Made In America (2 page)

Oh, and I’ve included them for a third reason: because I thought they were interesting and hoped you might enjoy them. One of the small agonies of researching a book like this is that you come across stories that have no pressing relevance to the topic and must be let lie. I call them Ray Buduick stories. I came across Ray Buduick when I was thumbing through a 1941 volume of
Time
magazines looking for something else altogether. It happened that one day in that year Buduick decided, as he often did, to take his light aircraft up for an early Sunday morning spin. Nothing remarkable in that, except that Buduick lived in Honolulu and that this panicular morning happened to be 7 December 1941. As he headed out over Pearl Harbour, Buduick was taken aback, to say the least, to find the western skies dense with Japanese Zeros, all bearing down on him. The Japanese raked his plane with fire and Buduick, presumably issuing
utterances along the lines of ‘Golly Moses!’, banked sharply and cleared off. Miraculously he managed to land his plane safely in the midst of the greatest airborne attack yet seen in history, and lived to tell the tale, and in so doing became the first American to engage the Japanese in combat, however inadvertently.

Of course, this has nothing at all to do with the American language. But everything else that follows does. Honestly.

Founding Fathers’ Day, Plymouth Rock

The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in north Wales wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Massachusetts, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders’ day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the
Mayflower
or the Pilgrims, but inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, ‘The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England)’ which begins:

and continues in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors – the
Mayflower
was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not ‘where first they trod’ but in fact their fourth landing site – it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the
Mayflower
landing that most Americans carry with them to this day.
^*1

The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn’t do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from near by. Indeed, it is doubtful that the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and it doesn’t make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.
¹
Not until about the time Ms Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly associated with the landing of the Pilgrims.

Wherever they first trod, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims stepped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief. They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel about the size of a modern double-decker bus. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors,
referred to them as
puke stockings,
on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.
²
Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom revelled ever after in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).

They called themselves
Saints.
Those members of the party who were not Saints they called
Strangers. Pilgrims,
in reference to these early voyagers, would not become common for another two hundred years. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them
Puritans.
They were
Separatists,
so called because they had left the Church of England.
Puritans
were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They would not arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the
Mayflower’s
manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter – occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.
³
Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as ’Captain Shrimpe’
⁴
– hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those
who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since
farmer
in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the
Mayflower
set sail back to England
^*2
just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.
⁵

At this remove, it is difficult to conceive just how alone this small, hapless band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbours – at Jamestown in Virginia and at a small and now all but forgotten colony at Cupers (now Cupids) Cove in Newfoundland
^*3
– were five hundred miles off in opposite directions. At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of ‘wild and savage hue’, in William Bradford’s uneasy words. They were about as far from the comforts of civilization as
anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).

For two months they tried to make contact with the natives, but every time they spotted any, the Indians ran off. Then one day in February a young brave of friendly mien approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name was Samoset and he was a stranger in the region himself, but he had a friend named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe, to whom he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims’ fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local
sachem,
or chief. Before long, as every schoolchild knows, the Pilgrims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cordial Thanksgiving feast. Life was grand.

A question that naturally arises is
how
they managed this. Algonquian, the language of the eastern tribes, is an extraordinarily complex and agglomerative tongue (or more accurately family of tongues), full of formidable consonant clusters that are all but unpronounceable to the untutored, as we can see from the first primer of Algonquian speech prepared some twenty years later by Roger Williams in Connecticut (a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame, incidentally). Try saying the following and you may get some idea of the challenge:

Clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend, and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they
called him Squanto. The answer, surprisingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English. Samoset spoke it only a little, but Squanto spoke English with total assurance (and Spanish into the bargain).

That a straggly band of English settlers could in 1620 cross a vast ocean and find a pair of Indians able to welcome them in their own tongue seems little short of miraculous. It was certainly lucky – the Pilgrims would very probably have perished or been slaughtered without them – but not as wildly improbable as it at first seems. The fact is that in 1620 the New World wasn’t really so new at all.

No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. The credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about
AD
1000, but there are grounds to suppose that others may have been there even earlier. An ancient Latin text, the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot),
recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to the New World made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Vikings – and this on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.

Even the Vikings didn’t think themselves the first. Their sagas record that when they first arrived in the New World they were chased from the beach by a group of wild white people. They subsequently heard stories from natives of a settlement of Caucasians who ‘wore white garments and ... carried poles before them to which rags were attached’
⁷
– precisely how an Irish religious procession would have looked to the uninitiated. (Intriguingly, five centuries later Columbus’s
men would hear a similar story in the Caribbean.) Whether by Irish or Vikings – or Italians or Welsh or Bretons or any of the other many groups for whom credit has been sought – crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Ages was not quite as daring a feat as it would at first appear, even allowing for the fact that it was done in small, open boats. The North Atlantic is conveniently scattered with islands that could serve as stepping-stones – the Shetland Islands, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland and Baffin. It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea. We know beyond doubt that Greenland – and thus, technically, North America – was discovered in 982 by one Eric the Red, father of Leif Ericson (or Leif Eríksson), and that he and his followers began settling it in 986. Anyone who has ever flown over the frozen wastes of Greenland could be excused for wondering what they saw in the place. But in fact Greenland’s southern fringes are further south than Oslo and offer an area of grassy lowlands as big as the whole of Britain.
⁸
Certainly it suited the Vikings. For nearly five hundred years they kept a thriving colony there, which at its peak boasted sixteen churches, two monasteries, some 300 farms and a population of 4,000. But the one thing Greenland lacked was wood with which to build new ships and repair old ones – a somewhat vital consideration for a sea-going people. Iceland, the nearest land mass to the east, was known to be barren. The most natural thing would be to head west to see what was out there. In about 1000, according to the sagas, Leif Ericson did just that. His expedition discovered a new land mass, probably Baffin Island, far up in northern Canada, over a thousand miles north of the present-day United States, and many other places, most notably the region they called Vinland.

Vinland is one of history’s more tantalizing posers. No one knows where it was. By careful readings of the sagas and calculations of Viking sailing times, various scholars have put
Vinland all over the place – on Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, in Massachusetts or even as far south as Virginia. A Norwegian scholar named Helge Ingstad claimed in 1964 to have found Vinland at a place called L’Anse au Meadow in Newfoundland. Others suggest that the artefacts Ingstad found were not of Viking origin at all, but merely the detritus of later French colonists.
⁹
No one knows. The name is no help. According to the sagas, the Vikings called it Vinland because of the grape-vines they found growing in profusion there. The problem is that no place within a thousand miles of where they must have been could possibly have supported grapes. One possible explanation is that Vinland was a mistranslation.
Vinber,
the Viking word for grapes, could be used to describe many other fruits – cranberries, gooseberries and red currants, among them – that might have been found at these northern latitudes. Another possibility is that Vinland was merely a bit of deft propaganda, designed to encourage settlement. These were after all the people who thought up the name Greenland.