Edward gives us a wonderful description of the Indian king: Massasoit was ‘a very lusty man, in his best years, an able body’. A great chain of what Edward called ‘white bone beads’ hung about his neck, from which at the back hung ‘a little bag of tobacco’. Edward did not know that what he was looking at was not bone but the little white shells known as wampum, which was the Indians’ currency.
* * *
Edward’s vivid account of these days, Mourt’s Relation, breaks off on 23 March. He had to face what he had been avoiding and ignoring in the vast forest: his wife Elizabeth would not see another day. Their personal dream was not to be. Elizabeth had been slowly declining for some time but now she was too feverish to take in her surroundings, perhaps mercifully.
She may never really have recovered after the deaths of Ellen More and Mary Allerton. Just before Christmas Mary had been delivered of a son, but he was born dead. Probably weakened by haemorrhaging and what was turning into a multiple epidemic of tuberculosis and scurvy, Mary herself died two months later on 25 February. She was just thirty years old.
Of eighteen adult women on the Mayflower only five were left alive at the end of the first winter. Captain Standish’s wife Rose died on 29 January. The Winslows’ two servants had died very soon after arrival. Having a dogged belief in a better future for themselves and their descendants had taken the colonists through the worst times. But determination, even if heightened by a religious excitement, could not prevail against immune systems too weakened by poor food and weather to make a proper recovery. Among those who witnessed the deaths of their loved ones was there, perhaps, a secret depression at the fear of a wretched future, that would not be worth their sacrifices?
In her last hours did Elizabeth mentally return to Holland and the carefree existence she had there? She had been ignorant then of what the future really held. The longed-for journey – for her – would end quickly. But to someone of her fervent belief, death was not to be feared. She passed away on 24 March 1621 and was buried in another unmarked grave on Cole’s Hill.
It may be that one of the reasons Edward threw himself with such abandon into the New World was a determination not to be destroyed by the vanishing of his dear companion in the great adventure.
* * *
The last of the Mayflower passengers were disembarked three and a half months after they had first made landfall. The next month, April, those who were strong enough were working in the fields to sow the seed for harvest, using rotting fish for fertiliser, as they had been shown by Squanto. Because he came from Plymouth he told them to wait a week until shad came up the town brook.
The Mayflower sailors had become very restive and rude. They did not share any enchantment with the Indians or the New World. After showing some interest in exploring the coast they became impatient. To try to avoid disease they had insisted many of the sick leave the ship before they were well, despite the weather and even though some were delicate women and small children. But the sailors themselves could not escape the epidemic. Half of the thirty-five-man crew died of disease. One lay ‘cursing his wife, saying if it had not been for her he had never come this unlucky voyage’. It would have been alien to their creed for the charitable Pilgrims not to help them. They nursed the once-abusive dying men in the most thoughtful manner, providing pillows and brewing herbal infusions.
The settlers saw the Mayflower depart on 5 April 1621. The surviving seamen had been testy in case they lost the tide. The messages for the Pilgrims’ friends in Europe that Captain Jones had stuffed in his canvas pockets sailed with them.
Over two centuries later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – descendant of two of the Pilgrims who subsequently married, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins – imagined the secret tears as the Mayflower left. It had been bobbing at anchor in the bay so comfortingly. He wrote: ‘Long in silence they watched the receding sail of the vessel / Much endeared to them all, as something living and human.’ The last glimpse of the Mayflower ’s departing sail going towards England, ‘Sun-illumined and white, on the eastern verge of the ocean’, seems ‘like a marble slab in a graveyard; / Buried beneath it lay forever all hope of escaping’. Such ideas may have been handed down to Longfellow as historic truths in his family: that many momentarily wanted to abandon ‘this dreary land’.
But whatever their material deprivations, and there would be many, returning was not an option for most of the colonists. England had not been home to the Leiden church members for over a decade. Edward himself believed the Pilgrims were being sheltered against God’s coming wrath. God had ‘brought His people hither, and preserved them from the range of persecution, made it a hiding place for them whilst He was chastising our own nation’. The caves of the misty Atlantic, the ‘measureless meadows of sea-grass / Blowing o’er rocky wastes, and the grottoes and gardens of ocean!’ were a protective barrier against an unfriendly English state.
Meanwhile there was not the lading that the Merchant Adventurers were expecting. Weston wrote to the settlers that if they did not spend so much time seeking biblical precedent and arguing, they could have filled the returning Mayflower.
In fact, there was little time for any sort of philosophical speculation. Their every breath was taken by clearing the land and ploughing fields. It was hard, grinding work without horses or oxen. A third of the indentured servants had died, the tough young men whose strong arms and firm muscles many families were relying on. Most colonists built their own homes with their own bare hands.
Not long after the Mayflower left, the gentle governor, John Carver, collapsed. He was in the fields planting – something he had never done before – when he felt a sudden pain in his head. It was the beginning of the stroke that killed him. He had to be carried back home by the stronger men, to his bed in a half-built house where he was attended by his distraught wife. The community was appalled at yet another blow from the blue. His death was ‘much lamented, and caused great heaviness amongst them’. But because they were now friendly with the Indians the Pilgrims no longer had to bury at night. Governor Carver was given a proper send-off, with volleys of shot fired over his grave.
Six weeks later his wife Catherine was laid beside him. Close family ties and an affectionate heart had taken her from her Yorkshire home to live with her sisters in Leiden. With the loss of her husband she too collapsed. The very subdued community believed she died of grief.
There was something of a breakdown of spirit. Though William Brewster had been such a force in Leiden, Bradford hints that going to America was almost too much for him physically. Brewster was in no way unwilling ‘to take his part’ and to bear his burden working in the fields alongside the rest of the colony, but he was too frail to live on what at times was a starvation diet.
William Bradford was now elected governor, a position he would largely occupy for the next forty years.
* * *
On 30 June 1621 John Robinson wrote a letter from Leiden to the colony. ‘The death of so many of our dear friends and brethren; oh how grievous hath it been to you to bear, and to us to take knowledge of.’ He was full of agonising sorrow for the horrendous mortality rate, as well as the great personal loss of his brother-in-law John Carver. He longed to come to them, but he could not desert the wives and children of many of them and the rest of the community until they were all placed on ships with support from the merchants. Trying to boost their morale, he told them: ‘Much beloved brethren, neither the distance of place, nor distinction of body, can at all either dissolve or weaken that bond of true Christian affection in which the Lord by his spirit hath tied us together.’ He continually prayed for a way to bring the rest of the community over. Nevertheless they should remember that in all battles some must die: ‘It is thought well for a side, if it get the victory, though with the loss of divers, if not too many or too great.’ He hoped God had given them that victory ‘after many difficulties’, even though there were more to come.
At a time of such sorrow and anxiety, and
in such an isolated situation, the colonists clung to one another for emotional support. Strong relationships formed suddenly. One such was between Edward and the recently widowed Susanna White.
William White had died in late February. An exhausted Susanna was left with two small children, one of them a demanding newborn. Edward and Susanna were married less than two months after Elizabeth’s death. Were they in love? Perhaps not in any twenty-first-century sense, but they were a good partnership. Susanna needed male protection. Who was to say affection would not follow, especially with someone as warm and engaging as Edward?
They were married on 12 May by an Elder, as Edward and Elizabeth had been in Holland. The Dutch system of marriage was much admired by the church. Nowhere in the Bible was it shown to be a sacrament or part of the minister’s office. It was ‘a civil thing’ upon which ‘many questions about inheritances do depend’. In any case there were no ordained ministers in the new colony.
Edward now had another good woman to look after him and comfort him. And there was another relationship in his life which also offered hope – his growing friendship with the Indian chief Massasoit.
CHAPTER VI
Massasoit
The year before he left for Leiden, Edward had been working in London when Princess Pocahontas and her train were received in great state by James I. Perhaps he even glimpsed her black hair and slim acrobatic figure accompanied by her half-naked retinue. Indians were the most fascinating cultural topic of the day, the vogue in England since the late sixteenth century. Indian relics were collected as excitedly as American plants. American Indians had occasionally been seen in England before, often freed from slavery as Squanto had been. But the arrival of Pocahontas was electrifying. Already a legend, she was the princess who had saved John Smith’s life in the early years of the Jamestown colony.
The Tradescants, the father and son who were the most influential English travellers and collectors of the first half of the seventeenth century, had a vast piece of skin said to be the mantle of Pocahontas’s father, the emperor Powhatan. It is covered with nearly 20,000 shells forming a design of two beasts of prey and a human. (The Tradescant Collection forms the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where the mantle remains.)
Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492 created a flood of fascinated commentary and speculation, and travel books became hugely popular. Like the invention of the Internet, discovering the Americas altered everything. European philosophers, writers and theologians stretched their minds to fit the new continent and its novel inhabitants into a Christian Eurocentric chronology. What had happened to the New World during the Flood? Were the Indians the original inhabitants of the world who had survived it? Such matters were of great interest to Edward. As he got to know the Indians and became Massasoit’s personal friend, he believed it was his duty to show they were cultured and moral people.
Whether the Indians had a recognisable ‘civilisation’ was a question informing the development of colonisation in England and Spain. The growth of the Spanish Empire organised under the encomienda system – where the indigenous peoples were forced into labour in exchange for protection and enlightenment by their Christian conquerors – led to strenuous public discussion. The Valladolid Debate of 1550–1 at the theological college of San Gregorio saw the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defend the right of Conquest over a people whom he defined as natural slaves. Like the Salamancan School philosopher Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas – the Spanish friar who was Bishop of Chiapas in Mexico – insisted on native rights: the Indians’ government and customs showed they were rational beings, whose property and lives should be sacrosanct. Educated English people were aware of these debates. Las Casas’s A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) had been circulating in translation in England since the 1570s. It was hugely influential, fodder for the English patriotic legend of the dastardly Spanish.
Amongst most English colonisers in the early seventeenth century it was a given that the Indians descended from Adam. As the Virginian minister Alexander Whitaker put it in 1613: ‘One God created us, they have reasonable souls and intellectual faculties as well as we. We all have Adam for our common parent.’
The Renaissance rediscovery of classical texts had profound effects on English colonisers, who adopted views first propounded by Tacitus, that the ancient Britons and Germans provided an instructive lesson in the manly valour, courage, martial vigour and civic virtue that corrupt Imperial Rome lacked. They favourably compared the Indians to the ancient Britons. The other side of the coin was that English colonisers were to be to the Indians what the Romans had been to the ancient Britons, bringing them civilisation and the Gospel. As Whitaker enquired, ‘What was the state of England before the Gospel was preached in our country?’
The classical comparisons which colonisers invoked were also made by Edward himself. Were the temples of the Indians not similar to that of Diana at Ephesus? Such ideas of course made the Indians less alarming and more familiar, and suggest why the Pilgrims were unafraid of peoples quite unlike themselves.
Edward’s first encounters with Massasoit indicated that the Indian king had the sort of rugged virtue admired by Tacitus. From very first the Pilgrims were impressed by the Indians’ valour and bravery. They also hoped that Massasoit might be the key to the fur trade. (From the late sixteenth century technological advances made beaver fur very valuable. It was boiled down to make the felt for hats. Now that they had recovered their health, the Pilgrims recognised the necessity of repaying their backers. The debt was around £1,600 at the time of their departure, but it grew exponentially. The investors proved costive and unimaginative about sending what the colonists needed to support themselves in the early years, such as supplies and draught animals.)
So it was with mounting excitement Edward made the first visit to Massasoit’s home, Sowams. A king was a king to these merchants, and indeed to the court of King James I. The historian David Cannadine has shown that when the English first encountered the native peoples of North America, they did not see them as ‘a race of inferior savages … these two essentially hierarchical societies were seen as coexisting, not in a relationship of (English) superiority and (North American) inferiority, but in a relationship of equivalence and similarity: princes in one society were the analogues to princes in another’.
Pocahontas herself had been treated as the daughter of a great emperor on a state visit by James I. She and twelve Indians with her were received by Queen Anne at Whitehall. She attended a masque by Ben Jonson for the king and sat in a position of honour on his right hand. The artist Simon de Passe made an engraving of her, in court dress with a ruff. Round the portrait runs the legend that she is the ‘filia potentiss. princ. Powhatani imp. Virginiae’ – ‘the daughter of the most powerful prince Powhatan, the emperor of Virginia’. Recent historical investigations have countered the long-held assumption that the early British Empire was underpinned by racist assumptions about the natural inferiority of the races they ruled. The English were not racist in the sense that they believed the Indians were really white people. The theory was that the Indians were born white – as is voiced very clearly by John Smith in 1612: they were ‘of a colour brown when they are of any age, but they are born white.’
* * *
Going to see Massasoit was meant to be an intelligence-gathering operation. The Pilgrims wanted to enquire how to repay the tribe whose corn they had taken on Cape Cod. This had been on their consciences, and they hoped to exchange some of Indians’ corn for other seed, to experiment with what suited the ground best. They were curious to find out how great the Indians’ numbers were, and wished to indicate they were very much up for trading in skins, in addition to making money by fishing.
As Edward and Stephen Hopkins travelled, accompanied by Squanto as guide and interpreter, Edward mentally noted every detail for posterity. Stephen was a fairly good fellow who was on all the early exploratory expeditions. As
he got older, drink made him obstreperous. Pleasant if rather loud company, and one of the leading figures of the colony as a well-to-do merchant, he was unafraid of the Indians. He remained a specialist on trade with them for many years. But he did not have Edward’s hunger for knowledge of them, nor was he especially popular. A fondness for getting the better of people meant he had a reputation for dishonesty when he traded in goods and beer (most of the colony sold things to one another). Perhaps the Indians found him too much of a hard bargainer, a little dishonest and a little coarse.
But Edward was not interested in getting the better of the Indians. Of an intellectual bent, he was uplifted to experience at first hand what he had read about these marvellous denizens of the New World. Squanto was used to English ways. As their guide on the forty-mile walk to Massasoit’s home, he showed the Pilgrims alewives, a seventeenth-century word for shad or herring, and the best places to catch deer. The Indians had their own agricultural methods: for 5,000 years they had grown beans, squash and maize together and kept the undergrowth down by burning it.
Passing a group of Indians fishing in the Pilgrims’ bay, Edward wrote: ‘As the manner of them all is, where victual is easiest to be got, there they live, especially in the summer … our bay affording many lobsters, they resort every spring-tide thither.’ These Indians accompanied the party as they travelled west to Massasoit, who lived near what is now Bristol, Rhode Island. At what they understood to be the Indian settlement of Nemasket (now Middleborough, Massachusetts) the inhabitants entertained them ‘with joy, in the best manner they could, giving us a kind of bread called by them maizium, and the spawn of shads, which then they got in abundance, insomuch as they gave us spoons to eat them’.
As the colonists journeyed deeper into the interior, Squanto showed them the tracks through the undergrowth. It became a piece of New England folklore that Indian paths were no wider than a ‘cart’s rut’. Relaxed by having an experienced guide, Edward took time to itemise the trees – ‘much good timber, both oak, walnut tree, fir, beech and exceeding great chestnut trees’. The terrain was well watered, full of meadows and small hills, but rocky too. Though the country was ‘wild and overgrown with woods, the trees were not thick, and easy to pass through’. At night, Edward and Stephen slept in the open fields with their Indian friends, wrapping their mantles round them. The two colonists were not soulmates, but Stephen was good company and resourceful.
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