If they survived these horrors, there were the savages to worry about, “cruel, barbarous and most treacherous, being most furious in their rage and merciless where they overcome; not being content only to kill and take away life, but delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be; flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals, [they] eat the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live.”
Finally there was the problem of money. A fortune had been spent to settle Virginia. Where would they get money to “fit them with necessaries,” not to mention the expense of shipping? Moreover, “many precedents of ill success and lamentable miseries befallen others in the like designs were easy to be found, and not forgotten to be alleged.” Probably the example that made the deepest impression on the exiles was the fate of 180 fellow Separatists who had left Amsterdam in 1618 under the leadership of Francis Blackwell. They had been arrested in England, and Blackwell had denied his Separatist principles under oath, betraying a number of fellow believers in order to escape the clutches of the bishops. But the ship in which his 180 disciples were “packed like herrings” had been driven far off its course by storms, the water had run low, and disease had broken out killing the captain, Blackwell, and many of the crew. Only fifty starved skeletons had staggered ashore at Jamestown, where, no doubt, more than half of these soon expired.
“The very hearing of these things could not but move the very bowels of men to grate within them and make the weak to quake and tremble,” William Bradford admits. But “some of the cheefest thought otherwise.” Bradford’s modesty does not permit him to name these “cheefest.” But he was one of them. There was something about this young yeoman that made him a natural leader.
Thus in Bradford’s memorable words, the prophets of doom were told that “all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.” No one denied the dangers; they were “great, but not desperate.” The difficulties were many “but not invincible.” It was true that such attempts were not to be made “without good ground and reason, not rashly or lightly as many have done for curiosity or hope of gain.” But “their ends were good and honourable, their calling lawful and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding.”
They had taken a vote at the end of this debate, and a majority of the congregation decided to stay in Holland. This meant that Pastor Robinson would have to stay with them. But the “cheefest” were still determined to move, and they decided to send their youngest and best men as advance guards to found a plantation. If they were successful, Robinson and the others vowed they would join them as quickly as possible. For their spiritual leadership, they would rely on Elder William Brewster until Robinson rejoined them.
So they had begun their voyage, and had sent William Brewster, John Carver, and Robert Cushman to England to “put this design in execution.” Years of frustrating delay and negotiation followed. The king would not grant them true freedom, the Virginia Company was glad to have them as colonists but was too bankrupt to supply them with shipping, and the Dutch offered to back them in a colony at the mouth of Hudson’s River but would not promise to defend them if the English, French, or Spanish attacked. Finally, in February, 1620, Thomas Weston appeared in Leyden with his offer from the London merchants.
Weston obviously saw these exiles as plums for picking. He treated them with the artful condescension a man of the world displays to country bumpkins. When they decided to buy a ship in Holland to transport themselves to England - and for use in the New World - he ragged them unmercifully over their choice of a forty-ton vessel which they rechristened the Speedwell. Looking for a bargain, the exiles bought cheap and then found that the vessel needed extensive repairs, including new masts.
“Mr. Weston makes himself merry with our endeavours about buying a ship,” Pastor Robinson wrote ruefully to John Carver in England. By this time (June 4, 1620) they had learned about the changes in the terms of agreement. Mr. Weston was not only a merry gentleman but a tricky one. It was intolerable to ask men “to serve a new apprenticeship of seven years, and not a day’s freedom from tasks.” This had discouraged a number of volunteers who had withdrawn from the enterprise. As for William Bradford and others who had money in the general fund, they, too, were so discouraged that not a man “would pay anything if he had again his money in his purse.”
By now there were only twenty-seven people willing to go. An attempt had been made to recruit volunteers among the Separatists in Amsterdam, but the democratic ways of the Church of Leyden were “ratts bane” to these stern Christians, and they soon demanded their money back. More and more the venture seemed to be tinged with imminent disaster. But men like William Bradford meant what they had said about “answerable courages.” They had sold their houses and furniture and given up their jobs. It was either sail or starve.
Yet Bradford betrayed his own doubts about the voyage by refusing to take his son John with him. Many others took their children. Issac Allerton, the tailor, brought his pregnant wife Mary and three small children. William White, the wool comber, took his pregnant wife Susanna and five-year-old son Resolved. Mary Brewster, the fugitive’s wife, brought her two youngest children, but left behind her two older daughters with her son Jonathan, age twenty-seven. Others followed Mrs. Brewster’s example and split their families. Francis Cooke and Thomas Rogers each brought along a son but no wife. A few left both wives and children behind - Doctor Samuel Fuller, Blacksmith Moses Fletcher.
These sixteen men, eleven women, and their nineteen children - less than a sixth of the Church of Leyden - were hardly the warrior band one might recruit to challenge a wilderness. The first settlers in Virginia had all been men. Almost every other colony had followed a similar policy. Never before had any English expedition attempted the New World with so many families and children.
Now it was time to declare “a day of solemn humiliation” to seek God’s guidance and blessing. They all came together at their pastor’s house in Bell Alley and heard Robinson preach on a text from Ezra, 8.21. And there at the River, at Ahava, I proclaimed a fast that we might humble ourselves before our God and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children and for all our substance.
Edward Winslow never forgot the advice Robinson gave them. “He charged us before God and His blessed angels to follow him no further than he followed Christ. And if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of His, to be as ready to receive it as ever we were to receive any truth by his ministry. For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy Word. . . . But withal exhorted us to take heed what we received for truth, and well to examine and compare and weigh it with other scriptures of truth before we receive it; for saith he, it is not possible that the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick anti-Christian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.”
After the sermon, Winslow tells us, “they that stayed at Leyden feasted us that were to go. . . . We refreshed our selves, after our tears, with singing of Psalms, making joyful melody in our hearts as well as with the voice, there being many of the Congregation very expert in music; and indeed it was the sweetest melody that ever mine ears heard.”
The next morning almost the entire congregation went with the voyagers to Delftshaven, a port some twenty-four miles from Leyden, where the Speedwell was waiting for them. They boarded the roomy canal boats at Nuns Bridge, near the pastor’s house at Green Gate. In a few minutes they were gliding down the Vliet, as the section of the canal between Leyden and Delftshaven is still called. Through the huge water gate in the city’s massive walls they sailed and then past the lush farms and pasture lands of the Dutch countryside.
As Leyden receded into the distance, more than one of the voyagers turned for a last look at its lofty roo
fs and spires, thinking wistfully of the peaceful, happy years they had spent there. Many, such as William Bradford and Edward Winslow, who had begun their married lives there, were flooded by tender memories. The pangs of their parting still live in William Bradford’s words: “And so they left that good and pleasant city, which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”
Nine miles from Leyden, the canal made a sharp turn to the left and flowed beneath the Hoorn Bridge. Now they sailed quietly beside the main road from the Hague to Delft, lined with tall ancient trees. Through the heart of Delft, then famous throughout Europe for its pottery, they went, passing the Old Kirk with its lancet windows and graceful leaning tower. Soon they were on the canal called the Schie, and finally into that miracle of Dutch engineering the Delftshaven Canal, which flowed toward the sea between miles of dikes high above the surrounding pasture land. Next came sets of sluice gates that gently lifted their barge into the harbor, and across the quiet sunlit water to the side of the Speedwell.
Bradford, Pastor Robinson, and a few others went aboard and conferred with Captain Reynolds and the English crew who had been sent from London to take over the ship. They had all signed up to serve the colony for a full year in the New World. Also aboard was a pilot, Robert Coppin, who had recently returned from a voyage to Virginia. Here was living proof that a man could survive the terrors of the Atlantic.
To skeptical eyes, the sixty-ton Speedwell seemed hardly a match for the mighty ocean. She was a pinnace, a sailing craft smaller than a typical cargo ship, probably not much more than forty feet long. But the passengers were somewhat reassured by recalling that the Godspeed, one of the ships on the maiden voyage to Jamestown, had been a mere forty tons and another, the Discovery, only twenty tons.
Soon down the quay came a smiling crowd, some of them friends from Leyden who had traveled by road to see them off, others friends from the English church in Amsterdam. Dorothy Bradford’s father was an elder of the Amsterdam church, and since the Leyden exiles had spent almost a year in Amsterdam when they first came to Holland, there were many other ties. The well-wishers escorted the departing ones into the town, and another brotherly feast was spread for them. “That night was spent with little sleep by most,” William Bradford says, “but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse and other real expressions of true Christian love.”
The next day the wind was fair, and the Speedwell’s captain said he was ready to sail. Down to the dock they went once more, and there the Bradfords made their heartbreaking farewell with their only son John. Other equally painful goodbyes were said.
Edward Winslow tells us that many were not able to speak one to another for the abundance of sorrow to part.” How deeply the Bradfords felt the farewell can be seen in the father’s own words: “Truely doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting: to see what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them, what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each heart; that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the quay as spectators could not refrain from tears. . . . But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away that were thus loath to depart, their reverend pastor falling down on his knees (and they all with him) with watery cheeks commended them with most fervent prayers to the Lord and his blessing.”
As the Speedwell eased away from the dock, Captain Reynolds, perhaps with a thought to cheering his mournful passengers, had his sailors fire a farewell volley from their muskets, to which his gunners replied with booms from three of the ship’s cannon. Such fireworks were small consolation to the saddened voyagers. But they did give the departure the aura of an historic occasion.
Out across the calm July waters of the English Channel sailed the little Speedwell, heading west to Southampton. This rendezvous had been chosen to avoid interference from either the bishops or the king. The exiles remembered what had happened to Francis Blackwell and his ill-fated congregation when they attempted to sail from London. There was not much support for the king’s religious policy in the west of England. Besides, if all went well, they would not be in port for more than a day.
As the wind rose and the Speedwell began heaving through the Channel’s mild swells, exclamations of alarm came from Captain Reynolds. He did not like the way the ship was handling. He was heard to mutter that only a fool would have put such masts and sails on a sixty-ton pinnace. With every swell, water poured over the decks and cascaded down on the hapless passengers below as if the seemingly solid planks were nothing more than sieves. It was a “wet ship.” In the language of the day, this meant that age and the pounding of the seas had “worked” the planks of the deck until they had separated so far that no amount of caulking could keep the water out.
This was common in sailing ships. It made for discomfort, but it was hardly a serious problem. So it was with excited happiness the voyagers crowded the rails to see the lofty chalk cliffs of Dover, their first glimpse of home in twelve years. Past Eastbourne, Worthing, Brighton, and Portsmouth they sailed, and finally, past the Isle of Wight into Southampton water. There, tied up at the West Quay, was the brown and gold Mayflower. She had sailed from London over a week before, and had been waiting for them for seven days.
Staying carefully below deck was “Mr. Williamson,” better known to the Leyden travelers as their beloved elder William Brewster. He had crept aboard the ship at Southampton, still heavily disguised, and he was not to show his head above deck until they were well at sea. For William Bradford, seeing his old friend and mentor again after almost two years was a joyous occasion, and his personal pleasure was shared by all. Equally pleasant were the reunions with Robert Cushman and John Carver, who greeted their families and friends after long separations.
But Cushman, Carver, and Mr. Williamson were by no means alone. Aboard the Mayflower, along with Captain Jones and his crew, were some eighty “strangers” who had sailed from London. These were the volunteers whom Thomas Weston and his business friends had recruited in London and its vicinity to fill out the plantation’s quota. Some, like Christopher Martin, were dissatisfied with the Church of England and quite ready to join the kind of church the Leyden exiles had created. Others had obviously succumbed to the Weston vision of profits in the wilderness and, like millions who came after them, were heading for the New World to make their fortunes. Stephen Hopkins was almost certainly one of these. He had already made one voyage to Virginia, and had survived a harrowing shipwreck in Bermuda. Now he was sailing on the Mayflower with his pregnant wife Elizabeth and their three children. He was a man of considerable means and had brought along two servants, Edward Dotey and Edward Leister, both of London. Another of the “strangers” was John Billington, a surly, contentious character with a viper-tongued wife and two unruly teenage sons. More devout was well-to-do William Mullins, boot and shoe dealer of Dorking. He was bringing his wife and two children, Joseph and Priscilla. Mullins had bought nine shares in Weston’s company - equal to an investment of about one hundred pounds - and he had a large supply of shoes in the ship’s hold, no doubt the last of his stock.
Also on board were a number of servants hired by either Jones or Cushman for the Leyden group. Husky twenty-eight-year-old John Howland was to do the heavy labor in the wilderness for Deacon Carver. Twenty-two-year-old William Butten was to do likewise for Doctor Samuel Fuller. Eleven men, one woman, and six children were on this helper’s list. The children were all orphans, probably illegitimate. There were thousands of them roaming the streets of 1620 London, and the city fathers had taken to rounding them up and shipping them in lots of one hundred to Virginia. There anyone who would pay three pounds for their fare and two pounds for their clothing could acquire them as servants. Like the apprentices of 1620, these servants were “bound” or indentured under a strict contract, which stipulated that they had to work from four to seven years wi
thout pay to settle the debt of transporting them. With the wrong master, this arrangement could turn out to be little more than slavery; it rarely made for happy, contented workers.
Equally important to the venture were two “master mariners” - Thomas English and John Allerton - and two ordinary seamen who were to man the ten-ton sloop or “shallop” stored between decks on the Mayflower. They were under contract to stay in the New World for a year, like Captain Reynolds and his crew aboard the Speedwell. The shallop would be essential for exploring the shallow waters along the coast.
One other hired man of considerable importance was red-headed Captain Miles Standish, a short, stocky, tough ex-soldier who had been signed to handle the plantation’s defenses. Now a man of about thirty-four, Standish had served with the English army sent by Queen Elizabeth to aid Holland against Spain. The last English troops had been withdrawn from Holland in 1609, about the time that the first of the Scrooby exiles were making their way to Amsterdam and finally Leyden. It is possible that Standish first met them in Holland, and, when the time came, they remembered this pugnacious warrior as the right man to superintend their military affairs. For Standish, whose only trade was soldiering, it was a welcome offer; between wars, the English government had an unpleasant habit of discharging its best men, leaving them either to steal or starve. Childless, the captain brought along only his wife Rose.
One Small Candle: The Pilgrim's First Year in America (The Thomas Fleming Library) Page 3