The Pilgrim Conspiracy

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  Just as he always did whenever he was near a famous building or artefact, Peter tingled with excitement.

  Standing right next to real, tangible history …

  But soon, and entirely predictably, he was jerked out of his romantic reverie.

  ‘It’s not the actual rock, of course,’ Tony said. ‘Well, actually, they have no idea if it’s the real rock or not. They certainly landed here, but whether this rock is the exact spot where they first set foot in America, or whether it was on a rock further up shore or on the beach, nobody knows.’

  Folklore and tradition … Peter thought. The longer people tell each other the same story, the more power it has. Eventually, a story becomes so potent, such an irrefutable truth that people are enraged when you call it into question. Point to a tree and say that Siddhārtha Gautama attained enlightenment under it, and people will come from far and wide to meditate there. Point to a place on the banks of the River Jordan and say that John the Baptist baptised people in that exact spot and Christians will come from all over the world to be baptised there. Point to a thorn bush and say that God spoke to Moses from that very same bush and believers will build a monastery there.

  ‘And anyway, they first landed near to what’s now called Provincetown,’ Tony went on. ‘That’s on the other side of Cape Cod Bay, opposite where we are now. The captain would obviously never have steered his ship towards the rocks. But you know, this is the story that’s been established, and tradition has decided that this was the site. The power of a place like this only grows over time. I’ve seen people standing here with tears in their eyes; not just descendants of the Pilgrims, but others too. Of course, in the end, it doesn’t matter where it is. You have to choose one site, so why not this one?’

  ‘Why are they so often referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers, actually?’ Peter asked, realising that he had never given this question much thought before. It had only just occurred to him. ‘Wasn’t the whole point of the Pilgrims,’ he went on, ‘that – and you actually said this to me yourself – this was the first time that entire families had emigrated. So half of the passengers on the ship would have been women. Leaving aside the children, obviously.’

  Tony rolled his eyes.

  ‘Well, that’s also … tradition. But you’re right. Customarily, we talk about Pilgrim Fathers, but of course, there were Pilgrim Mothers and Pilgrim Children as well, but in those days … They didn’t sign contracts or draw up any trade agreements, and they didn’t negotiate deals or fight battles. So they more or less disappeared from historical view. Well, from the bigger historical picture, anyway. I’m not making a case for Herstory, as such. That’s a big thing here just now, telling the stories of the forgotten and underestimated historical roles that women have played. It’s a counterbalance to a History …’ he emphasised the ‘his’ ‘… in which the main focus is on men. But the consensus on the Mayflower 400 committee is that, at least in official external communications, we use the gender-neutral word “Pilgrims”. But the old name is so ingrained – in me too – that it’s going to take a while for it to disappear.’

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘Next, we’ll walk a little way along the coast and then up to the Pilgrim Hall Museum. After that, we’ll go back to Boston.’

  That’s good, Peter thought. Then we’ll have seen everything there is to see here.

  Peter looked at the clock on a nearby church and saw that it was after two o’clock.

  An hour, maybe an hour and a half in the museum, then at least three hours to get back to Boston … Back on campus between seven and eight. Plenty of time to grab something to eat, freshen up, and pack my bag for tomorrow.

  They walked along an uninspiring stretch of waterfront lined with parked cars on one side and restaurants, ice cream parlours and souvenir shops on the other.

  ‘As you can see,’ Tony said, drawing an arc in the air with his arm, ‘Plymouth is on a bay. You can see Provincetown on the other side. It’s about twenty miles away over the water.’

  Peter did a quick conversion in his head: thirty-two kilometres.

  ‘I swam across it a few years ago with a bunch of other people. Took us about eleven hours. I’m an excellent swimmer, you know. We wanted to make a yearly event of it, a little like you Europeans swimming across the English Channel, but it never really took off. Less than ten people have done it so far.’

  Swimming non-stop for eleven hours …

  Peter was impressed. The hour he spent swimming lengths each week – and even his intensive water polo training sessions and matches – in the public pool in Leiden paled in comparison.

  They turned off Water Street and onto Chilton Street, a well-maintained row of carefully preserved colonial houses. It was clear that these homes belonged to people with deeper pockets than the average American.

  The Pilgrim Hall Museum was at the end of the street, but it stood out immediately. Peter couldn’t help smiling when he saw it.

  From the side, the building had looked fairly plain, but its façade was dominated by six enormous columns with a triangular gable on top. At the centre of the gable was a semi-circular window divided into ‘pie slices’, like half a wagon wheel with glass between the spokes. In contrast to the small town around it, it was quite pretentious.

  Here, just like at Plimoth Plantation, there was no need to buy entrance tickets. Tony introduced Peter to several staff members, most of them older ladies.

  They both signed the visitors’ book that was lying on the reception desk next to the cash register. Peter flipped through it and noted that most of the visitors were from the United States, but there were lots of visitors from other countries too.

  ‘Do you sign the book every time you come here?’ he asked Tony.

  ‘Well,’ Tony said with a crooked grin, ‘it’s kind of cheating, if I’m honest. The visitor numbers are calculated at the end of the year. Obviously, they go by the number of tickets sold, but they also look at how many names are in this book, and in particular, where they come from. They want to see an annual increase in the number of tickets sold, and in the number of visitors from other countries. It keeps the museum’s funders happy. So yes, my name appears in the visitors’ book pretty regularly. I often sign it with a made-up name … There’s a confession for you.’

  After they had hung up their jackets, they took a good look around the exhibit in the basement.

  Just as Tony had said, the settlers were consistently referred to as ‘Pilgrims’. The first information board explained the origin of the name ‘Pilgrims’ with a famous quote from William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth Colony:

  They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.

  William Bradford was citing the Epistle to the Hebrews – chapter 11, verses 13 to 16 – in which the Apostle Paul wrote about the Israelites who had left the fleshpots – meaning the good times, when there had been enough to eat – of Egypt and died in the desert in search of the promised land: ‘All these died in faith, and received not the promises, but saw them afar off, and believed them, and received them thankfully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things, declare plainly, that they seek a country. And if they had been mindful of that country, from whence they came out, they had leisure to have returned. But now they desire a better, that is an heavenly (one).’

  The history of the Pilgrims was outlined in neat displays and illustrated with original artefacts like tools, old Bibles and facsimiles of letters and maps.

  Peter couldn’t help feeling a sense of pride when he read sentences such as:

  Seeing themselves molested … by a joint consent they resolved to go into the Low Countries (Holland), where they heard that there was freedom of religion for all.

  Sometimes Tony appeared to be reading the information boards and labels, but he had told Peter beforehand that he had lost cou
nt of the number of times he had visited the exhibition. He could recite some of the information boards by heart now.

  All in all, Peter was glad that he had decided to come on this day trip after all.

  Tony’s a bit of an odd character, of course, he thought. There’s something not quite right about a man who would make such a strange, insulting speech at a funeral. And then there are his rigid opinions about the Freemasons and about taking the stories literally … People aren’t bees. We do have free will. We’re not programmed to carry out the same pre-determined tasks day after day without ever deviating from the plan. Quite the opposite. That’s what makes us human: our fate is in our own hands.

  But their day together was coming to a close.

  How likely am I to see Tony when he’s in Leiden again, he wondered. I could always find an excuse to avoid it. I don’t owe him anything.

  Peter wondered what the surprise was that Tony had been hinting at.

  Perhaps the visit to this museum was the surprise?

  Peter read:

  The Europeans also believed their colonizing efforts were justified by the introduction of the Christian religion.

  It remained a strange fact that there were people who believed that God had promised them a land, and that, on the basis of that divine promise, they had the right to take what didn’t belong to them and could even justify wiping out an entire ethnic group in an act of pure genocide.

  Peter paused at a text about the religious beliefs of the indigenous peoples that the colonists encountered.

  The Wampanoag had a strong and complex spirituality. Many English people did not recognize these beliefs as a “religion”.

  The arrogance …

  The labels in this museum were so brief that Peter decided to rummage in his bag for the information booklet that he had taken from a rack in the reception at Plimoth Plantation. Leafing through it earlier, he had noticed a short paragraph about Native American religions at the time of the Pilgrims’ arrival. Peter knew from experience that if he didn’t read it now, he would probably never read it at all. Once he got home, it would sit gathering dust on his ‘to read’ pile for a few months before he eventually threw it away.

  He sat down on a wooden bench next to the doorway and took a pen out of his bag so that he could highlight significant words and passages here and there.

  Most tribes practised a combination of polytheism (multiple gods, including the Great Spirit, Father Sky and Mother Earth) and animism (everything that lives on earth has a soul). The Indians lived in harmony with the plants and animals and never took more from Mother Earth than was necessary.

  Native American rituals around death could vary greatly from tribe to tribe and from region to region. However, they were always focused on freeing the spirit or soul so that it could make its way to the afterlife. It was believed that the journey would be long and dangerous. Rituals were vital for guaranteeing the safe arrival of the dead person’s soul in the afterlife.

  According to many Native Americans, the human spirit has two parts:

  1. the transcendent part or free soul that lives on after physical death and journeys into the afterlife;

  2. the life-soul that animates the physical body during life and disintegrates after physical death.

  After death, the soul goes on a journey to the afterlife, sometimes traversing a wide river in a canoe, climbing a mountain or crossing a desert.

  Crossing a desert …

  Peter circled the word ‘desert’.

  The dead person’s soul travels across the desert … Following the trail to a land of milk and honey …

  The soul’s final destination could vary depending on the tribe’s beliefs. Some tribes thought that souls lived in the Milky Way. Others thought that the Milky Way was merely the route to a spirit realm on the other side of the universe. A number of tribes saw the afterlife as an idealized version of life on earth: a paradise in a magnificent, lush prairie where people hunted, feasted and danced, otherwise known as the Happy Hunting Grounds.

  The concept of reincarnation was not a prominent feature in the spiritual lives of all Native American tribes. For the Plains Indians in particular, the idea was of only minor importance. It was thought that reincarnation took place only when the soul had not been completely developed during life.

  Interesting, very interesting … Peter thought.

  They literally left the fleshpots behind them: the flesh is elsewhere; the body is left behind. All that remains is the soul that journeys over mountains, over rivers and lakes and across a desert.

  Re-in-carne … Back in flesh, born again because there is still more to learn on earth, like the pupil held back for a year and not allowed to move up to the next level. You could read the ‘back to the fleshpots’ figuratively, back to the flesh, back to the body …

  Peter gave the leaflet a couple of taps with his pen and then folded it up and put it back in the front pocket of his backpack.

  He took the stairs up to the museum entrance on the ground floor, a spacious hall that was mostly given over to paintings.

  Peter noticed that his concentration was fading. Whenever he was in a museum – and it didn’t matter which one it was – his ability to focus usually lasted less than an hour and a half.

  His eye was drawn to a painting of the first Thanksgiving dinner. It portrayed colonists sitting at long tables covered with pristine, white tablecloths. A man with a pointed grey beard stood at the table. The white collar and cuffs of his shirt peeped out from beneath his black clothes, making him look like a clergyman. His clasped hands were pointing towards the heavens.

  A group of Native Americans sat on the grass in the background, plainly not allowed to join the others at the table. They had been placed so far to the right of the painting that they were almost falling off it.

  Peter left the entrance hall and had a look in the gift shop. While he was browsing the displays, he saw Tony talking to one of the older ladies behind the cash desk.

  He went to the toilet and picked his jacket up from the cloakroom on the way back.

  ‘Well, Peter,’ Tony said when he got back to the gift shop. ‘This is where we part ways.’ He grabbed Peter’s hand and started to shake it.

  The lady behind the desk looked on with interest.

  ‘I’ve just realised that I have some business to take care of,’ Tony said. ‘Since I’m here anyway, I ought to do it now. I’ve called an Uber for you, and it’ll take you to the stop where we got off the bus this morning. It’s all pretty simple. You can just use your printed ticket. The bus goes straight to South Station, and you can take the subway to Harvard from there.’

  This is a bit of an abrupt goodbye, Peter thought. Hadn’t we arranged to travel back together? And what about the surprise he was talking about? Was it this museum, after all?

  Peter didn’t mind travelling back to Boston on his own – in fact, it would be good to have some time alone after such a long day – but Tony’s sudden departure had come out of the blue.

  Tony gave Peter a firm, friendly pat on his shoulder before he went outside. He almost skipped down the wide steps, apparently pleased to be on his own, too.

  And I still haven’t asked him if he thinks all those cases might be connected to each other.

  Peter said goodbye to the lady behind the counter, put on his backpack, and left the museum. He sat down on the low wall that ran around the small garden at the front of the building.

  As Tony had promised, ten minutes later, a car pulled up. The driver got out and looked around.

  Peter waved at him and walked over to the car.

  ‘Mr Peter?’ the chauffeur asked.

  ‘That’s me,’ Peter replied.

  As he got into the back of the car, he noticed a road sign that gave the distance to Boston: 40 miles. A large arrow pointed the way to the bus station on the Pilgrims Highway.

  The car drove away in completely the opposite direction.

  Chapter 31

>   The car drove at a leisurely speed along Court Street and onto Main Street. Peter knew that the ocean was behind the houses on his left.

  Earlier that afternoon, when he had visited Plymouth Rock with Tony, he had seen Plymouth’s marina in the distance.

  Soon, they had left the town centre behind them.

  ‘You’re taking me to the bus station, right?’ Peter asked the driver.

  They had turned onto Sandwich Street now. Peter thought it might not be a bad idea to try to remember the street names. He could already see the ocean ahead.

  ‘The bus station?’ the driver repeated. ‘No, mister, not the bus station. I’m supposed to take you to a boat. We’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.’

  That must be the surprise then …

  Peter slumped back in the seat. He tried to adopt the confident attitude of the globetrotter who has seen it all and doesn’t mind not knowing exactly where he’s going.

  Should I go back, he asked himself. Just tell the driver to turn around and take me to the station so I can take the first bus back to Boston?

  He decided to wait and see where he would be dropped off. If wherever that was didn’t feel right, for whatever reason, he could always ask the driver to take him to a bus stop.

  He is a bit of a strange man, that Tony, but maybe he really does have a surprise in store for me. And after all, I have really enjoyed today.

  The car had turned right onto Ryder Way, a road that ran along a narrow, sandy spit of land. Peter could see water to his left and right, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.

  According to the clock in the Pilgrim Hall Museum’s reception, it had been almost four o’clock when Tony had left him.

  Maybe he wants me to see the bay? Sail along part of the route that the Mayflower took?

  There were almost no buildings here.