The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World*

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  ELEVEN

  The Ancient Mother

  BY THE EARLY 1640s, the Great Migration to the New World had come to an end as England was torn apart by civil war. Many settlers returned to England to join in Parliament’s efforts to overthrow King Charles. With the king’s execution in 1649, England became a Puritan state—unimaginable just a decade before. Bradford felt compelled to turn to an early page in his history of Plymouth and write, “Full little did I think, that the downfall of the bishops, with their courts, canons, and ceremonies, etc. had been so near, when I first began these scribbled writings ... or that I should have lived to have seen, or hear of the same; but it is the Lord’s doing, and ought to be marvelous in our eyes!”

  Until this spectacular turn of events, it had been possible for a Puritan to believe that America was where God wanted them to be. Now it seemed that England was the true center stage. In addition, the English civil war hurt the region’s economy. Pilgrims, who had watched the prices of their cattle and crops skyrocket over the last decade, were suddenly left with a surplus that was worth barely a quarter of what it was in the 1630s. More than a few New Englanders decided that it was time to return to the mother country, and one of those was Edward Winslow.

  Winslow had emerged as Plymouth’s main diplomat, whether negotiating with Massasoit or with the government back in England. In 1646, Winslow sailed for London on another diplomatic mission. His talents were noticed by Oliver Cromwell, head of the Puritan regime, and the Pilgrim diplomat soon became caught up in England’s struggles. To Bradford’s bitter regret, Winslow never returned to Plymouth. In 1654, Cromwell sent Winslow to the West Indies; a year later, he died from yellow fever off the island of Jamaica and was buried at sea with full honors.

  ◆◆◆ By the time Bradford received word of Winslow’s passing, Elder William Brewster had been dead for more than a decade. A year later, in 1656, Miles standish died in his home in Duxbury. At that point, Bradford was sixty-eight years old. He had come to America not to establish a great and powerful colony but to create a tightly knit religious community. For that to happen, everyone was supposed to live together and worship in the same church. But as early as the 1630s it had become apparent that the soil around the original Plymouth settlement was not the best. Many inhabitants also claimed they needed more land to accommodate the growing herds of cattle. To the governor’s dismay, many of his closest friends, including Brewster, Winslow, standish, and John Alden, had left Plymouth to found communities to the north in Duxbury and Marshfield. Thomas Prence, one of the colony’s rising stars, who first served as governor in 1634, also moved to Duxbury, then helped found the town of Eastham on Cape Cod.

  At the root of this trend toward town building was, Governor Bradford insisted, a growing hunger for land. For Bradford, land had been a way to create a community of saints. For an increasing number of Pilgrims and especially for their children, land was a way to get rich. Bradford claimed that the formation of new towns was “not for want or necessity” but “for the enriching of themselves,” and he predicted it would be “the ruin of New England.”

  It was difficult for Bradford to lose Winslow, Brewster, and the others. For as the new towns prospered and grew, Plymouth, the village where it had all begun, fell on hard times. “And thus was this poor church left,” Bradford wrote, “like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children.... Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor.”

  A deep sadness began to overtake Bradford as he came to realize that Plymouth had failed to live up to her original spiritual mission.

  Late in life, he looked back on the manuscript pages of his history of the colony. Beside a copy of a letter written by Pastor Robinson and Elder Brewster back in 1617, in which they referred to their congregation’s “most strict and sacred bond,” Bradford wrote, “I have been happy in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay, and ... with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same.”

  No one knew what the future held, but Bradford had his suspicions. If New England continued its “degenerate” ways, God would surely have his vengeance. In Bradford’s view, the seeds for this had been sown more than thirty years before, when Thomas Morton of Merrymount had begun selling guns to the Indians. Almost immediately, the Natives had become better huntsmen than the English “by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body, being also quick-sighted and by continual exercise well knowing the haunts of all sorts of game.” They were also quick to learn how to use a musket and were soon able to perform their own repairs and make their own lead bullets.

  The English were slow to give up their old and cumbersome matchlock muskets for the newer flintlocks, which came into use around 1630 and didn’t require a burning wick (or “match”) to shoot. The Indians, on the other hand, knew from the start that they wanted only flintlocks. “[T]hey became mad (as it were) after them,” Bradford wrote, “and would not stick to give any price they could attain to for them; accounting their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison of them.” suddenly the English were no longer the technological superiors of the Native Americans, and when they ran into “the Indians in the woods armed with guns in this sort, it was a terror unto them.”

  Over time, however, the English became accustomed to the sight of an Indian with a gun. Indians armed with flintlocks brought in more game and furs to English trading posts. And besides, if the Indians did not get their weapons from the English, they could easily buy them from the French and the Dutch. selling guns and ammunition was a highly profitable business, and Plymouth eventually came to approve the sales.

  From Governor Bradford’s perspective, the arming of the Indians showed that New England was headed for a fall. And it was the gun-toting Indians who would be “the rod” with which the Lord punished his people: For these fierce natives, they are now so fill’d

  With guns and muskets, and in them so skill’d

  As that they may keep the English in awe,

  And when they please, give unto them the law.

  In the winter of 1657, Bradford began to feel unwell. His health continued to decline until early May, when a sudden change came upon him. On the morning of May 8, “[T]he God of heaven so filled his mind with ineffable consolations,” Puritan historian Cotton Mather later wrote, “that he seemed little short of Paul, rapt up unto the unutterable entertainments of Paradise.” Here at long last was proof that the Lord had picked him to go to heaven. That morning he told those gathered around his sickbed that “the good spirit of God had given him a pledge of happiness in another world, and the first-fruits of his eternal glory.” He died the next day, “lamented by all the colonies of New England, as a common blessing and father to them all.”

  ◆ A chair once owned by William Bradford.

  ◆◆◆ In the forty years since the voyage of the Mayflower, the Native Americans had experienced huge changes, but they had continued to draw strength from traditional ways. The Pokanokets still hunted much as their fathers had done, but instead of bows and arrows, they now used the latest flintlock muskets. Inside their wigwams made of reed mats and tree bark were English chests in which they kept bracelets, rings, and strings of wampum beads. Attached to their buckskin breeches were brass bells that tinkled as they walked.

  Given the spirituality of the Native Americans, it was perhaps inevitable that many of them also showed an interest in the Englishmen’s religion. The Pilgrims had done little to convert the Indians to Christianity, but for the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, it was a priority from the start. The colony’s seal, created even before their arrival in the New World, showed a Native American saying, “Come over and help us.”

  The Puritans believed a Christian must be able to read God’s word in the Bible, and early on, efforts were made to teach the Indians how to read and write. A handful of Native Americans even attended the newly founded
Harvard College. In the 1650s, the missionary John Eliot translated the entire Old and New Testaments into a phonetic version of the Massachusetts language, titled Mamusse Wanneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God.

  Eliot created a series of Native communities known as Praying Towns. In addition to teaching the “Praying Indians” about Christianity, Eliot hoped to turn them from their traditional ways. But as was true with their use of flintlocks and jewelry, the Indians never wholly abandoned their former identities. Instead of replacing the old ways, Christianity became, for many Indians, the way for Native culture to endure.

  ◆ Painting of missionary John Eliot, circa 1660.

  For sachems in the seventeenth century, however, Christianity threatened their power. As increasing numbers of Indians turned to God, especially on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, there were fewer left to supply Massasoit with the steady stream of tribute on which he had traditionally depended.

  ◆◆◆ When it came to borrowing from the English, the Indians had demonstrated tremendous creativity and enthusiasm. The English were much more reluctant to borrow from the Indians, yet they did adopt some Native ways, particularly when it came to food. Ever since the Pilgrims stumbled across the buried corn on Cape Cod, maize had been an essential part of every New Englander’s diet. It has been estimated that the Indians ate between 280 and 340 pounds of corn per person per year, and the English were not far behind. Hominy and johnnycakes, which became staples of early American diets, are adaptations of Native recipes. Over the years, the English pottage that Massasoit had craved on his sickbed had become more like the Indians’ own succotash: a soupy mishmash of corn, beans, and whatever fish and meat were available. When it came to harvesting corn, the English adopted the Native husking bee celebration, a communal tradition in which a young man who came across a red ear of corn was allowed to demand a kiss from the girl of his choice.

  When the Pilgrims had first settled at Plymouth, there had been forty miles between them and Massasoit’s village at sowams. By 1655, there were just a few miles between the Pokanokets’ headquarters and the closest English homes at Wannamoisett. An intimacy existed between the English and Indians that would have been almost unimaginable to later generations of Americans. The English hired their Indian neighbors as farmhands; they traded with them for fish and game. Inevitably, a mixture of English-Indian languages developed, and it became second nature for an Englishman to greet a Native acquaintance as netop, or friend.

  still, intermarriage between the two races was virtually nonexistent, and without children to provide them with a genetic and cultural common ground, the Indians and English would always have difficulty understanding each other’s point of view. But while relations between the Indians and English were by no means perfect throughout the midpoint of the seventeenth century, the leaders on both sides worked hard to settle their differences. As they all understood, it was the only way to avoid a war.

  ◆ Massasoit’s pictogram from a 1657 land deed.

  ◆◆◆ In the fall of 1657, a few months after the death of William Bradford, Massasoit, now approaching eighty years of age, signed his last Plymouth land deed. At the bottom of the parchment, he sketched an intricate pictogram. What looks like the upper portion of a man floats above what could be his legs with only a wavy line connecting the two. Whatever it actually shows, the pictogram gives a sense of distance and removal. With this deed, Massasoit disappears from the records of Plymouth Colony, only to reappear in the records of Massachusetts Bay as leader of the Quabaugs, a subgroup of the Nipmucks based more than fifty-five miles northwest of Pokanoket.

  For years, the Pokanokets had maintained a close relationship with the Quabaugs, who lived with other subgroups of the Nipmucks between the Connecticut River to the west and the English settlements outside Boston to the east. As early as 1637, Massasoit came before officials in Boston as leader of the Quabaugs, and some historians think that twenty years later, in 1657, he moved to live among them. The move not only distanced the old sachem from Plymouth, it gave his eldest son, Wamsutta, who was nearly forty years old, a chance to establish himself as the Pokanokets’ new leader.

  Wamsutta had already begun to show signs of independence. In 1654, he sold Hog Island in Narragansett Bay to the Rhode Islander Richard smith without the written approval of either his father or the Plymouth commissioners. Just a few months later, Wamsutta refused to part with land his father had agreed to sell to the town of Taunton. Displaying a disregard for the Plymouth authorities, Wamsutta proclaimed that he was unwilling to surrender lands that the owners “say is granted by the court of Plymouth.” Named as a witness to the document is John sassamon—an Indian who represented everything Massasoit had come to fear and distrust.

  John sassamon had been one of the missionary John Eliot’s star pupils. He had learned to read and write English, and in 1653, he attended Harvard College. For years, he had worked in Eliot’s mission, and now he was Wamsutta’s interpreter and scribe. In the spring of 1660, perhaps at sassamon’s urging, Wamsutta appeared before the Plymouth court—not to approve a sale of land but to change his name. The record reads:At the earnest request of Wamsutta, desiring that in regard his father is lately deceased, and he being desirous, according to the custom of the natives, to change his name, that the Court would confer an English name upon him, which accordingly they did, and therefore ordered, that for the future he shall be called by the name of Alexander of Pokanoket; and desiring the same in the behalf of his brother, they have named him Philip.

  From that day forward, Massasoit’s sons were known, at their own request, by Christian names. It was a new era.

  ◆◆◆ Except for his son’s mention of his death in the Plymouth records, we know nothing about the circumstances of Massasoit’s passing. It is difficult to believe that he could be buried anywhere but Pokanoket. One thing we do know is that late in life he began to share Governor Bradford’s concerns about the future. At some point before his death, he took his two sons to the home of John Brown in nearby Wannamoisett. There, in the presence of Brown and his family, Massasoit stated his hope “that there might be love and amity after his death, between his sons and them, as there had been betwixt himself and them in former times.”

  It was somewhat unusual that Massasoit had chosen to make this pronouncement not in the presence of William Bradford’s successor as governor, Thomas Prence, but in the home of an English neighbor. But as the sachem undoubtedly realized, if conflicts should one day arise between his people and the English, it was here, in the borderlands between Plymouth and Pokanoket, where the trouble would begin.

  TWELVE

  The Trial

  THE PILGRIMS HAD been driven by deeply held spiritual beliefs. They had sailed across a vast and dangerous ocean to a wilderness where, against impossible odds, they had made a home. The second generation of settlers grew up under very different circumstances. Instead of their spiritual beliefs, it was the economic rewards of this life that increasingly became the focus of the Pilgrims’ children and grandchildren. Most Plymouth residents were farmers, but there was much more than agriculture driving the New England economy. The demand for fish, timber, grain, and cattle in Europe, the West Indies, and beyond was huge, and by the 1650s, New England merchants had established the pattern of transatlantic trade that existed right up to the American Revolution.

  By the early 1660s, one of the foremost citizens of Plymouth Colony was Josiah Winslow, son of Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow. Josiah was one of the few Plymouth residents to have attended Harvard College, and he had married the beautiful Penelope Pelham, daughter of Harvard treasurer and assistant governor of Massachusetts Herbert Pelham. In 1662, even though he was only thirty-three years old, Josiah had taken over Miles standish’s role as Plymouth’s chief military officer.

  Being Edward Winslow’s son, Josiah had come to know the Indians well. By the 1660s, many colonists, particularly the younger ones like Winslow, felt that their survival no longer depended on the s
upport of the Indians. Forgetting the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have survived their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims’ children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once offered Massasoit.

  ◆ Penelope and Josiah Winslow in 1651.

  For his part, Massasoit’s son Alexander had shown a combativeness of his own. First he had ignored Massasoit’s agreement with the colony and sold Hog Island to the Rhode Islander Richard smith. Then, in the spring of 1662, word reached Plymouth that Alexander had done it again. He had illegally sold land to yet another Rhode Islander. There were also unsettling rumors that the sachem had spoken with the Narragansetts about joining forces against the English. so the Plymouth authorities summoned him to appear before them. When Alexander failed to show up, Governor Thomas Prence instructed Major Josiah Winslow to bring him in.

  ◆◆◆ Winslow headed out in July of 1662 with ten well-armed men, all of them on horseback, trotting along the same old Indian trail that their forefathers had once walked to Pokanoket. They were about fifteen miles inland from Plymouth when they learned that Alexander was nearby at a hunting and fishing lodge on Monponsett Pond in modern Halifax, Massachusetts.

  It was still morning when Winslow and his men arrived at the Indians’ camp. They found the sachem and about ten others, including his wife, Weetamoo, eating their breakfast inside a wigwam. Their muskets were left outside in plain view. Winslow ordered his men to seize the weapons and to surround the wigwam. He then went inside to have it out with Alexander.