Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  To find him, the Pilgrims would have to climb up to Plymouth Fort and ask for the governor. Nobody in the realm, besides John Smith, thought more about New England than Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The fort’s commander, he came from an old French family from Normandy. His fascination with America seems to have arisen entirely from patriotism, and curiosity. He seems never to have made a penny from his efforts.

  At fifty-four, Gorges had been fascinated by America for more than a decade. His obsession dated back to 1605, when he met three Abenaki people, shipped back to Plymouth by an early English voyager to Mawooshen. Gorges questioned them closely about their home, and most of all about its rivers leading far inland.18 Excited by what he heard, Gorges helped lead the creation in 1607 of the Plymouth Company, designed to operate north of the Delaware, as a twin of the London company that founded Jamestown to the south. It planted the Popham Colony, and then it backed John Smith’s voyage of 1615. Beyond that, it achieved nothing, but Gorges refused to give up.

  As the Mayflower prepared to sail, Sir Ferdinando was about to relaunch the company, with a new name and a new royal charter. The Council for New England came into being on November 3, a few days before the Pilgrims sighted Cape Cod. Packed with marquesses, earls, and a clergyman or two, in the name of His Majesty it held dominion over all the land and sea between the fortieth parallel and the forty-eighth, from the St. Lawrence to the site of Philadelphia, and as far west as the Pacific.

  Because it later became extinct, abolished by King Charles, and because its papers mostly vanished, the council has never commanded much respect. Historians in America often portray the council and its creator as absurd feudal relics, intent on turning New England into an aristocratic fiefdom. Up to a point this is fair. Gorges antagonized many people, especially the fishermen of Devon, by charging fees for licenses to look for American bass and cod. But Gorges was no fool, and far from being narrow-minded, he was another visionary of a kind.

  Much later, he fell out with the Puritans of Massachusetts, but to begin with he happily welcomed the Pilgrims as settlers, speaking highly of their good relations with the native people whom they met. He recruited merchants as partners, inviting Jennings to join the council. Far earlier than other men, Sir Ferdinando saw the need to build much bigger ships to service the new colonies, to be paid for, he hoped, with a loan from the East India Company.19 If he charged fees for fishing, it was because he needed to defend the Gulf of Maine against the Spanish, the French, or the Dutch.

  In 1621, Gorges made his own disappointing tour of England’s west country, looking for colonists to follow the Pilgrims. He aroused as little interest as John Smith. Gorges spoke in the military language of empire, and perhaps this deterred investors. Security had to come first, he said, as he listed his American priorities: “erecting forts, placeing of Garrisons, maynteyninge shipps of warr upon the Coasts, and officers for the more safe and absolute Government of those parts.” Gorges had militarized Plymouth Sound, with cannon protecting each strongpoint. Now he wished to make the North Atlantic a fortified English lake, with Virginia and New England as the armed bulwarks of a new empire.20

  Like most of his fellow countrymen, Sir Ferdinando believed that another war with Spain was unavoidable. At Plymouth he stood in the front line. We can imagine him, pacing up and down his parapet, watching the Mayflower come and go, fuming at the politicians who withheld the funds he needed to man the fort and fight the pirates, and cursing the merchants who failed to share his vision of western adventure. For the time being, however, failure seemed the most likely outcome in a commercial project of any kind.

  DAMP AND DEADNESS

  Over the early years of the Plymouth Colony hung the shadow of depression. The voyage of the Mayflower took place at the moment when unease about the economy crystallized into acute alarm. Capital was scarce, and demand collapsed. Tens of thousands of weavers found themselves with no work to do. A few days before the Mayflower reached America, King James reluctantly called his first Parliament in six years, prodded into action by those who wanted England to join the Thirty Years’ War. Raising money for rearmament should have been its principal concern. By the time the House of Commons met in early 1621, the crisis in the economy had instead become the chief topic for debate.

  As unemployment rose, members of Parliament frightened one another with talk of a peasant uprising. “Looms are laid down,” one wrote in his journal. “Every loom maintains forty persons … the farmer is not able to pay his rent, not for want of cattle or corn or money. The fairs and markets stand still.”21 Most alarming was a sudden scarcity of money. For its bullion, the Royal Mint relied entirely on private citizens bringing in plate or old coins to be recast, but the inflow of silver ceased entirely. Not a single silver coin was struck at the mint between April 1619 and March 1620, and very little in the twelve months after that. At Cambridge, departing students sold their old desks and chairs to incoming men who took their rooms. One such was the student who had described the comet in his diary. As the Mayflower left Plymouth, he tried to auction his furniture, but found no takers: nobody had any cash.22

  As British governments do, King James appointed a committee to investigate. It reported that things were very bad, and offered many explanations. It said something must be done, and then the king did nothing. By the middle of 1621, western Europe had slipped into the deepest depression in six decades. As the European war made things still worse, a contemporary spoke of “that great and generall dampe and deadnesse … which we unhappily feele at this day.”23 In 1622, a year after returning from America, Jones died at the very bottom of the slump. He left a widow, sons and daughters, and an empty ship. Her ultimate fate is unknown, but most likely the Mayflower was scrapped in 1624.

  Behind the slump lay many causes, but for the Pilgrims it was the consequences that mattered. In their early years in the New World, they could expect only fitful support from their backers and friends at home. In due course, seamen and merchants looked for ways to avoid another economic crisis of the same kind by widening their sphere of enterprise; and in doing so, maritime England turned its attention decisively across the Atlantic. But that did not occur until much later in the decade. In the meantime, Bradford and his comrades mostly had to fend for themselves, or try to find allies on the western side of the ocean. And if they wanted help from heaven, they had to pray to a god of thunder, the terrifying deity of Calvin.

  * One London port book has survived in excellent condition, covering outward voyages in 1617. Lionel Cranfield, the first Earl of Middlesex and England’s lord treasurer, apparently took the book home, and it became part of the Sackville Papers, at Maidstone in Kent. Every item is legible, including four references to the Mayflower. Overlooked by historians, it provides a complete picture of London’s overseas traders, including some of those who financed the Plymouth Colony.

  Chapter Three

  CROSSING SINAI

  What man, if he be to goe a long and unknowne journey, will not hire a guide to conduct him? Or to undertake a voyage by water, to the East-Indies, Guiana or the Newfoundland, but desireth the most skillful pilot to goe with him? And shall not wee seeke unto God, and desire his direction from earth to heaven? From this old Aegypt to the new Ierusalem? If we doe not, we may well wander out of our way; and split the ship of our soules upon the rocke of condemnation.

  —JOHN BARLOW, PURITAN TOWN PREACHER OF PLYMOUTH, DEVON, IN A FUNERAL SERMON OF 16181

  Nine days and nights had passed since the last full moon. The men of the morning watch rang four bells to mark six o’clock, and turned the ship’s hourglass on its head in almost complete darkness. Due west, a third of the way up the vault of the sky, the Mayflower’s helmsman would have seen a flickering orange point. It would be Arcturus, one of the brightest fixed stars with which an expert seaman could measure latitude. Below Arcturus and to its right in the northwestern quadrant of the heavens gleamed the bulkier lamp of Venus.

  Then, as dawn approached, a long,
blurred horizontal shadow must have emerged from the gloom beneath the star and the planet. By seven, twenty minutes after sunrise, the shadow would have hardened into a thick gray line. From the swaying deck, Jones and his crew would have made out a ridge of land, wooded with oak and cedar.2

  In cold but clear weather and at perhaps only ten miles, there would be no mistaking its identity. Robert Coppin, the second mate, had been there before. Eighteen years earlier another Englishman had described the headland’s low sandy hills, its trees, and its shoals of cod, mackerel, and bream, and given the cape the name it has carried ever since. To seamen of Coppin’s generation, Cape Cod’s long sickle-shaped outline made a familiar landmark in the charts they could study before setting sail. It was, said an optimistic writer describing the voyage of 1602, a land “faire and pleasant, resembling France, temperate and well-agreeing with our constitution.”3 For ships coasting for six hundred miles from Maine to Jamestown, the anchorage behind the Cape’s northern tip had offered a safe haven for at least half a decade.

  Landfall came as a relief after more than nine weeks at sea, but by itself it gave Jones no cause for satisfaction, and for William Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims the sight of Cape Cod brought with it new anxieties. Because of their false starts and foul weather—for many days, the winds were “so feirce, and ye seas so high, as they could not beare a knote of saile,” Bradford later remembered—they were two months behind schedule. It seems that the Mayflower had found her way up the long slot of deep water that today forms the main shipping lane to Boston. Slanting northwestward on a naval chart, it passes between the dangers of the Nantucket shoals inshore and those of Georges Bank far out at sea. Even so, Jones had lost his way.

  They were nearly 250 miles from the destination he had hoped to find, somewhere between Rockaway Beach and Staten Island, with Manhattan beckoning behind them. And, within the belly of his ship, Jones carried a complicated human cargo, and one that might cause trouble.

  Between the timbers of the Mayflower lay a wet, narrow space smelling of vinegar, vomit, stale meat, and overripe cheese. In daylight the lower deck resembled a long dim corridor. Partially blocked at intervals by nautical clutter, at night it was entirely dark. From deck to deck the headroom was no more than about five feet, or only four in places where the beams reached from side to side. A crouching man found his way impeded by a capstan for hoisting the Mayflower’s anchors, three masts, the bulkiest nearly two feet thick, and the dismantled hull of a shallop, or small boat. The rest of the crowded space was filled with human beings and their belongings.4

  After so long at sea, the indignities of the voyage threatened to reduce them to a demoralized rabble. “A boisterous sea and stormy weather will make a man not bred on it so queasy sick,” wrote a maritime author of the day, Sir William Monson, “that it bereaves him of legs, stomach and courage so much as to fight with his meate.”5 And yet everything we know about the Mayflower’s passage suggests that they strove to keep up appearances and to maintain decorum.

  Even on the ocean, the English ranked each other in categories, carefully arranged in grades of wealth and social status. Twenty-four households traveled on the Mayflower. At least fifteen, with between them forty-nine members, were headed by an adult male who had lived in Leiden. The remaining nine households came from England; some apparently had Puritan leanings, of a less radical form, and it seems that some were purely economic migrants. We cannot be precise, because the passenger list does not refer to their religion, or their lack of it; it simply proceeds in order of deference. At the top were John and Katherine Carver, people of substance traveling with five servants, including John Howland, and an adopted child. At the bottom of the list sat ten single men without families, land, or skilled occupations. Sadly, because Carver failed to survive more than a few months in the New World, we know little about him, beyond the fact that he was “godly & well approved,” as Bradford put it, and their first choice as the colony’s governor. In the England of the period, a man of property naturally expected to serve as a local official.6

  It seems that the discipline he enforced extended to hygiene. Next to scurvy, amoebic dysentery ranked as the worst marine affliction, the so-called bloody flux that had killed Sir Francis Drake. And yet in the Mayflower’s case, only one crew member and one passenger failed to complete the journey, the latter being William Butten, a boy of fifteen who died a few days before they sighted land. Perhaps, as some have argued, wine residues in the ship’s planks helped prevent infection, since wine lees are mildly antiseptic. But this cannot have had more than a very marginal effect, if any at all. More likely, they held disease at bay by keeping their quarters clean, and always going up on deck to empty their bowels and bladders.

  Whether or not they were hygienic, their presence created difficulties for Jones, since human beings occupied precious space. To fill out their earnings, seamen were given part of the hold for “furthing,” a stock of trading goods they carried on their own account for dealing freelance at either end of the voyage. On the Mayflower, the colonists and their stores would have limited the room available for goods of such a kind. Since seamen resented emigrants, animosity between them might provoke a mutiny: shipboard squabbles were commonplace at the time, mainly arising from low wages or from the failure to pay them at all. In 1605 an angry English crew had refused to take a cargo of colonists to Guyana. Instead, they mutinied and marooned them on the island of St. Lucia, leaving them to starve or to be slaughtered by the Caribs.7

  Evidence of the unpleasant atmosphere on board the Mayflower survives in Bradford’s text. He speaks of the ship’s boatswain, who was “a prowde yonge man, and would often curse, & scofe at ye passengers.” This comment takes on its full meaning when we bear in mind that the boatswain was the most senior member of the crew. Responsible for sails and rigging, he conveyed the master’s orders to the sailors and took charge of the loading of the ship’s cargo. Under his direction, passengers came on board and stowed their possessions. During the voyage they fell beneath his control. Since he had to be able to read and write—he had to keep a “bosun’s book” listing the ship’s freight—his scoffing might be well-informed: from printed satires, or anti-Puritan jokes from the playhouse, he would know how best to needle a Separatist.8

  For all these reasons, Jones would be eager to disembark his passengers swiftly. So he decided to make straight for the Hudson. Within a few hours they came to a place where the glaciers that formed Nantucket Island and the Cape left on the seabed a shifting labyrinth of sandbanks and shoals.

  A man with Jones’s knowledge of England’s coastal hazards would not try to find his way through them without a pilot. So, when they sighted the breakers, they swiftly turned back from a point somewhere close to Pollock Rip, where the modern chart shows as little as eight feet of water. Back they went northward by night for fifty miles, passing the buff-colored ridge called the Highlands, close to the outer end of the Cape. At last the following day they rounded Race Point and entered the wide, shallow stillness of Provincetown Harbor, dotted then and now with a multitude of gulls, “the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw.”9

  Behind the calm waters of the anchorage, William Bradford saw only savagery and terror. For him, it was a wild country already chilled by the first onset of winter, “hedious & desolate,” full of wild beasts and wild men. Four times on a single page of his manuscript he wrote the word “wilderness” to describe Cape Cod. In front of them lay a desert, another word from his vocabulary: no inns, no habitations, but only woods and thickets.

  He likened the Pilgrims to the apostle Paul, stranded by a storm on the island of Malta, but their predicaments seemed to be very different. Paul met inhabitants who warmed him by their fire, while the Pilgrims could expect only arrows from the native people. Behind them was the ocean, vast and furious, dividing them from what Bradford calls “ye civill parts of the world.” Even so, he writes, they fell on their knees and gave thanks to God.

  So Br
adford remembered the occasion, when he described it in the early 1630s. His first narrative of the Pilgrim arrival had told another story. It can be found in Mourt’s Relation, the journal he co-authored with his fellow Pilgrim Edward Winslow, published in London in 1622. Intended for public consumption, to attract new investment and new settlers, it called the Outer Cape a “goodly land,” and it heaped praise upon the haven. Provincetown Harbor would safely hold a thousand ships, they said. It promised rich whale fishing, cod in season, and beyond the beach freshwater and timber for cooking fires.10

  Which version was correct? Was the Cape a goodly land or a wilderness? Neither account was objective fact of a simple kind, but in the space between the two narratives we find William Bradford himself. He lived a double or a treble life, as man of God, entrepreneur, and founder of a new commonwealth. In his account of the voyage, it was the Calvinist who held the upper hand, and because of that we can reenter his imagination and experience the arrival as he would have done.

  BRADFORD’S VOYAGE

  Somewhere out on the ocean, amid the blast of a gale, John Howland slipped off the wet timbers of the Mayflower. He may have been no more than twenty-one, a “lustie younge man,” says Bradford. Howland came up on deck and fell off, but before he hit the waves, he caught a rope that was trailing in the sea. It kept him afloat long enough for somebody to fish him out of the surging water with a boat hook within the short span of minutes before the cold froze his muscles and fatally weakened his grip.