by Tony Horwitz
But in Virginia, the role of serum administrator started to sour on me. A few days after visiting Richard Bowman, I went to Richmond for a museum lecture on Pocahontas. In the crowd of elderly whites wearing bow ties and big hats, I spotted three women who looked different. Going to sit with them, I learned that they were members of the Chickahominy. We chatted amiably about the tribe, until I realized one of the women was someone Richard Bowman had told me was a distant relative. When I mentioned this, her smile stiffened.
“There’s a lot who are Indian and don’t want to admit it,” she said.
“Is he related to you?” I asked.
“Some went to the other side, went black. That’s their choice.”
I was about to ask a blunt follow-up, a reporter scenting blood, when the interrogator in me withered. She wasn’t a public official or a corporate criminal. She was an eighty-seven-year-old woman who had lived through a vicious racial witch hunt. If there was a malefactor in the room, it was me: a latter-day Plecker, demanding to know whose blood was one-sixteenth this or one-thirty-second that.
“It was all paper,” she whispered, as the lecture began, gently completing the interview for me. “And paper could kill you.”
AFTER THE LECTURE, I decided to leave Virginia and its ghosts behind. From here, the story of early America pointed north, to the conventional starting point of the national narrative, and the last stop of mine.
But Jamestown shadowed this story, too. Of the many lapses in America’s memory of its beginnings, one of the most glaring is this. The founding father of New England wasn’t William Bradford or Myles Standish or others aboard the Mayflower. It was a man long reviled by Yankee historians: the peripatetic John Smith.
In 1614, five years after his departure from Jamestown, Smith voyaged to the northeast Atlantic coast and scouted the shore in a small boat, as he’d so often done around the Chesapeake. “Few have adventured much to trouble it,” he wrote of this northern region. His description of the coast explained why. Rocky and barren, it was “a Countrey rather to affright than delight.” He also passed stretches of beach dune, which appeared just as desolate. “High hills,” he wrote, “overgrowne with shrubby Pines, hurts and such trash.”
Nonetheless, Smith saw promise in this forbidding landscape. Its rocks could provide building material; food such as cod, clams, and lobster abounded; there was ample timber and land. “Tender educats” might “complaine of the piercing cold,” Smith wrote, but for “health and fertilitie” the region was well suited to the English. He became an ardent promoter of its colonization and penned several tracts on how to accomplish this. All that was needed for a settlement to prosper was “honest industry” and the leadership of a man such as himself.
The territory required one other thing: a new name. Though generally known in England as “the North Part of Virginia,” the cool, rugged coast bore little resemblance to the Chesapeake. Also, in 1614, “Virginia” was still synonymous in English minds with disease, famine, and hostile Indians.
While charting the northern coast, Smith observed that its latitude was the same as the Pacific shore Sir Francis Drake had sailed in 1579 and called Nova Albion. And so, in a stroke of geographic marketing that rivaled Eirik the Red’s christening of Greenland, Smith Anglicized Drake’s name and gave it to the cold, stony region he hoped to sell to his countrymen. He called it “New England.”
Smith never realized his dream of pioneering the place. Others followed his advice, and his fine charts, but sailed without the headstrong captain. Left to watch from afar, he kibitzed to the end, titling his last work Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any-where.
In 1631, at the age of fifty-one, Smith died in poverty, willing most of his meager estate to cover the cost of his funeral. “Here lyes one conquered, that hath conquered Kings,” his epitaph reads. “Subdu’d large Territories, and done things/Which to the World impossible would seem.”
CHAPTER 13
PLYMOUTH
A TALE OF TWO ROCKS
The rock underlies all America: it only crops out here.
—Wendell Phillips,
speech to the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth (1855)
WHEN I RETURNED to Plymouth, three years after my first brief visit, the place felt altogether different. Plymouth Rock, the replica Mayflower, the monuments studding the shoreline—they were familiar to me and yet not, like childhood haunts I’d revisited as an adult, only to discover that memory had played tricks on me.
It took me a while to figure out why. Plymouth hadn’t changed; I had. Before, I’d rolled into town as a passing traveler, a twenty-first-century motorist pausing to glimpse the shore where long-ago Pilgrims stepped off a wooden ship to found a new country. Now, arriving at the end of a long journey forward in time, I saw Plymouth through jaundiced eyes, not as the cornerstone of early America, but as its capstone, piled on a cairn erected by all those who came before.
For a day or two, this made me a grumpy tourist. I had to resist quibbling with shopkeepers whose T-shirts bore Plymouth’s motto: “America’s Home Town.” Not to Virginians it isn’t. Or to Hispanics, or Indians. At Pilgrim Hall, I barely glanced at the museum’s trove of colonial relics, instead searching until I found a small wall panel acknowledging pre-Mayflower visitors to America. That’s all?
Returning to the Rock, I wanted to lecture the tourists trying to land coins on its uneven surface, which Plymouth legend held was a token of good luck. Blarney, like everything else about that rock. Then I retreated to a pub on Plymouth’s main street, and needled the man on the next stool, a local tour-bus driver wearing a red, white, and blue jacket. What about Jamestown, I asked. Or St. Augustine?
“Forget all the others!” he finally shouted, slapping his hand on the bar. “This is the friggin’ beginning of America.”
I slunk from the bar to my room at the Governor Bradford Motor Inn. Lecturing locals about the flaws in their version of history was futile, not to mention obnoxious. Better to just take in the spectacle of Plymouth, like everyone else, and try to grasp what made the Pilgrim story so enduring.
I also had some research to finish, about the first English voyages to Massachusetts, which paved the way for the Pilgrims’ arrival and survival in Plymouth. This, at least, was a source of spiteful solace, affording me another story that was more colorful than the pious Pilgrim myth. English Massachusetts, that most Puritan of colonies, had first been settled because of syphilis.
In the sixteenth century, Europeans believed the remedy for a disease could be traced to the malady’s geographic source. Since syphilis was thought to have come from America, so must its antidote. In 1577, Europe’s leading expert on New World plants extolled the virtues of sassafras, an aromatic plant that Indians used for a range of medicinal purposes. “The roote of this Tree,” wrote the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes, cured many ills, foremost among them “the evill of the Poxe.”
Monarde’s ebulliently titled herbal, Joyfull news out of the newe found worlde, helped drive the price of sassafras to 20 shillings a pound. When Roanoke colonists found the tree in abundance, hopes soared that it thrived in “the North Part of Virginia” as well. Since this little-known territory was linked in English minds to Norumbega, the legendary land of riches, the region might also yield mineral wealth.
And so, in 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold set sail from England with thirty-one men, including an apothecary and twenty settlers to found a year-round trading post. His sailors were “none of the best,” wrote a gentleman aboard Gosnold’s ship, the Concord. After crossing the Atlantic, they sounded for days before making landfall “upon an unknowen coast.” Or so the rocky, fog-bound shore of southern Maine seemed to its first recorded English visitors.
Within hours of their arrival, another vessel appeared. Rigged with mast and sails, it looked to the English like a European fishing boat. Even more startling was its crew: Indians with painted faces, one of them clad in black serge breeches, waistco
at, hose, and shoes. The natives climbed “boldly aboord” the Concord, displaying no sign of fear or wonder. “They spake diverse Christian words,” wrote one of the astonished English, “and seemed to understand much more than we.”
With words and signs, the Indians explained that they’d traded with Basque fishermen, whose boats had trolled the northeast Atlantic coast for decades. As so often before, a land “unknowen” to the late-arriving English wasn’t so to other Europeans.
Gosnold, sensibly “doubting the weather” in Maine, decided to try his fortunes elsewhere. Sailing south, he reached a sandy headland where the sailors caught so much fish that Gosnold called it Cape Cod. His next stop was a lovely vine-draped island, which he named “Marthaes vineyard,” in honor of his daughter. Even more enticing was a nearby isle that Gosnold christened Elizabeth. “Sassafras trees plentie all the Island over,” one passenger exulted, “a tree of high price and profit.” It was here that the English chose to build their trading post and fort.
Natives of the isle—today’s Cuttyhunk, outermost of an island chain still called Elizabeth—traded furs for trinkets and helped cut and carry sassafras until more than a ton had been loaded on the Concord. At this point, some of the settlers who had agreed to stay behind with Gosnold changed their minds; they were poorly provisioned and feared that others might cheat them of the cargo’s profit. So, after a stay of only a few weeks, Gosnold reluctantly abandoned the island and its welcoming natives, who escorted the departing ship in their canoes.
“They made huge cries and shouts of joy unto us,” one of the English wrote. “We with our trumpet and cornet, casting up our cappes in the aire, made them the best farewell we could.”
Like so many early encounters, the Concord’s gentle island cruise quickly gave way to much harsher contact. Gosnold’s ambitions turned to Jamestown, where he died during the colony’s first summer. Those who sailed after him to New England seized on a new commodity, which sailors hauled aboard like so much lobster or cod.
“They were strong and so naked as our best hold was by their long haire,” a mariner wrote of five natives the English kidnapped in 1605. One captain paraded his exotic catch through the streets of London, to recoup part of the cost of his voyage. Another took Indians to Spain to sell as slaves; among these was a young native of Massachusetts named Tisquantum.
Seized in 1614, Tisquantum somehow escaped slavery in Spain and made his way to London and then Newfoundland, where he boarded an English ship headed toward his homeland. During his five-year absence, the New England coast had been hit by a devastating plague, probably introduced by European fishermen or sailors. Thomas Dermer, captain of the ship that carried Tisquantum south in 1619, described villages “not long since populous now utterly void,” or inhabited only by dying natives covered in “sores” and “spots.” Reaching Tisquantum’s home, formerly a large and thriving settlement called Patuxet, Dermer found its inhabitants “all dead.”
It was to this ravaged shoreline that the Mayflower passengers came late the following year. Initially headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, they’d been blown off course to Cape Cod and started probing the Massachusetts shore for a place to settle. At Patuxet, they found fresh water and woods cleared by the now absent Indians. Unloading their ship, they built shelters on the site of the extinct settlement.
In March, after a harsh winter that killed half the English, a lone Indian appeared, naked except for a leather apron. To the colonists’ astonishment, “he saluted us in English, and bade us welcome.” Samoset, as he called himself, was a refugee from Maine, where he’d met Englishmen before, acquiring a few of their words and a taste for their beer.
Five days later, he returned with an even more surprising figure: “the only native of Patuxet.” This was Tisquantum, whose kidnapping by the English in 1614 had spared him the epidemic that killed off his kinsmen. Like so much about America, the arrival of this miraculous survivor struck the pious settlers as providential. A plague had given them Patuxet as a home, and now the last of its people had appeared to guide them in the wilderness. Tisquantum spoke English, was willing to act as interpreter and intermediary with other Indians, and taught settlers how to plant corn and fertilize it with fish.
“Squanto,” wrote the colonists’ leader, William Bradford, using an abbreviation of Tisquantum’s name, “was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”
Samuel de Champlain’s chart of Port St. Louis (Patuxet) in 1605, showing native fields and homes before disease wiped out the settlement
Eighteen months later, Squanto “fell sick of an Indian fever, bleeding much at the nose,” Bradford wrote. He was dead within a few days. Though Squanto endures in American memory as savior of the Pilgrims, the name of his homeland vanished with its people. An English captain who visited Patuxet in 1603 called it Whitson Bay; two years later, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain rechristened it Port St. Louis. Then came John Smith, whose place names tended to stick. On his 1614 map of New England, the shore became “Plimouth.” The Pilgrims retained Smith’s name, though they also referred to their home as “New Plimoth” or “Plimoth Plantation.”
Like St. Augustine and Jamestown before it, Plimouth was a poor choice for permanent settlement. Its harbor was shallow and hard to navigate, and arable land was limited to coastal fields. When Puritan colonists arrived in force a decade after the Mayflower, they settled a much better harbor forty miles to the north, at the mouth of a river John Smith had named the Charles. This colony quickly overshadowed the Pilgrim settlement and grew into greater Boston, of which Plymouth (as it was eventually spelled) became a satellite. It remains one today, a formerly industrial town that has found new life as a bedroom community for the metropolis an hour’s drive away.
ON MY RETURN, once I got over my initial annoyance at Plymouth’s claims to historic primacy, the town started to grow on me. Unlike St. Augustine’s, its old commercial district hadn’t been given a franchise facelift. Nor was Plymouth overgroomed and quainted-up, the fate of so many New England towns. Centuries-old houses looked their age, well lived-in still, with peeling paint and warped clapboards. Most of the town’s historic sites were likewise antique and unimproved, memorials not only to the Pilgrims but to a bygone tourist sensibility.
Atop Cole’s Hill, overlooking the Rock and harbor, I plunked quarters into an old telescope to “bring distant points of interest within range.” The nearby wax museum had closed, denying me the chance to see paraffin Pilgrims planting corn. But the rest of Cole’s Hill remained a museum piece, its every boulder and bench and bronze inscribed with high-flown sentiment.
“Reader!” exhorted the inscription on a sarcophagus holding the bones of settlers who died during the colony’s first months. “History records no nobler venture for faith and freedom than that of this pilgrim band.” Invoking the “weariness and painfulness,” the “hunger and cold,” that settlers endured, the epitaph concluded: “May their example inspire thee to do thy part in perpetuating and spreading the lofty ideals of our republic throughout the world!” This message seemed likely to be lost on the well-fed tourists driving past in their climate-controlled cars.
At the crown of Cole’s Hill stood the largest monument of all, a towering bronze of Massasoit, “Great Sachem of the Wampanoags” and “Protector and Preserver of the Pilgrims.” The statue had been erected in 1921 by the Improved Order of Red Men, the fraternity of white men I’d encountered in Virginia. Ten feet tall, and perched on a boulder bigger than the Rock, the sculpted sachem had six-pack abs and taut, rippling glutes. A companion statue of William Bradford, below the hill, was as tiny as Massasoit’s was tall: a four-foot-six Pilgrim shrunken by a shortfall in the memorial budget.
Most townspeople, I discovered, had a sense of humor about Plymouth’s motley collection of marble and granite. They poked fun at the grandiose, neoclassical canopy covering the Rock and its sand pit, dubbing it the Greek Outhouse. Nor did all locals staunchly
defend Plymouth’s first-in-America status, as the tour-bus driver at the pub had done. Instead, they pointed out the apt initials of their town’s leading shrine.
“P.R.,” Roger Silva said. “That’s why people remember us. We had good public relations people on the Mayflower. They got our story out.”
I met Silva at a café where locals gathered each morning for coffee. Like most Plymoutheans, he didn’t trace his ancestry to the Pilgrims. The son of a Portuguese immigrant, he’d followed his father into Plymouth’s rope factory, and since served as a town selectman. The town’s industry had also drawn Irish, Italians, Germans, and Finns. Plymouth, for all its Mayflower fame, was more blue-collar than blue-nosed.
The one man in the coffee shop with Pilgrim forebears was the target of gentle derision. “Everett’s so old he came on the Mayflower,” one of his friends jeered. “Everett,” another man yelled, “be sure to tell him how hard that first winter was!”
As a town, Plymouth also took pains to puncture the romantic myths that had grown up around its early settlers. Paintings and legend depict the Pilgrims stepping from the Mayflower straight onto the Rock, and many visitors still believe this actually happened. But a historic marker near the Rock, and a booklet sold at museum shops, spelled out in detail the amusing truth behind the boulder’s enshrinement.
The first of the Mayflower passengers to step ashore at Plymouth were scouts, who arrived in a small boat. When the Mayflower followed, the ship anchored a mile out in the shallow bay, and the English were shuttled ashore. In any event, the Pilgrims never mentioned the Rock—or any coastal rock—in their copious writing about Plymouth. Rather, the story of the hallowed stepping-stone derived from oral testimony, recorded many generations later, in the manner of an Icelandic saga.