Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  * From the limited data that survive, it is impossible to say exactly how much money the investors and the Pilgrims sank into the Plymouth Colony before it broke even. In 1624, Captain John Smith gave a figure of seven thousand pounds, which is probably not too wide of the mark. This was equivalent to the market price of more than fifteen hundred acres of English farmland.

  * Peter Wilson Coldham, in an article in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

  * The Pococks became very close indeed to Richard Stock. When Stock made his will in April 1625, he left Mrs. Pocock thirteen shillings and four pence to buy a Bible, while John Pocock witnessed his signature. Since Stock was a central figure in the evangelical culture of his day, these details suggest that the Mayflower project was far more tightly linked to the mainstream of Puritan activity in London than historians have hitherto recognized.

  Part Five

  AMERICA

  Chapter Fourteen

  COMFORT AND REFRESHING

  Though this had been a day & night of much trouble and danger unto them; yet God gave them a morninge of comfort & refreshing (as usually he doth to his children) … on munday they sounded the harbor, and founde it fit for shipping; and marched into the land.

  —WILLIAM BRADFORD, DESCRIBING THE FIRST ARRIVAL AT NEW PLYMOUTH1

  Almost the first thing they saw was a school of whales. Every day they played around the Mayflower as she lay at anchor at Provincetown, like the little fleets of dolphins she must have passed ten weeks before along the coast of Devon. There were so many that Jones compared Cape Cod Bay to the whaling grounds of the Arctic. “If we had instruments and means to take them, we might have made a very rich return,” the Pilgrims later wrote, but for the time being, the whales were spared. Harpoons and nets were among the items they had failed to bring. When they tried to shoot one of the creatures from the deck, the gun exploded into pieces in its owner’s hand.

  A century later, in the 1740s, a local shipowner, Benjamin Bangs, kept a remarkable journal of his own, an account of the bay as the Pilgrims would have known it. Bangs described the great schools of blackfish, the Cape Cod name for pilot whales. At the time of year when the Mayflower arrived, Bangs often saw them fill the waters between Provincetown and the shore five miles away at Truro, each one as much as twenty feet long. When the wind changed to come from the northwest, it left them stranded in immense numbers along the beach. On a single day in late October 1747, the people of Truro killed six hundred of the creatures. As far south as Wellfleet, incidents of slaughter on an even vaster scale continued until as late as 1912, when in the age of petroleum the pilot whale at last began to lose its value as a source of oil for lighting or for lubrication.2

  The blackfish might stand as a symbol of the strange new world that the Pilgrims entered. It was an altered and vastly magnified version of what they knew in the old. Pilot whales belong to the same marine family as the dolphins of the English Channel, but here in America these creatures existed in numbers unimagined, just as the falls and the sweep of the Kennebec River in Maine far surpass the valley of the Trent. Reading the works of Captain John Smith had prepared the Pilgrims up to a point, but previous English seafarers like Smith had mostly come to this part of the Atlantic coast much earlier in the year. They had never described the blackfish, and never traveled far inland.

  In the pilot whales, the Pilgrims saw what Smith told them they would find: an abundant store of value in nature, holding out the promise or the temptation of riches. For the first time, they also realized how unprepared they were, how few tools they had, and how long it would be before anything better than survival could be achieved. A long process of education lay in wait. It was going to be a matter of trial and error, mistakes and successes, improvising and adapting. They took old skills and English models and either made them fit the New World or discarded them if they did not.

  Captain Smith made one dangerous omission. He had neither endured nor put into words a northeastern American winter, and while the Pilgrims must have known something about the climate, they had little with which to compare it. Although the Thames sometimes froze, it was a rare event, like the great frost at Christmas in 1607, chronicled in detail precisely because it was unusual. It was not a customary feature, like the ice that blocks rivers in New England between January and March. Cold of a very un-English severity was the second thing the Pilgrims noticed on Cape Cod, straight after the whales.

  It began when they had to wade ashore at Provincetown—the earliest detailed chart shows that water deep enough to float a ship began only half a mile from the beach, and even a small boat had to stop a long way out—and then it became steadily more acute. By the first week of December, more than six inches of snow covered the land. In a small boat men found that damp clothing froze on their backs like iron, and coughs and catarrh evolved into fatal illness.

  In his account of their first winter in America, Bradford only mentions scurvy by name as a cause of death among the colonists. However, he also refers to the filthy condition of the sick. At sea, for whatever reason, they had escaped the mariner’s scourge of amoebic dysentery, but Bradford’s comments suggest that the disease struck them with its full force after their arrival in New England. If scurvy was the principal agent of mortality, then the dreadful fact is that it could have been avoided. By 1620, ships’ surgeons in the East India service were already well aware that lemon or lime juice prevented the disease, although it took another century or more before the Royal Navy began to carry fruit rations on every long voyage. Dysentery was quite another matter: apart from trying to keep themselves clean, and drinking water to ease the dehydration caused by diarrhea, the Pilgrims could do nothing about it.

  By the time the spring returned, forty-four of the passengers had died, and nearly half the crew. The first four to succumb, including Dorothy Bradford, William’s wife, had died before the Pilgrims first saw New Plymouth. The fate of Dorothy Bradford—she fell into the sea and drowned—remains mysterious, but the other three were those we might expect to perish soonest. They were either old or very young. The first was Edward Thomson, a servant, probably in his teens, who died on December 4, but the next was seven-year-old Jasper More, and then James Chilton, on December 8. in his mid-sixties, Chilton was perhaps the oldest man on the Mayflower.3

  And yet, as disease began to take its toll, the Pilgrims also made their journeys of discovery. The fourth expedition finally took them to Plymouth Bay, on December 10, and led to their choice of a place to settle. There are two ways to tell the story of what occurred. We can simply follow the familiar sequence of episodes, narrated many times by many writers, as they explored the Cape on foot, and then with the shallop, and fought their first fight against the native people at First Encounter Beach near Wellfleet. Or, alternatively, the opening weeks can be seen as a series of meetings with objects or creatures like the blackfish, phenomena that, like the number of pilot whales, defied an English imagination.

  RANGING AND SEARCHING

  First, the outline of events. To sustain a colony, the Pilgrims needed timber, game, fresh running water, a flat expanse of earth for corn, shoals of fish, and a harbor—and, if they could find them, a wide river leading inland, and native people willing to sell skins. Some of these elements existed on the Cape, but the full combination most certainly did not. South along the shore, the mouth of the Pamet River was visible from Provincetown, but after a few miles it led to a dead end. It was tidal and salty, and around it the ground was dry. That was the damning flaw of the place: rain simply vanishes into the sandy soil. Provincetown has little water of its own, and although Truro has aquifers, they lie deep beneath the surface.

  Added to that, the terrain was exhausting. An outwash of gravel and sand from melting glaciers created the Outer Cape, and to the south it formed a wide, dense belt of low hills in their dozens with no obvious route through them. It was unattractive as a place to settle. Even in 1790, Provincetown had fewer than five hundred inhabitants.
The entirety of Cape Cod all the way to Sandwich had little more than seventeen thousand, so that much of the land lay empty.4

  The first expedition was simply a landing, fifteen or sixteen armed men going ashore on November 11 to reconnoiter the hook, where they found the black earth that so impressed them. The second was more ambitious, and began on November 15. Again it involved only sixteen men, but over three days they saw their first native people in the distance, found signs of graves and cultivation, and reached the Pamet. Most famously, they discovered a buried cache of corn and a ship’s copper kettle. They filled the kettle with corn and carried it back to the Mayflower slung on a pole between two men to serve as seed the following season. They intended to pay for it, and indeed they did so eventually, but not before the incident caused their clash with the natives.

  The shallop remained unfit for use until November 27, but then a third expedition was possible, more than thirty strong. The boat followed the men as they marched along the shore. Again they found corn, and more graves, but also their first native encampment, two houses made from bent saplings covered with mats. They were uninhabited, but filled with bowls, trays, dishes, pots, and an English basket. When they returned to the ship on November 30, they began to debate what they had seen: the time for urgent discussion had arrived, because as the weather grew worse, further missions by sea would become impossible. Supplies were running low, disease began to appear, and the Mayflower could not be relied on to linger on the coast. If they were to leave Provincetown and find a new place to settle, they would have to do so very swiftly.

  They decided to make a last journey of discovery, by sea around the inside of the Cape. Most of all, they wanted to reach an estuary, which the second mate of the Mayflower believed he had seen on an earlier voyage. Led by Standish and Carver, but also including Bradford, Howland, and Winslow, the party set out on December 6. They did not find the estuary—none of any size existed nearby—and they lost their mast and were nearly wrecked in a gale at the entrance to Plymouth Bay. But they did find the site of New Plymouth, where at last they landed on December 11. The Mayflower followed on December 16, the Pilgrims began to come ashore, on or near Plymouth Rock, and so the colony began.

  New Plymouth did not have an estuary, but it was the best place they could find. Dense woodland lay behind it, and the site had flowing water—as always, Bradford singles out for comment “the runing brooks”—and it had an adequate harbor, ringed by sandbanks but accessible with practice. Inland they found cornfields left by the native people, most of whom had died in the epidemics. It was also defensible, thanks to Burial Hill.

  Several hundred yards inland, the hill rose above the cornfields and might serve as a redoubt. This must have seemed all the more necessary, because during this last expedition the Pilgrims had come under attack, at First Encounter Beach. As they broke camp at dawn on the sands, a party of thirty or forty native people attacked them with a hail of arrows. Led by Standish, the party had to fight them off with their muskets.

  Such was the bare schedule of the journeys that the Pilgrims made, but their engagement with the Cape took another form as well. There was a narrative, a plot that unfolded as the Pilgrims looked for a suitable site to settle, but they also encountered a succession of new and bewildering images and objects. Of these, by far the most disturbing was a Native American grave that they found on November 30 somewhere in the flat-land along the Pamet valley. Winslow, assuming he was the author of this section of Mourt’s Relation, described it with a precision highly unusual at the time. This was a sign of how odd he felt it to be.

  Seeing traces of a recent burial, they began to dig. They found first a mat, then a bow, and then another mat. Beneath it was a board more than two feet long, painted and carved, with incisions or slots at one end that made it resemble a crown. Between the mat they found layers of household goods: bowls, dishes, and trays. Underneath them was another mat, which covered two bundles. The larger one contained a sheet of canvas, a cassock of a kind worn by sailors, and a pair of breeches. Inside them were the skull and almost entirely decomposed body of a man.

  To their astonishment, the skull had strands of yellow hair. Around the body there were European goods: a knife, a pack needle for securing baggage, and pieces of iron. Dark red powder, with a strong smell, covered the remains. They found the same powder in the second, smaller bundle, encasing the bones and the head of a small child. Strings and bracelets of white beads enveloped its limbs, and beside the remains was another small bow. The Pilgrims took some of the finest articles and filled in the grave.

  Archaeology did not yet exist in England, even in rudimentary form. Nearly forty years passed before a doctor from Norwich, Sir Thomas Browne, published in 1658 the first account of prehistoric and Roman remains plowed up by English farmers. Not until the 1680s did a museum curator in Oxford begin to write reports about stone tools found in the earth. And yet Winslow took notes of painstaking accuracy, giving details that can be exactly verified from later excavations. The twin burial at Pamet closely resembles a similar interment found at Marblehead, near Salem, in 1874. The excavators discovered the same powder and beads, a similar mixture of native and European goods, and the same manner of placing a child beside an adult.5

  Perhaps the dead at Marblehead and at Pamet were victims of the epidemics that had swept the coast: the Pilgrims saw many graves, suggesting that some appalling catastrophe had befallen the inhabitants. And yet Winslow displays not so much horror as fascination, as well he might. No contrast could have been greater with the burial practices of his homeland.

  By 1620, the churchyard of an English parish remained the resting place of the vast majority—the wealthy had taken over the chancel, inside the church and at the front—but it had become an unholy space, used for keeping geese or pigs or grazing cows. At Sturton in Nottinghamshire, women beat their laundry on a slab in the churchyard, beside a well. Few grave markers of any kind existed: only very rarely does one find a gravestone set up before 1660. If the churchyard dated back to the time of the Norman Conquest, by now it might contain thousands of skeletons, with no record of their resting place. Every plot had many occupants.

  After the English Civil War, attitudes began to change, but in the grave digger’s scene in Hamlet, Shakespeare portrayed Jacobean cemeteries as they were, muddy and unkempt, with their scattered bones and skulls and shallow, reused graves. Inside the church, another regime existed for the wealthy, and in the four decades before the Mayflower there was a rush to build carved monuments, with the painted effigies that still survive on so many tombs. Even so, it was the effigy that mattered, and the inscription. The physical remains of the deceased were an irrelevance.6

  For Calvinists, this was entirely logical. For them, death was final and absolute, an instantaneous divide, the point at which the soul passed entirely beyond the reach of human beings, either to damnation or to eternal life. It might make sense to erect a carved monument as a commemoration of rank, or to flatter the living members of the family, but caring for the corpse served no purpose. In the graves he found on Cape Cod, Edward Winslow encountered people for whom exactly the opposite was true, for whom the dead might be ever present. For them the ornamentation of the cadaver was a duty. They left precious trading goods with the remains as a mark of respect for the departed.

  Within the next three years, Winslow’s readiness to pay close attention to the customs and the language of the native people whom he met came to be an essential asset of the Plymouth Colony. It was critical for their survival. Equally fundamental was another early event: the signing of the Mayflower Compact, that document sometimes exalted as the origin of American democracy, and more often these days dismissed as an irrelevance.

  THE MAYFLOWER COMPACT

  If the first creatures they saw were the pilot whales, the first thing they did was to sign the compact, before the first men landed, before the women went ashore to wash clothes, and before the carpenter began to reassemble the shall
op. Like the blackfish, the compact was a mingling of the familiar and the very new. The Pilgrims took English models, and then radically transformed them to fit new conditions.

  Forty-one adult males put their names to it, because Carver and his colleagues wished to put a stop to argument and grumbling in the ranks, dissent that might give rise to mutiny. The problem arose because the Mayflower had strayed north beyond the domain of the Virginia Company, entering territory where the patent for the colony had no legal force. Because of this, says Bradford, some of the “strangers” on the ship—meaning men who had not come from Leiden, but joined the party in England—pointed out that they could not be compelled to obey orders.

  So, to maintain unity and discipline, they drafted and signed the compact. When Mourt’s Relation appeared in London, it included the text, but the authors added a preamble that puts the situation very clearly: “it was thought good there should be an association and agreement, that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent agree to make and choose.”7 As we shall see in a moment, the words the writers chose were loaded with significance.

  The compact was what an English lawyer would call an enabling document. It was not a constitution as such. They drew up a combination or a covenant, creating “a civill bodie politick,” and they gave it the powers to make “just & equall lawes, ordinances, Acts, constitutions & offices” for the general good of the colony. But they did not say exactly what those rules would be. For this reason, and because it was clearly improvised, it has become commonplace for historians to play down the importance of the document, as though it did not have a fundamental role to play.