The Pilgrims

 I am re-watching the PBS documentary about the Pilgrims.  At present, I find myself very fascinated by and interested in the story of the pilgrims.  History isn’t boring when you see it as the story of the lives of the people.  Written below is information from this documentary.  I am trying to remember, at this time, the significant facts.  This is just for my own knowledge and memory.  It is plagiarism of the contents of this documentary, but it is intended for no purpose other than my own education and ability to remember the facts. 

The English Puritan religious separatists of the early 1600’s lived at a time when having one’s own religious beliefs was dangerous.  It was worrying to authorities when people would make a stand against the church of England and the monarch.  The authorities felt that anyone who was separating from the church was also separating from royal authority.  The separatists of Scrooby in the county of Nottinghamshire needed to escape their own country and made their way across the North Sea to Amsterdam in Holland.  Led by William Brewster and John Robinson, they settled in the city of Leiden, a university town and the heart of the Dutch textile industry.  Because they were foreigners, they ended up getting lousy jobs in little factories where they worked long hours creating clothing often with their children.  The climate was harsher, and the challenges and hardships were greater than they had expected.  They nonetheless experienced a period of glory days where they were free for the first time to worship as they wished surrounded by the community that they created.  In 1613 William Bradford married Dorothy May, a young English woman.   After living for a decade in Leiden, the English separatists were concerned that their children were becoming Dutch.  They were proud of their English heritage, and they didn’t want to lose that identity of who they were.  They were also concerned when in 1618 a holy religious war that would involve all of the powers of Europe was beginning to take place.  This was the beginning of the great religious conflict known as the Thirty Years War.  The English separatists hoped to escape again, and find the freedom that they were looking for in the New World.  They wished to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River in the northern most part of the English colony, founded by the Virginia company.  They encountered much difficulty in undertaking this endeavor.  It seemed that they could not succeed with their plans when in early 1620 they were approached in Leiden by Thomas Weston, a broker from London who offered to organize financing for the  expedition through a group called the Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers.  They should have begun their journey in the spring or no later than the summer.  In June, their transport had not yet been organized and the investors were getting cold feet and insisting that non-separatist outsiders also go along with them.  Though appalling to them, there was nothing that the pilgrims could do.  In June, they arranged their own passage across the English Channel on an aging vessel, called the Speedwell.  On July 22, they set off leaving behind those who would remain in Leiden which included their pastor John Robinson.  William and Dorothy Bradford left their three-year-old son John behind with relatives.  When they arrived in Southampton, they found the Mayflower waiting for them.  They met the Mayflower’s captain Christopher Jones, his crew and the non-separatist strangers who would be traveling with them.  Originally the Speedwell was set to sail along with the Mayflower, but due to leaks, it had to be abandoned in Plymouth.  Everyone had to crowd onto the Mayflower and many people had to be left behind.  They set sale again with 102 passengers, only half of which were from the Leiden congregation.  Of these passengers, fewer than 50 were adult men and many were past their physical prime.  At least 30 were children and nearly 20 were women including 3 expectant mothers.  By the time they were able to leave Plymouth harbor and set sale across the open Atlantic, it was September 6th and far too late in the year.  Far out on the Atlantic, Steven Hopkin’s wife Elizabeth gave birth to a baby boy.  They named the baby Oceanus.  Two people had died and more were very sick when on the morning of Thursday, November 9, 1620, a sailor spotted land.  They had made landfall far north of their intended destination.  They were 200 miles off course.  Their captain Christopher Jones tried to head south but encountered waters too rough and treacherous for their safe passage so he instead took them north around the wrist of Cape Cod to modern day Provincetown Harbor.  On November 11, 1620 they traveled around the tip of Cape Cod and dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor.  The strangers spoke of splintering off and going their own way once they came ashore.  Due to these tensions, they drafted the short agreement, the Mayflower contract, to preserve the group.  The majority of the adult men on board, 41 in all, signed the contract on November 11, 1620.  John Carver was elected to be their governor.  The new land where they found themselves was to the group an alien environment.  They were alone and had but a desolate wilderness before them at the approach of the winter season.  On November 11, a group of 16 men that included William Bradford, Edward Winslow and Miles Standish, a veteran English soldier that they had hired, went ashore in a small boat and walked for hours amongst the windswept dunes of modern day Cape Cod.  On this day, they saw neither animals nor human life of any kind.  As the sun went down and they had returned to the Mayflower, they were confronted with the enormity of their situation.  They were separated by a vast ocean from all the civil parts of the world with weak hopes for supplies and aid from those they had left behind them. 

In the year 1616, before the pilgrims arrived at modern day Provincetown Harbor and then Plymouth Massachusetts, there had been a great plague that started in Maine that had been brought over by European fisherman.  The native American populations in the path along the coast where the plague swept suffered between 50% and 90% losses of their populations.  The greatest devastation took place in a village the Wampanoags called Patuxet.  One villager named Tisquantum had been kidnapped and carried off in chains to Europe, two years before the plague began.  He returned in 1619 to find his village completely abandoned.  He was the only survivor of his village of about 2000 people.  Patuxet was gone.  This is the world into which the pilgrims entered.

After anchoring in Provincetown Harbor, three successive scouting parties set out to find freshwater and a suitable place to settle for the winter.  On their first day out, they encountered six men and a dog.  These were the first native inhabitants that they had seen.  During this first scouting mission, they found a mound of earth that they dug up and found baskets of corn.  They took half of the corn away with them.  On their second scouting trip, they walked through the woods into an Indian village and found what looked like a grave.  They dug up the grave and were surprised when they found the bones and skull of a person that was covered with blonde hair.  The grave also held the remains of a child.  They couldn’t imagine what the relationship could have been between these two dead bodies and those that buried them.  A few nights later at First Encounter Beach, they were attacked in the dark by a party of warriors.  For hours they heard war cries and whistling arrows, which they responded to with blasts of musket fire until the attackers withdrew.  On December 8th, they came upon an abandoned Indian settlement that they thought might suit them for a settlement.  The place was Patuxet, the hardest hit of all of the Wampanaug villages.  Native peoples would never reoccupy such a place.  On December 12, the third scouting party sailed back across the bay to the waiting Mayflower.  William Bradford was greeted with the news that five days earlier his 23-year-old wife Dorothy had fallen overboard and drowned in the icy bay waters.  A child on the ship had also died a day before her death.  On Friday, December 15, 1620, the Mayflower and its sea-weary and sickened passengers and crew sailed across the bay to the shore that awaited them.  The Mayflower had to anchor a mile offshore because the water in Plymouth Harbor wasn’t deep enough to allow it to come closer.  This made it difficult and slow to get the people and goods and supplies to the shore.  It was the end of December by the time they started building houses.  While still on the ship, another expectant mother gave birth to a son that was born not living. They were only able to build very few houses before harsh winter weather really set in.  One by one the weakened immigrants began to die of diseases and exposure.  By the spring, more than half of the pilgrims had died.  

On Friday, March 16, 1621, a lone warrior wearing a loin cloth and carrying a bow walked boldly into their camp.  He saluted them in English and bid them welcome.  He told them his name was Samoset and the place was called Patuxet and that all of the inhabitants had died in an extraordinary plague four years earlier.  The Wampanoags were in need of an ally.  They realized that an alliance would be best for them and the Pilgrims because they were being dominated by other Indian tribes who were not affected by the epidemic.  It was about survival because weakened people without power backing them were vulnerable to enemies that existed around them who would take advantage of this.  Six days later Samoset returned bringing the leader of the Wampanoags, their Massasoit, along with 60 men including Tisquantum, the sole survivor of Patuxet, who served as their interpreter.  The two sides concluded a remarkable treaty agreeing among other things not to harm each other’s people and to come to each other’s aid in the event of attack.  It was also agreed that Tisquantum would remain with the struggling Pilgrims, at the site of his former home, to help the Pilgrims with their spring planting.  Both groups of people were in a survival situation.  The neighboring Narragansett people were threatening to take over the Wampanoags and the pilgrims were at risk of losing everything after their first devastating winter.  The pilgrims formed an alliance with the Wampanoags and this very much defined what happened in their first and second years as new settlers.  On April 5, 1961 the Mayflower set sail for England with Captain Jones, an empty hold, and a drastically diminished crew.  The pilgrims were on their own.  The pilgrims planted their first crops under Tisquantum’s careful supervision.  They planted herring in mounds of earth sewn with corn seed and added seeds of squash and beans once the corn came up.  That April the pilgrim’s governor John Carver became ill and died.  Shortly after, William Bradford was chosen as their new governor and was reelected every year.  All through the warm months that summer, the grieving pilgrims labored to build a world for themselves, building houses, tilling soil and fishing in the bay.  In June, they made their first efforts to trade with the neighboring groups around them.  In July, William Bradford sent Edward Winslow and Steven Hopkins to visit the Wampanoag in their village, 40 miles to the West, to build on their alliance and to find out who they had stolen corn seed from the previous December, and to make reparations.  By October, the pilgrims had finished building 11 crude structures, seven dwelling houses and four common buildings.  They also had a successful harvest of corn thanks to Tisquantum.  Edward Winslow reports that as the leaves began to turn they prepared a special way to rejoice together after they had gathered the fruits of their labors.  William Bradford made no mention of it in his history.  It was not called Thanksgiving at the time.  In his history, Edward Winslow made no mention of any invitation.  While the pilgrims were rejoicing together, the Wampanaug Massasoit showed up with about 90 of his men.  They stayed for three days and went out and got five deer to add to what the pilgrims were cooking.  They played games together.  There are few facts about what took places.  On November 9, 1621 from a lookout, the sails of a ship were seen far out on the bay.  It was the first they had seen since the departure of the move on.  It was a ship called the Fortune that had been sent by their broker Thomas Weston.  The small ship carried 35 new recruits.  Only a handful were separatists.  They came with no supplies to speak of.  They were more mouths to feed just as winter was approaching again.  They arrived with a letter from Thomas Weston, rebuking them for failing to send back any cargo with the Mayflower.  They freighted the Fortune with as much beaver fur and timber as they could muster but it was not nearly enough.  They needed something to ship back to pay their debts but there was nothing available in their early years in New England.  The pilgrims still struggled to stay alive and to keep their group together together. 

 In early December 1621, William Bradford ordered the construction of an 8 foot high timber wall around the entire settlement for protection.  Rumors that the Narragansett’s and then the Massachusetts were planning to attack had been spreading around the settlement.  Work on the fortification wall had just been completed when three new ships sent by Thomas Weston appeared in the harbor.  Their arrival triggered the darkest crisis in the pilgrim’s history.  Thomas Weston had sponsored another competing trading post north of Plymouth.  The 60 new arrivals were a group of young men who came just for financial reasons and none were separatists.  They had come to set up what amounted to a rival trading post.  After four months of uneasy cohabitation with the colonists at Plymouth, they moved 30 miles up the coast to a place called Wessagussett near a Massachusetts village still reeling from the recent epidemics.  Things very quickly started deteriorating there.  They had terrible relationships with the native inhabitants.  They ran out of food and they were made fun of by the native inhabitants.  They started trading their clothing for capfuls of corn, and they started working for the Indians.  The social structure of this group of young men and their trading post just fell apart.

More bad news befell the pilgrims.  The ship, The Fortune, was plundered on its return voyage leaving the colony with nothing to show for itself for the second straight year.  They also learned that a massive Indian uprising in Virginia had killed 347 English colonists near Jamestown.  The pilgrims feared that something similar was about to happen to them, and there were clear indications that they were under threat from some parts of the local Native American population.  In March 1623 the pilgrims received the news that Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoags and their only ally, lay dying.  William Bradford quickly dispatched Edward Winslow to his bedside.  Under his skilled care, the Wampanaug leader made a rapid recovery.  He revealed to Edward Winslow that the Plymouth colony was in grave danger from a region wide conspiracy, whose aim was to eradicate all English settlements in New England.  The Massachusetts had a plan.  They wanted to wipe out the Wessagusset trading post, but they were afraid of retaliation from Plymouth so they had a plan to create a coalition with other native inhabitants and wipe out both Wessagusset and Plymouth.  Confirmation came in mid March when a colonist from Wessagusset, Phineas Pratt, escaped from the dying settlement and made his way overland to Plymouth, pursued all the way by a Massachusetts warrior.  This warrior was captured by the pilgrims before he could kill him and was imprisoned in the fort.  The pilgrims learned from Phineas Pratt what was taking place at Wessagusset.  Mr. Weston’s colony of young men at Wessagusset had by their evil and depraved character so exasperated the Massa chusetts Indians that they secretly conspired with other native people to wipe out both the Wessagusset and Plymouth colonies to prevent any retaliation from Plymouth.  Miles Standish and Allerton and William Bradford decided to make a preemptive strike.  They went to Wessagusset on the pretense of trade.  They gathered many of the Indian men including 2 leaders and brought them into the trading post supposedly for trade.  They locked the doors and on a signal killed these two men with their own knives hanging around their necks.  Mile Standish was a war veteran of brutal warfare.  They hung a young Indian boy and the rest they stabbed to death.  They cut off one of their heads and brought it back and put it on a pole in the middle of Plymouth. The head was of Wituwamat.  The head was erected on a pike and placed at the apex of their fort and was left there for years to create terror and a warning to others.  The bloodshed at Wessagusset permanently altered the balance of power in the region in favor of the pilgrims and their allies, the Wampanoags.  Five months later, William Bradford married a recently arrived 32 year-old widow named Alice Southworth in a ceremony attended by the entire community.

In 1626 the pilgrims received word that John Robinson had died the previous winter.  This cast a gloom over the group.  Brewster and Bradford felt the pain of this very clearly.  It had been a perpetual disappointment to them that John Robinson, who was the most crucial mentor for the whole group and was so instrumental in creating their community, had never been there with them. 

During the early 1620s, the price for beaver skins was relatively low.  It rocketed up later in 1627 and 1628 because England found itself at war with France and Spain and beaver fur became more scarce in Europe.  The price quadrupled and the pilgrims got the benefits of that.  The increased demand for beaver skins arose entirely from the demand for beaver hats.  But in order to really get furs in sufficient quantities, they needed to get up to river valleys in Maine where there were enormous supplies of beaver fur readily available.  Edward Winslow had been going up to Maine for several years prospecting for beaver fur in the area, so everything came together in 1627 and 1628.  The price had gone up, the pilgrims had found the furs and they were able to deliver thousands of beaver skins back to England and turn a profit.  Investors in London saw that they might be able to build a much much bigger colony with not hundreds of colonists, but thousands.  This led to the founding of New Boston in 1630.  The pilgrims had shown that it was possible to come into a northern climate and make it pay and support a fairly large European population.  In the spring of 1630, a large ship called the Arabella, was the first of a massive fleet of 17 ships, led by a wealthy puritan lawyer named John Winthrop, that left Yarmouth for the Bay of Massachusetts 60 miles north of Plymouth bringing 1000 well supplied Puritan immigrants.  All through the spring and summer, the great ships arrived.  By the end of July, a church had been established, the First Church of Boston.  By mid September, the new settlement already had a population of nearly 1000 which was three times larger than the tiny community that Plymouth had gathered to itself in 10 years.  In July, Edward Winslow paid a visit to their new sister colony.  The two groups had theological differences, but Edward Winslow reported that John Winthrop could take courage in knowing that the elders of the new colony had been encouraged to take advice of them at Plymouth and to do nothing to offend them.  After 10 harrowing years, the future of a Puritan New England, if not a separatist one, seemed assured.

Against all odds, the Pilgrims survived, put down roots and established a colony.  In that sense, their story is a success story. The way in which the colony was not a success was that the community that William Bradford and the other separatists had hoped for didn’t materialize in the way that they had hoped it would.  It is partly because John Robinson never came over to join their community and there was a lack of an effective ministry.  They needed their pastor and he was never there.  They wanted to achieve the ultimate spiritual community on earth and that never happened.  William Bradford preserved the story and the history of his people in the writing of his account “Of Plimoth Plantation”.