And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men - and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not… What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?

William Bradford

There are more boats. There are always more boats. The most famous of them all, The Mayflower, sails from Plymouth in England on 16th September 1620. She is 90 feet long and 25 feet at her broadest, and overladen, as always, though as her previous cargo had been wine rather than livestock her dank and crowded hold smells sweeter than most. She carries 149 people. 105 are passengers, and of that number at least 35 are pilgrims, religious separatists determined to build a new church, a new home in this new world. The rest of the company are the indentured servants and artisans who will help make their dream a reality but these are the dreamers. They live huddled in the ship's hold for almost two months, in a space only five feet high as northeasterly storms batter the decks and soak everything. The vessel carries pots and pans, tools and weapons, dogs, sheep, goats and poultry. It has 12 cannon. The Mayflower carries all of this and more: she carries a myth, the founding myth of America1.

The Mayflower made landfall on Cape Cod on 9 November. They hoped to sail south, to the Virginia so extensively described and charted by John Smith, but high winds and savage rocks made the coastline impassable. Instead search parties landed, scouring the shores for a hospitable spot in which to make their home. On 11th December a group of men led by William Bradford made their way through a howling snowstorm into Plymouth Harbour: five days later The Mayflower dropped anchor, and on Christmas Day they began building the first house. Like the Virginia settlers before them they arived at a bad time of year, too late to plant, and like the Virginia settlers, nearly half of them were dead before the first winter was out (including fourteen of the eighteen married women). The coast was cold and windswept, the soil sparse and unforgiving, and for those first months entirely frozen. The passengers huddled aboard their ship, where scurvy, pneumomia and tuberculosis took a heavy toll. Unlike their Jamestown compatriots however they found field upon field of cleared lands, ready for the planting, as smallpox had already devastated the local population. And unlike the Virginia Company they had come for neither gold nor trade nor any earthly profit. They were on a mission from God2.

Well, some of them were. A third of the passengers were religious separatists, also known as pilgrims or saints, and later included under the more general label of puritans (although puritan migration proper comes later). Puritans were English Protestants who felt that their country's religious Reformation had not gone far enough, and that the Church of England needed to be purified. One of the key beliefs of Protestantism was that it was up to the individual to read and interpret Scripture for themselves, while Catholicism stressed the power of the Church, the clergy and the Pope to determine religious doctrine and practice. Puritans didn't like being told how to worship, nor having to attend church services led by ignorant, unenthusiastic or uninspired clergymen. They didn't much like being imprisoned, even executed, for refusing to attend church services, or for starting their own congregations. They didn't trust King James I, or his bishops, or his Spanish wife. King James wasn't crazy about them either (nor were his predecessors Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, while Queen Mary had enthusiastically burned several hundred devout Protestants the stake): the religious establishment, Catholic and (since Henry VIII's breach with Rome in 1535) Anglican, had long been a powerful supporter of the divinely-ordained monarchy, and royal authority was too absolute and far too realtistic to allow every man (let alone woman) decide for themselves what God might want, or what Jesus would do.

Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.

William Bradford History of the Plymouth Plantation

The puritans founded their own religious communities, their own kingdoms of God, in England, and some left for the Netherlands to find freedoms England would not afford them, but it never felt like a home, and over time the language barrier, Dutch religious practices, and the threat from the Spanish robbed the promise from this promised land. So they looked further afield, towards some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same3. Here, across the Atlantic, where Thomas More had located his Utopia, God's Chosen people could enjoy the freedom to worship as they saw fit, in a new world which God had seen fit to empty for them by sweeping away great multitudes of the population by the smallpox a little before we went thither (according to New England's First Fruits, published in 1643).

It wasn't much of a stretch to see the good hand of God (according to William Bradford) in the apocalypse that had befallen this land, this vast and empty chaos that Robert Cushman described in 1622. Some 95% of the native tribespeople had died by John Smith's estimation: where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found… he surmised on his return voyage to the region in 1622. How easy then for these providential voyagers to couch what they saw in the Biblical terms with which they were all too familiar, as Thomas Morton wrote in his New English Canaan4, published in 1637, that they died on heapes as they lay in their houses… in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one a live to tell what became of the rest… the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into this departed, as I travailed in that Forrest were the Massachussets, it seemed to see a new found Golgotha.

The land was, in reality, not a virgin wilderness but recently widowed.

James Loewen Lies my Teacher Told Me

Easy for the English to imagine their arrival was Providential, easier still for those natives that survived to imagine their gods had abandoned them. With their numbers, their powers, and their confidence so catastrophically depleted, native tribes could mount no significant threat against the English settlers for a good half a century, by which time they were thoroughly settled, spread, diversified, fortified, home. As it was the English found lands cleared, houses and villages abandoned, and fields cleared for the planting, already planted even as one colonists' journal records: we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans… In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us?

Just a few years before this land had been a vibrant community of interlinked towns and villages, until European fishermen plying the Massachusetts coast had left behind some new disease, a pathogen that tore through the native population and wiped the slate almost clean. By 1620 Europe was already well embarked upon its centuries' long process of exploration, conquest and colonisation that would reach near every corner of the earth. On other continents this amounted mostly to trade, pillage and rule, but in the Americas they settled, displacing the former inhabitants in large part or even entirely, and this was why: plague.

Luckily for the pilgrims and their fellow travellers, God had missed a spot and this world wasn't quite empty. On 17th March 1621 a group of settlers were startled by the appearance of a savage who strode into their midst and addressed them in English5. This was Samoset, a sagamore (a tribal leader) of the Abenaki tribe, who had picked up his English from fishermen in Maine (this name may have been one he used in dealings with the English, and is sometimes written as Somerset). Samoset was visiting the Wampanoag sachem (a prominent tribal chief) Massasoit, whose confederation of some 20,000, until the devastation of the recent plague. The Wampanoag were reduced to some 1,000 or so, and threatened by their rivals the Narrangansett to the west and now these new arrivals. The Wampanoag, Samoset explained, were ill affected towards the English, since an English Captain named Thomas Hunt had tricked 20 of them aboard his vessel some years previously and made off with them. Nevertheless Massasoit needed to reinforce his weakened position, and an alliance with the English might dissuade the Narrangansett from direct attack. A few days later Massasoit himself met with the Pilgrims, and a cordial alliance was agreed: as part of this the Wampanoag left one of their translators to stay with the Pilgrims, and help them adapt to this new land.

Tisquantum was instrumental in the survival of the Plymouth Colony, a fluent English speaker for the simple reason that he had been to England. Tisquantum had been one of those kidnapped back in 1614 by Thomas Hunt, who had sailed to the Maine coast with Captain John Smith (that guy again) on a whale-hunting and trading expedition. Smith had journeyed south and visited Tisquantum's village of Patuxet, had admired their homes, gardens and fields of maize, and had of course mapped these coasts, which he invited Prince Charles to name upon his return to England, hence Plymouth, and indeed New England. After Smith had sailed on back to the north Hunt engaged in a little side-business, and invited several dozen of the Wampanoag onto his ship, whereupon he shoved as many as he could into the hold and opened fire on the rest. Tisquantum was one of nineteen taken across the Atlantic to sell them at Málaga, but there he and many others were liberated by Catholic priests, and Tisquantum made his way to England seeking a passage home. Learning English from a London shipbuilder, he then managed to hitch a ride to a small English fishing camp in Newfoundland. Right continent, but still over a thousand miles from home, so Tisquantum talked up the bountiful wonders and opportunities of his homeland to anyone who would listen until he managed to secure a berth back to England, and from there with Thomas Dermer (another of Smith's old crewmates) to Massachusetts.

Tisquantum had crossed the ocean four times to get back home. He found a wasteland, utterly void in Dermer's words. Villages emptied, Patuxet abandoned, homes tumbled down and fields overgrown. Some way inland they met a small group of survivors, and the sachem (a prominent tribal chief) Massasoit, whose Wampanoag confederation of some 20,000 had been reduced to 1,000 or less, who told them of the great plague, and that their deities had allied against them. With nothing left for him, Tisquantum sailed on with Dermer back to Maine, but life with the fishermen and fur traders proved equally empty and he ended up walking the thousand miles through hostile territories back to his old home, where he was taken captive and returned to Massasoit, most likely because of his long association with the hated Europeans. He managed to persuade his captor of their potential advantage however, that if Massasoit could make [the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yet weare to[o] strong for him. The sachem was unconvinced, but then a few months later word reached them that Patuxet was once again occupied, and with English visitors.

By that March the Pilgrims must have been questioning the blessings of Providence. The winter had been hard and hunger and disease had taken their toll: only eleven of the nineteen planned residences had been finished, while the cemetary atop Cole's Hill already housed 45 dead. Their plans to grow their own food and rear their own livestock had been undermined by their arrival in the depths of winter and their failure to bring any cows, sheep or horses (thought they may have packed some pigs). Their fishing equipment was useless. The fact that any had survived at all can be attributed in large part to their one successful enterprise, robbing native houses, digging up native graves and food stores.

The settlers needed Tisquantum's help. He was their guide and their interpretor, he showed them which crops to sow and when, and he helped them establish a fledgling fur trade – high-quality pelts from beavers that were almost extinct in Europe but plentiful in the New World. Such was his value that, when he was abducted by natives from another tribe, the English sent a military expedition out to recover him.

Why did Tisquantum help these people, people who had occupied his old home, people who had stolen him from his family and dragged him halfway across the world, people like those who had brought death to his tribe and destroyed almost everything he had ever known? The alternative may have been imprisonment, but more than that, Tsiquantum was trying to rebuild, to gather some few survivors and refound Patuxet nearby. More than that, he may have hoped to exploit his position with the English to supplant Massasoit: as William Bradford wrote, he sought his own ends and played his own game. He told his fellows that he could protect them better than Massasoit, all the whle suggesting to the Pilgrims that Massasoit was plotting their destruction. His subterfuge did not go unnoticed, and Massasoit soon demanded his return, and when that was rebuffed, his head. His bridges burned, Tisquantum was, effectively, imprisoned with the English once more, and the fate of his peope finally caught up with him when, on an expedition with Bradford to Cape Cod in November 1622, he too sickened, and died.

In this place Tisquantum fell sick of Indian fever, bleeding much at the nose (which the Indians take as a symptom of death) and within a few days died there; desiring the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen's God in Heaven; and bequeathed sundry of his things to English friends, as remembrances of his love; of whom they had a great loss.

William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647

By this time however the alliance, shaky as it was, had bequeathed the Plymouth Colony's most enduring legend, that of the first (Christian) thanksgiving, a feast celebrating their first successful harvest attended by the 50 or so surviving colonists, Massasoit, and around 90 Wampanoag6. A letter from settler Thomas Winslow is our main source here: Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty. Governor Bradford added his own coda, elaborating upon the menu – And besides waterfowl there was a great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc., thus sealing the seasonal fate of the turkey for centuries to come7.

The Plymouth Colony had no royal charter, no blueprint nor prescription for their government or society (they weren't supposed to be there after all, they had been making for Virginia), so they had to make do themseves. Their first draft was the Mayflower Compact, drawn up on board ship and signed by 41 of the settlers on 21st November 1620 as they lay at anchor off Cape Cod, in which they promised to enact just and equal laws for the general good of the colony8. All adult men could be freemen, or citizens, of the Plymouth Colony (although later sponsorship by an existing freeman, waiting periods, and religious restrictions were imposed), and they elected the Governor (later appointed by the elected General Court). Although the Compact's signatories had declared themselves loyal subjects of King James, the colony was in practice a republic, not least because neither King nor Parliament much knew or cared what they were up to yet: the only people who did were their creditors, who were unimpressed with their returns (not least because the first ship laden with goods to be sent back, the inopportunely-named Fortune was promptly waylaid by the French).

Economically, Plymouth survived more than it thrived. The early promise of the fur trade was heavily disrupted by conflicts with native American tribes, and while agriculture grew more rewarding (especially after they had learned how to fertilise the soil with dead fish and optimally rotate their crops from the locals), there was no real wealth to be had - the colony did not manage to pay off its initial debts until 1648. Very few families could afford to keep slaves, and with no cash crop to sustain plantations there was no economic incentive - Plymouth harvest yielded maize, squash, pumpkins and beans, but never tobacco.

More ships, and settlers, came - the Fortune in 1621 (carrying, to William Bradford's disappointment, not so much as biscuit-cake, neither had they any bedding… nor pot, or pan) and the Anne and Little James in 1623 –and large families led to a steadily expanding population. The stockaded walls of the early settlement could no longer contain them, and smaller towns, built around congregations, spread along the Cape Cod and Narragansett bays, with solid English names like Bristol, Rochester, Little Compton, and Scituate9. Even so, by 1630 Plymouth was home to only 300, and maybe 2,000 in 1643 (by comparison, some 20,000 journeyed to the Massachusetts Bay colony further north between 1630 and 1640). The ideal of a self-governing religious community had given way to a fragmentary scattering of towns and churches, and the hope for a life of religious purity was inevitably tempered by the necessities of eking out a living on the harsh New England coastline.

Their beginnings were inauspicious, their outcomes unremarkable, and yet the Pilgrims have been elevated to near mythic status in American history. Their compact has been described as the foundation of liberty based on law and order, their dinner party spawned a national holiday, and even the rock claimed by a church elder in 1741 to have been their landing spot became an object of veneration in the United States according to Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. From the 37 Mayflower passengers known to have born childen, The Mayflower Society now claims some 35 million10 living descendents. Their number includes seven Presidents (two Bushes and two Adamses) and one would-be Presidential assassin, John Hinckley Jr, as well as Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, Clint Eastwood and Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda and Sarah Palin, Ernest Hemingway and Taylor Swift. The Pilgrim Fathers (the mothers were obviously busy churning out the future Mayflower Society) stand tall in America's historic pantheon, the first words in the most popular edition of America's autobiography. To paraphrase James Joyce on Christopher Columbus, they were the last people to first settle America. As an origin story, 1620 is a profoundly different to 1619. This is the past that, for the most part, America has chosen.

The place of the Pilgrim fathers in American history can best be stated by a paradox. Of slight importance in their own time, they are of great and increasing significance in our time…

Samuel Eliot Morison

Bibliography

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• Hakim, J. (2003) Making Thirteen Colonies - 1600-1740 (3rd ed.). New York, Oxford University Press.
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