_The
PILGRIM STORY_
BEING LARGELY A COMPILATION FROM THE DOCUMENTS OF GOVERNOR BRADFORD AND
GOVERNOR WINSLOW, SEVERALLY AND IN COLLABORATION; TOGETHER WITH A LIST
OF MAYFLOWER PASSENGERS.
Compiled and written by
WILLIAM FRANKLIN ATWOOD
ILLUSTRATED BY LEO SCHREIBER
Published by MPG Communications, Plymouth, Mass.
Copyright 1940
By
PAUL W. BITTINGER
Plymouth, Mass.
Second Edition
October, 1947
Third Edition
June, 1950
Fourth Edition
June, 1952
Fifth Edition
April, 1955
Sixth Edition (revised)
April, 1958
Seventh Edition
January, 1963
Eighth Edition
January, 1966
Ninth Edition
April, 1968
Tenth Edition
May, 1971
Eleventh Edition
May, 1975
Twelfth Edition
April, 1980
Thirteenth Edition
April, 1984
Fourteenth Edition
July, 1987
Linotyped, Printed and Bound
by MPG Communications, Plymouth, Mass.
Distributed by Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, MA 02360
CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER I
Scrooby: Persecution 7
CHAPTER II
Escape: Holland 11
CHAPTER III
Holland: An Alien Peace 15
Historic Decision 16
CHAPTER IV
London: Preparation 20
Articles of Agreement 22
False Accusations 23
The Embarkation 25
Voyage and Arrival 26
Signers of the Compact 28
First Town Meeting 30
Search for Permanent Settlement 30
The Shallop Arrives 32
Historic Landing 33
Permanent Settlement 35
CHAPTER V
A New Home 37
First Winter Losses 40
CHAPTER VI
Samoset’s Visit 42
Treaty with Massasoit 44
The First Marriage 47
The First Duel 47
Visit to Massasoit 47
Arrival of Hobamock 48
The Fortune Arrives 49
Pierce’s Attempt 49
CHAPTER VII
Preparations for Winter 51
The First Thanksgiving 51
Bradford’s Letter 53
CHAPTER VIII
Indian Trouble 56
CHAPTER IX
Consolidation 61
Arrival of the Anne and the Little James 62
The First Cattle 64
The Wollaston Incident 67
The First Settled Minister 69
The First Capital Offence 69
Increase of Obligations 69
Roger Williams 70
Winslow Elected Governor 71
Boundaries Established 71
New England Confederacy 72
Conclusion 73
List of Mayflower Passengers 74
List of Fortune Passengers 75
List of Little James Passengers 75
Index to Illustrations
NOTE—Many well-known pictures of the Pilgrims have grossly
misinterpreted their true spirit. A “Signing of the Compact” or a
“Departure from Delfthaven,” for example, that employs the sentimental
piety, the eyes and arms raised to heaven, of Italian Baroque art,
(that Jesuitical, most Catholic art), fails to reflect the real spirit
of the Protestant Pilgrims. The use of the gracefully reclining and
swooning figures of Italianate renaissance art is likewise
inappropriate.
Reacting sharply from this, the illustrations in the book portray in
the modern spirit both the activities of the Pilgrims and their
settings with strict realism.
Unsparing effort in consulting authorities, old documents, prints, and
actual scenes was expended to secure convincing authenticity.
Stock Scene, showing church attended by Brewster and approximate
location of the stocks in Scrooby 7
Birdseye view of Brewster Manor in Scrooby 9
Church at Scrooby 10
Capture of escaping Pilgrims by an English mob 11
Love Scene, showing actual bridge and the Cloth Hall in Leyden,
headquarters of the guild of woolen workers, of whom the
Pilgrims were a part 15
Destruction of Brewster’s printing shop 18
Cushman before the Merchant Adventurers 20
Embarkation, showing buildings and actual wharf from which the
Pilgrims departed 24
Sighting of Provincetown, showing deck construction of Mayflower
type of boat 26
Signing the Compact 29
The first building, showing position in relation to Town Brook and
Pilgrim Spring 37
The First Street, in its true topographical setting 39
Samoset’s Visit 42
The Treaty with Massasoit, in its actual setting, “an unfinished
building” 45
A Good Harvest 51
Thanksgiving Feast 54
The Snakeskin Warning 56
Capt. Standish Slays Pecksuot 58
The First Cattle 61
PREFACE
No phase of early American history presents a finer example of faith,
fortitude and determination of purpose than the story of that little
band of devout souls who landed at Plymouth in the winter of 1620 and to
whom we refer as the Pilgrims.
In the following limited pages the writer attempts to present something
of the conditions obtaining in England prior to the Departure, also
something of the struggles, privations, courage and forbearance during
the first years of the settlement at Plymouth.
In so doing dependence is placed particularly upon the contemporaneous
writings of Bradford and Winslow, both members of the Mayflower party.
With the vast bibliography relating to the Pilgrim history, together
with the requirements of brevity, it is indeed fortunate that we are
able to look to those who played such an important part in this historic
episode and who were thoughtful enough to leave a record for posterity.
It is difficult to epitomize a story so broad and sweeping in its
ramifications, its religious and material aspects and its touch of
romanticism. Consequently it is intended to include only such events as
may prove of interest and value to the reader as adduced from the
recognized authorities.
These authorities as before indicated are:
Bradford, William: History of Plimouth Plantation. (Printed from the
original manuscript in 1898 under the supervision of the
Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.)
Young, Alexander: Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. (1880.) Including
Mourt’s Relation (London 1622) by William Bradford and Edward
Winslow in collaboration; Good News from England, Winslow’s
Journal of 1622-23 (London 1624); Winslow’s Relation and
Winslow’s Brief Narrative.
Hazard, Ebenezer; Hazard’s Historical Collections, Vol. 1. Including
Old Colony and Plymouth Records, Philadelphia (1812).
Note:—With regard to the original manuscript of Bradford’s History of
Plymouth Plantation, it may be stated that it was first obtained by
Thomas Prince, the historian, from Judge Sewall, to whom it was “lent
but only lent” by Major John Bradford of Kingston, son of Major William
Bradford, formerly Deputy Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and grandson
of Governor William Bradford.
This precious document which seems to have passed through several hands,
finally found refuge, together with Prince’s library, in the tower of
the Old South Church in Boston, whence it later disappeared.
In 1856 it was found in the library of the Lord Bishop of London, at
Fulham Palace. A transcript was made and it was printed in Boston the
same year, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
In 1897 the original manuscript was brought to this country by the Hon.
Thomas F. Bayard, our Ambassador to England at the time, to whom it had
been delivered by the Rt. Rev. Mandell Creighton, Lord Bishop of London.
Much credit is due to the late Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts,
to the former Bishop of London, Dr. Temple, who later became the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and the aforementioned Ambassador Bayard, who
were all in accord as to the right and justice of the transfer.
This historic document now reposes in the state library in the State
House in Boston, priceless in both historic and sentimental value.
W. F. A.
FOREWORD
Expansion on Cape Cod
The early settlements on Cape Cod all came about under the aegis of the
parent colony in Plymouth. Several times in Pilgrim chronicles we read
how Captain Myles Standish was sent to Sandwich, Barnstable and Yarmouth
on tours of inspection and to supervise the division of lands purchased
for little or nothing by the newcomers from the remnants of an Indian
population decimated years before by disease.
Direct Pilgrim influence on the religious life, the administration and
the courts of the Cape settlements continued from the earliest
beginnings at Sandwich in 1637, with steadily diminishing strength,
until the election of Thomas Prence of Eastham as Governor of Plymouth
Colony in 1657. Meanwhile the parent settlement itself was coming under
the domination of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its Puritan
hierarchs. The Plymouth connection finally lapsed, for all practical
purposes, in 1685, when Plymouth Colony was divided up into Plymouth,
Barnstable and Bristol Counties.
First Cape settlement was in 1637, when a band of Puritan families from
Saugus and Lynn on the North Shore got permission from the Pilgrim
Fathers to migrate to the precincts of the Plymouth Colony, of which the
Cape was a part. Some Pilgrim families from Duxbury and Plymouth came
along with these first settlers to carve out homesteads in the Sandwich
area.
Next towns to be settled were Yarmouth and Barnstable, in 1639, an
earlier attempt to populate the Mattacheesett section of what is now
Barnstable having failed.
Yarmouth was a direct offshoot of Pilgrim Plymouth, and prominent among
its settlers was Giles Hopkins, son of Stephen Hopkins, who came over
with his father on the Mayflower.
Barnstable, at its inception, was dominated by the personality of the
Rev. John Lothrop, a very strongminded man of dissident Pilgrim
persuasion who, together with fifty of his parishioners, had once served
two years in jail in England for religious schism. For a time the spirit
of controversy continued in the new Cape Colony, fanned by the radical
views of Marmaduke Matthews, a firebrand Welshman. But by the time
Captain Myles Standish and two companions came down from Plymouth in
1643 to divide up the salt hay marshes, cleared farmlands and woods of
Barnstable into legally recorded homesteads, the colony had settled down
and become absorbed with more workaday matters.
Last of the very early Cape Cod towns to be settled was Eastham in 1644,
by a party led by the Rev. John Mayo, bearer of another of the names
later to become famous on the Cape in its great mercantilist period.
Falmouth, in 1686, fissioned off quite directly from Plymouth, and was
incorporated in 1686, originally under the name of Succonesset. Harwich
officially came into being in 1694, as an offshoot from Barnstable, and
very much later, in 1803, gave rise to Brewster. Dennis, meanwhile, had
fissioned from Yarmouth in 1794. But by this time Pilgrim origins and
influence were but the dimmest of memories.
Also influential on the early Cape, after the middle 1650’s, were the
Quakers, at first persecuted, but eventually accepted as a manifestly
superior kind of people. They, too, quickly merged during the following
century into the Cape Cod way of life, and became indistinguishable from
families of Pilgrim or Puritan origin.
[Illustration: Stock Scene, showing church attended by Brewster and
approximate location of the stocks in Scrooby]
CHAPTER I
Scrooby: Persecution
The Pilgrim story may well begin from the period of the Reformation or
the ascendency of the Protestant Church in England. Previous to 1600
much friction had existed between the Crown and the Papacy in matters
ecclesiastical and civil. The process of reform however had been
crystalizing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This came to
culmination in the establishment of the English Church (known as the
Church of England) as the official or state church of which the King was
to be the temporal head with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual
head or primate.
But still there was friction. It was like a house divided against
itself. There were those who could not conscientiously subscribe to the
laws and rituals laid down by the established church. They were
dissenters or non-conformists and are best described by Bradford as
follows: “The one side labored to have the right worship of God and
discipline of Christ established in the Church, according to the
simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men’s inventions, and
to have and be ruled by the laws of God’s word, dispensed in those
offices and by those officers of Pastors, Teachers and Elders, etc.,
according to the Scriptures.”
“The other party endeavored to have episcopal dignity (after the popish
manner) with their large power and jurisdiction still retained.”
Note: In the subject matter in quotations, the spelling of some words
has been changed to the modern form without otherwise affecting the
text.
This strained and anomalous situation led to the founding of the
Separatist Church in 1602 in the Old Hall in Gainsborough, with John
Smyth as pastor.
Smyth was highly esteemed by the non-conformist group. He was a graduate
of Cambridge, “an eminent man in his time,” and his pastorate at
Gainsborough extended from 1602 until 1606 when he was forced to retire.
The Scrooby fraternity, an off-shoot from Gainsborough, was presided
over by Richard Clyfton as first pastor. Prominent among the
non-conformists at Scrooby were William Brewster, born in Scrooby in
1560, William Bradford, born in Austerfield, a village three miles
distant, in 1588, and John Robinson, born in Lincolnshire about 1576.
Robinson received orders from the Church of England, was suspended for
non-conformity and later joined the Congregation at Scrooby where he was
made pastor.
This triumvirate became the ruling spirits of the Scrooby community,
Brewster became the Elder of the Church and later the religious leader
of the Plymouth settlement, of which Bradford became Governor. Robinson,
to whom both looked for inspiration and guidance, was destined by
circumstances to remain in Holland where he had later been forced to
take refuge.
These independent thinkers who firmly asserted their right to worship
according to their belief, were brought into constant conflict with the
constituted authorities of the Church of England. As Bradford says:
“This contention was so great, as neither the honour of God, the common
persecution, nor the mediation of Mr. Calvin and other worthies of the
Lord in those places, could prevail with those thus episcopally minded,
but they proceeded by all means to disturb the peace of this poor
persecuted church, even so far as to charge (very unjustly and ungodly,
yet prelate like) some of their chief opposers, with rebellion and high
treason....” And then regarding their treatment he says: “They could not
long continue in any peaceable condition but were hunted and persecuted
on every side.”
[Illustration: Birdseye view of Brewster Manor in Scrooby]
From 1603 when King James I succeeded Elizabeth who had reigned as Queen
during the preceding forty-five years, conditions grew increasingly
worse until as Bradford continues:
“Seeing themselves thus molested and that there was no hope of their
continuance there, they resolved to go into the Low Countries, where
they heard was freedom of religion for all men; as also how sundry from
London, and other parts of the land had been exiled and persecuted for
the same cause, and were gone thither and lived at Amsterdam and in
other places of the land. So after they had continued together about a
year, and kept their meetings every sabbath, in one place or other,
exercising the worship of God amongst themselves, notwithstanding all
the diligence and malice of their adversaries, they seeing they could no
longer continue in that condition, they resolved to get over into
Holland as they could which was in the year 1607-1608.”
[Illustration: Church at Scrooby]
[Illustration: Capture of escaping Pilgrims by an English mob]