The shipboard community was thus riven by conflict, bereft of legitimate civil authority, and likely to splinter into fragments. It was to restore order, to counter the mutinous speeches, and to begin the construction by consensus of a governing structure, that the Pilgrim leaders drew up an agreement, a compact, to create a “civic body politic.” The brief document, signed on shipboard, was simply a commitment by the signatories to obey the “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices” that would be promulgated by a government still to be formed. It was no constitution, only an effort to unite and direct to the public good the energies of the colony’s diverse population—saints and sinners, servants and masters, the pious from Scrooby and Leiden and the profane from London and Southampton. It expressed in simple language the passion of the leaders finally to realize their pious hopes for the creation of a truly Christian community, and so it was ratified with some solemnity. Forty-one men signed the compact, pledging “all due submission and obedience” to whatever regulations would emerge. The first to sign were the main organizers and sectarian leaders, those who had carried the major burdens—Carver, Bradford, Winslow, and Brewster. They were followed by other respected figures—Allerton, Standish, Alden, Martin, and Hopkins; and they in turn were followed by some of the lesser members of the community, servants, and hired workers. The belligerent Billington signed, as did the feuding pair, Leister and Doty. Since the pledge of householders committed their dependents—wives, children, and servants—the forty-one signatories in effect committed the entire shipboard population, save for the sailors, to the Leideners’ aspirations.
For Carver, endorsed as governor, and for the other leaders there was much to fear. In addition to the divisiveness of the community, there was the likely violence of the natives, possible abandonment by the crew, and starvation if their supplies ran out without help from the natives. But no one had imagined what the consequences would be of the malnutrition that had resulted from two months at sea, the accidents that could befall people coping with a strange environment, and above all the ferocity of a New England winter.18
There was a foretaste of things to come when, two days after their arrival, the passengers first went ashore. To get to dry land they had to wade through almost half a mile of shallow water, “which caused many to get colds and coughs, for it was … freezing cold weather.” For a month thereafter scouting expeditions were sent out to explore the land, establish relations with the natives, forage for supplies, and identify a site for the permanent settlement. They were successful in making reasonably peaceful contact with the natives and, with their help, in locating and digging up some of the Indians’ buried food supplies. But the cost was heavy. They had to dig into ground frozen a foot deep to reach the buried corn and beans, and to reach the ship after working on shore they had to wade “to the middle of the thigh, and oft to the knees … it brought to the most, if not all, coughs and colds … which afterward turned to the scurvey, whereof many died.” The exploring teams faltered again and again in the face of driving winds and rain: “some of our people that are dead tooke the originall of their death here.”
December 6: “the weather was very cold and it froze so hard as the spray of the sea lighting on their coats, they were as if they had been glazed” (Bradford); “like coats of iron” (Winslow).
December 8: After some hours’ sailing [in the small shallop they had brought on the Mayflower] it began to snow and rain, and about the middle of the afternoon the wind increased and the sea became very rough, and they broke their rudder … the storm increasing, and night drawing on, they bore what sail they could get in, while they could see. But herewith they broke their mast in three pieces and their sail fell overboard in a very grown sea.… And though it was very dark and rained sore, yet in the end they got under the lee of a small island … but were divided in their minds, some would keep [in] the boat for fear they might be amongst the Indians, others were so wet and cold they could not endure, but got ashore, and with much ado got fire (all things being so wet).
Finally they found the pleasant hillside at Patuxet, the cleared, cultivated, well-watered site of a deserted Indian village which they would call Plymouth. Its advantages were obvious, but there were problems too, and they had to consider that other, as yet unknown sites might be better. When they weighed the pros and cons, one “especiall reason” convinced them to settle on that hillside:
The heart of winter and unseasonable weather was come upon us, so that we could not goe upon coasting and discovery, without danger of loosing men and boat, upon which would follow the overthrow of all.… Also cold and wett lodging had so taynted our people, for scarce any of us were free from vehement coughs, as if they should continue long in that estate, it would indanger the lives of many, and breed diseases and infection amongst us.
In fact, the damage had already been done, and the ravages were beginning to mount.19
Death was everywhere. America, for these hopeful utopians, had become a graveyard, and the record keeper was the faithful Bradford. Day after day he registered in a small notebook the deaths as they occurred, along with the marriages and punishments. The young and the old died first. On December 4: Edward Thompson, one of William White’s servants; White himself would follow in February. On December 6, one of Carver’s young servants, the boy Jasper, died. On December 7, Brad-ford’s own wife, then twenty-three, drowned, it was said, after a fall from the Mayflower. On December 8 the elderly James Chilton, who had survived a vengeful mob in Leiden, succumbed. And there were two other deaths that month. January was worse: eight deaths were registered, including Miles Standish’s wife and the imperious Christopher Martin, whose last act was to give Carver a report on the state of their accounts. Early that month Bradford, who had caught cold on one of the expeditions, suffered such severe “griefe and paine” in his legs that his life was despaired of: it was “Gods mercie,” Winslow wrote, that he survived. By February the dangerous illnesses had become so general that a special house had been built as an infirmary, but in that month seventeen people died, among them Allerton’s wife, Mary Norris, after a miscarriage. And in March death took thirteen more, including Governor Carver, who suffered a stroke (his “senses failed”) after working in the fields. His wife, “a weak woman,” followed him a few weeks later. By then, Bradford noted that
in two or three months time half their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which this long voyage and inaccommodate condition had brought upon them. So as there died some times two or three of a day … that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained. And of these, in the time of most distress, there was but six or seven sound persons…[who] spared no pains night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, 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.
There was no such benevolence among the crew, who refused to help each other or the passengers, muttering “if they died, let them die.” Almost half of the crew, including the “lustiest,” were dead by early April, when the Mayflower returned to England.
Families had been destroyed—not only Christopher Martin but his wife and both servants had died; not only John Turner but both his sons as well; both Carvers and three of their six servants; both Mullinses, their son, and a servant; both Tinkers and their son; Mrs. Winslow and two of their servants.
4
It was therefore a grieving remnant, settled in two rows of small, dark thatched houses on the slope leading down to Plymouth harbor, that assembled to greet the first relief vessel. The Fortune, almost four and a half months in passage from London, reached Cape Cod just a year after the Mayflower had arrived. Even smaller than the Speedwell, it carried among its thirty-fiv
e passengers several of the people who had been left behind in 1620, including a few who would become pillars of Plymouth’s church and community, most notably Thomas Prence. The young son of a Gloucestershire carriage maker, in his fifty-two years in the colony Prence would become its most important public official after Bradford, serving as governor for seventeen years. He would also become one of the major landholders, and he would always be a battler for the maintenance of the church’s apostolic purity. He was the complete separatist, remembered at his death as not only a pious gentleman and “well-wisher to all that feared God” but also “a terror to the wicked.” And he was prolific. With his first wife, Patience Brewster, and the three wives who followed, he fathered nine children, whose careers trace the expansion of the town’s population across southern New England.20
On board the Fortune too was Prence’s future brother-in-law, Jonathan Brewster, William Brewster’s eldest son, one of the very few survivors of the original Scrooby conventicle. A ribbon maker in Leiden, he would prove to be one of the colony’s most active entrepreneurs, especially in developing the Indian trade, and at the same time he would engage in scientific experiments. The Cushmans, of a Kentish family who had been at the core of the Leiden group—Deacon Robert and his fourteen-year-old son Thomas—also arrived on the Fortune. The father quickly returned to England to continue his work on the Pilgrims’ business problems, but the son remained, to be adopted by Bradford and eventually to succeed Brewster as the church’s ruling elder. Two new arrivals who as children had been part of the Leiden community—Moses Simonson and the Walloon Philip Delano—quickly became members of the church and would remain faithful to it until their deaths six decades later. And there were a few others aboard the Fortune who were also prepared to live in close communion with the church, some of whose involvement was cut short by early deaths or sudden departures.
But the rest of the passengers, the majority on board, were workmen from London’s labor market who had been hired for the colony by the Pilgrims’ financial backers. A miller is listed, a journeyman mason, a leather seller (fellmonger), a vintner, a mariner, and an armorer; ten single young men gave no occupation. In no way committed to the church’s ideals, these artisans and laborers would drift through and often out of Plymouth as they had through and out of London, leaving behind only occasional traces of their lives in America—traces that document mainly their resistance to the moral constraints of this piously disciplined community.
In the nine years that followed—before the beginning of the great migration to the Puritan colony in Massachusetts—only fourteen vessels came into Plymouth harbor, and only six of them—none between 1624 and 1629—carried passengers to supplement the colony’s population. All of the ships, however, including the six that directly served the colony, brought an influx of just the kinds of “profane” people and the worldly corruptions that the Pilgrims had sought to escape.
Their struggle to maintain their identity and realize their hopes in this increasingly complex demographic situation was fierce, unending, and in the end unsuccessful. For a while, however, they seemed victorious. They could accommodate the sixty-seven “rough and unruly” men whom Thomas Weston sent over in 1622. For as expected, Weston’s “rude fellows,” led by his “heady … and violent” brother, moved off, after three months, to Wessagusset (Weymouth), thirty miles to the north, to establish a fishing station and trading post. Plymouth had been warned that these “are no men for us,” indeed that they were “not fit for an honest man’s company.” In the event they proved to be worse than their reputation and the cause of the Pilgrims’ most barbarous episode.
Throwing together a few log huts and a blockhouse surrounded by a stockade, Weston’s men set out to extract what they could from the neighboring Indians, who had recently been devastated by a severe epidemic. Furs and food were not forthcoming, and as the group “neither applied themselves to planting of corn, nor taking of fish … but went about to build castles in the air … when winter came … many were starved to death, and the rest hardly escaped.” The survivors (at least ten died that winter) scrounged for ground nuts, clams, and mussels for food and haunted the Indian encampments for help. When one of them was caught stealing the Indians’ seed corn, thus threatening any future assistance the natives might give, he was hanged by his own people “to give the Indians content.” By then the pressure on the natives had reached the point of brutality. In retaliation, the Indians began planning an assault that would wipe out the Wessagusset settlement altogether. Plymouth had recently heard of the Virginia massacre, and when word was received of a pending conspiracy at Wessagusset that might engulf them all, Standish, ruthless as were all of the veterans of the Netherlands’ wars, and a small troop were sent off to repel the attack before it began.21
They did their work quickly and savagely. They lured the leading warriors into the blockhouse and then stabbed them to death, one after the other. It was incredible, Winslow wrote, how many wounds the chiefs suffered before they died, “not making any fearful noise, but catching at their weapons and striving to the last.” The youngster who accompanied the warriors Standish “caused to be hanged.” Then, apparently on instruction, Standish cut off the head of the “bloody and bold villain” believed to have inspired the conspiracy and brought it back to Plymouth in triumph, where it was displayed on the blockhouse together with a flag made of a cloth soaked in the victim’s blood.
Standish was received “with joy” but not to universal acclaim. When word of the affair reached Leiden, the Reverend Robinson sent off a severe condemnation. Instead of murdering the Indians, why, he asked, had Standish not tried to convert them? And did he and his men have legal jurisdiction over them? It is not a question, he wrote, of what the Indians deserved but of what treatment was absolutely necessary. The murders were excessive. “Methinks one or two principals should have been full enough, according to that approved rule, the punishment to the few, and the fear to many.” “To be a terror to poor, barbarous people” might seem “glorious” in men’s eyes, but not in God’s. And quite aside from the morality and legality involved, Robinson concluded, such behavior might well stimulate others to begin a “ruffling course in the world” to everyone’s disadvantage.22
It was the end of this phase of Weston’s search for quick profits. His half-starved, demoralized men scattered—one of them settled with the Indians—leaving the blockhouse and huts deserted. But not for long. Soon after they left, another group, under the leadership of the well-connected Robert Gorges, resettled the abandoned site. Gorges, who sought some kind of palatinate for himself, some kind of private principality, came with a lieutenant’s commission from the Council for New England, which claimed title to all of New England and had parceled out the entire area to its twenty patentees. Gorges’s party was far more respectable than Weston’s, consisting of gentlemen, soldiers, artisans, farmers, traders, and a preacher. But the expedition lasted only a year. Gorges “scarcely saluted the country,” Bradford wrote, “not finding the state of things here to answer his quality and condition.” His party, like Weston’s, scattered after a single harsh winter. Some went back to England, some went on to Virginia, and some settled in isolated farms close by, eventually within, the expanding boundaries of the Plymouth colony.23
By then, in July 1623, more proper recruits to the colony had finally arrived among the ninety passengers on the Anne and the Little James. But the colony had been warned that this incoming group as a whole was “weak” in character, many of them having been selected not by Cushman but by the merchant backers for their financial interests. They and Cushman apologized for not sending over more of the Leiden congregation—“I hope ere long you shall enjoy them all” (Cushman)—and especially for failing to send over their charismatic leader, John Robinson. Still, though they were intermingled with people “so bad as they were fain to be at charge to send them home again the next year,” a number of the wives and children who had been left behind in 1620 were aboa
rd the two vessels. Among the “old friends” were two more of Brewster’s daughters, Patience and the teenage Fear, who had been born during the flight from Scrooby; several of the Walloon wives, together with their Danzig-born compatriot, Godbert Godbertson; Deacon Fuller’s wife; and that “godlie matron” from Somersetshire, Alice Southworth, who within a year would marry the widower Bradford.
Though faithful to the cause, the pious newcomers, when they arrived at Plymouth, found a scene that shook their confidence in God’s favor. Some simply “fell a-weeping,” Bradford later recalled, to see their predecessors in such a “low and poor condition.” Many of those who came to greet them, survivors of the Mayflower and the Fortune, were “ragged in apparel and some little better than half naked.” They seemed to have lost “the freshness of their former complexion,” as a result, it was believed, of a diet consisting largely of fish without bread, washed down with spring water. “Daunted and dismayed … fancying their own misery in what they saw in others … all were full of sadness.” And the future seemed grim. The spring and early summer of 1623 were hot and dry. For a time, with the ground “parched like withered hay,” a near famine prevailed, until finally, after much prayer, the rain came “with such sweet and gentle showers as gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God.” The fading crops revived, and they gave thanks for a plentiful harvest.24
But no sooner had their food supply improved and the palisaded town began to seem secure than the settlers ran into a problem with a peculiar group among the recent arrivals. Ten of the passengers on the Anne had come “on their particular”—that is, as a separate group, to settle independently within Plymouth’s territory. They were not separatists; nor were they religious in any significant way. Like so many adventurous spirits of the time, these “particulars,” Bradford wrote, dreamed of “building great houses … they would be great men and rich all of a sudden.” But they did have the right to settle and agreed, in exchange for land grants, to obey the colony’s laws, share in the common defense, pay taxes, and keep away from the Indian trade, which was reserved to the Pilgrims and the merchants, who expected the profits from it to repay the costs of settlement.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 42