Mayflower (46 page)

The estimate concerning the number of ships that could be contained within Provincetown Harbor is in
MR,
p.16. Bradford speaks of their voyage “over the vast and furious ocean” and the “hideous and desolate wilderness” in
OPP,
pp. 61–63. The description of the Pilgrims’ first wood-cutting expedition to Cape Cod is in
MR,
pp. 18–19. The Pilgrims described the wood they cut as juniper, which was, as Dexter points out (
MR,
p. 11, n. 32), undoubtedly eastern red cedar, the tallest of the junipers.

CHAPTER THREE-
Into the Void

As Thomas Bicknell points out in
Sowams,
Nathaniel Morton describes the location of Sowams, home of the Pokanokets, as “at the confluence of two rivers in Rehoboth, or Swansea, though occasionally at Mont Haup or Mount Hope, the principal residence of his son, Philip,” p. 157. Although Bicknell argues that Sowams is in Barrington, others have maintained that it is in Warren—both in modern Rhode Island. As Ella Sekatau points out in a personal communication, the word Massasoit is a title, not a name. To avoid confusion, I have used it as the Pilgrims used it, as a name. The exact nature of the plague has been the subject of intense speculation and debate. See Dean Snow and Kim Lanphear, “European Contact and Indian Depopulations in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics,”
Ethnohistory,
Winter 1988, pp. 15–33; Alfred Crosby’s “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,”
WMQ,
vol. 23, 1976, pp. 289–99, and his “‘God…Would Destroy Them, and Give Their Country to Another People,’”
American Heritage,
vol. 6, 1978, pp. 39–42; Arthur Spiess and Bruce Spiess’s “New England Pandemic of 1616–1622: Cause and Archaeological Implication,”
Man in the Northeast,
Fall 1987, pp. 71–83; and David Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,”
WMQ
(Oct. 2003), pp. 703–42. On the effects of the disease on population levels, see S. F. Cook’s
The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century,
pp. 35–36. Cook writes about “chronic war” further diminishing the Native population in “Interracial Warfare and Population Decline among the New England Indians,”
Ethnohistory,
Winter 1973, pp. 2–3. All evidence points to Pokanoket, not Wampanoag, being the name that Massasoit’s people called themselves. According to Kathleen Bragdon in
Native People of Southern New England,
1500–1650. “
Wampanoag,
as an ethnonym, now used to designate the modern descendants of the Pokanokets, was probably derived from the name
Wapanoos,
first applied by Dutch explorers and map-makers to those Natives near Narragansett Bay…. The term means ‘easterner’ in Delaware, and was probably not an original self-designation,” p. 21. Bragdon cites Daniel Gookin’s estimates of the preplague populations of the Pokanokets and Narragansetts, p. 25. In 1661, Roger Williams recorded that before founding the settlement that would become known as Providence, Rhode Island, he contacted the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi, who said that Massasoit “was their subject, and had solemnly himself, in person, with ten men, subjected himself and his lands unto them at the Narragansett.” Williams then went to Massasoit, who admitted that the Narragansetts were correct but “that he was not subdued by war, which himself and his father had maintained against the Narragansetts, but God, he said, subdued me by a plague, which swept away my people, and forced me to yield.” The Narragansetts complained that Massasoit now “seemed to revolt from his loyalties under the shelter of the English at Plymouth,”
The Complete Writings of Roger Williams,
vol. 6, pp. 316, 317. Eric Johnson cites Roger Williams’s statement that “[a] small bird is called Sachem” in his Ph.D. dissertation, “‘Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings’: Political Strategies among Native Americans of Seventeenth-Century Southern New England, ” p. 69.

William Wood’s account of the Indians’ first sighting of a European ship is included with several other first-contact accounts in William Simmons’s
Spirit of the New England Tribes,
p. 66. I have written about the voyages of Verrazano, Gosnold, Champlain, and Harlow to New England in
Abram’s Eyes,
pp. 35–51. For an account of Martin Pring’s visit to the Cape in 1603 and a convincing argument that he built his fort in Truro rather than, as is often claimed, Plymouth, see David Beers Quinn’s
England and the Discovery of America,
1481–1620. pp. 425–27. On Epenow’s experiences in England and his return to Martha’s Vineyard, see John Smith’s
The General History
in
The Complete Works,
vol. 3, in which Smith states: “[B]eing a man of so great a stature, he was showed up and down London for money as a wonder,” p. 403. Also see Carolyn Foreman’s
Indians Abroad,
1493–1938 for a more general discussion of Indian abductions. Phineas Pratt provides an account of the survivors of the 1615 French shipwreck in “A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People That First Inhabited New England” in MHS Collections, vol. 4, 4th ser., pp. 479–80. Thomas Dermer tells of rescuing the French sailors from captivity in a December 27, 1619, letter in
Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Maine,
edited by James Phinney Baxter, pp. 219–22, n. 276. Bradford also speaks of the French shipwreck and the Indians’ belief that the
Mayflower
had been sent to revenge the abduction and killing of the sailors in
OPP,
pp. 83–84.

For an account of Squanto’s life prior to his meeting the Pilgrims, see Jerome Dunn’s “Squanto before He Met the Pilgrims” in
Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society,
Spring 1993, pp. 38–42. Thomas Dermer speaks of the Pokanokets’ “inveterate malice to the English” in a December 27, 1619, letter in
Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Maine,
edited by James Phinney Baxter, pp. 219–22, n. 276; this letter describes the explorer’s visit, with Squanto as his guide, to Pokanoket. On Squanto, I am indebted to Neal Salisbury’s “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets” in
Struggle and Survival in Colonial America,
edited by David Sweet and Gary Nash, pp. 228–46. In his December 27, 1619, letter, Thomas Dermer states that he left Squanto with friends in Sawahquatooke, just to the north of Nemasket on the Titicut, now Taunton, River; see the map in
OPP,
p. 306. Concerning Squanto’s motivations, Salisbury writes, “[H]e sought…a reconstituted Patuxet band under his own leadership, located near its traditional home,” p. 243. On Hobbamock/Cheepi/Squanto, I have relied on Kathleen Bragdon’s chapter “Cosmology,” pp. 184–99, in
Native People of Southern New England,
especially pp. 189–90.

CHAPTER FOUR-
Beaten with Their Own Rod

It has generally been assumed that the authorship of
MR
was divided between Bradford and Edward Winslow, who clearly wrote some of the later chapters—for example, the description of his journey, along with Stephen Hopkins, to Pokanoket—and whose initials are on the final letter describing the First Thanksgiving. However, the point of view and phrasing of the earlier portions of
MR
seem to point to Bradford being the author. The descriptions of Bradford getting his foot caught in a deer trap, of the First Encounter, and of their desperate boat journey into Plymouth Harbor exemplify the self-deprecating and yet always lively voice of the author of
OPP.
As a result, I have taken the liberty of attributing several of the passages of
MR
to Bradford.

For an account of a typical Puritan Sunday, see Horton Davies’s
The Worship of the American Puritans,
pp. 51–59. Henry Martyn Dexter speculates on the location of where the Pilgrim women washed in his edition of
MR,
p. 12, n. 35. For information on blue mussels and shellfish poisoning, I consulted http://www.ocean.udel.edu/mas/seafood/bluemussel.html and http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/ ~mow/chap37.html. The Pilgrims speak of the whales they saw in Provincetown Harbor in
MR,
pp. 16, 30; unless otherwise noted, all of the quoted passages in this chapter are from
MR.
Thomas Morton refers to Miles Standish as “Captain Shrimp” in his
New English Canaan,
p. 143. John Smith refers to Massachusetts as “the paradise of those parts” in
A Description of New England
in
Complete Writings,
vol. 1, p. 340. He tells of his frustrations with the Pilgrims in
The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith
and
Advertisements: or, The Path-way to Experience to Erect a Plantation;
in addition to complaining about how they insisted that “because they could not be equals, they would have no superiors,” he writes of the way in which their “humorous ignorances, caused them for more than a year, to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with infinite patience; saying my books and maps were much better cheap to teach them, than myself” ; he also writes, “such humorists will never believe well, till they be beaten with their own rod,”
Complete Writings,
vol. 3, pp. 221, 282, 286. Smith attributed much of the Pilgrims’ foolhardy arrogance to their Separatist religious beliefs and the “pride, and singularity, and contempt of authority” that went with that radicalism. John Canup in
Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England
writes insightfully about Smith’s opinion of the Pilgrims and their wanderings about Cape Cod, pp. 92–96. I have also benefited greatly from John Seelye’s probing interpretation of the Pilgrims’ adventures on the Cape in
Prophetic Waters,
pp. 110–15. Seelye insists that the Pilgrims did not use John Smith’s map and book about
New England;
if they had, he argues, “it seems doubtful they would have spent so much time looking for a river on the Cape—where none appears—and would instead have headed toward the short but broad waterway which Smith shows opening into the mainland somewhat to the north,” p. 119. But as James Baker points out in a personal communication, Smith’s map and book were part of William Brewster’s library.

Henry Martyn Dexter judges the Pilgrims’ first day of marching to be closer to seven miles rather than the ten they thought it to be in
MR,
p. 16, n. 48. Even though there is a possibility that at least some of the Pilgrims had seen either references to Indian corn or the actual plant at the University of Leiden’s botanical garden (see Jeremy Bangs’s “The Pilgrims’ Earball,” forthcoming in
New England Ancestors
), Bradford explicitly states that they had “never seen any such before,”
OPP,
p. 65. On the strangeness of corn to Europeans, see Darrett Rutman’s
Husbandmen of Plymouth:
“Corn was new and strange, alien and, therefore, to the English mind, inferior to the more traditional grains,” p. 10. See also Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s
America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking,
which discusses the discovery of a thousand-yearold cache of maize, p. 8. On the Pilgrims’ shallop, see William Baker’s
The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels,
pp. 65–74. On the weather conditions of seventeenth-century New England relative to Europe, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period” in
American Historical Review,
vol. 87, 1982, pp. 1262–89. On the seasonal settlement patterns of Native New Englanders, see Kathleen Bragdon’s
Native People of Southern New England,
pp. 55–63. As John Canup comments in
Out of the Wilderness,
it is weirdly ironic that the Pilgrims named the place where they stole the Native seed Corn Hill, then met, only a few months later, Squanto, who had formerly lived in the Corn Hill section of London. Canup, following the lead of John Seelye in
Prophetic Waters,
speaks of the “prophetic meaning” of the Pilgrims’ experience on the Cape, p. 95. Seelye refers to the two skeletons unearthed by the Pilgrims as “a male Madonna with child” and sees them as prefiguring what Canup calls “a process of acculturation or intermingling between the Old World and the New,” p. 92. In the notes to his edition of
MR,
Henry Martyn Dexter speculates that the elaborately carved board found by the Pilgrims in the Indian grave depicted a trident, “connecting nautical associations with the grave,” p. 33.

When it comes to re-creating the sequence of deaths during that first winter, there are several sources: Bradford’s “Passengers in the Mayflower” in
OPP,
pp. 441–48, and information taken from Bradford’s papers (many of which have since been lost) by Thomas Prince and published in his
Chronological History of New England
in 1736. In his edition of
MR,
Henry Martyn Dexter provides a useful time line, pp. 157–62. Samuel Eliot Morison speculates that the pilot Robert Coppin’s Thievish Harbor was really Gloucester Harbor in “Plymouth Colony Beachhead,” p. 1352. I am more inclined to agree with John Seelye’s assertion in
Prophetic Waters
that it was Boston Harbor instead, especially given Coppin’s memory of “a great navigable river,” p. 119. On the technology of firearms in the seventeenth century, see Harold Peterson’s
Arms and Armor of the Pilgrims,
pp. 13–21. On the technology of the Indians’ bows and arrows, see Patrick Malone’s
The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians,
pp.15–17, and Howard Russell’s
Indian New England before the
Mayflower, p. 191. My thanks to Dr. Timothy Lepore, who shared with me his personal experience building and using a replica of the famed “Sudbury bow” at Harvard University. On the psychological effect of Indian war cries on the English, see the section “Native American Vocable Sounds” in Richard Rath’s
How Early America Sounded,
pp. 150–59. In “The First Encounter” in
Early Encounters: Native Americans and Europeans in New England,
W. Sears Nickerson claims that the site of the First Encounter was at Boat Meadow Creek, about a mile and a half from the historic marker at First Encounter Beach and about eight-tenths of a mile from the Herring River, which Samuel Eliot Morison believed to be the site of the encounter,
OPP,
p. 100–101.