Sadly there would not be much time for refined discussions in the months ahead. Good manners would be the least of their problems. In fact all their preconceptions of leading a civilised life were to take an almighty hammering. Etiquette books seem curiously touching and optimistic. Building a colony would be yet another sacrifice they would make for their religion.
What they did not need to read was how important it would be to be able to comfort one another, even if it were just with the warmth of their bodies. Although they set off from England in golden September days, they arrived in America at the darkest and least prepossessing time. The Pilgrims had not anticipated that the ground froze in mid-November, making planting impossible until the spring. In fact they had scarcely anticipated anything in the rush to get away, including that they would need fishing rods. They especially had not known that snow from the Arctic would suddenly sweep in, which made New England impassable unless one had snowshoes, like the Indians.
Although Edward and Elizabeth were on a holy mission, they were also Europeans, used to permanent buildings and a certain way of life, with a sense of history. The merchant community had been involved in the fish trade off the Newfoundland coast for over a century. Edward and Elizabeth knew that they would have to be entirely self-reliant. They would have no friends to welcome them, and no inns to offer warmth and shelter. There were no towns. But despite all the warnings it was very hard for the settlers to get out of the habit of thinking secretly that ‘civilisation’ would suddenly materialise. Once the Pilgrims got off the Mayflower they described looking for Indian ‘towns’, not aware that the Indians lived nomadically within their territories. Edward was to write sarcastically: ‘Can any be so simple as to conceive that the fountains would stream forth wine or beer, or the woods and rivers be like butchers’ shops or fishmongers’ stalls?’ Eight years after the Mayflower sailed the philosopher Blaise Pascal was born. One of his most famous sayings was ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.’ Deep down in the Pilgrims there must have been an almost overwhelming fear of the infinite, countered only by the thought of their God protecting them.
* * *
The Pilgrims were lulled into a sense of false security on a journey that began in warm sunlight. They gathered on deck and marked the bells for 8 a.m. and the noon watch with Psalms and prayers. The sea voyage suspended life. As David Cressy has written, ‘the ship became a liminal space, floating free of conventional considerations’. Voyagers bonded in the cramped space and emerged ready to face change and a new beginning. In some ways it was like a form of birth, as it is for immigrants everywhere.
The image the Leiden church had most readily to hand was the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses to bring his people to the Promised Land. The sea as providential metaphor would be one of the constant themes in the Puritan sermons preached to the 20,000 English immigrants who arrived in America over the next twenty years. Surviving the dramas of the ocean confirmed the Puritan sense that God was looking after them. The verse in Psalm 107 – they ‘that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep’ – became one of their favourites. The Reverend Francis Higginson, who followed the Pilgrims ten years later, wrote that those who stayed in ‘their own chimney corner’ and ‘dare not go far beyond their own town’s end’ would ‘never have the honour to see these wonderful works of Almighty God’ which were an instruction and a delight.
* * *
Elizabeth was fortunate in having several good female friends on board. Though the two women with whom she had travelled from England to join the church remained in Leiden, she was close to Mary Allerton which must have been comforting.
Mary had three children with her, Bartholomew, Remember and Mary (another child had died in Leiden), and she was pregnant again. In fact no fewer than three of Elizabeth’s fellow wives were pregnant. Labour could begin at any time. The women huddled together, longing intensely to see land. Although giving birth was then very much a public event for women, even the most elementary hygiene considerations could not be provided on board. Hot water was hard to guarantee, while keeping linen dry and sanitised was an impossibility. Every surface could be invaded by seawater at any time. Three hundred years before flush toilets, life’s lowlier details were something everyone had to deal with. Those unused to ships found it overwhelming. Travellers could be ticked off for being ‘very nasty and slovenly’, while ‘beastliness’ ‘would much endanger the health of the ship’. There was constant scrubbing and perhaps some discussion with the ship’s surgeon barber, young Giles Heale, who had just got his licence from the College of Barber–Surgeons. The Pilgrims also had their popular and courageous medical man Samuel Fuller to rely on for minor aches and pains. One of the Leiden church’s deacons, he was a self-taught medic specialising in herbal medicine, who may have attended medical lectures in Leiden. But Samuel and Giles would not be nearly as important as the female community when it came to childbirth. All grown-up women had to know about midwifery.
One day on the ship, it suddenly became clear that Stephen Hopkins’s wife Elizabeth was going into labour. While Stephen hustled his children up the other end of the boat, Elizabeth Winslow helped the more experienced married women rig up some kind of curtain for privacy. Amazingly, despite the conditions, a little boy was safely delivered. In wonder his parents named him Oceanus.
* * *
Although Oceanus had been safely delivered and the baby was the source of much joy, the pregnant Mary Allerton and Susanna White remained of special concern. The Pilgrims had anticipated nausea but not the poor health a voyage at sea produced. They were wearing all the clothes they possessed for warmth, but they were constantly wringing wet. Sunny days were longed for to hang the clothes out to dry but nothing stopped mould from forming. Some passengers were beset by intense fears which they had found hard to fight against but which they tried to conceal. They were not helped by the ship’s crew, who were irreligious and offensive. The Speedwell ’s alarming leak was believed by many to have been intentional. One group of sailors had lost their nerve about landing on the unknown shores of America.
The absence of Dorothy and William Bradford’s three-year-old son left behind in Leiden may have contributed to Dorothy’s increasingly desperate mood. There were lots of children on board to remind her of him. The Hopkins children were mainly clustered round Mrs Hopkins in her makeshift bed and delighting in the tiny baby at her breast. Doubtless playing together were Mary’s daughters Remember and Mary, six and four, and Love and Wrestling, ten and six, children of the Brewsters.
While Elizabeth Winslow looked after Ellen More, her special charge during the voyage, Edward and the rest of the more articulate church leaders struggled with the problems of how to organise the disparate colony. Coordination was made more difficult by Christopher Martin’s unsympathetic manner and bullying ways. When the Pilgrims arrived there had to be some rules of a self-evident kind – crimes like murder and theft were obviously forbidden. Transgressors were tried in a simple procedure by the governor and his assistants sitting in a makeshift court, with a number of freemen (as people who held stock in the colony became known) entitled to vote.
Because there had been so many stops and starts, the Pilgrims were worried that their victuals would be half eaten up before they left the coast of England. The excitement began to become more a mood of endurance as the weather set in the nearer they got to America. After 1,500 miles of good weather, storms suddenly blew up. The boat pitched continuously as they were attacked by fierce cross-winds, and the top sails started to shake, a danger signal. One of the main beams in the midships cracked. If something was not found to hold it up, the ship would not complete the journey. As the passengers crouched in semi-darkness beneath battened hatches there was a parley by the leaders and ship’s officers about whether they should return to England. But it was decided that the mast could be replaced by a great iron screw the Pilgrims h
ad brought with them.
In the past scholars believed the iron screw was part of the old Leiden printing press rescued from William Brewster’s attic, but the historian Jeremy Bangs suggests it was probably a house jack used to raise heavy timber frames for houses. It held the boat together for the next 1,500 miles, and the crew caulked any holes with pitch.
The weather grew worse, with storms so violent the swell rose to a hundred feet. As the ship was tossed on mountainous waves the passengers thought the wild sea would drag them to their deaths. The men held on to their wives, and the wives sheltered their children as they were thrown backwards and forwards. Water was everywhere, soaking their hair and in their mouths. The sails were taken down and the masts lashed to the ship. The Pilgrims’ Ark had simply to trust in being borne by the waves. In the hold they prayed God would make the storm calm and the waves still, as Psalm 107 said He would, and bring them to their desired haven. And they were preserved, despite conditions so appalling they could hardly see for the spray in their faces.
At one point John Carver’s servant John Howland, a lively, chatty young man, fell overboard but was rescued when the sailors fished him out with a boathook. And in what was for once a clear demonstration of the Almighty’s providence, a haughty and brutal young seaman who had tormented the poorer passengers was suddenly struck by a terrible disease. He had been cursing them to their nervous faces and delighting in his own good health, saying he hoped to throw half of them overboard before they reached America. Instead it was his body, wrapped in a white winding sheet, which would be the first to be thrown overboard. A detailed description of crossing the ocean in the autumn, written in November 1619, reveals how the mood of emigrants veered between annoyance at being becalmed and terrible anxiety when storms lasted all day ‘in the surging and overgrown seas’. Women were the ones who suffered most because, believed to be more delicate, they tended to spend most of the voyage cooped up under the hatches. What calmed the Leiden people, as it had done for the past twelve years, was their faith, and their habit of praying together and fasting to ‘seek the mind of God’. We know from Edward that many of the congregation were very musical. As the storms subsided and the ship sailed on, contrapuntal melody rose faintly from the decks, as the Pilgrims sung their Psalms.
Later emigrants would note the increasing cold as they neared America. All who were strong enough to go up on deck felt the touch of a sharper climate on their skin, and a brighter, stronger, harsher light in their eyes which was quite different from the soft tints of rain-washed England. Edward thought other people thinking of emigrating should profit by the experience of the Mayflower passengers and in 1621 sent the following advice back to England: ‘Be careful to have [on board your ship] a very good Bread-room, to put your biscuits in.’ On the Mayflower they became soggy. The casks for beer and water must be iron-bound so that they did not rot. Passengers should not do the dry salting themselves – no one could do it better than the sailors. Meal, i.e. flour, should be tightly packed in a barrel and in an accessible place for the journey so passengers could take it out for pancakes and pasties. Travellers must also bring plenty of lemons. Edward does not mention it by name but he was aware of scurvy, a terrible disease which could wipe out whole navies. They should ‘bring juice of lemons, and take it fasting; it is of good use. For hot waters, aniseed water is the best; but use it sparingly.’ Would-be colonists should build their cabins on the between deck as openly as possible, for conditions became fetid. They must take a ‘good store of clothes and bedding’. On a journey over two months everything became wet, even clothing that was packed away.
There were no glassmakers in America, but a temporary solution was ‘paper and linseed oil, for your windows’, and cotton yarn to make wicks for lamps. Every man should bring a shotgun, with a long barrel ‘for big fowls’. But travellers should not worry about the weight of it because most of their shooting was from stands. If settlers wished to bring anything as a bit of a luxury, butter or salad oil were very good.
Meanwhile the dazed passengers were saddened by the death of Samuel Fuller’s apprentice William Button, a youth of about twenty-one. While it did not exactly inspire confidence in Samuel Fuller’s remedies, young Button was the only passenger to die on the journey. Three days after his boyish corpse wrapped in a sheet had sunk to the depths of the ocean, the Pilgrims heard birdsong. The sailors told them that was a sign of land even though it might be 200 miles away. On 9 November 1620, with huge joy they saw what they correctly presumed to be what John Smith had called Cape Cod. It looked like ‘so goodly a land’ which was pleasantly wooded down to the sea.
CHAPTER V
Land
Even then, nothing went straightforwardly, and for two days, the ship was lashed with rain from squalls.
Although the Mayflower ’s crew were experienced sailors – Captain Jones had spent a lifetime transporting wine, while the two pilots or mates, John Clarke and Robert Coppin, had previously been to Virginia and New England – Jones had never travelled beyond Europe and he became alarmed by the huge waves, roaring breakers and shoals between Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. Instead of continuing south towards Virginia, he decided it was safer to turn the ship round and sail back up the coast to Cape Cod. Where Provincetown now stands on a slender peninsula curved round like a lobster claw, the Mayflower made anchor at sunrise on 11 November 1620, after just over two months at sea.
William Bradford remembered that the whole congregation, including Elizabeth and Edward, knelt in prayer at having arrived at all. But for all their feelings that God had saved them, the congregation were half-starved. Those who ran ashore and gobbled green mussels contracted food poisoning. The ship’s sanitation, always unsatisfactory, was even more of a health hazard at anchor.
Provincetown had trees, which were reassuring to see. The same species as back home grew round the bay in a harmonious way. There were oaks, pines, and sassafras – nowadays the chief ingredient of root beer, but then reputed a medicine – and other sweet wood. Juniper was cut down and taken back to be burnt on deck to fumigate the ship and cheer the weaker passengers shivering with the cold and incessant damp. Two days after the Mayflower had landed, the women felt brave enough to disembark. They washed themselves and some of their clothes on the beach in a discreet fashion, holding up towels with relief at having some privacy and being clean at last (which, Bradford remarks in a down-to-earth way, was very much needed).
There was, however, the real problem of order with some of the ‘strangers’ who had come on board at Southampton. They did not share the Leiden church’s unifying sense of purpose. There were mutinous mutterings that since they were not within Virginia, they had no patent and were not bound by anyone or anything. They said, accurately, that when ashore they could do as they pleased. No one could command them.
The Pilgrims’ initial problems about permission to depart meant their new colony did not have the advantage of a royal charter. Therefore just before they landed, they decided that they had to draw up an agreement so that everyone would abide by the same laws, which included many of John Robinson’s suggestions. This is now known as the Mayflower Compact. By and large the colonists were sensible people who obeyed the rules and accepted that the energetic Myles Standish should be their military leader, as it was obvious that discipline might be needed at first – authority had to be laid down or the colony would not last. Some of their new companions – especially the chaotic, boisterous Billington family and their ringleader, the obstreperous John Billington – were an argumentative and easily aggrieved group, who were perpetually discontented. One Billington son, the mischievous fourteen-year-old Francis, almost killed some of the passengers when he set off his father’s gun inside a cabin full of people. Luckily no one was hurt. Billington’s troublemaking and his refusal to obey Standish’s orders made John Carver, in many ways the kindliest soul imaginable, lose his temper. Billington was called before the whole company and condemned to having his neck and h
eels roped together in a humiliating fashion, until he begged for mercy and was forgiven. Bradford described Billington as ‘a knave’.*
The Mayflower Compact shows that the more educated – including Brewster, Carver and Edward – had some understanding of early seventeenth-century social-contract theory. So long as they were adults, i.e. twenty-one, all males on board were allowed to sign it, including the indentured servants. It bound these forty-one people into ‘a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience’. There was no necessity to be a member of the Leiden church.
The Mayflower Compact has been much romanticised. The signing took place in no special cabin. It is unlikely that women or children were present for it, as many representations suggest. Yet artists are right to depict the scene as a moment of great drama and historical import. The act of creating such a colony was revolutionary. Plymouth Colony was the first experiment in consensual government in Western history between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch. The colony was a mutual enterprise, not an imperial expedition organised by the Spanish or English governments. In order to survive, it depended on the consent of the colonists themselves.* Necessary in order to bind the community together, it was revolutionary by chance.
The Mayflower Compact has a whisper of the contractual government enunciated in the 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers ‘from the consent of the governed’. It anticipated the eighteenth-century American Republic’s belief that political authority was not bestowed by a monarch but a contractual agreement of free peoples, articulated at the end of the seventeenth century by the philosopher John Locke. The eminent American historian George Bancroft has called the Compact ‘the birth of constitutional liberty … in the cabin of the Mayflower humanity recovered its rights and instituted government on the basis of “equal laws” for the general good’.
The Mayflower Page 7