The contingent of Separatists from Leyden had crossed from Holland to England in their small vessel misnamed the Speedwell. It was purchased to be used as transportation and for fishing in the new settlement, She proved a balky ship, heeling way over and soaking her passengers on the short trip. They were seasick and drenched when the Speedwell pulled into Southampton harbor and docked alongside the Mayflower with its complement of “Strangers” from London. The two groups, unknown to each other but bound together in a perilous undertaking, had only a short time to get acquainted before new problems cropped up.
Christopher Martin, a Puritan, had been named expedition treasurer. He could not get along with the Leyden agents, Deacons Robert Cushman and John Carver. And they were having trouble getting along with each other. There was little cooperation in buying provisions and, as a result, the Mayflower was stocked with two tons of butter, hardly any guns, and little to use in trade with the Indians.
Thomas Weston, the London adventurer, was denounced as a “bloodsucker” for changing the terms of his agreement and he stomped off to London when the Leyden leaders refused to sign the new agreements. He vowed the Pilgrims would not get another cent from the Merchants and Adventurers. That was a heavy blow because the Speedwell captain refused to sail until the vessel’s rigging was changed and that would cost money.
Pleas for help were sent to Weston but he kept his word and sent the Pilgrims nothing. To clear port they had to sell some of their provisions, including most of their butter, leaving them short of supplies.
On August 15th the Mayflower and Speedwell put to sea with the passengers on the two ships totaling about 120. They sailed rapidly for two days before a stiff wind. Then the Speedwell, its captain said, became “open and leakie as a sieve.” The ships put back to Dartmouth where the Speedwell was dry-docked for nearly three weeks. The passengers on the Mayflower were so unhappy that Christopher Martin, acting as governor on that ship, refused to let anyone ashore for fear they would not return. Toward the end of August, Mayflower and Speedwell put to sea again. They were more than 300 miles out when the Speedwell reported it was leaking and “must bear up or sink at sea.”
This time the ships put in to Plymouth, England, where it was decided to go on without the Speedwell. The Mayflower would take as many passengers as it could, but 20 would have to be left behind. There were, by that time, plenty agreeable to do so, Deacon Cushman among them. On September 16th, the Mayflower set out alone. The Pilgrims had no Speedwell for fishing, they would arrive too late for planting, and they had few arms for hunting. Unless Thomas Weston relented there would be no future expedition with additional provisions and help. If they turned back, they would lose everything and be in worse poverty than ever. Saints and Strangers alike agreed to sail on and trust in God.
There were 102 passengers aboard — 50 men, 20 women, and 32 children — with a crew of 40. Only 16 Leyden men had agreed to Weston’s new terms. With them were 11 wives and 19 children. The rest came from London except one from Southampton, the handsome, strapping 20-year-old John Alden, a barrelmaker, hired on a one-year contract to teach the Pilgrims to pack their catches, and four sailors under similar contract to teach them to fish.
Captain Christopher Jones set his course along the 42nd Parallel, a bearing that would carry him to Cape Cod where he intended to swing south to Northern Virginia territory, near the Hudson River.
As week after boring week passed, tensions rose. The Saints and Strangers bickered at each other and the crewmen detested all. The crew cursed them with “greevous execrations” and their worst tormentor among the sailors said he expected to bury half of them at sea and “make merry with what they had.” When, later on, he died in delirium the Saints looked on it as the “just hand of God upon him.”
Halfway across the ocean, the point of no return, the Mayflower ran into fierce equinoctial storms. In one, the main beam amidships parted. Captain Jones, fearful for the safety of his ship and crew, was about to turn back to England when Francis Eaton, a carpenter, located the jackscrew he had brought along to be used in house building. With a few turns of the screw the broken ends of the beam were forced into position, two strong timbers were added as props to hold it in place, and the ship was once again sound and on her way to Virginia.
In another storm, John Howland sought relief from the fetid lower deck and was swept overboard. The ship happened to be trailing some halyards, which Howland grabbed and hung on to, although “he was sundrie fathoms under water.” Howland was pulled in with a boat hook but was “something ill” from the experience. Despite the storms, the hazards, the crowding and the poor food, only one Pilgrim died during the voyage — William Butten, a young servant of Dr. Samuel Fuller, counterbalanced by the single birth of a son to Stephen and Elizabeth Hopkins, who named him Oceanus.
The remarkable health record, in a day when ships on such expeditions often lost half their passengers, has been attributed to the Mayflower’s never before having carried passengers. She was called a “sweet ship,” with seepage from earlier wine cargoes having impregnated the timbers and sterilized the hold.
“After long beating at sea, they fell with that land which is called Cape Cod.” Though “not a little joyful” at their landfall off what is now South Wellfleet, the Pilgrims still were a long way from establishing a colony. Shortly after sighting land on November 19th, Captain Jones headed the Mayflower south toward Virginia. By mid-afternoon the ship had fallen “among the dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” of Tucker’s Terror, now known as Pollak Rip. The ship seemed in such great danger that Jones turned about to spend the night off Chatham. On the 20th, the Pilgrims sailed north to seek a fair harbor described to them by Robert Coppin, the second mate, who had been in New England waters before.
They hove to off the tip of the Cape on the night of the 20th and sailed on the next morning into what is now Provincetown Harbor. An unnamed rebellious element among the passengers had no desire to spend their lives in “travailes and labours” for the Merchant Adventurers of London. They said that when they got ashore “they would use their own libertie, for none had power to command them, the patente they had being for Virginia and not New England, which belonged to another government, with which the Virginia Company had nothing to do.”
Before anyone was allowed ashore, however, the Leyden Saints tried to meet the explosive situation with a formal document that laid the “first foundation of their government in this place.” As soon as it was decided to make a landing on Cape Cod, the London faction began quickly advancing the doctrine that, since the colonists were to land without a patent, every man was a law unto himself. He could live in the forest alone, work or play, fish or hunt, and do his will irrespective of the wishes of his associates. That doctrine of each person doing as he pleased so strongly appealed to the Strangers and bound servants that it threatened to divide the colony.
The seditious talk, coming to Master Carver’s ears, caused him to seek the counsel of Brewster, Bradford, and Standish, the Leyden men who were the real movers of the voyage. Seeing their colony in jeopardy, they reread a long and wise letter from their pastor in Leyden, John Robinson, suggesting that each adult male in the colony should have a voice in the government of the colony just as they had in the affairs of the church. They then prepared the “Mayflower Compact.” A bridle of some sort had to be slipped over the heads of the Londoners, a compromise being impossible as one faction was for role, while the other stood for breach of contract and anarchy.
The Compact was written on Friday, the Mayflower arrived in what is now Provincetown Harbor on Saturday, and the formal signing took place that morning. Nothing is more evident from the record than that, in drawing up the document, the Saints were merely defining what, in their circumstances, it was absolutely necessary to do. As a practical matter, the giving to every man the right of voting — the choosing of their own officers by the entire body of men, and the discussing of their affairs in town meetings — laid the foundation for a totally new system of government. It is probable that the Pilgrims, in this instance as in others, little foresaw or contemplated the momentous results of an arrangement dictated at the time by stern necessity.
On November the 21st, before they came to the harbor, Bradford remarked that “observing some not well affected to unity and concord, but who gave some appearance of faction, 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; and set our hands….”
Among the colonists were three distinct divisions of society: gentlemen, commoners, and servants. On the dock you would hear Master Carver, Master Winslow, Master Hopkins, so that in addressing gentlefolks it was “Master this,” and “Master that.” But the commoners were called plain Francis Cook or Thomas Rogers or Degory Priest. Being on different social planes as they were, and yet making themselves equals in civil government, was an important innovation. Of the 41 men and servants who agreed to sign away their rights and have them returned with limitation that morning, Edward Dotey and Edward Leister, who were servants of Master Stephen Hopkins, were the last. Of the 65 men and boys on board, 25 did not sign — but they were sons of those who had given their allegiance or men too sick to do so.
The Pilgrims were a diverse agglomerate, many illiterate, but they showed an extraordinary political maturity. They established a government by consent of the governed with just and equal laws for all. They also negotiated a treaty with the Indians which was kept scrupulously and which assured peace to the struggling colony for more than half a century. Deeply in debt to the London Merchants who sponsored them, they worked for more than 20 years as individuals and a community to liquidate the crushing burden. They borrowed money with which to buy out the shares of the Merchants and Adventurers in 1627, and by 1645 they had paid off the entire debt at the astronomical interest rate of 45 percent.
The colonists had intended to become fishermen to meet their debts, but they never did. By early training and inclination the leaders among them were all farmers. They tried fishing, but their little sloop proved inadequate and their nets faulty. Their profits came from farming, and they then expanded into furs, cattle dealing, and trade. In the process they established posts which later became the sites of four other settlements: Augusta on the Kennebec River in Maine, Castine on the Penobscot in Maine, Windsor on the Connecticut River in Connecticut, and Bourne on Cape Cod.
All of those developments came slowly. In the meantime it took a month after reaching Provincetown to locate the site of their first settlement at Plymouth. Bradford’s History Of Plimoth Plantation (free pdf download) is a daily account as exciting as Robinson Crusoe and almost as inspiting as the New Testament account of the acts of the earliest Christians.
The first explorers landed at Plymouth on December 21, 1620, but weather delays kept the others from seeing their new home until a week later. It was Saturday morning, January 2nd, before a storm abated sufficiently for a working force to go ashore with felling axes to cut timbers for the common house. Governor John Carver, accompanied by Stephen Hopkins, who had been in Virginia and was familiar with the latch pines, used for foundation logs, carried a felling ax, marking the trees that were to be cut. While the two notched trees, the others began cutting them.
Most of the Leyden men, farmers in their boyhood days, knew the knack of sending an ax into the heart of a tree. While the chips were flying and the sound of axes echoed through the woods, a sharp lookout was kept for savages. Myles Standish wished to set sentinels round the choppers, but there were so few men, and so much to do, that they decided to take their chances against attack. Their matchlocks stood close by with sparks in readiness.
Gentlemen, commoners, and bonded servants worked side by side. Even the Elder Brewster and the gray-haired Carver worked at felling trees and cutting branches from them. Standish, too, labored with the lowliest. By noontime, a long line of men, dragging a log, came towards the clearing, their bodies bent forward and straining at every nerve. Every few moments the end of the log would strike an obstruction, or else dig its way into the ground, causing the men to stop with a jerk. Having gained their breath, they would again strive with their load until stopped by exhaustion; it was drudgery of the hardest kind, but every man had hold of the rope. Having neither horses nor oxen, they were themselves compelled to take the placers of animals.
Simply to state that work on the common house began two days later, and was finished all but the thatching on January 19th, eclipses the human element — the Herculean effort involved, the devotion and death of Degory Priest, for example, who gave his every last ounce of energy to the project.
Hardly had work on the common house begun when it was decided that “every man shall build his own house thinking by that course, men would make more haste than working in common.” Though there were 24 married men, only 18 had their wives with them and Mistress Dorothy May Bradford had accidentally drowned while the ship was anchored in Provincetown Harbor. There were thus fifteen single men. Since all could not build houses, the leaders divided the colonists to make 19 households, with each group expected to build a dwelling. The sites were determined by casting lots.
Having completed the common house, the colonists began building a small house to be used as a storeroom for their tools and provisions. They also had to build a house for the sick. With the exception of a corncrib or barn, built just before harvesting their crop the following summer, those were the only buildings built by all hands for common use.
By the middle of February there were four family huts completed. Many of the colonists had made beginnings, but sickness prevented them from finishing. The path was littered with big and little timbers, dragged with infinite toil from the forests by men now too feeble to carry on. These lay where they had been dropped, many never to be moved by the hands that had brought them so far. With the winter came chili winds and frost: still, it was mild as winters go in New England. Unfortunately, influenza is more prevalent in such a winter and the dreadful scourge of sickness and death set in. The great sickness filled the sick house to overflowing with men, women, and children. The common house was likewise filled with beds of rough boards to keep the feeble off the clay floors.
During that time the Pilgrims and the sailors alike were struck by the “general sickness.” Nearly half of the settlers and sailors died in the cold, rainy, and snowy weather when their rations were meager, their shelter scant, and the work load more than their weakened bodies could stand. “They died sometimes two or three of a day … and … in the time of most distress there was but six or seven sound persons, who spared no pains, night or day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed their meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them.”
Four entire families were wiped out, only three married couples were left unbroken, and only five of eighteen wives survived. The children fared best. The 29 single men, hired hands and servants, were hard hit with 19 of them dying. And in the midst of their travail, “ye Indeans came skulking about them.”
Though the Indians had done nothing harmful or threatening, except to steal a few unguarded tools in the forest, the settlers were ill at ease with the idea that unseen eyes were watching them. They were in the midst of a military planning conference on Friday, March 26th, when a tall brave, carrying a bow and arrow, walked boldly down the path straight toward the common house where the meeting was being held.
“Welcome, English, welcome,” he kept repeating.
The Pilgrims were dumbfounder and the Indian, who said his name was Sameset, explained that he had traveled from Monhegan Island, a day’s journey by canoe to mainland and three days journey on foot to Plymouth. He astonished them more by asking for some beer. Having used up their supply, the Pilgrims gave him “strong water” and sat down to listen to his story — how the Patuxet tribe that lived in their clearing had been overwhelmed by the “plague” of 1617, completely wiped out except for one, the true owner of the land on which the plantation now lay. His name was Squanto and he had survived by having been kidnapped in 1614 and transported to England, where he learned to speak English even better than Sameset, who had learned what he knew of it from English explorers and fishermen at Pemaquid.Sameset later brought Squanto and the news that the great chief Massasoit, who ruled the entire area, was coming. The arrival of the chief diverted the Pilgrims from Squanto, who was to become their best friend. Sameset disappeared from Pilgrim records and apparently went back to Maine, but Squanto stayed, “and was their interpreter. and was a special instrument sent of God for their good, beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he died.”
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