The Pilgrim Conspiracy

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  They slowed down but didn’t stop. As the car crawled along, the driver leaned over the steering wheel and peered through the windscreen, scanning the coastline on their left.

  ‘It should be here somewhere,’ he said, but he didn’t sound very sure of himself. He accelerated slightly and shook his head as if he had suddenly realised the futility of his task.

  ‘So who said you should bring me here?’

  ‘Well, uh …’

  Suddenly, the driver slammed on the brakes, throwing Peter forward. He managed to brace his arms on the seat in front of him just quickly enough to stop himself being hurled against it.

  ‘There it is,’ the man said, pointing enthusiastically at the beach.

  Peter looked over the man’s shoulder at what he was pointing at.

  There was indeed a white motorboat in the shallow waters, keeling slightly as though its skipper had been caught out by the low tide.

  A man was standing on the beach, waving energetically with something orange in his hands. He was too far away for Peter to make out his face, but he could tell it was Tony from his baseball cap. He opened the car door and got out, but he kept his right foot on the sill and gripped the top of the door with one hand. He shaded his eyes with his other hand.

  ‘Okay, sir?’ the driver asked, making no effort to mask the relief in his voice.

  ‘I think …’ Peter said hesitantly.

  Should I ask him to wait for a few minutes, he wondered. Just until I know what’s going on? Why is Tony waiting for me here? Why didn’t we just take a boat from the marina? Why didn’t we come here together?

  Peter got out of the car properly and took a few steps away from it. The driver turned the car around to face the other way. And then he appeared to decide that he’d had quite enough. First, he drove forwards very slowly while he performed the acrobatic feat of reaching behind his seat to close the back door, and then he drove off at high speed.

  Oh, come on! What on earth is going on?

  Peter turned around and saw the long, sandy road behind him. Plymouth, if that was indeed the town he could see in the distance, shimmered in the damp haze drifting in from the sea.

  Tony had put whatever the orange thing was back on the boat. Now he held both his arms aloft like a football supporter watching his team score a winning goal.

  Despite the strangeness of the situation, Peter started to laugh.

  There’s something quite endearing about him, he thought. That enthusiasm … Wanting to surprise me like this, like a treasure hunt at a children’s party.

  Now Peter finally waved back, and Tony dropped his arms to his sides. Peter decided to go over to the boat. He supposed that the answers to his questions – Why are we here? Where are we going? When will we be back? – would be forthcoming soon enough.

  ‘Fooled ye!’ Tony hollered when Peter was close enough to hear.

  Peter waved again.

  ‘Did you really think I would end our trip so suddenly?’ Tony asked, clearly pleased with his little stunt.

  Peter had reached the waterline now.

  The boat’s name, Sea Breeze, was painted in ornate letters on the prow, with three horizontal lines of different lengths after it, representing the wind.

  Gentle waves washed over the sand bringing little shells and pebbles with them. The endless cadence of the tide’s ebb and flow, the rush of the sea and the briny smell of the water always made Peter feel calm. For the first time since he’d got into the car at the museum, he relaxed a little.

  ‘I did think it was a bit … unusual, yes,’ Peter said. ‘But why are we meeting up here? And why didn’t we just go to the marina together?’

  ‘Ah, but then it wouldn’t have been a surprise now, would it?’ Tony said. ‘You should have seen your face when I said goodbye! Besides, if we’d gone to the marina together, this would have been no more than an ordinary day trip. But this, my friend, is going to be something you’ll never forget. Come on!’

  Tony was barefoot, and he had rolled up his trousers. ‘Take your shoes off and throw them on board. Then you can help me launch the boat.’

  ‘But what …’ Peter began. ‘What’s the plan, Tony? Why are we going on a boat? And what was the deal with the taxi driver? I didn’t even get a chance to pay him.’

  ‘I already paid him at the taxi stand.’

  ‘But you phoned for a taxi, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, so he was waiting for me at the stand. It’s just around the corner. You’ll have gone past it on your way here.’

  ‘But what—’

  ‘I want to give you the authentic Pilgrim experience,’ Tony said excitedly. ‘From the water, we’ll be able to see what the Pilgrims saw when the Mayflower sailed into the bay here. Of course, you’ll have to imagine all the buildings away. And we’ll sail past Provincetown, which is where the Mayflower dropped anchor. And it’s where the Mayflower Compact was signed. We’ll be on historic ground, even if it is on the sea. Come on!’

  Peter sat down on the sand to take off his shoes. He stuffed his socks inside them. Then he rolled up his jeans and waded through the water to put his shoes on the boat. The water felt pleasantly cool on his hot, tired feet.

  This is actually quite nice …

  ‘And the best is yet to come, Peter,’ Tony said. ‘We don’t have to take the bus back, because we’ll be sailing all the way to Boston Harbor! How do you like that?’

  Peter laughed at the childlike and probably very American eagerness with which Tony was looking at him, like a schoolboy inviting his classmate to his birthday party.

  He may be a bit of an oddball, and he was thrown out of the Masons because of some very odd behaviour, but on the other hand … He is a member of the committee that’s organising events for Mayflower 400.

  ‘We’re going to Boston?’ Peter asked.

  They pushed the boat off the beach.

  ‘Isn’t that a long way?’

  ‘Oh, it’s even further with the bus!’ Tony said. ‘We’ll be navigating close to the shore, no tailbacks, no going the long way around. We can go straight there. It’s only twenty-five, maybe thirty miles … Oh, sorry! Forty kilometres. It’ll take less than an hour.’

  The unmoored boat bobbed up and down to the rhythm of the waves.

  Tony held the boat steady, and Peter eventually managed to haul himself on board. Tony climbed up after him.

  Peter stowed his shoes under one of the plastic benches that were moulded into the sides of the boat and put his backpack on top of them.

  Tony was at the helm, sitting on the only chair on board. A low plastic screen divided into three windows protected him from the worst of the wind. The foredeck was so small that it could barely be called a deck at all.

  Tony started the motor. It produced a low throbbing sound.

  Apart from two life vests and the remarkably large bright orange lifebuoy, there was nothing on the boat. The buoy was so huge that four people would have been able to hold onto it without getting in each other’s way.

  ‘Is this your boat?’

  ‘Kind of … I share it with some other people. Too expensive for me otherwise. I can’t even afford the marina fees!’

  The boat skimmed swiftly over the ocean. The wind in his hair felt good. Peter trailed his fingers through the water, feeling the coolness of the air on them each time a wave lifted the boat up and set it back down with a slap.

  The two men didn’t speak, but the sound of the motor and the whistling wind would have made normal conversation difficult anyway.

  At first, Tony steered towards the Plymouth coast. In the distance on the left, Peter could see the Plymouth Rock Portico. But then they veered right and sailed around the end of the spit. Before long, they were in the open water just outside Cape Cod Bay.

  At one point, the boat slowed down and then came to a complete stop. The motor purred softly, as if it was indignantly wondering why it wasn’t being utilised to its full potential.

  Tony stood up an
d set his legs wide apart to give himself some stability. Peter stayed where he was on the bench.

  ‘We don’t know this for certain either, obviously,’ Tony said, ‘but the Mayflower was somewhere around about here, off the coast near Provincetown when the Mayflower Compact was signed. If you were to look at where we are on a map, you’d see that we’re just under the outermost point of the hook of Cape Cod.’

  Peter took in the surroundings, already imagining how he could use this in his lectures. Students always liked it when he could liven up a story with his own experiences.

  ‘When the Mayflower reached Cape Cod,’ Tony said, raising his voice slightly, ‘some of the passengers questioned the legitimacy or authority of the group’s leaders. They had been given that authority in a patent, a charter that said they could start a new settlement to the north of the Colony of Virginia. But here in New England, that charter was invalid. The passengers said that this meant that the group’s leaders had no jurisdiction over them. You can only imagine – or I do, at least – how those leaders must have felt. They were seeking liberty. The freedom to believe what they wanted and practise their beliefs as they saw fit, without any interference from anyone else, without other people telling them what was and wasn’t allowed. But just think, they’d crossed an ocean, feared for their lives, survived storms, faced conflicts, deaths, births, tears, laughter, prayers … And then … then, at last, the coast comes into view. The promised land, the land of milk and honey, the land of all their hopes and dreams. This was the place where they would finally be free. And instead of being thankful to their leaders for bringing them out of Europe, giving them a new future, no less, they started complaining almost before they even saw land. But hey, better to die on your feet than live on your knees, right?’

  Peter looked up from his seat at Tony, who had the air of a captain encouraging his demoralised crew.

  ‘The ingratitude … the lack of trust … Little people with small minds … So what do they do then? What do they decide upon? The male passengers draw up a contract, a pact, the first governing document of Plymouth Colony, better known as the Mayflower Compact. The Separatists, the people who had come from Leiden, referred to themselves as the “Saints”, the holy ones. The Hebrew word for “holy” literally means “set apart for a specific purpose”. They called the others, the adventurers and merchants who had gone with them, the “Strangers”. It was only later that both groups were referred to collectively as “Pilgrims”. So forty-one of the one hundred and two passengers signed this agreement on November 11th, 1620. Remember, this was according to the Julian calendar that they used then, which, as I’m sure you know, is ten days behind the Gregorian calendar that we use now, so we’d say it was November 21st. The original document is long gone, but we know what was in it because of the writings of William Bradford – just like we know what was in the Ten Commandments because of the Old Testament.’

  Tony widened his stance slightly, bracing himself even more securely.

  ‘In fact, they decided between them that they would form a government based on what we call the majority model; it disregarded women and children because they weren’t allowed to vote. The compact was actually a social contract. The colonists all agreed that they would follow its rules so that they could preserve order and survive here. A spiritual covenant had marked the beginning of the Pilgrims’ Leiden congregation, and now a civil covenant formed the basis of a secular government in America. Because that’s … Just a few moments, Peter, and then we’ll get going again … Because ultimately, that’s what it’s all about … Look, Peter, people had come to America before, but they were traders, fortune-seekers, people who made the journey for economic reasons. But this was men, women and children, whole families who came here for something else, and above all, brought something else with them. And that is where Leiden comes in. That is why your little city played such a vital role in this whole thing. You could say that Leiden was fundamental to everything, fundamental to the principles upon which the whole of the United States would eventually be built. On which, ultimately, all of western civilisation would be built … I know you’re probably thinking that I’m overstating it, but the ideas that were brought here from Leiden, from the Netherlands: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press … Their legacy has proved to be much more enduring than anything the other colonists left behind – if they even left us anything at all. As far as I’m concerned, my dear Peter, this covenant is every bit as important as the Declaration of Independence. Its words should be displayed in every classroom so that pupils can learn its contents. If it was up to me, they would memorise parts of it so that the text becomes as familiar to them as those other famous words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" and so on.’

  ‘And have you memorised the Mayflower Compact?’

  Tony looked at him, delighted that Peter had asked this question. ‘Of course I’ve memorised it! What did you expect?’

  He cast his gaze to the sky and recited the words of the compact with all the poignancy of a Shakespearean actor delivering a monologue. When he was finished, he sat down again. ‘And in this too, everything was done for the greater good, working as a single body for the wellbeing of the entire community.’

  The boat began to move again, and they navigated along the coastline at a gentle speed.

  ‘There’s one thing I don’t entirely understand, Tony,’ Peter said, ‘and I’m hoping you can explain it to me. You’re descended from one of the Pilgrims.’

  ‘And very proud of it.’

  ‘As an American, you value your liberty. But at the same time, you talk about community, about unity, about how an individual should go along with the majority, that they sometimes need to practise humility, surrender their free will. Don’t those two things contradict each other?’

  Tony looked at Peter oddly, as though this was the first time he’d been made aware of the contradiction.

  ‘But, my dear Peter, it’s very simple. Charlton Heston expresses it perfectly in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments when he says that without the law there is no liberty. It’s an incredibly profound statement. It seems like a contradiction because how can laws give us liberty? Surely laws are there to limit us, aren’t they? A law tells us that we can’t do something, or even that we must do it. You mustn’t steal, kill, commit adultery, lie, et cetera. But people forget that real liberty, total and absolute freedom to do as you please, will ultimately lead to a complete lack of liberty. Because what happens if everyone has total freedom? That’s like a class having no teacher or having a teacher who can’t control them. It means complete chaos. Bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all. Man is a wolf to man. You know Hobbes, right? You’d get a situation of universal fear where the law of the jungle prevails, and nobody is able to realise their full potential. That’s the opposite of liberty. It’s only within the constraints given to us by the law – the law that regulates our behaviour, in which agreements have been made about which behaviours are permitted and which are not – that we can ever really be free. Only then can people thrive and flourish and become who they truly are inside. By definition, liberty can’t be unlimited because your liberty ends where another person’s liberty begins.’

  He paused for breath and then he continued: ‘Almost no one realises this. Many people think that liberty is about having no commitments, having no ties, being independent and going your own way. They don’t see that it doesn’t work like that, that that’s not how we function. That we actually can’t function like that!’

  ‘This is really an important issue for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is an important issue. It should be an issue for more people. You can only be free when you have limits. That’s what people just don’t get. Sometimes freedom does come at the expense of individual sovereignty. You have to surrender a certain amount of control, but what you get in return is worth so much more than that, it’s so much great
er than your teeny tiny individual self. But Sam and George didn’t understand it, either.’

  Peter’s heart froze, and a chill went through him, as if someone coming in from the snow had laid an icy hand on his neck.

  ‘This is pretty much the place where they went overboard,’ Tony said. ‘Poor fellas.’ He gazed at the water. ‘Such a tragedy,’ he added, but there was a coldness in his voice that betrayed an utter lack of sympathy.

  Oh God, what am I doing here, Peter thought.

  He stood up.

  The shore had almost disappeared from view. A thin line divided the vast, grey expanse of the sea and the dark blue sky above into two segments, almost as though an artist had tried to make the ultimate minimalist representation of the scene in an abstract piece, The Coast.

  I’ve got to get away from here.

  ‘How about we start heading back now?’ Peter asked as calmly as possible. ‘I really appreciate you giving up some of your valuable time today, Tony, but I’m supposed to be meeting my friend Judith. She’s waiting for me.’

  It was a lie, of course. Judith was giving her presentation that evening and wouldn’t be home until late.

  ‘That’s fine, Peter,’ Tony said, but there was something in his voice that made Peter feel more uneasy, not less. ‘There’s just one thing …’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Peter asked.

  ‘What was your real reason for coming to the States? Why did you really come to Boston? Why did you want to visit the grand lodge?’

  Peter looked at him quizzically. ‘What do you mean? I came here to see Judith.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!’ Tony roared.

  The metamorphosis was so extreme and so unexpected that Peter sat back down in shock.

  ‘What—’

  ‘Do not lie to me! Why did you want to see me? Why did you come and find me? Why did you have to get yourself involved?’

  ‘Involved in what? What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m a moron or something?’

  ‘Sorry, Tony, but this is … ridiculous. I don’t know what’s got into your head, but this is absurd. Take me back to Boston. Now!’ Peter stood up again.