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

by Thomas Fleming

  There were several places to land shallops and small boats, including the large harborside rock. Best of all, in one field there was a great hill where Miles Standish recommended setting up a platform and planting cannon. From there the defenders could command both the bay and the surrounding countryside, and they could see far out into the bay and even into the sea. There was only one small defect - the cleared land made a long haul in lugging wood. But they decided to make the best of this problem.

  Twenty men chose to stay ashore that night. The next day, December 21, every able-bodied man was to join them and begin building houses. But the weather refused to cooperate. That night a storm came howling out of the northeast, and the men on shore could do nothing but shiver and shake through a wet, freezing night. The morning was no better. The bay was so rough that no one could even get off the Mayflower to join them. To add to their misery, the men ashore had no food. Finally, some sailors managed to get ashore in the shallop with provisions.

  They carried with them a melancholy sight - Richard Britredge of London, sewed into his shroud. He had died at dawn. Braving the wind and rain, they dug a shallow grave for him on the low hill just above the shore. All that day and the next day, Friday, December 22, the storm continued to beat down on the shivering men ashore. That morning aboard the Mayflower, there was more gloom. Mary Allerton gave birth to a son, but he was “dead born.”

  The next day the weather improved and every man well enough to work went ashore and began the laborious task of chopping down pine trees and sawing them into planks for the construction of their first dwelling, a “common house” or. “rendezvous.” It was to be about twenty feet square and would serve as a shelter for the workers who were to be left shore each night to guard the precious tools.

  The next day, Sunday, no work was done as usual, but those on shore spent some uneasy hours. Early in the morning the woods suddenly erupted with that same unearthly clamor that had signaled an Indian attack on the exploring party two weeks before. Matchlocks were lighted. The men crouched behind their log barricade and waited for the enemy to storm from the forest, but the cries faded away, leaving them only with the eerie sensation of danger. Aboard the Mayflower that same day occurred another ominous event - the death of Solomon Prower, servant of Christopher Martin.

  Monday, December 25, was another working day. These earnest Christians could find no mention of the celebration of Christmas in the Bible, so they simply ignored it. All day they worked, and as twilight was falling, a terrible cry was heard again in the woods. Once more tools were dropped and everyone rushed to his musket, but no attackers leaped from the trees. They left twenty men behind the barricade to keep the night’s “court of guard.”

  Aboard the Mayflower there was doleful news. The passengers had drunk the last of their beer. There was nothing left now except the brackish ship’s water, but because it was Christmas Day, Christopher Jones donated some of the ship’s beer, and sailors and passengers enjoyed a small party together.

  That night the weather broke again with “a sore storm of wind and rain,” which continued all day Tuesday, the twenty-sixth. But on Wednesday and Thursday everyone was back on shore again, toiling both on the Common House and on the platform on the hill where they planned to set their cannon. On Thursday afternoon, they laid out the measurements for New England’s first main street. It was to run up the hill to the fort on top, with two rows of houses on either side. The layout was chosen, probably on Miles Standish’s recommendation, because it would be easier to build a palisade around it. To save time and to keep the colony as compact as possible, they decided to assign unmarried men to each family. This reduced the number of houses needed to nineteen. There was a rough attempt to approximate the size of the plots to the size of the families. As for positions on the street, they were chosen by lot.

  But the houses were slow in coming. After the first burst of energy, the work bogged down badly. Rain and cold discouraged those on shore. “Great smokes of fire” made by camping Indians further disturbed them. The mile-and-a-half trip from the Mayflower to shore was another frustration. The movement of supplies and men was constantly hampered by wind and tide. A ship of the Speedwell’s size could have come right up to shore, and more than once during these painful days the colonists lamented her loss.

  On Monday, January 1, the workers on shore watched the shallop land and sailors lift out the body of another victim, Degory Priest. He was buried beside Richard Britredge on the hill by the shore. It was another grim reminder of the desperate need to get the people off the Mayflower. By now the Common House was almost finished, and they went to work on the first of the houses along their main street. Contrary to general belief, they did not build log cabins, which were known only in the Nordic countries in the 1620s and did not appear in the New World until the Swedes settled in Delaware in 1638. The Plymouth colonists built frame houses, about fourteen by eighteen feet with a fireplace on one end and a loft, reached by ladder, for sleeping.

  These small houses were not easy to build. A foundation of stone had first to be laid, then an open frame erected. For this trees had to be cut and trimmed to roughly square sections with a broadax and then finished with an adze. The fireplace and hearth were of fieldstone. For the walls, two-inch planks had to be stripped of their bark and sawed. There was no glass; oil paper was used in the windows, and the joints and cracks in the walls were daubed with clay. For roofs they used thatch, as generations of their country forefathers had done in England. Thatch, however, was not easily gathered at Plymouth. It meant miles of tramping through the meadows and along the creek banks to gather it, with the constant possibility of being cut off by a surprise Indian attack.

  It was impossible to forget the Indians, even if they were so inclined. On Wednesday, January 3, they saw more great fires in the distance, coming, they thought, from Indian cornfields. The next day Miles Standish marched with five men in the direction of these fires, hoping to meet the men who made them. But they found only some dilapidated wigwams, long abandoned.

  On the way home, however, they had one small piece of luck. They shot an “eagle” out of a tree, and that night all hands enjoyed him for dinner. “It was excellent meat,” William Bradford says, “hardly to be discerned from mutton.” City dwellers for so long, it was hard for them to learn the hunter’s art, and harder still for them to abandon their taste for traditional English food.

  They had little interest in fish for food. Captain Jones, who grew up in a port town, thought differently, and when one of his sailors found a herring alive upon the shore, the master had it for supper. Jones urged them to do more fishing, but when they broke out their equipment, he was astonished to find that in their naiveté they had brought the wrong-sized kooks. The ones they had were too large for the kind of fish they could catch in Plymouth Bay, but the considerate captain of the Mayflower volunteered to send the shallop out to sea where the fishing might be better.

  The shallop fishermen made several trips, and on January 3 they were caught in a violent storm which came close to sinking them. But that night they returned with “three great seals and an excellent good cod.” Fresh food could not have been more welcome. The list of sick was growing daily. On January 6 Christopher Martin had become so ill that “to our judgement there was no hope of life.” John Carver was called back from shore to confer with the treasurer of the company about his scrambled accounts, but poor Martin was in no condition to discuss finances. Not long before the shallop returned on the eighth, he died, and the next morning he was laid to rest beside the others on the little bill.

  Those who had strength continued to build. The big Common House now needed only a roof, but this proved to be slow work. In four days of mixing mortar and gathering thatch, only half of it was finished. The weather continued to be bad, and the discouraged workers found that they were able to use only half their daylight hours.

  While toiling on the Common House, sickness struck down one of their strongest and
best, William Bradford. He simply collapsed, doubled up with terrific pain, and for a few moments his friends thought he was going to die on the spot. He had been suffering from a severe cold and had felt some pain in his ankles. But now the pain wracked his entire body. Until nightfall his death seemed imminent; then he rallied. But it took him weeks to regain his strength.

  Meanwhile some of the younger members of the colony were having adventures. Francis Billington, the lad who had almost blown up the Mayflower, remained as itchy as ever. No long after he came ashore, he shinnied to the top of a tree on a high hill and in the distance he saw the sun shining on what appeared to be a great body of water. He was certain he had discovered a sea, perhaps even the Northwest Passage, and pestered the adults until one of the ship’s mates took a musket and went with him to find it. After a two-mile walk, they found two lakes, the bigger of them five or six miles around, the smaller, three miles. They seemed to be fresh water and were full of fish. Wild fowl abounded on their banks. Someone in a playful mood named the place Billington Sea, after its impish discoverer.

  A few days later, two slightly older members of the colony gave everyone a serious fright. John Goodman and Peter Brown went out with two other men to cut thatch on Friday, January 12. They worked all morning and then sat down to have lunch. They had with them their two dogs, “the great mastiff bitch” and a smaller spaniel. They were only about a mile and a half from the plantation, but the woods were thick and it might as well have been a hundred miles. While the others were still eating, Goodman and Brown decided to do some exploring. Leaving the other two behind to bind the thatch that they had cut, they went off with the dogs.

  After lunch, the two who were left behind did as they were told – bound up the thatch and then followed the two explorers. But there was no sign of them. They called and shouted their names. Only echoes drifted back from the silent forest. That was more than enough to raise the hackles on the necks of the two searchers. Indians had seized and perhaps killed Goodman and Brown. They raced back to the plantation with the grim news. John Carver and four other men immediately dropped their work, seized their muskets, and rushed into the woods. But there was not a trace of the missing men. The next day Miles Standish and twelve armed men made another search – again fruitless. “They could neither hear nor see anything,” Bradford says, “so they returned with much discomfort to us all.”

  That day Plymouth was full of worried, conferring men. What could they do? If Brown and Goodman were alive and in Indian hands, they had to do something to save them. But how? What? Then late in the afternoon they heard voices shouting down the bay. It was the two lost men with their dogs and they had an adventure story to tell.

  Not long after they stepped into the woods, their mastiff had seen a deer. They two dogs bounced off after him, and without thinking the young men ran too. The deer quickly outdistanced all pursuers, but when they had collected the dogs and tried to turn back, they were hopelessly lost. They had wandered all that afternoon, shivering in the rain, without cloaks or hats, no weapons but sickles, and, worst of all, no food. Night soon fell, and with it came snow. They did not know what to do.

  But their worries were only beginning. Not long after dark, they had heard what they thought were two lions “roaring exceedingly for a long time together.” A third “lion” seemed even closer. They decided to climb a tree, even though it would prove “intolerable cold lodging.” All night they walked around and around their selected tree while the “lions” howled and roared in the forest around them. The mastiff was raring to plunge after them, and they had to hold her by the neck. No doubt her growls and snarls and barks were the reason why the wolves never moved in for the attack.

  At dawn, the two exhausted men had set out through the forest once more, passing by many lakes and brooks in the woods and in one place a great cleared field which the Indians had burned out, five miles in length. Finally, from a high hill they saw Clark’s Island in the bay and knew where they were. By the time they reached the colony, they were almost too weak to walk. John Goodman’s feet were so frostbitten that his shoes had to be cut off, and he had to be put to bed immediately.

  The next day was Sunday January 14, and it was celebrated with the usual prayer and meditation, both aboard the Mayflower and on shore. By now the roof was completed in their Common House, and the workers ashore were using it for a general warehouse and shelter. It was a comforting sight from the ship – the solid-looking walls and fine thatched roof gave the barren shore a hint, at least, of civilization.

  But at six o’clock that night an anguished cry of alarm ran through the ship. The Common House was on fire! Everyone immediately thought it was an Indian attack. There was a rush for muskets. Men stormed up ladders and over the side into the shallop, but the tide was too low to land and they had to sit in the big boat for an agonizing three-quarters of an hour, watching the smoke billowing up on shore, wondering if there would be anyone alive when they got there.

  They finally arrived to find everyone busy fighting the fire, which was caused not by Indians but by a spark that flew up from the fireplace into the thatch. Fortunately they got it out before any of the beams caught fire, so the roof was still in sound condition.

  But it was a close call for William Bradford, who had been lying sick in the house when the fire started. Half-open barrels of gunpowder and charged muskets were lying about the place, and only quick work by Bradford, Goodman, and a few others had gotten them outside before the sparks came raining down. It was a bad scare, and it made them decide to build a separate shed where they could store their provisions and gunpowder beyond the reach of wandering sparks.

  A few days later, John Goodman had another adventure in the forest. Limping along on his frostbitten feet, be wandered a little way from the plantation accompanied only by his small spaniel. The dog went frisking ahead of him through the woods, then came scurrying back with frightened excited yelps. Through the trees loomed two great wolves, obviously intent on making a lunch out of the spaniel.

  The little dog cowered between Goodman’s legs. The young invalid had no weapon with him, but he picked up a stick and threw it at the two marauders, hitting one. They both ran away, but soon returned, this time creeping stealthily through the trees. Afraid to turn his back, Goodman seized heavier stick and stood his ground. Both parties maintained their positions “for a good while,” the wolves sitting on their tails “grinning at him.” Finally, they gave both master and dog up as a bad job and trotted away.

  In another week, it was the end of January. The weather continued to alternate between days of rain and sleet and clear winter sunshine. Fortunately, there was no heavy snow. By now they had several houses half completed along the main street, as well as the shed and the Common House. But all through the last week, the work faltered badly, and by the end of the month it had come to a complete stop. In the Common House, aboard the Mayflower, and in another small house set aside as an emergency hospital, men and women lay on beds coughing and gasping for breath. The General Sickness had come.

  Dozens of persons had been suffering from colds and from the early stages of scurvy, but the continuing state of crisis in which they were living forced many of them to keep going when they should have been in bed. Moreover, scurvy is an extremely deceptive disease with periods when the victim feels quite well and ready to go back to work. Sailors had seen more than one man step from his hammock announcing he was fine, walk a few feet, and drop dead. Now, in the worst of winter, a virus similar in many of its symptoms to influenza swept through the weakened colony in epidemic proportions. Bradford, Governor Carver, Winslow, William White, William Muffins, Stephen Hopkins, all were laid low. The victims were so weak that they were unable to perform the simplest physical tasks. At times there were only six or seven out of a hundred people on their feet, and men and women died at the rate of two and three a day.

  Dr. Samuel Fuller did what he could to ease their suffering, but the primitive medicine of 1620 h
ad little or no curative powers. His treatment consisted largely of bloodletting, violent physics, and herbal remedies such as the juice of thyme, supposedly specific for bronchial irritations, or lovage, whose leaves, root, and seed were said to cure any sort of fever.

  The weather grew worse. During the first week of February there was a violent storm with “the greatest gusts of wind that ever we had.” The driving rain melted away most of the clay with which the colonists had daubed their houses, exposing them even more to the weather. So fierce was the storm that even the Mayflower, riding cargo-less in the harbor, was thought to be in danger.

  It was a time of supreme crisis. Lesser men might have given up, left the sick to their doom in the wilderness, and sailed for home. But the special spirit that animated these people thrived on challenge. Those who were well worked unceasingly for the sick. “With abundance of toil and hazard of their own health,” William Bradford says, “they fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them. In a word, did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren; a rare example and worthy to be remembered.” William Brewster and Miles Standish were among the most indefatigable nurses. It is easy enough to see Brewster in the role of the good Samaritan, but that Standish, the tough veteran of the wars, should also play the part was remarkable proof of how deep the spirit of brotherhood ran.