One Small Candle: The Pilgrim's First Year in America (The Thomas Fleming Library)

by Thomas Fleming

  Firing a matchlock was slow work. Again and again, Standish had his men go through the lengthy maneuver on the Mayflower’s unsteady deck. First the match was removed from the serpentine with the left hand and held between the fingers. With the thumb and forefinger of the same hand, each man had to hold the barrel of the gun upright while with his right hand he poured a charge of powder down the muzzle. Next he shoved home a ball and a wad of tow or paper with his wooden rammer. Finally the flashpan had to be “primed” with fine-grained powder, the cover closed, and any loose powder blown away.

  Now they were ready to fire - almost. The match must first be returned to the serpentine and adjusted. The glowing tip had to be blown into life. The match had to be watched continually, Standish warned. If it burned down to the serpentine, it would go out. When this happened, it should be instantly reignited from the other end, which was also kept burning for this reason.

  Now - ready, aim carefully - fire! The crash of a dozen muskets shook the Mayflower. The gunners were enveloped in a great cloud of smoke. Not wanting to waste precious powder, Standish probably had the men go through the monotonous drill more often than he had them fire, but they had to shoot the guns once or twice to get used to their tremendous kick. An unprepared man could easily dislocate his shoulder.

  A few men on board, Miles Standish and probably Stephen Hopkins, had more modern guns - snaphaunce or flintlock muskets, which could be fired without the clumsy match and which were far more accurate. They were also more expensive, and most of the voyagers had had to content themselves with the second-rate matchlocks.

  Military preparations were by no means the only concern of the leaders from Leyden. The future organization of the colony was a far bigger question. They were acutely aware that they were a minority - a mere twenty-seven adults - yet it was vital to retain control of the group if they were to find the kind of commonwealth they envisioned. As a first step in this direction: When they lost the Speedwell they deposed Christopher Martin from his post as “governor” of the Mayflower and elected John Carver in his place. But when they landed they would need allies among the “strangers” - and a good part of these first weeks were spent in cautious attempts to get acquainted and find out who was trustworthy.

  Stephen Hopkins was a man who automatically commanded respect, but he was a difficult, contentious character with an alarming past record of dissension. When he had been shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1609, he had come within a whisker of being hanged for mutiny. Richard Warren of London was called “master,” a social term only slightly below “gentleman,” and seemed to be a serious, dependable man. So was William Mullins. Then there was Christopher Martin, whose disposition showed no sign of changing, and the Billington family, who were uncooperative about everything, full of complaints about food and sleeping quarters, quarreling with crew and fellow passengers alike. It was not going to be easy to control such a mixed company.

  William Brewster had worked as a teacher in Holland, and he may have set up a school for the children on the Mayflower. As charming as he was gentle, with a disposition William Bradford describes as always “cheerful,” Brewster was the perfect man for the job. He had brought along a library of almost two hundred books, which he no doubt doled out to all comers. But every family had at least one book of its own - the Geneva translation of the Holy Bible - and it was this that Brewster used for a schoolbook.

  For the older boys and young men such as John Alden, there were wrestling matches and other sports with the sailors. On another voyage a few years later, one diarist noted how “the Captain set children and grown men to harmless exercises which the seamen were very active in and did our people much good.” The stronger, such as Alden, may well have pitched in with the crew to haul on the thick and cumbersome halyards as one of the ship’s six sails were dropped or hoisted. The huge bulky sails required backbreaking effort to maneuver.

  From his poop deck Christopher Jones surveyed the life below him with a captain’s uncompromising eye. Day and night the decks had to be swabbed, the sails and lines mended, and the sailors kept at the perpetual task of keeping their clothes and themselves reasonably clean. Any sickness or breach of discipline on the part of passengers or crew was reported to him immediately.

  The ship itself required constant attention. Sails rubbing against the rigging could be holed, and ropes could part in the same way within a matter of hours. As the wind shifted, the sails had to be expertly handled to get the maximum benefit from it. If it blew aft to forward, both sheet lines would be well slacked out on port and starboard sides so that the sails could stretch to maximum width and drive the ship at her best speed. But the wind was seldom so cooperative, and when it shifted to dead ahead, the sails would flap and lose all their driving power, so the course had to be altered - the nautical word is tacking - until the sails filled again. When the wind came on either quarter, the sails had to be adjusted once more to get the most out of it.

  As the absolute ruler of this floating kingdom, Captain Jones had chosen their current route. They were not going to follow the old sea trail blazed by Columbus, which ran past the Canaries, on a great southerly loop down to the West Indies, and then north along the American coast. It was a thousand miles longer and, for a single ship, far more dangerous. Algerian, French, and Spanish pirates lurked along it, always ready to pounce on a lone ship, especially if she was English.

  Jones had decided to hold the Mayflower firm on the forty-second parallel and drive for the New World on an almost straight line. It was a route lately preferred by the English, but neither Jones nor his fellow captains knew that almost all the way across, they were bucking the contrary current of the Gulf Stream, which slowed the ship’s speed to a bare two miles an hour.

  To tell him where he was on the trackless ocean, Captain Jones relied largely on shooting the sun with his cross-staff, a graduated bar of wood about thirty-six inches long, across which at right angles was attached a sliding bar about twenty-six inches long; there were sights on one end of the vertical bar and on both ends of the horizontal bar. By measuring the angle between the sun and the horizon through these sights, Jones was able to approximate his latitude pretty well, but of longitude he was almost always in the dark. The chronometer, by which today’s navigators determine their distance east or west of Greenwich meridian with marvelous accuracy, would not be aboard ships at sea for a long time.

  For judging his speed, Captain Jones had only two crude instruments, the log line and the log glass. The log line was a quadrant of wood weighted on one side with a line about 150 fathoms long attached to it. The line was knotted at regular intervals, and by counting how many knots ran out while the sand ran through the log glass, the number of knots, or miles per hour, could be roughly computed. In heavy weather, or when fighting head winds, the device was almost useless, however.

  Heavy weather was exactly what Captain Jones and his mates were expecting. Balmy breezes could not last at this time of the year on the Atlantic. Again and again, second mate Robert Coppin, who had been transferred from the Speedwell, or first mate John Clark would stare grimly into the northwestern horizon where the westerlies came roaring down from Greenland. Or they would quietly study the surface of the ocean looking for that “head sea,” which often announces the gale hours before it arises, with the regular heave of swell upon mounting swell.

  Finally it came, the cold breath of the Arctic, tearing down the long reach of white-capped sea. “All hands, all hands,” roared the boatswain’s mate, adding some choice persuasion which must have made the passengers shudder. “Up, up, you gobbets, you abbey-lubbers!” Into the shrouds went the shivering seamen, some of them still half asleep, while others heaved on the groaning, squealing yards. Aboard the old square-riggers, sails were furled by hoisting, never an easy job, and worse now with the wind tearing at them. Then came the job of lashing them, sixty feet above the careening ocean.

  Beneath the feet and before the eyes of the horrified passengers, the Mayf
lower suddenly began behaving in a new and entirely alarming manner. The masts swayed crazily against the lowering sky, and the bow lifted hesitantly over first one swell and then a second, and finally a third gave her no chance to come up and she plowed into the heart of the onrushing mountain of water, which came thundering over the forecastle and inundated the waist. A terrific shudder ran through the Mayflower. She was “hawse full,” water pouring off her waist and streaming through her forecastle, where the cook was frantically shutting portholes.

  Now sea after sea broke over the old ship, sending her reeling first to the port and then to the starboard, while men at the whipstaff fought to keep her headed. On the poop deck, Captain Jones and his mates, drenched in flying spray, bellowed more orders to the men aloft.

  If there were any civilians left on deck, Captain Jones surely chased them with a roar: “All passengers below!” Hatches were secured, portholes on the gun decks bolted tight, cannon and any other heavy movables lashed down. Captain Jones and his crew were left alone above deck to cope with their natural enemy, the ocean. “We shall have wind,” Captain John Smith wrote in his advice to would-be explorers. “Take in the sprit sail. In with your top sails. Lower your main sails, lower the foresail. . . . Lash sure the ordnance, strike your top masts to the cap. . . . How capes the ship? Con the ship, spoon before the wind. She lists! She lies under the sea. Try her with a cross jack, bowse it up with the outlooker. She will founder in the sea!”

  Not if Christopher Jones could help it. He had done all these things, and more. But it was as bad a storm as he had ever seen. Every inch of sail had to be furled. There was nothing to do but hull - run before the wind with bare poles - even though they were being driven hundreds of miles off their course. Still the Atlantic pounded after them, foaming over the lower decks, flinging great geysers of spray over the poop, while on the howling wind came the bitter autumn rain, cutting through the thin shirts and trousers of the sailors.

  Below deck the passengers huddled together praying for God’s help. On other voyages, the women passengers had panicked in similar storms, making everyone “look one upon the other with troubled hearts and fainting bosoms, our clamors drowned in the winds.” To make matters worse, if possible, after the first day or two the Mayflower proved herself a wet ship. The pounding seas opened all the seams in her upper works, and with every wave, freezing water cascaded down upon the hapless passengers, huddled below in the foul semidarkness, lit only by the occasional glow of a single candle through panes of opaque lanthorn. Knowing nothing of seamanship, they felt that every roll and pitch and shudder of the ship was the end, as well it might be.

  Stephen Hopkins must have remembered with special alarm another wild storm, which had sent him and others aboard the Sea Adventure piling onto the Bermuda reefs in 1609. One of his fellow passengers left a vivid description of that fierce blow, and many of the details were probably repeated upon the Mayflower. “Our sails wound up, lay without their use, and if at any time we bore but a hullock, or half forecourse, to guide her before the sea, six and sometimes eight men were not enough to hold the whipstaff in the steerage.” Once, a wave “broke upon the poop and . . . covered our ship from stern to stern, like a garment of vast clouds it filled her brim full, from the hatches up to the spar deck.”

  Even a moderate storm - winds up to fifty miles an hour - piles up waves fifty feet high, and the winds that struck the Mayflower at this time of the year on the North Atlantic were at least of this velocity. Anyone who has ever watched a ship at sea fight her way through a gale can have some small idea of what Captain Jones and his men went through watching waves roar down upon them as high as the masts, seeing the weary ship plunging down, down into immense hollows of water, and fighting her way up the other side, while the foaming ocean stormed over every inch of her decks. Again and again, the waves pounded down on her, great smashing blows of the Atlantic’s inexhaustible fist.

  At such times even sailors prayed, and William Brewster must have reminded the passengers of the voyage some of them had made from England to Holland in 1609. Their ship had been driven almost to the coast of Norway by a fantastic storm, and “when the water ran into their mouths and ears,” the captain and crew had given up in despair, crying: “We sink, we sink.” But the exiles had cried out: “Yet Lord thou canst save, Yet Lord thou canst save,” and, miraculously, so it had seemed to them - and to the awed sailors - the wind had soon slackened and they were able to limp into Holland, weary but alive. Elder Brewster urged his damp and frightened friends to call on God again with the same faith.

  Someone suggested a psalm. Yes, a psalm, let us all sing a psalm! Feebly the voices rose above the monstrous wind:

  Jehovah feedeth me, I shall not lack

  In grassy folds he down dooth make me lye

  He gently leads me quiet waters by

  He dooth return my soul; for his name sake

  In paths of justice leads me quietly

  Yea though I walk in dale of deadly-shade

  Ile fear none ill; for with me thou wilt be

  Thy rod thy staff eke, they shall comfort me.

  Fore me, a table thou has ready-made

  In their presence that my distressers be.

  But still the wind thundered and the ocean smashed at their ship. Then, as their quaking voices began the next verse, another monstrous wave boomed down, and with the crash of a cannon shot, a main beam amidship cracked and buckled.

  Pandemonium now, both from men and weather. The captain and mates rushed below to gaze up from the gun deck at the sagging beam, the splintered deck around it. Water gushed through new openings, and the terrified passengers huddled against the ship’s sides to escape it. The carpenter was summoned. What could be done? Nothing, unless they could force that beam back in place. The strongest men aboard - John Alden, the blasphemous boatswain’s mate, and a half dozen others - put their shoulders to the job while the freezing water poured down on them. But it was like trying to raise the roof beam of a house. The massive piece of timber only sagged a little more. A spare beam was dragged up from the hold, and the men tried using that as a ram. Again, failure.

  Then someone remembered a “great iron screw” they had bought in Holland to help them raise houses in the New World. Maybe it would do the job. Sailors and passengers went scrambling into the hold, flinging aside boxes and bales until they found the gleam of metal in the flickering lantern light. Grunting and gasping, they lugged the screw up to the gun deck and placed it under the ruined beam. Slowly now, twist the crank, make sure the face is aimed precisely at the break, now, put your backs into it, one two three, it’s going up, it’s working! Ram that spare beam under it, now. There!

  It held. Disaster was no longer imminent. But the wind still howled like the voice of doom, and the sea still smashed down on the Mayflower. Before their eyes the splintered deck shivered and trembled, and another cascade of water poured down. How long would this repair job last?

  This was a question that Captain Jones and his mates must decide, and they retired to their cabin for a conference. On the gun deck, the carpenter and some sailors put additional braces under the cracked beam, and from their mutterings it soon became obvious to the passengers that survival was by no means certain. “There was great distraction and difference of opinion amongst the mariners themselves,” Bradford tells us. Some were for going forward, but their motives were far from reassuring. If they turned back now, halfway over, they would break their contract, forfeit their wages - and it was almost as long one way as the other. Still, some were for turning back because, in Bradford’s words, “they were loath to hazard their lives too desperately.”

  Alarmed, William Bradford, William Brewster. and John Carver sought out Captain Jones and his mates and asked them bluntly whether they were in serious danger. Was this the first of many possible cracks in the old Mayflower? If they sailed on would the next break or the one after it spell disintegration? If so, let us run for the nearest land. Africa, the
Canary Islands - anywhere.

  All eyes turned to Captain Jones. The mates had given their opinions, but they did not really count. It was the captain who must decide - and 150 lives hung in the balance between his courage and his prudence. Now Christopher Jones spoke in the proud tradition of his Harwich ancestors. True, wind and weather would be more favorable on a run back to England. They could run for Africa or the Canaries, which were even closer. But the old ship was still solid under the water, and that was what counted. He had seen her through bad weather before. Once, in a storm off Norway, they had had to jettison half the cargo, but the Mayflower had come through. She was a solid, dependable old girl, and he was ready to swear by her for a few more years, at least.

  As for the splintered deck, they would caulk it as soon as the weather eased and they could melt some pitch. It would keep some of the water out, and even if the cracks opened again in a few days, as the ship worked in the wind, there was no special danger in that, as long as they did not strain things with too much sail.

  A deep sigh of relief ran through the listening passengers. They had spoken out of their responsibility for the women and children below. But the problems of turning back were almost as harrowing as the risks of going forward. It was good to let this sturdy man of the sea make the decision for them. “So,” William Bradford says, “they committed themselves to the will of God, and resolved to proceed.”