Transcriber’s Notes
Italic text enclosed with _underscores_.
Small-caps replaced by ALL CAPS.
Superscripted text indicated with ^.
More notes appear at the end of the file.
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THE WOMEN WHO
CAME IN THE MAYFLOWER
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The Women Who Came
in the Mayflower
BY
ANNIE RUSSELL MARBLE
[Illustration: colophon]
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON CHICAGO
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COPYRIGHT 1920
BY A. W. FELL
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON
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Foreword
This little book is intended as a memorial to the women who came in _The
Mayflower_, and their comrades who came later in _The Ann_ and _The
Fortune_, who maintained the high standards of home life in early
Plymouth Colony. There is no attempt to make a genealogical study of any
family. The effort is to reveal glimpses of the communal life during
1621-1623. This is supplemented by a few silhouettes of individual
matrons and maidens to whose influence we may trace increased resources
in domestic life and education.
One must regret the lack of proof regarding many facts, about which are
conflicting statements, both of the general conditions and the
individual men and women. In some instances, both points of view have
been given here; at other times, the more probable surmises have been
mentioned.
The author feels deep gratitude, and would here express it, to the
librarians of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England
Genealogic-Historical Register, the American Antiquarian Society, the
Register of Deeds, Pilgrim Hall, and the Russell Library of Plymouth,
private and public libraries of Duxbury and Marshfield, and to Mr.
Arthur Lord and all other individuals who have assisted in this
research. The publications of the Society of Mayflower Descendants, and
the remarkable researches of its editor, Mr. George E. Bowman, call for
special appreciation.
ANNIE RUSSELL MARBLE.
_Worcester, Massachusetts._
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD v
I ENDURANCE AND ADVENTURE: THE VOYAGE AND LANDING 3
II COMMUNAL AND FAMILY LIFE IN PLYMOUTH 1621-1623 21
III MATRONS AND MAIDENS WHO CAME IN “THE MAYFLOWER” 53
IV COMPANIONS WHO ARRIVED IN “THE FORTUNE” AND “THE ANN” 93
INDEX 109
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ERRATA
Page
49 (And foot-notes elsewhere) read _The Mayflower Descendant_
for Mayflower Descendants.
49 Foot-note, read _53 Mt. Vernon St._ for 9 Ashburton Pl.
78 Line 21, read _two hundred and seventy_ for seventy.
79 Line 12, read _inventory_ for will.
82 Line 12, omit Revolutionary.
84 Lines 4 and 5, read _Edward Winslow and Peregrine White_ for
William Mullins and Miles Standish.
84 Line 21, read _Petty coate with silke Lace_ for Pretty, etc.
86 Line 25, read _step-mother_ for mother.
88 Line 10, read _eighty_ for ninety years.
98 Line 14, read _Abraham_ for Alexander.
102 Line 9, read _Mercy_ for Mary.
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I
ENDURANCE AND ADVENTURE: THE VOYAGE AND LANDING
“_So they left ye goodly and pleasante citie, which had been ther
resting-place near 12. years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, &
looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to ye heavens,
their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits._”
—_Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantations. Chap. VII._
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CHAPTER I
ENDURANCE AND ADVENTURE: THE VOYAGE AND LANDING
December weather in New England, even at its best, is a test of physical
endurance. With warm clothes and sheltering homes today, we find
compensations for the cold winds and storms in the exhilarating winter
sports and the good cheer of the holiday season.
The passengers of _The Mayflower_ anchored in Plymouth harbor, three
hundred years ago, lacked compensations of sports or fireside warmth.
One hundred and two in number when they sailed,—of whom twenty-nine were
women,—they had been crowded for ten weeks into a vessel that was
intended to carry about half the number of passengers. In low spaces
between decks, with some fine weather when the open hatchways allowed
air to enter and more stormy days when they were shut in amid
discomforts of all kinds, they had come at last within sight of the
place where, contrary to their plans, they were destined to make their
settlement.
At Plymouth, England, their last port in September, they had “been
kindly entertained and courteously used by divers friends there
dwelling,”[1] but they were homeless now, facing a new country with
frozen shores, menaced by wild animals and yet more fearsome savages.
Whatever trials of their good sense and sturdy faith came later, those
days of waiting until shelter could be raised on shore, after the weeks
of confinement, must have challenged their physical and spiritual
fortitude.
There must have been exciting days for the women on shipboard and in
landing. There must have been hours of distress for the older and the
delight in adventure which is an unchanging trait of the young of every
race. Wild winds carried away some clothes and cooking-dishes from the
ship; there was a birth and a death, and occasional illness, besides the
dire seasickness. John Howland, “the lustie young man,” fell overboard
but he caught hold of the topsail halyard which hung extended and so
held on “though he was sundry fathoms under water,” until he was pulled
up by a rope and rescued by a boat-hook.[2]
Recent research[3] has argued that the captain of _The Mayflower_ was
probably not _Thomas_ Jones, with reputation for severity, but a Master
Christopher Jones of kindlier temper. The former captain was in
Virginia, in September, 1620, according to this account. With the most
generous treatment which the captain and crew could give to the women,
they must have been sorely tried. There were sick to be nursed, children
to be cared for, including some lively boys who played with powder and
nearly caused an explosion at Cape Cod; nourishment must be found for
all from a store of provisions that had been much reduced by the delays
and necessary sales to satisfy their “merchant adventurers” before they
left England. They slept on damp bedding and wore musty clothes; they
lacked exercise and water for drink or cleanliness. Joyful for them must
have been the day recorded by Winslow and Bradford,[4]—“On Monday the
thirteenth of November our people went on shore to refresh themselves
and our women to wash, as they had great need.”
During the anxious days when the abler men were searching on land for a
site for the settlement, first on Cape Cod and later at Plymouth, there
were events of excitement on the ship left in the harbor. Peregrine
White was born and his father’s servant, Edward Thompson, died. Dorothy
May Bradford, the girl-wife of the later Governor of the colony, was
drowned during his absence. There were murmurings and threats against
the leaders by some of the crew and others who were impatient at the
long voyage, scant comforts and uncertain future. Possibly some of the
complaints came from women, but in the hearts of most of them, although
no women signed their names, was the resolution that inspired the men
who signed that compact in the cabin of _The Mayflower_,—“to promise all
due submission and obedience.” They had pledged their “great hope and
inward zeal of laying good foundation for ye propagating and advancing
ye gospell of ye kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of ye world;
yea, though they should be but as stepping-stones unto others for ye
performing of so great a work”; with such spirit they had been impelled
to leave Holland and such faith sustained them on their long journey.
Many of the women who were pioneers at Plymouth had suffered severe
hardships in previous years. They could sustain their own hearts and
encourage the younger ones by remembrance of the passage from England to
Holland, twelve years before, when they were searched most cruelly, even
deprived of their clothes and belongings by the ship’s master at Boston.
Later they were abandoned by the Dutchman at Hull, to wait for fourteen
days of frightful storm while their husbands and protectors were carried
far away in a ship towards the coast of Norway, “their little ones
hanging about them and quaking with cold.”[5]
There were women with frail bodies, like Rose Standish and Katherine
Carver, but there were strong physiques and dauntless hearts sustained
to great old age, matrons like Susanna White and Elizabeth Hopkins and
young women like Priscilla Mullins, Mary Chilton, Elizabeth Tilley and
Constance Hopkins. In our imaginations today, few women correspond to
the clinging, fainting figures portrayed by some of the painters of “The
Departure” or “The Landing of the Pilgrims.” We may more readily believe
that most of the women were upright and alert, peering anxiously but
courageously into the future. Writing in 1910, John Masefield said:[6]
“A generation fond of pleasure, disinclined towards serious thought, and
shrinking from hardship, even if it may be swiftly reached, will find it
difficult to imagine the temper, courage and manliness of the emigrants
who made the first Christian settlement of New England.” Ten years ago
it would have been as difficult for women of our day to understand
adequately the womanliness of the Pilgrim matrons and girls. The
anxieties and self-denials experienced by women of all lands during the
last five years may help us to “imagine” better the dauntless spirit of
these women of New-Plymouth. During those critical months of 1621-1623
they sustained their households and assisted the men in establishing an
orderly and religious colony. We may justly affirm that some of “the
wisdom, prudence and patience and just and equall carriage of things by
the better part”[7] was manifested among the women as well as the men.
In spite of the spiritual zeal which comes from devotion to a good
cause, and the inspiration of steady work, the women must have suffered
from homesickness, as well as from anxiety and illness. They had left in
Holland not alone their loved pastor, John Robinson, and their valiant
friend, Robert Cushman, but many fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters
besides their “dear gossips.” Mistress Brewster yearned for her elder
son and her daughters, Fear and Patience; Priscilla Mullins and Mary
Chilton, soon to be left orphans, had been separated from older brothers
and sisters. Disease stalked among them on land and on shipboard like a
demon. Before the completion of more than two or three of the one-room,
thatched houses, the deaths were multiplying. Possibly this disease was
typhus fever; more probably it was a form of infectious pneumonia, due
to enervated conditions of the body and to exposures at Cape Cod.
Winslow declared, in his account of the expedition on shore, “It blowed
and did snow all that day and night and froze withal. Some of our people
that are dead took the original of their death there.” Had the disease
been “galloping consumption,” as has been suggested sometimes, it is not
probable that many of those “sick unto death” would have recovered and
have lived to be octogenarians.
The toll of deaths increased and the illness spread until, at one time,
there were only “six or seven sound persons” to minister to the sick and
to bury the dead. Fifteen of the twenty-nine women who sailed from
England and Holland were buried on Plymouth hillside during the winter
and spring. They were: Rose Standish; Elizabeth, wife of Edward Winslow;
Mary, wife of Isaac Allerton; Sarah, wife of Francis Eaton; Katherine,
wife of Governor John Carver; Alice, wife of John Rigdale; Ann, wife of
Edward Fuller; Bridget and Ann Tilley, wives of John and Edward; Alice,
wife of John Mullins or Molines; Mrs. James Chilton; Mrs. Christopher
Martin; Mrs. Thomas Tinker; possibly Mrs. John Turner, and Ellen More,
the orphan ward of Edward Winslow. Nearly twice as many men as women
died during those fateful months of 1621. Can we “imagine” the courage
required by the few women who remained after this devastation, as the
wolves were heard howling in the night, the food supplies were fast
disappearing, and the houses of shelter were delayed in completion by
“frost and much foul weather,” and by the very few men in physical
condition to rive timber or to thatch roofs? The common house, twenty
foot square, was crowded with the sick, among them Carver and Bradford,
who were obliged “to rise in good speed” when the roof caught on fire,
and their loaded muskets in rows beside the beds threatened an
explosion.[8]
Although the women’s strength of body and soul must have been sapped yet
their fidelity stood well the test; when _The Mayflower_ was to return
to England in April and the captain offered free passage to the women as
well as to any men who wished to go, if the women “would cook and nurse
such of the crew as were ill,” not a man or a woman accepted the offer.
Intrepid in bravery and faith, the women did their part in making this
lonely, impoverished settlement into a home. This required adjustments
of many kinds. Few in number, the women represented distinctive classes
of society in birth and education. In Leyden, for seven years, they had
chosen their friends and there they formed a happy community, in spite
of some poverty and more anxiety about the education and morals of their
children, because of “the manifold temptations”[9] of the Dutch city.
Many of the men, on leaving England, had renounced their more leisurely
occupations and professions to practise trades in Leyden,—Brewster and
Winslow as printers, Allerton as tailor, Dr. Samuel Fuller as say-weaver
and others as carpenters, wool-combers, masons, cobblers, pewterers and
in other crafts. A few owned residences near the famous University of
Leyden, where Robinson and Brewster taught. Some educational influences
would thus fall upon their families.[10] On the other hand, others were
recorded as “too poor to be taxed.” Until July, 1620, there were two
hundred and ninety-eight known members of this church in Leyden with
nearly three hundred more associated with them. Such economic and social
conditions gave to the women certain privileges and pleasures in
addition to the interesting events in this picturesque city.
In _The Mayflower_ and at Plymouth, on the other hand, the women were
thrust into a small company with widely differing tastes and
backgrounds. One of the first demands made upon them was for a
democratic spirit,—tolerance and patience, adaptability to varied
natures. The old joke that “the Pilgrim Mothers had to endure not alone
their hardships but the Pilgrim Fathers also” has been overworked. These
women would never have accepted pity as martyrs. They came to this new
country with devotion to the men of their families and, in those days,
such a call was supreme in a woman’s life. They sorrowed for the women
friends who had been left behind,—the wives of Dr. Fuller, Richard
Warren, Francis Cooke and Degory Priest, who were to come later after
months of anxious waiting for a message from New-Plymouth.
The family, not the individual, characterized the life of that
community. The father was always regarded as the “head” of the family.
Evidence of this is found when we try to trace the posterity of some of
the pioneer women from the Old Plymouth Colony Records. A child is there
recorded as “the son of Nicholas Snow,” “the son of John Winslow” or
“the daughter of Thomas Cushman” with no hint that the mothers of these
children were, respectively, Constance Hopkins, Mary Chilton and Mary
Allerton, all of whom came in _The Mayflower_, although the fathers
arrived at Plymouth later on _The Fortune_ and _The Ann_.
It would be unjust to assume that these women were conscious heroines.
They wrought with courage and purpose equal to these traits in the men,
but probably none of the Pilgrims had a definite vision of the future.
With words of appreciation that are applicable to both sexes,
ex-President Charles W. Eliot has said:[11] “The Pilgrims did not know
the issue and they had no vision of it. They just loved liberty and
toleration and truth, and hoped for more of it, for more liberty, for a
more perfect toleration, for more truth, and they put their lives, their
labors, at the disposition of those loves without the least vision of
this republic, or of what was going to come out of their industry, their
devotion, their dangerous and exposed lives.”
-----
Footnote 1:
Relation or Journal of a Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New-England
and Proceedings Thereof; London, 1622 (Bradford and Winslow)
Abbreviated in Purchas’ Pilgrim, X; iv; London, 1625.
Footnote 2:
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation; ch. 9.
Footnote 3:
“The Mayflower,” by R. G. Marsden; Eng. Historical Review, Oct., 1904;
The Mayflower Descendant, Jan., 1916.
Footnote 4:
Relation or Journal, etc. (1622).
Footnote 5:
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation; ch. 2.
Footnote 6:
Introduction to Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (Everyman’s
Library).
Footnote 7:
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation; Bk. II.
Footnote 8:
Mourt’s Relation.
Footnote 9:
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, ch. 3.
Footnote 10:
The England and Holland of the Pilgrims, Henry M. Dexter and Morton
Dexter, Boston, 1905.
Footnote 11:
Eighteenth Annual Dinner of Mayflower Society, Nov. 20, 1913.
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