Mayflower (47 page)

MR
does not mention the direction of the wind during the shallop’s approach to Plymouth, and the description of how the Pilgrims entered the harbor is open to interpretation. Henry Martyn Dexter and Samuel Eliot Morison, for example, have the wind coming from virtually opposite directions in their accounts of the voyage. One can only wish that Sears Nickerson had also chosen to analyze this part of the Pilgrims’ adventures in the New World. Having approached Plymouth Harbor myself in a small boat, I am inclined to agree with Morison’s account of the approach in “Plymouth Colony Beachhead,” p. 1352; see also his note in
OPP,
p. 71. In a note in his
New England Memorial,
Nathaniel Morton claims it was called Clark’s Island “because Mr. Clark, the Master’s mate, first stepped on shore thereon,” p. 34. It is intriguing to speculate that the traditions associated with the first person to step on Clark’s Island, recorded by Morton just forty or so years after the original event, somehow mutated into the more famous traditions concerning who first stepped on Plymouth Rock, originally mentioned by Samuel Davis in “Notes on Plymouth,” MHS Collections, vol. 3, 2nd ser., 1815. According to Davis, “There is a tradition, as to the person who first leaped upon this rock, when the families came on shore, December 11, 1620; it is said to have been a young woman, Mary Chilton,” p. 174. However, descendants of John Alden, including President John Adams, later claimed that Alden had been the first to the Rock. If not for Elder John Faunce’s claim in 1741 that Plymouth Rock was the “place where the forefathers landed,” the Rock might have remained buried within a solid-fill pier to this day. For an exhaustive account of the traditions surrounding the Rock, see John Seelye’s
Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock,
especially p. 384. See also Francis Russell’s “Pilgrims and the Rock,”
American Heritage,
October 1962, pp. 48–55; Robert Arner’s “Plymouth Rock Revisited: The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,”
Journal of America Culture,
Winter 1983, pp. 25–35; and John McPhee’s “Travels of the Rock,”
New Yorker,
February 26, 1990, pp. 108–17. Like the skeletons in the Indian graves in Truro, the Rock has become much more important to subsequent generations than it was to the Pilgrims themselves.

Concerning Dorothy Bradford, Cotton Mather writes in his
Magnalia,
“at their first landing, his dearest consort accidentally falling overboard, was drowned in the harbor,” p. 205. In 1869, in a story entitled “William Bradford’s Love Life” in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
Jane Goodwin Austin claimed that she had seen documents proving that Dorothy had committed suicide on learning of her husband’s love for Alice Southworth, the woman he would eventually marry in 1623. As George Bowman has shown in “Governor William Bradford’s First Wife Dorothy (May) Bradford Did Not Commit Suicide,” in the
Mayflower Descendant,
July 1931, Austin’s article was a fabrication, pp. 97–103. However, just because Austin misrepresented the facts does not eliminate the possibility that Dorothy Bradford killed herself. Samuel Eliot Morison writes that Bradford’s “failure to mention [her death] in the History is consistent with his modest reticence about his own role of leadership in the colony; but it may be that he suspected (as do we) that Dorothy Bradford took her own life, after gazing for six weeks at the barren sand dunes of Cape Cod,”
OPP,
p. xxiv. In “William Bradford’s Wife: A Suicide,” W. Sears Nickerson claims that according to family tradition still current on Cape Cod when he was growing up at the end of the nineteenth century, Dorothy Bradford did, in fact, kill herself. He also points out that “[i]t is a well-known fact among sailors that acute melancholia frequently results from scurvy,” in
Early Encounters: Native Americans and Europeans in New England,
p. 98. Also to be considered is the psychic trauma of the immigration experience. As Leon Grinberg and Rebecca Grinberg demonstrate in
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile,
the stresses associated with the early stages of immigration can have a crippling effect on a person: “[I]n the first stage, the predominant feelings are intense pain for all that one has left behind or lost, fear of the unknown, deep-rooted loneliness, need, and helplessness. Paranoid, disorienting, and depressive anxieties may alternate with one another, leaving the person prone to periods of total disorganization,” p. 97. Bradford tells of the settlers’ fear of being abandoned on the Cape in
OPP,
p. 92. Sears Nickerson suggests in
Land Ho!—
1620 that she may have fallen from the poop deck: “I have often wondered if this was the spot from which Dorothy Bradford dropped overboard to her death in Provincetown Harbor,” p. 21. The four lines of poetry are from a much longer poem Bradford wrote toward the end of his life that appears in Nathaniel Morton’s
New England’s Memorial,
p. 172.

CHAPTER FIVE-
The Heart of Winter

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from
MR,
pp. 38–50, and
OPP,
pp. 77–87. As noted in the previous chapter, 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 timeline, pp. 157–62. Both Champlain and John Smith visited Plymouth Harbor and left descriptions of the area and its people; see introduction to
MR,
pp. xix–xxiii. On the stunning plentitude of fish, lobsters, and clams at this time, see William Cronon’s
Changes in the Land,
pp. 22–23, 30–31. I cite Roger Williams’s account of the Narragansetts’ fleeing disease in
Abram’s Eyes,
p. 50.

My account of the Pilgrims listening to the cries of Indians owes much to Richard Rath’s
How Early America Sounded,
particularly his chapter entitled “The Howling Wilderness,” pp. 145–72. See Keith Thomas’s
Religion and the Decline of Magic
on how the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries increased a sense of “Satan’s immediacy”: “For Englishmen of the Reformation period the Devil was a greater reality than ever…. Influential preachersfilled the ears of their hearers with tales of diabolic intervention in daily life…. Hugh Latimer assured his audience that the Devil and his company of evil spirits were invisible in the air all around them,” p. 561.

On the construction techniques the Pilgrims employed that first winter, I have relied on the James Deetz and Patricia Deetz’s
The Times of Their Lives,
pp. 171–84. My thanks to Pret Woodburn and Rick McKee, interpretive artisans at Plimoth Plantation, for their insights into the construction techniques employed by the Pilgrims. On the configuration of the town, see “The Meersteads and Garden Plots of [Those] Which Came First, Laid Out 1620,” reproduced in Arber’s
The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers,
p. 381. Jeremy Bangs writes of the possible Dutch military influence on the town plan of Plymouth in
Pilgrim Life in Leiden,
p. 36. Robert Wakefield carefully weighs the evidence in determining how the Pilgrims were divided up among the first structures during the first year in “The Seven Houses of Plymouth,”
Mayflower Descendant,
January 1994, pp. 21–23.

On English mastiffs see “The History of the Mastiff” at http://www.mastiff web.com/history.htm. On eastern cougars see http://staffweb.lib.jmu.edu/users/ bolgiace/ECF/abouteasterncougars.htm. William Cronon’s
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
contains excellent chapters about the Indians’ land management; see especially pp. 19–33. On the background of Miles Standish, see Robert Anderson’s
The Pilgrim Migration,
pp. 451–57; Standish refers to getting cheated out of his rightful inheritance in his will. John Lyford refers to Standish as a “silly boy” in a letter referred to by William Bradford in
OPP,
p. 156. Bradford’s remarks concerning John Billington’s “opprobrious speeches” was recorded in Thomas Prince’s
A Chronological History of New England,
vol. 3, p. 38. The ages of those orphaned during the first winter (some of which are estimates) are from PM. Concerning the Pilgrims’ attempts to create the impression that they were stronger than they actually were, Phineas Pratt in “A Declaration” writes, “[T]hey were so distressed with sickness that they, fearing the savages should know it, had set up their sick men with their muskets upon their rests and their backs leaning against trees,” MHS Collections, vol. 4, 4th ser., p. 478. On the demographics of death during the first winter, see John McCullough and Elaine York’s “Relatedness and Mortality Risk during a Crisis Year: Plymouth Colony, 1620–1621” in
Ethology and Sociobiology,
vol. 12, pp. 195–209; their findings indicate that those who were part of a family had a slightly better chance of survival and that children with one or more surviving parents had a much greater chance of survival. John Navin also provides a useful analysis of how the deaths of the first winter impacted the makeup of the colony in
Plymouth Plantation,
pp. 392–418. James Thacher in his appendix to
The History of the Town of Plymouth
tells of how a “freshet” revealed the bones of the Pilgrims during the first winter, p. 327. My thanks to James Baker for bringing this reference to my attention.

For information on the Pilgrims’ “great guns,” see Harold Peterson’s
Arms and Armor of the Pilgrims,
pp. 24–27. Richard Rath in
How Early America Sounded
writes suggestively about the importance the colonists placed on thunder and lightning, pp. 10–42.
MR
describes Samoset as simply saying “Welcome” to the Pilgrims, but Prince, whose chronology was apparently based on Bradford’s original (now lost) notes, has him saying, “Welcome, Englishmen! Welcome, Englishmen!” in
A Chronological History of New England,
vol. 3, p. 33.

CHAPTER SIX-
In a Dark and Dismal Swamp

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from
MR,
pp. 50–59, and
OPP,
pp. 79–87. Although the Pilgrims did not comment on Samoset’s skin color, they later noted that the Indians are “of complexion like our English gypsies,”
MR,
p. 53. John Humins in “Squanto and Massasoit: A Struggle for Power” in
NEQ,
vol. 60, no. 1, speculates that Samoset’s two arrows symbolized war and peace, p. 56. In
Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America,
Karen Ordahl Kupperman states that “the name [Samoset] gave to the Pilgrims was probably ‘Somerset,’ given him by the fishermen,” p. 185.

Bradford tells of the three-day meeting in “a dark and dismal swamp” in
OPP,
p. 84. Quoting from William Wood, William Cronon writes of swamps: “The Indians referred to such lowlands as ‘abodes of owls,’ and used them as hiding places during times of war,” in
Changes in the Land,
p. 28. According to Kathleen Bragdon in
Native People of Southern New England,
Indians “retreated to deep swampy places in times of war, where they were not only harder to find but had stronger links to their other-than-human protectors,” p. 192. On the role of powwows, I have looked to the chapter “Religious Specialists among the Ninnimissinuok” in Bragdon’s
Native People of Southern New England,
pp. 200–216 as well as William Simmons’s “Southern New England Shamanism: An Ethnographic Reconstruction,”
Papers of the Seventh Algonquian Conference,
1975, edited by William Cowan, pp. 217–56. The description of Passaconaway’s ability to “metamorphise himself into a flaming man” and his remarks concerning his inability to injure the English appear in William Simmons’s
Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore,
1620–1984. pp. 61, 63.

Neal Salisbury in “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets” in
Struggle and Survival in Colonial America,
edited by David Sweet and Gary Nash, states that Squanto’s “most potent weapon was the mutual distrust and fear lingering between English and Indians; his most pressing need was for a power base so that he could extricate himself from his position of colonial dependency. Accordingly, he began maneuvering on his own,” p. 241; Salisbury also cites Phineas Pratt’s claim that Squanto assured Massasoit that if he sided with the English, “enemies that were too strong for him would be constrained to bow to him,” p. 238. Bradford in
OPP
speaks of Squanto’s insistence that the Pilgrims possessed the plague, as does Thomas Morton in
New England Canaan:
“And that Salvage [Squanto] the more to increase his [Massasoit’s] fear, told the Sachem that if he should give offense to the English party, they would let out the plague to destroy them all, which kept him in great awe,” p. 104.

In
GNNE,
Edward Winslow writes of the “wicked practice of this Tisquantum [i.e., Squanto]; who, to the end he might possess his countrymen with the greater fear of us, and so consequently of himself, told them we had the plague buried in our store-house; which, at our pleasure, we could send forth to what place or people we would, and destroy them therewith, though we stirred not from home,” p. 16. Neal Salisbury in
Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England,
1500–1643 comments on Quadequina’s insistence that the Pilgrims put away their guns, p. 120.

On the
Mayflower
’s return to England and her eventual fate, see Sears Nickerson’s
Land Ho!—
1620. pp. 34–35. I’ve also relied on the information compiled by Carolyn Freeman Travers in 1997 and posted on the Plimoth Plantation Web site at http://www.plimoth.org/Library/mayflcre.htm. Although some have argued that Squanto learned to use fish as a fertilizer from English farmers in Newfoundland, this claim has been authoritatively refuted, at least to my mind, by the late Nanepashemet in “It Smells Fishy to Me: An Argument Supporting the Use of Fish Fertilizer by the Native People of Southern New England,”
Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings,
1991, pp. 42–50. On Native agriculture, see Kathleen Bragdon’s
Native People of Southern New England,
pp. 107–10. The duel between Edward Doty and Edward Leister is mentioned in Thomas Prince’s
Chronological History of New England,
vol. 3, p. 40.