THE OLD COLONY
I
It is a welcoming country, and easily enough some of the Pilgrims,
after they had established their settlement at Plymouth, returned to
the sandy shores, the woods and meadows that had first offered them
the possibility of home. They must have had a peculiar sentiment for
the place: for here began their adventure in the great free country
of the wilderness, and the chronicles of Bradford and Winslow show an
ingenuous pleasure in the recital of it. They were for the most part
yeomen and farmers, exiles from the pretty valley of the Trent, who
for some eleven years had lived restricted in small Dutch cities; and
for sixty-seven days all of them, yeomen and artisans, men, women,
and children, many more than the Mayflower could well accommodate,
had been buffetted about the Atlantic by autumn gales. Driven out of
their calculated course to the southward, they made their landfall at
Cape Cod, “the which being certainly known to be it,” no wonder that
they were “not a little joyful.” “Being thus arrived in a good harbor
and brought safe to land,” writes William Bradford, “they fell upon
their knees and blessed ye God of Heaven, who had brought them over
ye vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles
and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and
stable earth, their proper elemente.”
Nor was it a country unknown to them. Since Cabot’s voyage of
discovery more than a hundred years earlier, the whole coast
from Cape Breton to the Hudson had been increasingly visited by
French and English seamen who were attracted chiefly by the rich
fishing-grounds. It is even said that the great Drake was the first
Englishman to set foot in New England, and that it was upon Cape Cod
he landed. There are stories of ancient adventurers voyaging, as it
might be, to the rhythm of Masefield’s Galley-Rowers:
“... bound sunset-wards, not knowing,
Over the whale’s way miles and miles,
Going to Vine-Land, haply going
To the Bright Beach of the Blessed Isles.
“In the wind’s teeth and the spray’s stinging
Westward and outward forth we go,
Knowing not whither nor why, but singing
An old old oar-song as we row—”
Madoc of Wales, Saint Brendan the Irishman, Icelanders, Phœnicians
even; and, more certainly, a company of Norsemen who set up a wrecked
boat on the Cape Cod bluffs, the Long Beaches, to guide the landfall
of later visitors to their Keel Cape.
French, Dutch, Spanish, English, all had their names for the Cape,
but in 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, examining the coast of New England
with a view to colonization, was to give it the predestined and
only right name: “Cape Cod.” Making across Massachusetts Bay “with
a fresh gale of wind,” writes his chronicler, “in the morning we
found ourselves embayed with a mightie headland” with “a white
sandie and very bolde shore,” where, landing, they met an Indian
“of proper stature, and of a pleasing countenance; and after some
familiaritie with him, we left him at the seaside and returned to
our ship.” Another scribe of the party remarks that the Indian had
plates of copper hanging from his ears and “shewed willingness to
help us in our occasions.” “From this place, we sailed round about
this headland, almost all the points of the compass,” and so on to
Cuttyhunk, “amongst many faire Islands.” But the significant point
for us is that they “pestered” their ship so with codfish that they
threw numbers of them overboard, and thereupon named the land Cape
Cod.
In 1604, and for several years thereafter, Champlain was much upon
the New England coast, helping Du Monts in a colonizing scheme under
a charter of Henri Quatre; had they succeeded, New France would have
reached Long Island Sound. Champlain landed at Barnstable and named
the harbor “Port aux Huistres,” “for the many good oysters there.”
He judged, also, that it would have been “an excellent place to
erect buildings and lay the foundations of a state, if the harbor
were somewhat deeper and the entrance safer.” The tip of the Cape he
called “Cap Blanc,” the treacherous shoals at the elbow “Mallebarre,”
and at Chatham he was like to have been swamped in the shoals
had the Indians not dragged his boats over into the harbor—“Port
Fortune” he called it. But it held no good fortune for him: for his
men quarrelled with their rescuers, and after two of them had been
killed, he sailed away. Champlain, a scientific man, the king’s
geographer, wrote interestingly of the savages, their appearance,
customs, agriculture, dwellings, and weighed the advantages of
colonization there, but French the land was not to be.
After Gosnold came several Englishmen, Martin Pring among them,
searching for sassafras, which he knew was to be found in sandy soil,
and was then much esteemed in pharmacy as of “sovereigne vertue
against the Plague and many other Maladies.” Pring coasted along
to Plymouth, where at last he found “sufficient quantitie” of his
sassafras, and camped for several months. There one of his company
played the “gitterne” to the joy of the savages who danced about him
“twentie in a Ring, ... singing lo la lo la la and him that first
brake the ring the rest would knocke and cry out upon.” Henry Hudson
spent a night off the Cape and had some difficulty with shoals and
tides and mists; but he testified that “the land is very sweet,”
and some of his men brought away wild grapes and roses; as did also
Edward Braunde, who hoped to discover “sertayne perell which is told
by the Sauvages to be there,” and found near Race Point, where he
landed, only some “goodly grapes and Rose-Trees.” It should be noted
that as Hudson cruised thereabouts, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayney
of his crew saw “the mermaid.” And in 1614 Captain John Smith set
sail for these shores to look for whales and gold-mines, failing
which they would take “Fish and Furres,” as the event proved to an
amount of some fifteen hundred pounds. Smith, with eight men in an
open boat, explored and charted the coast and dedicated his map to
Prince Charles, with the request that he change “the barbarous names”
thereon. “As posteritie might say,” writes Smith, “Prince Charles was
their godfather.” New England, the river Charles, Plymouth retain the
royal nomenclature. But his Stuart Bay and Cape James are still Cape
Cod and Cape Cod Bay, and Milford Haven is Provincetown Harbor. Cape
Cod, “a name, I suppose, it will never lose,” said Cotton Mather,
“till the shoals of codfish be seen swimming on the highest hills.”
“This Cape,” wrote Smith, “is made by the maine Sea on the one side,
and a great Bay on the other in forme of a Sickell.” “A headland of
high hills, over growne with shrubby Pines, hurts [huckleberries] and
such trash, but an excellent harbour for all weathers.”
And while Smith was engaged in his scientific expedition, Captain
Thomas Hunt, whom he had placed in command of the larger boat, after
lading her with fish and furs, put his time to profit by capturing
twenty-four savages, Nauset and Patuxet Indians among them; and
setting sail for Malaga, he sold the cargo for his masters and the
savages at twenty pounds the head for the advantage of his own
pocket. “This vilde act,” wrote Smith, “kept him ever after from any
more employment in these parts.” But such commerce was not unknown:
in 1611, Harlow, sailing for the Earl of Southampton, with “five
Salvages returned for England,” and one of these men “went a Souldier
to the Warres of Bohemia.” The Cape Cod Indians seem to have been a
gentle, even a forgiving race, but they had a long memory for such
perfidy, which was to prove a bad business for all later visitors
to the region. Yet more often than not whites and natives fought,
however friendly the first overtures might have been; and Smith
reports, as a matter of course, of the Indians about Plymouth: “After
much kindnesse wee fought also with them, though some were hurt,
some slaine, yet within an houre after they became friends.” But
kidnapping seems to have been the unforgivable offence.
Only the summer before the Pilgrims arrived came Thomas Dermer,
sailing for Fernando Gorges, Governor of Old Plymouth, and returned
the Indian Tasquantum or Squanto, captured by Hunt and survivor of
many vicissitudes, to the end that he might serve as interpreter
and find out the truth about tales of treasure in the country.
Dermer thought favorably of Plymouth for a settlement, and rescued
a Frenchman who had been wrecked three years before on Cape Cod and
was living with the Indians. He brought back, with Squanto, Epenow,
one of Harlow’s victims, who, however, succeeded in escaping at
Martha’s Vineyard. Epenow, during his exile, had been something of
a personage: “being of so great stature he was shewed up and downe
London for money as a wonder, and it seemes of no lesse courage and
authoritie, than of wit, strength and proportion.”
It is reasonably certain that some of these adventures, perhaps all
of them, were known to the Pilgrims. They would have been common
talk in Plymouth, the city of Fernando Gorges, and in London; and
the Pilgrims were come to a region familiar at least to their
captain or his pilot, who is said to have sailed once with Dermer.
But every man aboard the Mayflower, as they rounded the tip of Cape
Cod, knew that they were about to land beyond the bounds of their
permission to colonize, which lay within the jurisdiction of the
North Virginia Company and “not for New England, which belonged to
another government”; and “some of the strangers amongst them had let
fall mutinous speeches—that when they cam ashore they would use their
own libertie.”
Not for such liberty had Brewster, Bradford, Winslow, Carver, come
upon their pilgrimage; they were men who meant to be free only within
lawful bounds; and they were true pioneers, men who in an unforeseen
perplexity could make a just decision. Hardly had they sighted the
golden dunes of the Cape, and fetched short about to escape its
treacherous shoals, than they were meeting their first test. As they
made the “good harbor and pleasant bay” of Provincetown, “wherein a
thousand sail of ships might safely ride,” the famous Compact was
written, and forty-one men of the company signed it ere they set
foot to land. It was a simple act, and none could have been more
amazed than the Pilgrims had they known its historical significance.
But because they meant to be both free and obedient, their Compact
contained the germ of all just government: “It was thought good
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.”
“In ye name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyall
subjects of our dread soveraigne, King James, ... haveing undertaken,
for ye glorie of God and advancemente of ye Christian faith, and
honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colonie
in ye Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly
and mutualy in ye presence of God and one of another, covenant
and combine ourselves togeather into a civill body politick, for
our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of ye ends
aforesaid, and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute and frame such
just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices,
from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient
for ye generall good of ye colonie, unto which we promise all due
submission and obedience.”
There is the Compact. Freedom within due limits set by the consent of
the governed, these men who had chosen exile rather than submission
to a tyrannous reading of the law proclaimed as the rule of their
future, a principle vital to the spirit of the nation that was to be.
And their Compact signed, and John Carver chosen governor for the
ensuing year, the captain anchored offshore and they proceeded upon
the next step of their adventure.
After the cramped wretchedness of the Mayflower, they must have
been eager for release. “Being pestred nine weeks in the leaking
unwholsome shipe, lying wet in their cabins, most of them grew very
weake and weary of the Sea,” John Smith wrote of their passage
thither. In any case there could be no question as to the necessity
of landing: they must have wood and water; the women wanted to wash,
the men to stretch their legs and replenish the larder with fish
and game and corn. If in the process they found a spot suitable for
settlement and offering a prospect of fair return on the investment
made by their financial backers, the “Merchant Adventurers” of
London, so much the better.
That first day, November 11, Old Style, after the Compact was signed,
some fifteen men landed rather to gather firewood than to explore.
They saw no Indians, and found the “sand hills much like the downs of
Holland, but better, the crust of the earth a spit’s depth excellent
black earth all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch,
holly, vines, some ash, walnut; the wood for the most part open and
without underwood, fit either to go or ride in.” Comment which would
ill describe the present appearance of Provincetown and Truro; but
then the whole inner shore of the Cape, at least, seems to have been
wooded to the water’s edge. The party returned with a boatload of
juniper, “which smelled very sweet and strong.” The Sunday they kept
aboard ship, with what thankful hearts for their “preservation on
the great deep,” and steadfast hope of the future as we may imagine.
On Monday the men went ashore to do some boat-building, and the women
to wash. These landing parties had an uncomfortable time of it, for
the water was too shallow to beach a boat, and they “were forced to
wade a bow-shot or two in going a-land, which caused many to get
colds and coughs, for it was many times freezing weather.”
On the fifteenth an exploring party set off under the command of
Captain Miles Standish. For drink, wrote Edward Winslow, there was
“a little bottle of aqua vitæ—and having no victuals save biscuit
and Holland cheese—at last we came into a deep valley full of brush,
wood gaile [bayberry] and long grass through which we found little
paths or tracts; and there we saw a deer, and found springs of fresh
water, and sat us down and drank our first New England water with as
much delight as we ever drank drink in all our lives.” They sighted a
few Indians, who “ran into the woods and whistled their dogge after
them”; and William Bradford, lagging behind to examine a deer-trap,
was caught by the leg for his pains. “It was a pretty device made
with a rope of the Indians’ own making which we brought away with
us.” They were as eager as boys on a Scout trail; and when they came
upon an old palisado, they were sure it must have been the work of
Christians; and on what is still known as Corn Hill they found a
cache of corn packed in baskets, and an old ship’s kettle. Whereupon
they took a kettleful of corn along with them—they meant to pay
for it when they found the owners, they said, and, moreover, many
months after, they did so. They saw flocks of geese and ducks, and
also three fat bucks, but would rather have had one. And they camped
in the open near Stout’s Creek at East Harbor, and next day kept on
to Pamet Harbor in Truro. Altogether a satisfying expedition for
Miles Standish and his men who had been cooped up for so many weeks
in the Mayflower, but they had found no spot to their taste for a
settlement. They wanted not only good farm lands, but an adequate
harbor for the trade that was to be: Pamet Harbor they dismissed on
account of the “insufficiency of the place for the accommodation of
large vessels and the uncertainty as to the supply of fresh water.”
These way-worn stragglers were entirely sure they were to need
accommodation for large vessels; fresh water, by the way, was there
a-plenty, although they did not find it.
On the twenty-seventh they set out on their Second Discovery, this
time by boat under the command of Master Jones, the Mayflower
skipper, who landed them short of their destination at Pamet River.
They camped in a freezing sleet, and taking boat again in the morning
kept on to Pamet. That night they camped under some pines and supped
on “three fat geese and six ducks which we ate with souldiers’
stomachs, for we had eaten little that day.” Next morning, on the
way to Corn Hill, they killed a brace of geese at a single shot.
“And sure it was God’s good providence that we found the corn,
for else we know not how we should have done.” Again they camped
in the open, and again marched on by Indian wood paths until they
came upon a broad trail leading to a settlement. And although they
saw no Indians—no doubt keen eyes were watching them from woodland
coverts—they poked into the wigwams that were low wattled huts with
doorways scarce a yard high hung with mats; and they noted the
wooden bowls and trays, earthenware pots, and baskets of wrought
crab-shells, and “harts’ horns and eagles’ claws.” They seem,
here and there, to have taken a sample of the best, and regretted
that they had nothing to leave in exchange. “We intended to have
brought some beads and other things to have left in their homes in
sign of peace and that we meant to truck with them, but it was not
done; but as soon as we can conveniently meet with them, we will
give them full satisfaction.” They discovered the grave of a white
man, they thought, decently buried, with his sailor’s clothes and
treasures beside him, and a child’s grave, from which they took a few
pretty ornaments. Some burial mounds they left undisturbed, saying
sententiously that “it might be odious unto them to ransack their
sepulchres,” which very likely was no more than truth. And still they
found no place to strike root.
But the Third Discovery was to have a better result. On December 6
they set out, again by boat, and rounded Billingsgate Point before
they landed to camp for the night. About five in the morning, their
picket rushed in with cries of “Indians! Indians!” and they roused to
savage war-whoops and arrows rattling down upon the camp. But when
they fired their muskets the Indians, probably some of the Nausets
whom Thomas Hunt had despoiled of men, ran away as they had come,
with no one harmed on either side. The place, situated near Great
Meadow Creek in Eastham, was named “The First Encounter.” Again
the explorers took boat, and passing the harbor and fertile lands
of Barnstable in a driving northeast gale and snowstorm, drenched
with the freezing spray that made their clothes “many times like
coats of iron,” they pressed on to Plymouth Bay. So thick was the
weather that their pilot, who had probably sailed with Smith or
Dermer, lost his bearings. “Lord be merciful, my eyes never saw this
place before,” cried he as they passed the Gurnet. He would there
and then have beached the boat, but one of stouter heart shouting,
“About with her, or we are all dead men,” they turned and ran under
the lee of Clark’s Island where they landed. There, in storm and
wet, they miserably bivouacked over the next day, a Sunday; and on
the Monday exploring the mainland and finding harbor, meadow, and
brook to their mind, they determined to make here at Plymouth their
permanent settlement. Very likely they had bethought them of Dermer’s
commendation of it to Fernando Gorges, although they seem not to have
been amenable to advice from John Smith, who cites them as a warning
in his “advertisemente to Unexperienced Planters.” “For want to good
take heede,” writes he of them in 1630, “thinking to finde all things
better than I advised them, spent six or seven weekes in wandering
up and downe in frost and snow, winde and raine, among the woods,
cricks, and swamps.” On December 16, Old Style, the whole company,
reunited at Plymouth, set about the building of their new home.
The Pilgrims had been little more than a month at Provincetown, but,
beside the great achievement of the Compact, history had been making
to open the annals of Anglo-Saxon New England: Edward Thompson,
Jasper Moore, and James Chilton had died; Dorothy, the young wife of
William Bradford, had fallen overboard to her death; and Mrs. William
White had been delivered of a son, fittingly named Peregrine, the
first born of English parents in New England. Not unreasonably does
Cape Cod claim precedence of Plymouth when homage is paid the Pilgrim
Fathers.
II
The Compact sprang into being by no magic of inspiration: it was the
fruit of minds that had fostered the intention to be free through
years of just living, and the winning simplicity of the Pilgrims’
several declarations of faith was the natural outcome of the spirit
that framed them. For eighteen years or more their leaders had
believed and practised the precepts of John Robinson whom they
had chosen as pastor of their little congregation at Scrooby; and
Robinson charged them, according to Edward Winslow, to keep an
open mind: “for he was very confident the Lord had more truth and
light yet to break forth out of His holy word. He took occasion,
also, miserably to bewail the state of the Reformed Churches”
who stuck where Luther and Calvin had left them. “Yet God had not
revealed His whole will to them.... It is not possible ... that
full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.” Men who
held that concept of life—the progressive revelation of truth—were
as little likely to cramp the just liberties of other men as they
were to submit themselves to the unjust imposition of law. And when
England persecuted them, it was fitting that they should flee to
Holland, the country of William the Silent, who had declared: “You
have no right to trouble yourself with any man’s conscience, so long
as nothing is done to cause private harm or public scandal.” That
might have been the motto of their new government. It has been truly
said that the Plymouth Church was “free of blood.” They never hanged
a Quaker or burned a witch, and refugees from the Massachusetts Bay
Colony constantly found asylum with them. It must be remembered
that they were so-called “Separatists,” the Independents, men who
set religion above any church, a very different folk from those
uncompromising protestants of the Church of England, the Puritans.
Yet, wisely, John Robinson had counselled them to be “ready to close
with the godly party of the Kingdom of England and rather to study
union than disunion” with their neighbors in the New World. That
“union” was meant to include no abandonment of principle, and when
unwillingly enough they were forced to merge with the richer colony
of Massachusetts Bay, they were sufficiently powerful to expand
somewhat its rigid theocracy; though the Puritan influence, in turn,
did much to curdle the early tolerance of the Pilgrims.
In the seventy years of their independence, the Pilgrims worked
out, by sober and deliberate progression, a plan of government that
was a model of statehood, and they had the advantage over other
colonies that they were constrained by no formal royal patent.
When their agents had gone over from Holland to obtain the king’s
consent to their undertaking, James was ready to concede that “the
advancement of his dominions” and “the enlargement of the gospel”
were an honorable motive; the idea of fishery profits was no less
to his liking. “So God have my soul,” quoth he, “an honest trade.
’Twas the Apostles’ own calling.” But a formal grant to the despised
Separatists was another matter, and they had to be content with
a hint that “the king would connive at them and not molest them
provided they behaved themselves peaceably.” They were willing to
take the chance that the king’s word was as good as his bond: for
if later there should be a purpose to injure them, they shrewdly
reasoned, though they had a seal “as broad as the house floor,” there
would be “means enow found to recall or reverse it.” And they secured
financial backing in London, obtained permission from the North
Virginia Company to settle on their coast, then “casting themselves
on the care of Divine Providence, they ventured to America.” Divine
Providence, apparently, decreed that they should be free of even such
slight restraint as the permission of the North Virginia Company,
and instead of settling near the Hudson they were driven to the New
England coast.
But they took care in the Compact and in all succeeding legislation
to affirm their loyalty to the English Government. Though England
had been none too tender in her treatment of them, they recognized
and meant to abide by the essential justice of English law, and to
profit by the stability that a strong bond with the Home Government
could give them. Moreover, in these men flourished the British
instinct to make whatever spot of the globe they should elect as home
“forever England.” They themselves for eleven long years had fretted
as expatriates in an alien land. “They grew tired of the indolent
security of their sanctuary,” wrote Burke of them, although as a
fact they had worked hard enough for their daily bread, “and they
chose to remove to a place where they should see no superior.” In any
case they meant that their children should be English rather than
Dutch, and they had refused overtures from Holland to settle in Dutch
territory.
The machinery of their government was of the simplest, and expanded,
as necessity came, with their growth. As provided in the Compact,
the Governor was elected yearly by general manhood suffrage. His
one assistant was soon replaced by a council of seven. For eighteen
years the legislative body, the General Court it is still called,
was composed of the whole body of freemen; and the qualifications
of a freeman were that he should be “twenty-one years of age, of
sober, peaceable conversation, orthodox in religion [as a minimum,
belief in God and the Bible], and should possess rateable estate
to the value of twenty pounds.” By 1639 the colony had grown to
require a representative form of government; and the two branches,
the Governor and Council and the town representatives, sat as one
body to enact laws. But save in a crisis, no law proposed at one
session could be enacted until the next, so that the whole body of
freemen could have opportunity to pass upon it—a clear case of the
“referendum.” As early as 1623 the community had outgrown its custom
of trying an offender by the whole body of citizens, and substituted
trial by jury. Capital offences were six as against thirty-one in
England—treason, murder, diabolical conversation, arson, rape, and
unnatural crimes—and of these only two came to execution. No one was
ever committed, much less punished, for “diabolical conversation.”
Smoking was forbidden outdoors within a mile of a dwelling-house,
or while at work in the fields: evidently there was to be no gossip
over a pipe with the farmer next door. In time this law was eased;
and though in the early days the clergy alluded to tobacco as the
“smoke of the bottomless pit,” they soon came to use it themselves
and “tobacco was set at liberty.”
In 1636 they first codified their law; in 1671 was printed their
Great Fundamentals. Hubbard, in his “General History of New England
from the Discovery to 1680,” writes: “The laws they intended to be
governed by were the laws of England, the which they were willing to
be subject unto, though in a foreign land, and have since that time
continued of that mind for the general, adding only some particular
municipal laws of their own, suitable to their constitution, in
such cases where the common laws and statutes of England could
not well reach, or afford them help in emergent difficulties of
place.” They were loyal Englishmen to the bone, and in the first
codification of law affirm their allegiance: “whereas John Carver,
William Bradford, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, Isaac Allerton
and divers others of the subjects of our late Sovereign Lord James
... did undertake a voyage into that part of America called Virginia
or New England thereunto adjoining, there to erect a plantation and
colony of English, intending the glory of God and the enlargement
of His Majesty’s dominions, and the special good of the English
nation.” Yet they never waived a jot of their rights as freemen;
and in 1658, toward the end of Cromwell’s Government, they prefaced
the General Laws with a note that the advisers of George III would
have done well to heed: “We the Associates of New Plymouth, coming
hither as freeborn subjects of the State of England, endowed with
all and singular the privileges belonging to such, being assembled,
do ordain, constitute and enact that no act, imposition, law or
ordinance be made or imposed on us at present or to come, but such as
shall be made and imposed by consent of the body of the associates or
their representatives legally assembled, which is according to the
free liberty of the State of England.”
At the Restoration they gave allegiance to Charles; in 1689,
bridging the chasm of revolution, to William and Mary: the
significant point that they held themselves loyal to England,
whatever its government might be. And it is interesting, in their
address to William and Mary, that they felt entirely free to pass
judgment upon the hated Royal Governor, Andros: “We, the loyal
subjects of the Crown of England, are left in an unsettled state,
destitute of government and exposed to the ill consequences thereof;
and having heretofore enjoyed a quiet settlement of government in
this their Majesties’ colony of New Plymouth for more than three
score and six years ... notwithstanding our late unjust interruption
and suspension therefrom by the illegal arbitrary power of Sir Edmond
Andros, now ceased, ... do therefore hereby resume and declare their
reassuming of their said former way of government.” But that, to
their great disappointment, was not to be, and the royal charter
of William and Mary united definitely the colonies of Plymouth and
Massachusetts Bay.
The advantage of their “quiet settlement of government” had been
a double benefit: for it seems to have been a fact that liberal
Plymouth was free of any interference from England, while the
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, on the contrary, were in continual
hot water with the Home Government. England probably did not love
the Separatists better than she had ever done, but she had no notion
of quarrelling with sober, reasonable men who, in consideration of
a personal latitude that cost her no inconvenience, were willing
that other men, provided they were “civil,” should live according
to their individual right; and thereby saved her the trouble of
playing arbiter in colonial disputes. England, moreover, was deriving
considerable profit from the lusty young colony that, by its
enterprise, was tipping the scales in her favor in the trader’s game
she was playing with Holland and France.
III
The Pilgrims had been no visionaries seeking Utopia. They were
members of a well-constructed joint-stock company which, as occasion
offered, they adapted to the changing needs of the colony; and they
were prepared to earn not only a home for themselves, but a return on
the money invested in their enterprise by their financial backers,
and, if they prospered, a sum sufficient to buy out such interests.
It is true that they were, first, religious men seeking religious
freedom for themselves, and, if God willed, they would be the bearers
of good news to others. Beyond all other reasons pushing them to
their adventure, wrote Bradford, was “a great hope and inward zeal
they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way
thereunto, for the propagation and advancing of the gospel of Christ
in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but
even as stepping stones unto others for the performing of so great a
work.”
Yet money as well as zeal was necessary for such an undertaking
as theirs, and the Holland exiles were poor. But arrangements
were concluded with a company of promoters in London, “Merchant
Adventurers” was their more romantic title then, to supply the larger
part of the necessary capital, while the Pilgrims as “Planters”
should furnish the man power. Their agreement set forth that: “The
Adventurers and Planters do agree that every person that goeth,
being aged sixteen years and upward, be rated at ten pounds, and ten
pounds be accounted a single share”; that “he that goeth in person
and furnishes himself out with ten pounds either in money or other
provisions be accounted as having twenty pounds in stock, and in the
division shall receive a double share”; and “that all such persons as
are of this Colony are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all
other provisions out of the common stock of said Company.”
Doctor Eliot, in his speech at the dedication of the Pilgrim monument
at Provincetown, lucidly described the working-out of the Agreement:
“It was provided that the Adventurers and Planters should continue
their joint-stock partnership for a period of seven years, during
which time all profits and benefits got by trading, fishing, or any
other means should remain in the common stock.... At the end of seven
years the capital and profits, namely, the houses, lands, goods, and
chattels, were to be equally divided between the Adventurers and the
Planters.... Whoever should carry his wife and children or servants
should be allowed for every such person aged sixteen years and upward
one share in the division.... At the end of seven years every Planter
was to own the house and garden then occupied by him; and during
the seven years every Planter was to work four days in each week for
the Colony and two for himself and his family.... Before the seven
years of the original contract with the Adventurers had expired the
Pilgrims had established a considerable trade to the north and to
the south of Plymouth, and had found in this trade a means of paying
their debts and making a settlement with the Adventurers, which
was concluded on the basis of buying out their entire interest for
the sum of eighteen hundred pounds. Eight of the original Planters
advanced the money for this settlement, and therefore became the
owners of the settlement, so far as the Adventurers’ liens were
concerned. It was then decided to form an equal partnership, to
include all heads of families and all self-supporting men, young
or old, whether church members or not. These men, called the
‘Purchasers,’ received each one share in the public belongings, with
a right to a share for his wife and another for each of his children.
The shares were bonded for the public debt, and to the shareholders
belonged everything pertaining to the colony except each individual’s
personal effects. These shareholders numbered one hundred and
fifty-six, namely, fifty-seven men, thirty-four boys, twenty-nine
women, and thirty-six girls.” Probably the heads of these families
were the men referred to as Old Comers or First Comers; namely, those
who had arrived in the first three ships that brought colonists from
England—the Mayflower, the Fortune, and the Anne and her consort.
“The Purchasers put their business into the hands of the eight men
who had become the Colony’s bondsmen to the Adventurers, and the
trade of the Colony was thereafter conducted by these eight leading
Pilgrims, who were known as Undertakers.”
There is the framework of their polity; its sure foundation that
they were “straitly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the
whole by everyone; and so mutually”—the bedrock requirement for the
successful working of any coöperative scheme. There was no playing
of favorites: each man worked; each man, if for no more than his own
sake, must work with good-will. “The people,” Robinson had written
of them, “are for the body of them industrious and frugal, we think
we may safely say, as any company of people in the world.” He knew
intimately the men of whom he spoke. They were “common people” as
compared with some of the aristocrats of Massachusetts Bay; yet on
the Mayflower roster appeared “masters,” “servants,” and “artisans”;
and each in his degree contributed to the public welfare. Action they
constantly matched up with their professed attitude to God, with the
result that if the expression of their belief were of an ancient
pattern, the practice of it would stand well with the liberalism of
to-day.
The first year of the little colony was difficult enough, and before
the winter was over they might have starved had it not been for the
fisheries and the kindness of their Indian neighbors. Yet of their
neighbors’ good-will they were not too confident, and they levelled
the graves of their dead lest the number should be known to the
Indians, and for the discouragement of prospective colonists. Before
the spring was over, one half of the one hundred and two souls that
sailed by the Mayflower had died, and of the eighteen women only four
survived the hardships of the first six months. Yet they would not
lose heart. “It is not with us as with other men whom small things
can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish themselves
home again,” William Brewster and John Robinson had declared. “If we
should be driven to return, we should not hope to recover our present
helps and comforts, neither indeed look ever for ourselves to attain
unto the like in any other place during our lives.” Wherein one may
read how bitter had been the years of their exile, how constant their
longing for freedom and the abiding comfort of justice. They meant
now to hold on and succeed, and if possible to encourage others
to join them, in the place where their own courage and initiative
had set them; for it seems to have been a fact that the Pilgrims
displayed not only indomitable spirit in their optimistic reports to
correspondents in the old country, but also the considered policy
of shrewd men who would enlist recruits for their enterprise. Even
their critic, John Smith, was moved to admiration for these men
who, to be sure, had invited trouble by “accident, ignorance, and
wilfulness,” yet “have endured, with a wonderful patience many losses
and extremities.” And he marvels that “they subsist and prosper so
well, not any of them will abandon the country, but to the utmost of
their powers increase their numbers.”
Somehow, in spite of sickness and death and short rations, they won
through the dark months of that first winter, and fortunately for
them the spring broke early. On March 19 and 20, “we digged our
grounds and sowed our garden seeds”; and these Yorkshire farmers, at
any cost, must have been glad to be out in the open again planting
their seeds. “I never in my life remember a more seasonable year
than we have here enjoyed,” Winslow had the courage to write in his
“Brief and True Declaration.” “For the temper of the air here, it
agreeth well with that in England, and if there be any difference at
all, this is somewhat hotter in summer. Some think it to be colder
in winter, but I cannot out of experience so say. The air is very
clear and not foggy, as hath been reported.” It is a cheerful report,
persuasive reading for would-be colonists, that Winslow sent back to
England by the Fortune which, in the autumn of 1621, brought over the
Pilgrims that had perforce remained behind when the Speedwell broke
down. And among the new colonists was one William Hilton, who was so
pleased with the prospect that he sent back post-haste for his family.
“Loving cousin,” wrote he, “At our arrival ... we found all our
friends and planters in good health, though they were left sicke and
weake with very small meanes, the Indians round about us peaceable
and friendly, the country very pleasant and temperate, yeelding
naturally of itself great store of fruites. We are all free-holders,
the rent day doth not trouble us; and all of those good blessings
we have, of which and what we list in their seasons for taking. Our
companie are for the most part very religious honest people; the
word of God sincerely taught us every Sabbath: so that I know not
anything a contented mind can here want. I desire your friendly care
to send my wife and children to me, where I wish all the friends I
have in England, and so I rest Your loving kinsman.”
William Hilton had arrived in time for the celebration of their first
Thanksgiving Day, which was kept after the kindly manner of the
Harvest Home in Old England. Here is Winslow’s description of the
festivity: “Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men
on fowling, that so we might, after a more special manner, rejoice
together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four
in a day killed as much fowl as, with a little help besides, served
the company almost a week. At which time amongst other recreations,
we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us. And
amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoyt, 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 on 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.” A memorable feast; and twenty-five
years later Bradford wrote: “Nor has there been any general want
of food amongst us since to this day.” The fine healthy temper of
the pioneers shines out in these simple words—the words of men who
could pass lightly over the uncertainties and privations of that
first difficult winter, when more than once it must have seemed to
them that all their hope and labor were in vain and their adventure
doomed, to emphasize only the good things that had come to them.
And Robert Cushman who, with his family, arrived by the Fortune, sent
report back to his “loving friends the Adventurers of New England”
that New England it was not only because Prince Charles had named
it so, but “because of the resemblance that is in it of England,
the native soil of Englishmen; it being much the same for heat and
cold in summer and winter; it being champaign ground, but no high
mountains, somewhat like the soil in Kent and Essex; full of dales
and meadow ground, full of rivers and sweet springs, as England is.”
IV
The country was sparsely settled by natives: for some four years
earlier an “unwanted plague,” an act of God the pious might have
been excused for judging it to sweep the country bare for the uses
of white immigrants, had all but depopulated the coast from the
Penobscot to Narragansett. The vicinity of Plymouth, in particular,
had been affected, and when Squanto was returned there by Dermer, he
found all his kinsmen dead. It is said that a short time before the
calamity, the Nausets, making reprisals on a shipwrecked French crew
for the kidnapping activities of the whites, had been promised by
one of their victims the vengeance of the white man’s God who would
surely destroy them and give over their country to his people. “We
are too many for him to destroy,” boasted the Indians. But when the
plague wasted them, and the arrival of the Mayflower might be held
as confirmation of the prophecy, their assurance may have weakened.
It seemed that the white man’s God might have more power than they
supposed; and perhaps that futile flight of arrows at the First
Encounter was no more than a half-hearted protest at the decree of
fate. The natives had some pretty superstitions of their own—as
to the discovery of Nantucket, for instance, which, they told the
Englishmen, had been quite unknown until many moons earlier when
a great bird had borne off in his talons so many children from
the south shore that a giant, one Maushope, moved with pity, had
waded out into the sea and followed the bird to the island where he
found the bones of the ravished children under a tree. Whereupon,
recognizing the futility of regret, he sat him down to smoke, and
the smoke was borne back across the waters he had traversed—the true
origin of fog in the Sound. And Indians, as it drove in from sea,
would say: “There comes old Maushope’s smoke.” Another story has it
that Nantucket was formed of the ashes from Maushope’s pipe; but that
the island was discovered by the parents of a papoose that was borne
off by an eagle. They followed fast in their canoe, but not fast
enough, for they were only in time to find the bones of their child
heaped under a tree in the hitherto unknown land of Nantucket.
The Plymouth settlers seem to have encountered no great opposition
from the natives who, although shy and suspicious as might be any
creatures of the forest, were responsive to the just dealing that was
the considered policy of the Pilgrims; and on both sides there was an
impulse to friendliness tempered, however, by the ineradicable racial
instinct to be wary of whatever is strange. Within a few months the
settlers had concluded a treaty with Massasoit, the great overlord
of the region. And Samoset, who had learned a little English from
traders, soon presented himself with his friendly greeting: “Welcome,
Englishmen, welcome.” And Squanto, from the first, was their faithful
interpreter. The remnants of the Cape tribes, the Cummaquids, the
Nausets, and Pamets, scattered among their little settlements from
Sandwich to Truro—Mashpee, Sacuton, Cummaquid, Mattacheesett,
Nobscusset, Monomoyick, Sequautucket, Nauset, and Pamet—were, save
the Nausets possibly, a singularly gentle race. Nor were the Nausets,
when it was well within their power once, disposed to take vengeance
upon a boy.
In July, 1621, young John Billington set out from Plymouth to do
some independent exploring; nor was this the first escapade of the
Billington family. Back there at Provincetown, one morning, John’s
brother Francis was like to have blown up the Mayflower by firing
off a fowling-piece in the cabin where there was an open keg of
powder. “By God’s mercy, no harm was done.” The Billingtons seem to
have been among the undesirables of the Mayflower: the father “I
know not by what friends shuffled into our company,” Bradford writes
of him. And later, in 1630, the man was hanged for murder. But the
settlers were not men to leave young John to his fate; yet search as
they would, they could find no trace of him until Indians brought
in rumors of a white lad roaming about the Cape. Ten men, with two
Indians as interpreters, set sail for Barnstable Bay, and asked news
of the boy from some natives catching lobsters there. Yes, such a
boy was known to be with the Nausets, and the company was invited to
land. They were welcomed by Iyanough, sachem of the Cummaquids, “a
man,” wrote Edward Winslow of him, “not exceeding twenty-six years
of age, but very personable, gentle, courteous and fair-conditioned;
indeed, not like a savage except in his attire. His entertainment
was answerable to his parts, and his cheer plentiful and various.”
And here at Cummaquid they saw a woman, upwards of a hundred years
old, who was mother of three of Hunt’s victims and bewailed the loss
of her sons so piteously that the visitors sought to comfort her not
only with futile words, but with a gift of “some small trifles which
somewhat appeased her.” And after partaking of the “plentiful and
various cheer,” they set out again, with Iyanough himself and two of
his men as a guard of honor, and grounded their boat near the Nauset
shore. But they did not land, and after some cautious interchange
of civilities, Aspinet, the sachem there, brought the boy, whom
he “had bedecked like a salvage,” and “behung with beads,” out to
their boat. And through Aspinet, the Plymouth men arranged to pay
for the seed corn they had taken from his cache on Corn Hill in the
previous November. Returning with Iyanough to Cummaquid, there was
further “entertainment”: the women and children joined hands in a
dance before them; Iyanough himself led the way through the darkness
to a spring where they might fill their water cask; he hung his own
necklace about the neck of an Englishman. And the party set out for
home with due reciprocation of courtesy, but were hindered by tide
and wind, and again returned, and again were welcomed by the natives.
Truly, a fine adventure for young John Billington.
This expedition seems to have cemented a friendly understanding with
the Cape Indians. In November, when the Fortune was sighted off the
Cape and the Indians feared she might be a hostile French ship, they
warned Plymouth in time for the townsmen to prepare for possible
attack. And the natives were always ready to supplement the settlers’
scanty stock of food, which, but for them, would have had no other
variety than game from the forest and fish from the sea. Not that the
pious were unmindful of such mercies. “Thanks to God who has given
us to suck of the abundance of the seas and of treasure hid in the
sands,” was the grace said over a dish of clams to which a neighbor
had been invited. But for the fruits of the earth they were chiefly
dependent upon the savages. “The cheapest corn they planted at first
was Indian grain, before they had ploughs,” runs the record. “And
let no man make a jest at pumpkins, for with this food the Lord was
pleased to feed his people to their good content till corn and cattle
were increased.”
“We have pumpkins at morning, and pumpkins at noon.
If it were not for pumpkins, we should be undone.”
The first harvest was not sufficient for the winter’s need, and in
November a company under William Bradford set out in the Swan—a boat
lent by their neighbors of Weymouth, who had had no small share in
depleting their supplies—for a coasting trip around the Cape to trade
knives and beads for corn. With them was their interpreter Squanto;
and this was to prove poor Squanto’s last voyage, for at Monomoyick
(Chatham) he was taken ill and died. At Monomoyick eight hogsheads
of corn and beans were stowed away on the Swan; at Mattacheesett
(Barnstable or Yarmouth) and Nauset an additional supply was had. But
at Nauset, where a few men had run in shore in the shallop, their
boat was wrecked, and caching the stores, the party procured a guide
and set out overland for Plymouth, while their companions in the
Swan proceeded by sea. In January Standish took the lead in another
expedition by boat, recovered and repaired the wrecked shallop at
Nauset, brusquely demanded restitution of the Indians for “some
trifles” he charged them with stealing, and then and afterwards at
Mattacheesett where he made a like charge, received the articles and
ample apology from their chiefs.
All visitors to these shores seem to be agreed on the thievish
propensities of the natives: Gosnold’s chronicler remarks that they
are “more timerous” than those to the north, but thievish; Champlain
thought them of “good disposition, better than those of the north,
but they are all in fact of no great worth. They are great thieves
and if they cannot lay hold of anything with their hands, they try to
do so with their feet.” He adds, charitably: “I am of opinion that if
they had anything to exchange with us, they would not give themselves
to thieving.” The fact seems to have been that these children of
nature could not resist the lure of any unguarded bits of treasure;
but Miles Standish was not the man to enter into psychological
elucidations of behavior, and at Mattacheesett, as at Nauset, he
suspected the natives of treachery as well as thieving, and kept
strict watch while they filled his shallop with grain.
In the following month, March, he had still more reason, he thought,
to question the friendly intention of the chief Canacum at Manomet,
or Bourne, who, however, one bitter cold night had suitably
entertained Bradford’s party and sold them the corn which Standish
had come to fetch. Standish’s suspicions increased to certainty when
two Massachusetts Indians joined the company and one of them began
a tirade to Canacum which afterwards was known to be a complaint of
outrages committed by the English at Weymouth and a plea to cut off
Standish and his handful of men. Winslow writes that there was also
“a lusty Indian of Pawmet, or Cape Cod, there present, who had ever
demeaned himself well towards us, being in his general carriage very
affable, courteous, and loving, especially towards the captain.” But
“this savage was now entered into confederacy with the rest, yet to
avoid suspicion, made many signs of his continued affection, and
would needs bestow a kettle of some six or eight gallons on him, and
would not accept anything in lieu thereof, saying he was rich, and
could afford to bestow such favors on his friends whom he loved.”
Now a kettle was one of an Indian’s most precious possessions, and
very likely the Pamet, when he heard the treachery afoot, offered it
merely as an extravagant pledge of friendship; but when he demeaned
himself to help the women whom Standish had bribed to load his cargo,
the captain merely saw there another proof of perfidy. The Englishmen
spent an anxious night in their bivouac on the beach; but when
morning broke embarked safely, and with their corn made the return
trip to Plymouth.
Whether or not incited thereto by intolerable wrongs, Indians of
the mainland had begun to make trouble, and information now came to
the Pilgrims, through their ally, Massasoit, of a plot against the
whites in which not only Indians near Weymouth, but some of the Cape
Indians, were said to be implicated. Weston’s colony of adventurers
there had from the first been a thorn in the side of Plymouth; but
when one of the Weymouth men, eluding the Indians, made his way
across country to report the dangerous conditions there Standish
waited not upon the order of his going. With eight whites and an
Indian guide, he set sail for Weymouth, where he seems to have met
with little resistance, and having slain a due number of the savages,
returned to Plymouth with the head of their chief, Wittaumet, “a
notable insulting villain,” as a trophy. Very likely thereby a
serious rising of the natives was averted. To Wittaumet’s men a
white was a white; it was all one to them whether he were blameless
Pilgrim or Merrymount royster; and as for the Patuxets and Pamets
and Nausets, we know they had old scores to settle. It is true,
moreover, that any long contact of Indians and whites was fairly
sure to end in a quarrel and bloodletting. And if the purpose of
Standish’s expedition was to create terror, it was a success. Natives
of the seacoast, whom the plague had spared, innocent and guilty,
fled to the swamps and waste places, where disease attacked them more
effectually than the English could have done, and many of them died;
among them Canacum of Manomet, Aspinet of the Nausets, and even the
“princely” Iyanough, who seems to have been blameless in intention
and act. More than two hundred and fifty years later, the bones of a
chief were discovered near a swamp in East Barnstable, and, believed
to be those of Iyanough, were encased suitably and placed in Pilgrim
Hall near relics of Miles Standish who had as surely done him to
death as if slain by his hand. The name of Iyanough is preserved in
that of the modern town of Hyannis.
How much fault in all this deplorable business may be charged to
Miles Standish, one may not say. He was not a “Pilgrim,” nor of their
faith, but from the first, on account of his experience and skill,
had been chosen for their military leader. Hubbard writes of him: “A
little chimney is soon fired; so was the Plymouth captain, a man of
small stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper.” And when wise
John Robinson, at Leyden, heard of Standish’s bloody reprisals, he
wrote the brethren at Plymouth that he “trusted the Lord had sent him
among them for good, but feared he was wanting in that tenderness of
the life of man, made after God’s image, which was meet; and thought
it would have been better if they had converted some before they
killed any.”