’s map of New England appears in volume 1 of
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith,
edited by Philip Barbour, pp. 320–21. My description of how Jones conned the
Mayflower
along the back side of the cape is based on Nickerson, pp. 32–33, 79, as well as Alan Villiers’s account of sailing the replica
Mayflower II
across the Atlantic in 1957 in “How We Sailed
Mayflower II
to America,” in the
National Geographic,
November 1957, pp. 627–72. Nickerson refers to Pollack Rip as “one of the meanest stretches of shoal water” in
Land Ho!,
p. 66. Barbara Chamberlain speaks of the dangers of the back side of the cape in
These Fragile Outposts:
“The timbers of more than 3000 vessels lie buried in the offshore sands on the Cape…. The shores of Chatham alone—afew miles of sandy beach—are said to have received half the wrecks of the whole Atlantic and Gulf coastline of the United States,” p. 249. See also John Stilgoe’s “A New England Coastal Wilderness,” in which he cites John Smith’s famous dismissal of the accuracy of existing charts as “so much waste paper, though they cost me more,” p. 90. Nickerson describes Champlain’s 1606 attempt to penetrate the rip, pp. 43–44. Bradford speaks of the “roaring breakers” in
OPP,
p. 60, in which he also tells of the “discontented and mutinous speeches,” p. 75. William Strachey writes of the “outcries and miseries” of the passengers aboard the
Sea Venture
in
A Voyage to Virginia
in 1609, edited by Louis Wright, p. 6. John Navin in
Plymouth Plantation
writes of the non-Separatists’ lack of cohesiveness and the likelihood that Christopher Martin played a role in standing against the threatened rebellion, pp. 287, 292, as well as the Separatists’ dependence on Robinson’s leadership while in Leiden, where the congregation had “customarily deferred to the authority of their pastor and church elders in virtually all matters of discipline and controversy, both inside and outside the church,” p. 289. For a discussion of how the
Mayflower
was rigged, see William Baker’s
The Mayflower,
pp. 44–54.

Edmund Morgan discusses the various views of the relations between church and state that were possible within the Puritan tradition in
Roger Williams: The Church and State,
pp. 28–85. The Pilgrims stood somewhere between the extremes of the theocracy that came to be established in Massachusetts and the total repudiation of this by Roger Williams. Jeremy Bangs makes a strong case for the importance of Dutch influences on the crafting of the Mayflower Compact in “Strangers on the
Mayflower
—Part 1” in
New England Ancestors,
vol. 1, 2000, no. 1, pp. 60–63, and in Part 2,
New England Ancestors,
vol. 1, 2000, no. 2, pp. 25–27. John Robinson insists on the need for the Pilgrims to become “a body politic” in his farewell letter in
OPP,
p. 369. In
Hidden History,
Daniel Boorstin calls the Mayflower Compact “the primeval document of American self-government” and adds, “The transatlantic distance had given to these transplanted Englishmen their opportunity and their need to govern themselves. The tradition of self-government, which had been established in England by the weight of hundreds of years, was being established in America by the force of hundreds of miles.” Boorstin also cites John Quincy Adams’s famous claim that the compact was “perhaps the only instance, in human history, of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government,” pp. 68–69. Robinson’s advice about choosing a leader appears in his farewell letter in
OPP,
p. 370. The description of John Carver as “a gentleman of singular piety” is in Hubbard’s
History,
cited in Stratton’s
Plymouth Colony,
p. 259. The Mayflower Compact appears in
OPP,
p. 75–77, and
MR,
pp. 17–18; Nathaniel Morton was the only one to list the names recorded on the original document, which has not survived, in his
New England’s Memorial,
published in 1669. For a discussion of who signed the compact, see Henry Martyn Dexter’s edition of
MR,
p. 9, n. 27.