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

by Thomas Fleming

  But if they had met old Neptune’s harshest challenge, the water god was still in a turbulent mood. Day after day the ship continued to wallow through mountainous seas, sometimes pounded by gales, sometimes merely hounded by typical North Atlantic weather. By now it had been weeks since anyone had been able to light a fire. The food being brought up from the hold was getting worse and worse. The biscuits had to be pounded to pieces with a chisel, the cheese was moldy, the butter rancid. Peas and grain had more and more crawling things in them. The endless slices of salt meat and fish had to be choked down or sloshed down with beer, which was also going sour.

  Day after day they asked the captain or one of the mates if they could go up on deck, and the answer was always no. Too dangerous. Seas were still running as high as the poop. Even with lifelines strung, the crew had to watch the water or go overboard. So the voyagers were condemned to more hours in the foul darkness of the gun deck. A hundred people crowded into a space not much roomier in total square feet than a modern house, unable to change their clothes or wash for over thirteen weeks now, with freezing sea water sloshing and dripping around them until everyone was permanently damp and chilled.

  It was enough to make anyone wonder if they were all mad to have left those warm, neat houses in Leyden, where life had flowed past as placidly as a Dutch canal. For a young girl like Dorothy Bradford, raised from early childhood in the comfortable world of the Netherlands, the question came again and again, a nagging, tormenting finger of doubt which no prayer seemed to dispel.

  For the younger men, bursting with energy and vitality, the confinement below deck was almost intolerable. It was like a prison sentence. Who was that captain, where did he get the authority to pen us up like a cargo of animals? This was what young John Howland, hired as John Carver’s servant, kept thinking. Finally he could stand it no longer. He shoved open a hatch grate and stepped out on deck. Oh, clean, delicious air! What did it matter if those waves were higher than he had ever seen water before? The simple joy of breathing made it worth the chance he was taking.

  For ten or twenty seconds, this ecstasy persisted. Then a blast of wind tore at the Mayflower, and she heeled over like a toy ship in a tub. John Howland’s feet were suddenly where his head had been, and then he was deep in the foaming frigid Atlantic. He did what every man who has ever gone overboard in the history of the sea has done. His frantic outstretched arms clutched at life, his fingers clawed at the roaring water, remembering solidity. Usually the clutching hands find only emptiness. But John Howland was one of the rare lucky ones. His hands found rope. So far over had the ship rolled that her topsail halyards were running in the water, and John Howland grabbed them and hung on.

  But life was by no means certain yet. The ship was still heaving and bucking through a huge sea, and Howland found himself far beneath the wild waves. The wet ropes tore his hands; his lungs began to fill with terrible pain. Then air! The seamen of the Mayflower may have been a blasphemous, brawling lot, but they knew their jobs. A team of deck apes had leaped to the halyards and hauled Howland to the surface. Now he was in danger of getting his brains beaten out against the ship’s hull, as the maddened sea flung him back and forth like a piece of bait on a line. But he hung on somehow, while the men above him shouted their encouragement. One sailor tied a line around his waist and teetered over the side with a boat hook in his hand. One pass, two, got him! Up on deck came John Howland like a large flounder.

  He had swallowed an unpleasant amount of sea water and was half frozen. The sailors lugged him below, and for the next several days, Howland was a very sick young man. Fortunately, he had a rugged physique, and was soon downing his share of beer and salt pork again. But he had lost all his enthusiasm for the cool, clear air of the open decks - and so had everyone else. The Atlantic raged on, and its wet miserable victims did nothing but endure it.

  Then a new crisis. Cries of pain from the Great Cabin. Elizabeth Hopkins was in labor. Neither she nor her husband ever expected to have their child during an Atlantic gale. By every sane calculation, they should have been in the New World by now, safely ensconced in a warm house. But it was too late to mutter regrets or make accusations. Experienced older women, such as Mary Brewster and Catherine Carver, rushed to her side. They had assisted at dozens of births during the years at Leyden, and they gave the young and frightened mother badly needed reassurance.

  Hours passed with nothing but the sounds of the storm to fill the minds of those waiting on the gun deck. Childbirth was dangerous enough, but in a damp, foul cabin, without heat or warm water - no, it was better not to think about what might happen. William Brewster suggested they join in prayers for Elizabeth Hopkins, and the Leyden exiles and the London strangers knelt together while the quiet, steady voice of the ruling elder led them in asking help for the lonely woman in the aftercabin.

  Then Mary Brewster strode out of the shadows holding a small bundle in her arms. A lusty yowling baby boy, Master Hopkins! Listen to him outshout the gale! A veritable son of Neptune! Stephen Hopkins agreed and promptly named the new arrival Oceanus.

  The birth cheered everyone. They had snatched another life from the hungry Atlantic. Even the sailors regarded it as a good omen, and vowed that land could not be far away now. But a week and then another week passed, and nothing broke the monotony of wind and rain, cold and damp. Susanna White, also big with child, began to fret and worry. She would like to have her baby on familiar mother earth.

  Dorothy Bradford was a good friend of Susanna’s and did her best to make life a little easier for her. She watched five-year-old Resolved White, doing her best to save his mother unnecessary steps, made doubly dangerous in the pitching, rolling ship. But every time Dorothy saw the youngster exchange a hug with his mother or run to her with a complaint, an aching emptiness tormented her. Resolved was the same age as her son John. Better not to have him on this miserable ship, of course. But without him she was only half a woman. All through those years at Leyden he had been hers. He had barely seen his father, toiling those endless hours over his weaving. Five was the worst possible age to separate them. If they had waited another year or two, he would have been old enough to understand.

  Again Dorothy Bradford prayed for help, for the banishment of these dark and futile thoughts. But these thoughts were almost preferable to the smelly, splashing semidarkness in which she had been imprisoned for the last eight weeks. She could not share her feelings with her husband. It was his decision to leave young John behind. To complain would sound like a reproach - and a good Christian wife obeyed her husband, in body and mind and soul.

  The Atlantic was not through with them yet. As the tenth week at sea drew to a close, William Butten, a husky twenty-two-year-old hired as a servant for Dr. Samuel Fuller, took to his bunk complaining of a terrible weakness. One moment he was pouring sweat, unable to tolerate a blanket over him, the next he was shivering with a tremendous chill. Then came agonizing pain, stabbing lances of fire in his arms and legs, and a terrible, nameless fear.

  The lad was from Austerfield, William Bradford’s home village. William Brewster had probably induced him to come along during his sojourn in the north the year before. Both men felt personally responsible for him and did everything they could to comfort him. They summoned Samuel Fuller, their own doctor, and Giles Heale, the ship’s surgeon, for advice. Captain Jones, who had seen more sickness at sea than both doctors, also came down for a look.

  All shook their heads. It was the first case of scurvy. Hardly surprising, in a voyage that was already a month overdue. Butten had come aboard the Mayflower in London, and had been eating the miserable diet of salt meat, biscuit, and dried peas for seventeen weeks now. He was a young man with no one to watch his diet for him, and he may have disliked the lemon juice and dried fruit recommended by shipboard veterans as an antidote to scurvy. There was nothing to do now but force a little of these remedies into him - though it may well be too late.

  The next morning, Butten’s breathing be
came labored. He was still in terrible pain, and now he had to fight for every breath. William Bradford sent his wife hurrying to Samuel Fuller. The diagnosis was grim. Butten had pneumonia as well. All afternoon, the trapped voyagers sat in the darkness listening to his rasping struggle for life. William Brewster led them in prayers once more. But this time the Atlantic would not be denied. Before morning Batten was dead.

  Quickly, the matter-of-fact sailors sewed him into his shroud. Dead men were not allowed to linger aboard a ship at sea. They spread infection and, in the superstitious conviction of salt-water men, slowed down the ship. As dawn broke over the heaving, sullen ocean, William Batten of Austerfield, almost three thousand miles from those green fields which he and William Bradford called home, plunged into the gray depths.

  For William Bradford and his friends, it was a time for prayer and pleading. This death would be the first of many if they did not get off the Mayflower soon. Below deck there were ominous signs of trouble. Men were complaining of swollen legs; one or two women were in their bunks with William Butten’s chills and torpor. The male servants, both the young men and boys, were particularly bad. Like Butten, they had probably been careless of their diets, and they also lacked the sense of purpose that sustained the family men. How much longer, how much longer? the leaders asked Christopher Jones. The captain took them into his cabin and showed them his charts. By the crude calculations of the log line, landfall could come at any time. According to his cross-staff, he was back on the forty-second parallel. But he could not press on too much sail, with his weakened deck. They must somehow content themselves with their creeping pace.

  More days slipped by. The weather at last became bearable. Hatches were opened, and those who were well walked the narrow decks once more. On the captain’s advice, even those who were sick in their bunks were routed out and forced to take some exercise.

  There was an air of expectancy quivering though the ship. Aloft in the crows’-nest a lookout peered endlessly over the western horizon. Nothing rose there but more and more miles of trackless ocean. Another day of creeping. Would it ever end? Another night below in the smelly bunks, restless sleep broken by whimperings of unhappy children, the moans of the feverish.

  Morning on November 9 was no different from the other mornings since they had come aboard. Above deck the crew plodded through their routines. Captain Jones leaned over the taffrail of his poop deck watching the dawn grow on the glistening sea. Out of the west came a curious gull, to dip and weave above the weary freighter with astonished cries. An old salt scrubbing down the half-deck vowed he could smell land. The last pale quarter of the old moon drooped in the dawning sky as the lookout scrambled to his perch in the rigging.

  Above, the sails flapped in the dying wind. Mate John Clark pointed to the changing color of the water - indigo blue had blended into emerald. Another good sign. Land was close, and they had better begin to take soundings. The captain agreed, and sent the leadsman to his place outside the mizzen shrouds. In a few moments the hiss and plop of the lead line was followed by the singsong call of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty fathoms. Then a sudden break in the sleepy chant and the excited bellow: “And bottom at eighty fathoms, sir!”

  Land. It was there, beneath the Mayflower’s encrusted keel, the continent of North America, reaching out into the sea to welcome them. Captain Christopher Jones looked around him at his old enemy, the mighty Atlantic, and mocked him with a victorious smile.

  Now the sun was making the ship’s worn sails gleam as if woven with gold. A breath of wind came on the spreading light, and the sails stopped their flapping and began to fill. Then from the maintop lookout burst the cry that passengers and crew had been hearing in their dreams for weeks.

  LA-A-ND HO! LA-A-ND HO!

  Sleepy men and women stumbled from their bunks, still not sure whether they had heard it or dreamed it. No, there it was again: LAND. LAND HO! Up the ladders to the main deck they streamed, refusing to believe until they saw it for themselves. “Where away?” bellowed Captain Jones.

  “Two points on the weather bow, six!”

  All eyes followed the captain, and there, looming out of the ocean as if it were being created by the rays of the rising sun, was a long low stretch of brown and gray, a faceless world, but real. Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong went the ship’s bell. It was seven o’clock on the morning of November 9. They were sixty-five days out from Plymouth, ninety-seven from Southampton.

  Shouts of joy and tears of relief mingled. Many fell on their knees and thanked God with simple spontaneity. William Brewster suggested a song of gladness and gratitude, and in a few moments from the crowded waist of the Mayflower soared the words of Psalm 100.

  Shout to Jehovah, all the earth

  Serve you Jehovah with gladness

  Before him come with singing mirth

  Know that Jehovah he God is

  It’s he that made us, not we

  His folk and sheep of his feeding

  0 with confession enter ye

  His gates, his courtyards with praising.

  Confess to him, bless you his name

  Because Jehovah he good is

  His mercy ever is the same

  And his faith, unto all ages.

  But rejoicing must be brief. The Mayflower was under way now, moving steadily closer to this unknown coast. A hurried: conference with Captain Jones was in order. Where were they? What part of North America was this? If his charts and his navigation were correct, Jones told them, this long, low shore was part of that great arm of land known as Cape Cod. Captain John Smith, charting the coast six years before, had renamed it Cape James, after the king, but most sailors still preferred the original christening, in memory of the magnificent fishing off its shores.

  All very well, but the territory of the Virginia Company, in which their patent entitled them to settle, did not extend north of latitude 41 - present clay Westchester County, New York. In John Carver’s baggage were letters from Sir Edwin Sandys and John Ferrar, Treasurer and Secretary of the Virginia Company, introducing them to Sir George Yeardley, Governor of Jamestown, and admonishing this gentle man “that he should give them the best advice he could for trading in Hudson’s River.”

  These were legal facts and potential advantages that could not be ignored. But the Mayflower’s passengers were also men who believed strongly in the personal guidance of God. They could not avoid noticing that the winds had carried them to that very New England coast that Weston and his associates had urged them to choose. No English bishops to worry about here (a potential problem in Virginia Company territory). At Plymouth, Sir Ferdinando Gorges had assured them that his Council for New England would promptly issue them a patent. Sickness was a growing threat, sea weariness was universal. Perhaps it would be wiser to land here.

  How far was it to Hudson’s River, they asked Jones? About fifteen leagues - sixty miles - according to his maps. Another day or two of sailing. After some hesitation and debate, the passengers decided to rely on the patent they had in their hands, rather than one Sir Ferdinando Gorges might - or might not - be able to issue them in the uncertain future. Tack about and head south, they told Captain Jones. They would grit their teeth and endure the Mayflower for a few more days.

  By now they were close enough to see high brown bluffs and the tops of tall trees. But it was all in outline. The ship’s master did not dare venture too close to shore in these crudely charted seas. He knew from the experience of other sailors that there was some very ugly water off this stretch of coast. Captain John Smith had described “long and dangerous shoals and rocks.” Captain Bartholomew Gosnold and his men had made almost the same landfall in 1602, and within a matter of hours were wishing they were a thousand leagues at sea again. They had encountered miles of shoals and breakers which they named “Tucker’s Terror,” in honor of one of their mates who was apparently the most frightened man aboard.

  Up in the bow, the leadsman was hard at work feeling for the bottom. “Fort
y fathoms, thirty fathoms, twenty fathoms.” They were losing water all the time. With a loaded ship drawing some twelve feet, Captain Jones could not be too careful. They were using a hand lead now, weighing some fourteen pounds, easier to haul up than the hundred-pound dipsey with which they had begun their sounding.

  For half the day they continued this cautious progress down the coast. The leadsman’s chant began to lull everyone into sleepy security. They were rolling along in comfortably safe water, though fighting a tide that slowed them to a crawl. Then from the maintop lookout came a sudden shout: “Breakers ahead!” All hands peered in the direction of his pointing hand and saw white, churning water, miles of it - shoal water, ready and able to pound the bottom out of the Mayflower.

  Before they could alter course, they were in the middle of it. Now the leadsman chant changed from a lullaby to a sharp staccato cry. Twenty fathoms, ten fathoms, fifteen fathoms. The bottom was as irregular as a landscape in Scotland. Any moment the chant could go from twelve fathoms to none.