continual danger of the savage people, who are cruel, barbarous and most treacherous … not being content only to kill and take away life, but delight to torment men in the most bloody manner … flaying some alive … cutting off the members and joints … and broiling on the coals, eat[ing] the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live, with other cruelties horrible to be related.
Simply contemplating the voyage, Bradford wrote, caused “the very bowels of men” to grate within them and the weak among them to quake and tremble.9
But in the end they decided that the dangers, though great, were not desperate, nor were the difficulties insuperable. God, they believed, would bless them, and if they died in the removal, they would die honorably, while in Leiden they would die “in exile and in a poor condition.” And the future in the Netherlands was darkened even more by the prospect of the resumption of warfare with the Spanish, who “might prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the famine and pestilence as sore here as there, and their liberty less to look out for remedy.”
So they went ahead. They sent emissaries to London to negotiate with the Virginia Company and, after months of delays, obtained the patent to settle in that colony. But then they faced the more difficult problem of raising the necessary funds for the trip and resettlement. On this the Virginia Company was of no help, nor were the Dutch. Success came in the form of a London merchant named Thomas Weston, who had an interested investment group at hand, and the encouragement of the long-dormant Plymouth Company of Virginia whose pending patent would give them legal jurisdiction over New England. The attractions of that area were not only the available financing but also the sense of a more agreeable climate and the absence of a hovering Anglican presence.
In the end, Bradford wrote, “the generality was swayed” to New England. Weston’s group—seventy London merchants and craftsmen, some more, some less sympathetic to the Pilgrims’ religious views—raised a joint stock of approximately £7,000, of which the emigrating householders became partners by contributing their settlement efforts and labor. The next question became who should first undertake the move, and who should stay and follow later. Most of the congregation could not arrange their affairs quickly enough to join the immediate shipment; nor could the vessel they bought accommodate a large group. In the end it was agreed that about seventy-eight of the Leiden community would leave; the rest pledged that if the Lord gave them life, means, and opportunity, they would follow as soon as possible. The pastor, the charismatic John Robinson, would have to remain behind with the majority, despite his desire to “have borne my part with you in this first brunt,” while the church’s ruling elder, Brewster, took over the leadership of the exodus. All agreed that the migrants would not be alienated by their departure. The exiles would become “an absolute church of themselves,” as would the group left behind, but if members of either group were able to join the other, they would be accepted fully “without any further dismission or testimonial.”10
So, in late July 1620, on the eve of the emigrants’ departure, the Leiden congregation, seeking a truly secure location in which to live safely apart from the world, gathered for a day of prayer, solemn humiliation, preaching, tears, and the singing of Psalms, “making joyful melody in our hearts, as well as with the voice, there being many of the congregation very expert in musick.” The next day the voyagers, their close friends, and their household goods were loaded onto canal boats for the twenty-five-mile journey to Delftshaven where their ship, the Speedwell—a mere sixty tons—lay docked. The final parting from the Dutch world that had been their refuge and home for over a decade seemed unendurable. So doleful was the scene, Bradford would later recall—such “sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them,” such “tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each heart”—that the Dutch strangers standing on the quay “could not refrain from tears.” At the final moment those who were left behind fired off their muskets, all raised their hands in salute, and Pastor Robinson fell to his knees, “and they all with him,” to give his final blessing.11
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He would never see them again, nor would many of the others who hoped to join the exodus. Families had divided. The Brewsters left three of their children behind, the Bradfords their five-year-old son, and at least eight of the men departed from their wives, hoping someday to be reunited. There was a reunion of sorts at their first stop, in Southampton, not with the Leiden people but with a contingent of co-religionists who had remained in England and who now wished to join the emigration. They had been brought from London in the chartered Mayflower, a commercial transport vessel most recently in the French wine trade, along with servants and artisans selected by the merchant backers to help in the fishing, hunting, and other lines of work by which they hoped to recoup their investment. After some days of greetings and further planning, the overall company was divided between the two vessels, and on August 5 the voyage began—disastrously, as it turned out for the 150 people on board. Twice they had to return to England when the Speedwell reported leaks and general weakness, perhaps exaggerated by the rather fearful crew. They had no choice but to abandon the smaller vessel, and stuff what they could of its provisions into the Mayflower, together with some of the Speedwell’s passengers—those who were still willing to face the dangers and those who were not considered to be too young or unfit to face the voyage.12
The Mayflower, “an ordinary pot-bellied merchantman” of 180 tons’ burden, was a small vessel for the cargo it bore: perhaps 113 feet in length, twenty-six feet wide, with eleven-foot depth of hold. When it left Plymouth on September 6, it carried—in addition to barrels and crates of supplies of all kinds, piles of household goods, and some domestic animals—approximately 132 people, of whom about 30 were crew. The 102 passengers crowded into every available corner of the ship not occupied by the crew or cargo, sleeping in double bunks in the poop house, the cabin, and wherever they could find space—in hammocks in the ’tween decks beneath the grated hatch, in the shallop they carried aboard, on the gun deck, and among the goods and furniture. And of this jumbled, “ununited,” undisciplined population, living “compact together” for over two months in a severely restricted space, the committed Pilgrim group was a minority: perhaps 44 souls in all—18 men, 11 women, and 15 children. They were a huddled, defensive cluster, harassed even by the vessel’s official “governor,” Christopher Martin, their own backers’ agent, who, when in charge of purchasing and accounts in Southampton, “insulteth over our poor people,” the Pilgrims’ business agent Robert Cushman reported from Dartmouth, “with such scorn and contempt, as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes. It would break your heart to see his dealing, and the mourning of our people.”13
But Martin was only one of the many “strangers” who contested with the pious sect day and night for space, food, and the primitive sanitary facilities. Two-thirds of the passengers were servants or workmen hired by the merchant backers; they shared none of the Pilgrims’ religious convictions and often mocked their piety. Among the many children aboard—thirty-four in all—seven were vagabonds who had been snatched up from the London streets and pressed into servitude; three were illegitimate children from Shropshire who had ended up servants in one of the merchants’ houses; and among the hired workers and adult indentured servants were several vagrant journeymen, some of them respectable, some, in Bradford’s eyes, profane, obscene, and arrogant. The worst person on board, Bradford reported, was a “lusty … haughty” seaman, always “contemning the poor people in their sickness and cursing them daily with grievous execrations,” even threatening to throw them overboard. But such was “the just hand of God” that the sailor was smitten with a “grievous disease” that killed him, and so it was he and not the pious worshippers, Bradford wrote with some satisfaction, who ended in the sea.14
The sailors were always difficult, but they were a transient population. The hired help and independent workers aboard the Mayflower would be a mo
re permanent part of the community, and some of them were little better than the sailors. They were drawn from every corner of the land, and they brought with them attitudes and experiences of all kinds. “One of the profanest families,” Bradford would later recall, was the Billingtons, originally from Lincolnshire. The father, John, was trouble from the start; the son Francis, age eight in 1620, almost blew up the Mayflower when he fired a gun into a barrel of gunpowder in the main cabin; and John’s wife, Eleanor, would be sentenced to time in the stocks and a whipping for slander. Stephen Hopkins, of a Gloucestershire family, alone of the people aboard had once lived in America, having arrived in Virginia after surviving the shipwreck of the Seaventure in Bermuda in 1609, where he had barely escaped hanging for defying the governor’s authority. Sometime during his short stay in Virginia he had probably sailed along the New England coast and had become acquainted with the local natives, and so he would prove to be of great help to the Pilgrims in their relations with the Indians. But despite that, and despite the fact that he would hold public office in the colony from time to time, he was forever in trouble with the authorities—at one point charged with battery, at another with allowing excessive drinking on his premises, at still another with contempt of court. Two of Hopkins’s servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister, were so angrily at odds with each other on board ship that they ended in a duel with swords and daggers, for which they were condemned to be tied up neck and heels. Leister would ultimately escape to Virginia, while Doty would spend much of his thirty-five years in the colony defending himself from charges of assault, slander, and theft.15
Though the Pilgrims were harassed at times by the strangers aboard and were always apprehensive of their contaminating influence, they had supporters among them too. Their military leader, the tough thirty-six-year-old veteran of the Low Country wars, Miles Standish, who would be a rock and pillar of the settlement though some would describe him as a small man with “a very hot & angry temper,” had made contact with the congregation’s leaders before they left Leiden, yet he was never of their church. And there was John Alden, the “hopefull” twenty-one-year-old cooper, hired in Southampton for purely economic reasons; in his sixty-seven years in the colony, he would prove to be not only faithful to the Leideners’ creed but one of the most rigorous in enforcing it.
But however bedeviled the sectarians were by the profane majority around them, the expedition in the end was theirs, its goal the realization of their dreams. To bring the miscellany of people into a purposeful community were leaders of personal dignity, competence, and presence if not of affluence or gentry status. The fifty-three-year-old Brewster, the senior of the Leideners’ project, the original organizer of the Scrooby conventicle, was now the ruling elder. His capacities, Bradford would write in an elegy after his death, were superior “above many.” Perched precariously on the cusp of gentry status, he was uniquely sensitive to the despair of the suddenly dispossessed and the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. He was “wise and discreet,” Bradford wrote,
and well spoken, having a grave and deliberate utterance, of a very cheerful spirit, very sociable and pleasant amongst his friends, of an humble and modest mind.… He was tenderhearted and compassionate of such as were in misery, but especially of such as had been of good estate and rank and were fallen unto want and poverty either for goodness and religion’s sake or by the injury and oppression of others; he would say [that] of all men these deserved to be pitied most. And none did more offend and displease him than such as would haughtily and proudly carry and lift up themselves, being risen from nothing and having little … to commend them but a few fine clothes or a little riches more than others.
A modest, even humble man, his innate dignity was as impressive to contemporaries as was his lay preaching, which was capable of “ripping up the heart and conscience before God.”
His former assistant in the Leiden printing trade, the twenty-five-
year-old Edward Winslow, son of a salt merchant of Droitwich, Worcestershire, was not only well educated but exceptionally competent in public service. After twenty-two years as a diplomat, explorer, entrepreneur, pamphleteer, legislator, and executive in the Plymouth colony, he would find a larger role in England’s foreign service and ultimately in the leadership of Cromwell’s conquest of Jamaica. On board the Mayflower Winslow met Isaac Allerton, a tailor’s son from London, already an imaginative, ambitious entrepreneur, clever and somewhat unscrupulous. With good connections in England and the Netherlands, he was one of the planners of the migration to America, where, after the death of his first wife, he would marry Brewster’s daughter Fear and quickly assume a dominant role in the colony’s trade and external affairs. But his enterprising flair as the colony’s agent in London, his complex commercial adventures throughout the North American and Caribbean trading area, and his dubious mixing of personal and official accounts offended the colony’s leaders, especially Bradford. Dismissed from the agency, he would thereafter engage in all sorts of enterprises in London and in the English, Swedish, and Dutch colonies, leaving an estate of £118 at his death in 1659.16
But of all the Mayflower’s leaders, John Carver had perhaps the most exceptional combination of talents. A Yorkshire tradesman born in Doncaster, less than ten miles from Scrooby, he moved to London where he prospered, and then to Leiden, where he was caught up in the separatists’ congregation. By 1610, related by marriage and creed to Pastor Robinson, he was a deacon of the church. When in 1617 and again in 1620 negotiations for removal to America began, it was he, with another deacon, who was sent to England for discussions with the Virginia Company and to begin making arrangements for the move. And when the migration was finally under way it was he who was elected the prospective colony’s governor. For it was in him above all other leaders, as his “dear brother” Robinson wrote in a moving farewell letter, that the congregation had its deepest confidence and rested its hopes for success. He had such “singular piety, rare humility, and great condescendency,” and he was so selflessly devoted to the cause, so public spirited, and yet at the same time so competent. His wealth had become “a public purse, [he] having disbursed the greatest part of that considerable estate God had given him, for the carrying on the interest of the company.” He had known the world and was fleeing from it, in search of higher, deeper goals.17
And then there was Bradford. He was thirty when the Mayflower left England, still in the shadow of his seniors in the search for the simple, uncluttered, austere Christian life. It could easily be seen that he was intelligent, thoughtful, pious, well read, and adept at languages—fluent in Dutch, familiar with French, a master (Cotton Mather later wrote) of Latin and Greek, and a student of Hebrew. But no one on board the Mayflower could have known that he had a heightened consciousness of the drama in which they were involved, the imagination to cast it all as a central passage in Christian history, and the literary capacity to express their fortunes as a heroic epic, in biblical cadences. He must have lived, even then, a deeply considered life, exquisitely responsive to the people around him, keenly aware of their and his own achievements and failures in what he took to be the eyes of God. Convinced of his people’s transcendent mission and that they were finally, after many years of searching, approaching the ultimate realization of their dreams, he noted each fluttering motion, however slight, of progress or regression. The strangers’ sins, vulgarities, and indifference aboard the Mayflower disturbed him deeply, seared his sensibilities; later he would recall them bitterly. So too would he rejoice in remembering the resolution, faithfulness, and sanctity of the truly pious in this travail of mind and soul and body.
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He would never forget the voyage or its immediate aftermath. After a tranquil start the Mayflower hit storms that shook every timber in the ship, created leaks in the upper areas, and cracked one of the main beams. They had no choice but to reduce their sails and drift, pitching and tossing wildly. One of Carver’s six servants, “a plain-hearted Christian,” was th
rown overboard as the ship tipped far over to one side, and was dragged underwater, clinging to a loose halyard until hauled back on board with a boat hook. The sailors panicked. They were willing, they said, to earn their wages but not to risk their lives. Their fear spread to the passengers. A group of them confronted the ship’s officers demanding that they consider returning to England. But repairs, it was decided, could be made, and stress could be reduced by shortening sails, and so “they committed themselves to the will of God” and completed the voyage. On November 11 they dropped anchor in Provincetown harbor, in the northernmost tip of Cape Cod.
They had been at sea for nine weeks, and though only one passenger had died on the voyage, they were not only severely “weatherbeaten” but debilitated to an extent they did not yet know. Fresh food supplies had been consumed early in the voyage, firewood too, and signs of scurvy had appeared among both crew and passengers. Sickened and exhausted, when they came to the shore they were shocked by the scene before them. On one side, as Bradford would later write in one of his most vivid passages, there was “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men … the whole country full of woods and thickets”; on the other side there was “the mighty ocean which … was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all civil parts of the world.” The crew threatened not to budge from the temporary anchorage until the Pilgrims discovered a permanent location for their settlement, and if they delayed too long, the sailors said they would simply abandon them on the nearby sandy shore. And from the servants and other strangers came grim mutterings, to the effect that once ashore they would strike out on their own, which they said they were legally free to do since they were not in Virginia and hence not under any patented jurisdiction.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 41