The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (9 page)

When Thomas Dermer returned to the region the following summer, he discovered that the Pokanokets possessed a newfound and “inveterate malice to the English,” and for good reason. That spring, an English ship had arrived at Narragansett Bay. The sailors invited a large number of Massasoit's people aboard the vessel, then proceeded to shoot them down in cold blood.

Almost everywhere Dermer went in the summer of 1620, he came under attack. He would certainly have been killed at Nemasket had not squanto, who had spent the winter in the region, come to his rescue. But not even squanto could save Dermer when he and his men arrived at Martha's Vineyard. Epenow and his warriors fell on Dermer's party, and only Dermer, who was badly wounded, and one other Englishman escaped, while squanto was taken prisoner. soon after reaching Virginia a few weeks later, Dermer was dead.

Epenow appears to have distrusted squanto from the start. He understood that if the English should ever try to settle in this land, those such as squanto and himself, who could speak the Englishmen's language, would possess a powerful and potentially dangerous advantage. They could claim to know what the English were saying, and no one would know whether or not they were telling the truth. For his part, Epenow had proven his loyalty to his people by attacking Dermer and his men. But squanto's true motives were anyone's guess. six years ago, squanto had been abducted by pale, hairy-faced men whose weapons killed with blasts of fire and smoke. He had been thrust inside a huge, birdlike vessel that had taken him across an endless ocean. He had found himself in one of the largest cities in Europe: a crowded, dirty, smelly place of narrow streets and tall wooden houses.

But most disturbing of all had been his return home. Almost everyone he had once known was dead and the village of Patuxet abandoned. Because of his years among the English, he was now looked to with suspicion. Perhaps there was anger growing inside of him. Perhaps it was ambition.

Massasoit shared Epenow's distrust of squanto, and by the fall of 1620, squanto had been moved from Martha's Vineyard to Pokanoket, where he remained a prisoner. When the
Mayflower
arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims would do little to change that assumption.

In the meantime, squanto waited for his chance.

FOUR

Beaten with Their Own Rod

THE
MAY FLOWER
HAD arrived at Provincetown Harbor on saturday, November 11. since the next day was a sunday, the Pilgrims remained aboard ship, worshipping God under the direction of Elder Brewster. As Puritans, they believed that the entire sabbath must be devoted to worship—both a morning and an afternoon meeting along with personal and family prayers throughout the day. Work and especially play on a sunday were forbidden.

On Monday, the four battered pieces of the shallop were taken ashore in the smaller rowboat. As the carpenter and his assistants began to put the vessel back together, the passengers enjoyed their first day ashore. After more than two months at sea, there was a “great need” for washing, and the women found a small freshwater pond near the present site of Provincetown. For generations to come, Monday would be wash day in New England, a tradition that began with the women of the
Mayflower
.

At low tide, amid the barnacles and seaweed, they found plenty of blue mussels attached in clumps to the shoreside rocks. Passengers and sailors alike enjoyed the first fresh food any of them had tasted in a very long time, only to fall victim to vomiting and diarrhea from shellfish poisoning.

The harbor also contained thousands of ducks and geese—“the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw.” But it was the whales that astounded them. “[E]very day we saw whales playing hard by us,” they wrote. These were Atlantic right whales, huge creatures that feed on plankton. Jones and one of his mates, who had experience hunting whales in Greenland, claimed that if only they'd had some harpoons they might have taken between three thousand and four thousand pounds' worth of valuable whale oil.

For the Pilgrims, who were expected to provide the Adventurers with a regular supply of goods, it was extremely frustrating to be surrounded by all this potential wealth and yet have no way of capturing any of it. One day a whale, apparently enjoying the afternoon sun on her dark, blubbery back, lay on the water's surface within only a few yards of the
Mayflower,
“as if she had been dead.” It was just too much of a temptation. As a small crowd looked on, two muskets were loaded, but when the first was fired, the barrel burst into pieces. Amazingly, no one was injured, and the whale, after issuing “a snuff,” swam leisurely away.

The shallop was proving to be a problem. Instead of days, it was going to be weeks before the boat was completed. some of the passengers began to insist that they should launch a land expedition. When the
Mayflower
first sailed into the harbor, the mouth of a river had been sighted several miles to the southeast. some of them, probably headed by Captain Miles standish, wanted to take a small party to investigate this potential settlement site.

The dangers of such a trip were considerable. so far they had seen no local inhabitants, but for all they knew, huge numbers of hostile Natives might be waiting just a few miles down the Cape. It was eventually decided, however, that the expedition was worth the risk. standish's party consisted of sixteen men, including William Bradford, stephen Hopkins, and Edward Tilley. Each man was equipped with a musket, sword, and corselet, a light form of body armor that included a metal breastplate.

On Wednesday, November 15, they were rowed ashore. Provincetown Harbor, as well as much of the bay side of the lower Cape, is characterized by wide tidal flats. Even a small boat runs aground many yards away from the beach, and during the fall of 1620 the passengers were forced to wade through the shallows to shore. With the temperature on the verge of freezing, it was a long, cold slog to the beach, especially weighted down with armor and weapons. standish soon had them marching single file along the shore. He was not a tall man—in the years ahead he won the nickname Captain shrimp—but his courage was never questioned. Before leaving for America, the Pilgrims had contacted another potential candidate for the position of military leader: Captain John smith. No one in England knew more about America than smith. He had been at the founding of Jamestown in 1607; in 1614, he had led a voyage of exploration to what he named New England, creating the most detailed map of the region to date. (It was smith's companion on that voyage, Thomas Hunt, who had abducted squanto.) When the Pilgrims approached him in London, smith wanted desperately to return to America, particularly to “the country of the Massachusetts,” which he described as “the paradise of those parts.” But the Pilgrims decided that they wanted no part of him. smith bitterly related how they had insisted that his “books and maps were better cheap to teach them than myself.”

Smith's fatal flaw, as far as the Pilgrims were concerned, was that he knew too much. In the beginning of the settlement, they would have had no choice but to do as he said, and this could be dangerous. smith possessed a strong personality, and a man of his worldly nature might come to dominate what they intended to be a mostly religious society. “[T]hey would not ... have any knowledge by any but themselves,” smith wrote, “pretending only religion their governor and frugality their counsel, when indeed it was ... because ... they would have no superiors.”

If the Pilgrims did possess smith's map of New England, though, they failed to make good use of it. Rivers were considered essential to a settlement site, and smith's map clearly indicated that the nearest major river was the Charles River, less than a day's sail to the northwest, at present-day Boston. The Pilgrims, however, insisted on exploring the entire bay side of Cape Cod, even though there was no evidence on smith's map of a decent river along this more than fifty-mile stretch of coastline.

As smith later wrote, much of the suffering that lay ahead for the Pilgrims could easily have been avoided if they had paid for his services or, at the very least, used his map. “[s]uch humorists [i.e., fanatics] will never believe ... ,” he wrote, “till they be beaten with their own rod.”

 

◆◆◆ Standish and his men had marched just a mile or so down the beach when up ahead they saw half a dozen people and a dog walking toward them. They initially assumed it was Master Jones and some of the sailors, who they knew were already ashore with the
Mayflower
's spaniel. But when the people started to run inland for the woods, they realized that these weren't sailors; they were the first Native people they had seen. One of the Indians paused to whistle for the dog, and the group disappeared into the trees.

They followed at a trot, hoping to make contact. But as soon as the Indians saw that they were being pursued, they made a run for it—setting out “with might and main” along the shore to the south. standish and his party did their best to chase them, but it was slow going in the ankle-deep sand, and after several months aboard ship, they were in no shape for a sprint across a beach.

Even though they were quickly left behind, they followed the Indians' footprints. From the tracks, they could tell that the Indians ran up each hill and then paused to look back to see whether they were still being pursued. After what the Pilgrims judged to be ten miles of marching, they stopped for the night. With three men on guard at a time, they gathered around a large fire and tried to get some sleep.

The next morning standish and his men once again set off in pursuit of the Indians. They followed the tracks past the head of a long tidal creek into a heavily wooded area, “which tore our armor in pieces.” Finally, around ten in the morning, they emerged into a deep, grassy valley, where they saw their first American deer. But it was water they truly needed. The only liquid they had brought with them was a bottle of aqua vitae (a strong liquor), and they were now suffering from violent thirst. At last, at the foot of a small rise of land, they found a pool of freshwater—called today Pilgrim spring. They claimed to have “drunk our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives.” From a group of lifelong beer and wine drinkers, this was high praise indeed.

Once they'd refreshed themselves, they marched to the shoreline, where they could see the
Mayflower
just four miles to the northwest across the arc of the bay. They made camp, and that night they built a large fire as part of a prearranged signal to let their friends and loved ones know that all was well.

As they continued south the next morning, they came across evidence that they were not the first Europeans to have visited this place. First they found some sawed planks and an old iron ship's kettle—perhaps from the French shipwreck of 1615. Then, near the river mouth that they'd seen from the
Mayflower,
they discovered the remains of what must have been Martin Pring's seventeen-year-old fort. But it was evidence of a Native sort that soon attracted their attention.

On a high shoreside hill, they found an area where the sand had recently been patted smooth. As three of them dug, the others gathered around in a defensive ring with their muskets ready. Not far down, they found a basket made of woven reeds filled with so much corn that two men could barely lift it. Nearby, they found a basket containing corn that was still on the cob, “some yellow and some red, and others mixed with blue.” One of the more remarkable characteristics of Indian corn, or maize, is that, if kept dry, the kernels can be stored forever. In Mexico, storage pits containing perfectly preserved corn have been dug up that were at least a thousand years old.