The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* Read online

  The Mayflower sailed south past the future locations of Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, and Chatham. Throughout the morning, the tide was in their favor, but around 1 P.M., it began to flow against them. Then the water dropped alarmingly, as did the wind. suddenly, the Mayflower was in the midst of what has been called “one of the meanest stretches of shoal [shallow] water on the American coast”—Pollack Rip.

  Pollack Rip is part of a complex and ever-changing maze of sandbars stretching between the elbow of Cape Cod and the tip of Nantucket Island, fifteen or so miles to the south. The huge volume of water that moves back and forth between the ocean to the east and Nantucket sound to the west rushes and swirls amid these shoals with a ferocity that is still, almost four hundred years later, terrifying to behold. It’s been claimed that half the wrecks along the entire Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United states have occurred in this area.

  The calm waters had suddenly been transformed into a churning sea. And with the wind dying to almost nothing, Jones had no way to get his ship away from the danger, especially since what breeze remained was from the north, pinning the Mayflower against the breakers. It was approaching 3 P.M., with only another hour and a half of daylight left.

  Just when it seemed that all had been lost, the wind began to change, gradually shifting in a clockwise direction to the south. This, combined with a fair tide, was all Master Jones needed. By sunset at 4:35 P.M., the Mayflower had turned around and was well to the northwest of Pollack Rip.

  With the wind building from the south, Jones made a historic decision. They weren’t going to the Hudson River. They would keep going north, back around Cape Cod to New England.

  ◆◆◆ By 5 P.M., it was almost completely dark. Not wanting to run into any more shoals, Jones decided to “heave to,” adjusting the sails so that the ship was barely moving—standard procedure on an unknown coast at night. Four or five miles off present-day Chatham, the Mayflower drifted with the tide, waiting for dawn.

  In the meantime, the news that they were headed to New England instead of the Hudson River put the passengers in an uproar. As they all knew, their patent did not technically apply to a settlement north of the Hudson. some of the strangers made “discontented and mutinous speeches,” insisting that “when they came ashore they would use their own liberty, for none had power to command them.”

  It was now clear that the future of the settlement was, once again, in serious danger. The strangers were about half the passengers, and unlike the Leideners, they had little holding them together except, in some cases, a growing reluctance to live in a community dominated by religious fanatics. On the other hand, some of the strangers, including the Mayflower’s governor, Christopher Martin, had strong ties to the Adventurers in London; in fact, passenger William Mullins was an Adventurer himself. These strangers recognized that the only way for the settlement to succeed financially was if everyone worked together. Before they landed, it was essential that they all sign a formal and binding agreement of some sort. Over the course of the next day, they hammered out what has come to be known as the Mayflower Compact.

  As had been true for more than a decade, it was Pastor John Robinson who pointed them in the direction they ultimately followed. In his farewell letter, Robinson had seen the need to create a government not based on religion. With so many strangers in their midst, there was no other way. They must “become a body politic, using amongst yourselves civil government,” i.e., they must all agree to submit to the laws drawn up by elected officials. Just as a spiritual covenant had marked the beginning of their congregation in Leiden, a civil covenant would provide the basis for government in America.

  Written clearly and briefly, the Mayflower Compact bears the unmistakable signs of Robinson’s influence, and it is worth quoting in full:Having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do these present solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

  ◆ A seventeenth-century engraving of the Pilgrims signing the Mayflower Compact on board the Mayflower.

  ◆ A writing cabinet said to have been brought on the Mayflower by the White family in 1620.

  They were nearing the end of a long and frightening voyage. They were bound for a place about which they knew nothing. It was almost winter. They didn’t have enough food. some of them were sick, and two had already died. still others were threatening to leave, which would have probably meant the end of the settlement and, most likely, their deaths. The Leideners might have looked to their military officer, Miles standish, and ordered him to subdue the rebels. Instead, they put pen to paper and created a document that ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the United states Constitution as an essential American text.

  But there was one more critical decision to make. They must choose a leader. The Leideners were barely a majority, but they could be counted on to vote together, guaranteeing that their leader would not be the Mayflower’s governor, Christopher Martin. The only other person aboard the Mayflower who had played a central role in organizing the voyage was deacon John Carver. Carver was, according to one account, “a gentleman of singular piety, rare humility, and great condescendency.” He was also wealthy and had contributed much of his personal fortune to the congregation in Leiden and to this voyage. He and his wife, Katherine, who had buried two children in Leiden, had brought five servants on the Mayflower, one of whom was John Howland, who had almost died when he fell overboard. John Carver, it was decided, would be their governor.

  As the Pilgrims created their compact, Master Jones pointed the Mayflower north. By nightfall, the ship was nearing the northern tip of Cape Cod. Jones wanted to enter Provincetown Harbor, known to them as Cape Cod Harbor, as close as possible to sunrise so that they’d have most of the day for exploring the surrounding countryside. But before they could set foot on land, every man who was healthy enough to write his name or, if he couldn’t write, scratch out an X, had to sign the compact.

  They awakened very early on the morning of November 11, 1620. sunrise was at 6:55 A.M., and the passengers probably met in the Mayflower’s great cabin—approximately thirteen by seventeen feet, with two windows in the stern and one on either side. Beginning with John Carver and ending with the servant Edward Leister, a total of forty-one men signed the compact. Only nine adult males did not sign—some had been hired as seamen for only a year, while others were probably too sick to put pen to paper. The ceremony ended with the official selection of a leader. Bradford informs us that “they chose or rather confirmed, Mr. John Carver (a man godly and well approved amongst them) their Governor for that year.”

  In the meantime, Master Jones guided the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor, one of the largest and safest natural harbors in New England. Tucked within the curled wrist of Cape Cod, the harbor is so large that Jones estimated that it could accommodate at least a thousand ships.

  But on the morning of November 11, they were the only vessel in the harbor. Jones found a deep spot with good holding ground for the anchor to grip. No matter from what direction the wind blew, the Mayflower was now safely at rest beside what is known today as Long Point.

  Many of the passengers knew that Master Jones was already impatient to get them off his ship and head the Mayflower back for home. But the land that surrounded them was low and sandy—a most unpromising place for a plantation. Bradford called it “a hideous and desolate wilderness.” And then there were the native people of this place, who they feared were “readier to fill their sides full of arrows t
han otherwise.”

  Years later, Bradford looked back to that first morning in America with wonder. “But here I cannot stay and make a pause,” he wrote, “and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition.... [T]hey had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.” And in the next four months, half of them would be dead.

  ◆ Nineteenth-century illustration of the Pilgrims landing in the New World.

  But what truly astonished Bradford was that half of them would somehow survive. “What could now sustain them,” Bradford wrote, “but the spirit of God and His Grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.’”

  It was time to go ashore. They had brought with them an open boat that could be both rowed and sailed, known as a shallop. About thirty-five feet long, it had been cut up into four pieces and stored below—where it had been “much bruised and shattered” over the course of the voyage. It would take many days for the carpenter to assemble and rebuild it. For the time being, they used the smaller ship’s boat. Loaded with sixteen well-armed men, the boat made its way to shore.

  It was only a narrow neck of land, but for these sea-weary men, it was enough. “[T]hey fell upon their knees,” Bradford wrote, “and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.”

  They wandered over hills of sand and found birch, holly, ash, and walnut trees. With darkness coming, they loaded their boat with red cedar. The freshly sawed wood “smelled very sweet and strong,” and that night aboard the Mayflower, for the first time in perhaps weeks, they enjoyed a warm fire.

  It had been, for the most part, a reassuring introduction to the New World. Despite the barren landscape, they had found more trees than they would have come across back in Holland and even coastal England. But there had been something missing: Nowhere had they found any people.

  THREE

  The Plague

  ABOUT SIXTY MILES southwest of Provincetown Harbor, at a place called Pokanoket at the head of Narragansett Bay in modern Rhode Island, lived Massasoit, the most powerful Native leader, or sachem, in the region. He was in the prime of his life—about thirty-five, strong and imposing, with the quiet dignity that was expected of a sachem.

  During the three years that the Pilgrims had been organizing their voyage to America, Massasoit’s people, the Pokanokets, had been devastated by disease. It may have been the bubonic plague, introduced by European fishermen in modern Maine. Whatever the disease was, it quickly spread south along the Atlantic seaboard to the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, killing in some cases as many as 90 percent of the region’s inhabitants. so many died so quickly that there was no one left to bury the dead. Portions of coastal New England that had once been as densely populated as western Europe were suddenly empty of people, with only the whitened bones of the dead to indicate that a community had once existed along these shores.

  The Pokanokets had been particularly hard hit. Before the plague, they had numbered about twelve thousand, from which Massasoit could gather three thousand fighting men. After three years of disease, his force had been reduced to a few hundred warriors. Making it even worse was that the plague had not affected the Pokanokets’ neighboring enemies, the Narragansetts. Their homeland was on the western portion of the bay, and they numbered about twenty thousand, with five thousand fighting men. Just recently, Massasoit and ten of his warriors had suffered the humiliation of being forced to pay homage to the Narragansetts, whose sachem, Canonicus, now considered the Pokanokets his subjects.

  Wasted by disease and now under the thumb of a powerful and proud enemy, the Pokanokets were in a desperate struggle to maintain their existence as a people. But Massasoit had his allies. The Massachusetts to the north and the Nausets on Cape Cod shared the Pokanokets’ dislike for the Narragansetts. Numerically, the Pokanokets were at a disadvantage, but this did not prevent Massasoit from attempting to use his alliances with other tribes to protect his people from the threat to the west.

  ◆◆◆ No one was sure how long ago it had occurred, but some of the Indians’ oldest people told of what it had been like to see a European sailing vessel for the first time. “They took the first ship they saw for a walking island,” the English settler William Wood wrote, “the mast to be a tree, the sail white clouds, and the discharging of guns for lightning and thunder, which did much trouble them, but this thunder being over and this moving-island steadied with an anchor, they manned out their canoes to go and pick strawberries there. But being saluted by the way with a [cannon’s] broadside ..., [they turned] back, not daring to approach till they were sent for.”

  As early as 1524, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano had stopped at Narragansett Bay in the vicinity of modern Newport. There he encountered “two kings more beautiful in form and stature than can possibly be described.... The oldest had a deer’s skin around his body, artificially wrought in damask figures, his head was without covering, his hair was tied back in various knots; around his neck he wore a large chain ornamented with many stones of different colors. The young man was similar in his general appearance. This is the finest looking tribe, the handsomest in their costumes, that we have found in our voyage.” Almost a century before the arrival of the Mayflower, Verrazano may have met Massasoit’s great-grandfather.

  By 1602, when the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold visited the region, European codfishing vessels had become an increasingly familiar sight along the New England coast. After giving Cape Cod its name, Gosnold ventured to the Elizabeth Islands at the southwestern corner of the Cape, where he built a small fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. A few days after his arrival, fifty Indians in nine canoes arrived from the main-land for the purposes of trade. It was apparent to Gosnold that one of the Indians was looked to with great respect. This may have been Massasoit’s father. It is possible that Massasoit himself, who would have been in his early teens, was also present.

  Gosnold presented the sachem with a pair of knives and a straw hat, which he placed on his head. Then the Indians “all sat down in manner like greyhounds upon their heels” and began to trade. With the exception of mustard (“whereat they made a sour face”), the Indians appeared to enjoy all the strange foods the English had to offer. For their part, Gosnold and his men enjoyed the Indians’ tobacco, a dried green powder that when smoked in carefully crafted clay pipes proved addictively pleasant.

  ◆ A nineteenth-century photograph of the Gosnold Memorial, which was erected on the island of Cuttyhunk to commemorate Gosnold’s landing on American soil.

  Gosnold was at a loss to understand the Natives’ language, but the Indians were immediately able to mimic the Englishmen’s speech. At one point, a sailor sat smoking beside an Indian and said, “How now, sir, are you so saucy with my tobacco?” The Indian repeated the phrase word for word, “as if he had been a long scholar in the language.”

  But Gosnold’s introduction to the area and its people turned as sour as his mustard. While out searching for food, two of his men were attacked by four Indians. No one was hurt (in part because one of the Englishmen cut the strings of the Natives’ bows with his knife), but Gosnold decided to abandon his fort and sailed for England.

  It was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again in the years ahead. soon after Gosnold returned to England with word of his discovery, the explorer Martin Pring sailed for Cape Cod and built a fort of his own in the vicinity of modern Truro. After a summer of harvesting sassafras, Pring also began to wear out his welcome with the locals. When an Indian-lit fire almost destroyed his fort, Pring took the hint and sailed for home.
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  Beginning in 1605, the Frenchman samuel Champlain explored the Cape and produced detailed maps of several harbors and inlets. In 1611, the year that the playwright William shakespeare produced The Tempest, the English explorer Edward Harlow voyaged to the region. By the time he returned to London, he had captured close to half a dozen Indians and killed at least as many in several brutal battles. One of his Indian captives was quite tall, and Harlow helped repay his debts from the voyage by showing him on the city streets “as a wonder.”

  The Indian’s name was Epenow, and he soon realized that there was nothing the English valued more than gold. He told his captors that back on Martha’s Vineyard, an island just to the south of Cape Cod, there was a gold mine that only he could lead them to. An expedition was promptly mounted, and as soon as the English ship came within swimming distance of the island, Epenow jumped over the side and escaped.

  Around this time, in 1614, Captain John smith led a voyage of exploration to the region. There were several vessels in smith’s expedition, and one of the commanders, Thomas Hunt, decided to take as many Native captives as his ship could hold and sell them as slaves in spain. Hunt’s actions badly damaged Indian-English relations in New England for years to come.

  The following year, a French ship wrecked on the north shore of Cape Cod, and the Indians decided to do to the French what the English had done to them. Indians from up and down the coast gathered together at the wreck site, and William Bradford later learned how they “never left dogging and waylaying [the French] till they took opportunities to kill all but three or four, which they kept as slaves, sending them up and down, to make sport with them from one sachem to another.”