The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (12 page)

And then that evening, when they returned to the
Mayflower
after a long day's sail across the bay, William Bradford received what would have been, for many men, the final blow. He learned that five days before, Dorothy May Bradford, his wife of seven years and the mother of his three-year-old son, John, had slipped over the side of the
Mayflower
and drowned.

 

◆◆◆ Bradford never wrote about the circumstances of his wife's death. Much later in the century, the Puritan historian Cotton Mather recorded that Dorothy Bradford had accidentally fallen overboard and “was drowned in the harbor.” That she fell from an anchored ship has caused some to wonder whether she committed suicide.

Dorothy certainly had reasons to despair: she had not seen her son in more than four months; her husband had left the day before on his third dangerous trip away from her in as many weeks. On the same day the shallop had departed, seven-year-old Jasper More, one of the four abandoned children placed on the
Mayflower
, died in the care of the Brewster family. Two other More children would die in the months ahead. For Dorothy, whose own young son was on the other side of the Atlantic, the deaths of these and the other children may have been especially difficult to bear.

We think of the Pilgrims as tough adventurers strengthened by religious faith, but they were also human beings in the midst of what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile. Less than a year later, another group of English settlers arrived at Provincetown Harbor and were so overwhelmed by this “naked and barren place” that they convinced themselves that the Pilgrims must all be dead. In fear of being abandoned by the ship's captain, the panicked settlers began to strip the sails from the masts “lest the ship should get away and leave them.” If Dorothy experienced just a portion of the terror and sense of abandonment that gripped these settlers, she may have felt that suicide was her only choice.

Even if his wife's death had been unintentional, Bradford firmly believed that God controlled what happened on earth; every event
meant
something. John Howland had been rescued in the midst of a storm at sea, but Dorothy, his “dearest consort,” had drowned in the calm waters of Provincetown Harbor.

The only clue Bradford left us about his feelings can be found in a poem he wrote toward the end of his life.

FIVE

The Heart of Winter

THE
MAYFLOWER
LEFT
Provincetown Harbor on Friday, December 15. Headwinds from the northwest prevented the ship from entering Plymouth Harbor until the following day. Both Plymouth Harbor and Duxbury Bay to the north are contained within two crescents of sand: the Gurnet, an extension of Duxbury Beach, to the north and Long Beach to the south. The
Mayflower
anchored just within Goose Point at the end of Long Beach, a mile and a half from Plymouth Rock.

Not until Wednesday, December 20, after three more days of exploration, did they decide where to begin building a permanent settlement. some voted for Clark's Island, their camp during the shallop's first night in the harbor, as the safest spot in case of Indian attack. Others thought a river almost directly across from the island was better. Unfortunately, Jones River, which they named for the
Mayflower
's master, was not deep enough to handle a vessel of more than 30 tons (the
Mayflower
was 180 tons), and the settlement site would have been difficult to defend against the Indians. That left the area near the Rock.

The future site of Plymouth Plantation had several advantages. Rising up from shore was a 165-foot hill that provided a spectacular view of the surrounding coastline. On a clear day, it was even possible to see the tip of Cape Cod, almost thirty miles away. A cannon-equipped fort on this hill would provide all the security they could ever hope for.

The presence of the Rock as a landing place was yet another plus. Even more important was the “very sweet brook” that flowed beside it, carving out a channel that allowed small vessels to sail not only to the Rock but up what they called Town Brook. Just inside the brook's entrance was a wide salt marsh where, Bradford wrote, “we may harbor our shallops and boats exceedingly well.” There were also several freshwater springs along the high banks of the brook that bubbled with “as good water as can be drunk”—an increasingly important consideration since they had so little beer left.

The biggest advantage of the area was that it had already been cleared by the Indians. And yet nowhere could they find evidence of any recent Native settlements. The Pilgrims saw this as a miraculous gift from God. But if a miracle had indeed occurred at Plymouth, it had taken the form of a holocaust almost beyond human imagining.

Just three years before, even as the Pilgrims had begun preparations to settle in America, there had been between one thousand and two thousand people living along these shores. As a map drawn by samuel Champlain in 1605 shows, the banks of the harbor had been dotted with wigwams, each with smoke rising from the hole in its roof and with fields of corn, beans, and squash growing nearby. Dugout canoes made from hollowed-out pine trees skimmed across the waters, which in summer were full of bluefish and striped bass. The lobsters were so numerous that the Indians plucked them from the shallows of the harbor.

Then, from 1616 to 1619, disease brought this centuries-old community to an end. No witnesses recorded what happened along the shores of Plymouth, but in the following decade the plagues returned, and Roger Williams, the future founder of Rhode Island, told how entire villages became emptied of people. “I have seen a poor house left alone in the wild woods,” Williams wrote, “all being fled, the living not able to bury the dead. so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but the houses and the whole town, take flight.”

No Native dwellings remained in Plymouth in the winter of 1620, but gruesome evidence of the sickness was scattered all around the area. “[T]heir skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” Bradford wrote. “A very sad spectacle to behold.”

◆
Samuel Champlain's map of Plymouth Harbor.

It was here, on the bone-whitened hills of Plymouth, that the Pilgrims hoped to begin a new life.

 

◆◆◆ They decided to build their houses on what is called today Cole's Hill, overlooking the salt marsh. situated between the shore and the much higher hill, soon to be known as Fort Hill, Cole's Hill was flat enough for a small settlement and was easily accessible from the brook. That night twenty people remained on shore. They planned to begin building houses the next morning.

But Thursday, December 21, proved so stormy that the
Mayflower
was forced to set an additional anchor. The people on shore were without food, so despite the winds, the shallop set out from the
Mayflower
“with much ado with provisions.” The terrible weather lasted throughout the following day, making it impossible to begin work on the houses.

In the meantime, the
Mayflower
had become a grim hospital ship. In addition to colds, coughs, and fevers, scurvy tormented the passengers. James Chilton had died even before the
Mayflower
arrived in Plymouth Harbor. That Thursday, Richard Britteridge passed away, followed two days later by Christopher Martin's stepson, solomon Prower. On Friday morning, Mary Allerton gave birth to a stillborn son.

Not until saturday, December 23, were they able to transport a work party from the
Mayflower
to shore. With their axes and saws, they felled trees and carried the timber to the building site. The fact that Monday, December 25, was Christmas Day meant little to the Pilgrims, who believed that religious celebrations of this sort were an insult to the true word of Christ. Of more importance to them, December 25 was the day they erected the frame of their first house. “[N]o man rested that day,” Bradford wrote. But toward sunset, the familiar cries of Indians were heard in the surrounding forest. The Pilgrims took up their muskets and stared tensely into the darkness as the cries echoed briefly and died away.

The Pilgrims' intense spiritual lives did not prevent them from living with the constant fear that satan and his minions were
out there,
working against them. It was a fear that must have been difficult to contain as they stared into the gloom of the American night. After waiting a few more tense minutes, they decided to send the shallop back to the
Mayflower,
leaving the usual number of twenty ashore. That night they were drenched by yet another rainstorm.

 

◆◆◆ It took them two more weeks to complete the first building, a twenty-foot-square “common house.” Known as an earthfast house, the Pilgrims' first structure probably had walls of cut tree trunks interwoven with branches and twigs that were cemented together with clay. This “wattle-and-daub” construction was typical of farmers' cottages in rural England, as was the building's thatched roof, which was made of cattails and reeds from the nearby marsh. The house's tiny windows were made of parchment. The chimney—if, in fact, the house did have a chimney instead of a simple hole in the roof—would have been made of four boards that funneled up the smoke from an open fire on the dirt floor. It was a dark and smoky space, but for the first time, the Pilgrims had a real roof over their heads.

On the morning of Thursday, December 28, they turned their attention to the high hill, where they began to construct a wooden platform on which to mount the various cannons they had brought with them aboard the
Mayflower.
This was also the day they started to plan the organization of the settlement. First they needed to decide how many houses to build. It was determined that “all single men that had no wives to join them” should find a family to live with, which brought the total number of houses down to nineteen. From the beginning, it was decided that “every man should build his own house, thinking by that course, men would make more haste than working in common.”

Miles standish appears to have had a hand in determining the layout of the town. The most easily defended settlement pattern consisted of a street with parallel alleys and a cross street. The Pilgrims created a similar design that included two rows of houses “for safety.” For the time being, Plymouth was without a church and town green, features that came to typify a New England town.

In the weeks ahead, the death toll required them to change their plans. Instead of nineteen, only seven houses were built the first year, plus another four buildings for common use, including a small fortlike structure called a rendezvous. The houses were built along a street that ran from Fort Hill down to the sea. Known today as Leyden street, it was crossed by a “highway” running from north to south down to Town Brook. Around this intersection, the town of Plymouth slowly came into being, even as death reduced the newcomers to half their original number.