by Rod Gragg
“Their eyebrows and hair are black, which they wear long, tied up behind in knots”
“These people are exceeding courteous, gentle of disposition and well conditioned”
“It Was the Best They Could Find”
The Pilgrims Pick a Site for Their Colony
Finally, they found it—the location for their colony. After battling the Indians, they had retreated to the shallop and again sailed westward, exploring Cape Cod Bay’s southern shoreline. After several hours, the wind picked up and began to pelt them with snow and rain. The seas began to roll in large waves, and they realized they were in the midst of a heavy gale. “The seas were grown so great that we were much troubled and in great danger,” Winslow and Bradford would later recall, “and the night grew on.” In the darkness, tossed by rough seas and slammed with driving snow and rain, their shallop began to come apart. First a hinge holding the rudder in place popped off, then the boat’s mast split into three sections. After surviving a potentially deadly Indian attack, would they now be killed by wind and waves? Ahead they saw an island in the darkness, but its shore was lined with rocks, and they appeared headed for a shipwreck—until the storm suddenly pushed their boat straight onto a stretch of sandy beach.
Safely beached, they built a bonfire to combat the cold, and there they spent the night. The next morning they realized they were on a forested island—Clark’s Island, it would be called—and were safe from sea and Indians because “it pleased the Divine Providence.” It was Saturday, December 9. The storm had passed, the sun appeared, and they remained on the island all day, drying weapons and equipment, and presumably repairing their shallop. They rested the next day, which was a Sunday, and the following day—Monday, December 11, 1620—they sailed westward from the island into a broad, sheltered harbor. There, they found their new home. On the shore before them lay a broad clearing that sloped upward from the harbor to a high hill. The site had been cleared of timber, presumably by the Indians, but there were no signs of Native Americans anywhere—just empty, abandoned cornfields.
Unknown to the Pilgrims at the time, the location was the former site of a sprawling village inhabited by the Patuxet Indians, who were allied with the larger Pokanoket tribe. It had been depicted on French-man Samuel Champlain’s map as a bustling population center, but it had been ravaged by a deadly epidemic three years earlier, and was now forsaken and uninhabited. Encouraged by the favorable appearance of the site, they put ashore to explore the area, likely beaching their shallop at or not far from a huge granite boulder that would become famous as the fabled “Plymouth Rock.” If they stepped upon it, were near it, or noticed it, these first Pilgrims to come ashore on the site of Plymouth Colony did not record it—ever. Contrary to countless works of art, there were no women in the landing party that day, nor were there any Indians to greet them. The account of the Pilgrim forefathers landing on Plymouth Rock would not be recorded until more than a century later in 1741, when ninety-five-year-old John Faunce, the son of settlers who came to Plymouth Colony in 1623, insisted that his father had been told by some of the original Pilgrims that they had landed on the rock.
After battling Indians and a winter storm on Cape Cod Bay, a party of explorers from the Mayflower landed on the bay’s western shore and warmed themselves with a bonfire. Their mission: to find a site for the Pilgrims’ colony.
BRITISH LIBRARY
On December 11, 1620, Pilgrim leaders found a likely location for their colony—cleared, high ground with a freshwater brook overlooking a sheltered harbor. It would become the site of Plymouth Colony.
ECLECTIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Ashore on the site—wherever they first landed—Carver, Standish, Bradford, Winslow, and the others walked the grounds of the sprawling clearing. It was cut by a small stream that ran along the base of the hill—Bradford called it “a very sweet brook”—and emptied into a salt marsh. Other, smaller brooks coursed through the area, which would provide an easily accessible source of drinking water, and the ground was good, composed of rich, black earth. Lying as it did on the west side of Cape Cod Bay, the site would be a long row from the offshore fishing grounds where the Pilgrims hoped to pay their way with hauls of codfish, but they sounded the harbor and found that it would accommodate ships as large as the Mayflower. They would have to make a long walk to cut firewood or fell timber, but having a cleared site would save countless man-hours of labor, help compensate for their late arrival in the midst of winter, and would offer protection from Indian attack. The crest of the hill was a perfect location for a defensive fortification that would have a clear field of fire for artillery over the entire site below and an unobscured view of the sprawling bay. The location was far superior to anything they had seen before, and they were cheered by the prospect of building their homes here—but it would have to be approved with a vote by all the passengers aboard the Mayflower.
In this fanciful nineteenth-century lithograph, the Pilgrims explore the site of Plymouth Colony while the Mayflower rides at anchor nearby, and a Native American man observes their activity. In reality, a mere handful a Pilgrim leaders were the first to land on the site; they came in a small boat, saw no Indians, and the Mayflower lay some thirty miles away.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In Mourt’s Relation, Winslow and Bradford described the future site of Plymouth Plantation as it appeared to those first Pilgrims who explored it:
We marched also into the land, and found divers cornfields, and little running brooks, a place very good for situation. . . . there is a great deal of land cleared, and hath been planted with corn three or four years ago, and there is a very sweet brook [that] runs under the hill side, and many delicate springs of as good water as can be drunk, and where we may harbor our shallops and boats exceeding well, and in this brook much good fish in their season; on the further side of the river also much corn-ground cleared. In one field is a great hill on which we point to make a platform and plant our ordnance, which will command all round about. From thence we may see into the bay, and into the sea, and we may see thence Cape Cod. Our greatest labor will be fetching of our wood, which is half a quarter of an English mile, but there is enough so far off.4
Produced in 1869, almost 250 years after the Pilgrims selected the site for their colony, this dramatic image depicts Pilgrim men and women climbing ashore atop Plymouth Rock. At the actual initial landing, there were no women present, and while those who were first ashore likely landed near or at the rock, they left no record of it.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“There is a very sweet brook [that] runs under the hill side”
Likewise, William Bradford, writing in Of Plymouth Plantation, would also praise the location in a terse description.
On Monday they sounded the harbor and found it fit for shipping, and marched into the land and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place (as they supposed) fit for situation. At least it was the best they could find, and the season and their present necessity made them glad to accept of it. So they returned to their ship again with this news to the rest of their people, which did much to comfort them.5
“This news . . . did much to comfort them”
CHAPTER TEN
“It Was the Lord Which Upheld Them”
When William Bradford returned to the Mayflower, he learned that his wife was dead. Several days earlier, twenty-three-year-old Dorothy May Bradford fell off the Mayflower into the icy waters of Cape Cod Bay and drowned. Bradford got the news the evening he climbed back aboard the Mayflower with the exploratory party. The couple had just observed their seventh wedding anniversary. How did she fall? Was she trying to board a ship’s boat to go ashore to wash clothes again? Did she lean too far over the ship’s railing? Or did she slip on the icy deck and tumble overboard? History has no answer. William Bradford recorded no details, and no other known record exists. Plymouth Colony historian Nathaniel Morton, who was Bradford’s nephew, gave no details in his work
, New England’s Memorial. Neither did Puritan historian Cotton Mather, who simply reported more than seventy years later that Dorothy Bradford’s drowning was an accident.1
Her decks covered in ice, the Mayflower rides at anchor in Cape Cod Bay. As William Bradford and other Pilgrim leaders explored the forested shores of Cape Cod, the rest of the Mayflower’s passengers awaited their return aboard ship.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“Faint Not, Poor Soul, in God Still Trust”
William Bradford Grieves in Silence
In all his writings, William Bradford kept silent about the death of “his dearest consort,” as Mather described Dorothy Bradford. In an appendix to Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, among a list of deaths that occurred in the colony’s early days, he penned a brief notation about himself and the tragedy—“his wife died soon after their arrival.” Did he write nothing more because he considered his wife’s death too personal? Was he simply too broken-hearted to record or recall the event? Or was there another reason? Centuries later, some would speculate that the ordeal of the Atlantic passage and the stark reality of the American wilderness overwhelmed young Dorothy, and that she committed suicide—jumping from the Mayflower into the near-freezing waters of Cape Cod Bay. No historical evidence confirms a suicide, but beginning in the late nineteenth century, the suggestion wormed its way into the Pilgrim story.
“Fear not the things thou suffer must”
A nineteenth-century artist’s conception of a young Pilgrim woman: did it resemble twenty-three-year-old Dorothy Bradford?
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Back home in England, Bradford had a three-year-old son who would never get to grow up in his mother’s loving care, and the plans Bradford had to build a home, a family, and a life in the wilderness with his “dearest consort” were not to be. How did he handle such grief and disappointment? Although he left no written record that expressed his feelings, he did eventually write these heartfelt words about trusting in the sovereignty of God:
Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust,
Fear not the things thou suffer must,
For, whom he loves, he doth chastise,
And then all tears wipes from their eyes.
It was a reference to a passage of Scripture in the New Testament that was familiar to Puritans and Separatists, and which would prove relevant to the trials and tribulations they would face in the wilds of the New World. It was one of the Bible passages from which William Bradford likely sought comfort as he grieved for his young wife:
“For whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth”
My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither faint when thou art rebuked of him.
For whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth: and he scourgeth every son that he receiveth.
If ye endure chastening, God offered himself unto you as unto sons: for what son is it whom the father chasteneth not?
If therefore ye be without correction, whereof all are partakers, then are ye [illegitimate] and not sons.
Moreover we have had the fathers of our bodies which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: should we not much rather be in subjection unto the father of spirits, that we might live?
For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but he chastened us for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness.
Now no chastising for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: but afterward, it bringeth the quiet fruit of righteousness, unto them which are thereby exercised.2
“Hard and Difficult Beginning”
The Pilgrims Struggle to Construct Their Homes
The sound of cast-iron axes chopping wood rang through the New England forest—the Pilgrims were felling trees to build homes. Although undoubtedly affected by Dorothy Bradford’s drowning, the Pilgrims had gone forward with their plans—they had to start their colony. On Friday, December 15, 1620, the Mayflower had weighed anchor, and Master Jones had set sail across Cape Cod Bay to its western shoreline, which lay almost thirty miles away. On Saturday, the ship anchored in what would become Plymouth Harbor, and on Sunday, the Pilgrims observed the Lord’s Day aboard ship. The next day, Monday, December 18, they put ashore another exploratory party. Its members found much to like about the site: cleared, high ground with fresh drinking water and easy access to the bay and the Atlantic beyond. Some of the colonists wanted another site, but on Wednesday, December 20—after prayer and consultation—a majority agreed to build the colony at the site of the cleared hillside discovered nine days earlier by Governor Carver’s exploration party—on the abandoned Indian village site cut by the “very sweet brook.”
A colonist fells trees in the New England forest. In late December of 1620, the Pilgrims went to work preparing the site for their settlement and building their homes.
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY
Delayed by gale-force winds and driving rains, they were unable to go to work until Saturday, December 23. That day, a work force finally went ashore, hiked into the forest and went to work. Conditions were now becoming desperate: more people were falling ill in the confined quarters of the Mayflower, rations were running low, winter weather was fully upon them, and Master Jones was anxious to take his ship back to England. Their first chore was to build a “common house” for storage, protection, and temporary shelter as needed. By early January, it was complete—although it almost burned down soon afterward when a spark set the thatch roof afire. With the common house constructed, the Pilgrims turned to their homes.
The Pilgrims established their Plymouth settlement on high ground overlooking a sheltered harbor on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay.
MAP BY AMBER COLLERAN
With axes and saws, they felled trees, hauled the timber back to the site, split the logs, hewed rough planks, and began erecting their homes. Instead of the log cabins that would typify later eras of the American frontier, the Pilgrims initially built crude frame clapboard cottages equipped with plaster-like wattle-and-daub interior walls and dirt floors. They were topped with the thatched roofs familiar to the Separatists from England’s East Midlands, although the New England version was apparently thatched with marsh reeds and cattail leaves. Most of them stayed on the Mayflower at night and worked during the day. They planned to put up at least nineteen houses on the broad clearing that had once been the Patuxet village. A rough town plan laid houses on both sides of a narrow street that extended up the hill with a single intersecting lane.
In the rush to erect housing, it was agreed that the single young men each would join a Pilgrim family, so that fewer houses would have to be built at first. Small plots of land were marked off, and lots were drawn to see who would build on each of them—except for Governor Carver and Captain Standish. A governor’s home, it was determined, would be raised on a larger corner lot, and Captain Standish would build his house near the crest of the hill. There, the Pilgrims built a crude artillery emplacement, fortified with a battery of artillery composed of cannon from the Mayflower. The cannon tubes and artillery carriages were eventually wrestled ashore and hauled up the hill, where they were mounted on a wooden platform—all under the supervision of Captain Standish. The artillery thus had a clear field of fire over the lands surrounding the fledgling village as well as the shoreline and harbor.
Slowly, the row of thatch-roofed cottages rose—following the understanding “that every man should build his own house.” From the beginning, it appears, the Pilgrims referred to their colony as Plymouth or New Plymouth—the name placed on it years earlier by Captain John Smith after exploring the region. The Pilgrim departure from Plymouth, England, no doubt reinforced the name, and it stuck—spelled at times as “Plimouth.” Carved out of the American wilderness, Plymouth was hardly reminiscent of England’s bustling southern port of the same name—and was actually the site of a massive graveyard. As they cleared the land for habitation, the Pilgrims began uncovering skeletal remains—a lot of them. It was grisly evidence of the killer e
pidemic that had wiped out the Patuxet villagers who had inhabited the site just a few years earlier. The grim discovery would prove ominous, for in time the site would also become a burial ground for many of the Pilgrims.
A simple planked cottage topped by a thatched roof was common in early seventeenth-century England. The Pilgrims built their homes in a similar fashion, although the first houses at Plymouth Colony were much smaller and more like cottages.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Initially, however, the chief focus of the new inhabitants of Plymouth Colony was building homes and establishing the colony. Enduring the fierce New England winter weather, they steadily, resolutely worked to raise their wilderness homes, even as they battled illness, and watched warily for possible Indian attacks. They found that they could indeed catch fish, and successfully hunt for New World wildlife—including seal and eagle meat. They continued, unsuccessfully, to try to make peaceful contact with the area’s Native Americans, and from time to time explored the surrounding forest. One trek into the wood led two Pilgrims to spend the night lost in the wilds, shivering from freezing temperatures and the unnerving screaming of cougars or wildcats, which they called “lions.” It was a “hard and difficult beginning . . . ,” in the words of William Bradford. Those initial arduous and challenging weeks of raising Plymouth Colony were recorded diary-style in Mourt’s Relation:
Saturday, [December] 23rd. So many of us as could, went on shore, felled and carried timber, to provide themselves stuff for building.