The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  By February 1620 the church community was agreed. They sold their homes in Leiden and awaited developments. Edward and Elizabeth prepared to emigrate without a backward glance, and Edward wrote about entering on ‘this great work’. Gilbert Winslow would accompany them, but John would wait until the following year.

  CHAPTER III

  Leaving Holland

  After many squabbles and anxieties, Carver, Cushman and a third administrator chosen by the Adventurers – a brutal Essex merchant named Christopher Martin – pulled the final details together. The expedition would leave for America from Southampton. The Adventurers had provided extra people who were mainly in practical trades, willing to hazard a go in the New World. To twenty-first-century eyes England’s population in 1620 of around 4.5 million seems very small, but it had almost doubled in the previous century, putting pressure on social structures. This was a time of dislocation, when the rich became exponentially richer and the poor exponentially poorer. It was fairly easy to find people who believed they could do better abroad. Half a million acres had been enclosed to make sheep farming more efficient, forcing 50,000 people off the land. The crisis in the countryside was enhanced by inflation from the influx of silver from the New World. Food prices and the cost of living were going up, while wages went down because of the population explosion. Woollen cloth, England’s wealth-creating staple industry, was not as secure as it had been, and the international nature of the cloth trade was beginning to be disrupted by the Thirty Years War.

  By 20 July 1620 the position had firmed up. A small boat in Holland called the Speedwell was bought, which the church intended to keep in America as they would need it for fishing and exploring the coast.

  There was not enough money to hire ships to take all the church community. It was decided that the healthiest and strongest of the congregation should go. Hardiness was important. They would need fit young men to hack down trees for houses. The church knew about the Indians’ quaint wigwams, made of poles and skins, pictures of which were popularly available in a series of engravings by Theodore de Bry of John White’s 1585 watercolours. They had no intention of needing their help.

  In the end around fifty members of the Leiden church were chosen to emigrate, mainly families. As well as the original Nottinghamshire/South Yorkshire contingent there was a cluster of people who had East Anglian roots.* Just as Elizabeth Winslow probably knew Mary Allerton through an East Anglian connection, she probably also knew the two Fuller brothers, thought to be sons of a butcher from Redenhall in Norfolk. Samuel had sufficient medical expertise to be the community’s doctor; his married brother Edward brought a twelve-year-old son.

  The East Anglians included the Allertons, Mary and Isaac. Isaac had worked as a London tailor but now was more of a cloth merchant. With them was their brother-in-law Degory Priest, a hatmaker who left behind his wife, Sarah, while the Bradfords did not take their young son. Similarly a camlet merchant – someone specialising in a sort of cashmere – Thomas Rogers, originally from Northamptonshire, left his wife and two female children behind, probably because he feared the conditions would be too harsh for them.

  Isaac Allerton was not obviously the stuff of which hearty pioneers are made. For all the religious convictions that brought him to Leiden, he could not hear an idea before calculating what was in it for him. It was he who managed to procure the Speedwell when all seemed to be failing. William Brewster was friendly with him, though he may have had misgivings. Allerton’s cunning made up for there being something a little slippery about him. His dynamism and financial acumen made him an important leader in a church full of devout people who were sometimes a little too meditative for their own good.

  His wife Mary, who had been a witness at the Winslows’ wedding, was already a member of the Robinson church in her own right when she married Isaac, suggesting she was an interesting, strong-minded and devout woman. One can compare her to Elizabeth Winslow. ‘Discreet’, ‘sober’ and ‘modest’ were Edward’s favourite adjectives when it came to women. Elizabeth had all of these qualities, as well as pluck and determination. A number of her friends, including Mary Allerton, were perpetually pregnant and Elizabeth may have had concerns as to why she was not.

  William Brewster brought his sons Love and Wrestling. He left behind his daughters Patience and Fear, as well as his eldest son Jonathan. His wife barely concealed her poor spirits at this voyage to the unknown. She was duty-bound to follow her husband, for whose sake she had left her comfortable life in a manor house in Nottinghamshire.

  The Cookes – Francis and his eldest son – were part of the Canterbury group which encompassed Robert Cushman and the separatists from Sandwich (from where Cushman’s second wife came). Sandwich volunteers included the outrageous Mrs Chilton, her elderly husband James and their family friend Moses Fletcher. James was not in the best of health (coming home from church one day the previous year, he had been stoned by some youths), but he was determined to go.

  A quietly religious type was the well-to-do merchant Richard Warren who had come from Hertfordshire to join the church. An impressive figure who had taken risks leaving England and going to America at quite an advanced age, his experience and good sense meant he was consulted on financial matters. He had a redoubtable wife named Elizabeth, and five daughters aged between two and ten: Abigail, Anna, Elizabeth, Mary and Sarah. They and their mother would be among the crowd of weeping female figures waving off the voyagers at Leiden. But Richard Warren could be sure his lioness-like wife would ensure his daughters were well protected and brought up in a sensible, God-fearing way.*

  The young Whites, Susanna and her husband William, took particular care to wrap up their valuable belongings against damage as they were heaved from ship to ship, especially a very pretty writing chest made of black pine which survives to this day. A sort of imitation of Chinese lacquerwork, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with a door and little drawers for letters, it was a real luxury item.

  Everyone assumed John Robinson would be joining the colony, with the rest of the church, once it was up and running. The little community clung to him and his large comforting family. But of course the fact that he was not to accompany them on the initial journey was a subject of grief to many who derived so much from his presence.

  There was an emotional gathering at Robinson’s house the night before they set off. Robinson gave a memorable sermon, examining how a life in the New World could be reconciled within a historical Christian framework. Robinson impressed himself on Edward in such a striking way that years later Edward could remember long passages of his sermons by heart.

  Only God knew whether he would live to see their dear faces again, said Robinson. In his unusual and unorthodox way he emphasised they must never make a fetish of his teaching, but seek for guidance in the Bible. At a time when there was much speculative debate in European government circles about the nature of the Indians, Robinson came down firmly on the side of those who believed the Indians had souls.

  * * *

  In late July 1620 the departure began. The whole remaining community – around 200 people – accompanied those who were leaving. They travelled by canal boat to the coastal town of Delftshaven, where the Speedwell was waiting to receive them. John Robinson headed the group and gave it dignity.

  There were already ructions about the insulting conditions Weston had forced on them. They were furious that, in order to attract investors, the settlers were to work seven days a week and none of them was to own their own home.

  Although Robinson admired Cushman because he was a good, thoughtful man ‘and of special abilities in his kind’, he confided to Carver that Cushman was not the right person to be a negotiator. An odd, intense personality, Cushman’s brutal frankness was nevertheless what was needed if the expedition was ever to get off the ground. To the community’s frenzied protests about the harsh terms, Cushman responded they must stop thinking about social distinction. To their point that ‘All men are not of one condition�
��, he testily replied, ‘If you mean by condition qualities, then I say he that is not content his neighbour shall have as good house, fare, means etc. as himself is not of a good quality.’

  Weston had been so dilatory and inefficient in obtaining the boats it was felt that – with many people having sold their houses in Leiden – it was better to agree to the conditions or the expedition would never get going. It was now or never. There was still a question mark hanging over their faith. Separatists had a reputation for ‘condemning all other churches, and persons but yourselves’. Though they were angry at the hard bargain driven by the Adventurers, there was little that they could do. Bradford, Brewster and probably Cushman owned copies of the English translation of Jean Bodin’s influential and wide-ranging discussion of how to govern, the Six Books of the Republic, written in the wake of the massacre of the Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Brewster and his protégé Bradford were also aware of – if they had not actually read – the work of writers including Plato, Pliny the Younger and Livy, and Thomas More’s Utopia. William Brewster was a highly educated man and many members of the congregation were not. Nevertheless, a level of political consciousness existed among them, created by their exiled state. William Bradford, a passionate autodidact whose nose was never out of a book, constantly sought precedents for their new life, not just in the Bible but in classical literature. He would soon be comparing sailing to America to an episode in Seneca, and Plymouth Colony’s smallholdings to the early days of ancient Rome.

  By now Mrs Brewster was in hiding with her husband, so Brewster asked the Leiden-dwellers to pack up his precious library and bring it to him in Southampton. Over his lifetime he would collect over 400 books, at a time when they were still rare objects. There were many classics, including religious and philosophical works which gave him the stoicism to endure. The leather-bound editions must have been a strange sight amongst the more homely household possessions (brooms, spindles and great black iron cooking pots) on the barges moving serenely from Leiden to the sea, as was William Brewster’s chest. Made of Norwegian pine – there was a great deal of trade between Norway and Holland – it can still be seen at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, Massachusetts. About two and a half feet high and four and a half feet wide, with leather straps and made out of six planks, it was used as Brewster’s desk, bed and storage unit. It was also the surface on which the first civil contract agreement in New England was drawn up as the Mayflower was at harbour in Provincetown, New England.

  Some wanted to bring the elaborately turned chairs and bedsteads that were the fashion in England and the Netherlands, but there was not enough room for all their furniture. Many of their last links with their old lives vanished as they left Leiden. Half their furniture was to be sent over later but never arrived.

  William and Susanna White already had one child, their son, Resolved. Since Susanna was pregnant – yet apparently unafraid of travel – the Whites commissioned a Dutch cradle for the new baby. This cradle, which rests on oak rockers, was made of wicker, willow osiers or shoots woven in a checker pattern. It was a real souvenir of Holland, where willows were grown along 3,000 polders to help prevent flooding.

  As the Whites left Holland it was at its loveliest, an orderly man-made landscape. Windmills pumped water out of the saturated earth and the willow trees’ trembling branches swayed in the breeze. Did the Whites sigh as they realised what they were leaving behind? Just like other English residents in Holland, Edward Winslow had relished the simple Dutch diet of bread and the local cheeses eaten to this day, including Gouda and Edam. In fact the Pilgrims took so much Dutch cheese with them it would be what they first ate on American soil and offered to the Indians.

  Dairy farming was one of the principal occupations. Dutch farmland was the drained soil of marsh and bogs far too wet for crop farming. As Edward and Elizabeth began their great journey into the wilds, a reminder of the Dutch way of life accompanied them: eighty casks of butter, about fourteen hundredweight, made by the church’s housewives, including Elizabeth. Stored in firkins, small wooden barrels with lids, it was loaded onto the barges by hardworking Dutch bargemen in their baggy trousers. With their cramped living conditions in Leiden it is unlikely many Pilgrims had gardens in which to tether animals. The huge amounts of butter they made may well have come from paying for the milk of a local Dutchman’s cow.

  For all those like the ebullient Edward who were eagerly awaiting the future, there were a considerable number who dreaded separation. Mrs Carver had already spent many months apart from her husband John while he negotiated so patiently, despite much exasperation. She found it particularly hard to leave her three sisters and brothers-in-law as she came from a close-knit family who had emigrated to Leiden to be near one another.

  Other women were more robust. Mrs Chilton was a forceful, daring person unafraid of censure or unconventionality. She needed to be strong. Unlike many other mothers, she thought her twelve-year-old daughter Mary would be fine in the advance party. Elizabeth Winslow must have liked the fact she was with her good friend Mary Allerton. In that group there was a gently percolating excitement at the thought of a better life. Accompanying them was Myles Standish, a close friend of Robinson, and his wife Rose. As a soldier’s wife who moved quarters with each campaign, Rose was perhaps the woman in the party who was most used to discomfort.

  Standish was hired for his military experience and expertise to defend the colony from what were presumed to be savage Indians. A small, bristly, red-faced member of the church, he was a veteran of the Dutch wars and had been wounded in 1601. He owned a large number of books on subjects almost as varied as those in William Brewster’s library, and was trusted to be the colony’s treasurer for a long period. He was very fond of John Robinson and in his will left a sum of money to Robinson’s youngest daughter Mercie, in memory of her father. Standish was from a family originally from Lancashire, well known for its Catholic recusant families. Some historians have suspected him of a cryptic Catholicism, but there is little sign of it, especially as he fought for Protestant Holland against Catholic Spain. He took his full armour used against the Spanish with him to America. What had been necessary on the Flanders battlefield seemed absurd against half-naked men armed with bows and arrows. On its first outing his armour became tangled up in the briars and undergrowth of the New England forest.

  Edward bought a Spanish rapier in Holland, perhaps as a souvenir of the country he might never see again, but the colonists were short on guns. They were also short of livestock and other animals. The Dutch East India Company provided all Dutch settlers with a herd of cattle, but the Robinson church had nothing like that. They brought their own ploughs, though unbeknownst to them the Indians had no domesticated horses or oxen, only dogs. Everything, including the ploughing, was at first to be done without the help of beasts. (Once they got to England, friends and the new colonists joining them bought pigs and goats to accompany them. On the Mayflower there were two dogs, an English mastiff and an English spaniel. Three years after they landed they had fifty pigs, six goats and a large number of chickens.)

  There was very little room on the Speedwell. Without warning even more of their precious possessions, particularly furniture, had to be left behind with those staying in Leiden. Family tradition had the Winslows bring with them the great carved oak chair which is in Pilgrim Hall Museum, and a table with a walnut top made in Cheapside in 1614. Perhaps Elizabeth also managed to secrete a small set of darning tools and a drop spindle for weaving wool.

  After prayers performed by Robinson, those staying in Holland accompanied the colonists to the ship. They were scarcely able to speak to one another because of their emotions. Those who were left behind had to jump off because the tide was running. Robinson himself was on his knees on the quay, barely able to see through his tears. From on deck those departing ‘gave them a volley of small shot and three pieces of ordnance’. With this jaunty farewell salute they began their great journey into the unknown.
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  Robinson continued to fret about his flock, either that there might be a collapse of group morale or that they might have trouble mingling with the non-church members who would be joining them in Southampton. With such a mixed bag of settlers, all kinds of fights might break out. The ways of the church were different from others, but they must try and see other people’s point of view, ‘with brotherly forbearance’. Speaking of his pain at being separated from them he asked, ‘Let every man repress in himself … as so many rebels against the common good, all private respects of men’s selves not sorting with the general conveniency.’ In all new enterprises, like new houses, the parts must be firmly knit and ‘not shaken with unnecessary novelties or other oppositions at the first settling thereof’.

  He wrote several letters to give them some useful pointers, reminding them of the importance of obeying those they elected to govern. Now they had made themselves into ‘a body politic, using amongst yourselves civil government’, the fact that they did not have any ‘persons of special eminency’ meant that whatever their social position, office-holders should be given their full loyalty. He reminded them that the image of the Lord’s power and authority ‘which the magistrate beareth, is honourable, in how mean persons soever’.

  The Pilgrims clearly felt a difference between themselves and the new arrivals, many of whom were to give practical help. They were not members of the Leiden church and a good many were not even religious. The Billington family, for example, were a wild bunch. But recent research shows that some of the new people had sympathy with Puritan aims, and may have been members of other separatist churches in London. Some even had Leiden links. The businessman William Mullins had shares in the Adventurers’ company. Previously he was thought to have been a shoemaker because he brought 250 pairs of shoes on board the ship. His house in Dorking, Surrey, shows he was well-to-do. He had been hauled before an ecclesiastical court for erroneous opinions. He decided he needed to make a fresh start, and shoes were an easily transportable form of capital. He also brought with him a son, Joseph, and his daughter, the pretty eighteen-year-old Priscilla.