The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World*

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  It had been a long month of exploration. Later, looking back on their trek along the shore of Cape Cod, Bradford could not help but see their journey in biblical terms. New World Israelites, they had, with God’s help, finally found their Canaan. But back then, in the late afternoon of Tuesday, December 12, as the shallop approached the Mayflower, Bradford and his companions had little reason to believe they had found the Promised Land.

  Much of Plymouth Harbor was so shallow that a ship the size of the Mayflower, which was twelve feet deep, had to anchor more than a mile from shore. The harbor was also without a navigable river extending into the land’s interior. It was true that there were no Native settlements nearby, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be attacked. The Indians in the region had already surprised them once; it would probably happen again. Worst of all, they were approaching what Bradford called “the heart of winter,” and many of them were sick—indeed, some were on the verge of death.

  And then that evening, when they returned to the Mayflower after a long day’s sail across the bay, William Bradford received what would have been, for many men, the final blow. He learned that five days before, Dorothy May Bradford, his wife of seven years and the mother of his three-year-old son, John, had slipped over the side of the Mayflower and drowned.

  ◆◆◆ Bradford never wrote about the circumstances of his wife’s death. Much later in the century, the Puritan historian Cotton Mather recorded that Dorothy Bradford had accidentally fallen overboard and “was drowned in the harbor.” That she fell from an anchored ship has caused some to wonder whether she committed suicide.

  Dorothy certainly had reasons to despair: she had not seen her son in more than four months; her husband had left the day before on his third dangerous trip away from her in as many weeks. On the same day the shallop had departed, seven-year-old Jasper More, one of the four abandoned children placed on the Mayflower, died in the care of the Brewster family. Two other More children would die in the months ahead. For Dorothy, whose own young son was on the other side of the Atlantic, the deaths of these and the other children may have been especially difficult to bear.

  We think of the Pilgrims as tough adventurers strengthened by religious faith, but they were also human beings in the midst of what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile. Less than a year later, another group of English settlers arrived at Provincetown Harbor and were so overwhelmed by this “naked and barren place” that they convinced themselves that the Pilgrims must all be dead. In fear of being abandoned by the ship’s captain, the panicked settlers began to strip the sails from the masts “lest the ship should get away and leave them.” If Dorothy experienced just a portion of the terror and sense of abandonment that gripped these settlers, she may have felt that suicide was her only choice.

  Even if his wife’s death had been unintentional, Bradford firmly believed that God controlled what happened on earth; every event meant something. John Howland had been rescued in the midst of a storm at sea, but Dorothy, his “dearest consort,” had drowned in the calm waters of Provincetown Harbor.

  The only clue Bradford left us about his feelings can be found in a poem he wrote toward the end of his life.

  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.

  FIVE

  The Heart of Winter

  THE MAYFLOWER LEFT Provincetown Harbor on Friday, December 15. Headwinds from the northwest prevented the ship from entering Plymouth Harbor until the following day. Both Plymouth Harbor and Duxbury Bay to the north are contained within two crescents of sand: the Gurnet, an extension of Duxbury Beach, to the north and Long Beach to the south. The Mayflower anchored just within Goose Point at the end of Long Beach, a mile and a half from Plymouth Rock.

  Not until Wednesday, December 20, after three more days of exploration, did they decide where to begin building a permanent settlement. some voted for Clark’s Island, their camp during the shallop’s first night in the harbor, as the safest spot in case of Indian attack. Others thought a river almost directly across from the island was better. Unfortunately, Jones River, which they named for the Mayflower’s master, was not deep enough to handle a vessel of more than 30 tons (the Mayflower was 180 tons), and the settlement site would have been difficult to defend against the Indians. That left the area near the Rock.

  The future site of Plymouth Plantation had several advantages. Rising up from shore was a 165-foot hill that provided a spectacular view of the surrounding coastline. On a clear day, it was even possible to see the tip of Cape Cod, almost thirty miles away. A cannon-equipped fort on this hill would provide all the security they could ever hope for.

  The presence of the Rock as a landing place was yet another plus. Even more important was the “very sweet brook” that flowed beside it, carving out a channel that allowed small vessels to sail not only to the Rock but up what they called Town Brook. Just inside the brook’s entrance was a wide salt marsh where, Bradford wrote, “we may harbor our shallops and boats exceedingly well.” There were also several freshwater springs along the high banks of the brook that bubbled with “as good water as can be drunk”—an increasingly important consideration since they had so little beer left.

  The biggest advantage of the area was that it had already been cleared by the Indians. And yet nowhere could they find evidence of any recent Native settlements. The Pilgrims saw this as a miraculous gift from God. But if a miracle had indeed occurred at Plymouth, it had taken the form of a holocaust almost beyond human imagining.

  Just three years before, even as the Pilgrims had begun preparations to settle in America, there had been between one thousand and two thousand people living along these shores. As a map drawn by samuel Champlain in 1605 shows, the banks of the harbor had been dotted with wigwams, each with smoke rising from the hole in its roof and with fields of corn, beans, and squash growing nearby. Dugout canoes made from hollowed-out pine trees skimmed across the waters, which in summer were full of bluefish and striped bass. The lobsters were so numerous that the Indians plucked them from the shallows of the harbor.

  Then, from 1616 to 1619, disease brought this centuries-old community to an end. No witnesses recorded what happened along the shores of Plymouth, but in the following decade the plagues returned, and Roger Williams, the future founder of Rhode Island, told how entire villages became emptied of people. “I have seen a poor house left alone in the wild woods,” Williams wrote, “all being fled, the living not able to bury the dead. so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but the houses and the whole town, take flight.”

  No Native dwellings remained in Plymouth in the winter of 1620, but gruesome evidence of the sickness was scattered all around the area. “[T]heir skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” Bradford wrote. “A very sad spectacle to behold.”

  ◆ Samuel Champlain’s map of Plymouth Harbor.

  It was here, on the bone-whitened hills of Plymouth, that the Pilgrims hoped to begin a new life.

  ◆◆◆ They decided to build their houses on what is called today Cole’s Hill, overlooking the salt marsh. situated between the shore and the much higher hill, soon to be known as Fort Hill, Cole’s Hill was flat enough for a small settlement and was easily accessible from the brook. That night twenty people remained on shore. They planned to begin building houses the next morning.

  But Thursday, December 21, proved so stormy that the Mayflower was forced to set an additional anchor. The people on shore were without food, so despite the winds, the shallop set out from the Mayflower “with much ado with provisions.” The terrible weather lasted throughout the following day, making it impossible to begin work on the houses.

  In the meantime, the Mayflower had become a grim hospital ship. In additio
n to colds, coughs, and fevers, scurvy tormented the passengers. James Chilton had died even before the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbor. That Thursday, Richard Britteridge passed away, followed two days later by Christopher Martin’s stepson, solomon Prower. On Friday morning, Mary Allerton gave birth to a stillborn son.

  Not until saturday, December 23, were they able to transport a work party from the Mayflower to shore. With their axes and saws, they felled trees and carried the timber to the building site. The fact that Monday, December 25, was Christmas Day meant little to the Pilgrims, who believed that religious celebrations of this sort were an insult to the true word of Christ. Of more importance to them, December 25 was the day they erected the frame of their first house. “[N]o man rested that day,” Bradford wrote. But toward sunset, the familiar cries of Indians were heard in the surrounding forest. The Pilgrims took up their muskets and stared tensely into the darkness as the cries echoed briefly and died away.

  The Pilgrims’ intense spiritual lives did not prevent them from living with the constant fear that satan and his minions were out there, working against them. It was a fear that must have been difficult to contain as they stared into the gloom of the American night. After waiting a few more tense minutes, they decided to send the shallop back to the Mayflower, leaving the usual number of twenty ashore. That night they were drenched by yet another rainstorm.

  ◆◆◆ It took them two more weeks to complete the first building, a twenty-foot-square “common house.” Known as an earthfast house, the Pilgrims’ first structure probably had walls of cut tree trunks interwoven with branches and twigs that were cemented together with clay. This “wattle-and-daub” construction was typical of farmers’ cottages in rural England, as was the building’s thatched roof, which was made of cattails and reeds from the nearby marsh. The house’s tiny windows were made of parchment. The chimney—if, in fact, the house did have a chimney instead of a simple hole in the roof—would have been made of four boards that funneled up the smoke from an open fire on the dirt floor. It was a dark and smoky space, but for the first time, the Pilgrims had a real roof over their heads.

  On the morning of Thursday, December 28, they turned their attention to the high hill, where they began to construct a wooden platform on which to mount the various cannons they had brought with them aboard the Mayflower. This was also the day they started to plan the organization of the settlement. First they needed to decide how many houses to build. It was determined that “all single men that had no wives to join them” should find a family to live with, which brought the total number of houses down to nineteen. From the beginning, it was decided that “every man should build his own house, thinking by that course, men would make more haste than working in common.”

  Miles standish appears to have had a hand in determining the layout of the town. The most easily defended settlement pattern consisted of a street with parallel alleys and a cross street. The Pilgrims created a similar design that included two rows of houses “for safety.” For the time being, Plymouth was without a church and town green, features that came to typify a New England town.

  In the weeks ahead, the death toll required them to change their plans. Instead of nineteen, only seven houses were built the first year, plus another four buildings for common use, including a small fortlike structure called a rendezvous. The houses were built along a street that ran from Fort Hill down to the sea. Known today as Leyden street, it was crossed by a “highway” running from north to south down to Town Brook. Around this intersection, the town of Plymouth slowly came into being, even as death reduced the newcomers to half their original number.

  ◆◆◆ Thursday, January 11, was “a fair day.” Given the uncertainty of the weather, they knew they must make as much progress as possible on the houses—especially since, it was still assumed, the Mayflower would soon be returning to England.

  The frantic pace of the last two months was beginning to take its toll on William Bradford. He had suffered through a month of exposure to the freezing cold on the exploratory missions, and the stiffness in his ankles made it difficult to walk. But there was more troubling him than physical discomfort. Dorothy’s passing had opened the floodgates: Death was everywhere.

  That day, as Bradford worked beside the others, he was “vehemently taken with a grief and pain” that pierced him to his hipbone. He collapsed and was carried to the common house. At first it was feared Bradford might not last the night. But “in time through God’s mercy,” he began to improve, even as illness continued to spread among them.

  The common house soon became as “full of beds as they could lie one by another.” Like the Native Americans before them, the Pilgrims were struggling to survive on a hillside where death had become a way of life. In the days ahead, so many fell ill that there were barely half a dozen people left to tend the sick. Progress on the houses came to a standstill as the healthy ones became full-time nurses—preparing meals, tending fires, washing the “loathsome clothes,” and emptying chamber pots. Bradford later singled out William Brewster and Miles standish as incredible sources of strength:And yet the Lord so upheld these persons as in this general calamity they were not at all infected either with sickness or lameness. And what I have said of these I may say of many others who died in this general visitation, and others yet living; that whilst they had health, yea or any strength continuing, they were not wanting to any that had need of them. And I doubt not that their recompense is with the Lord.

  ◆ William Bradford’s silver drinking cup, made in England in 1634.

  At one point, Bradford requested a small container of beer from the Mayflower, hoping that it might help in his recovery. With little left for the return voyage to England, the sailors responded that if Bradford “were their own father he should have none.” soon after, disease began to ravage the crew of the Mayflower, including many of their officers and “lustiest men.” Early on, the boatswain, “a proud young man,” according to Bradford, who would often “curse and scoff at the passengers,” grew ill. Despite his treatment of them, several of the Pilgrims attended to the young officer. In his final hours, the boatswain experienced a kind of deathbed conversion, crying out, “Oh, you, I now see, show your love like Christians indeed one to another, but we let one another die like dogs.” Master Jones also appears to have undergone a change of heart. soon after his own men began to fall ill, he let it be known that beer was now available to the Pilgrims, “though he drunk water homeward bound.”

  ◆◆◆ On Friday, January 12, John Goodman and Peter Brown were cutting thatch for their roofs about a mile and a half from the settlement. They had with them the two dogs, a small spaniel and a huge mastiff. English mastiffs were frequently used in bearbaitings—a savage sport popular in London in which a dog and a bear fought each other to the death. Mastiffs were also favored by English noblemen, who used them to catch poachers. The Pilgrims’ mastiff appears to have been more of a guard dog brought to protect them against wild beasts and Indians.

  That afternoon, Goodman and Brown paused from their labors for a midday snack, then took the two dogs for a short walk in the woods. Near the banks of a pond they saw a large deer, and the dogs took off in pursuit. By the time Goodman and Brown had caught up with the dogs, they were all thoroughly lost.

  It began to rain, and by nightfall it was snowing. They had hoped to find an Indian wigwam for shelter but were forced, in Bradford’s words, “to make the earth their bed, and the element their covering.” Then they heard what they took to be “two lions roaring exceedingly for a long time together.” These may have been eastern cougars, also known as mountain lions, a species that once ranged throughout most of North and south America. The cry of a cougar has been compared to the scream of a woman being murdered, and Goodman and Brown were now thoroughly terrified. They decided that if a lion should come after them, they would scramble into the limbs of a tree and leave the mastiff to do her best to defend them.

  All that night they paced bac
k and forth at the foot of a tree, trying to keep warm in the freezing darkness. They still had the sickles they had used to cut thatch, and with each wail of the cougars, they gripped the handles a little tighter. The mastiff wanted desperately to chase whatever was out there in the woods, so they took turns holding back the dog by her collar. At daybreak, they once again set out in search of the settlement.

  After passing several streams and ponds, Goodman and Brown came upon a huge piece of open land that had recently been burned by the Indians. For centuries, the Indians had been burning the landscape on a seasonal basis, a form of land management that created surprisingly open forests, where a person might easily walk or even ride a horse amid the trees. Come summer, this five-mile-wide section of blackened ground would resemble, to a remarkable degree, the wide and rolling fields of their native England.

  Not until the afternoon did Goodman and Brown find a hill that gave them a view of the harbor. Now that they were able to orient themselves, they were soon on their way back home. When they arrived that night, they were, according to Bradford, “ready to faint with travail and want of victuals, and almost famished with cold.” Goodman’s frostbitten feet were so swollen that they had to cut away his shoes.

  ◆◆◆ The final weeks of January were spent transporting goods from the Mayflower to shore. On sunday, February 4, yet another storm lashed Plymouth Harbor. The rain was so fierce that it washed the clay daubing from the sides of the houses, while the Mayflower, which was floating much higher in the water than usual after the removal of so much freight, wobbled dangerously in the wind.

  Tensions among the Pilgrims were high. With two, sometimes three people dying a day, there might not be a plantation left by the arrival of spring. Almost everyone had lost a loved one. Christopher Martin, the Mayflower’s governor, had died in early January, soon to be followed by his wife, Mary. Three other families—the Rigsdales, Tinkers, and Turners—were entirely wiped out, with more to follow. Thirteen-year-old Mary Chilton, whose father had died back in Provincetown Harbor, became an orphan when her mother passed away that winter. Other orphans included seventeen-year-old Joseph Rogers, twelve-year-old samuel Fuller, eighteen-year-old John Crackston, seventeen-year-old Priscilla Mullins, and thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Tilley (who also lost her aunt and uncle, Edward and Ann). By the middle of March, there were four widowers: William Bradford, Miles standish, Francis Eaton, and Isaac Allerton; Allerton was left with three surviving children between the ages of four and eight. With the death of her husband, William, susanna White, mother to the newborn Peregrine and five-yearold Resolved, became the plantation’s only surviving widow. By the spring, 52 of the 102 who had originally arrived at Provincetown were dead.